findmypast - free access weekend

Free and they don't insist on your cc details.

Always intended to delve into my past, because I knew nowt, or remembered not much. Back in those days it was very confusing too, because everyone had to be called an aunty or uncle, so were they or were they not?

Anyway, I managed to trace all the way back to the middle of the 19th century, on both sides, but one oddity I could not suss out.

In the 1901 census, there was a father and son by the name of Heavysides lodging with my grandfather, wife and at the time five young kids. My father didn't appear until 1911.

Tracing my maternal side back, it went Farrar, his wife Sunderland, her mother a _Heavysides_.

All unusual surnames, so how come an Heavysides shows up in two separate families?

I also half remember an Heavysides family which we were freindly with, living near us when I was a nipper.

My father always hinted at his side of the family being from the Norfolk/ Suffolk border and there was a village named after us. I always took that with a pinch of salt, but he was right. His father James came from Yaxley and his fathers name was James too.

They don't half get about these Heavysides lol

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield
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Reply to
harryagain

Most libraries offer free access to Ancestry if you want to carry on researching. Mine doesn't publicise the fact, mainly I would think because they don't have the staff to answer questions. Quite good fun for a while until you come to a fork in the road where it could be this person but could equally be that person. Then, for me, it was time to call a halt

Reply to
stuart noble

Actually, the cynic in me suspects this crowd are mining data to make money from it, and secondly, Heavyside was the name of a person who discovered one of the radiation belts I am sure I was tought at school. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

When I did my FH a few years ago, I used a whole range of FH web sites and search engines, because no single one gave me all the information I needed. Scotlandspeople is excellent to those whose families are from north of the border, by far the best. It's not too expensive, and you buy credits for viewing documents

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Ancestry is also good, and it also gives you access to relevant family trees that others have researched, so can save you a lot of time, although beware of gross inaccuracies, which are not uncommon. Subscription required there; I take out a monthly sub and then immediately cancel it, otherwise Ancestry will sneakily renew it every month, and charge your card. Canceling immediately gets you the month's worth but stops them renewing.

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Family Search is the Mormon site and is free, and you don't even have to convert!

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Free BMD is also quite good and free, run and contributed to by volunteers AIUI
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, and as you say, Find my past
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Census records are very helpful; the most recent published Census is

1911, but the earliest is 1840, which gives information on people born in the latter half of the 18th century and onwards. But before that it all gets rather vague, and research depends almost entirely on Old Parish Records, which give much more limited information. I'm very suspicious of anyone who claims to have traced their tree back beyond about 1750.
Reply to
Chris Hogg

Inaccuracies are inevitable due to human error, either in recording the original data or digitising it. Spelling mistakes are dealt with fairly well by Ancestry IME but the widespread chopping and changing of christian names makes life difficult. Plenty of people were born with one name and died with another. Very inconsiderate of them!

Reply to
stuart noble

Chris Hogg formulated on Saturday :

I found nothing useful in the 1911, but the 1901 at least allowed me to trace back beyond my father. Am I correct in assuming the census's only included 1 in 4 households, so only a 25% chance of being included?

My father's birth record only included his date of birth, no parents information. He was born in 1911, the youngest of the litter, but the

1901 included his siblings and their deaths matched what little I remembered.

All very interesting, which is why it kept me awake much of the night digging up the details.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

Not that I'm aware. AFAIK they covered all households in the UK.

As he wasn't in the 1911 census, he was presumably born later in that year.

When you get back to the 1841 census (I wrongly said 1840 above), be aware that everyone above the age of ~10 had their ages rounded to the nearest 5 years, so you only get an approximate year-date of birth, which makes looking back further into the OPR's much less reliable. Hence my comment about being sceptical when people claim to have gone back further. Americans seem to be particularly prone to doing that.

For years I swore I wouldn't get into FH, but there were some family myths I wanted to confirm or otherwise, and my mother was of an age when she could have died at any time taking her memories with her (she's actually still alive and going strong at 95!), so I started, and got hooked! Some of the myths were reasonably correct, some complete fabrications. I guess family myths are like that.

A big problem with English records is that most of the searches just give you a reference to an entry in a record book. You have to get a paper copy from the Records Office to confirm and get more details, and that costs, especially if you're not sure that you're getting details of the right person. The Scottish records allow you to download an image of the relevant certificate for much less cost, so you can afford a few mistakes and mis-hits.

Reply to
Chris Hogg

  1. There are 2 sorts of birth certificate - the full one and a "a short certificate". Sadly looks as if you have only the short version. The full one - which you could order for ?9.25
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    - should give child's date and place of birth, both parents' names (including mother's maiden name) and the father's occupation.
  2. There are mailing lists for Norfolk and Suffolk which might put you in touch with people with similar interests/shared ancestors:

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gives links to Norfolk lists, and
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gives links to Suffolk lists.

I belong to the 1st named Suffolk list, people seem to be helpful.

  1. One manifest possibility is that the Bloomfield and Heavyside families were friends (and quite possibly inter-married) over generations.
  2. Heavysides may be an uncommon name nationally but not necessarily locally. And I have come across both Farrar and Sunderland, so I don't think they are very unusual."
Reply to
Robin

Robin expressed precisely :

I think what I'm getting for free, is just the parish records. It comes up with the digital version of the record, then allows you to look at a scanned original. The original is a closing typed page with numerous records on it.

As said, I have managed it for free and it seems to fit together well.

The wonderful thing about it, is all the memories it brings back and trying to piece them together.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

I don't recall any parish records I saw, being typed. But they were from a time before typewriters were invented. IME records accessed by the usual FH search engines are the official Civil Registers, which were introduced in 1837, not PR's, which were generally discontinued after about 1840. Are you sure they were PR's? Can you put up an image of one, on Tinypic for example?

Reply to
Chris Hogg

I joined Ancestry.com a couple of years ago, but I've found out all I want to at the price they charge. They keep on giving hints, and then say you have to upgrade to see the information. There are two family connections I can't find, and it's now at the point where I'm going to not renew at the end of this month. Those two connections will just have to remain secret.

BTW, Yaxley is about 5 miles from me.

Reply to
Davey

Other family history search engines are available.....

Reply to
Chris Hogg

Yes, and I might well join one of them sometime. For now, I know that it is time to leave Ancestry.com! The most important connection that I cannot find is how two sisters that I knew as Aunts, one of whom never married, and received her 100th birthday telegram from The Queen, the other of whom married and lost both her daughters, son-in-law, and grandson to a V-1 in the war, were related to my maternal grandfather. Assuming that there must be a marriage involved, I cannot find one linking the two family names together. I have complete trees for both sets of people, and can find no point where they join together. Most odd. The aunts mentioned were both taken by their parents to live in Oregon, in the latter part of the 19th century. If I had only known what The Oregon Trail was all about when they were alive, I would have eagerly talked to them about it. They missed having to travel by wagon by only a very few years.

Some historical groups do leave a lot to be desired, refusing to believe that the information that they distribute is lacking or even plain wrong.

Reply to
Davey

I recently discovered a glaring mistake in the general register office records, I know it's wrong and there is overwhelming evidence that it has to be wrong, but not sure if it could ever be corrected by the official registry.

There is a lot of bullshit particularly by Yanks and 'First Fleet Australians' on how far people have traced their lines back particularly where only one forename is involved. Some seem to crave a royal connection regardless.

With parish records I can get to mid 1700's with some degree of certainty on a few lines (based on mobility being less than it has been for the past 100 years or more) but despite being wholly within the UK one line is impossble to get back before the mid 1920's. The 1921 census might help, might not, the earlier ones certainly don't. A missing marriage in the early 1920's is my stumbling block. It might be destroyed records, it's not a transcription error, the original parish records draw a blank too. There might not have ever been a marriage but everything else like multiple baptism records for all the children of one generation at one church suggests otherwise. It's a puzzle that might not ever be solved.

Reply to
The Other Mike

As far as England and Wales are concerned pre 1837 will be transcribed parish registers that were originally handwritten, to begin with on plain paper, and later on pages with printed headers, these will usually be baptism record rather than birth records. Post 1837 will be the official records where the indexes are the closely typeset pages.

Reply to
The Other Mike

My father was born overseas in 1910, in a little mining town in 'Southern Russia', later Georgia, and now part of NE Turkey. His father was a mechanical engineer employed by the mining company. Subsequent events (WW1 and Turkish invasion+occupation, Russian Revolution, incorporation into Turkey) mean that I can find no record of his birth, not even on the 'overseas records' that most FH search engines offer. I assume any registration by the local British Consulate was lost or destroyed. I have his passport with Place of Birth on it, but it took me ages even to find that place, because the name has been changed over the intervening years. I had to resort to some mining history books of the period, on-line fortunately.

Reply to
Chris Hogg

When we lived in the US, we were amazed at how many families supposedly had come over on The Mayflower. Then we found a book listing the actual families, and were able to prick a few balloons.

My particular annoyance is with a local group that is supposed to know all about historical county windmills. There were several locally, shown on historical maps; one of my wife's ancestors was the miller at one of them, and he is listed as such in two censuses. But the mill history group denies all knowledge of anybody with his surname working in any mill anywhere. There is a photo, sent to me by different history group, showing him and his father at a different mill, with the father as its miller, so the name was quite prominent in the local milling industry.

Reply to
Davey

Hear, hear.

I don't give a stuff about genealogy, but my mother is obsessed and has been constructing a family tree for 20+ years. She says the same as you - they're desperate to be related to someone famous.

Reply to
Huge

Like many history as taught to me at school was presented so dryly and dour that I just shut down and got out of the subject as soon as possible. One of things that was taught rather briefly as if it was an embarrassment was the US declared independence in 1776 and Britain moved on to India. Now if an exciting teacher had carried on to mention things like much of the present US was still unclaimed or settled it may have made things more interesting. It was only with the arrival of the interweb that I found out how fascinating the tale of Oregon was with much of it being under joint US/British administration till most of the boundary was agreed in the late 1840's, and even then some anomalies lingered for years. The Pig War should be taught as an example of how little things could get out of hand ,fortunately sanity prevailed and it is now regarded as an amusing incident.

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G.Harman

Reply to
damduck-egg

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