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Month: December 2019

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Genealogical Resolutions – 6 Ways I’m Going to Boost My Genealogical Game in 2020!

genealogical resolutions 2020

Another year is about to bite the dust (didn’t it go fast?) and it’s time to make some New Year’s Genealogical Resolutions! Genealogy is one of those hobbies where it is important to stop and take stock of where you’re up to and what you’re doing every so often. It helps you to keep on the right track, remain focussed and improve your habits and effectiveness at compiling your family tree.

Here are my genealogical resolutions for 2020! I would probably be staying inside to avoid the extremes of the hot summer weather anyway, I may as well do useful things!

Genealogical Resolution 1: Reboot my desk

No matter how well-organised I try to be with the filing of my work, when I am researching multiple lines and using lots of different sources for each, my immediate vicinity can start to resemble a mountain range of paperwork and open books very easily! I am using the quiet time after the holiday season to reorganise my desk. I will reduce it down to only the priority work I am currently doing (i.e. client research). The rest (i.e. my personal research!) can be filed. To prevent me from worrying about forgetting to follow up a line that’s on ‘pause’ at the moment, I can create a spreadsheet of things to return to.

Genealogical Resolution 2: Get on top of correspondence

genealogical resolutions correspondence
The correspondence soon piles up!

Like many of us, I get a huge number of emails every day. A large proportion of them is genealogy-related. Anything professional, I deal with immediately. Personal ones tend, like my personal research, to often be shunted to one side for ‘when I have time’. I rarely do! This pile, being electronic, doesn’t loom like the physical things on a desk. But it’s no less mortifying.

I’m going to tackle this one a piece at a time and chip away at it. It may take me the full year to get it back to something manageable. But if people have written with queries, even if I can see they are researching a completely different Mary Smith, they deserve the courtesy of a response. This is one I constantly feel guilty about, so it has to be done.

Genealogical Resolution 3: Explore new DNA tools

I manage not only my own DNA but that of many of my family members, and over multiple testing sites. This contributes to a lot of the correspondence I have fallen behind in! Genetic genealogy has grown a lot in the nine years since I first tested. It’s absolutely boomed in the last couple of years as it’s become not only a mainstream genealogical research method but also popular in the non-genealogical community. I even heard an AncestryDNA advertisement on a major radio station which caters to the youth demographic yesterday!

genealogical resolutions DNA tools
New tools for analyzing DNA results are being developed constantly!

Unsurprisingly, this growth means that new tools to help make sense of the data are popping up rapidly all over the place. Several of these are extremely exciting. The sheer number of them I want to explore seems to be inversely proportional to my free time lately. My DNA genealogical resolution is to schedule some ‘DNA Playtime’. If I don’t do this just to practice with some of the new tools I run the risk of falling behind. In particular, I want to try out the new ‘auto trees’ feature at Genetic Affairs, work out what I’m doing with Genetic Family, and do some exploring at Borland Genetics. I also want to fully utilise DNA Painter and the WATO tool, which I’ve had some really good results with already!

Genealogical Resolution 4: Finish writing my book

genealogical resolutions
I need to keep up with my writing…

Quite often in this blog, I tell little stories about my ancestors. There is one you haven’t and won’t hear about here. Her tale is such an interesting, and ultimately tragic one that I am turning it into a book. In my spare time. Are you sensing a theme here?

Nonetheless, the story of Leah Swinbourne, my maternal great-grandmother WILL be completed, and hopefully published by the end of 2020.

Genealogical Resolution 5: Get the most out of my subscriptions and memberships

I love having access to databases to access information online. Some, like Familysearch, Internet Archive and Trove, are completely free to use. None, whether free or not, will contain everything that I need to access. My research covers many corners of the world. I need access to more than just births, deaths, marriages and censuses. Therefore, I need multiple subscriptions to paid databases. So that’s what I do. And then, being human, I spend 90% of my time in just a handful of them.

This year, I will actively remind myself to check the more obscure ones regularly. Perhaps it may be worth my while to check if they also offer the purchase of credits rather than subscriptions. In some cases, it could be more cost-effective to use them in this way if they are perfectly wonderful but only visited a few times a year for a unique dataset!

Genealogical Resolution 6: Find one new research resource a week

Now this one might sound silly. The overwhelming theme throughout this blog has been that I don’t have enough time to use all the data (whether documents or DNA) that I have access to already. Why would I continue to look for more resources?

The answer is simple. There are wonderful new resources coming online all the time. We are only scraping the surface of the archival material that is out there waiting to be digitised. Also, our research often goes off into different geographical or occupational directions so different resources may help. I am always on the lookout for a site that will search several databases at once too. I will be in heaven if anyone manages to come up with something that will search all the genealogical databases at once. Familysearch has made a start in that direction. A reminder to anyone looking for genealogical resources on a specific topic – the first stop should always be Cyndi’s List. If you can’t find anything there, it probably doesn’t exist!

So that’s my six genealogical resolutions for 2020. I’m looking forward to this year of consolidation and moving forward more effectively. Working out how to balance my professional and personal research time is key – this has been my first year of genealogy being both my hobby and my profession. It’s been wonderful and also challenging!

Wishing you a happy and prosperous 2020. What will your genealogical resolutions be?

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Christmas Weddings – Myth or Fact?

Christmas wedding

Christmas weddings are understood by many genealogists and family historians to have happened more frequently than weddings on other days. Others say this is simply not true. Surprisingly little in the way of actual research appears to have been done on the subject. Do we just notice a Christmas wedding between our ancestors more than we notice one held on a more ordinary day?

Why would anyone marry on Christmas Day?

These days, no one would really consider getting married at Christmas. Churches are busy, friends would be unlikely to attend as they would be visiting with their family, finding caterers would be horrendously difficult…but go back a century or two and things were very different.

In the days before trade unions were formed and worker’s conditions were improved, it was rare to get more than one day off each week. People worked extremely long hours and often had only Sundays for themselves. The only time of year when people knew they would have two days in a row off was at Christmas. Christmas day was a day off to attend church. However, the next day (Boxing Day or St Stephen’s Day) was one of the four bank holidays for the year from 1871. This meant that there were always two days off. This often also allowed people the luxury of travelling home if they’d been working away, so it may also have been the only time of year for many families that they could all be together. Therefore the rumour of multiple Christmas weddings makes logistical sense.

It is also said that ‘batch weddings‘ were often offered at Christmas, especially in poorer areas. This was to encourage people to marry – the cost could otherwise be prohibitive at several shillings. There does not appear to be much in the way of documentary evidence to support this practice, although reports of local churches doing it can be found occasionally in the newspapers.

What about Christmas weddings in my family tree?

I have long believed that Christmas weddings were in fact a ‘thing’. From the earliest days of my interest in family history, I have noticed what seemed to be more frequent than expected marriages on that date in my tree. I wish I could run a report to analyse my tree for occurrences of that wedding date (maybe this could be assigned as a holiday project for a younger family member to get them into genealogy!). However, I knew if I took a quick look I’d have no trouble finding some. Bingo! Within five minutes I had found my great grandparents Frederick Seal and Rose Davies. They married in 1902 at St George, Hockley, Birmingham. This church is a major one in my paternal family tree.

Christmas wedding Seal Davies
My great grandparents Frederick Seal and Rose Davies married on Christmas day 1902.

I didn’t need to look much further to find that Fred’s uncle Thomas Pearsall married Elizabeth Adcock on Christmas day in the same church in 1889.

Christmas wedding Pearsall Adcock
Frederick Seal’s half-uncle Thomas Pearsall also married on Christmas day in the same church, 13 years earlier.

Checking the marriage registers for several years revealed that Christmas weddings are not a myth. At least not at this church or in this era. Away from the Christmas period, there was a wedding approximately every week or two. Each Christmas day, between ten and thirteen couples were married there.

Christmas wedding St George church

When I jumped forward a couple of decades in the same register, the pattern was gone. There were occasional Christmas day weddings but no more frequent, and probably less so than other dates. This rather neatly coincides with the improvement of working conditions, allowing people more freedom to choose the date of their nuptials.

What about your family? Were Christmas day weddings common for your ancestors? Comment below!

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Ferdinando Kuffeler – Sheep of Many Colours?

Kuffeler galleon

For the past couple of weeks, I have dwelt on the darker side of our family histories. The black sheep and the shame they brought to their families at the time. Sometimes looking at their actions through our current day values rehabilitates them and shows them just to be human. Sometimes what they did will remain a dark stain on the family tree for all time.

Occasionally, however, it is difficult to know whether someone was a black sheep or just had a very exciting and unusual life! I have an ancestor who I am hesitant to label a black sheep using the limited amount of information I have. I have my suspicions he wasn’t always the ‘good guy’ but suspect his full story will never be known.

The glimpses into his life that I have found have intrigued me and left me wanting more. But for a man who clearly lived his life to the fullest, he left remarkably few records of it. Okay, that’s probably not true. There will be records somewhere. It’s just time to pull out all stops to find them. And perhaps I shouldn’t be writing about him till I’ve done that, but he irresistibly draws me in while we’re on this topic of ‘outrageous ancestors’!

Captain Ferdinando Kuffeler

Ferdinando Kuffeler was born in 1646, the son of Johannes Siebertus Kuffeler and his wife Catherine Drebbel (daughter of Cornelis Drebbel). I am yet to find evidence of his baptism. He may have been born in London where his father operated a dye works in Stratford-by-Bow. More likely he was born in the Netherlands, where the family also had dye works in Katwijk and Hulckenstyn near Arnhem, and where his younger brother Edward was baptised. My next step in locating his baptism records will be to do a deep dive into Dutch records around these areas in particular.

The first official records I have of his existence appear in 1668. On 22nd October, a marriage allegation is completed in London, showing him to be a bachelor of St Margaret’s Westminster, and his intended bride Katherine Graves of St Clements Danes. That very same day, they rushed off to the Chapel of the Holy Trinity in Knightsbridge and got married. In that same year, he is listed as a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber of Charles II. This is somewhat unsurprising, given that his grandfather had been at the court of James I, and his father had been involved in attempting to develop an exploding torpedo for Charles II.

Marriage allegation Ferdinando Kuffeler
Marriage allegation between Ferdinando Kuffeler and Katherine Graves.

Bigamist or widower?

At some stage, probably in the early to mid-1770s his wife bore him a daughter, Catherine. No baptism has been found, but she married in 1697 at St Margaret’s Westminster, to a John Burchett. I have found no evidence of Ferdinando and Katherine having any other children together.

Recently I found a Dutch book of pedigrees published in 1760 which contained the Kuffeler family, including Ferdinando. Known names and dates tallied well and it provided the names of several additional siblings to Ferdinando that I had not known of. It even stated categorically that Ferdinando had one child.

Kuffeler dutch genealogy
Genealogy of the Kuffeler family published in the Netherlands in 1760. Ferdinando is stated to have one child…

I flipped the page expecting to see the child listed as being Catherine. But no…it was a Leonora! Herein lies another mystery. Was he widowed and did he remarry in the Netherlands? If so, why would the book not show both sets of offspring?

I am slightly suspicious that Ferdinando may have had a family on both sides of the sea. I have not found a marriage for him yet in the Netherlands, nor is his Dutch wife named in this document. No burial record for Katherine has yet been found.

kuffeler dutch genealogy
…but this child is not the one he had he had in London!

Interestingly, Leonora’s son Abraham Engelgraaf was living in London at the time of his death in 1775, which names the same wife as in the document shown above – so the family definitely had links with England. Whether or not the Engelgraafs and Burchetts knew one another is yet to be discovered, however!

Privateer or Scammer?

Now here is where I get really mystified as to how so little has been written about Ferdinando. Look at the advertisement below, found in a compendium called Rariora. The story sounds like an Errol Flynn-style swashbuckling adventure! Interestingly he is referred to as Captain Kuffeler, hinting at some kind of military, perhaps naval career. No evidence has been found so far that this is the case.

Kuffeler galleon
Broadsheet advertisement for sale of shares in the Spanish Galleon booty found in ‘Rariora’.

There are a couple of possibilities here. Ferdinando really was taken prisoner and learnt of the wreck of a Spanish Galleon loaded with treasures galore. Or he made it up. Did he really swear an oath in Chancery? He may have, but it hasn’t turned up in the catalogue of the National Archives. Still digging. Did he really get a licence to fish for the wreck, or is it some elaborate hoax? Still looking. Regardless, at least one person bought shares…

Kuffeler Gostwick bill of sale
Indenture of Assignment of a grant of 120 shares in the Spanish Galleon wreckage to Charles Gostwick of St Giles in the Fields.

Mr Charles Gostwick, a gentleman of St Giles in the Fields bought 120 of the 1000 shares from Ferdinando. If the expedition was successful, presumably he ended up an extremely wealthy man. I suspect he didn’t.

We know the Ferdinando Kuffeler selling the shares was the same Ferdinando as the one married to Katherine Graves (as if the strikingly unusual name wasn’t enough!). Take a look at the bottom of the Indenture and you can see his faint signature. A great match for the one on the marriage allegation.

I have as yet found no further mention of Ferdinando in records of the time, official or unofficial. He seems to have disappeared completely though he managed to remain partially obscured for most of his life.

Forgive me for doubting his integrity, but at this stage, I am unconvinced that he does not for one reason or another, deserve the black sheep title. Either way, he’s definitely a fascinating ancestor, about whom I hope to learn much much more…