I get so many people telling me how hard they find it to “just concentrate” on their direct family lines back that it has set me thinking. In the “old days” when letters had to be written and weeks would go by before you got a reply, genealogy was taken at a leisurely pace. You really had enough difficulty finding your direct line of ancestors without worrying too much about those aunts, uncles and cousins who left the parish to find their fortune elsewhere.

Now of course with the advent of the computer and the internet (and didn’t genealogists take to that technology – like ducks to water!) we have the GRO indexes, census, military records and increasingly parish registers all at our fingertips and more often than not they are indexed. Finding your 3 cousin 7 times removed is as easy as typing in his name. It is no wonder that we gather in all those people who have blood ties how ever distant, it is all so easy.

So does it matter if you get side-tracked, are you less of a genealogist if you go sideways as well as up your family tree? Of course not. I have so often found cousins staying with cousins, aunts bringing up orphaned nieces and nephews, in-laws staying with in-laws all of whom give vital clues to help progress the pedigree backwards.

During a conversation the other day about this sideways research I decided that a name needed to be given to this new phenomena. Extreme Genealogy. You get extreme sports so why not extreme genealogy? I practise this type of research, I don’t necessarily go looking for all the cousins etc, but if I come across them then I record them. If they look as if they led interesting lives then I look a little deeper. I can get quite fond of some of my distant cousins and they can lead me into some interesting reading. Henry Pottinger who became the first Governor of Hong Kong and was central to the negotiations to end the 1st Opium War with China is my 8th cousin and is about to become my next focus of attention. He may only be a very distant cousin, but he sounds to be a very interesting chap!

Become a practitioner of Extreme Genealogy if you like, don’t feel guilty about it, you will be surprised where those distant cousins take you!

I don’t know how many of you tried to get onto Find My Past for their free access 3 hours whilst the England match was playing, but if you did then I bet you were as frustrated as I was about either not getting onto the site at all or if you did get onto it getting bumped off before you got a chance to take a look at anything!

Surely they must have realised that their site was going to get millions of hits during that 3 hour period especially at the start. It gave me memories of the debacle of the first launch of the 1901 census and I would have thought that Brightsolid would have known what to expect.

I’ll post something on the Mad About genealogy forum and perhaps you could tell me and others of your experiences!

Madaboutgenealogy has been a bit quiet of late due to a computer malfunction. I am awaiting Mr Dell to deliver a new all singing…all dancing computer shortly and then I shall be able to start working on the backlog of websites that I have found to share with you all!!

Regards

Linda

When I heard that Guy Etchell’s had applied for information from the 1939 National Register I decided to also apply and see if I could get information on my parents and grandparents. Today after about a 3 month wait and 6+ emails I got the results. Below is one of the entries

National Registration No: EDKL 263/1

Name: William ELLIOTT

DOB: 25/01/1863

Address: 93 Victoria Road, Farnborough

Marital Status: Married

Occupation: Retired Soldier on Pension

I had to supply name, date/place of birth and  town where they were living to get the information and as you can see I gained the full address, marital status and occupation. You might think that it isn’t worth the effort of applying, but imagine if this information was online and searchable by name as is the census and you can see the advantage of having access to this resource.

The database is held by the NHS Information Centre for health and social care http://www.ic.nhs.uk/ to whom application should be made.

To read more about Guy’s campaign to get this information freely available read the article on the BBC website http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8363341.stm 

I am sure I’m not the only genealogist who thinks that Guy should get some award to recognise his work on getting the early release of the 1911 census and also for his work towards the release of the 1939 Register.

Guy’s website is at http://freespace.virgin.net/guy.etchells/index.htm

With the advent of the 1841 – 1901 census being indexed and available online using a process of elimination is now becoming an even more important tool than before for genealogists. Let me give you an example…..

John Southwell marries Susannah Clark at St Mary’s Hornsey in 1829, they are both described as “of this parish”, they have children; Mary Ann, George and Henry and then one day at their home in Queens Head Walk, Shoreditch when they were just settling down to some bread, cheese and small beer there is a knock at the door announcing the census enumerator. This stranger asks for their names, ages, occupations and if they were born in or out of the county in which they are now living. John says he wasn’t born in Middlesex, but everyone else was, his occupation is a leather dresser and he is the only one who is in employment in the household because the children are too young.

Ten years pass and the family have moved to Bermondsey centre of the leather trade and John & Susannah have added another two children to their brood. This time the arrival of the census enumerator marks a change he wants to know more information than last time and in greater detail. When it comes to where everyone was born John gives Norfolk at his place of birth, Susannah gives Hornsey and all the children were born in Hoxton.

More than a century later along comes their 2 x great grand daughter and she is pleased that she has discovered them in the 1851 census, but where exactly in Norfolk was John born? This is where the online census and a process of elimination comes in.

Susannah dies in 1852, but no death can be found for John so the hunt is on to find him in the 1861 census. A search on Ancestry for a John Southwell born about 1804 give or take five years brings up 10 entries. None of them give Norfolk as their place of birth, none of them were in the leather trade and most of them had children whose names didn’t coincide with those of my John Southwell. I hadn’t narrowed the search to Norfolk because experience had taught me that my ancestors can change their minds from one census to the next as to where they were born!

I decided to search the 1871 census for John Southwell using the same birth parameters, this time there were ten candidates to be looked at. Some I recognized from before and I could eliminate them immediately. Amongst the ten were 2 born in Norfolk, one I had met before in the previous census, but he had been happily married and having children in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire whilst my John had been doing the same in London. The other was living in Wisbech Work House and was born in 1804 at Walsoken Norfolk, did he belong to me?

Going back to the 1861 census and searching for a Southwell, no first name, born in Walsoken brought up this chap I. Southwell. An inspection of the actual census page showed that this was indeed a transcribers error, an easy one to make, but an error never the less. The “I” was in fact a “J” and this person was an inmate of Wisbech Work House. The enumerator had been confused about what to put in the relationship column and had put father, then crossed it out and written pauper inmate. Below J Southwell entry was another Southwell, this time it was a C Southwell, daughter crossed out and replaced with pauper inmate, aged 14 years, a scholar and born in Walsoken. Was this my John’s daughter Charlotte? The age was correct, but place of birth should have been Hoxton, Shoreditch or even just London. If this was my John then had he given his daughters place of birth as Walsoken because he wanted to keep her in the same work house as himself or was it an assumption of the enumerator or work house official?

I went on and found John Southwell in the 1881 census, it seemed that once he entered the Walsoken Workhouse he didn’t leave. I can’t find him in the 1891 or 1901 census so it would seem as if he has died. A search of the GRO death indexes on Ancestry.co.uk gave me 3 possible deaths of a John Southwell, none of them have exactly the right age, but all are within give or take 6 years.

My next steps are to locate and inspect the Wisbech Union Workhouse records to see if the admission records have survived and what they say about J & C Southwell on their admission to the workhouse.

If I hadn’t had access to indexed census records and scans of the originals I wouldn’t have been able to eliminate the John Southwell’s throughout the country that obviously had been married and having children when my John was married to Susannah and raising their family. I would have been able to narrow down the search to age range and place of birth. Having the GRO indexes online meant that I could search for deaths for the John Southwell at Wisbech.

All this without leaving home, isn’t the internet great?!!

I have my family tree on Ancestry.co.uk as well as keeping it on my home computer using Family Tree Maker. The trees on Ancestry are arranged so that I have 4 trees, one for each grandparent and I have opted to keep the trees accessible to guests only. That means that if anyone does a search for one of the names on my tree they will be informed they need to email me via Ancestry for further information. I like doing it this way as it means I get contact with fellow researchers rather than them just going in and grabbing my research and wandering off into the sunset!

I have made several very useful contacts this way and we have exchanged information to everyone’s benefit. I allow these people access to my trees and they can then take whatever research is missing from their own trees. I must say the odd time I have got an email along the lines of “I want all your research” without any indication of what their connection is with my families tend to get deleted without replying, so Mr. B from New York that is why you haven’t heard from me!

Just lately I have had a couple of emails which asked for information and the connection between their family trees and mine is that one of their ancestors siblings married one of my ancestors siblings so there was no blood connection. With the advent of so much information available online, particularly the GRO indexes and census, it has become relatively easy to research family members back in time, forward and sideways. We can now gather up siblings and cousins of all degrees removed and place them on our family histories, but when does adding a person and their extended family to your family tree become irrelevant?

In my opinion the point when you should stop adding in names is when that person isn’t a blood relation to you. On Family Tree Maker the programme has a facility to calculate the relationship of an individual to the “Home Person” which in most cases will be you. I am sure other genealogy programmes have similar facilities and the use of this will stop you adding hundreds if not thousands of people to your family tree that bear no relationship to yourself. The obvious exception is one name studies or parish reconstruction when everyone sharing the surname or living in the particular parish are of interest.

This is just my opinion and of course genealogy is done for the pleasure and enjoyment it give to us so if you want to go ahead and add the pedigree of your 5^th cousin 10 time removed wife’s sister husband then who am I to stop you!

In the ‘old days’ of genealogy progress from one generation to the next was a slow business. Letters were written and daily hopes of a reply were dashed until finally a reply was received which either told you that nothing had been found or something had been found in a dusty old register, but it produced one answer along with five further questions. A day spent at a record office or Somerset House was dreamed of and planned weeks sometimes months in advance and was the highlight of the genealogist’s year.

How things have changed, now most of us sit at home, log onto Ancestry.co.uk or some such website and away we go. Ancestral information tumbles out of our printers, stores itself onto our hard drives and collates itself onto our family trees. Regular additions to the websites databases satisfies our hunger for more, but not for long. Give us the 1901 census and we want the 1911, give us the 1911 and we want the 1939 registration information. We want more and what’s more we want it NOW!

However having more and having it now isn’t always a good thing, How many of us have acquired screeds of printouts, discs of information and family trees of names, but not actually put the whole things together to tell the story of our ancestors? The reasons for doing genealogy are as varied as the people who indulge in it, but a common thread that runs through the reasons is that we want to find out the story of our ancestors. Who were they, what did they do, why did they do it and what was going on around them whilst they did whatever they were doing!

To achieve this the family historian has to take the time to look at what she/he has and to appraise, confirm and consolidate everything that she/he knows about that particular ancestor. So this year I have resolved to spend as much time consolidating my research as I spend on chasing more information and more ancestors. I shall work family by family and check that my information has been sourced, that my notes make sense, that all the different bits of information are pulled together and that the links from one generation to another are solid. I want to hand onto my descendants a family history that they are proud of and not one that is so shambolic that it gets consigned to the bonfire.

What about you, are you handing on to your children files and boxes of disconnected information or a genealogy that will stand the test of time?

Hi everyone

I am trialling a different approach to posting onto the Madaboutgenealogy website. I will post news, articles and updates on the front page (blog) part of the site, but no longer publish each individual addition. Hopefully this will mean that more content gets added to the website more quickly. I’ll see how it goes.

So for today the update is that I have added lots of content to the Bedfordshire page, lots of links for all sorts of genealogical subjects.

To see the new links click here http://www.madaboutgenealogy.com/united-kingdom/bedfordshire-2/

Enjoy!!!

Linda