Who do I think I am?

View from Anderston to Govan (featuring the 'Squinty Bridge')

In 2014 I did something I have never done before, and may never do again. I paid with my own money to attend a family history fair in the UK. I have attended every Who Do You Think You Are - Live in London and Birmingham, and before that, every Society of Genealogists Fair in London, as well as a number of local and national events. I was always a volunteer for one organisation or other, and since 2003 it has been part of the day job.

This was different. 'Who Do You Think You Are - Live!' was in Glasgow, the city of my birth, and where I have at least one line of ancestry back to the 16th Century. Both my parents, all four grandparents and five of my great-grandparents were born there too. So you can understand why I was keen to go. But despite my deep roots in the city, and elsewhere in Scotland, I don't mind admitting that I am much more knowledgable about English genealogy than Scottish. I like to think I have a reasonable working knowledge of Scottish records, but it is not where my expertise lies. So when I am in Scotland I am the enthusiastic amateur, and it is actually rather enjoyable being on the other side of desk for a change!

I had a wonderful time, I could suit myself and do what I wanted without looking at my watch all the time to see when I needed to be back on duty. The location of WDYTYA - Live!, the SECC, was also a happy coincidence for me. It is in an impressive setting on the banks of the Clyde, in Anderston to be precise, a district of Glasgow that is virtually unrecognisable from even a few decades ago. My father and many of his family were born there, and from my room in the Hilton hotel I had a view across the river to Govan, where my mother was born, as were many members of her family. So I could hardly have been more at home if I tried.

I have spent most of my life in England, and have no plans to move, but I have never for a minute identified myself as English; British yes, and Scottish, yes, but not English, much as I love the place and (most of ) the natives! I guess the acid test is 'Who do you support in a sporting contest?' My answer to that is that I support a Scottish team or contestant if there is one, and if it is a contest where teams or individuals compete on behalf of the UK or GB, then I root for the British team or person. In a contest where Scotland and England are both involved, I am all for Scotland, but if (and sadly, all too often when) Scotland are out, it's 'Eng-er-land' for me! I am not one of those who support two teams, Scotland, and whoever is playing against England. If you could have heard my father screaming himself hoarse as he cheered England on to victory in the 1966 World Cup, you'd know where I get it from.

Although I haven't lived there in over 50 years, I am very much a Glaswegian - you can take the girl out of Glasgow, but you can't take Glasgow out of the girl! In many ways I feel I have more in common with people from other cities than with other parts of Scotland, although I have ancestral lines from the rural Scottish counties and the Highlands too. I was also surprised to find just how much I felt at home in Ireland the first time I visited, long before I discovered just how mush Irish ancestry I have. But perhaps that is just a characteristic of family historians in general; we are always looking for something that we can identify with in people and places everywhere, to understand them better.

As a family historian I have discovered over the years that yes, I am very interested in my own family, and families that I have some connection with. But much of the time I am equally excited by the things that I find out about other people's families too. I have always been fascinated by all things historical, an in particular the 'what people did all day' kind of history. I am keen to know about the history of the places where I have lived, and where I live now (which I will write about another time). To get the most out of your family research you want to see where your people fitted in to their time and place, their communities and the wider world. That's why I want to know about the neighbours, and what they were up to, and what was influencing their lives. Or perhaps I'm just nosy.

For St Paddy's Day: your Irish ancestors in The National Archives - in England!

Tracing your Irish ancestry isn't easy, but it might not be as hard as you think. Sometimes you need to look in places where you might not have thought of looking, and one of those places is in England, In The National Archives at Kew, to be precise. Although probate, census and vital records will be held in Ireland (when they survive) for many other purposes Ireland was part of the United Kingdom until less than a century ago. This means that there is lots of information on Irish people in records that were created on a UK-wide basis.

Soldiers, sailors and more

Many Irishmen served in the British Army, and a lot of records are now online, on Ancestry.co.uk for the First World War, and on Findmypast.co.uk for earlier records, back to the 18th century. Many others were in the Royal Navy or the Royal Marines and their service records have also been digitised, and you will find them on The National Archives website among the Online collections. There are several guides on how to research men (and women) in all of the armed services on the Looking for a person page.

Other services

Apart from the armed forces you might find your Irish ancestor serving in the merchant navy, Coastguard or Customs and Excise. You won't find detailed service records like those you might hope to find for the armed forces, but you can still piece together details of their lives and trace their movements, which can point you in the direction of more clues. Tracing merchant seaman can be tricky, but it has become a lot easier since some records have been put online by Findmypast.co.uk  There are no online records for customs and excise officers, but there are some coastguard records on Digital Microfilm You still have to look through the microfilm to find what you want, but instead of putting a roll of film on a reader, you can download it as a PDF file and click your way through.


Irish records

Perhaps surprisingly, there are several collections that relate specifically to Ireland, notably the records of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Some of these are on microfilm, and should eventually be digitised and put online. There is also an interesting set of records for the Irish Reproductive Loan Fund in record series T 91. The fund provided loans at interest to the industrious poor, who had to provide some form of security for the loan. Some of these records have been digitised and indexed and can be downloaded free of charge from Moving Here. They consist of the Returns to the Clerk of the Peace for the counties of Cork, Galway, Limerick, Mayo, Roscommon and Tipperary.

CO 762/48 Application of JohnScanlon 

There is a surprising amount of material from the early 20th Century, although most can only be consulted as original documents. Applications to the Irish Grants Committee from people who had claims against either the British or Irish governments are indexed by name and place in record series CO 762. There is a collection of passport applications - only a single box, unfortunately - from 1921, some with photographs. These are part of the major collection known as the Dublin Castle Records in CO 904, dealing with the British administration in Ireland from 1795, and there are similar records in CO 906.

Those are just a few highlights, and there are plenty more, mostly under-explored. But just to give you an idea of what you might find, I know exactly where and when one of my Irish ancestors, William Charlton was born - in 1785, before the start of parish records there - through the records of his service in the British Army.

Happy St Paddy's Day, and happy hunting. I hope that the luck of the Irish comes your way.  

Some of the many advantages of being Scottish

Janet Soutar Brown 1856-1915

This is a post about mothers, because it is Mothering Sunday here in the UK. My own ancestry, so far as I have been able to trace it so far, is entirely Scottish and Irish, mostly Scottish. And one of the great things about Scottish records is that women never really lose their maiden names, and this makes them much easier to trace than most English women; in fact they are often easier to trace than Scottish men too.

In my own case the direct paternal line comes to an abrupt halt with the birth of my great grandfather Robert Collins in 1874 - if you want to know why, I wrote about it in a post called The cautionary tale of McIntyre.

I have been much more successful with my research in the opposite direction, where I can trace my direct female line back six generations. The severe looking lady in the picture is my great grandmother, Janet Soutar, and her great grandmother, Margaret McJannet was probably born in the 1750s or 1760s, more than a century before Robert Collins. Granted, I don't know anything about her, beyond the fact that she and her husband Andrew Drennan or Drynan were the parents of another Margaret, who was born in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim in the 1780s. This Margaret also married a soldier, William Charlton, and one of their daughters, called (guess what) Margaret, married a soldier, William Soutar, and they became the proud parents of six children, including my great grandmother Janet.

I have all the relevant birth, marriage and, crucially, death certificates. Plus of course parish register entries, census, military records and poor law applications to support my conclusions. And this is another advantage of being Scottish; there is a lot more information on certificates, and in particular you get details about mothers; for example, a marriage certificate in England and Wales gives details of the fathers of the bride and groom, but in Scotland you get the names of the mothers too, including their maiden names. Better still, if the mother has been married more than once you get all of her surnames. Death certificates give a wealth of information that English and Welsh researchers can only dream of; the full names of all of the deceased's spouses, and the names of both of their parents, including of course the mother's maiden name.

Searching for the deaths of married women or widows is also easier in Scotland, because they are indexed by both surnames. So even someone with the commonest of names is comparatively easy to find because you are looking for a pair of matching entries, rather like searching for a marriage. This is just as well, since Janet's married surname was Brown. Have you any idea how many Janet Browns have died in Scotland? Neither have I, but a Janet Brown cross-referenced with Janet Soutar wasn't hard to find. Finding her husband John's death was a lot more difficult! And I only know about Margaret McJannet in the first place because she appears on her daughter's death certificate; Margaret Charlton (nee Drennan/Drynan) lived long enough for her death to be recorded in Scottish civil registration. Registration began in 1855, and she died in 1858, aged 75.

Death entry for Margaret Charlton 1858 RD 644/03 (courtesy of ScotlandsPeople)

 I know a lot more about many female ancestors in all of the direct lines; the Scottish practice of recording maiden names in all kinds of records was very useful, but the fact that they were poor was of even more help. All four of my great grandmothers appear in the Glasgow Poor Law records held at the Mitchell Library; Janet was the only one of them who did not apply for poor relief, but her mother did so when she was a young child so details are recorded for Janet and her siblings. Whenever the central heating breaks down, or I run out of milk, or suffer from some other 21st century inconvenience, I think about the incredibly hard lives these mothers led, their many pregnancies, and the children they lost. I have led a charmed life by comparison,

So let's hear it for mothers past, and their mothers, and their mothers' mothers. We wouldn't be here without them.


 

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.  

A question of nationality

I have just read a very interesting and thought-provoking blog by Polly Kimmitt He's not American. Is he Kenyan, English or Irish? The whole business of nationality can be much more complicated that you might think. In the UK we have the added complication of the four home nations, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Most of us identify ourselves with one of these, although our nationality is British, as a glance at a passport will confirm. The full wording is 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' but I must admit I was glad to be able to tick 'Scottish' on my census form last week.

I have lived in England for most of my life, but I have never considered myself as English, and I never will. British, yes, but never English. I like it here, though, and I have no plans to leave; the natives seem to have accepted me. My young nephew, on the other hand, has absolutely now doubt that he in English. Fair enough, because he was born in England, and so were both of his parents, but that is a s far as it goes. But none of his grandparents came from England; one set were Scottish, the other Irish. So he could qualify to play football for any of three counties, and who knows, he might do so one day, because he's a pretty good footballer. Sorry Wales, you don't get a look in.

The whole sporting thing gets more confusing the more you look at it. In the Olympic Games and some other sporting events we compete as the United Kingdom (sometimes referred to as 'Team GB', which is wrong of course, and must annoy Northern Ireland even more than it annoys me). But in others, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland send separate teams. Except for Rugby League and Rugby Union, where Ireland is represented by combined teams drawing players from both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Don't spend too much time thinking about it, it will make your brain hurt.

Sporting allegiance and national identity may be important to the way you feel, but the hard legal facts of nationality law can affect where you are allowed to live. Many of the enquiries we deal with at The National Archives are not from genealogists, but from people who need to prove their right to British nationality, or their right of residency in the UK. We hold certificates of naturalization and of nationality issued up to 1983, and there are lots of different kinds, depending the kind of certificate and where it was issued. It also depends on the legislation that was in force at the time. It's a complicated business. There is a Wikipedia article on British Nationality Law that explains it, but you need to set aside a good long time to read it all. Like I said, it's a complicated business.

To add to the fun, there are many anomalies in the relative status of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, and the relations between them. Britain used to be a colonial power, and when they gained their independence most former colonies and dominions became members of the Commonwealth. The Republic of Ireland, however, is not, and has never been, a member, and distanced itself from the UK to the extent that it remained neutral during the Second World War. Despite this, there has always been free movement between the two countries, and until 1978 the two currencies were of equal value, even adopting decimalisation at the same time. Irish people who lived in the UK could vote in elections here, even before our two countries joined the European Union.

In her blog, Polly describes the complications that arose because her British husband was born in Kenya, while his father had been sent there to work by the British government. Something similar occurred in a family that I am related to, where the father was Irish and the mother British. Two of their children were born in England, but one was born overseas, because her father, an Irish citizen, was a soldier in the British  Army and was stationed there at the time. She had no idea that this could cause a problem until as an adult, she applied for a passport, and discovered to her surprise that legally, she was not actually British. It was sorted out in the end, and she did get her passport, but it makes you think.

For St Patrick's Day - some little-known Irish sources

Quay Street, Galway

A lot of Irish sources are being flagged up today, Paddy's Day. There is the promise of a new Findmypast.ie site to come soon, and additions and updates to records on existing sites. and that's not counting all the events and special offers. I was at the Society of Genealogists last Saturday running a workshop on Tracing your Irish Ancestors in The National Archives - in England which seemed to go very well. This a particular hobby-horse of mine, because for much of its history Ireland has been part of the United Kingdom, or at least subject to the British Crown. So a lot of records about Ireland and the Irish are held in The National Archives of the UK. I have hawked this around as a talk in Ireland, England, and the USA (Boston - where else?) and written about it in Irish Roots magazine. My deathless prose on the subject will appear in another publication later this year, and a version of my talk was podcast in 2007, although this is now a little out of date, since more records have been put online since then. You can't say I'm not trying to get the point across!

So as my contribution to St Patrick's Day, here is a source that many people won't have thought of looking at for their Irish ancestors, but which includes some indexed, digitized records, and it's FREE. It's not a genealogical site as such, which is why you could easily miss it. It's called Moving Here and is about the immigrant experience in England of four separate groups, Irish, Jewish, Caribbean and South Asian. The Irish sections in Migration histories and Tracing your roots are particularly useful; the site hasn't been actively maintained for a while, so some of the web links are out of date, but the background information is wonderful.

The fund provided loans at interest to the industrious poor, who had to provide some form of security for the loan. Records of the local associations that administered the loans survive for counties Cork, Clare, Galway, Limerick, Mayo, Roscommon, Sligo and Tipperary. In addition to the notes of security (signed by the debtor and two guarantors), there are loan ledgers, repayment books and defaulters books. They show place of abode and occupation, and sometimes include details of the death or emigration of debtors. The documents that you can search on Moving Here are the returns to the Clerk of the Peace for the counties of Cork, Galway, Limerick, Mayo, Roscommon and Tipperary.

Select 'Yes - search for a person's name', limit your search to 'Documents', choose 'Irish community' from the drop-down menu and away you go. And may the luck of the Irish go with you!

T 91/187c

You might find something like this example, from the townland of Cloonkehanne, Co Mayo, dated 8 June 1852, which shows that Pat Barnicle and Thomas Boland emigrated 'to America about 4 years since', and that more recently two of their neighbours, Michael Rowley and Luke Monaghan, had gone to England.

Not just Chelsea Pensioners

The results of a recent Friends of The National Archives project has been added to the online Catalogue. This is good news for the genealogist, as the project was the indexing of the discharge documents of more than 20,000 soldiers, held at Kilmainham Hospital in Dublin (series WO 119). Kilmainham administered the records of these out-pensioners until 1822, after which they became the responsibility of the better-known Chelsea Hospital. Many of the men are Irish, or from Irish regiments, but you will find plenty who had no obvious connection with Ireland.

The Chelsea Pensioners' Records (series WO 97) have already been digitised and indexed on Findmypast.co.uk and eventually these Kilmainham records will be onlinethere too. In the meantime this major addition to the Catalogue will make it much easier to track down some of our soldier ancestors.

It is worth noting that there are other sources for soldiers beyond the wonderful online Chelsea Pensioners' records; they will soon be joined by a series of attestation records for the militia 1806-1915 (series WO 96). There is also another set of discharge documents of Chelsea Pensioners (series WO 121), much of which has also been indexed in the Catalogue, again by the Friends of The National Archives, and the records are on microfilm at Kew. This is well worth a look if you fail to find someone in the WO 97 records. This is where I found one of my own ancestors, William Charlton, who fought in the Peninsular War. He was a private in the 74th (Highland) Regiment of Foot and was pensioned following the battle of Fuentes D'Onoro in 1811, where he received a gunshot wound to the jaw. If, like me, you are a fan of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books, Sharpe's Battle is the one that describes this particularly bloody episode.

WO 121/126

These early records don't give as much information as some later ones, but I was still able to find out quite a bit about him. The document itself told me his age and birthplace, that his former trade was labourer, and gave a physical description; he had black hair, dark eyes. and I was surprised to find how tall he was, 5 feet 11 inches. Once I had found him in the pension records, knowing his regiment and dates of service meant that I could look in the regimental muster book for December 1806 when he joined the regiment. This gave me his exact date of birth, 2 November 1786, and showed that he had enlisted at Dumbarton. The muster also showed the height of all the recruits, and of the 35 men on the page, only two men were taller than William.

So thanks to these military records I know that my Irish ancestor from two centuries ago arrived in Scotland, where he spent his life after the army, before he joined up. I have some idea what he looked like, and I even know his exact date and place of birth, where the parish records didn't start  until much later. Not a bad result for an Irishman.

Fearless Females: tragic deaths

The more I study my family history, the more I find women making their way in the world without men. Some of them were widows for a number of years - not all that surprising, since women generally live longer than men. Some of them had husbands who must have been around at the conception of their children, but don't seem to be around for much of the rest of the time, and a couple never married but produced children anyway. But the one that touched me most when I found out about her was my great-great grandmother, Jane Hanavan.

She came from Ireland, and she married twice. Her first husband, Michael McDonough, was a soldier, in the 3rd Regiment of Foot, the East Kent Regiment, known as the Buffs. He was also Irish, possibly from County Clare. During this first marriage, Jane followed her husband's regiment and gave birth to their four children in County Clare, Dover, Limerick and 'England' in that order. When her youngest child was only two years old, Michael died, not heroically in battle, but, like many soldiers, of the entirely unglamorous cause of dysentery. I have yet to work out how she made her way to Dublin where she married her second husband, my great-great grandfather Thomas Cross less than a year later, presumably with the four young children in tow.

Thomas was from County Tyrone, but the family settled in Glasgow, where Jane gave birth to four more children. She would have been on her own with the children for much of the time, since Thomas was a merchant seaman, and was away a great deal. He certainly was never at home with them in any census - although I am now counting the days until the Scottish 1911 Census is released to see if he was at home then. Poor Jane gave birth to her seventh child, a son called Thomas, in 1889, but the poor little mite died of acute bronchitis when he was only nine days old. She registered both the birth and the death herself, so it is possible that Thomas never even saw the son who was named after him.  A year later she had another son, William, who died of scarlatina when he was four. By now Jane was in her forties (I don't know her exact age) and had suffered the loss of a husband and two sons. You'd think this was enough tragedy for one person, but fate hadn't finished with her yet.

Navy Memorial at Plymouth Hoe.
Thomas Cross is commemorated there

Widowhood might be considered an occupational hazard when you are married to a soldier, but when you are in your 60s and married to a civilian, you do not expect to become a war widow. But this is just what happened to Jane. During the First World War, Thomas was among the crew of a merchant ship, the Ermine, that was commandeered by the Royal Navy as a fleet messenger, and in 1917 the ship was torpedoed and sank, with the loss of most of the crew, including Thomas. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jane died two years later, of a cerebral haemorrhage, but the family said she died of a broken heart. This last bereavement must have been just too much for her. Her granddaughter, who is still alive, never knew her, but was told by her mother that Jane was never the same after Thomas' death. She said that they had to watch her carefully at night, otherwise she would go and stand at the street corner in her nightdress, waiting for her Tommy to come home.  

Rootstech - good news from Ireland

There are so many sessions to choose from at a big conference like Rootstech that it's hard to know which of them to choose. But I am always keen to find out what is going on the world of Irish research, so I made sure that I went to hear Brian Donovan give us the latest on the digitisation of Irish records.

It was nice to have some good news to report for a change. There are lots of exciting developments in the offing, from Brian's own company Eneclann and elsewhere. Starting with the Civil Registration indexes, many of these have been re-keyed by the Irish GRO, but there is no sign of them going online anytime soon. It is worth remembering, though, that many of the indexes are on FamilySearch, (Ireland Civil Registration Indexes 1845-1958) as are a selection of the actual registers, included in the Ireland Births and Baptisms, Marriages and Deaths and Burials indexes.

One of the problems with Irish genealogy in the past has been that relatively few people in Ireland were interested in their family history. But things are beginning to change, and the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport is committed to putting records online, free of charge. You can search church records for Dublin, Cork & Ross, Kerry and Carlow on Irish Genealogy

The National Archives of Ireland, in conjunction with FamilySearch, are imaging and indexing the Tithe Applotments 1826-1837. No launch date has been announced, but this is one to look out for. Another important source is the Landed Estates Court Records, which should be online by mid-2011. These records contain the names of approximately 600,000 tenants.

Another major series in the offing is a colossal collection of prison records from the 26 counties, containing up to 6 million names of Irish prisoners, their families and their victims. This collection spans more than a century, from the 1790s to the 1920s. The records of 15 million cases in Irish Petty Sessions, from 1821 to 1910, featuring 40 million people will also be released from mid-2011 onwards.

To keep up with these and other developments, be sure to sign for the Eneclann newsletter, and wait for news of a brand new website with some of these digitised records, to be launched on St Patrick's Day. The site also includes a comprehensive article about the digitisation of Irish records, which is not news (it was originally published in The Septs,Volume 29 Number 2, April 2008) but provides an excellent overview of the records and the challenges involved in these projects.

The above was based on notes I made during Brian's presentation at Rootstech, so any inaccuracies are entirely my own. There are many other Irish records which, it is hoped, will make their way online, though not in the near future. There are exciting times to come for Irish research at last. Bring it on!

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 Three

Great Seal of Queen Anne 1707, commemorating the Act of Union of England and Scotland

Since my last post on this subject, I have been taking another close look at the collections in new FamilySearch that were formerly categorised as 'British Isles'. The fundamental problem with these records is that the place filters simply do not work. Unless this is sorted out, it will be very difficult for anyone searching British Isles records - England, Scotland, Ireland (North and South), Channel Islands, Isle of Man, or United Kingdom - to find what they are looking for, or even to know what is there to be searched in the first place. Some of the issues I have raised relate to this region, the one that I know best, but could apply equally to others; you can't filter by US state or Canadian province, which is just as bad as not being able to filter by county within the British Isles. But the way that the records here have been categorised is unique.

These lists don't match!

On the home page, scroll down to 'Browse by location' and select 'Europe'. You will see a list of 'countries' on the left, and a list of record collections on the right, in country order. The list of the left corresponds with the list on the right - up to a point. The list of countries on the left reads: Austria, Belgium, Channel Islands, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France ...and so on. The record collections mirror this exactly as far as Denmark, then the next collections are not from Finland, but England, which does not appear at all in the left-hand list.

The list on the left continues...Germany, Gibraltar, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland...but the right-hand list has Germany, Gibraltar, Great Britain, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy...etc. More record collections, this time for 'Great Britain' which have no counterpart on the left. The two lists continue in step almost to the bottom, where the last four countries listed on the left are Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Wales. Now if you look to the right-hand list of record collections, there is only Switzerland, Ukraine and Wales, the 'United Kingdom' record having been distributed, inaccurately, between England and Great Britain.

This discrepancy between countries and record collections ONLY occurs in relation to the British Isles records, and nowhere else in the whole of the Historical Records collections.

Collections in the wrong place

I have already mentioned some of the anomalies in my earlier posts, New FamilySearch, a view from the British Isles Part One and Part Two. There is a filter for Wales, but it contains only Probate Abstracts 1773-1780; the major collections of Wales, Births and Baptisms, Wales, Marriages, and Wales, Deaths and Burials are found within the United Kingdom filter. Also within the United Kingdom are the Great Britain collections: Great Britain Births and Baptisms, Great Britain Marriages and Great Britain Deaths and Burials. I had looked at these before, and found that they included some Irish records - all of Ireland used to be part of the United Kingdom, and part of it still is, but it has NEVER been part of Great Britain. The Irish Sea is in the way! Great Britain is the geographical term for 'the other island' as one of my Irish friends calls it.

Further investigation shows that the baptism register of St Peter's, Athlone and Drum, Roscommon, is included in Great Britain Births and Baptisms, which contains the baptism register of the Immaculate Conception Chapel, South Orange, Essex New Jersey! I also found a number of entries there from the Irish Civil Registration indexes. Naturally, I have reported this using the Feedback facility.

Overseas Records

There are in fact many more records classified as 'Great Britain' which do not belong there. These are not records that have been mistakenly put in the wrong place by someone with an imperfect understanding of British geography. These come from substantial collections of records which are held in London, but whose whole point is that they record events that took place OUTSIDE the British Isles. These comprise many thousands of events recorded in British churches and chapels overseas, or registered with British consulates, embassies and legations abroad. The original records are held at The National Archives in either the Foreign Office or General Register Office collections, or in the Bishop of London's 'International Memoranda' at the London Metropolitan Archives. A further large  collection of births, marriages and deaths at sea, held at The National Archives, is also included in 'Great Britain' by FamilySearch.

These records are not just relevant to researchers with British Isles ancestry; they include people from all nations, particularly the 'At Sea' records which include many records of foreign nationals who were passengers or crew on British-registered ships. They may be included here because they are held in British archives, but records from the India Office Collection, held at the British Library, are correctly indexed by FamilySearch under India, so we know it can be done. Time to hit the Feedback button again...

Mappy Monday - A New Giant's Causeway

Cassell's New Penny Magazine 1899

This map shows the distance between Ireland and Scotland, only 12.5 miles at the narrowest point, and a 'Proposed Land Junction of Great Britain and Ireland'. According to the accompanying article, this was the idea of one J Charles King, who had been promoting it for forty years. He had spent a great deal of his own time and money on surveying the two coastlines from Morecambe to Ayr and Oban, and from Dublin to Ballycastle. He proposed the reclamation of the land at this narrow point, adding nearly a quarter of a million acres to Ireland, stopping the inflow of the Gulf Stream, 'making the Irish Sea an island-studded lake.' Vessels  would get in an out of this 'lake' by means of two new sea-level canals through the Cantyre (Kintyre) peninsula, and the existing Crinan Canal, a safer passage than the rocks and strong currents of the existing route.

There are no engineering difficulties. For the labour requisite for the undertaking, if carried out by the Government, the work of convicts could be well utilised here, aided by the labour of break-water builders.

The force of the current is so great here as to be sufficient to supply electric power for the work, and light up those parts of Antrim and Cantyre, the coal there giving subsidiary means of power for working machinery.

For finance - if kept out of the hands of private speculators - Government paper money would pay all costs, to be liquidated from rentals of the reclaimed land, no charge or toll to be levied for passage-way along the Causeway.

With judicious supervision, the work could be completed in three years, the projector, Mr J Charles King, undertaking to give his services free, if entrusted with the work to be done.

Simple!

An intriguing notion for anyone with ancestors from Northern Ireland or south-west Scotland (like most of mine), and who moved between those two places (quite a lot of mine).
  

New FamilySearch, a view from the British Isles Part One

I don’t wish to be an old stick-in-the-mud, but when something new comes along, it isn’t always an improvement. Having said that, there are lots of good features in new FamilySearch, but sadly, there are quite a few flaws too. The optimist in me thinks that it should be possible to tweak and amend it so that more of the good features of old FamilySearch are re-introduced, or even improved on. We shall see.

There have been some very useful comments and observations from other bloggers; if you don’t already subscribe, I’d strongly recommend The Ancestry Insider as one of the best on this subject. I agree with much that has already been said, but I want to add some observations of my own from a British Isles perspective.

You will notice that I said British Isles, and not just ‘British’, and this is deliberate. Many people use the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’ interchangeably, but they are not the same, and it’s important to know the difference. It’s not just a question of courtesy to the Scots (most of me), the Irish (the rest of me), the Welsh, Manx and the Channel Islanders; if you are looking for records of your ancestors, it saves time if you look in the right country, it really does.

One of the most useful features of old FamilySearch is the way you can filter searches by place, and much of this has carried over to the new site BUT for this corner of the world it has become much worse.

Old FamilySearch

You need to select the IGI search page for this (you can only filter down to Country level from the All Resources page)

Region: British Isles

Country: England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Isle of Man or Channel Islands, or you can leave it at 'All countries'

County: you can select a county, or 'All counties' or 'county unknown', except for the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, which are very small to start with

New FamilySearch

Under Historical Records, 'Browse by location'

Region: Europe

Country: Channel Islands, Ireland, Isle of Man, Scotland, United Kingdom, Wales (There is no collective British Isles category)

County: 'No further place filters found'

There are a number of obvious problems with this. First of all, there is no option called 'England', and no way to search all of the British Isles records at once, you have to search each one separately. If you look closely, the databases in 'United Kingdom' are mostly from England, but they include 'Wales Births and Baptisms.1541-1907', 'Wales Deaths and Burials 1586-1885' and 'Wales Marriages 1541-1900'. Wales has its own country category, but this only contains 'Wales Probate Abstracts 1771-1780'. If you then explore the actual databases listed within the 'United Kingdom' category, there are three (apart from the Welsh ones I have just described) that are not excplicitly English, these are the 'Great Britain' categories for Births and Baptisms, Marriages, and for Deaths and Burials. These, as you might expect, contain mostly events in England, but there are also a great many events which took place abroad or at sea - go to 'Great Britain Births and Baptisms 1571-1977', enter 'Florence' in the Place box and you will see what I mean. I have also found a number of Irish baptisms in the same category. Incidentally, 'Great Britain' is not the same as either 'England' or 'United Kingdom', and definitely does not include Ireland.

I will return to this subject again, but this is enough for now. I am still trying out the new site and there are features that I haven't explored properly yet. I have used the Feedback button to report my comments, and I do have some positive things to say about new FamilySearch too, but my first concern is with these place filters. FamilySearch as an organisation has been kind enough to sponsor me to speak at this year's NGS Conference in Charleston South Carolina in May; one of the sessions they have asked me to deliver is a favourite of mine called 'What is Britain?' It would be nice to think that some of the software engineers might pay attention to what I have to say.

Surname Saturday - the cautionary tale of McIntyre

Surnames are the tools of our trade as genealogists, but we shouldn't set too much store by them, and I don't just mean all the mis-spelllings and variants. Does anyone remember the film Local Hero? An oil tycoon wants to build a refinery in Scotland, and sends one of his executives to sweet-talk the locals. He chooses a man called McIntyre, thinking that a Scotsman would be particularly well-suited to the task. It is incidental to the plot that McIntyre only came have that surname because his Hungarian immigrant ancestor adopted it to sound more American. I used to tell this tale to my genealogy classes as a warning that you shouldn't get too hung up on the origins of a surname, in case an ancestor had simply chosen it, just like McIntyre.

Little did I know that I would have a McIntyre story of my own. It took me 20 years to locate the birth certificate of my great-grandfather, Robert Collins.His marriage and death certificates (both in Scotland) indicated that he was born around 1881, son of Patrick Collins and Jane McAtee. Patrick was dead before Robert married in 1907, and the family story was that Robert was born in Paisley, but the family came from Ireland. I tried everything, but the family could not be found in any census, and I seemed to have a set of great-great-grandparents who weren't married, were never born, and didn't die, in Scotland or Ireland.

Then I found my great-grandmothers application for poor relief in Glasgow because Robert had gone AWOL for a few months, leaving her with two small children and no money. The details given here corroborated the information I already had, with the added detail that Robert's mother Jane had gone to Canada in about 1905,and that her maiden name was McIntee, not McAtee. This was enough for me to track her down on a passenger list, with her married daughter's family, and gradually I pieced the family together, with yet another variation on Jane's maiden surname, McAttee. At last I found them in the census, including the elusive Robert, who turned out to be 7 years older than I had thought! So now I found his birth certificate at last, in 1874, not 1881, and it's a beauty. I found him inthe index as Robert Collins, but to my surprise the certificate read "Robert McIntyre  (or Collins) (Illegitimate)", and for parents' details "Jane McIntyre...widow of Patrick Collins, engineer, who died in March 1871".

So now I don't know who his father was, but he certainly was not the Patrick Collins who appears on all his documents. That's another puzzle to solve, and now I have my very own McIntyre story! And any interest I may have in the history and origins of the Collins surname has nothing to do with my own family history.

As a postscript to this, I noticed that in the 1881 census the Collins family were in the same house as another Irish family headed by a Thomas McEntee. This may just be a coincidence, or they may turn out to be related, recorded, with another spelling of the name. I'm not sure what to make of that one, I'm still investigating!