Dave started his talk looking at the benefits of access to subscription services, bearing in mind he started researching when online resources weren’t available. These resources, if we use them, give us 24 hour access, hugely reduce the damage to surviving documentation, are frequently indexed and mean that Archivists in local Archives can spend their time conserving the documentation they have.
However, they do come with a warning: don’t believe the “hints”! Companies like Ancestry encourage us to build family trees and direct us, first and foremost, to other people’s “research”- the inverted comma’s are important.
Dave then went on to give us several examples where hints directed the researcher to what looked on the surface as if it may be the right person, but when the original records were seen, it was clear that they weren’t and some details in the record, such as the occupation did not fit with other known facts. He asked us to look carefully at a marriage record of 1805 and identify clues which would help us pin down the couple concerned. He showed us how to follow up a number of possible baptism records and narrow down which one may be the correct person. Firstly, by following each baptism to see if the child concerned died before adulthood, as so many of the existing trees on Ancestry, for example, are built around people who records show, died before they could possibly have produced children. Quite often the burial record is also on Ancestry, but presumably the person entering the information on the tree has not looked for it.
Secondly, each possible baptism should be followed as far as possible, picking up other siblings, until a burial is reached, in order to eliminate all the wrong candidates. Only then can you say with some confidence that you have found the right person.
Dave explained how these links get copied by other subscribers and go viral. He gave us one example where the wrong person has been added to over 20,000 other trees and that number rises almost on a daily basis.
Dave spent the second half of the talk looking at the coverage of information on these sites. Where they say they have digitised all records for a particular county, how likely is it? Not very, it turns out.
Parish registers in England were supposed to start in 1558. Only a very small percentage did. Most of the earliest ones start in 1599, when a second decree went out, and some clerks copied out earlier registers from the start of Elizabeth 1st’s reign. The ravages of time, flood, fire and insect/rodent activity have lead to significant losses. A Civil form of registration was made compulsory by the Commonwealth in 1653, which, had it been followed, would have given us some comprehensive records, but quite often these are missing or the rules were not followed, so we are left with a “Commonwealth Gap”.
Some registers are still retained by the original parish and some have only recently been deposited, after the digitisation process has happened with FindMyPast or Ancestry. The big companies have little interest in going back and filming small collections, even if they should be part of the collection, although Dave recounted that during lockdown, a member of LDS at Salt Lake City collected people’s complaints about registers missing from Ancestry and told Ancestry to “get it sorted”. Apparently they listened and are working their way through the ones they missed from London archives. Nevertheless, gaps remain and Dave advised us to report them, if the Company say they hold a complete set.
It was an informative and entertaining talk, followed by some questions and experiences by local members and I’m sure quite a few of us will be going back through areas of research to check our results.
Report by Viv Carter