The War of 1812 - from the British side

Today is the anniversary of day the British Army marched into Washington DC and burned a lot of it, including the White House. The War of 1812 is an important milestone in American history, but doesn't f eature so prominently on this side of the Atlantic (sorry USA, but Britain was more concerned with the Napoleon, the enemy on the doorstep).

Proper historians in the USA, Canada and the UK have researched the events of 1812-1815 and written plenty of books about it. I can't compete with them, but a couple of weeks ago I gave a talk about some of the records of the war that can help genealogists. To be more precise, I was talking about records held in The National Archives, and there are lots of them, including plenty about the men who fought on the American side, not just the British.

The podcast of the talk was uploaded to the website earlier today - how's that for timing? I illustrated it with some documents, including the one below, the service of record of John Adams, an American from Philadelphia who served in the British Army.

From his physical description (on the second extract) it looks as though he was an African American. There are a few more of these, but most of the records relating to Americans are about the several thousand who were taken prisoner. Most of these are lists of names, some with more detail than others. This one is a list of American prisoners who were fever patients, taken from a Royal Navy surgeon's journal.

In a few cases you might find a detailed account of a poor American soldier or sailor who was not only unlucky enough to be captured, but was sick as well.

Many American genealogists are unaware of these records, but when they do see them they are pretty impressed. Better still, the names of the American prisoners from 1812 to 1815 are name-indexed, although unfortunately the index is not online. Oh well, maybe one day.

Catching up

brightsolid offices

I've had (an am still having) an unusual and pleasantly busy week, so I am a bit behind with my blog posts. However, having started the Olympic torch route series I am going to keep it up, although the illustrations might be a bit restricted for the next few days.

I'm in the USA at the moment, waiting for a plane to take me on the next stage of my travels - to Buffalo, since you ask. The first part of my week involved two interesting events in London; a conference, which they call an 'executive briefing' for some reason at CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, and the following day a reception at the smart new offices of brightsolid, a converted nonconformist chapel. So I was out way past my bedtime that night, which didn't leave much time for packing for this trip.

The 'executive briefing' was called 'The Social Media Revolution - how user-generated content is changing the way we work'. It was a very interesting day with good speakers, and if you are among the Twitterati you can find some comments on the day using the hashtag #socialmediaeb. We still had handouts in the form of printed PowerPoint slides, which seemed like an awful lot of dead tree for an event that was all about online media.

The brightsolid event was much more of a social event, and I was lucky enough to be shown round their lovely new offices, in a converted nonconformist church near Old Street. I met lots of nice people, some that I already knew and some that I had not previously met. It was a lovely evening. Someone had a lot of fun choosing the decor inside, all very tasteful in the various brightsolid brand colours.

Right now I'm in upstate NY, heading back to Boston tomorrow. I shall return.

Meanwhile, happy Jubilee weekend for anyone whois celebrating it

 

Some thoughts on the 1940 census

The release of a new census is always an exciting event. Even if it another country's census you can still join in the excitement. Like many other Brits I have 'cousins' in the USA, so I had a personal interest in the 1940 census, as well as my general interest in all things genealogical.

There are some interesting comparisons to be made between US and British census records, but the first thing that struck me was that the (near) instant availability of images with no indexes was rather a good thing. There have been so many advances in recent decades in the way that records are made available to us that it can make your head spin; so much basic genealogical source material is not only online but name-indexed that we can easily take it for granted.

When I started doing family history research the way to find someone in the census was to establish the address where you hoped they would be on census night, and search there. If you didn't find them there, you trawled the surrounding area until you found them (or not). There were place indexes but not many name indexes. Do I want to go back to those days? Of course not. But there was one big advantage of doing it the hard way; you had no choice but to look at the town or village where your ancestors lived. You might notice in passing some other family members that you wouldn't have gone looking for, and you get a sense of the ancestors' immediate surroundings. In short, you see your family in context. Looking for people in 1940 is a little bit like that, where you can find someone if you know where they were living then and are prepared to take the trouble .

Millions of people certainly tried, and I could tell from messages on Twitter and in blogs that at least some of them succeeded. It wasn't really surprising that not everyone could get through or view images in the first few hours. This always happens when there is a really big online release. The demand is always huge in the first hours or days, well in excess of the number of the hits  the site will get on a daily basis after that. It strikes me that if a site was equipped to accommodate everyone who tried to use it on day one, it would be massively over-resourced as soon as the initial rush subsided; rather like cities that have hosted the Olympics and then find themselves with an oversized airport and too many hotels. Frustrating as it may have been, the fact that some people were able to find and download pages, rather than sites crashing altogether has to be encouraging.

Like many other people I had to give it a try on 2 April, and like many of them I couldn't get through to the image I wanted. I had another go early next morning (GMT) while most of America was asleep, and it worked like a charm! I found great-great-great-uncle Robert in the small town in Minnesota where I knew he'd be. When America woke up again things seemed to have calmed down, and since then people have been finding people at a furious pace. All the images are online, on one site or another, and the first indexes have appeared. Pretty impressive for a country the size of the USA, and in less than a week.

We can get awfully impatient, we 21st century people, but as genealogists who deal in decades and centuries we should be capable of taking a more long-term view, we really should. Amy Coffin (whose We Tree blog is always worth reading) hit the nail on the head when she said on Twitter 'Ok people, you're allowed 3 complaint tweets about the #1940census, then you have to take a chill pill. Pretty generous if you ask me.' (Also well worth following on Twitter @ACoffin).

Having found my own relative in the 1940 census, and a few others I am interested in, I started making my contribution to the common good by logging on to FamilySearch Indexing and transcribing some pages. This is a novel feature of this census, that it is the subject of a massive collaborative project between NARA, Archives.com, FamilySearch and Findmypast.com. This is feasible with American records because the images are freely available for anyone to use, unlike in the UK where the images are Crown Copyright. So you can also find the 1940 census images on other sites, Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com (who produced the first online index, for Bristol County, Rhode Island). The race is on, and it's fascinating to watch.    

 

Warlike Wednesday: the War of 1812 - from the other side

I was lucky enough to be present when the Federation of Genealogical Societies Preserve the Pensions appeal was launched. These records are held at the National Archives in Washington DC, but there are two sides to any argument, and it set me thinking about any records from the British side that might be held in The National Archives in the UK.

Not surprisingly, there is quite a lot of material, and some of the records are full of the names of prisoners. Many prisoners were held on ships, and some of the most interesting records are the surgeons' journals kept by the Admiralty. They not only contain names, but give quite a lot more information besides. One of these is the surgeon's journal for the prison ship 'Bahama' carrying American and Danish prisoners.

The National Archives reference ADM 89/1

One of the volumes contains details of the illnesses and treatment of a number of men who were attended by the surgeon while the ship was at Chatham between 1812 and 1814. Some of the patients were sailors or marines, but most were prisoners. Some pages are just lists of names, but for a number of men ages are given, along with details of their illnesses, treatment, and whether they survived. Most of them did - there were only three deaths on board - but several of them, probably the sicker ones, were transferred to the hospital ship 'Trusty'.

The American prisoners whose ages and details appear were:

Alfred Leonard 39, Abnes Polland 41, Procter Symmonds 19, George Symington 48, George Brown 36, Adimus Bowen 44, Jeremiah Hill 46, Mr Lane (Mate) 48, Henry Shaw 32, Golding Spencer 30, Henry Scott 29, Capt Light 54, Francis Williams 28, Charlemagne 28

Medical details, but no ages, are given for:

James Head, Nicholas Noble, James Odihorne, Artimus Bowen, Jonathan Freeman.

All of these men either recovered or were transferred to the Trusty, except for Golding Spencer and Jonathan Freeman. Golding Spencer died of smallpox, and the unfortunate Jonathan Freeman died as the result of 'a singular kind of tumor in the groin' which was mis-diagnosed as a hernia by the first two surgeons who saw him. The third, James Brenan, took a great interest in this case, and wrote it up at great length. The abcess burst, and his symptoms were described in graphic detail. He succumbed to a fever as a result, was sent to the Trusty, but returned to the Bahama, apparently recovered, only to suffer a relapse that caused him to be sent back to the Trusty again, where he died.

There and back

Robert and Mary Donaldson

One of the great things about records going online is the new things that you find. OK, that's pretty obvious, but I don't just mean the things you are actively looking for, like waiting patiently for an new census release to get an elusive ancestor's birthplace. It's the unexpected finds that are the most fun, the things that you wouldn't even have considered looking for.

My favourite find was when I did a 'hit and hope' kind of speculative search and got much more than I bargained for. The people in the picture are my grandfather's grandparents, and I knew a lot about them. They were born in the 1830s and lived well into their 80s. They had eight children, and I have plenty of birth, marriage and death certitificates, parish register entries and census returns for the family. They moved around a lot, but always in the counties of Fife and Forfar, much as you might expect of farm workers. Two of their sons, including my great-grandfather, moved west and settled in Glasgow, and I used to think that this picture was of a sweet old couple who stayed behind in the countryside while their more adventurous offspring moved on. I was wrong.

Like most genealogists I am interested in tracing forwards to see what happened to the siblings of my ancestors, and I had accounted for some members of the Donaldson family in Scottish records, but not all of them. Donaldson is not exactly a rare name, but one of their sons, Robert, had the distinctive middle name of Robertson, so in a fit of optimism I put his full name into Ancestry.com as an exact search, and got a result in the US World War I Draft Registration Cards, with his exact birthdate, giving his resdience as Marshall, Minnesota. I wasn't entirely surprised to find that he had emigrated, but when I investigated further and looked for him in the US census, I was amazed to find that his parents were with him!  I then found that they had sailed from Glasgow to New York in 1888 on SS Devonia, with his younger brother James. I have the death certificates of Robert snr and Mary in 1919 and 1920 respectively in Inverkeilor, Forfar, so it had never occurred to me that they might have left the country, although I hadn't been able to find them in the 1891 or 1901 censuses. In 1902 Robert and Mary returned to Glasgow on the Laurentian, and as far as I know this was the end of their travels.

So the sweet old couple that I assumed had never ventured beyond two counties in the east of Scotland turn out to have spent 13 years farming in Minnesota! Robert stayed on in Marshall, where he died in 1946, and was a veterinary surgeon. He became a US citizen, and married his wife Jean, another Scots-born immigrant, in around 1912. They don't appear to have had any children, so I probably don't have any distant cousins in Minnesota. His younger brother James also stayed in America, but I hold out no hopes for any cousins there either, because the last sight I have of him is as a 54-year-old newlywed in the 1930 census.

This shows the benefit of looking for collateral lines, which can bring the unexpected bonus of extra information about your direct ancestors; but now that so many records are easily searchable, particularly passenger lists, I'm sure I'm not the only person with emigrant ancestors they never suspected of being emigrants at all. Perhaps you can't find the death of an ancestor who seems to vanish after their children have grown up and married, because they emigrated with another son or daughter and their family. I also have a couple of those, and I can't believe that my family is all that unusual, so maybe it's worth looking at passenger lists, or doing the kind of entirely unscientific search I described at the start of this post. You never know what you might uncover.

American Civil War Graves in the UK

This was an interesting item on this week's episode of BBC Radio 4 series Making History Part of the synopsis reads:

Michael Hammerson is researching the lives and last resting place of Britons caught up in the American Civil War who returned to the UK.
His initial interest lies in the graves of American Civil War veterans in Highgate Cemetery in North London  but he would like Making History listeners with American Civil War ancestors to get in touch.He would also like to hear from those people who know of other American Civil War veterans’ graves here in the UK. Please contact Making History and we will pass on your information to Michael.

There are also links to a PDF version of a fascinating 8-page leaflet he has written about the graves in Highgate Cemetery, and to a podcast of the whole show (which can also be downloaded from iTunes).

That's quite some project he has taken on, and I wish him well. I've never come across one of these graves, or any references to them, but if I do, I know who to tell.