Making work for the postman

Of the 14 letters I finally sealed up today, 10 were to new cousins.

They were scattered around the edges of England with a disproportionate number (33%) in what was once Lancashire.

Few of the addresses were in the phone book - but luckily 192.com was on-hand to help me locate them.  After learning the postcode area (for example DH7), I've taken to using a house price website called Proviser (example pages are from Bradford), to capture the full list of streets within that postcode area.

I also consult Google maps to see if there are other clues - relatives living nearby, or a geographical feature that would make one part or other of the area more likely.  Within Proviser I note down the names of village settlements, for example within Blackburn there is Mellor.  I double-check that the address I need doesn't include a village name.

Now I can whip through the list of streets in Proviser - including or excluding the villages as found by my earlier checking - and quickly narrow the field to the correct street.  Possibly the longest search was for a relative in Walks Avenue (Manchester).  It's a big old postcode area, couldn't easily be split up and W is right at the end of the alphabet.

Sometimes it makes sense to do a visual.  When looking for an address by the Lakes, there just seemed to be a tonne of possible addresses - so I picked out some likely streets from looking at the map, and was proven correct.

If you are unlikely and your relative lives on a densely populated Old London Road (which tend to be rather long) there could be a lot of houses to the one postcode.  Or worse, finding a relative lived in a tower block in Plymouth - there were at least 10 floors and in the order of 90 different properties all occupying the same thousand square foot.

It's useful if somebody on the property is in the phone book (not necessarily the person you expect) and if somebody's ever held a directorship.  One trick I used in Liverpool at a down-at-heel neighbourhood, once very grand, was looking in the 1984 phone book to see if the address was given there.  It was.

On the whole, it needn't take that long to search a postcode.  The bulkiest areas can be divided into villages - and postcodes for central urban districts might only cover a few dozen streets.  The worst area I searched was BB2 - 10 pages of addresses mostly all in Blackburn itself, so few could be eliminated (or focussed on) by determining if the address was/ was not in a surrounding village.

It can be embarrassing when you've spent ages pinning down your postcode and got the address only to find that the person was in the phone book all along.  I was looking for a Richards family member in Romford and missing a possible entry in the phone book was understandable as it was just such a common name.

Another trick is to know the combination of names of a couple.  I mentioned here how knowing that John B Jones had a wife Ann E enabled me to focus-in on the only couple in the country who shared this name-combo.  (Name slightly changed to keep them anonymous.)  For this highly mobile couple who'd lost contact with relatives 30 years ago, and had left their Midlands address 20 years ago, I needed a miracle to pin them down.

The site to use for comparing addresses with postcodes and vice versa is the Royal Mail's Postcode Finder.  It used to offer only a measly 10 searches a day - which got you nowhere, particularly if you're still struggling to understand its search boxes.  It's considerably more relaxed now, particularly since it's been sold out of our hands to the lowest bidder!

Once you've found your address, you still need to write the letter, prepare and include copies of documents, keep a photographic record of what you've sent and muster up sufficient envelopes, pens, stamps, paper, printer ink, and power cables to get the show on the road.  In fact I recommend writing the address on the envelope as the very first thing you do - then at least the myriad documents can be filed in the correct place as you prepare for dispatch.  I would certainly recommend sending a stamped-addressed envelope, unless you strongly suspect you'll be getting an email response.

As for writing the letter itself, some tips on this business can be found a few pages up.

It's now slightly more work than it used to be when I got all my addresses from wills, and later in the brief periods when electoral roll full results were easy to come-by.  But I'd rather have all the information relatively easily than just a portion of the information ridiculously easily, which is how I'd describe family history 20 years ago...  (Plus you never used to know until too late, just who was hiding behind those terse phone book entries.)

For today - some folk I've been hunting nearly 20 years, others turned up yesterday when I took a detour down a branch I'd not known existed.  We will have to see what comes back.

Lost memories

I am still cross nearly 20 years later about a missing letter.  My great-grandmother had several cousins and most of them had names that fitted her own social standing - Joyce Summers, Una Hatch, Ellen Glover.  One of these, another Una, wrote to me in 1996 at Burchett's Green College, Berkshire.  I can just see the letter now, perched behind the bar which was where all student correspondence was kept.  Slipping down behind a steamy dishwasher or falling into a pile of bills.  Never to see the light of day again.

After Una's death, her son remembered the letter. Yes she had written one, he said, and it had been full of family information.  At the time he hadn't been interested, but now that he was, could he have a copy of the letter!  I suppose I could fax him an image of a nice clean beer glass, post him a box of big blue cleaning roll, or hand him the keys of the now-closed college for him to search himself.

Hard-to-swallow

It was something of a shock to discover that a large number of Gladys's cousins weren't upper middle-class at all.  Some of them weren't even middle-class.

Much of the blame for this lies on uncle Arthur Smith, who is edited out so fiercely from the family tree, that leaves you wondering if the official records are in error.  Gladys claimed there was only one uncle and he was variously listed as '?' or William. Clearly you weren't expected to ask too much about him, still less enquire if there was yet another uncle.

But there was, and he'd come to London during the gasworkers' strikes of the 1890s, to work as a blacklegger.  He stayed long enough to sire 12 children, before allegedly going off to Australia (this story borne out by two separate branches of the family).  It says a lot for the widow that most of the children survived and several fought in the First World War.  They didn't really leave Bermondsey much, and the thought of them ever meeting their Muswell Hill cousins does leave one pondering.  It would be about as socially awkward as the Edwardians could devise.

A tidal wave of news came pouring in from Bermondsey - I even rang up one of the cousins who lived in the towers near Millwall.  A pint at the Hobgoblin got us going, but I'd need more than a pint to take in 90 years of missing history.  These memories weren't so much lost as scattered to the four corners of south-east London.

I don't feel the 92 boxes of Jim Mortimer's life as trade union leader and Labour Party official fit into my notion of my family at all - yet he had been married to Arthur Smith's granddaughter.

Hard-to-find

With all this talk of Arthur it was easy to forget there was another brother, William Smith.  What had happened to him?  I knew that he was born in England in 1851, and surprisingly, this was pretty much nearly all that was required to find him - in Jamestown.  Hard-to-find?  I don't think so.

This time he brought yet another factor into the equation.  Supposing all my calculations are correct, Gladys now numbers among her cousins the wonderfully-named Victoria Ulander, wife of Axel.

A sense of who she was

It bothered me for ages that more and more data was accumulating about the lives of the Chappell children - who were orphaned in 1867 and who did more and more interesting things.  Several new members emerged as well.  All of these were notionally under the auspices of their mother and grandmother Mrs Jane Chappell who survived until 1925 age 95.  This age may not be so remarkable today, but consider her oldest brother left England in 1832 to practically found the colony of Tasmania.  That she survived the majority of her nephews and nieces (one of whom left her a legacy in her will as if resigned to the fact she would live forever).  And because many of the generations rolled around so quickly, there was barely a year after 1900 when some new significant thing didn't happen.

We got closer to real human memories with a surprise letter from great-granddaughter Eileen.  It shouldn't have been a surprise as it was in reply to mine- but I was innured to non-response.  I'd phoned great-great-granddaughter Eileen who was interested to see there was this other Eileen.  But other Eileen wrote me screeds and I left it too late to meet her, I think.  Not sure of Jane's role here, but her eldest son apparently lost her the farm.

James Chappell's will from 1867 records Thomas Haine as a witness.  And one of the Haine boys later took over his farm, Manor Farm, now the site of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve at Yeovilton.  So if the Chappell boy gambled away the farm, how did one of the Haine's get it?

58 years later, Jane's obituary tells us nothing at all - she is absent from it.  The closest we get is her own son's obituary in Decatur, Illinois.  He'd done well for himself and the paper wrote at his passing (and boy did he look tired) of his venerable mother back in England.  I feel this gave Jane a role and in lieu of photographs, stories, this is at least something.

For other female members in this family, there's nothing.  I have a character-filled photograph for one, a clearly chequered life for another, a decent obituary here, but for one or two women there's nowt.

Turning it around

When cousin Joyce died a few years following first contact, my heart sank.  She'd never after all told me anything of her mother's eight siblings, only that they existed.  I had no names, or if I did that's all there were.  It was tough to get any information.

One Christmas, 19 years after finding out about them, I decided to interrogate freebmd, and emerge with some credible identifications of the Taylor siblings that I knew about, including Mary L.

Incredulously, I found only one Mary L Taylor matched.  The data seemed to tell me she died in Queensferry, Flintshire in 1951, leaving a will.  That was one sibling sorted.  It was all ok, but everyone was dead.  The one thing Joyce had revealed was a cousin Rhona still up in North Wales.  Combing through all the births in Wales showed only one girl who matched.  Lucky or what?  I did write her a letter, but chances like this needed another approach.  By bicycle.  I cycled off the border hills and into Mold, and was able to get an hour with Rhona at her bungalow.  She even guided me back down the hill into Queensferry as a bonus.

The short of it is that 120 years after Grandpa's aunt died, the resulting Taylor offspring have now been pinned through stories and photographs and those nearly lost memories have been properly found.

Staying power in our contacts, and more of them, please

A former editor of the Greenwood Tree met his wife while doing family history;  I once had a box of chocolates sent me from Kansas City - see 'choc or bloc' which I'll post some time.  My longest-running family history partnership goes back to 1994 and has seen us through changes in life circumstances, several trips to the States, and many a curry.  One gets dozens of contacts from people all the time, through Ancestry or Genes Reunited.  How on earth do you decide 'how far to go'.  I'm not suggested a church, but a marriage of ideas can prove pretty compelling.

I guess I'm looking for staying power.  I like to include enough information in my first message (or first reply) to get the other person interested, if they are a family historian; and to encourage them to open up a bit, if they are not.  But I hold back.  Those contacts who demand 'all my information' I dismiss as one-night emailers, and probably our relationship isn't going anywhere.

I'm also looking for eye contact: very hard through email.  The closest I can get is a touch of honesty, something you wouldn't tell the mailman: 'I'm away for two weeks; I'm at O'Hare; my daughter was very excited to hear about your message;  I wish you could have met my father'.  In contrast, worrying signs are easily elicited over your second date, or message: 'I found all the data online and have no information beyond that; I'm not related to these people they are just on my tree; I'm confused they had the same name could a brother marry a sister?'

Most of the time, the second message never comes, and we know it was a fleeting moment.  Peter Calver at LostCousins won't allow you to exchange information unless the recipient has the courtesy to acknowledge your first enquiry.

It's worth being patient with newbies, or to borrow from the dating world, 'fresh meat'.  They may bungle the facts, but with your experience you should be able to set them straight.  A lady asked if her grandmother's relatives were related to her?  Another had incorrect baptismal records for our John Purton, but was happy to acknowledge she might be wrong, a charming touch and so rarely seen.

The more people adding good data to sites like Ancestry, the fewer brickwalls we'll have in our research, particularly going 'downhill' from the past to the present.  Oftentimes, it is newer researchers who are able to add this information. (I have written earlier about the strength of weak connections.)

The strength of weak paper

My inbox has become awash with messages from new cousins, in a way not familiar since the early days of GR (not George I but Genes Reunited, then known as Genes Connected or, now, Genes Untied).

I have just been browsing the guru James Caan's book about careers in the Puzzles section at Foyle's, St Pancras International. How are these two facts connected?

Well the magic medium is PAPER. Not only was Caan's book printed on the stuff, but in addition he recommends the fusty tree product as the best way to get something to him.

So it is with the Royal Mail, which should be knighted for services to family history. I messaged cousin Julie through Ancestry and then through the ghastliness that is Mrs AOL-Time Warner (divorced) but my little dweebie message just got lost along the way. Presumably as I wasn't a trusted sender, not being, say, Mr PayPal.

Sir Royal however just picked up my letter to Julie, delivered it, and on the morning of its arrival, bang came an instant reply to my email inbox.

There are huge benefits of sharing information. I despaired at lacklustre late-night lowbrow e-mails from GR, Ancestry, often where the owner was struggling with basic family structure and should have stuck with darts. Yet, the paper correspondents are trumping me in leaps and bounds, have private houses in exciting locations, offspring in Switzerland, family Bibles and FamilyTreeMaker in the guest room and a sense of there being no rush: I suspect these were the winners of the second marshmallow in the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. Our shared interest is building into good conversations about a variety of issues.

Today:
Julie - here is proof that our Davieses were indeed from Atherton
Debra - look forward to meeting up when we're back from Switzerland
Tim - will be chatting with my Mum (90) about the Cornish village where we came from, shortly
Tracey - your letter has made my year, mate!
Paul - my mother and I were both very interested in your letter...

And all these contacts came about by my writing letters. The last word to cousin Mike in Dorset - 'thanks for writing. We sold the rights to the china clay to English China Clay in the 1950s', and ECC do what with that clay, that's right, make paper!