#6 Trick to help your family history

Turn a death entry into an address

John Burnett James died in 1986 in Brighton but didn't leave a will.  I had hunted for a marriage but not got very far.  So, I found Jack James in the Brighton phone book then found a lady listed in the current electoral roll under that same address.  Jack's widow!

Yes she was still there even though she had died.  This led me to a number of places including the discovery that his widow had made the gloves for the present Queen's honeymoon in 1947.

#5 Trick to help your family history

Confirm the name at birth before you do anything

Ensure you have the right name.  I found that ‘Caroline Creed’ was really Catherine Creed after a lot of aggro.  The child was only at home in ONE census, and when she was, her name was given as 'Caroline' sending us on a wild goose chase, until I worked out she must have been Catharine.  I found that Mary Jones was born Edwyna M H Jones by guessing the registration district of her birth and looking for likely people.  As Edwyn was a family name, I knew I had the right lady.  I was stymied for a long time by her aunt listed as 'Ellen Jones' in the census.  She wasn't Ellen but Eleanor.  So, confirm the birth if you can before you go anywhere.  This is assuming the birth was registered of course (compulsory from 1870 onwards).

#4 Trick to help your family history

Leapfrog over that missing marriage

Find your relative in the census if you can’t find their marriage: I found that Elizabeth Stone married Thomas Lakin even though that marriage probably happened in India (and still hasn't turned up there); I found that Laura Emily Collins married James Young even though that marriage probably never happened at all.

Here's Laura at home in 1891 - I only spotted her as she was in the same household as her sister (who later proved her will).  I'd not have found Laura or her wonderful will without this census entry.

I had heard that Elizabeth settled in Oxford and had a lot of boys (mostly girls, actually!) But I couldn't find her marriage, or anyone in 1901 that matched her description, born in Secunderabad.  So I searched all Elizabeths born in India, and was later able to prove that Mrs Lakin was ours.

#3 Trick to help your family history

Make freebmd work for you - even when it's wrong

Don’t give up, not all freebmd marriages are recorded correctly.  I found the marriage of Jane Gibson to John Johnson even though it wasn’t coming up on freebmd.  I knew they'd married in Durham/Northumberland between 1851 and 1861, and you can hopefully spot the marriage below among several possibles.  Beatrice Keddell was wrongly indexed as Beatrice Kedde (now corrected).  Double check the reference numbers given on freebmd, one of them may be wrong which could mean, like me, the marriage you seek eludes you!

PS I didn't give up once I found the South Shields marriage - I stumbled on George Bell's transcriptions of St Hilda, the largest parish, and found the actual date and place of the Johnson marriage on this link http://genuki.cs.ncl.ac.uk/Transcriptions/DUR/MSSH1851.html

#2 Trick to help your family history

Match the marriage with the births

Here you can see marriages being matched for Olive M Skinner - you can't always be sure which one is which, but you can confirm things with the death indexes.  In this case, I found that my Olive married in Mitford, which I later proved from other sources.  What have you got to lose?

#1 Trick to help your family history

Hustle to get the modern day address you need for free
Not so long ago, you could copy and paste the results from 192.com into Notepad, and the grid co-ordinates would magically appear in the text: that's right the grid co-ordinates of your relative's house.  You could use streetmap to turn these into a postcode which would be within 100m of your relatives' house. This loophole has been closed but there may be others!

A good few weeks

Time passes and Stuff happens.

Like how I met Mik Pearce in Praed Street, Paddington....

Mik is a descendant of William Pearce 1770, the builder of St Austell Methodist Chapel and convert to Wesleyan Methodism. My ancestress Mary was his sister, twenty years younger, and she retired to London, having in her youth married a Methodist minister and walking with him nearly 60 years.  William's boy and Mary's girl lived by chance, perhaps, in the same street, ten doors away, in Porchester Terrace - guess where.  That's right, round the corner from Paddington in Lancaster Gate.

While Mik and I were talking I answered a question about the status of being a genealogist by courtesy of membership of the Society of Genealogists.  A huffy man in the same cafe, said excuse me, but I'm a member of the SoG and it confers enormous status upon me (or words to that effect).  While we had drinks from the juice bar and examined Mik's excellent photograph collection, I glanced out the window to see a gentleman in a rugby shirt emblazoned 'Pierce' just sitting outside the cafe.

.... and Mrs Barrabrith at home in Hampstead Garden Suburb.  I would have met Jean the same week as Mik only I'd tied myself in a knot, and forgot that I might actually have to return to work after the Easter holiday.

I have a slew of Welsh cousins courtesy of my Cornish grandfather having summoned most of his ancestors to Wales in order for him to have been born there in 1925, the same year Jean R Williams was born a few miles away in the same town.  It was my task to find Jean and as you can readily divine, I did so.  Fortunately she had the middle name of Rodda and also there were scarcely any other Jean Williamses around (something of a surprise).

I was lucky enough to get a tour of the Suburb from Jean's daughter and son-in-law who are intimately involved with the Hampstead Garden Suburb Free Church perched in a delicious location at a certain distance from the Anglican Church a few yards away. It was to this (Free) church that Jean came with her husband, a Congregationalist minister, in 1961.

I also learnt of John Harvey Rodda's death in Mexico.  He was a mine manager and Jean's grandfather.  When things got too hot during the second revolution he sent his wife and family home to a house in Swansea, where they remained.  They never heard from John again.

I believe in free wills

In double-quick time I got nearly 100 transcripts of wills proven between 1858 and 1925.

These were obtained *for free* at London LDS family history centre, 20 on the afternoon of Tuesday 11 August 2009.  Who says you have to pay for family history – this would have been £90 in wills had I bought them (which I never would).

It’s amusing that the biggest leads came from the references to ‘Jane Williams’ and ‘Mary Price’.  Ok Mary had a massive telltale middlename of ‘Orledge’ which made it impossible *not* to find her.

(Curiously there is an 'Ordnance connection' - Jane's sons-in-law worked for Ordnance Survey in Southampton.  Mary lived in Ordnance Road, Enfield Wash.)

Jane Williams was a bit less of a cheat.  I knew from the context that this Jane must have been born a Hambly in Gwinear, Cornwall, 1826 so using some of this information helped me find her marriage in freebmd (Jane to  Samuel Williams, 1847 Cornwall) and this led me to find her in the 1861 census (Jane Williams born about 1826 Gwinear, wife of Samuel) and then with the family details listed to find her in the 1881 census where she is just Jane Williams born about 1826 ‘in Cornwall’.  But there are very few Williamses in Hampshire, and fewer Cornish ones, so I was actually able to find not only Jane but all bar one of her children's marriages (to William Tawse, John White, Betty Stoneley, Richard Jones, Rosa Burden, Charles Morris, Frederick Lewington).

Mary Price's own helpful will gives the full names of her seven children which again made misidentification really tricky – particularly as there just weren’t many Welsh Prices still less English ones in English Enfield Lock.

I wrote a little program to help people find wills like how I did - http://haine.org.uk/wills/willsearch.php