Royal Wedding - there is no escape!

Prince George of Wales aged 18

I'm not a great fan of weddings at the best of times; I don't ever remember having what is often described as 'every girl's dream' about walking down the aisle in a big white dress. In my immediate family there has only been one church wedding in the last hundred years. So perhaps it's hereditary, but. for whatever reason, I have never discovered my inner Bridezilla. And although I remain bemused by all the fuss, I can't deny that most people seem to enjoy a good wedding, and it's a good excuse for a party, which I'm all in favour of. Today is of course Royal Wedding day, and we got a bank holiday out of it, which I'm also in favour of.

I can admit to being slightly interested in Prince William, because he is a few days younger than my younger son, so I was pregnant at the same time as Princess Diana. If I had a daughter she was going to be Elizabeth, and I was worried that if Diana had a girl, she might be Elizabeth too, and people would think I'd copied the royals. I was very relieved that we both produced boys.

Prince George of Wales aged 25

It is hard to grow up in Britain without having at least a basic grasp of the genealogy of the royal family, and if you become interested in history and genealogy, as I did, it comes with the territory. A few days ago the Prince of Wales was in the news when he became the longest-serving heir-apparent to the British throne, exceeding the record set by Edward VII, at 59 years, 2 months and 13 days. Naturally parallels have been drawn between Prince Charles and Edward, his great-great grandfather, but that set me thinking about parallels between Prince William and his great-great grandfather, George V. I came across a set of pictures of Prince George of Wales, as he then was, in the Strand magazine of 1891. Most pictures of George V show him with the full beard that he sported for his adult life, like the one on the left, when we was 25, but in the top picture, when he was 18, he is clean-shaven, and I was struck by the resemblance between him and Prince William. What they also have in common was that they both married at the age of 28, while serving in the armed forces - George was in the royal Navy - and while their grandmother was queen.

The parallels don't go all the way, though; George was married to Princess Mary of Teck in the Chapel Royal, St James's Palace, not Westminster Abbey, and he was the second son, not the eldest, his elder brother having died of pneumonia in the flu pandemic of 1889-92. What remains to be seen is whether the newlyweds emulate the example of George and Mary in having a long and devoted marriage. Royalist or republican, no-one would begrudge them that.

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.  

Commonwealth War Graves Registers on Ancestry - worth the trouble?

When I saw that these records had been added to Ancestry, I wondered what the point was, since the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site already has all this information, and it is completely free. It also has cemetery plans, and all sorts of other information, including printable certificates for each casualty. But of course I had to have a closer look, just in case there was something there that I was missing. The results were quite interesting.

Plymouth Naval Memorial  

The Commonwealth War Graves site has a single database for all services and nationalities, and for both world wars. The records recently added to Ancestry.com are for the First world War only, and comprise two separate databases. First there is the 'British Commonwealth War Graves Register 1914-1918' which contains entries from only about 250 cemeteries in three countries; most of them are in France, with a few in Belgium and Iraq. The source is the series of books printed by the Imperial War Graves Commission (as it was called then) in the 1920s. I compared a number of entries in these books with their equivalents on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) site, and found no differences, except that in a few cases the printed books said 'killed in action', 'died of wounds' or 'died of disease', which did not appear on the website. I did find one entry where the CWGC gave the wrong date - 1916 instead of 1918 - but the correct date was in the book.

So there doesn't seem to be any great advantage in using Ancestry for these war deaths, beyond the outside chance of finding a entry that had been mis-transcribed by the CWGC. We can already check 'Soldiers Died in the Great War' for place of birth and place of enlistment, a database which is available on more than one site. But there is one advantage to using Ancestry; not for the information it gives, but for the search engine. If you put a place name in the Keyword(s) box you can find men from a particular town, and the name search finds names of next of kin as well as the fallen soldiers - try putting in female names and you will see what I mean.

The second set of records is 'UK, Royal Navy and Royal Marine War Graves Roll, 1914-1919' and for all the entries that I compared provides more detail than the CWGC. This often includes next of kin information, and exact birthdate where the CWGC just gives an age at death. I also found a number of cases where the CWGC gave only initials, but Ancestry's database provides full names. So this is definitely worth using, even if you have already found and entry for your sailor or marine on the CWGC site - with a couple of exceptions. First of all, the men listed are in the Royal Navy or the Royal Marines, but not the Merchant Navy, although I found a member of my own family there who was a merchant seaman, but whose ship had been commandeered by the Royal Navy, so there should be others like him.  Ancestry's description of the records suggests that the database contains records of Royal Navy and Royal Marines officers, but I could only find records of other ranks. One section of the description refers to the War Office, and seems to apply to the Army rather than the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, whose records were kept by the Admiralty. I will need to investigate further to get to the bottom of this. Watch this space.

Shopping Saturday - Mrs Addley Bourne

This is one of those frustrating newspaper cuttings that came as part of a bundle of assorted ephemera, without a date. It probably dates from the late 1870s, though, as I have seen similar adverts for the Swanbill Ceinture Corset dated around then. It's a fascinating looking contraption, and adds to the many reasons I am glad I live in the 2010s and not the 1870s. I have no idea what a 'Jeanne d'Arc Belt' is, but I don't like the sound of it. But once you get over the wince-inducing appearance of the thing, and the thought of what it would do to you ribcage and your circulation, the advertising pitch is interesting. 'It is most effective in reducing the figure and keeping the form flat'. Just look at the shape of it - not exactly designed to 'lift and separate' (for those old enough to remember the Playtex slogan). The 'graceful and elegant symmetry' it promises is fairly timeless, I guess, but nowadays we expect cleavage, not the reinforced mono-prow that this seems designed to deliver. It shows how concept of the ideal female form does change over time. I've been waiting patiently for thick ankles to come into fashion, but I don't think it's going to happen. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Another feature of note is the pricing; 21s, or for a hand-made corset 30s or even 42s. It's a sign of the times that a shop in a high-class location like Piccadilly would offering ready-made items at all; a few decades earlier everything would be made to measure for the discerning and well-heeled customer. Ready-made items like this were a product of the industrial age. The most expensive hand-made item, though, was only twice the price of the ready-made one, which says a lot about the cost of skilled (female) labour in the 1870s. The equivalent modern values would be about £50 and £100 respectively. I'm not in the habit of buying corsetry of any kind, but it strikes me that £50 ready-made is on the expensive side, but £100 for hand-made would be a bargain.

Like many fashion retailer, Mrs Addley Bourne played up the French association of the firm, believing that this would lend an air of chic sophistication, and she was probably right. Addley, incidentally, was not her first name, but that of her husband. In fact it was his middle name (his first name was Benjamin) and she was Ann, but followed the practice of the time in using her husband's name, as in Mrs Patrick Campbell. It is less common today, but we have become used to Princess Michael of Kent, I suppose.

The Bournes conducted their business at 37 Piccadilly for a number of years, and retired to Sutton, Surrey at some time in the 1880s, where they died within 3 weeks of each other in 1895. The Piccadilly address seems to have been very dear to them, because the birthplace given in the 1891 census for the three children who still lived with them was given as '37 Piccadilly'.

Those Places Thursday - London docks

St Katherine's Dock

The area round London's docks has always been busy and crowded, with people who lived there, and even more who were just passing through. Long before the railways or decent roads, the Thames was London's highway, and nearly all the goods that came into the capital city, even from other parts of England, came in through the docks at its eastern end.

This map of the Port of London describes the area from St Katherine's Dock and the Tower of London all the way downriver to the East India Docks. It covers areas like Stepney, Limehouse and Poplar on the north bank, and Bermondsey, Rotherhithe, Deptford and Greenwich south of the river.

These places were populated by people who depended on the river and the docks for their living, going back many centuries. They left plenty of evidence of their lives and activities, in parish registers and other records.

You can find out a lot about these people at Parishregister.com, the website of Dockland Ancestors Ltd. Although it is a commercial site with books, maps, CDs and look-ups for sale, there is lots of background material and links to other useful sites. Many of the parish register indexes can also be searched on Findmypast.co.uk

Many of these will also be found on Ancestry.co.uk as part of their London Parish Registers collection. They also have some Poor Law Union records, which are not searchable by name, but can browsed.

The family history societies for this part of London are the East of London Family History Society for the area north of the river (Middlesex), the East Surrey Family History Society for Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, in the modern borough of Southwark (Surrey), and the North West Kent Family History Society for Deptford and Greenwich (Kent). That should be enough to keep you going for a while!

Such a busy port needed a lot of customs officers, and if your ancestors were among them you can find out about their records in The National Archives. None of the records is online, but there is a Research signpost that will tell you where to start researching.

But if you want background information about the place itself and its history, the Port Cities - London site is full of it. There are chapters on all kinds of themes, with a collection of images and even a 'virtual pub crawl'. How can you resist that?