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.
Over the past few weeks (now that the Duddleston dust has settled), I’ve finally resumed my search for the origins of my Townley family. Earlier attempts, what feels like a century ago, hit brick walls. Even now, there are obstacles to overcome.
Be methodical when tackling obstacles in your family tree. (Photo by form PxHere)
They’ve Got the Wrong Man!
Most researchers have come to the conclusion that ‘my’ William Townley was ‘The Rev. William Townley’. He was the vicar of Orpington in Kent and apparently the son of a linen dealer named John Townley. Unfortunately for this to be true it would involve him coming back to London periodically to produce children with his wife Sarah (nee Gussin) and claiming to be a victualler rather than a vicar on baptism records!
Baptism of Frederick Townley, 14th November 1813 (the date in the margin is his birthdate), St Botolph without Aldgate, London. His father William is clearly noted as a victualler.
According to the Clergy of the Church of England database, at the time of his supposed son Frederick’s birth in Aldgate he was a deacon at Old Windsor in Berkshire. He had moved on to Wyrardsbury, Buckinghamshire as stipendiary curate by 1814, while his family (according to the accepted wisdom of the genealogical community) continued to be raised in Aldgate. Although he was in London for a short while before this he was based in Marylebone, not Aldgate, and by 1816 he had taken up the position of Vicar in Orpington. He remained there until his death. He’s there in the 1841 Census. Tithes were still being paid to him in 1843. Finally, his death, still with the title of Vicar of Orpington is announced in the Gentleman’s Magazine as having occurred on 24th September 1847.
Surely it would have been scandalous and not a little inconvenient to have his family ensconced in London for all that time? Especially when he was rattling around his church-provided Vicarage with only a couple of female servants for company?
I stick to my claim that William Townley, husband of Sarah Gussin, who claimed to be a victualler was….wait for it….a victualler!
William Townley, Victualler not Vicar
It just so happens a William Townley purchased his Freedom of the City of London by redemption through the Innholder’s Company as a victualler in 1803.
The Freedom of the City document showing William’s entry to the Company of Innholders as a victualler.
John Townley, Gardener not Linen Dealer
The document does indeed name his father as John. But John is not a linen dealer. He is a gardener, and the document tells us where he was from in the margin. Let me turn that image around for you and save your neck.
Detail from the Freedom of the City document margin, showing that John was a gardener, deceased.
Great handwriting, huh? And it led me down the garden path, no pun intended. I read the place as being Carshalton. Carshalton is not in Kent, it’s in Surrey, the county next door. Hmmm, it could have been a mistake by a clerk who hadn’t spent much time south of the Thames. I ran it past a ‘jury of my peers’ at The Genealogy Squad without letting on what I thought it said. They unanimously said it was Carshalton, confirming what I had thought. So, I hit the parish registers to try to find John’s death and hopefully William’s baptism.
Nothing.
I ended up searching through a hundred years of the Carshalton parish register the old-fashioned way until I went cross-eyed, not relying on indexes or transcripts, looking for evidence of Townley families in the parish. There was nothing found to indicate that there were Townley families established at Carshalton.
So, if Carshalton doesn’t seem right, Kent might be, right? I looked for places in Kent that had a name that could conceivably be construed from the margin notation and decided to give Charlton a look. There are two Charltons in Kent. One near Dover and one near Woolwich. William and Sarah’s first couple of children were baptised in Southwark, not too far from the Charlton near Woolwich. This wouldn’t likely have been Sarah’s doing, her family was from Epping in Essex. So, I opted to start with investigating that one.
The good news. It seemed Charlton was the location of a grand house with massive gardens, so gardeners would not be unusual there. Secondly, I found a John Townley buried at the parish church in 1798. Promising.
But the bad news was there was very little of the parish register available in the usual places. I extracted what I could find, a grand total of less than ten of them and way too late for my William’s baptism. With a bit of digging, I found that North West Kent FHS had the full parish registers on CD-ROM and ordered a copy from them. While I waited for them to arrive from England, I began the quest to tie up all the Charlton Townley families from any sources I could find in the meantime and ‘FAN club‘ the stuffing out of them.
Robert and Mary Ann (nee Hammond) Townley stood out. He was a blacksmith not a gardener, but he was from Charlton and was baptising children there in the handful of records I’d found. Census records showed he was of an age to possibly be William’s younger brother. So, I built their tree out and down through the years, incorporating clues as to how the other Townleys fit with this family. Gradually they all began to fit together and I was gathering confidence that the local Townley families seemed to spring from one source. Many were gardeners and many also had strong links to Hackney, a massive market gardening area in that era.
Taking a deep breath, I added the word ‘HYPOTHESIS’ in the name suffix box on Ancestry (so as not to confuse anyone) and linked Robert to John the gardener as a son. I was still waiting for the CD so I decided to see whether DNA would help confirm things. Apart from myself, there are four DNA kits I manage that come from that same family line – 2 siblings, a first cousin and a 3rd cousin.
The Townley family emerges
Within hours, common ancestors going back to various children of Robert and Mary Ann began pinging up against all of these kits. My mum’s DNA never made it to Ancestry before she passed away so I went to the site where hers was. Same result, matches that went back to Robert were there too. Carshalton was hurled out of the window and Charlton is definitely where John Townley had died and his children were raised.
I say raised rather than born, because when the CD-ROM arrived, I could only find one baptism of a child to John. Joice Townley was baptised 4th July 1790 to John and Betty.
Baptism of Joice Townley, 4th July 1790, Charlton, Kent.
Joice went on to marry David Lake at St Botolph Bishopsgate in 1807. This was only a third of a mile from St Botolph Aldgate where my William and Sarah were baptising their later children.
So it seems that John arrived in Charlton somewhere between Robert’s approximate birth in 1788 and Joice’s in 1790. It is highly likely he was the 1738 son of Nathaniel Townley, a gardener of Chelsea and his wife Jane (nee Cheasey). Nathaniel and Jane moved to Lewisham (3 miles from Charlton) by 1744 and remained there for the rest of their lives.
Ploughing through the registers it looks like the other children of John and Betty who mostly stayed in Charlton, married and had children, were John, Mary and Thomas. I’ve now built their trees out and down too, looking for more DNA pings. Betty was likely the Elizabeth Townley who witnessed both Mary and my William’s marriages in 1797 at Charlton and 1801 in Aldgate respectively. The signatures are certainly the same person.
Where To From Here For The Townley Family?
Betty at this stage could be Elizabeth Cutter who married John Townley in 1757 at St Botolph without Aldersgate. Or more likely Elizabeth Panter who married John Townley at St Mary Rotherhithe in Southwark in 1766. Or perhaps an entirely different marriage that I haven’t yet found. More work to do, there are some pros and cons to both hypotheses. The next step is to find the baptisms of the pre-Charlton children, including my William. Wish me luck!
So, lousy handwriting nearly put a spanner in the works here. It pays sometimes to not trust your eyes or even the eyes of multiple others when it leads you to dead ends. Be creative, look at all aspects of the writing. I’d still be looking round Carshalton if they hadn’t written Kent next to it. Think outside the squiggle even if it doesn’t make sense. Try it all out. Deeply. FAN club the entire village if you have to. And never assume a victualler is a vicar.
There are so many amazing genealogical events every year that give us all the opportunity to learn, connect and advance our skills from beginner hobbyist to professional. With the challenges of the past couple of years, the genealogical community has pivoted beautifully. Virtual offerings have increased accessibility to all.
The biggest by far has been RootsTech, the annual conference run by FamilySearch. Last year, there were over 1.5 MILLION registrants for over 1500 virtual presentations. This year, the number of registrants looks likely to beat that! The virtual nature of the conference makes it accessible not only because of the comfort of watching without travelling, but you can spread most of your viewing out indefinitely.
I am thrilled to be an Ambassador for RootsTech this year! I’d like to help ensure that everyone gets the best out of this totally free event so that they can climb their family tree more successfully after attending. It was amazing to attend RootsTech London in 2019, but I’ve had equal pleasure and value from attending virtually since.
As with anything though, the key to getting the most out of something is to prepare before going in. So today I’d like to help you prepare for RootsTech. Read on to learn what has helped me navigate this huge and somewhat overwhelming experience so that you get the full benefit!
Preparing for RootsTech – Sessions
Sooooo many sessions to choose from, where do you start? Firstly, when do you start? Now. Sign in to your FamilySearch free account, and register for the conference if you haven’t already done so.
First, let’s tackle the live sessions. At the top of the page is a ‘Main Stage’ tab. This is where all the time-sensitive content is. There are some great keynote speakers, such as Matthew Modine, Azumah Nelson and Diego Torres. There are also presentations on what’s new from some of the key industry players that you won’t want to miss. I’m especially looking forward to hearing about some of Jonny Perl’s new tools at DNA Painter! As a global event, you will be relieved to know that session times will display in your local timezone (so you don’t need to count on your fingers to work out what time that really is for you!). Add the ones you want to see into your diary so you don’t forget to tune in.
Next, check out the list of pre-recorded sessions. Unsurprisingly, it’s under the ‘Sessions’ tab, which will take you to this screen:
From here you can filter in multiple ways to zero in on the sessions that are of most interest and select them. They are then in your own personal playlist. These sessions are all pre-recorded and can be watched at your leisure for at least the next year.
Preparing for RootsTech – Connecting
One of the key themes for RootsTech is connecting with family. This can be achieved by becoming a better researcher through the learning you take away from the sessions. But you can also directly connect with relatives also attending. This can make up for being unable to network in person at the virtual event and in some ways is better. You don’t need to spot them in a crowd, you can find them using the ‘Relatives at RootsTech’ feature.
If you have your ancestors entered on the FamilySearch Family Tree, and consent to being part of ‘Relatives and Rootstech’ when you register for the conference, the tree will be searched to find others who descend from the same ancestors.
Remember this is a collaborative tree, so I recommend checking that you are connected to the correct people. So go check that you’re happy with where you are sitting in the tree first so you get the right relatives on your list. So far I have a couple of thousand relatives identified with a handy summary of how and from whom we connect, with the ability to message them.
You can also see if and how you are related to famous people, for example, Charles Dickens!
Preparing for RootsTech – Research Help
Everyone attending RootsTech has the opportunity to book a 20-minute one on one session with a professional genealogist for assistance with a brick wall. This is great because we all have brick walls in our research!
Preparing for RootsTech – Bargains
And last but definitely not least, don’t forget to visit the Expo Hall to visit the multitude of sponsors. Many of them have special offers available at their stand and people you can speak with to get information about their offerings. For those who are as into further education as me (and of course you are, you’re attending RootsTech aren’t you?), I am especially tempted to pick up more discounted courses at the National Institute of Genealogical Studies, even though I’m already working my way through three certificates at the moment! I can’t wait to see what else I can save money on!
So here we are, two days out. So use the time to get prepared and have a great time!
Edward and Ann Eginton (also Egginton) are my 4th great-grandparents and have been a bit of a nightmare, to be honest! No matter where I looked, I could not find the record of their marriage. Ann stubbornly remained ‘just’ Ann. This week, I uncovered her maiden name. She was born into the Duddleston family, and I now have a whole new family to explore.
Edward and Ann Eginton
So how did this brick wall tumble? Like the Vaughan story, it’s a long tale. Strap yourself in. I knew Edward was from Birmingham, baptised as the son of William and Mary (nee Holt) at St Martin in 1778. Edward and Ann had baptised their first known child William at the same church in 1802. Immediately above this entry in the register is the baptism of his brother Francis’s daughter Ann on the same day. There were no more children baptised to Edward and Ann in Birmingham until 1818, when three more were baptised over the next four years. How odd.
Building the tree forward to the era of censuses, I found links between William and some other Egintons born in Yorkshire. This led to me to travel north (in a virtual sense!) and do some more digging there. Edward and Ann had settled in Sheffield for several years where he worked as a silver plater in the cutlery industry. Many children had been baptised and some buried there before they returned to Birmingham. I now had a beautiful timeline of their offspring, with no overlap between the two places or unexplained gaps, that covered Ann’s entire expected fertile years.
But I still had no wedding to give me her maiden name. There was nothing for an Edward Eginton and an Ann in or around Birmingham, and nothing in Yorkshire either. I now knew that it had likely taken place around 1800/1801, given their ages and when their family together had commenced.
Grasping at straws
The other day, on a whim, I decided to check out FreeReg.co.uk for this marriage. This site can be useful as it contains transcriptions of parish registers from all across the country, including many places which don’t yet have good coverage at other sites. There are no images, it contains purely derivative sources, but it’s a starting point. Bingo! There was an entry that was in the right timeframe, just 10 miles from Birmingham in Walsall, Staffordshire. It was, however, between an Edward Egerton (not Eginton) and Ann Duddeston.
It wouldn’t have even turned up on the search if it weren’t for the eagle eye of the transcriber, Dale Braden, who made a note that the vicar had entered it as Egerton, but the groom had signed clearly as Eginton. The transcriber entered the transcription under both surnames. THANK YOU DALE! I’m not surprised the vicar got it wrong. The couple were clearly not really of the parish, as claimed. It had been almost forty years since any Eginton had appeared in the register and would be more than twenty years until an Egerton turned up. There were no Duddestons at all.
The note added by the transcriber at FreeReg which set me on the right path.
Now I needed the image. Reminder: always get back to the original source if possible! FindMyPast holds many but not all of the images for Staffordshire parish registers. Unfortunately, their Walsall, St Matthew coverage was only transcriptions, and they had indexed it only under Egerton, not Eginton. FamilySearch had similarly indexed the entry, but I knew they would have an image available on request. So I used their free lookup service to get the original parish register image.
I already knew Edward’s signature looked like this:
Edward Eginton’s signature at the marriage of his son Thomas Eginton to Mary Locke, 14 March 1836, at Aston, St Peter and St Paul.
He had been a witness to his son Thomas’ marriage in 1836. So, seeing a matching signature on his own marriage document would be great supporting evidence.
When the ‘Egerton/Duddeston’ marriage image arrived though it was clearly not the original entry, but a Bishop’s Transcript. Everything, including all the signatures, was written out neatly in the same hand, and they’d written ‘Egerton’. I would have to take Dale’s word for it for now and find some other sources of evidence until I could track down the actual parish register.
Finding Ann Duddeston [sic]
Yes, this was an error as well. The Duddeston surname quickly turned out to be a dead end. However, there was an Ann Duddleston of the right age who was baptised in 1780 by Hugh and Ann Duddleston in Birmingham where she was known to be from. Could this be her Duddleston family?
I turned back to Edward and Ann’s marriage entry. The witnesses were John Webster and Elizabeth Yeomans. I decided to see if they were related. By now I knew most of Edward’s family and nothing jumped out at me from there. But Elizabeth turned out to have been Elizabeth Duddleston, who married William Yeomans in 1795 in Harborne, just outside Birmingham at that time. Elizabeth was a member of Hugh and Ann’s Duddleston family…Ann’s elder sister!
Hugh Howard Duddleston and Ann (nee Hilton) were really beginning to firm up as Edward’s wife’s Duddleston family. So I began to build their family tree down and peruse their associated documents. It wasn’t long till I found Edward Eginton again signing his name with his distinctive flourish on his initials when he witnessed the 1818 marriage of Ann’s brother Thomas. His signature had matured over the years but it was clearly the same man. The other witness was Elizabeth Yeomans, Ann’s sister.
Edward Eginton’s signature at the marriage of his brother-in-law Thomas Duddlestone to Deborah Foster, 21 April 1818, at Birmingham, St Martin.
So now I had the same Edward Eginton witnessing a Duddleston marriage of another child of Hugh and Ann, his hypothesised parents-in-law, alongside the woman who had witnessed his own marriage. I’m happy with that!
Does DNA support the hypothesis?
Now I decided to turn to the DNA…it was stretching the limits of autosomal testing but would I find matches who descended from the same Duddleston family? I sure did. Since I’d built the tree down as far as I could on all lines and attached it to Ann over the course of several days, Ancestry had had a chance to do its magic, and I had four matches who connected with the common ancestors being Hugh Howard Duddleston and Ann Hilton. Three had public trees, and they were from different lines of the same Duddleston family. My brother had six matches, four of whom were unique to him, tying him to this Duddleston family through still other lines. So far there are DNA matches who descend from three of Hugh and Ann’s children. My half-sister (on the ‘other’ side!) had no Duddleston relatives amongst her matches at all.
One further match even extended a further generation back. I had already come to the conclusion that Hugh Howard Duddleston was the son of Ralph of Wolverhampton. There are not many Duddleston families. In fact, Ralph’s was pretty much the lone Duddleston family in the area at the time.
Rather conveniently so far, at least two of his sons emigrated to the US. This is always a bit of a bonanza when it comes to DNA. More people in the US have had their DNA tested, and those early immigrants often had large families with most of the children surviving compared to England. Therefore, the chances of a DNA match with a descendant are good.
The match that was from this generation was a descendant of Hugh’s brother Thomas Duddleston who as it turns out was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. I’ve been able to find a swathe of documents on him and will be building his line of the Duddleston family out too. Sigh, I feel yet another one-name study emerging out of this find. I just can’t help myself.
So, in conclusion…
We know that original sources are better than derivative sources. However, sometimes we need to start somewhere. Without that note on the transcription of the ‘Edward Egerton’ and ‘Ann Duddeston’ marriage in Walsall, I perhaps would never have found the Duddleston family branch. Do not dismiss transcripts and indexes when you are having trouble finding an elusive ancestor.
Remember to look at collateral branches, check witnesses, use the ‘FAN club’. It may make your tree big and unwieldy to include all these other people, but it’s often a great source of pieces of evidence that may not lie with your direct ancestors. And that big tree also helps with identifying DNA matches in that family line.
Good luck with breaking down your next brick wall. The Duddleston family look like keeping me busy for a good while now!
The Austin Motor Works, Longbridge, Birmingham around 1920
The 1921 Census of England and Wales was released with great fanfare on January 6th 2021. It is the last census that most of the current generation of family history researchers will see (the next will not be available for 30 years!). So it’s important that we take the opportunity to mine it for all the information we can extract. Countless articles and blogs have been written about the 1921 Census itself. I’d like to focus today on an aspect of it that can be extremely helpful with our research – the inclusion of workplaces in the 1921 Census.
Every census contains slightly different information, depending on what the government of the day wanted to know about the demographics of their population. We tend to forget as genealogists that the census was not designed for us, but for their planning purposes! I am very grateful that they focussed on workplaces in the 1921 Census.
Workplaces in the 1921 Census – what’s the big deal?
Every previous census has contained the occupations of people at each address. So why is adding the name and address of their workplace in the 1921 Census of any additional advantage? Well, it’s all about context. It’s all about enriching the stories of your ancestors’ lives. As a passionate seeker of my family’s stories, this new addition of workplaces in the 1921 Census has been my favourite thing so far!
I have focussed on only looking up my direct ancestors while the census is pay-per-view, cheapskate that I am. Just wait till it’s included in my FindMyPast subscription, they won’t know what hit them! There were seven households containing my grandparents, great-grandparents and even some great-great-grandparents still living in 1921.
What have I found so far?
My ancestors of that era mostly worked in the metal trades around Birmingham. Unsurprisingly, many of them worked at the Austin Motor Works in Longbridge (see photo above). Two of my grandparents grew up to work there too, so it featured in my childhood a lot. Good to know it was a multigenerational thing!
I knew that one of my great-grandfathers, William Simpson, worked as a painter and decorator and that he had died falling from a ladder. It was wonderful to find his workplace in the 1921 Census. It wasn’t a major factory like the Austin. How was I able to establish that? I found a photo online. It was a small firm called Pitts and Phillips. The address showed me how close he lived to his place of employment and I was able to map his likely route to the office on Google Maps (although I’m sure he spent most of his time onsite at jobs).
Pitts and Phillips, Bristol Rd, Birmingham in 1923
Now I intend to dig through Birmingham Archives and see if they have any documents from the firm. Perhaps they might have records of the workplace accident that led to his death? Perhaps they kept employment records? Dig through the relevant archives to see what you can find in their catalogues.
If I’m really lucky there might be a published history somewhere of this or one of the other companies I’ve discovered my ancestors working at. If I’m really REALLY lucky there might be photos that could include them, or at least show more of what their work involved.
For the larger companies like the Austin there might be staff magazines. For any company, a search of newspapers using their name might pull up some stories, where the ancestor’s name wouldn’t. if the company is still going, you may find a history on their website…
You get where I’m going with this? Workplaces in the 1921 census lead us to all sorts of record sources to help flesh out the family stories. Find them, plunder them and build out your family stories!
“Out of Work”
One apparent oddity you may notice is that ‘out of work’ is written next to the workplace. How can someone be simultaneously out of work and employed somewhere? Many of my family members had this on their census forms.
William Simpson – employed but ‘out of work’
This is for the same reason as the census was delayed from April to June. 1921 was a time of great industrial upheaval and strikes were occurring at the time they were originally going to hold it. They delayed till June to allow it to go ahead less impeded by strike action. However, many people were still involved in or affected by industrial events by June. So they were employed by a company but may not have been actively working there at the time of the census. When I see the size of some of the households and how many were out of work, I wonder how they survived, and hope they were soon back to paid employment!
Enjoy trawling the 1921 Census, I hope it brings you luck in adding colour and enrichment to what you know of your family in that era!
Artist’s impression of the Ward Chipman by K.A. Marshman from In Search of A Better Way by Aubrey Harris
All too often, when we read immigration stories written by descendants, we hear little of the actual immigration itself. Why did they leave their homeland? What was the journey like? When we delve a little deeper into this momentous portion of our ancestors’ lives, too often summarized as a set of departure and arrival dates, their story becomes richer and deeper as a result.
I hope to illustrate this a little today with some of the immigration story of John Harris and his family who came to Australia from Bristol on the 1841 voyage of the Ward Chipman.
John Harris of Shirwell, Devon
John Harris in 1872, detail from ‘The Explorers and Early Colonists of Victoria’, State Library of Victoria
John and his wife Elizabeth (nee Trump) were from Shirwell, near Barnstaple in Devon and came from farming families. They had married in 1829 at nearby Loxhore, and Elizabeth had borne seven children, though two had died in infancy.
After the death of their sixth child James in 1837, they had moved to the busy port of Bristol, Gloucestershire where their last child Elizabeth was born. John became a policeman, recruited into the recently formed Bristol police force.
We cannot be sure what drove John to uproot his family from Devon to Bristol, and then ultimately to Australia. However, there was a lot of political unrest at the time and the economic situation was challenging. An unsuccessful vote of no confidence in the government took place that year. Ultimately the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne was to resign.
John Harris and family in the 1841 Census of Clifton in Bristol.
At the time of the 1841 Census, the family was living in Whittaker’s Buildings, Clifton. A government sanitation survey taken in 1850 stated that:
“the lower storey of one house is used as a public receptacle for filth“
and that the building was set into a hillside and terribly damp. It is therefore not unreasonable to believe that the family was struggling to make ends meet, and saw emigration as a potential remedy.
The Harris Immigration Story Begins
A week after the census was taken, the following advertisement appeared on the front page of the Bristol Mercury, and the decision was made to make a new start.
The advertisement in the Bristol Mercury on June 12th 1841 that triggered the emigration of the Harris family.
In order to qualify for free passage as a bounty immigrant, John had to meet the occupational requirements stated in the advertisement. He had previously worked as a mason in Barnstaple, and he stated this as his occupation in order to get his family aboard this vessel.
The Ward Chipman was scheduled to sail on August 1st, but from the very beginning, this voyage was a disaster. Poor planning meant that there were delays in Government inspections and the ship was not ready to sail on that date. Despite that, the passengers were required to remain on board for over three weeks until she finally set sail on 27th August 1841. This must have been an awful beginning to their journey, with 325 cabin passengers crammed together in the height of summer, consuming much of the water and food intended for the voyage.
The Harris family in the Ward Chipman passenger lists
Things went from bad to worse during the journey, with not only shortages of provisions and implements, but also an outbreak of food poisoning from faulty tinned food. Twenty-one people were to die on the journey, nineteen of them infants and children. Sadly, as an assisted migration vessel, there are no known surviving ship’s surgeon journals for further insight into the dreadful experience endured by the passengers. Luckily, none of John’s family succumbed.
Detail of deaths on the voyage, found on the summary page of the passenger list.
Research tip: Don’t confine your searches of passenger lists to the page on which your ancestors appear. There is much more useful information that can be found within its pages!
They finally arrived in Port Phillip Bay on December 16, 1841. This did not however mark the end of the scandals regarding this voyage. On arrival, a claim for 4524 pounds of bounty payment was denied to Arthur Kemmis, a prominent local merchant and Managing Director of the Steam Navigation Company. Several people who had worked on the ship were also denied pay.
A New Life in Australia
After this inauspicious start to their new life, John and his family initially settled in Melbourne. He apparently bought some land on the corner of Spring and Lonsdale Streets (what would that be worth now?!). Ironically, this was either on, or immediately across from the present-day site of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.
Finding the then dirty and primitive Melbourne not to their liking, their immigration story continued when they moved to the Western District of Victoria. Details of this journey and its timing are not yet known, but it must have taken place by 1845 when his eldest son William died in Port Fairy. It is highly likely that the Harris family were part of a contingent of forty families who travelled there together in early 1843 according to reports in the Port Phillip Gazette on the 25th February of that year. I need to have a dig about and see if I can find the names of those families! He took up land, and went back to his farming roots, eventually dying in 1900 in Mailors Flat, leaving behind a large and comfortably-off family.
Immigration stories – not just departure and arrival dates
When looking into the immigration stories of our ancestors, it can be really helpful to check out newspaper reports (in both countries!) and advertisements to find more detail about the voyage. They can also provide information more broadly around the political and economic landscape impacting their lives, which may have influenced the decision to leave the country. Don’t forget history books (try the Internet Archive or FamilySearch Digital Library!), both general and local which can give marvellous insight into the time and place our families were experiencing. Archives may even hold diaries and letters, if not of our family, perhaps of their fellow passengers. Dig, dig, dig!
Note to Regular Readers…
Apologies, ‘life’ got in the way for a few months and the blog suffered neglect as a result. It’s taken a while to have the mental bandwidth with everything else going on to be able to get back into the swing of regular activities. I hope to bring you more regular blogs in the coming months, though it may take a little while to become as prolific as I was previously. Bear with me, thanks for your patience!
This week’s 52Ancestors challenge is ‘cousin bait’. What is cousin bait? It’s any way you are sharing your family tree, stories and information that allows other family members to find it (and you!). When you connect with others researching the same tree, you can share information with one another. There are bound to be things each of you didn’t know. There may even be artefacts, photos and documents passed down to another branch of the family that you hadn’t been able to access before.
A case in point – the family bible that was pivotal in solving my longest-standing brick wall, the Vaughan family. It was through a third cousin who I had been in contact with for several years before she realised that I might find its contents useful. We had originally connected through the discovery of our similar trees online. The family lines had long since lost track of one another in real life. Once the bible was shared I was able to solve the mystery that had held up both of our research.
Cousin bait tools
Cast a wide net when looking for cousins! Image: Chandan Mohapatra at Scopio
consider more than one site, different people fish in different ponds
make them wide as well as deep, your cousins may recognise their families’ names or those more closely related to them
Website or blog
share your names, places and stories
‘cousin bait’ is a major and unashamed motivation for this blog! I’ve shared stories and information about several family lines, usually containing some useful (I hope!) ideas on how to approach problems or resources to use. Unknown cousins who Google our surnames and places in common will be greeted with a story about our mutual ancestor in the search results and a way to contact me!
Social media
join groups that cover genealogy for your places or surnames and post a query
also join general groups such as The Genealogy Squad, as they can have large member numbers across the globe. They also provide lots of guidance on methodology, tips and resources to help you!
DNA
again, make sure you are on as many of the sites as possible, to maximise those fishponds. Test at a company that doesn’t allow uploads (e.g., Ancestry or 23andMe), then use your raw data from that test to upload to the others who allow it (e.g., MyHeritage, FTDNA, LivingDNA, Gedmatch, Geneanet, Geni.com)
Mailing lists
many of the old Rootsweb lists still survive, at least the ones that were active! Most of them are now over at groups.io, and can still be a great source of information and connections
Lost Cousins
The Lost Cousins site will match you with people who have ancestors who’ve flagged the same census entry as you. Therefore, when you connect with them you already know where they fit into the tree! There’s also a very useful fortnightly newsletter as an extra benefit.
You have soooo many cousins you’ve never ‘met’!
Do you have any other tried and true cousin bait tools in your tackle box that I haven’t mentioned here? What works for you?
This week, another longstanding brick wall tumbled. This one was thanks to a relatively small DNA match (19cM) that popped up at one of the sites I have tested with.
Benjamin Morter
Benjamin was my 5th great-grandfather. I had not had any luck in unraveling his origins over the years. He’d lain a little neglected in recent times. Morter is not a common surname and is localised around East Anglia, so I suspected he or his ancestors probably came from around there somewhere. But I’d had no luck in definitively finding a likely candidate.
The only indication of a birth date I had was the fact that he was recorded as 65 years old when he was buried in the Globe Fields Wesleyan burial ground at Mile End Cemetery in 1834. This meant he was likely born around 1769 if the informant was accurate about his age.
His will named five surviving children and I have DNA matches with descendants of at least four of them. It also named a brother, John, and DNA matches to me have turned up on several branches of HIS descendants too.
Benjamin Morter’s will named five children from two mothers, almost all of whom have descendants I share DNA with.
His children were from two relationships. The second was a marriage in St Dunstan, Stepney, London on January 7th, 1798 to Elizabeth Cupee, but the first was with a woman named Esther who remains a stubborn mystery and is my 5th great-grandmother. No marriage has yet been found. Perhaps it didn’t take place and the twins he had with her were illegitimate. It might explain why he was able to call himself a bachelor when he married Elizabeth…or he may just have been telling a fib.
The twins, John and Charles, were born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire in 1796. So for a while I thought that may have been his place of origin. However, I found no evidence of his baptism there, and there appeared to be no Morter families in the area. He likely went there for work.
Benjamin’s London life
He turned up next in London. In 1797, he and his family of five were removed from Christchurch, Middlesex to Shoreditch. I don’t know who made up that five, other than the twins and possibly Esther (there is probably at least one other child to discover). Though given he married Elizabeth soon after that, and she was five months pregnant at the time, perhaps she had already died. I am yet to find her burial.
He and Elizabeth had five children together, all baptised around Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. When he wrote his will, he was ‘of Exeter St, Strand, Middlesex’, so appears to have moved back to the area he was originally removed from in 1797 at least for a time. He was living back in Bethnal Green when he died in 1834.
I had never found a baptism for him in the London area and had no evidence to suggest where else he may have been from.
Serendipity strikes with a small DNA match
Not all useful DNA matches are enormous. Do not ignore your smaller ones.
And then…I got this small DNA match and it all fell into place over the course of the next few hours. Guess who stayed up all night? She was a shared match to multiple other Morter matches. Sure enough, she had Morters in her tree, but it didn’t go back very far. It was a start though.
So off I went and soon found out why she had run into a brick wall. Her furthest back Morter ancestor was orphaned young, raised by an uncle and aunt, and gave the wrong name for his father at his subsequent marriage. He had been born in Norwich and it was a fairly straightforward job for me to find his birth, his parents’ real names, and their marriage.
How a small DNA match tumbled the brick wall
Tracing the tree back, he turned out to descend from a Charles Morter, born around 1763 in Neatishead, Norfolk, who in turn was the son of John Morter and Hannah Walsingham of that tiny village of fewer than 500 people at that time. I checked their offspring. Lo and behold, they had sons Benjamin and John born within a couple of years of the estimated ages of my Benjamin and his brother John. Could this be it at last? Were John and Hannah my 6th great-grandparents?
Benjamin’s baptism in the Neatishead parish register – found at last!
I worked the trees of a few more DNA matches. Some of them also went back to John and Hannah. I constructed a hypothetical tree including as many of the matches as I could and checked the Shared cM Tool at DNA Painter for each one of them to see if it all hung together. It did. I checked that their Benjamin didn’t stay in the Neatishead area or die as an infant. It all gelled beautifully, there was no sign of him anywhere.
This shows that you don’t need to have a huge DNA match to make a brick wall fall. With some solid tree building, research and a thorough analysis of the shared DNA matches you already have, sometimes it can be achieved with a small DNA match which is possibly at first glance not especially helpful.
My conclusion is that John Morter, collar maker of Neatishead, and his wife Hannah are my 6th great grandparents. Now who on earth is Esther…?
This week, the 52ancestors theme is “Name’s the Same”. In a few days, it will be St Patrick’s Day. So I decided to combine the two themes and provide an update on the recently discovered Irish corner of my family tree. My challenge with this branch is now that I’m tackling a massive problem of the same given names AND multiple variations of the same surname concurrently!
For those who have been playing along with my meanderings, my great-great-grandmother Norah Vaughan was eventually found to be an Irish famine refugee from Cork. Since I wrote up the 30-year journey it took to find her Irish origins, I’ve found her baptism which gave her mother’s surname. That led me to her parents’ marriage.
Blarney roots
John Vaughan and Hanora Manley married in Blarney in 1836. Blarney Roman Catholic parish is in the civil parish of Whitechurch about 5 miles NW of Cork city. The Blarney parish registers are some of the earliest Catholic registers available in Ireland. However, there is a significant gap of over an entire generation between 1792 and 1821 for baptisms, after only commencing in 1791. The marriage registers have a gap from 1813 to 1821 after the early flurry of recording from 1778. The details included also varied from parish priest to parish priest over the years.
Manley – the Worst. Surname. Ever (for variations!)
Her surname was given as Maley (as was one of the witnesses), so at first, I was unsure if it was them. So I did a bit of digging. The original Irish name was Ó Máinle. In a Cork accent, the ‘n’ is not strongly pronounced. In fact, the pronunciation can come out sounding like Mauley. Therefore, it’s also occasionally spelt that way. So, surname variations include all the ways to spell it with an ‘n’ in it. Or without. Or with a ‘u’. Also, occasionally a ‘ur’ or even an ‘or’. With or without the ‘e’. Possibly a double ‘l’. And sometimes an ‘O” on the front for good measure. Most of these variations appear in the Blarney register. They are all at the end of the day, the same name.
There no such thing as one way to spell an Irish surname! Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Blarney appears to be Manley Central for Ireland. It looks at this stage as though there were at least 7 separate but related families by that name in Blarney in the early days of the parish registers. However will I work out which family is which and where my Hanora fits in? Especially given that her baptism was never recorded. Hers is the generation missing from the registers. And their townlands were rarely recorded in the register until after the mid-1850s. Time to FAN club the Dickens out of the entire community!
But the first names are also the same…
The first names are consistent. Sigh. The names are the same, over and over. John, Daniel, Patrick, Timothy or Cornelius for the males. Ellen, Mary, Margaret, Johanna and Honora for the females.
The other ‘name’s the same’ issue that I run up against here is that the pool of other local surnames is also small. I am trying to analyse the witness/sponsor names to gauge patterns that might tie branches of the Manley families together, but it was a community where the same surnames appear over and over too, so conclusions cannot be reached with this approach. Even where there is a pattern it’s potentially a hint only.
Sadly, it was rare to baptise with a middle name. Therefore, there’s been no opportunity to take advantage of the old middle name trick as yet!
The ‘Manley Blarney’ project (because I need yet another project!)
Blarney Castle, site of the Blarney Stone. No wonder I talk a lot. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
The ‘Manley Blarney’ project has begun. I have extracted every single person with every variant of the Manley surname from the Blarney baptism and marriage registers up to the turn of the 20th century (so far). Unhelpfully but not surprisingly there are no burial registers to help me kill off the early ones. Now I am systematically trying to cross-reference against Tithe Applotment Books, Griffiths Valuation, civil registration for later entries (especially marriages to tie them to a father’s name and townland), surviving census fragments/pension applications, gravestone records, will indexes, estate records etc. Irish newspapers have not been helpful so far; I need more time to try all those surname variations out!
I will be working through the Catholic record collection on FMP looking for emigrant families in the US, UK and anywhere else, as I suspect many families left during those famine years. Did any other related families end up in the Chepstow area too (it doesn’t look like it so far)? Passenger lists for further-flung locations will also be trawled. Certainly, the parish registers showed fewer and fewer Manleys as the years went by.
I have created a hypothetical tree with a ‘Connector Manley’ as a pseudo-father to each of the Manley children with unrecorded baptisms and uploaded to each database that generates record hints. This has been helpful in discovering a branch that went to Buffalo and another that went to Detroit so far and occasionally helped me give them their real father’s name. Bit by bit as I explore further the children will find their true families.
I’m going to continue to build down the lines to see if I get any DNA hits too. If this happens it may also help me unravel the families. By using WATO, I may be able to see which lines are genetically the closest to my Hanora.
I think this will be a long-term project. It’s turning into both a mini (i.e. localised to one parish) One-Name study and a bit of a One-Place study as so many other local families of the time are being dragged into it!
There will be a further update. It may be a long time coming…
I realise I am setting high expectations on myself, given that it’s not common to get back into the 18th Century for most Irish families. But I don’t give up easily and am looking forward to the challenge of seeing how much of the Manley family I can untangle! It’s a quagmire of names the same and names different. It’s just another temporary brick wall. Let me at it!
I was a twin. All through my childhood, while most were fantasising that they were adopted or actually princesses, I only ever felt like I had a twin somewhere. That I had been part of a multiple birth. There were no other children in the house of the same age, so why did I feel this way? There has been much written about twins having some kind of connection. I always thought that there was someone else out there that I was connected to in this way. I felt daft though. How could this feeling have any basis in reality?
My mum broke the news when I was eighteen years old. She’d been told she was expecting twins. It was her first pregnancy and the labour was dreadful. I was not only breech, but sideways rather than even just feet first. They never resorted to a caesarean delivery which would have changed the course of our family’s history. Finally, my mother was presented with me. Just me. Three weeks overdue but only just over 7lbs. Yes, I was an overcooked twin.
There was no mention of another baby, and she was too exhausted and overwhelmed to ask the question. Somehow, however, when she eventually told me, it all made sense. With it came the knowledge that not only had I had another brother or sister, but that I had killed them by barring their entrance to the world. My first action as a human being and I feel irrationally guilty to this day.
Two’s company…
Twins run in families and are not uncommon. However, it’s only fraternal (non-identical) twins that do this. Identical twins are an accident of fate. This is why I know my twin could have been either a brother or a sister. Because twins do run in our family. When checking your family tree for multiple births, check on the mother’s side. The gene for this is a maternal one.
I had a great aunt Peggy and a great uncle Ron who were on my mother’s side. Going further back on that line Norah Vaughan also gave birth to twins. They both died, and I only discovered their existence through their names being listed in the family bible. Twins are not hugely uncommon. In natural pregnancies, 1 in 250 or so will be twins, so there are sure to be some lurking in your tree somewhere. There may be mention of surviving babies being twins in their birth or baptism records. However, this was not universal, so if it is not mentioned don’t assume it wasn’t so. If the birth dates match though I think it’s probably safe to make a bold assumption!
The family bible revealed the births and deaths of the Simpson twins
Another hint, the older the mother was, and the more children she had already had, the greater likelihood that she would have twins. In my family branches, twins were quite frequently the ‘grand finale’ of the mother’s childbearing life!
…three (or more) is a rare crowd!
I have found no evidence of larger multiple births, e.g. triplets or quadruplets in my family though. But this is not unexpected. Firstly, they are rarer. Triplets naturally occur in about 1 in 10 000 pregnancies and quadruplets in around 1 in 700 000. Back in the early days, it was unusual for multiple births to have a successful outcome, either for the babies or the mother. They were often miscarried, or very premature and both the pregnancies and the labours were more complicated, perhaps leading to the deaths of all involved.
When they were successfully brought to term and delivered, newspapers and magazines of the time often covered these families extensively. So if you know of triplets or even bigger multiple births in your family, be sure to check at least the local papers and perhaps even national ones for that coverage! Some of the websites you might try depending on where the families were from may be the British Newspaper Archive (UK and Ireland), Trove (Australia), Papers Past (New Zealand), or Newspapers.com (USA).
What is the greatest number of babies from a single pregnancy that you know of in your family?
