The Wesleyan Methodist chapel

I came across a new resource, the 1873 Returns of accommodation provided in Wesleyan Methodist Chapels, available at My Wesleyan Methodist Ancestors, that might be of interest to other UK one-place studiers. It was a nationwide survey and will tell you whether there was a chapel in your place and the number of seatings. Wing held 411, and I've added that snippet to my Methodists page.

Lights out

Today is the centenary of the outbreak of WW1 and  I have turned the lights out on the Wing One-Place Study website to acknowledge those from Wing that served.

If you continue on to the website, you'll find that the WW1 page has been expanded. You may recall at the beginning of the year I was planning to have profiles of each serviceman up on the website beginning this month. The rapid escalation in the number of men (and women) with Wing connections who served during the war has meant I've now declared this a four-year centenary project. Today I have updated the list of servicepeople, expanding it from 125 to 315 people, so that you can see who I've identified so far - the first step in the project. This won't be my "final" word on the names of WW1 servicemen born in, living in, or with other close connections to Wing, but it's getting there - there's around 50 more men I don't have full names or regiments for yet.

If you have a serviceman ancestor from Wing, have info to share, or are simply keen to see their profile make it online sooner rather than later, please email me so I can prioritise them (and perhaps we can work together on researching them). While you're waiting, can I suggest a trip to the wonderful new Wing At War website from my friend Sarah? She has transcribed the parish magazines for Wing for the WW1 period and collated information on a variety of topics for you to read about.

Take my money

Commercial genealogy providers, here's how to take my money:

1. I Always Search Individual Record Sets

I'm not a beginner, I've been at this a while. Your global search function across all your databases is only good for doing speculative searches. I almost always search by going through your lists of record sets or databases, identifying one that sounds promising then reading your blurb to find out exactly what it is, where it came from, and any search hints i.e. what their little quirks are, which fields are actually contained in it, which are indexed, whether there are any gaps in your record set. Then I search just that record set, using what I've learned to search smarter and get more results of interest.

If you don't tell me which record sets you have, in enough detail, then I won't give you money.

If you don't tell me whether I get access to a particular record set I'm interested in within the subcription/access option I'm contemplating before I give you money, then I won't give you money.

If I can't search by individual record set, then I won't give you money.

2. I Like To Search By Place.

I'm a one-place studier. I'm particularly interested in what kinds of place fields are in a record set, what level (country? county? village?) they've likely been specified to, and whether you've indexed them. I'm also interested in context, neighbours and the like, so I like to browse pages before and after any given result, just in case something illuminating pops up. Sometimes I even - egads! - browse from the beginning of the record set, in case there's general information there!

Without the background information about place fields your record set has limited use to me, and I won't give you money.

Without the ability to search by place field (alone, without forcing me to search with a surname) you tend to induce a murderous rage, and I won't give you money.


It should be pretty simple for me to give you money. Stop trying to make it harder.

52 weeks of abundant genealogy - week 1

I have no idea how Chris Paton does it (check his profile to see what a busy boy he is) but his British GENES blog highlights pretty much everything you need to know or might be interested in as far as the UK genealogy world is concerned. It's essential blog reading - I don't always have time to keep up with everything (who does?) but I know it'll all be there in his blog. Thanks, Chris!

This blogpost is part of the 52 Weeeks of Abundant Genealogy series from Amy Coffin and geneabloggers.com

I've come over all lightheaded

I've been hyperventilating with excitement. The British Newspaper Archive is temporarily open in beta form this weekend. You do have to pay to view actual pages rather than snippets of results (£6.95 for 1000 credits, with each newspaper page viewed being 10 credits) but  with no ability to download images during the beta period. However I'll be able to access those pages I paid for once the site goes live, and you bet I'll be back!

As part of the terms and conditions of the beta period I can't share many details of the treasures I discovered - suffice to say the Bucks Herald was one of the newspapers included and there were plenty of results for Wing! One of the first things I found was the newspaper report of the theft accusation involving one JORDAN in 1836 that was a noted point of ill-will in the ADAMS murder case the following year. Also that year was the suicide of a habitually-intoxicated Wing resident, the case of the stolen cowstalls, and the sale of wheat, straw and machinery from Burcott Farm.

 If you preregistered on the site you should have received an email about beta access. Have fun!

April update

I have several new 17th century marriage strays this month (BREEDON, KEENE, MORTIMER, ROBINSON, STRUPOR, WIGG). Whenever I learn about a new genealogical website or database I tend to use Wing Bucks/Buckinghamshire as my test search string to see what pops up, and I found these entries within books at Internet Archive using the Mocavo genealogical search engine. I won't comment further on Mocavo as it's brand new.

By the same method I came across a will of a Benjamin FEN senior from Milford Connecticut. He had inherited land in Wing from Agnes SEARE, and in turn passed this land on to one of his sons when he died. I must locate Agnes' will and find out what the connection was between the two.

Behind the scenes I'm trying to get my pages on the farms of Wing ready. This is a big big job!

RIP IGI

A few days ago FamilySearch switched over their beta site to their main site - if you haven't been over that way in a while, go and scare yourself. A perusal of the Adjustment Guide confirms the following things:

The International Genealogical Index is dead - or, at least, no longer part of the main site, so as good as. The Guide admits that those patron-submitted records with no sources were of "limited value" (yes, those are the precise words we all used too, aren't they?) and deserved to be jettisoned - we're right there with you. RIP IGI, I suspect we will remember you more fondly than your flaws deserve.

The free Personal Ancestral File (PAF) software is also banished from the main site. PAF's retirement has been coming for a long time - farewell, our elderly friend!

RIP batch numbers - gone too are the good old days when you could run a search specifying a particular batch number for a particular place. This is distressing news (no, I don't want to search the behemoth that is the 68-million-and-counting England Births and Christenings database, I'd actually like to narrow it down a lot first, and by the way births and christenings are two very different things), so I guess we must learn to have faith in FamilySearch's new-and-improved Place field.

The 1881 census is only temporarily AWOL - phew!

I actually found the Guide helpful, not so much from the "where is it" perspective but for the clear insight it gave along the way into the fundamental principles behind the changes. I was pleasantly surprised by how eminently reasonable it all sounded.

However I shall bite my tongue and rant on the inside wait until I've had more time to fairly evaluate the other aspects of the changes before commenting. Some of these are most definitely improvements, lest you think I'm not super-excited about scanned original source records being available online for free, because I can't get enough of that action. More, more, cries the greedy genealogist!

One Place Studies website

Today I'm proud to announce the launch of the One Place Studies website. The Index of One Place Studies previously maintained by John Palmer of the Wirksworth OPS has been updated and expanded, and the website has a range of resources to help those of us undertaking one place studies. These resources will grow over time (it's a bit lean at the moment!) as we all contribute to the pool of knowledge.

I'd like to thank the following who provided elements of the site:

* My old friends Katrina and Michael Thompson of katproductions who provided the webspace for this project - thanks, guys!
* Arcsin for the website template
* phpBB for the open-source software for the forums, and A1ex (no, not me) for the SkyBlue style template used
* Google Maps
* http://www.buttonshut.com/ for the social media buttons

If you're interested in one place studies, please come over, check it out, and get chatting on the forums. If you're interested in genealogy (and you know you are), see if there's a study for any of your ancestors' places. And spread the word!

Bookshelf: Village Sketches

In my quest to find interesting genealogical or historical reading for my new Kobo e-reader, I've just come across this potential treasure in Google Books.

"Village Sketches descriptive of club and school festivals and other village gatherings and institutions" by TC Whitehead of Gawcott, Buckinghamshire, published in 1861

I may have squealed just a little when I saw it was Buckinghamshire-related. And now to download and read it!

Find My Past - free access during England games

If you're not a football fan, then you'll appreciate this offer of free access to Find My Past while England games are being played.

If you are a football fan, then hopefully you have a laptop to perch in front of the TV with. Genealogists, multitask!

A task of military precision

I've now gathered as many medal roll index cards as I can find for the Wing men who served in WW1 (as listed on the WW1 page, obviously there will be more as-yet-unidentified men). This means that for most of those men I now have at least two separate documents or records of their military service - on my computer there's 10 subdirectories for the different sources I've used.

I need to spend some time revisiting those documents and cross-checking the information contained in them. In some cases there will be additions or corrections to the information on the WW1 page. I'm not planning to extend the information online at this stage though - it's intended to be more of an index, listing basic information about these men's service and the documents I'm aware of that exist for them, so that you have the necessary information to research further as required. Extended profiles of at least one of those men may well appear here on the blog though, so that you can see the kinds of things you might find in those records.

I'm toying with implementing a formal structure to this cross-checking process by picking up some of the ideas from Mark Tucker's Research Documents, in particular the research analysis document. How many of us document the process and resulting "facts" of our research in such a comprehensive way? I found these templates really valuable when looking for the burial of one of my COLES ancestors, and captured within them a lot of useful information about potential burial locations, who holds the burial records, and how easy (or not) it is for me to access those records from NZ - when I next decide to look at it, I'll know exactly what I've ruled out and where to go to see how the necessary digitisation projects are progressing. I think the Research Analysis document, with a little customisation, will be ideal to consolidate each serviceman's records.

The genealogical in-tray (should I call it the GIT for short? it has a certain ring to it, no?) has now officially reached overflow proportions, and this military task will take up some time. If only I didn't keep dreaming up new projects for myself!

London addresses

I'm currently wrestling with exactly how to load London addresses into my genealogy file. This isn't such a problem for non-London addresses as the parish and village are generally the same and the street name is often non-existent.

In the source attached to any event I've been quite specific in listing full parish name (eg St David West Holloway), then the broad suburb (eg Islington), then county (eg Middlesex). However in terms of actually filling in the address field of the event the lines get blurred.

Part of the problem I think stems from the fact that PAF only has a certain amount of space to print addresses, so I know it will abbreviate parts of it to initials only when I print out the individual's summary page - understandable, but useless in practice. This means I have a tendency to try and abbreviate things myself - no point putting "24 Alfred Street, St David West Holloway, Islington, Middlesex" when I know on printouts it will just show "24 Alfred Street, SDWH, I, Middlesex". I'm thinking I might change my self-imposed rule and just put the Chapman code for the county instead of spelling out the county in full but this won't get me back that many characters.

Another part of the problem is the fact that I'm not a Londoner myself so my geographical grasp of suburbs is probably pretty shaky - it bugs me that I don't know if I'm using the name it would actually be known as in practice! I've just printed out most of the sections of this excellent 1877 parish map, and I think I could standardise this by using the poor law union name as the suburb name.

My brain also wants to use "London" rather than "Middlesex", even though London should only really be used for the City of London area.

And don't even get me started on the frequent parish boundary changes and name changes for those London parishes!

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how they approach this? Do I really need to include the parish name as part of the address so long as I've got it in the source? Am I overthinking the whole thing?

GRO orders - removal of reference checking

I was ordering some certificates today ahead of the fee increase at the GRO tomorrow, and it seems there has been a further late change to this. They are now scrapping the reference checking facility altogether effective tomorrow, 6 April. In the past, if a reference check was specified and it turned out to be the wrong certificate you were only charged a partial fee - now you will have to take your chances and pay to have the certificate issued regardless. So if you have any you think may fall into that category, order them today!

Historical Streets Project

The reason I was meandering through Ancestry.co.uk's Help yesterday was because I have just realised that Old Search enabled you to search a particular census by piece and folio number, but New Search doesn't as far as I can tell. Very annoying - I was looking for one of my ancestors in the 1871 census, who as luck would have it had banns read in late March and married in early April 1871, both with the same street address given as his residence. I therefore had the address he *should* be living at in the 1871 census, and just needed to locate the page for that address. I was able to find the piece and folio numbers thanks to the excellent Historical Streets Project of the National Archives, but had to switch back to Old Search on Ancestry in order to utilise that information.

After all that I found the page for that address in St Pancras but my Edmund WHITE is not there. Some extensive digging later I discover an Edward White of the right age and occupation but no birthplace given, a visitor at an address in Paddington. The streetname looked vaguely familiar - and lo, it was the same address my Edmund was known to be living a year later, so I'm happy that Edward is in fact Edmund. Happy dance!

1911 census summary books

While meandering through the Help database in Ancestry.co.uk, I came across the following:

1911 England and Wales Census Summary Books
Question: When will the 1911 England and Wales Census Summary Books be available?
Answer: Early Release of the 1911 UK Census - We have now reached an agreement with the National Archives to release the 1911 England and Wales Census Summary Books. The Summary Books are projected to be released some time during 2010.

This item was last updated on 31 December 2009. One could speculate from this that we won't see the household pages themselves on Ancestry any time soon (perhaps they will end up waiting until the non-redacted versions are available in 2012) but the summary pages (the supplementary lists with one line per household showing the address, occupier name, and headcount) will be coming shortly.

Suffice to say, those summary pages would be *extremely* useful for the Wing One Place Study.

A love-hate relationship

Ancestry.co.uk has been messing with me today.

Firstly, I found my grandmother's baptism by manually browsing the London parish and year I had been told she was baptised in. Hurray!

However she doesn't come up easily on a search as her forename has been mispelled - given the underlying record I'll give Ancestry the benefit of the doubt on that one.

Secondly, I discovered she had an older sister - a surprise, and hurray! I did this by searching for her parents names in conjunction with the parish name that my grandmother was baptised in.

However, her parents names are George and Alice Martha. I wanted to see if they perhaps had other children I didn't know about baptised elsewhere, so I removed the parish name, and included mother Alice's middle name with the "Exact" box ticked. Hey presto, it doesn't find ANY entries, even the two I know are in there! I know for a fact that Alice's middle name is included on the transcription because I can see it on the two entries I found earlier. So, Ancestry, why does your search engine do this?

The surname is a very common one, so if I remove the Exact tickbox on the forename it finds 27,395 possible entries and doesn't show the George and Alice Martha ones first. *Sigh*

HistPop

In yesterday's post you may remember that I mentioned there was quite the backlog of information to process in relation to the Wing One Place Study, and also that I wanted to spend time this year concentrating on my personal genealogy. As always, good intentions have flown out the window....

I rediscovered www.histpop.org. It's a one-place-study's dream, particularly if that one place happens to have its own civil registration subdistrict as Wing does. From the annual reports of the Registrar General I've downloaded statistics on the numbers of births and deaths registered in Wing in the 1841 to 1881 period (still to get the later years). Who knows what other gems are hiding on that website to jump out and distract me?


Here's 1871's report with Wing near the bottom of the page (click to enlarge) - 15 illegitimate births registered that year out of 112 total.

A world without Ancestry.co.uk

Yesterday I received my annual renewal reminder email from Ancestry.co.uk. Last year I had difficulty affording the annual subscription fee - and this year it has increased by 29%. The exchange rate between the NZ dollar and the UK pound might be the best it's ever been (so it didn't actually convert to as high a number as I was expecting) but it's still getting up there.

Has the time come for me to put my money where my mouth is - i.e. firmly at home with the in-tray full of resources waiting to be studied, transcribed and incorporated into my personal genealogy, the one-place-study and the one-name-study? But what would my genealogy world look like without the instant gratification of immediate access to Ancestry? I've never contemplated such a thing before. Although I use a wide range of online and offline resources Ancestry is fairly central to my genealogy workflow, but perhaps it needn't be that way.

I certainly have more than enough to be going on with as far as the Wing One Place Study is concerned - frankly, the discipline this exile might impose is probably a good thing! But I was determined to make serious inroads into my father's side of things this year and this would definitely make that task more challenging.

Some of that money I wouldn't spend on Ancestry would no doubt (in an emergency only of course, but let's not kid ourselves that emergencies don't exist even though everyone involved has been dead for decades if not centuries) end up in the pockets of the alternative sites. Options like:
* FindMyPast.co.uk who I see offer a 20% loyalty discount on their subscription renewals - something which would have made a difference to my current opinion of Ancestry had they had a similar deal. Nothing like being a continuous subscriber for several years and not getting any discount at all to make you feel valued!
* TheGenealogist.co.uk who I'd never been tempted to give any money to as their website did a really bad job of providing specifics about what you might actually get for your money - however I see that they have improved in that respect.

After the initial shock, I have to admit I'm actually not so scared by the idea of going cold-turkey. So what do you think - should I embark on this, my great experimental Ancestry-free year? Or shall I save that for 2011, when the impact of exchange rate changes will likely give me a much larger shock?

Guy's Tonic

2, Aylesbury Road, Wing, Bucks
My Daughter, who is suffering with a very bad Ulcerated Stomach, has been taking Guy's Tonic for some time, and I am glad to say is now much better.
Mrs GEORGE GARDINER

from the Penny Illustrated Paper, 4 July 1898

I'm not sure exactly who this might be there's no George Gardiner and family in Wing in either the 1891 census or 1901 census. There was a George born in 1871 in Littleworth but in the 1901 census he's single and living in Leighton Buzzard.

BMD certificates

The charge for ordering a copy of a birth, marriage or death certificate from the GRO will be going up from 6 April from £7 to £9.25. While I don't have a problem with them needing to cover their costs, I will certainly be dipping into the piggy bank and seeing how many I can order before then, as that's quite a difference once translated to to my current NZ-dollar purchasing-power.