Those Places Thursday - there is more to an atlas than the maps

Beautiful coloured maps are obviously the main attraction in and old atlas, but there may be all kinds of other interesting information too. These two diagrams are from Bacon's Atlas of the British Isles 1890.

I like this way of illustrating the relative sizes of the four nations - bearing in mind of course that there was only one Ireland in 1890. This is just an illustration of their land areas, while the second diagram is a novel way of illustrating population density.

Relative density of the population of the UK 1801-1881

'Each square represents one tenth of a square mile, the dots giving the number of inhabitants on an average for each country on that area'

All the information is drawn from census statistics, and a number of more conventional census tables are also included in the atlas. One of these is a bar chart showing the actual population figures, and it is worth remembering that while the population of England, Wales and Scotland grew steadily over that period, the population of Ireland increased until 1841, and then dropped sharply, so that by 1881 it was less than it had been in 1821, the year of the first census in Ireland.

The atlas also has a handy list of the Principal Towns, arranged by county, with a one-line description of each. Some of my favourites include:

Reading, Berkshire - Abbey ruins, grammar school, seed, biscuits, ribbons
Richmond, Surrey - Pleasure resort, hill, park, boating, old palace
St Ives, Huntingdonshire - Great cattle and sheep market
Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire - Abbey restored, Yorkist victory 1471
Llandudno, Caernarvonshire - Watering-place, Great Orme's Head
Inverary, Argyleshire - Castle of Duke of Argyle, fishing on lake
Stirling, Stirlingshire - Castle, Wallace monument, tartans, Bannockburn 1314
Ballycastle, Antrim - Coal mines, romantic scenery
Middleton, Cork - Corn export, whisky distilleries, one street 

 

Great improvement at Familysearch

I couldn't have been in a better place to discover that FamilySearch had at last made the change I had been hoping for. I was in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, settling down to some Irish research, when I found that the British Isles category has been reinstated. I have written about this a great deal in the past, bemoaning, among other things, the fact that the British Isles categories in the left-hand list did not match the ones in the detailed list of resources 'United Kingdom' in one, 'Great Britain' in another, with a clearly imperfect understanding of the divisions within our collection of islands.

The site has now reverted to filters that more closely resemble the British Isles section of the old FamilySearch site. Well done FamilySearch, you listened to your users, including me! The categories are now:

Channel Islands
England
Ireland
Isle of Man
Scotland
United Kingdom
Wales

This is still not ideal, but it is a great improvement. The individual databases now reflect this list much more closely, and to be fair, some of the databases do not fit neatly into one of the main categories. If you click on the United Kingdom category, the three databases contained are all 'Great Britain', but these  are miscellaneous collections extracted from various sources, and at least Great Britain is part of the UK. The creation of a UK category as distinct from England, Scotland etc means that there is a home for any future databases that may be added in future; for example military or naval records that relate to the whole of the UK.

Some of the existing databases cover more than one place, the most obvious being the England and Wales censuses. But the Wales filter does include these within its results, which is another improvement - the Wales category was a bit of a mess before! It might be ungenerous to point out that the 'England and Wales census' databases also include the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, but does not appear in their filters. I'm sure that can be fixed.

It's a great way to start my stay in Salt Lake City. Now, if we could only get county filters too...

 

Mappy Monday - British Isles industries

I didn't realise that I had this map; I came across it when I was looking for something else, often the best way of finding things. It's a fold-out from 'Cassell's Encyclopaedia: a Storehouse of General Information'. The encyclopaedia comprises six volumes, with some very high quality illustrations and maps. Unfortunately there is no publication date, but the contents suggest it is c1900.

It reminds me of some the maps from the geography books we had at school, and you don't see this kind of map very much outside of specialist historical atlases. That's a pity, because a visual representation is much more memorable than any amount of text, especially if you are not familiar with the British Isles.

England and Britain are not the same - and why it matters

St George's Day is a good day to remind the world (including England) about this. The terms 'England' 'Britain' and 'UK' are often used interchangeably, but be warned, this can lead you into all kinds of problems. And I don't mean the risk of incurring the wrath of the Scots, Welsh, Irish, Manx and Channel Islanders.


For the genealogist, or any other researcher using British records, it is really important to know the difference, or you could be looking in the wrong place, or failing to look in the right one, which is just as bad. If you are not from the British Isles you may find this confusing; you are not alone. It's not just that some English people say England when they mean the UK, and vice-versa (and I have even heard history professors do this, and they really should know better).

I found a file among Home Office Correspondence in The National Archives (ref: HO 45/7928) which contained a petition, together with the official response. I transcribed both documents and placed them on the Your Archives wiki site, so you can read A Protest against The Name England being imposed upon the United Kingdom for yourself. See what you think.

A century and a half on, confusion still reigns. I am trying to do my bit, and in a couple of weeks I shall be delivering my talk 'What is Britain' at the NGS Conference in Charleston, South Carolina. I have previously given it in Florida, Massachusetts, Virginia and Utah, so after Charleston that will only leave 45 states to go...

I am being sponsored by FamilySearch to deliver this and another talk, and I am very grateful for their support. I have also recorded a shortened version of 'What is Britain' which can be viewed on the Research Courses page. At the risk of biting the hand that feeds me, I see they have filed it under 'England Research', presumably because there is no 'UK' or 'British Isles' Research section. Oh well. I have commented on this before in my earlier posts on the way that FamilySearch now describes records from the British Isles.

I won't go into any more detail here, but for a good online account see Uniting the Kingdoms.

I enjoyed seeing the flag of St George around London today. I think it looks better on a flagpole or a building than draped around tubby shaven-headed young men with lots of tattoos and no neck, but that's just my opinion.  

New FamilySearch, a view from the British Isles Part Four - Ireland

Clonmacnoise    

A couple of days ago a helpful article on Irish Civil Registration appeared on the FamilySearch Indexing blog, and a further instalment is promised, with hints on how to use these collections. I shall look forward to that, but in the meantime I have been doing a little exploring of my own.

I was one of the indexers who seized on the opportunity to help get these indexes online, because they are an essential resource that was formerly all but inaccessible to most of the people who wanted to use it. So I am familiar with the records, and I understand their structure. I decided to do sample searches using a not-too-common Irish surname, Rowley. I selected the database 'Ireland, Civil Registration Indexes, 1845-1958', then Advanced search, and searched for the surname Rowley, with the 'exact match' ticked. It gave me 2124 results. The search boxes and drop-down menus are on the left, and one of the drop-downs is 'Event'. from this I selected Births, but the search still returned 2124 results, and the same thing happened when I selected 'marriages', 'deaths' or 'residence', all with the 'match all exactly' box ticked. Hmm. Something isn't working here.

Back to the birth search for a moment; the first of my 2124 results was for a birth in 1826 - nearly 40 years before the start of registration. It is, of course, a death where the age at death is recorded in the indexes, and the year of birth has been estimated from this. Scrolling through the results, the first 84 were of this kind, death entries with an estimated birth date, not actual birth registrations. The 85th result was for a death with no estimated birth year, and therefore by no stretch of the imagination what you would expect to get from a birth search. Oh dear. I narrowed the search to Thomas Rowley, and this returned 119 results; when I selected 'Births' from the drop-down menu, I still got 119 results; 26 deaths with estimated birth years, then 27 marriages, and finally 66 actual birth entries. So I was able to find out, eventually, how many Thomas Rowley births were registered in Ireland 1845-1958, but I had to click through the results a page at a time to get there, at 20 results a page. I'm glad it wasn't Patrick Murphy - there are 18089 of them. Changing the filter to marriage, death or residence made no difference whatever.

I tried a different kind of search, filtering by place. There are lots of Rowleys in Co Sligo, so I searched for the surname Rowley with 'Sligo' in the 'Place' box, both ticked for an exact match, and got four results, all from 1957 or 1958, four births from Sligo registration district, and a marriage in Tubbercurry district, which is in the county. When I repeated the search, but with the exact place search un-ticked, I got 1895 results from all over Ireland. It is not at all obvious how the non-exact place search works, because it filters out 229 hits from my original search, but still includes results from Dublin, Belfast and other places that are nowhere near Sligo. If I change the place filter to Tubbercurry, I get no results at all, whether ticked  for an exact search or not, not even the 1958 marriage. If I change it to Tobercurry, the more usual spelling, I get 50 hits for both kinds of search. I could go on, but I think this enough to show that these searches do not work properly, and I doubt if it the problem is confined to a single record set.

There is one more thing I want to highlight about the Irish records. The advanced search facility looks as though you can search for relatives, but with one exception, you can't. I know this, because I have seen the printed indexes from which they are constructed. The Civil Registration indexes are exactly that - indexes. You can select 'Spouse' from the 'Relationship' drop-down and put a surname in the 'Mother's maiden name box' and get results back, but only birth from the 1920s and later, when the mother's maiden name is in the indexes. You can select 'Spouse' from the relationship drop-down, but if you put anything at all in the boxes, you will get no results. This is because it is impossible to get this information from the Civil Registration indexes, they don't contain enough detail, so it is misleading to suggest that this search is feasible. Perhaps searches like this could be disabled where the database does not support them?

New FamilySearch, a view from the British Isles Part Two

I have been having a closer look at New FamilySearch, with particular reference to the British Isles collections (even though the term 'British Isles' is no longer used as a place filter, see my earlier post on the subject). This time I have been looking at some of the collections themselves, and although these observations apply to specific collections in this region, the same kinds of features may well occur in records elsewhere.

I decided to look at the Scottish records, a very small collection compared with the inaccurately-defined 'United Kingdom' one.There are two record sets 'Scotland Births and Baptisms, 1564-1950' and 'Scotland, Marriages, 1561-1910' . The description of the first collection is rather vague

Index to selected Scotland births and baptisms. Only a few localities are included and the time period varies by locality. This collection contains 9,431,034 records. Due to privacy laws, recent records may not be displayed. The year range represents most of the records. A few records may be earlier or later.

You can scroll down the page for more information, or click on links that take you to the appropriate page in  the Research Wiki. There is a lot of useful information here, but it is all general rather than specific, and at no point is there list of the actual historical records that make up the collection. To be fair, the old FamilySearch did not provide this information eithe; the last time you could find such a list was in the Parish and Vital Records listing that came with the old microfiche editions of the IGI, and the last one of those was produced in 1992.

ADDENDUM: Chris Paton's comment below mentions the very helpful GENOOT site, so I have added the link here so that you can click on it instead of having to cut and paste. Cheers, Chris!

On the plus side, you can search the FHL catalog using the film number from any given entry and find details of the original source, which certainly was not always possible with the old FamilySearch. Furthermore, since the patron submissions from the IGI have been separated out, the source should now be an actual record that can be checked and evaluated. Or so I thought.

The date range 1564-1950 is very wide, and I guessed that the most recent entries would come from Civil Registration, known as the Statutory Registers in Scotland, so I did a search among the most recent entries to find out. This is another good feature of the new site, because you seem to be able to search on as many or as few fields as you wish, even a search on a date range of a single year, with no other fields filled in. Oe of the irritating features of the old site was getting a message  like 'You must enter at least a first or last name, or you must enter a father's full name and at least a mother's first name' 

A search in the range 1946-1950 returned 10 results, but only 4 of them were births from that period, the others were much earlier, but they included dates of DEATH that fell within the specified range. For the first time in my rummaging through new FamilySearch, I found that none of these entries included a film number, or any means of identifying the source. It may be that this information will be added later; I certainly hope so. But what I found more worrying was the fact that records containing death dates were in a collection called Births and Baptisms. The information shown is what you would expect to find on Scottish death certificates, except that the date and place of birth of the deceased do not appear in death entries during this period. So while these look like very informative records, I have no idea what I am searching.

I looked at the marriages next, and while the record descriptions were as vague as for the births and baptisms, there were film numbers that I could check in the FHL Catalog. I also discovered another advantage of new FamilySearch; it will return results from anywhere within the record being searched, which was not possible before. For example, a search for a man's name will not only return results for grooms of that name, but also where he is recorded as the father of the bride, which was an unexpected bonus. Not that this information appears in many Scottish marriage records before 1855, but it's wonderful when it does. Names of both parents of the bride and the groom appear from 1855 onwards, and marriages up to 1875 have been included in the IGI for many years, but only the brides' and grooms' names were included in the index. All the same, if post-1875 records are included later, or if the extra detail is ever added to the existing marriages, it's good to know that FamilySearch can cope with it.  It's nice to end on a positive note for a change.

I'll carry on exploring - and using the Feedback button of course - and report back again in a while