Deal branch had our first face-to-face meeting in August (all socially distanced and wearing masks) and combined it with our very brief branch AGM! After which we had a talk from LadyTeviot who gave us an absorbing talk on ways of getting round the ‘brick walls’ that we all find, at some point, in our family history research.
She started by saying that researching your ancestors in the past had been somewhat daunting, with visits to Somerset House etc. but in the last 5-10 years it had got much easier with the advent of on-line records. One of the pitfalls of this was that many people tended not to use two or three well-documented sources to back up their findings and very rarely looked through original records any more. It was a good idea to follow a person through various census records to check on ages and birthplaces – most family stories have some truth in them but people may have lied about certain aspects of their lives.
Often children were brought up by someone other than their mother, maybe grandparents, a sister, aunt or a person who was no relative, making them difficult to trace. When Lloyd George brought in the ‘Old Age Pension’ in 1908, a marriage certificate was needed to claim your pension, so many couples married then, years after their children were born. Just be aware that marriage certificates may not appear when you are expecting them to and couples may have married much later.
Using specific examples, Lady Teviot gave us many ideas of records to investigate, including school admission records, baptism and census records, Parish magazines, newspapers,Ellis Island records and Wills. Old Bailey records can be very useful as the names of witnesses are mentioned as well as victims and perpetrators. The Foundling Hospital in London, which opened in 1741, took in 27,000 children before it closed in 1954. The mother had to present a petition to get an infant admitted and all children were renamed, so records include baptisms and mothers’ written petitions. Mothers also often left a token with the baby to identify it by, if she was later in a position to be able to reclaim her child, so an admission number should link the petition, new name and potential token.
Many people were missing from censuses; for example in 1901, 40,000 soldiers went to the Boer War and so are missing from their family homes. Often baptisms don’t occur in the expected parish; as extra churches were built in the 19th century, baptisms sometimes occurred in places where the parents didn’t live and many children from one family may have been baptised at the same time.
Elimination is a great part of family research and you might have to go forward looking at a person’s life before you can travel backwards. Don’t take any information at face value and if you can’t find someone, you may need to look just at initials, or the potential reversal of first and middle names. The way that letters are written in old records can also be confusing, so a capital letter ‘I’ can be mistaken for a ‘J’ etc. Also, be deeply suspicious of names as they can be spelt with so many variations for example Clark or Clarke/ Davis or Davies and these may change through time.
Lady Teviot finished up her talk by advising us to ‘Google’ anything as we might be surprised at what we could find as many parishes have transcribed local records etc. She also advised us that certificates are absolutely vital as researchers can make enormous errors without them.
Altogether, a thoroughly entertaining talk with much food for thought.
Report by Lesley Smith, Deal & District Branch Secretary