Welcome new editions of old(ish) books

I'm not in the habit of plugging books (apart from my own, which comes out next month - you'll see some shameless self-promotion then!). But there are some books where a new edition is worth shouting about, and this is one of them. There is a lot of interest in Caribbean family history, but there is relatively little in print, compared to other areas of research. It's quite some time since the last edition of Guy Grannum's Tracing your Caribbean Ancestors appeared, and it has been out of print for a while too, so the new edition is particularly welcome. If you are interested in the subject, Guy's website Caribbean Roots is also worth a look.  

This book is a National Archives Guide, from Bloomsbury Publishing, I knew that publication was imminent, so I was pleased to see a few days ago that it had arrived in The National Archives bookshop - I could hardly miss it, it's Publication of the Month. This means that you can buy it at a bargain price, £11.99 instead of £16.99, if you follow the link above. Like a number of other new publications it is also available as a e-book, which you can buy direct from Bloomsbury.

I also noticed a new edition of another established title that first appeared 25 years ago, Bound for Australia by David Hawkings. Most of the records he mentions are held in The National Archives, and David Hawkings is extremely good at finding relevant ones. Since the first edition appeared in 1987 he has discovered a victualling list for the First Fleet among Treasury records, which he reproduces in full in Chapter 1 (TNA ref T 46/22). This edition has 8 more chapters than the original 1987 work, with 22 appendices, a bibliography and separate indexes of personal names, place names and ships.

Although the title and the cover illustration suggest that this is a book about convicts, the subtitle 'A guide to the records of transported convicts and early settlers' shows that its scope is wider than that. One of the items that caught my eye on flicking through the book was an extract from 'A List of Free Passengers on board the Convict Ship Merchantman at Swan River on the 15th February 1863' (TNA Ref: MT 32/5). Among the Wives and Families of Pensioner Guard , the conduct on board of Mrs McCourt is described:

'A violent and most unmanageable woman. She was reported to me by her husband for keeping company with single men on board and refusing to come to bed at 10pm.'

Oh dear. So it wasn't just convicts who caused trouble.

Bound for Australia is published by The History Press and is also available from The National Archives bookshop, and although it isn't Publication of Month, it too is on sale at a bargain price if you buy it online.

Mappy Monday - London institutions 1911

Leaving the workhouse 1883

As part of the day job, I have been looking at the census statistics for institutions such as workhouses, barracks, prisons and so on. As I looked though the tables of the 1911 Census Report, it struck me that several London institutions were not in London at all, but in the adjacent counties. Even withing London, some were outside the actual parishes to which they belonged. For example, the St George Hanover Square workhouse was in Fulham.

The reason for this is obvious, when you think about it. London was full. From the early 19th century, if a London parish needed to build a workhouse, or even bury its dead, there was no space in the centre of town, so they had to look for available land further afield. As London grew, and with it the demand for workhouses, hospitals and more, these institutions were built further and further afield.

I decided to plot the positions of the London institutions that were outside London altogether, using Google Maps and the results were rather interesting. I also colour-coded them, red for workhouses and homes, dark blue for schools, light blue for asylums and green for hospitals and convalescent homes. I also added some details about each one, including the number of staff and inmates. The locations are approximate, although I may be able to refine them as I find out more about each of them. Meanwhile, they give a reasonable indication of how far London habitually removed some of its poor and needy.

Furthest afield are sanatoria and convalescent homes, some of them is seaside resorts, but by far the greatest number of displaced Londoners were in asylums. Nowadays we would call them mental hospitals, but in 1911 terms like 'Lunatic Asylum' were considered perfectly acceptable; Several of them had more than 2000 inmates.

'London' in this case is the Administrative County of London, created with the formation of the London County Council in 1888. It comprised the Mettropolitan Boroughs of Battersea, Bermondsey, Bethnal Green, Camberwell, Chelsea, Deptford, Finsbury, Fulham, Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith, Hampstead, Holborn, Islington, Kensington, Lambeth, Lewisham, Paddington, Poplar, St Marylebone, St Pancras, Shoreditch, Southwark, Stepney, Stoke Newington, Wandsworth, Westminster Woolwich and the City of London.

This 1896 map gives some idea of the area covered, although it also includes parliamentary constituencies, which have slightly different boundaries - the main difference being that West Ham is not part of the London County Council area. 

So you may find that members of your family you have always considered to be Londoners are a long way from home on census night. Most, though not all, of these places were Poor Law institutions of some kind, so the place to look for more information and links is of course Peter Higginbotham's The Workhouse site. Many related records will be found at the London Metropolitan Archives, and some are even online at Ancestry.co.uk

Shopping Saturday - Oetzmann & Co

Oetzmann & Co were described in the London Post Office Directory of 1894 as 'complete house furnishers, cabinet makers and upholsterers, British carpet and rug warehouse, importers of Turkey, Persian, Indian and every description of Oriental carpets and rugs' or, according to the 1908 London Telephone Directory 'Cmplt Ho Frnshrs' - and you thought Text-speak was new! Their bill-head, from which the illustration above was taken, claimed that the business was founded in 1848, and it was still in business nearly a century later. You can see a selection of their advertisements on the Grace's Guide site, and one of them is dated 1947.

The founder appears to have been John Robert Augustus Oetzmann, and the business was carried on by his sons after his death in 1886. His brother, Thomas, was a piano-maker, and he too founded a successful business. The family came from Ipswich, and although their surname is German, there is no-one of that name in any English census who was born outside England. It is worth remembering that for centuries East Anglia has had close trading links with the countries that are now Germany and the Netherlands. I thought it was worth including the bill-head from which the top picture was taken, because it includes a comprehensive list of all the goods and services they provided. 

The company advertised extensively in the press, and the example above dates from 1906, when they had evidently taken over another business, Norman & Stacey, or at least acquired their stock. The London Metropolitan Archives holds some records relating to the Oetzmanns, mainly to do with their properties in Hampstead Road. 

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.

What did you do in the War, Grandpa?

David Donaldson 23 August 1895 - 14 March 1958

I never actually asked him because he died when I was four, but I have found out quite a bit, as it happens. Today would have been his birthday if he'd lived to a record-breaking age, so it's a good day to remember him.

The picture on the right is the grandpa I remember, although more cheerful - he always looked grumpy in pictures, I have no idea why. He always wore a collarless shirt and a waistcoat, and he always had a tiny little stub of a pencil in the pocket. I would say 'draw funny man' and he'd take out the pencil and draw little clown pictures for me.

He was born and died in Govan, and like many men there he worked in the Glasgow shipyards; when he married my grandmother in 1917 the marriage certificate showed his occupation - iron driller - and the ship that he was serving on, HMS Emperor of India. I had known that he was in the Royal Navy, but when I found his service record I was surprised to find that he seemed to have only joined the navy in August 1917. If I had looked closely I would have noticed that the marriage certificate, dated four months earlier, gave the name of his ship.

TNA Ref: ADM 188/1073/315

The answer was that he had been on board HMS Emperor of India since 1915, but as a member of the Royal Naval Division. His record on HMS Emperor of India was exemplary, but after he transferred to HMS Ramilles in January 1918 it was a different story. He was court-martialled for wilful disobedience of lawful commands, and an act to prejudice of good order and naval discipline. He then made things even worse by escaping from custody. Orders for his demobilisation were cancelled, and he was recaptured and imprisoned in June 1918. Fortunately for him, he never served the year's imprisonment with hard labour to which he originally been sentenced. In October 1918 his sentence was suspended and he was released to civilian life. He was not alone in his misbehaviour, his shipmate James Finlay, from Leith, was convicted of the same offences at the same time, and they escaped together. I haven't been able to discover any more about the actual incident so far, but I may get to the bottom of it one day. I do know that while he was locked up he read the Bible. He was never at all religious, but since it was the only reading material available he read it just to pass the time. He had a remarkable memory, and for the rest of his life he could quote extensively from it.  

TNA Ref: ADM 339/1

In fact, he signed up for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve a few days before his 20th birthday in 1915.

TNA Ref: ADM 337/27/7

He was very keen on ships, that's for sure, whether building them or sailing on them. The family story goes that when he was having a row with my Granny during the Second World War he stormed out of the house saying that he was going to join the Navy again, and he'd be killed at sea and then she'd be sorry! The Navy didn't want him; as a skilled man he was much more valuable in the shipyard!

I don't have a photograph of him in uniform, but there a picture of him with my grandmother, probably taken around the time they married, although it is not a wedding photograph.

He was the fourth of thirteen children, and his three elder brothers were also of an age to serve in the First World War. I have found no trace of the two eldest brothers serving in any of the armed forces, but the third one, George, served in the Highland Light Infantry and was killed towards the end of the war, in August 1918.

Who do you think you are? - Samantha Womack's military ancestors

Military genealogy is not really my speciality, but I was intrigued by some of the details of Sam Womack's soldier ancestor. Alexander Cunningham Ryan's story was fascinating in itself, but it was an odd little detail that first caught my eye. Because he was in a Guards regiment, the record of his First World War is held at the Guards Museum, and not at The National Archives; so far, so good. Then it was revealed that he had served in the Highland Light Infantry before the war, so off she went to Glasgow to find out more, and was filmed there looking at a copy of his service in that regiment. I thought it was rather odd that they were looking at a black and white printout, when pre-First World War service records on FindMyPast were scanned in colour - nerdy, or what?

The next twist in the story was that he had transferred from the HLI to the Royal Garrison Artillery, but had not mentioned this when he joined the Scots Guards. Living up to my earlier post 'You know you're a genealogist when...' I was of course typing furiously on my laptop while watching the show. I found his Royal Garrison Artillery record on Findmypast easily enough, but there was no trace of his service in the HLI, which I had seen Sam Womack and her expert looking at on TV.

One of the perks of my day job is working in a room full of records specialists, so I asked William Spencer, our senior military specialist, for his advice. He suggested I look in the First World War service records on Ancestry, and, lo and behold, there it was. Or, to be more precise, they they were. In theory, a man's pre-First World War military service records should be found with his First World War records, even if he had left the army, and then re-enlisted at the outbreak of war in 1914. Since his service in the RGA was on Findmypast, and his First World War records were at the Guards Museum, it would not have occurred to me to look on Ancestry for any of his records. I found them in the database which is wrongly described by Ancestry as 'Pension records'. They are not pension records. They are the duplicate records collected by the War Office, from a variety of sources, to replace the First World War service records destroyed by fire during the Second World War. So the three records covering the whole of his military service are all in one place, and I now knew why the record they were looking at in Glasgow was in black and white, and not in colour (the First World War records on Ancestry are in black and white because they were scanned from microfilm; they were only ever released on microfilm because of the fragile state of many of the originals)

Incidentally the nice man in Glasgow rather undermined his 'expert' credentials by suggesting that the wonderful photograph of 'J Ryan' aged about 15, in HLI uniform might be Alexander's younger brother, on the grounds of having the same surname and serving in the same battallion. There's nothing wrong with speculating, and he conceded that he had no evidence, but if he had looked at the third page of the record he was holding he would have seen the names of Alexander's three brothers - Michael, Peter and William.

Duplicate copy of Alexander' attestation for the Highland Light Infantry in 1895, aged 14

Alexander's attestation for the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1903, aged 22

Duplicate of Alexander's attestation for the Scots Guards in 1914, aged 33

But I was still interested in possible family connections, since Alexander's records all showed that he was born in Maryhill, and Maryhill Barracks is the home of the Highland Light Infantry, so I wondered if his father might also have been a soldier. Throwing caution to the winds, I used a few of my ScotlandsPeople credits to look at his birth entry, and, sure enough, his father was John William Ryan, sergeant in the 74th Regiment of Foot - ie the Highland Light Infantry. Better still, since he was born in 1881, I was able to find him with his parents in the 1881 census. By this time my profligacy with ScotlandsPeople credits knew no bounds, and I lashed out a few more on the marriage of John William Ryan and Jane Mitchell in 1880. This showed that John William's father, William Ryan, was also a soldier, not in the HLI but in the 33rd or First Yorkshire West Riding Regiment.

The 1881 census showed that John William was born in about 1850 in Sunderland, again obligingly close to a census, and the family were found in barracks in 1851. I was not at all surprised to find that William Ryan was born in Ireland, given his surname and the large number of Irishmen in the British Army at that time. There is no service record for him on Findmypast, and I couldn't find the family in the 1861 or 1871 census in England or Scotland. So I consulted the very useful 1861 Worldwide Army Index, also on Findmypast. This confirmed what I had suspected, that William's regiment was overseas, in India to be exact (TNA Ref: WO 12/4849, Muster book and paylist, 1st Battalion 33rd Regiment of Foot, 1 January 1861-31 December 1862).

Most families, celebrity or otherwise, have more potential leads than can be followed up in a single episode of Who do You think you are? So I have no complaints that this area wasn't explored, since the story that was told was also interesting. I'm not sure why I took such an interest in this one, since military research isn't usually my thing. Maybe it's because I had an uncle in the Scots Guards, another in the Highland Light Infantry, and one of my grandfathers served in the Royal Artillery.

Home Guard records released - More 'Lad's Army' than 'Dad's Army'

Home Guard service records for County Durham 1939-1945 have just been released online by The National Archives. According to the press release, a majority of the men who served were much younger than is popularly thought:

'The defence volunteers organisation the Home Guard was commonly thought to have consisted mostly of men who were too old for military service, yet this project has revealed that 50% of the records selected were of men under the age of 27, with 28% of the men aged 18 or younger in 1940, the year the Home  Guard was formed.'

Only the County Durham records are held by The National Archives, and have been released as a pilot project. Records for all other counties are still held by the Ministry of Defence, and there is more information about them at VeteransUK

All of the records can be searched by key word, using the online catalogue, Discovery, but only about half can be downloaded; the records for men born less than 100 years ago are closed. There is more information on a new Research Guide Durham Home Guard records 1939-1945.

Online records - never mind the description, look at the source

The great news for genealogists is that more and more records are being digitised, indexed and published online. Every few days, it seems, FamilySearch, or one of the major commercial websites announces the launch of a new collection of records, or a significant addition to an existing one. And then you can look at each site's master list or news archive for earlier releases for all the launches that you missed. There's a lot of stuff out there.

There is so much, in fact, that it is not easy to work out exactly what is available, and how complete any collection might be. Reasonably enough, you can start by looking at the description of a collection, but that isn't always very helpful. Sometimes a site fails to provide an adequate description, and in fairness, this may be because an accurate description would be so long that you would lose the will to live before you finished reading it - I defy anyone to give a decent account of FamilySearch's  'World Misc' collection, for example.

Newly-added collections tend to have better descriptions, but they still can't be absolutely accurate, for the reasons I have just given. Some of the most useful, and most popular, sets of records being added to sites like Ancestry.co.uk and Findmypast.co.uk are the collections of digitised and indexed parish registers. They are usually classified by county, which is the most helpful kind of brief description, but you shouldn't take these at face value; don't assume that the newly-released collection of parish records for the (fictional) county of Borsetshire will include all records for all parishes and for all dates. A more  accurate description might be 'Baptism, marriage and burial registers for the ancient county of Borsetshire 1538-1925, except for those parishes in the Archdeaconry of Felpersham which are held in the Dean and Chapter Library there, the parish of Borchester whose records remain at the parish church, and the parishes of Penny Hassett and Waterly Cross which were transferred to the Metropolitan County of Shakespeareland following boundary changes in 1974'

See what I mean? Many online collections on Ancestry and Findmypast will make a lot more sense if you look at the record offices, because that's where the parish registers are held (and many more records besides). So each online collection will relate to a record office's holdings, which may or may not coincide with an actual county. The bottom line is, there is no substitute for knowing something of the history and geography of the place where your ancestors lived. For England you can find out where records are held for any parish using one of my favourite resources, England Jurisdictions 1851 or for anywhere in whole of the UK and Ireland there is GENUKI.

Ancestry has a number of collections whose descriptions give a good indication of what they contain, but which need closer attention. For example, the West Yorkshire collection consists of records from the West Yorkshire Archive Service, covering most of West Yorkshire but not all of it; the area round Sheffield and Doncaster has its own record office, and these records are not included. Its London Collection is from the holdings of the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), covering most of what is now Greater London - roughly the historic county of Middlesex with parts of Surrey, Kent and Essex. But this does not include the City of Westminster, which has its own separate record office, Westminster City Archives  (although the LMA holds some bishop's transcripts for Westminster parishes).

St James Piccadilly,
part of the Westminster Collection

The Westminster Collection itself is online at Findmypast. This collection includes lots of other material, mainly poor law records, but not school admission and discharge registers. These are held at the LMA, because they are part of the records of the London School Board. So you need to go back to Ancestry...

Other collections may be from printed, ie secondary, sources, or they might be incomplete for some reason. You will only know this if you take the time to read the source information. Different sites have different ways of providing this, but it is usually there. I am always grateful for any information that I find online, but unless I am confident about the source I treat it as a clue, not a fact.

It's easy to blame websites for making us lazy, and thinking we've done a comprehensive search by typing a name into a search box on a single site. But we shouldn't blame the internet for everything; before there were any genealogy websites some people thought they had searched a whole county's registers  by looking at the appropriate section of the IGI on fiche. And I'm sure that even longer ago some searchers used the many printed parish register volumes published by record societies and others, conveniently forgetting the less accessible registers that were still kept in parish churches. That's human nature, it's always tempting just to go for the low-hanging fruit.

You know you're a genealogist when...

We don't have the Letterman show in the UK at the moment, and I'm missing his 'Top Ten' lists, so I've had to make up my own.

You know you're a genealogist when...

... you are more interested in the credits at the end of a TV show than in the show itself

...you're reading a family saga-type book and you look for a pedigree chart at the front. And if there isn't one, you draw one as you go along.

...a dear friend announces they are going to have a romantic wedding on a tropical island, and before congratulating them you make sure they know about lodging a copy of their marriage certificate with the GRO.

...Who Do You Think You Are? is on TV so you have Ancestry, Findmypast, FamilySearch etc open on separate tabs on your laptop, to check the research while you watch.

...it's your birthday soon so you ask for a couple of death certificates, some ScotlandsPeople credits, acid-free storage boxes and a Flip-Pal scanner.

...you never knew you could use a spreadsheet for financial calculations, you thought it was for indexing parish register transcripts.

...you tell your workmates you'll be spending two weeks in Utah in the middle of winter, and are surprised when they ask if you are going ski-ing.

...the first thing you think of when someone says 1812 isn't Tchaikovsky's overture, or even a war in North America, but Rose's 'Act for the better regulating and preserving Parish and other Registers'.

...you can't read a road map, but you know the Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers like the back of your hand.

...you get chatting with a telesales person, and at the end of the conversation you've persuaded them they should start tracing their family tree, and they haven't sold you a thing.

Mappy Monday - working at Somerset House

In the census you occasionally come across a description page for an enumeration district like the one above in 1851, which includes a sketch map of the district as well as a list of the streets it contains. I found this one while I was working on one of my pet projects, the story of the people who worked for the General Register Office at Somerset House. 

I have been able to find some of these men in the census, and where I could identify them on a modern map of London I have plotted them using Google Maps. I created a map which I have called General Register Office staff. Each marker represents a member of staff in a particular census year, and its tab shows the man's name, the census year, his address and his post in the GRO at that time.

The markers are also colour-coded 1851  red, 1861 - blue, 1871 - pale blue, 1881 - yellow. It's an ongoing project, so not all census years are included yet, and I also need to do more work to locate some addresses where the street names have changed, or where the streets have disappeared altogether. 

I found the census map particularly interesting because the one of the streets shown, Chapel Street, was the home of the Registrar General at the time, George Graham.  

London - but not the Olympics this time

Well, I'm catching up on today's Olympic news on TV as I type, but that's the only connection, honest. I've been working on a little piece of research that involves London addresses, and I was using some online resources I thought were worth sharing, including one that was new to me.

May favorite is Lee Jackson's Dictionary of Victorian London, not just because of the excellent content, but because it's FUN. I can also highly recommend his blog The Cat's Meat Shop and following him on Twitter @VictorianLondon is very entertaining.

The site I have only just discovered is the London Miscellany section of map.thehunthouse which is really useful for researching streets, with its very helpful lists of street name changes, and some maps. There are even more good maps at MAPCO and MOTCO.

The Charles Booth Online Archive at the London School of Economics not only has the famous colour-coded Poverty Maps, but also the survey reports and notebooks that go with them. They are particularly good for the East End, but there is plenty of good material for the rest of London, too.

If you want pictures of London back to 1500 (and even more maps) there is the Collage collection from the London Metropolitan Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery.

For printed sources, particularly on the early history of London, there is a large section devoted to London and Middlesex at British History Online

Anyone who lives within easy reach of London, or who visits regularly might want to join London Historians but even if you a long way off there is plenty of interest on the website, and a blog to follow.

And finally, some pictures, because I like to share them.

Billingsgate Market 1841

Clerkenwell Green

Kings College Hospital 1872

London Bridge and Dyers Wharf c1750

Those Places Thursday - Ludlow

I succumbed to temptation (as usual) today and bought a book in the Summer Sale in The National Archives bookshop. The book that I bought, Ludlow: an Historical Anthology, by David Lloyd and Peter Klein, isn't one of the online bargains, it was only available in the on-site shop, and there were only a couple of copies (sorry). I mention it because it's about Ludlow, a place I have only visited once, several years ago, but I just loved it.

Ludlow has a lot of history, which always tends to endear a place to me, and a lot of old buildings there are intact. The biggest of these is Ludlow Castle, and one of the most famous is the Feathers Hotel.

Thomas Wright's History of Ludlow (1852) is on Google Books, with some fine illustrations, and the Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Ludlow Castle and the Church of Saint Lawrence, Ludlow (1869) by the same author. You can find some gazetteer entries and a several travellers' accounts of Ludlow on A Vision of Britain Through Time.

As befits such an historic town, it contains many listed buildings - 402 of them to be exact. You can feast your eyes on these on the English Heritage Images of England site, and a collection of old photographs the related Viewfinder site.

The Feathers hotel

Records for Ludlow are held at Shropshire Archives, which has a good range of information leaflets and guidance on family and local history. They are also working on a series of Place Guides, which look very promising, although they are working through the alphabet and have reached the letter G, so no Ludlow yet, but it will be worth looking out for, judging by the standard of the guides they have produced so far.

The historic Feathers Hotel dates back to 1619, and as you would expect in a building of that age there is hardly a straight line in the place. It is reputed to be haunted, but I suspect this is the result of a combination of overactive imaginations and creaky floorboards. I didn't see any ghosts when I was there, and I loved it. Writing this has made me want to go back to Ludlow - and the rest of Shropshire, come to that, it's a lovely county.

Ludlow is dominated by its medieval castle, which has a fascinating history of its own. it is adjacent to the town, but is not part of the parish of Ludlow, it is an extra-parochial place.

Ludlow Castle

Yorkshire Day

I have to confess that it had passed me by in previous years, but I am reliably informed that Yorkshire Day has been celebrated on 1 August since 1975. This year it is being hosted in Scarborough, at the start of a 5-day festival.

So, to mark the day, here are some pictures:

York Minster

Whitby Abbey

Richmond Market Place

Scarrborough

Leeds Town Hall

Castle Howard