Collins

Tracing Your Family History

Anthony Adolph

How We Are Related

‘Who begot whom is a most amusing kind of hunting’ Horace Walpole

For our friend’s daughter Kim Van Trier, who completed her journey from conception to birth in marginally less time and with considerably less fuss than the writing of this book, and for Scott Crowley, whose quiet support and encouragement throughout have been unfaltering.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

How We Are Related

Dedication

Introduction

PART ONE Getting Started

CHAPTER ONE Ask The Family

CHAPTER TWO Writing It All Down

CHAPTER THREE Ancestral Pictures

CHAPTER FOUR Before You Begin

PART TWO The Main Records

CHAPTER FIVE General Registration

CHAPTER SIX Censuses

CHAPTER SEVEN The Main Websites

CHAPTER EIGHT Directories & Almanacs

CHAPTER NINE Lives Less Ordinary

CHAPTER TEN Parish Records

CHAPTER ELEVEN Manorial Records

CHAPTER TWELVE Wills

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Gravestones & Memorials

PART THREE Taking It Further

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Newspapers & Magazines

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Land Records

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Slave Ancestry

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Maps & Local Histories

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Records of Elections

CHAPTER NINETEEN The Parish Chest

CHAPTER TWENTY Hospitals & Workhouses

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE What People Did

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Fighting Forbears

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Tax & Other Financial Matters

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Swearing Oaths

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Legal Accounts

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Education! Education! Education!

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Immigration & Emigration

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Religious Denominations In Britain

PART FOUR Broadening The Picture

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Genetics

CHAPTER THIRTY What’s In A Name?

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Royalty, Nobility & Landed Gentry

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Heraldy

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Psychics

Useful Addresses

Index

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Long before there were computer programmers and engineers, blacksmiths or even farmers, our ancestors told each other stories of who they were and where they came from. Over time, as other subjects became more important (or at least seemed to be), our ancestral tales began to take a backburner, the older ones blurring into creation myths but the more recent ones remaining important to their tellers and listeners.

When memories started to be written down, one of the first things to be recorded were ancient genealogies, linking the living to their ancient roots. It is for that reason that we can trace the Queen’s ancestry back through the Saxon royal family to their mythological ancestor, the god Woden. Yet for most, the rise of written records heralded a gradual erosion of oral traditions and, in medieval England, memories tended to grow shorter in proportion to the proliferating rolls of vellum and parchment recording our forbears’ deeds, dues and misdemeanours. And then, just as it became apparent to our ancestors that they were losing touch with the past, it crossed people’s minds that these self-same documents, compiled for no better reason than to record land transfer, court cases or tax liability, could help us retrace our past and discover the identities of our forgotten forbears.

My great-great-grandparents, Albert Joseph Adolph and his wife Emily Lydia, née Watson. When I started my research, they were as far back as my grandfather’s memory stretched.

This, the act of tracing family roots through both remembered stories and written records, is genealogy, the subject that has preoccupied most of my life, first as an amateur and later as a professional ever since, as a child, I encountered the pedigrees of elves and hobbits at the back of The Lord of the Rings. And it has been my good fortune that the past few decades have been ones of exceptional growth in genealogy as a pastime across the world, from a minority interest with snobby overtones in the 1960s to a mainstream activity, contributing significantly to the tourist industry and constituting one of the principal uses of the internet. In recent decades, it has broken through, too, into the media.

The author presenting BBC1’s 2007 Gene Detectives with Melanie Sykes.

NEW EDITION

FAMILY HISTORY is enjoying an extraordinarily dynamic phase and much is changing. In the last few years, internet companies have realised the profits to be made by setting up pay-to-view websites, especially covering the two great building blocks of 19th-century family trees, General Registration and census records. The small amounts paid by users fund further indexing work, thus bringing yet more records within far easier reach of more people than ever before.

These sites have truly revolutionised searching. When I wrote the first edition of this book, I would only have sought people in the 1871 census (for example) if I had a precise address, or had no alternative choice. Now, I can search the entire 1871 census online in seconds. I would make one plea, though: if you are new to this, please don’t take these new developments for granted, or grumble at the relatively very small amounts of money being charged. You are at a vast advantage over genealogists in previous generations. Equally, however, pre-internet genealogists did have to get to grips with and understand how these records worked in far more detail, and this tended to make them very good researchers. So, having saved a lot of time thanks to the internet, why not use some of it to read the relevant chapters of this book, so that you can form a more rounded picture of how the original records were created, and where the originals may be found? This edition is as up-to-date as it can be – yet improvements in accessibility occur almost monthly. These are exciting times indeed.

The first year of this millennium saw two series appearing on national television, BBC 2’s Blood Ties and my own series, Extraordinary Ancestors, on Channel 4. These were followed by further series with which I have been privileged to be involved, particularly Living TV’s Antiques Ghostshow and Radio 4’s Meet the Descendants, which have continued to tell stories of genealogical investigation and discovery.

My mother’s great-grandfather, Rev. Patrick Henry Kilduff – one of a treasure trove of old photographs I was given by a distant cousin whom I had traced in the course of my research.

Millions of people, including you, are now actively investigating their origins, or at least thinking about doing so. This complete guide is intended to cover all the topics you will need to know about how to trace your family tree. You can start at the beginning, letting it guide you through the process of getting started and working back through the different types of records which should, given time and patience, enable you to trace your family tree back for hundreds of years. Or, if you are already a genealogist, you can use it as a reference book to identify and learn more about the vast array of different types of source that may be available for your research.

In some respects, this book follows the standards already set out by its predecessors, and I fully acknowledge my enormous debts to genealogical writers who blazed the trail before me, not least Sir Anthony Wagner, Mark Herber, Terrick FitzHugh, George Pelling, Don Steel, John Titford and Susan Lumas. In other respects, and within the parameters set by what is expected of genealogical reference books, I have tried to add to this my personal perspective, not least by drawing on my experiences in translating genealogy into radio and television.

A NEW BOOK FOR A CHANGING WORLD

In this book, I have tried to reflect the extraordinary changes that have recently injected new life into this most ancient of subjects.

DNA technology

DNA technology has escaped the confines of the laboratory and become readily available to anyone with even a modest research budget. Do not be deceived by the relative brevity of my chapter on the subject; its implications for genealogy are vast.

Multi-cultural roots

Although Britain has always been a multi-cultural nation, a barrage of prejudices and phobias meant that we have only recently started to uncover the full extent of our global roots. Only in the last two decades have the many white families with black or Asian ancestors been able to start investigating such connections. Only recently have they been permitted by society and, in some cases, their own attitudes, to look on their connections with other continents with fascination rather than shame. Equally, thanks to the post-war mass immigration of black and Asian families, there are now a very great number of British families with roots exclusively from overseas. But by far the greatest trend, resulting from relationships between the different ethnic communities in Britain, is the rise of generations with roots both in indigenous white Britain and in other continents.

Shilpa Mehta (on the right) with her father, Shailendra, and brother, Shayur, in Zambia before her family settled permanently in England (see here).

Other genealogical writers have not ignored this fact, but nor have they addressed the issue in any depth. I felt that, in writing a book for genealogists in modern Britain, it was appropriate to broaden its scope to acknowledge the vast number of readers whose ethnic English blood – if they have any at all – is only a small proportion of their total ancestral mix. I have not attempted to write a worldwide guide to tracing family trees but, while the focus of the book is on research in England, I have tried to show and remind readers how the same or similar sources can be located and used in the rest of the British Isles and in countries all around the world. Please note that, when I refer to records outside Britain, I do so by way of example: the absence of a reference to a type of record in a certain country does not mean that records are not there. The volume of material available for America requires a separate book and has therefore been omitted almost entirely.

The internet

The internet has changed genealogy by making different types of records more easily searchable and by creating new resources that never existed before, such as the GenesReunited website. If you are serious about tracing your family tree, I recommend you either acquire a computer, find a good library or café providing internet access, or are very, very nice to someone who is already connected to the web. While you should never trust anything on the internet without checking it in original sources, the amount of time you can save using the resources available online is enormous.

The Genes Reunited Website home page: www.genesreunited.co.uk

On a daily basis, new indexes and resources appear, change, grow or, in some cases, disappear from the great information super-highway that is the worldwide web. Website addresses are so helpful and important that I have provided the ones that are most useful at the time of writing, and made them an integral part of the text. However, the rate of change inevitably means that, by the time you read this book, some things will have changed and proposed new legislation even threatens to restrict access to some of the records described here. In most cases, though, change will only have been for the better in terms of more records becoming more easily accessible via index and databases.

PROFESSIONAL HELP

I became a professional genealogist in 1992 after several years studying at the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies. During most of my career, first working for a well-known firm of genealogists and latterly with my own freelance business, I have spent more time establishing what sources are available to solve particular problems and commissioning record agents to search them, than actually being in archives myself.

Connections between the past and present. My great-great-aunt Louisa Havers (1832–1937) at Ingatestone Hall, Essex, in 1917, with her young cousin Philip Coverdale who, as an old man, took me under his wing and taught me how to trace family trees.

This is a course of action I wholeheartedly recommend to all readers of this book. Many people say, ‘But I want to do it all myself.’ Fair enough – and use this book to acquire a detailed knowledge of the sources and their whereabouts. But there are many cases where paying a record searcher in a different county (or on the other side of the world) for a couple of hours’ work can save a vast amount of time, travel and accommodation costs, especially if the source you identified turns out to have been the wrong one. Receiving positive results by post (or email) may not be quite as exciting as turning over a dusty page and finding an ancestor’s name but, frankly, most records are now searchable only by microfiche in record offices anyway. The time you will have saved having the search done can then be spent visiting the place where you have discovered your ancestor once lived. If you really want to do it yourself, though, don’t let me stop you. I merely offer a piece of personal advice.

GETTING TO KNOW YOUR ANCESTORS

Throughout this introduction, I have referred to genealogy. There’s also a subject called family history. Essentially, genealogy is tracing who was who – the nuts and bolts of the family tree – while family history is more about finding out about the ancestors themselves, exploring their lives and working out how they came to do what they did and be who they were. That in itself then merges into the subject of biography. Once you have researched your family history in depth you will, in effect, have researched mini (or not so mini) biographies of your ancestors. Most, if not actually all, of the sources used by biographers are described in this book. Getting to know your ancestors can be a fascinating experience even if you do not (as people who have seen me in Antiques Ghostshow will know) want to roam into the world of psychics.

Filming the story of EastEnders’ convulted family tree on location at Elstree, 2000.

The author filming ITV’s Lost Royals at the College of Arms with former BBC Royal Correspondent Jenny Bond and Norrow and Ulster King of Arms.

But, in investigating your family tree, please bear in mind there is a real distinction between your ancestors and the records in which they appear. I have known people to cherish birth certificates as if they were the spiritual embodiments of their forbears. They are not. Think of when you last looked at yours and what a nuisance it is when you generate records similar to those you use for tracing ancestry. Obtaining passports and driving licences is a chore: dealing with banks, lawyers, the Inland Revenue and social services is tiring and invariably annoying. Often, when you encounter an ancestor in a record, they, too, were probably vexed and annoyed through the making of it. Equally, useful though they are, many modern genealogy programs and charts require you to focus so much on dates of birth, marriage and death that you can easily forget that the people concerned actually had lives in the intervening years. The real ancestors stand back behind the dates and records they generated: bear that in mind and you won’t go far wrong in learning to understand them.

PART ONE GETTING STARTED

Tracing family trees is mainly about seeking records, but before you do that, there’s a great deal you may be able to learn from your own family – close as well as distant relatives. And whatever you find out, don’t forget to write it down. Start properly and avoid tears later!

CHAPTER ONE ASK THE FAMILY

With very few exceptions, nobody knows more about your immediate family than your immediate family. Yet the first steps in tracing a family tree are often ignored or skipped over in the headlong dash for illustrious roots and unclaimed fortunes.

Most people reading this will probably have made at least some sort of start at researching their family tree. This chapter gives structure to your first steps and, I hope, to all your research over years to come.

Family papers: a letter to my great-great-grandmother from her husband’s cousin, Mrs Dorthea Boulger (1908), concerning their family history.

STARTING OFF

However old you are, the very best way to start research is by writing down your own essential details, which are:

Date and place of birth

Your education, occupations and where you have lived

Religious denomination

Anything interesting about yourself, which future generations may be glad you took the trouble to record

Date and place of marriage, and to whom (if applicable)

Date and place of children’s births and marriages (if applicable)

Then repeat the same process for your siblings, parents, their siblings, your grandparents and so on, adding details of when and where people died, if applicable.

One of the key elements here is write it all down because all this work will be to little avail if you do not record your findings.

Besides information on the living, you will soon start to record information on the deceased, as recalled by their children, grandchildren and so on. This is oral history – things known from memory rather than written records.

THE ORAL TRADITION

Originally, all family trees were known orally. In Britain, there are a handful of pedigrees of the ancient rulers of the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Britons, Gaels and Picts, which stretch far back into the past, and which are known now because they were later written down. They contain some palpable mistakes and grey areas, but they are greatly valued because they are pretty much all we have left. Sadly, cultures such as Britain that adopted widespread use of written records tend very quickly to lose the oral history that has been accumulated over the centuries. For much of the Third World, and the native cultures of the Americas and Australasia, this invasion of literacy has happened much more recently, and oral traditions are still strong. With the spread of literacy, though, oral history is under threat and will probably disappear altogether very soon; hence the need to write it down and make it available on websites such as Genes Reunited.

LIFETIMES: A RICH ORAL TRADITION

JUST BECAUSE very few written records were made in pre-colonial Africa does not mean that family trees cannot be traced. Benhilda Chisveto of Edinburgh knew her father was Thomas Majuru, born in 1953, and that his mother was Edith, but that was all. She then made enquiries about her family from older relatives still living in her native Zimbabwe, and was told the following family tree, dictated orally and perhaps never recorded on paper before.

Thomas Majuru was son of Mubaiwa, son of Majuru (hence the modern surname), who lived near Harare, and who was apparently the only survivor of his area when British forces invaded in 1897. He buried the dead and then sought refuge in Murehwa, where the family now live. He was son of Mukombingo. Before Mukombingo, the line runs back, son to father, thus: Kakonzo; Mudavanhu; Mbari; Taizivei; Barahanga; Jengera; Zimunwe; Katowa; Mhangare; Maneru; Dambaneshure; Chihoka; Chiumbe; Musiwaro; Mukwashahuue; Makutiodora; Diriro; Gweru; Makaya; Chamutso; Guru; Waziva; Misi; Chitedza otherwise called Chibwe Chitedza; Nyavira also called Nyabira; Mukunti-Muora.

A FEW FACTS

The only dates in the oral history were for Mbari, who was chief of his tribe from 1795 to 1797, and Katowa, who was chief 1450-97. The earliest ancestor, Mukunti-Muora, supposedly lived 4000 years ago. One thousand would be more realistic, and to get back from 1795 to 1450 in five generations is stretching it. There may, then, be some omissions of generations, or misremembered facts, but that makes this no different to the earliest oral pedigrees of the British Isles, which stretch back to Arthur, Brutus of Troy and the god Woden. This does not detract from their immense value because they undoubtedly do record the names of ancestors who really lived, and who are not recorded in any other fashion. Lose the oral history and these ancient memories will vanish irrevocably.

Such traditions should be treated with the greatest respect, but it is unrealistic to imagine that they can be strictly accurate. When using oral history as the basis for original, record-based research, you mustn’t be surprised if you find names, dates or places are given slightly (or sometimes wildly) inaccurately. I sometimes get my own age wrong by a year (I certainly can’t remember my telephone number all the time), so you should be prepared for this and, if you do not find what you are looking for under Thompson in 1897, see if what you want isn’t listed under Thomson in 1898 instead.

Family papers: lists of children’s dates of birth and baptism were often kept by families, especially before the start of General Registration in 1837.

In fact, you can’t trace a record-based family tree properly without developing a healthy scepticism for anything you are told, or indeed anything you read. There are deceptions and lies, of course. One family I helped, who were called Newman, discovered their ancestor had faked his own suicide and started a new life – as a ‘new man’, his original name having been something completely different. More often, though, discrepancies and inaccuracies arise through simple mistakes or lapses of memory. ‘Granny would never lie,’ said one client of mine, ‘so that birth certificate must be wrong.’ No, Granny didn’t lie, she just got her age slightly wrong. There’s a real difference.

Indeed, recording oral history often relies on interviewing the elderly. Sometimes, it’s the only time very old people have any proper attention paid to them, so be indulgent if they don’t reel out exactly what you want in ten minutes flat. Letter, telephone and email can all help you gain valuable information from your relatives, but if you can visit them, so much the better. It may seem a bind, but it’s often worth it and will become part of your store of memories to pass on to later generations. I once went all the way to Tours in France to visit Lydia Renault, a cousin of my mother’s. I arrived at 11am and, whereas her English relations would have offered me tea and some ghastly old biscuits, Lydia suggested whisky and Coca-Cola, which we drank on her balcony, overlooking the Loire, while she regaled me with tales of her family at the start of the 20th century.

ELICITING THE PAST

That was an exception. If you get tea and stale biscuits, receive them with as great a semblance of delight as you can muster. If you are approaching someone you haven’t met before, make every effort to write and telephone in advance and make it absolutely clear you are after their invaluable knowledge, rather than their (usually less valuable) purse. Write down (or tape record) everything they say, as the seemingly irrelevant may later turn out to be the main clue that cracks the case. If they have difficulty remembering facts, ask them to talk you through any old photographs they may have – that often stimulates the synapses – and sometimes you may get more from them if you allow them to contradict you.

FOR EXAMPLE:

‘What was your grandfather’s mother called?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘I think it was Doris.’

‘No, no, Doris was his sister. His mother was Milly!’

Another tip: if they can’t remember a date of, say, when someone died, try to get them to narrow down the period in which it could have happened.

‘When did your great-grandmother die?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, do you remember her?’

‘Oh yes, she was at my wedding.’

‘So she was alive in 1935. And was she at your first child’s christening in 1937?’

‘Oh no, she died before then.’

Be sensitive, too, to changing social attitudes. Fascinating though it may be to you, the very elderly may not want to talk about their parents’ bigamous marriage, so if you want any information from them you must tread very carefully. One man’s black sheep, after all, is another’s hero.

THE POWER OF PAPER

Don’t forget, though, that younger relations of yours may have been told things by much older relations who are now dead. Equally – and here we leave the realms of oral history and move on a step – they, like the elderly, may have family papers and heirlooms. These come in so many forms: letters, school reports, memorial cards, passports, vaccination and ration cards, and so on, all crowned by the queen of all family papers, the family bible.

My grandfather’s air raid warden card. Note that he had been appointed before the war, in 1938.

Some bibles can be centuries old, faithfully recording the births, marriages and deaths of each member of the family. The tip to finding family bibles is to trace down the female-to-female line of the family, as they are often passed from mother to daughter. Lost or unwanted ones (how can anybody not want a family bible?) often end up at car boot sales and genealogical magazines have been known to publish letters from well wishers who have found such a bible, describing its contents and volunteering to return it to the right family.

Whether it’s a family bible or a 70-year-old funeral bill, write down all the salient details (or, better still, photocopy everything) because such papers may contain clues that will only become useful to you long afterwards. Ignore such advice at your peril and, if you have to go back all the way to Wigan to have another look at your cousin’s grandmother’s address book you didn’t bother with ten years ago, don’t blame me.

Pages from the Fairfax family bible, which even includes an extra newspaper cutting.

Actually, the real prize transcends even that, because sometimes you will find that an ancestor will already have tried to trace the family tree. One of the things that really encouraged me to pursue my own was being given a Harrods’ carrier bag full of ‘the family papers’, which turned out to be my great-great grandmother’s notes, showing her attempts to trace her family tree between 1880 and 1920. Sadly there was no sign of her finished family trees – if there ever were any – and nor have they ever turned up. However, the bag did include replies to letters she had written to her second and third cousins, thus filling out my own family tree before I had ever set foot outside my front door.

Family reunions: a family photograph showing the Adolph, Mitchiner and Gale families celebrating the 80th birthday of my grandfather Joseph Adolph in 1990.

AN OUTLINE OF THE MAIN SOURCES
PRELIMINARY RESEARCH

Make notes on what you know

Constantly update your notes

Ask immediate family

Network with remoter family

Register with www.genesreunited.co.uk (see here) and other ‘contact’ websites

Update your entries as you learn more

BASIC RESEARCH

General Registration (from 1837) (see Chapter Five)

Censuses (1841-1901) (see Chapter Six)

Wills and administrations from 1858 (see Chapter Twelve)

MORE IN-DEPTH RESEARCH

Unindexed censuses, using directories (see Chapter Eight)

Parish registers (from 1538) (see Chapter Ten)

Bishops’ transcripts (from 1598) (see here)

Manorial records (see Chapter Eleven)

Wills and letters of administration (before 1858) (see Chapter Twelve)

Gravestones (mainly from 17th century) (see Chapter Thirteen)

Newpapers for obituaries, etc. (Mainly from 18th century) (see Chapter Fourteen)

Electoral registers (see Chapter Eighteen), etc. to find addresses

Parish chest and poor law material (mainly from 17th century) (see Chapter Nineteen)

Occupation records (especially army and navy, mainly from 18th century) (see Chapter Twenty-One and Chapter Twenty-Two)

Legal records (see Chapter Twenty-Five)

Education records (see Chapter Twenty-Six)

Printed pedigrees, heraldic records, etc. (see Chapter Thirty-One and Chapter Thirty-Two)

AND, IF ALL GOES EXCEPTIONALLY WELL …

Medieval tax lists and land records (from 1086) (see Chapter Twenty-Three)

Early university and school records from Middle Ages (see Chapter Twenty-Six)

Ancient oral pedigrees now in print

CHAPTER TWO WRITING IT ALL DOWN

The rest of this book is about how to trace your ancestry, but this chapter focuses on how to record your findings, from getting all your notes written down on computer or paper and moving onto understanding the family tree conventions.

Your Family Tree and Family History Monthly genealogical magazines.

Some people can get bogged down in choosing computer packages, filing systems and so on. Frankly, if you enjoy computer programs, then you’ll love family history, as there is a vast array to chose from, reviewed and advertised in the genealogical magazines like Your Family Tree and Family History Monthly, with an excellent comparative chart at www.Myhistory.co.uk. Everyone has a preference. Personally, I don’t rate very highly the packages that invite you to fill in forms about all your ancestors. I feel it de-humanises them and encourages some people to become obsessed simply with the act of form filling with completing forms that can’t be. Me? I keep a cardboard file for each family I am tracing, containing photographs, documents, notes and so on, and a rough family tree on paper, and then maintain a narrative pedigree on my word processor. Once I feel satisfied with what I have done, I may also write up a summarised version of the family story, including the best pictures and documents, either to circulate among the family or to submit to a relevant family history journal (see here).

GETTING IT ON PAPER

The main point at this stage is to write everything down. Be they oral or written, quote your sources precisly. Later, you can interpret the sources, but if you do this initially and discard the original information, and then find that your interpretation of the sources had been wrong, you (or someone else trying to help you – and, believe me, I’ve been there!) may have a terrible time disentangling what is correct from what is not. This applies just as much to interviewing people as to record-based research. In addition, always write down exactly what records you were searching, for what periods and for what you searched. If you do, and later you find that you are stuck, you may rely on your notes to tell you, say, that you looked under Thompson and also Thomson, thus potentially saving yourself a repeat journey to a record office to perform a search you had, in fact, already carried out but forgotten about.

THE BASIC FAMILY TREE

CRANE PRINTS

OLD FAMILY TREES were drawn with the names of parents in circles and their children radiating out below them. This arrangement was thought to resemble the footprints of Cranes in the soft mud of river banks, hence their name ‘Crane’s foot’ – ‘pied de Cru’ – pedigree!

There are several different types of family tree. These are:

‘Family trees’ and ‘pedigrees’, sometimes prefixed with the term ‘dropline’ (a chart with the earliest ancestor at the top and each subsequent generation connected by dropping lines), are one and the same – charts depicting a line or lines of ancestry.

‘Narrative pedigrees’, which are family trees written down in paragraphs, a style that is used by Burke’s Peerage and which is a highly effective way of recording a lot of information in a small space, but which isn’t so good for easily seeing who’s related to who. It is not much use for conducting original research, when only a family tree will make everything clear.

Seize quartiers, which spread out either like trees or in concentric circles, to show both parents, all four grandparents, the eight great-grandparents and – if you can manage it – all 16 great-greats. The original purpose of seize quartiers was snobbish, as you had to prove that all 16 were noble if you wanted to join foreign orders of knighthood like the Golden Fleece. Now, however, they are a good way of showing you have traced your family exhaustively. But don’t feel obliged and become exhausted, this is supposed to be fun and you can aim to trace as much or as little as you want.

Part of my mother’s family tree, showing how Germans Printed pedigrees in the 1930s.

CHARTING CONVENTIONS

= Indicates a marriage, accompanied by ‘m.’ and the date and place

— Solid lines indicate definite connections

… Dotted lines indicate probable but unproven ones

Wiggly lines are for illegitimacy and ‘x’ for a union out of wedlock important on old pedigrees but less relevant today

– – Loops are used if two unconnected lines need to cross over

Wives usually go on the right of husbands, though only if that doesn’t interfere with the overall layout of the chart

Conventionally, surnames are put after men’s but not women’s names, but again this is becoming a bit old fashioned

Equally, there are no rules about what you can or can’t include on a family tree. Put in as much or as little as you want and include as many families as you want, though beware of cluttering. I would recommend a minimum of full names, dates of birth or baptism, marriage and death or burial, where those events took place, and occupations. If your chart lacks any of these, it will be of little use to other researchers and, more importantly, it will be boring. If you know someone was crushed to death by a bear or invented the casserole dish, for goodness sake put it on the chart!

There are some sensible conventions and abbreviations, which you’ll need to know both for compiling your own charts and understanding other peoples’. These have been outlined above.

Marriage bond for John Nursey, surgeon of Coddenham, Suffolk.

EXPANDING ON THE BASICS

When it comes to writing up the family history, you can, again, decide what to say and how to say it, and you can get ideas from the examples in this book and the many published family histories and articles in family history journals and magazines.

It’s a good idea to try to relate the events in the family to the world around them:

Who was on the throne

What wars and plagues would have concerned or affected them

What the places where they lived were like at the time

What their occupations entailed.

This is a valuable exercise, which might actually help you find out more about them, or highlight inaccuracies or even mistakes in the family tree. It is also a good reminder that these were real, breathing people who existed in the world, not as pale shadows on old, dusty records. Indeed, if you think your ancestors only existed within the confines of parish register entries and, now, the forms generated by genealogical computer programs, it’s unlikely you will gain very much from family history, or that other people will enjoy and benefit from your hard work. The more you can think of and convey the idea of your ancestors as real human beings, the more fun – and success – you’re likely to have.

PRESENTING YOUR RESULTS

HERE IS THE SAME information about the Fairfax family, presented as a narrative pedigree, a prose account and a traditional family tree.

NARRATIVE PEDIGREE

John Fairfax, born about 1710, married Mary Hayward on 16 September 1735 at Framlingham, Suffolk. He was a draper and grocer of Coddenham and wrote his will in 1751, naming his executors as his wife Mary and brother-in-law John Hayward. It was proved 2 June 1758 (Suffolk Record Office IC/AA1/184/49). His children (details of which are recorded in the family bible) included:

1. Frances, born 24 May 1736, baptised 25 May and died 31 May, Stowmarket.

2. Mary, born 9 June 1738, baptised 26 June at Stowmarket.

3. John Fairfax, born 30 June 1739, died 15 weeks old, buried at Stowmarket.

4. John Fairfax, born 30 August 1741. Left a watch by his father. Married Penelope Wright at St James’s, Bury St Edmund’s, on 5 May 1770. Elected freeman of Bury St Edmunds, 1802. Death recorded in Gentleman’s Magazine as being in a fit on 12 February 1805 while visiting ‘a friend [sic], Mr P. Nursey, at Little Bealings’. He had two children:

1. Penelope, born on 17 April and baptised on 31 May 1771 at St James’s, buried on 30 June 1787 at Bury St Edmunds.

2. Catherine, born on 6 November 1772 and baptised on 3 December 1790 at Bury St Edmunds by Rev. Mr Sharp, as is recorded in the family bible.

5. Catherine Fairfax, born 7 September 1742 and baptised by Mr Meadows. Inherited share of a messuage in Kettleburgh from cousin Katherine Fairfax in 1747/50. Married John Nursey by licence on 4 April 1764 at Coddenham, before witnesses John and Mary Fairfax; he was described as a surgeon of Coddenham and she as daughter of John Fairfax of Coddenham, a draper. Died at Wickham Market on 13 April 1827, aged 85. No will has been found in Suffolk. They had children, including the landscape artist Perry Nursey (baptised on 25 June 1771 at Stonham Aspall).

Catherine Nursey, née Fairfax, mother of the Suffolk landscape painter Perry Nursey. Picture owned by her descendant Mrs Nancy Bedwell.

PROSE ACCOUNT

THE LIFE OF JOHN FAIRFAX

JOHN FAIRFAX was born in 1710, four years before the death of Queen Anne ushered in the reign of George I and the start of the Hanoverian period. Growing up in rural Suffolk, he was variously described as a grocer and draper in the village of Coddenham, indicating either an enterprising mind or (less likely in view of the relative prosperity of his children) an inability to find the right niche in life. He married Mary Hayward on 16 September 1735 at Framlingham, a market town some ten miles from Coddenham, and, indeed, going to market there may have been how he met her. He wrote his will in 1751, making her and her brother John his executors, and it was proved, indicating he had died by then, in 1758, two years before the death of King George II.

John’s children included Frances, Mary, two Johns and Catherine, of whom Frances and the first John died young. To his surviving son JOHN FAIRFAX he left his watch ‘that was my cousin Smith’s’ and £63 to apprentice him ‘to some proper business at a fit age’. This younger John married Penelope Wright at St James’s, Bury St Edmund’s, on 5 May 1770 and obviously benefited from his apprenticeship, as he became a freeman of Bury St Edmunds in 1802. He died in a fit on 12 February 1805 while visiting his nephew, the artist Perry Nursey, at Little Bealings. He had two children, Penelope and Catherine.

John senior’s daughter Catherine, born 7 September 1742, received a bequest of land from her father’s cousin Catherine Fairfax in 1750 and, perhaps as a result of this, made a good marriage to the local surgeon, John Nursey of Coddenham. They married there by licence on 4 April 1764. She was mother of the artist Perry Nursey (baptised on 25 June 1771 at Stonham Aspall), at whose house her brother died in 1805.

FAMILY TREE

CHAPTER THREE ANCESTRAL PICTURES

Most of this book is about finding records of ancestors. Pictures can be records, too; even a photographer’s address on the back of an old snap could provide a clue as to where the depicted ancestor came from. But they are also valuable in their own right as a fantastic way of bringing your family history to life.

My cousin Ernest Rietschel of Dresden, a renowned German Sculptor, who was born in Pulsnitz in 1804 and died in Dresden in 1861.

Before the invention of photography in the 19th century, some of our ancestors were depicted in paintings, sketches, silhouettes and even busts and sculptures. From grand Van Dycks to amateur scribbles, such pictures are always worth seeking out, for, especially in family history, a picture really can be worth a thousand words.

WHERE TO SEARCH
PAINTERS AND PAINTINGS

For painters and paintings, look to M. Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers (London, 1903–4) and F. Spalding’s 20th-century Painters and Sculptors (Antique Collectors Club, 1991).

The best places to make searches are in London at Westminster Central Reference Library, the National Portrait Gallery (which has a database of over 500,000 portraits and engravings), and the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Of course, many ‘painters’ in the past were no more than jobbing artisans and many, such as engravers, herald painters and so on, appear in routine apprenticeship records. A detailed article on sources for artists and their subjects is in Family History Monthly, March 2003.

QUICK REFERENCE

WESTMINSTER CENTRAL REFERENCE LIBRARY

www.westminster.gov.uk/services/libraries/findalibrary/westref/

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

www.npg.org.uk/search

NATIONAL ART LIBRARY

www.vam.ac.uk/page/n/national-art-library

Gainsborough’s famous family portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews, c.1748–9.

PHOTOGRAPHERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

Photography began in earnest in the 1850s and portrait photographs of people who became our ancestors took off in the 1870s. Collections of photographs are at county record offices, libraries and elsewhere, often enabling you to see what places where your ancestors lived looked like and, if you are very lucky, you might even find a picture of your ancestor.

WHERE TO SEARCH
PHOTOGRAPHERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

The largest collection in Europe is the Hulton Getty Collection with a staggering 12 million pictures. The National Monuments Record Centre has 6.5 million pictures, mostly of buildings around the time of the Second World War, indexed by parish.

There are many commercial outlets for old photographs and reprints from old negatives, such as the Francis Frith Collection. There will often be a book of old photographs of the places where your ancestors lived.

There are also several excellent guides to dating old pictures, including R. Pol’s Dating Old Photographs (FFHS, 1998). Many other sources for pictures are listed in J. Foster and J. Sheppard’s British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2002). Another guide to collections is R. Eakins’ Picture Sources UK (Macdonald, 1985).

QUICK REFERENCE

HULTON GETTY COLLECTION

www.hultongetty.com

NATIONAL MONUMENTS RECORD CENTRE

www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/national-monuments-record-centre

FRANCIS FRITH COLLECTION

www.francisfrith.co.uk

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