One Name Studies Help to Trace Your Ancestors

Most people tracing their ancestors choose one family line, usually the father's family first - tracing them backwards and noting marriage partners families - then their mother's when the have gone back as far as they can with the father's family. They will have a family tree that includes dozens of different family names from the relations of their ancestors partners and their children's partners.

However, some people become so fascinated by how their own surname (family name)
developed that they decide to look for every example of someone with a surname the same as their own, whether they are directly related to themselves or not. They will collect many hundreds and, if it is a common name, sometimes thousands of instances of people with this one family name, Usually they will also collect the same type of detail that any genealogist would: where they lived, when they lived and their relationship to other family members.

It is not unusual to find that the people collecting these names will be doing this as part of tracing their own family tree adding this extra aspect for additional interest. Many people believe that ultimately everyone is related in some way and there is a fascination in trying to find if people who appear completely unrelated, do have a distant common ancestor.

People involved in these One Name Studies Often form a society or group for people interested in this one family name so that they can share resources and information. Not surprisingly, these societies are called One Name Studies Societies.

When you are tracing your family history it is a good idea to look to see if there are any One Name Societies specialising in your family names (there may be several groups) and ask if they have any information that can help you. You will need to know the name and location of at least one ancestor to do this. The most likely successes will come from names in the late 1800's as this is when official records in Britain became more formalised and extensive.

I personally had experience of using a one name society. I used Genes Reunited to store my tree and this allows me to make my tree available to others by making it public (making sure that no living ancestors were on it to prevent fraud). I was contacted
by a one name society asking me if I would be interested in knowing about one of my relatives which they had found using a name search. I was delighted as this particular ancestor (my great-great grandmother) just seemed to disappear and, despite spending many hours looking for her whereabouts, I just could not find her. The one name society was able to tell me that she had died and then gave me details of when and where this happened and also confirm details of a marriage. This allowed
me to trace many other relatives once this piece of my genealogical jig saw was
solved.

You can find Links to one name societies and other family history resources here

Value of British money prior to Decimalisation

When tracing your family history you may well come across documents which show payments or bequests (money left in a will).

If these were written before February 1971 (when British money became decimalised and money became valued in units of 10), then it will use units of money called pounds, shillings and pence. There may well be unfamiliar coins such as farthings and Guineas also mentioned.

To give you some idea of the value of coins, according to the UK Government's research department , you would need more than 150 of today's UK pounds (about 300 US $) to buy what one UK pound would have bought in 1750. Unlike recent times, the value of money hardly changed in the years between 1750 and the beginning of the 20th century so, as a rough guide, this valuation would also have applied to your ancestors living in Victorian (1800's) Britain.

There were 240 pence to each pound with twelve pence equal to one shilling and twenty shillings equal to one pound. The main coins you will come across are shown below:

To put it another way:

2 farthings = 1 halfpenny
2 halfpennies = 1 penny
3 pennies = 1 threepence
4 pennies = 1 groat
6 pennies = 1 sixpence
12 pennies = 1 shilling
20 Shillings = 1 pound
21 Shillings = 1 guinea

Pennies are usually called pence when there are several of them e.g. 12 pence = 1 shilling.

So One Pound is equal to:
960 farthings
480 halfpennies
240 pennies (
80 three pence
60 Groats
40 Six Pence
20 Shillings
5 Florins
4 Half Crowns
2 Crowns
1 Soverign

Complicated as it was, nobody thought so at the time (this was the coinage for hundreds of years) and when the British public were told that they were going to have to change to decimal coinage in 1971, the initial reaction of most people was that they would never be able to understand it!

For more information on tracing your family history, go to Find British Ancestors

Life in Victorian Britain - Domestic Servants in the 1800's

If you have started to trace your ancestors using British Census returns you may, as I was, be very surprised by the number of people either in service or employing servants in 19th century Britain. What surprised me most was that, in the early to mid 1800's, people with comparatively small incomes employed a domestic servant and often several. Getting work as a servant was known as "going into service".

The reason for this is that for most people, particularly women and girls, there was a very limited choice of jobs available. With no compulsory education and often unable to read and write , most of the the poor had a choice of working as an agricultural labourer or going into domestic service. For women, in particular, domestic service was seen as the only respectable available work.

According to Pamela Horn in her excellent book The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant it was often the practice to find domestic staff from a Workhouse as this would have been relatively inexpensive and for the person concerned possibly a better option.

Servants ranged from the the General Domestic servant. Basically this sort of servant was little better than a slave having to do any duties that was asked of them. They would generally be poorly educated and from a poor background. Duties could range from keeping the house clean, scrubbing pots and pans or helping out in employers business. With no modern gadgets to help them live was extremely harsh. The hours were long, often 15 hours and more a day, and the pay very poor. Live was generally very hard for this level of servant.

The next level were more specialists servants such as Cook, housemaid (responsible for general housekeeping duties often supervising a general servant to do the worst work) or nursemaid (who looked after the children). These specialist servants would be paid more than a general servant and be expected to be more experienced and skilled.

A special type of servant was the Governess. This was the Victorian inequivalent of today's nanny and would usually be better educated and perhaps be the daughter of a friend of the family. They were treated, and expected to be treated, much better than a normal servant. For example, one of my female ancestors was shown on the 1861 Census as a Governess whilst her father employed three servants himself. So it was obviously not seen as a huiating to take on this type of role.

As today, the very wealthy would employ a butler but in general you will find when you search the mid Victorian Census returns that most people who were professionally qualified or who ran their own business would employ between one to three servants.

As other forms of employment became available due to the expansion of industry in the late 1800's and education increased due to wider provision by the state following the 1870 Education Act, people had more choice of work open to them. Going into domestic service became gradually less and less appealing and so the supply of servants gradually fell. As a result of this the competition for the people that were available caused wages to rise and the income needed to employ staff gradually increased to a level that most people could not afford.


For more information on British family history go to www.findbritishancestors.co.uk

BMD and Census are not the only search tools.

You have used the BMD and Census tools from government returns and perhaps managed to trace your ancestors back to the 18th century - now what? Well, the answer is that you need to use other documents and sources.

There are a few problems the further you go back, unless your ancestors were very wealthy, and that is that many ordinary people didn't really feel the need to write things down (even if they could and many people didn't learn to read and write back in the 18th century) and tried to avoid "officials" as much as possible.

One source that you can try are Parish Records. Parish records are records kept by the local churches and record baptisms (a Christian ceremony usually carried out very close to the day of birth), marriages and burials (obviously carried out close to the time of death). Although many have been destroyed or lost over the years, there are a significant number remaining. Luckily, from 1598 often a copy of the records was made and sent to the Bishop in charge of a large area. These are called Bishop's Transcripts and there are often therefore two sources of the same information. You can learn more about Parish Records and links to them here.

Another source is Wills and probate records. Probate is the process of confirming that a Will is valid. Written wills first became valid in 1540 (previously property went to the oldest son by default) but it is the 1837 Wills Act that really made wills more widely used. As married women were not allowed to own property in their own right until 1882, most wills you will come across will be for men, unmarried women and widows. Even then it tended to be the wealthier people that would make a will as they were the only people owning property. This was because wills had to be prepared by professional lawyers, which was costly. You can learn more about Wills and links to them here.

You can find information and lists to links covering all aspects of tracing your family history on the Find British Ancestors website.

Where have my ancestors gone?

One of the mysteries you will find when trying to trace your Family Tree is that ancestors seem to just disappear! One year they and their family are on a Census or you find a birth certificate
but no trace of their life afterwards.

There are many reasons for this:

• People often used different names to their official name at birth. This was usually a shortened form of their full name: for example Albert was often shortened to Bert and Elizabeth to Beth or Liz. What makes things very difficult though is that sometimes people used names that were completely different to their original name.


• People could not always read and write, you may often find marriage certificates where the couple or their witnesses have put an X instead of their name, so they may not have known their real details. If their family travelled around the UK they may only have a vague idea of where they actually were born. In my own family even the most educated seem to have changed their mind between census returns. Whether this was the fault of the person taking the enumentaor or the fault of my ancestor, i'll never know.


• This brings me to the point that the people taking the census varied considerably in both their ability to take down the details, you will get to know about various enumerators as you study the census returns and learn which ones you can rely on and which ones are truly hopeless, and the legibility of their handwriting appaling.

One of the problems using computer searches is that unless you know exactly where someone was living at the time of a census you will probably have to search by name. This means that you will be using transcribed records.

Unfortunately, this brings in two possible sources of error: the enumerator may have got it wrong or the transcriber may have read the writing wrong.

If you ancestors travelled to different regions but still kept their accent then the enumerator may well have misunderstood what they were saying. Given that there was not the means to travel we have nowadays, and no television or radio, people would not easily have understood accents from a different part of the country and would be unfamiliar with the place names from another area.

This means that when trying to trace ancestors you have to sometimes be very flexible when entering search terms: sometimes using a specific area and just the family name and sometimes using the full name but widening the area of the country in which you are expecting to find your ancestors. As mentioned in my previous post people people did travel, sometimes considerable distances even though, by today's standards, it was very difficult to do so.

Post your family tree and let others find you.

One of the great things about using the internet to trace your family history is that you can often get free help from other people researching relatives who link to yours. Whilst this does not mean that you can stop looking yourself, often a breakthrough with a difficult to find relative will happen when you least expect it. This happens when you link to someone else who already has information on your family as part of their search. They find the information but you don't as they are approaching the search from a different angle, perhaps via a relative who has married into your family line.

My favourite site for posting family trees is Genes Reunited. It is free to post your tree and they will send you "Hot Links" of people who have similar names and dates of birth in their family trees. You can also look up the names yourself. Several years back, I was stuck as my great-great grandmother just seemed to disappear. On the 1851 Census she was living with her parents, on the 1861 Census she was nowhere. My first thought was that she got married and changed her name or perhaps had died. I spent hours looking though the marriage and death records, even spending several days in London at the General Records Office looking at the original manual books, but found nothing.

I had posted my tree on Genes Reunited and had forgotten about it but someone else searching found me and asked if I was interested in knowing about my relative. Of course I was! It turns out that my relative had married, although not where I had expected, and was related to someone who was researching my relatives husband's family line. I have since been able to repay the favour by helping others also stuck when I found links that they were not able to.

People tracing their family tree are nearly always willing to help others in their search and Genes Reunited is one good way to do it.

Free Family History Search using the LDS Mormon site

Like most people starting out to trace their family history, I started out wanting to know about my ancestors but didn't want to invest a large amount of money to do it! One of the first sites I used was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) site www.familysearch.org. The information on this site is freely available to anyone, not just members of the church, and it contains several important collections of records for the family historian.

Although most of the records are not specifically related to British ancestors, so you can use it to trace your ancestors throughout the world, there are some categories of information which are for ancestors in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Two of the most important collections for me were the 1881 British Census and the Vital Records collection (which lists births and deaths of people living before 1930).

To have success with this site you need a good idea of where your ancestor actually lived. You put in the search boxes as much information as possible about the person and their family. Choose a country where they were born, lived or died. The important thing here is that you you can't choose Britain or the UK (it's not on the list), you have to choose the actual country: England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland.

A search usually finds Ancestral Records. These are records going back many centuries, often back to the 1500's and have been collected mainly from local, non Mormon, church records. It give details such as dates and places of birth, christening, marriage and death.

Next it will tell you if it has found anyone with the name you selected in the British 1881 census.

It then lists people in the International Genealogical Index. This index is similar to the Ancestral file although people may have contributed details to one and not the other.

Finally it lists names that have been recorded by people in Family Trees lodged with the Church or submitted to the site (you can add your own family tree). If you find a match, you can often find contact details of the person who submitted the tree.

If you are using this search, there are a couple of problems. The first is that many of the records may be too early to use for a search at the start of your research. Most people just don't know the names of their ancestors from more than 100 years ago and probably are not certain of exactly where they lived. I found I needed to start with the 1901 census, unfortunately not available on the LDS site, and work back from there for my search (see My Search for details).

Nevertheless, it is well worth a try and certainly a resource that is worth coming back to each time you find a relative in your family tree.

For more information and free resources for tracing your British ancestors try www.findbritishancestors.co.u

Life in Victorian Britain: The Workhouse

If you have ever read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens you will probably have heard of Workhouses. Oliver was born in a Workhouse and Dickens wrote about the terrible conditions in these places. Workhouses were places where the poor and destitute would go to received food and shelter in return for work. If any of your ancestors were poor for part or all of their live, and most people have at least some who were, they may have been in contact with a Workhouse at some point in their lives. My great-great grandfather was born in a workhouse and his birth was registered by the local Workhouse Master.

Workhouses had started in the 1700's as an attempt to help the poor. However it was the 1834 The Poor Law Amendment Act that changed the way they operated. The view at the time was that the poor were poor only because they avoided work and therefore should be punished. This government legislation actually proposed that conditions in workhouses were to be made very harsh to discourage people from asking for help! Deciding to enter a workhouse, when both going into and leaving a workhouse was voluntary, must have been very difficult and we can only imagine the desperation of those entering them.

Perhaps the only compensating features of the workhouses was that they did provide medical care at a time when private medical care was both expensive and hard to obtain for the poor. It also gave a place where people knew they could go if they were truly desperate. For example, unmarried mothers in the 1800's were often disowned by their family and, unable to provide for themselves whilst pregnant, would have very few options open to them other than going into a workhouse until the birth.

For more information of British institutions in the 1800's an excellent free site is
workhouses.org.uk

Links to other useful free family history resources can be found on the
www.findbritishancestors.co.uk website.

Free Family Genealogy search tools.

One of the great things about the family genealogy community is that so many people are willing to share information. It must be one of the friendliest and most helpful communities around. A great way to find out about this is to try some of the FREE resources available.

Although not offering the same coverage of records as sites like Ancestry.com or Genes Reunited, free volunteer run sites offer access to many records. People contribute to the sites either by adding their own information, which they have gathered doing their own family history research, or volunteer their time out of interest in genealogy to do a particular piece of work such as indexing Birth records.

My first experience of using these sites was with the free volunteer run Freebmd website which is a good place to start if you are searching for England and Wales BMD information. You put in the name and area where you think someone was born and it gives you a list of people with birth, marriage or death certificates registered. Fantastic!

For census records you can look at the 1881 UK census records, and a lot of other information on the Mormon LDS genealogy site http://www.familysearch.org. The companion site to FreeBMD for census information in the UK is Freecen. This is another volunteer site which is attempting to transcribe all the census records from 1841 to 1891 to make then freely available online. They haven't quite got there yet but they have converted large number and are certainly worth visiting.

Both Ancestry.com and Genes Reunited allow a free search of their records which gives you a lot of basic information. You only have to pay to view the actual records.

For more free resources for family historians check out my website www.findbritishancestors.co.uk.

Travelling Around - Travel in the past

Today I went to my local gym and found a note on the notice board saying that they would be enforcing a parent and child parking area, just outside the main entrance. Apparently, parents are no longer prepared to walk the 100 feet from the car park. They consider this is too far for their children to walk! What has this to do with family history: Well, it got me thinking about how life had changed since my Victorian ancestors time.

One branch of my family lived and worked within a few miles of the town where I was born going back to the 1600's. That's fantastic for tracing that particular branch of my family tree and quite unusual. However, ancestors in other branches seemed to move every few years, often by hundreds of miles

How did they do this? The poor ones almost certainly walked!

When I was young, I remember talking to a farm labourer who had worked during the early 1900's, herding cows. He reminisced that several times a year he would take cows to market. How did you do that without a lorry I asked. He replied incredulously: "We walked of course!". There wasn't any other alternative.

He would walk about 100 miles to London, where the price they could get for each cow was much higher than locally. Walking with five or six cows from dawn to dusk, they managed to cover about 20 to 30 miles a day. If they walked further the cows would damage their feet.

If he was lucky he would find a friendly farmer who would sell him some food, let him use a field for the cows and allow him to sleep in the relative comfort of a barn. If not, he slept by the side of the road with the cows. Sometimes, he wouldn't eat for a couple of days to save money. It must have been a hard and unpleasant life by modern standards but he only had fond memories of that period.

What does this mean for people tracing their family tree for ancestors who lived in Britain?

Firstly, it means that you you may not find your ancestors where you expect them to be. if you don't find them in one place, try looking elsewhere. This is where Census Returns come in useful.

If there are a number of people in your ancestors family then you can look for families with similar names. Later Census returns have a place of birth so if you can find a family with the same names in the family and, if possible, born in the same place as your ancestors,there is a good chance that it is the same family.

Secondly, as the countries of Britain are relatively small, people would often move between England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland (North and South) in search of work. People still do, although not usually by walking!

It is quite probable that, if you have British ancestors, you may have to search records in several of the British countries, particularly if your ancestors lived within a hundred miles of a border. Because there were no policed borders between the countries of Britain, our British ancestors could travel between them easily and very often did.

Click here for more information on the Census

Click Here for links to records offices for British countries.

First Post

I guess it would be a good idea to make my first post a summary of what this blog will be about.

I have been tracing my family history, here in England, for over three years . There have been some exciting times, when I managed to find a link buried deep in a Census return, and some very frustrating times when ancestors just seemed to disappear completely, never to resurface. In this blog i'll be telling you about my search and letting you know the problems and solutions I have found when tracing my genealogy in Britain.

Everyone who starts out tracing their family history never forgets the first time they find details of an ancestor from four or five generations ago: a person that no living relative can remember but who may have been the subject of many family myths. Suddenly history, which seemed so boring when young, comes alive.

It's amazing how emotional it can be to read about the hard life of someone distantly related. It's odd but I have found that seeing the details written down in birth, death, marriage and census documents made the people more real to me. Instead of just a name they become people I "know". I have spoken to other people tracing their family tree and they have had the same experience so it must be quite a common reaction.

If you are looking for your own family history in Britain (England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland) then my website www.findbritishancestors.co.uk that should also be useful.