Finding Your Families

How to make good use of FamilySearch  www.tree-sleuths.co.uk This is a blog about using FamilySearch, the free to use online genealogy website created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) which is at www.familysearch.org . Everybody who pursues genealogical research will, at one time or another, have heard of FamilySearch. Many of them dismiss it out of hand, and consequently miss out on the real treasure it holds. There are no two ways about it, this is a colossal website. It can be quite intimidating to use on first seeing it; some people just keep to the (small) part they know and never discover some of the valuable information to be found there. In a nutshell, what is FamilySearch? FamilySearch is several things rolled into one. It is (1) an underlying archive of images original records and other resources, which have been used to create (2) a database of searchable derived records which in turn have been used together to create (3) a single huge family tree. Si

 The 1921 England & Wales census - some tips and tricks A page from a 1921 census return - original image from The National Archives in Class RG15 Today, early 2022, the only public access available to see returns from the 1921 census is through FindMyPast. This access is charged on a pay per view basis (unless you use FindMyPast on computers based at The National Archives and a couple of other locations, in which case access is free). FindMyPast provides a search engine allowing you to search on more than 35 different fields. You may think this should make it easy to find any record, but the number of fields available can instead lead you to over-search and get no results. First, the bad news. This searchable index is chock full of transcription errors. Remember, what you are doing when you search is scouring the index that the FindMyPast website makes available to you; this index was created by transcribing the contents of all of the census returns and entering this data into a c

My Ancestor was Captured by Barbary Pirates www.tree-sleuths.co.uk Where it all started My ancestor was a rating in the Royal Navy in 1760, what else can be discovered about him? This blog post is about some recent research that took an unexpected turn. It all began when I looked at the Marriage Register from Stoke Damerel (just outside Plymouth), Devon, for September 1760. It recorded  the marriage of Nicholas Phillips, who was my ggggg grandfather, and Mary Davey. There was a family legend that an ancestor in this family line had had connections with the Royal Navy, but this was the first documentary evidence of this I had found: he was described as “of His Majesty’s Ship Portland”. Stoke Damerel, Marriage Register [1] (image: www.findmypast.co.uk) Was there a story to be uncovered here? The year 1760 was around the time that Royal Navy muster lists were changed to show the age and origin of each rating when they joined the ship so it may be worth looking at these at TNA to see if I

Finding Ancestors in Jerusalem in the Late 19th Century www.tree-sleuths.co.uk The Jaffa Gate, towards the end of the 19th-century, photo: Bonfils House How _do_ you perform genealogical research into late 19th century Jerusalem, from a desk in lockdown Britain? This is the story of an unusually productive attempt to do just that. Why? The later 19th century was a difficult time for Jews in Eastern European countries like Romania, with the introduction of laws effectively depriving them of their livelihoods and forcing them to move elsewhere. It had long been rumoured that my great grandfather was from Romania so, as a lockdown project, I set out to unearth more about this part of my family. My own father had believed, until only three years before his death at the age of 89, that his grandfather had been English. Why would he not be? His grandfather’s family spoke English at home. His grandfather ran a pastoral care centre for British soldiers during WW1 (this was before the days of

Using Digital Media Files for Genealogy Introduction A lot of people ask how best to handle digital media in their genealogy research. This blog post explains some of the benefits of using digital media, and highlights some important aspects to bear in mind. This blog post does not address how to best cite digital sources; that will be the topic of a future post. What is different about digital media? There are big differences between what you might call traditional paper sources (I will call these physical sources) and what most people predominantly use today: online digital sources. First, the physical sources exist, you can touch them. They don ’t disappear overnight (unless there is a fire). Digital sources can disappear overnight, they can be duplicated with no effort so may appear in many places at the same time, they are essentially ephemeral. Second, digital sources are either copies of physical sources that already exist, or they are databases that you