Family trees

Ames

Thank you, I'll have a look to see if there's a local one.

Although I have found one ancestor who was practically a foreigner - they were born on the border with Bradford!

Mojisola

Ames wrote: »

I think my current plan is to use the Ancestry trial to get as many names and dates as I can and then take it from there, does that seem reasonable?

I looked at a couple of census reacords online but really struggled to read the writing! As did whoever put the information on Ancestry, since the job as they read it (Pice weaver) doesn't seem to have existed.

You really need to verify at each stage that the names and dates you are collecting are part of your family - it can be easy (especially with more common names) to spend ages going down the wrong family line.

If you join RootsChat (which is completely free), you will get lots of advice and help with problems like reading old paperwork.

Ames

Thanks. I'm not sure if the records I was looking at last night were correct, they were listed on a family tree with some people I know are my relatives, but I've got a feeling the person who put the treee together made a mistake.

I'll have a look at RootsChat now.

PasturesNew

THIRZAH wrote: »

.... Cambridgeshire group years ago and ... parish registers

That's my region of interest.... considered joining, but as I could never attend groups etc it seemed pointless ... and I could just buy the CDs. Trouble is, there are so many I'd like.

I've got the assizes 1917-1930 or so at the moment, which gave me my grandad's name Can't find him though as he disappeared, but at least I know his name and so could do his tree all the way back to about 1800!

My lot are mostly St Andrew the Less & Chesterton.

I'd really like to look at the originals too though, alongside transcriptions, as sometimes the transcription might be wrong and I could spot it as I'm looking for specific entries in a sea of people ... or there might be a nifty note about the event/people!

PasturesNew

Ames wrote: »

Thanks. I'm not sure if the records I was looking at last night were correct, they were listed on a family tree with some people I know are my relatives, but I've got a feeling the person who put the treee together made a mistake.

I'll have a look at RootsChat now.

Yes, there are LOTS of mistakes where people make assumptions.

I found a tree online that said my ancestor had travelled 12 miles to marry a woman in a town where others of the same male surname lived. I figured "why on earth would my ancestor go there to marry, there must be a mistake" and so I just pencilled in that marriage... however, the GRO then put online the index of births and I checked my GG-grandmother's birth and there it was: the mother's name WAS that woman 12 miles away, so I know that the marriage I'd dismissed as "possibly made up nonsense just because he has the same name" is the right person. Although that doesn't exclude the possibility that people of those names regularly married! There are people out there with identical names.... but you can nudge the tree along, over time, for free, cross-checking records, bits of records, your own gut feeling and what's possible/feasible and likely.

The more people you know in the tree, too, the more your gut feeling grows. You start to understand the type of world they were living and moving in.... e.g. I found one ancestor's family in an entirely different county.... that'd seem random, but dig around a bit more and I found a bunch of them had moved at the same time and I found out how/why from a newspaper article of a golden wedding anniversary that then gave me more leads/clues.

PasturesNew

Ames wrote: »

get as many names and dates as I can and then take it from there, does that seem reasonable?

One way to use the site you mentioned is to search the public trees. You can't read them, but you can sometimes read enough in the search results to give you a clue.

e.g. if you have a Richard Monyhon Gubbins born 1876 and you do a search on the public trees to see if anybody else has got him ... it might show you that they know where he died, or that he married. It won't give you the information at that level, but you'll know that the records are out there... and, sometimes, with the death, it does tell you where... so there's your next clue.

If you buy into the subscriptions, you go there to get what you need. Doing it all free means you have to "think like a ninja" Not being constrained by a paid site does lead you to some odd and other data sources...

Yes, the paid sites help you do it faster .... which is great ... but there are other ways of skinning a cat.

People do it for different reasons. If you're trying to solve a mystery that's a direct bloodline enigma then you want to throw money at it to solve it quickest. If you're quite interested in this as a hobby and will end up looking up everybody's sister/brother/families they married into and the neighbour's cat .... then do it for free.

I've got so many different trees now .... I need to get organised and get a printer and start making little files

I've got my maternal maternal upline; my maternal illegitimate grandfather's upline; my paternal English upline .... and I've got all the downlines of my great-great grandmother. For my paternal maternal upline, that's all in French and my aunt's been doing that over 30 years, visiting all the records offices in France personally - and she's got it back to about 1300-1400.

I've even tried to find all the illegitimate children of my grandfather and plot their downlines.... my mum had a half sister she never knew about, who died in 1995 aged 75! And another I'm a bit stuck on... but there might be more!

Ames

I've been looking at my grandad's mother, there are two women with the same name born eight years apart. The tree I've found has the earlier one, but is missing at least one child. If it's the one born in 1892 then it means she was about 30 when she had her first child, which would seem quite old but given WW1 would have been in her early 20s isn't so unusual. But it could be the one born in 1900.

I'm not sure how I can actually find out which it is, even if I get my grandad's birth certificate it'll only have his mother's name, not age.

I'm actually looking for a specific person for a specific reason, but I don't think I'm going to find them.

Ames

Oops, cross posted.

Initially I want to find a particular person for a particular reason. I'm also interested in historical topics, like did I have any active Luddites in my family? (At a guess I'd say yes, but it'd be nice to know).

TonyMMM

Ames wrote: »

I'm not sure how I can actually find out which it is, even if I get my grandad's birth certificate it'll only have his mother's name, not age.

And the address your grandfather was born at, and his mother's occupation and home address (if different from the place of birth), and the details of the person who registered the birth, which may or may not be his mother. Not to mention his father's details (depending on whether his parents were married) - even if they weren't married his details could still be there if he went to register the birth.

Certificates for key individuals are essential if you want to research your ancestors accurately. Working from indexes means you are making assumptions which can often be wrong.

Ames

TonyMMM wrote: »

And the address your grandfather was born at, and his mother's occupation and home address (if different from the place of birth), and the details of the person who registered the birth, which may or may not be his mother. Not to mention his father's details (depending on whether his parents were married) - even if they weren't married his details could still be there if he went to register the birth.

Certificates for key individuals are essential if you want to research your ancestors accurately. Working from indexes means you are making assumptions which can often be wrong.

Sorry if I'm being thick, but how does that information help me determine if Jane Doe born in SomeTown in 1892 is the mother or if it's Jane Doe born in SomeTown in 1900?

I guess I'd then have to get marriage certificates?