Every year around this time, FamilySearch hosts RootsTech, the largest genealogy conference in the world. This year RootsTech 2024 promises to deliver on a huge range of topics, both live and online. Those lucky enough to be in Salt Lake City at the time will get the full conference experience, but for the majority of us, the free online access makes it so accessible from wherever in the world we are.
Remember…
…is the theme of RootsTech 2024, but the most important things to remember right now are:
take a look at the schedule and mark which presentations you are most interested in. This creates your own personalised playlist.
consider signing into ‘Relatives at RootsTech‘. This is available every year for free, and lets you see how many of your cousins are also registered for the conference. A great way to find others who are researching the same family lines!
keep your diary free for February 29th-March 2nd (or March 1st-March 3rd depending on your timezone!). This one isn’t crucial, since if you have created your playlist, it’s so easy to go back later and catch up. I spread my viewing out over the full year since I always pick so many of the presentations!
Keynote Speakers
As always, as well as live and recorded presentations from genealogists and family historians, RootsTech 2024 is hosting live keynote speakers, some from other professions, to talk about what remembering family means to them.
This year the keynote speakers include Lynne M. Jackson (Dred Scott Foundation), Henry Cho (comedian), and Nancy Borowick (photographer)
RootsTech 2024 – Prepare, Attend, and Enjoy!
As with anything in life, a little preparation is key to getting the best out of it. Follow the tips above and you’ll be well-armed to get the most out of your time at RootsTech 2024!
The Accentuate the Positive Geneameme, created by GeniAus is something I really enjoy taking part in each year. It’s an awesome opportunity to reflect on the year past and what has been achieved. I find it helpful in channelling my thoughts for goals for the upcoming year as well!
I’ve been a little bit slower than usual in posting my responses this year. Just as with my activities on the genealogical front (including maintaining this blog!), the year was overtaken on the personal front – deaths in the family, illness, you name it! I’m very much hoping for a less eventful 2024. Accentuating the positive is more of a challenge than usual for 2023.
Anyway, here goes…
Let’s Accentuate the Positive!
1. On revisiting some old research I found … newspapers to be especially helpful in filling in the gaps in the stories – two of which I wrote about this year, the Millen Murder and the suicide of John Rigby. I am such a newspaper junkie, and I heartily recommend going back to old research and seeing if the newspapers can illuminate the stories of your ancestors.
2. In 2023 I hooked up with a new (to me) living cousin … none I’m afraid, quite the opposite. An old to me living cousin who I’d been in contact with for about 15 years and met on a trip to England suddenly passed away. But lest that be seen as an answer that doesn’t accentuate the positive, I will say that he added so much laughter to my life in those 15 years that I’m really glad we met.
No, really, positivity…!
3. I’m pleased I replaced a tool I had been using with … Goldie May. Research logs are so essential to our genealogical work but let’s be frank…so tedious. Goldie May automates the process with one click and has saved me hours of manual labour. Another super-useful tool has been Cite-Builder. Source citations are so essential to our genealogical work but let’s be frank…so tedious (I’m sensing a pattern here!). Cite-Builder has also saved countless hours by allowing me to enter the information required into a template for each record type and generating the citation. Sometimes they need a little tweak, but still it’s been hugely labour-saving.
4. My sledgehammer did great work on this brick wall … finding the origins of William Townley and who his mother was. This came out of thinking I was disproving an Ancestry hint, which turned out to be valid even though it looked improbable! Building out the family and checking probate documents turned out to be the key.
5. I was pleased that I finally read … The Floating Brothel by Sian Rees. It had been on my bookshelf for years but I’d never got around to reading it.
Getting more sociable…
6. I enjoyed my geneajourney to … a behind-the-scenes tour at the Public Record Office of Victoria. When we go to the archives, we’re in the reading room, being served up documents from the mysterious depths ‘back there’. It was great to actually see ‘back there’. Nerdily delightful.
Visiting the depths of the PROV!
7. In 2023 I finally met … many of my fellow Genealogical Society of Victoria volunteers in real life. I really only got involved with helping to run the Midlands and East Anglia Discussion Group during the pandemic so our Volunteers’ get-together early in 2023 was the first time I’d met many many people in 3D!
8.I was the recipient of genearosity from … someone who is not a relation but who has been researching the lives of all the Parkhurst Prison juvenile offenders, one of whom was someone in my extended tree. He sent me everything he’d discovered, and I was able to add further details to help him in return. We ultimately found that three children from the same family had been sent to Australia as convicts!
9. I am pleased that I am a member of … so many family history societies. I can’t choose just one, because they all provide so much value for the small amount of money it costs to be a member. Supporting the family history societies for the areas of your research helps to ensure that they can keep on going, and their resources and journals are invaluable to our research.
Getting some research done…
10. I made a new DNA discovery … when I dug into a line where the documents made sense but there had been no DNA matches generated with any of my family members anywhere over many years. There’s a blog coming on this one so I shan’t say much more other than a revisiting of some mystery DNA matches provided the answer and corrected the line.
11. An informative journal or newspaper article I found was … I found an excellent thesis online (do you check for theses about the people or places you’re researching? You can strike gold!). It gave a full and in-depth history with maps, photos and records of a rural area of Victoria where my client’s family went on their immigration. It opened up so much further research for me, and provided a great background.
12. I enjoyed my wander around … cemetery. I didn’t actually get to do any cemetery wandering this year other than on a personal level, which was not enjoyable. That’s one to pick up again for fun this year I hope.
13. AI was a mystery to me but I learnt … the value of using it for transcribing, summarising, extracting and tabulating those long handwritten documents like wills that are so essential to our research. Upcoming blog on this!
Giving…
14. The best value I got for my genealogy dollars was … so hard to choose just one. I subscribe to all the major and several smaller genealogy websites for the areas I research. They all have their own strengths. I’d hate to do without any one of them.
15. It felt good to contribute to … the Midlands and East Anglia Group at the GSV. I love giving presentations, and as someone born in the Midlands, it’s nice to be able to share context with those who have the ancestry but have never been there.
17. I got a thrill from opening someone’s eyes to the joy of genealogy … with a client who was so thrilled with what was being found that the original project got extended, extended, and extended until it filled most of my year. It’s now continuing with another family member’s branch into this year. It’s been thrilling to bring so much enthusiasm and joy to someone just by doing what I love to do!
Finally…
18. Another positive I would like to share is … no matter what hurdles get in the way, the research is always there to come back to when the time is right. And it’s therapeutic!
RootsTech24 is coming around quickly. Has anyone got through all the wonderful content from RootsTech23 yet? Me neither! There are about 3 1/2 months to go till even more marvellous genealogy information and tools begin flooding into our grasp. So don’t panic, there’s still a bit of time to catch up with what’s there now. Preparing for RootsTech is all part of the buildup to the main event!
The theme this year is ‘Remember’ and as part of that theme, RootsTech will be producing a cookbook of old family recipes. They invite you to submit your own for inclusion. If you would like your Grandma’s special cake recipe preserved for all time, here’s your opportunity! Submissions are open till December.
RootsTech24 will be held both in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA and virtually around the globe from February 29th – March 2nd 2024. As always, it is totally free to register for the virtual event (and registration is already open so why not register today?).
Attending RootsTech24 in person gives you a whole lot more. There are many extra classes and activities, and of course, the legendary Expo Hall is way more fun to visit in person!
If you’re lucky enough to be able to get there, it’s certainly the best way to experience the atmosphere and catch up with friends old and new. Although it is very competitively priced, it is not free to attend. Currently, the early bird price is $US99 for the full 3 days.
RootsTech24 Pass Sweepstakes
Here’s where the RootsTech24 Pass Sweepstakes comes in! Every year there is a giveaway of free passes for lucky winners to take away that cost of attendance and allow you the added experience of being there for the cost of virtual entry…nothing!
For the whole of October, the QR code below will take you to the entry page. (Don’t worry if you’ve already paid for registration – if you win, it will be refunded). 20 winners will be drawn from around the world on November 1st.
As they say, you gotta be in it to win it! Good luck to all!
John Taylor, Superintendant of Police, Manchester, 1842-1855
It was the early 1990s when I first discovered that my husband was descended not only from a convict, but also a Superintendant of Police! Back in the days of having to use snail mail and be satisfied with not viewing original records easily. Thirty years later, I discovered a transcription error that has hidden an intriguing chapter of John Taylor’s career from view. The Mitten Murder was really the Millen murder!
Finding a police officer in the tree
Hannah Taylor was my husband’s great-great-grandmother. I knew she and her husband had arrived in Australia from New Zealand after each emigrating separately and marrying there in early 1867. So I took out my pen and wrote to New Zealand’s National Archives. They sent me a transcript of both their marriage and their application to marry (no parents’ details on either) and some photocopies of their mentions in the local Dunedin newspapers. One was the marriage announcement which described Hannah as ‘the fourth daughter of Mr Superintendant John Taylor, Chorlton Town Hall, Manchester, England’.
Marriage announcement from the Otago Daily Times, 30 January 1867
Soon after, I found that Hannah had died just a year after arriving in Australia. I obtained her death certificate which confirmed he was a Superintendant of Police.
Excerpt from Hannah (Taylor) Finck’s death certificate, 1888
John Taylor’s career details
The 1851 Census was unable to assist in locating John. It turned out that this section of Manchester’s census had been destroyed by water damage, and only the 1881 Census was otherwise available back then – there was no John Taylor, Superintendant of Police to be found there.
Taking out my trusty pen again, I wrote to the Greater Manchester Police Museum to see if they had any information on John. They wrote back to say they only had details of post-1858 recruits onwards. He wasn’t amongst them.
So that was that, until two years later, when they wrote again, bless ’em. They said that they had a volunteer researcher compiling an index of earlier officers and they had remembered my request. Attached was a three-page transcription of his service records, his 1855 letter of resignation and a report of the Watch Committee approving his superannuation payment.
It was fascinating reading. He’d been recruited in 1833, and become an Inspector very quickly, rising to Superintendant of the D Division by 1842. Among other notes, he was recorded as having been severely injured in the Chartist Riots in 1848. It was on the basis of his ongoing head and leg problems from these injuries that he resigned seven years later.
In an otherwise very impressive career summary, there was one blot on his copybook. Reference was made to an enquiry regarding ‘the murder on 13th August 1844 of a woman called Jane Mitten, by a man called Evans’. John had allowed a confidential letter to be seen by the press and was found guilty by the Watch Committee of ‘the most inconsiderate and reprehensible conduct’.
Finding The Mitten Murder
Of course, I wanted to know more, but could find no reference to the murder of a Jane Mitten anywhere. As in my previous post, it was only when I recently remembered to revisit this mystery that I found the answer. I went looking for Jane Mitten in the British Newspaper Archive…
…still nothing. I went back to the original correspondence from the Police Museum. They had mentioned that much of the Watch Committee Minutes was written in illegible handwriting. I tried various combinations of names and alternatives. Finally, I found a plethora of articles regarding ‘The Millen Murder’. Jane Mitten was actually Jane Millen mistranscribed from those messy minutes.
The Millen Murder
A particularly detailed report was printed in the Manchester & Salford Advertiser and Chronicle on August 17th 1844 under the title ‘Barbarous Murder and Daring Robbery’. It told of the crime, the chase, the capture, the prisoner’s statement, the inquest and court case over several tightly packed columns. This included praise of John Taylor and his ‘extraordinary exertions and vigilance’ to bring the prisoner to justice.
Initial praise for John Taylor in the Millen murder
The Millen murder was an awful crime. Jane Millen was an elderly lady who took in a lodger by the name of George Evans. He subsequently lost his job. She supported him for six months, kindheartedly waiving his rent and feeding him. Eventually, she began to ask him to make more effort to find a job and ultimately found him one. He worked for a day and then decided he didn’t wish to return to the job the next morning. Instead, he bashed her on the head and strangled her, before stealing several items from her home and catching the train to Liverpool. He was found in a lodging house there, awaiting a steamship to New York the next morning. Evans was totally unrepentant and it took a very short time for the jury to find him guilty of ‘Wilful Murder’.
The Tide Turns
Just a week later, the newspapers revealed the letter for which John Taylor was severely upbraided. It is printed in full in the Manchester Courier and Lancashire Advertiser of the 24th August:
The rogue letter that got Superintendant Taylor into so much trouble
It was quite rightly felt that since it had been published in a rival newspaper before the trial it would have been prejudicial for the jurors to have the opportunity to have read it. This newspaper took full advantage of the opportunity to criticise their rival, thus bringing even more attention to it. The Watch Committee had to act.
The Watch Committee’s findings
On the 14th September, the same newspaper published the Watch Committee’s findings on the matter.
Report of the Watch Committee
And thus, with John’s previous good record and eating of much humble pie, he retained his position and reputation. What a relief.
Once again, newspapers have come to the rescue to brilliantly add detail and colour to the information supplied in other documents.
Recently I decided to take my focus off the ancestors further back in my tree to fill in some details on more recent generations. It’s always good to come back periodically and review what is now available to flesh out the stories of our relatives. So many new sources are constantly being made available! And when it comes to railway tragedies, it is very likely that multiple records will be left.
John Rigby and Charlotte Teague
John Rigby was born in 1837 in Shoreditch to a silk weaver also named John and his wife Sarah Morter (last mentioned here). However, he did not follow his father into the declining silk industry but became a cigar maker. He married Charlotte Teague, the third daughter of Enoch Teague and Sarah Townley in 1861 at Christchurch Spitalfields.
John Rigby and Charlotte Teague marriage certificate 1861
Together they had 8 children, the first three of whom were born in London, the remainder in Leicester. John and Charlotte had relocated about 1868, where John worked and eventually became a foreman in a cigar factory. It is possible he worked with Joseph Carey ‘John’ Merrick, who became known as ‘the Elephant Man’, as they were both working in a cigar factory and living very close to one another during the mid-1870s.
John Rigby Junior and the Railway Tragedy
1862 baptism of John Rigby
John and Charlotte’s eldest son, also called John was born in 1862 in Hackney. He too became a cigar maker. Of all the children of John and Charlotte, I had never found what became of John after the 1891 census. At that stage, he too had moved cities, from Leicester to Sheffield, also to work as a foreman in a cigar factory belonging to Messrs J Morris & Son of Whitechapel and Sheffield. He had a wife, Mary Ann (nee Hall) who he had married in 1887 and two children, John and George both born in Sheffield. After that, he appeared to have disappeared in a puff of (cigar?) smoke and I abandoned him for a decade or two. It was now time to see what I could find about his later life.
John Rigby and family in the 1891 Census
Once again, the newspapers came to the rescue. They have become my absolute go-to source these days given the accident-proneness of my family!
The reason I hadn’t found John in any later censuses was that he hadn’t lived to see 1901. From the newspaper reports following his death, it seemed that John had become very depressed during 1900. He was convinced that his employers were unhappy with him. He thought that he was about to lose his job (something they strenuously denied at his inquest).
Trip to London
At Easter, he went to visit his father in Leicester, who was determined to cheer him up. John Senior bought railway excursion tickets for himself, John, and one of the younger Rigby brothers to visit London for a few days.
Approaching London, there was a long tunnel at Haverstock Hill. The train carriages were unlit. John took the opportunity of the darkness to smash the carriage window and leap out onto the tracks. His father tried to grab his coat but was unsuccessful. John was then horrifically killed by a train passing in the opposite direction.
The death and subsequent inquest were reported in several newspapers with varying levels of detail. In none of them did it report which brother had been in the carriage with the two John Rigbys.
Inquest report in the Leicester Chronicle, 21 April 1900
It is hard to imagine how traumatising this would have been for both his father and this brother, and what impact it may have had on their later lives.
There were three younger brothers of John who were alive at the time – George, Charles and Alfred. Charles was my great-grandfather and I suspect that he might have been the brother on the train.
Why? He effectively became estranged from the family. Although he was still in Leicester in 1901, by 1911 he had moved to Bedworth, by 1915 he was in Coventry, and he ended up in Birmingham by the following year, where he lived out the rest of his (short) life. His father died in 1917, and his will reveals bequests to all of his living children…except Charles.
The rest of the Rigby family remained in Leicester and by all accounts were close to one another. I wonder if Charles somehow got the blame for not saving his brother? Pure speculation on my part and probably unable ever to be confirmed one way or another. Of course that is not the only possible reason for his estrangement from the family, but that’s for another blog post.
Two families with railway tragedies in common
You may remember a railway tragedy in the Swinbourne branch of my family, which I wrote about here. Well, the two families impacted by railway tragedy happened to merge. Charles Rigby married Leah Barnett (nee Swinbourne) in 1916. His brother and her son, both killed by trains. What are the odds of that?
Well here we are, it’s the middle of March already, and RootsTech is done and dusted. But is it? Is it really? No. It’s not too late to RootsTech!
Even if you didn’t attend either in person or virtually between March 3rd and 5th, it’s not too late to participate in RootsTech 2023.
Why get involved now?
RootsTech is the largest family history conference in the world.
It’s totally free!
The on-demand sessions remain on the site for easy access whenever you need to learn (or just feel like learning) something new about genealogy.
There are currently more than 1,500 sessions on 185 topics in over 30 languages in the On-Demand Library, so you’re sure to find something of use and interest to you.
Some of the sponsors still have conference deals and offers running for another week or so.
‘Relatives at RootsTech’ is also still available until March 28th. Connect with family!
You can create your own personal playlist of presentations you are interested in. That saves you from having to remember which ones grabbed your fancy!
It’s NOT TOO LATE TO ROOTSTECH!
My favourite session this year
There were so many to choose from, and I’m still working my way through them, but my favourite has to be Jonny Perl’s presentation on third-party DNA tools. He didn’t just talk about his own site, DNA Painter. He spent an hour taking us through a huge swathe of different tools available on different sites. It was a great summary of what’s available to help people who want to do more with their DNA results than their original testing company can offer. It was a really good overview of what each tool does, how it might help, who it might suit… There’s just so much around and we’re spoilt for choice, really!
I still have an awful lot to watch. Family ‘stuff’ is currently taking a lot more of my time than family history. But that’s okay. That’s how RootsTech works. It’s NEVER too late to Rootstech!
PS: Mark your calendars for RootsTech 2024! February 29th-March 2nd…counting down! Maybe next year I can actually be there…like in 2019 in London…a girl can dream…
The next phase in sorting out the Townley family, or the story of how I tried to disprove a strange hint and ended up proving it!
Regular readers may remember that I blogged last year about my Townley family and the strange propensity people have of assuming that William Townley, victualler of London was the Reverend William Townley of Orpington, Kent. We now have him tracked down to Charlton next Woolwich in Kent where his father John was a gardener. Through combing the parish registers, his siblings Robert, John, Mary, Thomas, and Joice (the only one to be baptized in Charlton) were discovered. A satisfying number of DNA descendants of this Townley family matched with my family through this line. So what now?
If there is no trace of them in the Charlton parish register before the 1790s, where were they before then? And could I pin down exactly who was John’s wife Betty?
There was a multitude of possibilities for baptisms of my ancestor William, so I decided to focus on Robert, a less common forename.
I could find one baptism that fit well with the known facts in all respects except one. It was a long LONG way from Charlton. A Robert Townley was baptised to John and Betty on 11 Nov 1787 in Buckland, Gloucestershire. Buckland is a little Cotswolds village near the Gloucestershire/Worcestershire border. 100 miles away from Charlton. As I began to research further it was with the thought of disproving this was the correct Robert, not proving it.
So I leapt into the Buckland parish registers. Wait, there was also a son William baptised on 29th August 1779 to John and Betty! Another perfect fit. Interesting. Was there also a Mary, John and Thomas, the other siblings that had married in Charlton? No. Okay then. Probably not the right family, right? There were however baptisms for a Sarah in 1770, and two James’s in 1785 and 1786.
A Full House of Townleys
So who were the John and Betty Townley of Buckland? The only John Townley and Betty (or Elizabeth) that I could find a marriage for were John Townley and Betty Oldaker in 1769 in Withington, 13 miles away. Could this be them? It would fit with Sarah being baptised in 1770. But there was a big gap between her baptism and William’s in 1779. Was I looking at two separate families? I spread the net a little wider. At Chipping Campden, less than 5 miles away, a John and Elizabeth Townley had baptised Mary in 1772, John in 1775 and Elizabeth in 1777. This perfectly filled the gap, accounted for two of the other known children and added one more unknown. Still, just because it fits, doesn’t mean it’s true. It still could be coincidence.
A London link
I looked for burials around Buckland of any of the children that I knew to have grown to adulthood and settled in the Charlton area in an attempt to rule them out. None of them was buried in the area. I did notice though that many burials in the second half of the 18th century were of people ‘of London’. So plenty of Londoners seem to have been recruited to Buckland for work in this timeframe. Perhaps it wasn’t so unlikely that John Townley had gone 100 miles for work after all. I have found no record of major works occurring in this time period in or around Buckland but perhaps the Lord of the Manor, Thomas Thynne (at that time 2nd Viscount Weymouth) needed workers for his lands and gardens.
Townley as a name in the Buckland parish registers seemed to be confined to this family, though there were some Townley families in Winchcombe, just a few miles away.
Who was Betty Oldaker?
What about Betty Oldaker, the wife of this John Townley, where was she from? Her baptism to Thomas and Mary Oldacre was found in the Buckland parish registers in 1747. She had siblings Robert, Mary, James, Thomas, Sarah, William and…Joyce! Many names already known to have been given to Charlton John and Betty’s children. And Joyce was actually baptised in Charlton. I was beginning to believe that these were in fact the same family. Betty Oldaker’s paternal ancestry shows many Joyces through the generations, so though it wasn’t a really common name at this time, it had significance in her particular family.
If the John and Bettys were the same people, given that they moved to Charlton when their eldest child was still only in her teens, I should be able to find records of her and the other previously unknown children Elizabeth and James in the Charlton/London area then, right?
Sarah Townley 1770
Once I knew of Sarah’s existence, she wasn’t hard to find. She married in 1793 to John Embleton at St Botolph Bishopsgate. How do I know it was the Buckland Sarah Townley? A witness was James Oldaker, now known to be her uncle.
Elizabeth Townley 1777
Elizabeth Townley was also found quite quickly. She married John Blasdall in 1804 at St George the Martyr, Southwark. Not only was this where her brother William was baptizing children at the time, but her brother Thomas had married Frances Blasdall there the year before.
James Townley 1785 and/or 1786
James remains a sticking point. I can find no trace of him yet. Was he baptised twice? If so, why? Is the second baptism actually a misrecorded burial? Or is one of the baptisms actually a misrecorded Thomas for whom I have not yet found a baptism but who is known to be part of this family? The search continues. This did sow a seed of doubt, the one thing that didn’t fit, until…
The Death of John Townley’s Mother-In-Law, Mary Oldaker
Mary Oldaker (nee Bravel) of Buckland died in 1786. Her probate documents sealed the deal. The administrators of her estate were James Oldaker her eldest son (Betty’s brother) of Charlton, Kent and John Townley of Buckland (remembering that John and Betty were still in Buckland at that time). There is the definitive link to Charlton, and to the James Oldaker who witnessed Sarah Townley’s marriage!
James Oldaker and John Townley named together on Mary Oldaker’s probate documents, linking Charlton in Kent and Buckland in Gloucestershire
James’ signature on each document was definitely made by the same person…
The signature of James Oldaker (and lack of signature of John Townley!) on his mother’s probate documents in 1786
James Oldaker’s signature on his niece Sarah Townley’s marriage record in 1803. Undoubtedly the same man.
So there was much circumstantial evidence that led me to believe that Buckland John and Betty and Charlton John and Betty were one and the same. But this single document definitively tied the places and people together.
John Townley, born 1738 in Chelsea, moved to Buckland sometime before 1769, met and married local girl Betty Oldaker, moving back south together in the late 1780s with their family. They settled in Charlton, where Betty’s brother was already living and John’s living siblings were close by. Just waiting for some DNA pings from the descendants of the ‘new’ children now!
RootsTech Pass Giveaway Winner!
Congratulations to Becky Smith who won the three-day pass to RootsTech in Salt Lake City next week. Have a wonderful time! A reminder to those who aren’t making the journey that virtual RootsTech is free to attend online. If you haven’t yet registered there is still time…and while you are at it, Relatives at RootsTech is happening again, giving you the chance to find cousins and compare notes. Why not register for that too?
Welcome to 2023 everyone! I finally succumbed to Covid on New Year’s Eve after avoiding it for three years, so this will be the shortest-ever blog. But I just had to let you know…. I have a 3-day in-person pass to RootsTech 2023 to give away to one of my lucky readers!
Please note, this ticket is for those intending to attend the conference in person in Salt Lake City. The virtual event is free to attend from anywhere in the world. But I know many people are beginning to emerge, travel and attend events in person again – why not begin the year with the biggest and the best?
The 3-day pass is valued at $98 and includes:
access to all on-site classes
keynote and general sessions
access to the Expo Hall (ooooh bargains!)
If you’ve already purchased a ticket, don’t worry. If you win, you will be refunded what you paid so it’s still worth entering!
So, how can you get your hands on this giveaway for RootsTech? Easy. Drop me a message via the ‘Contact Me’ area on this page, and answer this simple question…
‘IN WHICH CITY IS ROOTSTECH 2023 HELD?’
Entries close at midnight AEDT on 26th January 2023 and a winner will be randomly chosen on the following day. Good luck!
Every year, my genimate Jill Ball produces a list of questions, encourages us to review what we have achieved or learnt and ‘accentuate the positive’. It’s that time of year again.
I really recommend this as a process for everyone working on their family history. It’s so easy for a year to go by and you really wonder if you’re making progress sometimes. Sitting down and thinking about some of these questions as they apply to your own year’s work may help you realise that you are getting there, bit by bit. It can also help with setting your family history goals for the next year!
So how did I accentuate the positive in 2022?
1. I was happy to go back to… libraries and archives after a Covid absence, though not as much as I’d like to yet!
2. In 2022 I was particularly proud of writing… an article for the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly journal highlighting the benefits of seeking family stories rather than ‘just the facts Ma’am’.
3. A new software package or web application I embraced was… GoldieMay, though I still have my training wheels on. I haven’t yet upgraded to the top tier for the full experience. I’m hoping for a discount to be available at RootsTech 2023! This is going to save me HOURS!
4. My sledgehammer did great work on this brick wall… finding the maiden name of the wife of Edward Eginton gave me a whole new family line to investigate. The Duddlestons . As recently as the past week I have had further connections to this family making contact. This has led to further DNA confirmation that this is the correct line. Perhaps this year I will finally find the father of Sarah Bytheway, 2023’s target person!
5. A new genealogy/history book that sparked my interest was… “Bound for Australia: A Guide to the Records of Transported Convicts and Early Settlers” by David T. Hawkings (The History Press, 2012). Okay, so it’s not new, but it’s a new acquisition. It very much focuses on the sources to be found in The National Archives in Kew, some of them quite unexpected and obscure! Great for anyone with convict ancestors.
6. A geneasurprise I received was…. the journal article I wrote that I mentioned above becoming the cover story for that issue! I can’t accentuate the positive any more than by saying ‘Omg, omg, omg’!
7. In 2022 I finally met… a client face-to-face again! I’d gotten so used to exclusively using Zoom, email and phone to communicate over the previous couple of years.
8. Locating… where the Townleys came from gave me great joy… it also allowed me to confirm a line for a family that is commonly misrepresented in other researchers’ trees.
9. I am pleased the Covid situation caused me to change… some of my expectations on what I could achieve. Being forced to stay home for a while was probably helpful for my self-care! And it forced to me think of alternative ways to get things done.
10. I progressed my DNA research by… revisiting GenomeMate Pro, updating it to the newer Genealogical Data Analysis Tool and importing a whole lot of new relatives from across the testing platforms. I’d been intending to do that for a while but have had a VERY full year. I thought I needed more time to get my head around the changes than I actually did. If you previously used GMP, don’t hesitate to move across to GDAT, it’s not as steep a learning curve as expected!
11. An informative journal or newspaper article I found was… a series of reports (over 1000 found so far!) on an arrest and two murder trials printed over the course of several months in many different newspapers. Bit by bit, they dropped details of the accused person’s life into the timeline I was building and gave lots of clues as to where to look next for him.
12. I was pleased I could contribute to… the Genealogical Society of Victoria by becoming co-convenor of a new Discussion Circle for the Midlands area of the UK, which is where a huge number of my ancestors (and myself!) originate.
13. I got a thrill from opening someone’s eyes to the joy of genealogy… when they initially decided they only wanted their family researched back to their immigration to Australia, then realised there was so much more exciting stuff to be found in the countries of origin!
14. The best value I got for my genealogy dollars was… the Association of Professional Genealogists Professional Management Conference. Great content, and I more than covered the cost of attending by winning one of the door prizes, worth twice as much as the conference attendance fee! It made it extra worthwhile to stay up all night 3 nights running to attend the live sessions.
15. I enjoyed my first post-Covid face-to-face event because… I’m changing this one to I WILL enjoy my first Covid face-to-face event as I’ve yet to attend one and am looking forward so much to meeting up with some of my genimates again! Accentuating the positive is easy with this one. And the virtual versions of conferences attended were all well worth it.
16. A fabulous event I attended was… RootsTech2022. I still have a ton of sessions to catch up with, there is more included each year than anyone could possibly hope to watch. I’m so glad they leave most sessions up indefinitely, as RootsTech 2023 will be here before we know it!
Have you registered yet?
17. I’m happy I splashed out and purchased… a new laptop. The old one was groaning under the strain, and the new one flies along in comparison! It was a good excuse to deal with some reorganisation of my filing system too!
18. I got the most joy from … working with some lovely new clients, with some return customers sticking around to find out more about their families. I love solving people’s mysteries!
19. Another positive I would like to share is … YOU WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF STORIES TO FIND ABOUT YOUR FAMILY!!
What about you?
What did you enjoy about your genealogy research this year? Remember, ‘accentuate the positive’!
I’m stepping away from family stories this time to rave about two great genealogy tools that work together brilliantly to help you find more cousins researching your family…and by extension helping you FIND more family stories! These two tools are FTAnalyzer and Lost Cousins.
Family Tree Analyzer – Great Genealogy Tool 1
I know many people are familiar with FTAnalyzer. It’s a fantastic family history resource, most commonly used to analyse your family tree GEDCOM file looking for errors…and it’s free.
However, it has a number of other uses, including:
reporting on where you are missing data such as censuses
showing you who your ‘treetop’ (furthest back) ancestors are for each branch
viewing your ancestors on maps, current and historic
creating lists for occupations so you can see how many blacksmiths for example are in your tree
the surname list will show you if there is a project for any of your surnames at The Guild of One-Name Studies, with a clickable link to take you there
…and so on…did I mention it’s free?
The FTAnalyser screen showing where to find the Lost Cousins function
Lost Cousins – Great Genealogy Tool 2
I also know many people are familiar with Lost Cousins. This one is used to find other people researching the same families as you. It matches census entries that you have found and entered onto the site. It’s a brilliant way of connecting with distant cousins with ancestors in the UK, Ireland, US and Canada. You just need to enter each family and the census reference details onto the site. When you get a match, you know you are researching the same family because you’re not just matching names, but specific households! Lost Cousins is also free to use.
As a free member, you also get access to a very handy newsletter that comes out twice a month, packed with useful information. You are able to see that you have matches to the people you have entered census information for, and they can see that they have a matching ancestor with you. Connecting requires that one or other of you is a subscriber (£10/year), which allows you to discover who the descendant is, and communicate with them directly.
Bringing Them Together For Powerful Results
But did you know these two great genealogy tools can work together? The biggest thing that has held me back from taking full advantage of the Lost Cousins site is the thought of manually entering all the census record references. I tend to build my trees both across and down to maximise my DNA hits with cousins, so there are tons of census records I have gathered over the years. I’d entered a few hundred and basically stopped.
FTAnalyzer can automate the process. I’d heard about that a while ago and it was one of those things I was ‘getting around to’. I’ve finally done it. With the click of a button, it found almost 6000 census records to add from England, Wales, Scotland and the US. It went on its merry way chugging through adding them to the Lost Cousins site with no further input from me. It took only a couple of hours, during which I was still able to use my computer for other things. I now have a whole lot of new leads to chase up as a result!
One click! 6000 automatic uploads of census details! I was so happy, I just had to write a blog about it! Genealogy is a never-ending project by definition. Every time you proceed back a generation, there are twice as many ancestors to find on that line as before. Any tools that help make the job easier are great to find. And when two great genealogy tools collide to save hundreds of hours of data input, it’s worth talking about.
