Finding Your Families

Finding Free Genealogy Records www.tree-sleuths.co.uk This blog post continues from my earlier post Using FamilySearch . In this post I will introduce you to a selection of free data websites where you can find genealogical information about individual people: things like records of births marriages and deaths. These websites focus on Great Britain and Ireland. These resources are all categorised as Data (D) [1].  Records from England and Wales General Register Office This is the natural place to start, if only because it sits at the centre of the spider’s web: the England and Wales General Register Office (GRO). Although mainly an administrative arm of government serving other government functions, it has data for you. Its website is www.gro.gov.uk (D). The website hosts searchable indexes of birth and death (not marriage) registers for England and Wales created from the full copy registers the GRO holds. Although there are gap years, the indexes are very useful because births show th

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