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.
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!
Every year, Jill Ball, aka Geniaus, encourages us fellow geneamates to do a review of our year in genealogy focusing on the positives. It’s a great idea that I recommend everyone does, even if not as a blog. It’s very heartening to realise that we have all made achievements in 2021 from the countless hours we have spent slaving over a hot keyboard!
So here is my contribution…
1. I got the most joy from…
…finally identifying the last of my 3 x great-grandparents. This was the father of an illegitimate son who became my 2 x great-grandfather. It’s been decades but finally, I have a name…and it’s not the rumoured name that made it down through several generations. An entire complex cover story took several years to be systematically disentangled and disproved. Now I realise why it was constructed. This was absolutely one of my biggest achievements for 2021.
More to come on this one, I can’t NOT blog it, but it may take a while to find the time to devote to the telling of this saga! it could even end up as long as the Vaughan story…
2. The Covid situation gave me an opportunity to…
…get more involved in local family history societies that weren’t at all local to me. Most of them opened up Zoom meetings instead of their usual face-to-face ones 12 000 miles away from me. Often the timezones were challenging, but it has been especially nice to put faces to names of members that I’ve heard of but never seen for up to 35 years!
Photo by Francisco Javier Martinez Navio on Scopio
3. I managed to attend a face to face event…
…nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. Everywhere I had booked for this year cancelled their face to face events and for much of the year, we were in lockdown. Luckily, they were often replaced with online versions!
4. My main focus this year was…
…my Dad. Getting him home from Ireland after an ill-timed holiday in early 2020 was a 14-month marathon effort. He left just before Covid struck and international borders closed while he was away. That was followed by 5 months this year living with him in Tasmania on his return. I packed up his home and life around him whilst providing the 24/7 care he needs and brought him back to Victoria to be closer to family and quality care. This was a single-handed task and is definitely my greatest achievement of 2021. He’s now settled and happy again. Family is everything. It evens trumps family history, though I couldn’t abandon that entirely!
5. A new piece of technology or skill I mastered was…
…I don’t know if this counts as ‘mastering’ or just ‘discovering and making use of’! But I’m gradually working my way through the list of things to look up if I’m ever again in an FHC affiliate library by using the new FamilySearch Record Lookup Service.
Have you found an index entry for your probable ancestors but need to see the original image? This fits the bill perfectly. I’ve found it especially useful for my Worcestershire ancestors while I continue to wait for Ancestry to put the Bishops Transcript images online. It’s free, it’s fast and it’s a whole lot cheaper than paying 16 pounds per image to get it emailed from the Archives!
6. A geneasurprise I received was…
…the sudden and almost simultaneous purchases of the two main French genealogy sites by the big guns! MyHeritage purchased Filae, and Ancestry purchased Geneanet. In a year when my Huguenot heritage was confirmed this is perfect timing! I’m already a Geneanet subscriber but was tossing up whether to join Filae. Now I don’t have to, the records are appearing where I already have access!
7. A Facebook Group that helped me was…
…The Genealogy Squad. I learn something new on a regular basis from the friendly conversations amongst the 45 000 global members (the Squad’s achievement for 2021!)
Confession – I’m also a moderator there and this is a shameless plug for people to come join the party!
Photo by Francisco Javier Martinez Navio on Scopio
8. My 2021 social media post that I was particularly proud of was…
…the one where I unravelled the mystery of where my Morter family came from before arriving in London, I knew it was likely to be East Anglia somewhere given the surname distribution, but it’s been a needle in a haystack until DNA knocked down the brick wall.
Since then I have had more and more DNA matches also turn out to be descended from the Norfolk family a further generation before my London ancestors. The hypothesis just keeps on firming up.
I love how technically the subject of genealogy is finite, but there was never a presentation that I didn’t take away something useful from.
11. A great journal or newspaper article I found…
…was not a big one, not a particularly complex one, but a very enlightening one. It reported the 1844 death of James Underhill, father of my newly identified 3 x great grandfather Samuel Underhill (unnamed father of Frederick George Seal). This newspaper article added a layer of context that linked the Underhill and Seal families directly, not just by locality and occupation, but by specific workplace and hierarchy.
12. I got the most value from this subscription…
…oooh, this is a tough one. There are very few subscriptions I have that I would willingly give up. They all provide value in their own way.
Naturally, I am subscribed to the major sites for accessing records – Ancestry, FindMyPast, MyHeritage, TheGenealogist, but I’ve also increased my society memberships to 10 (doubled!) to cover the main geographical areas of research, and I am a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists.
A little hint though…check each of your society membership benefits, they may offer significant discounts to other subscription sites which will save you some significant outlay!
13. I progressed my DNA research with …
…a return to network graphing after a couple of years break from it. I always loved how visual it is, but I needed to familiarise myself with all the new DNA tools appearing on the testing sites as well as 3rd party tools continually popping up. With limited time, network graphing was shelved for a while. But I’m pulling on my wellies, wading back in and finding clear confirmation of conclusions drawn as well as some further intriguing ‘clumps’ to explore.
Photo by Francisco Javier Martinez Navio on Scopio
14. A DNA discovery I made was…
…a couple who are repeatedly popping up among US DNA matches, and are clearly connected to one of the branches of a certain pair of great grandparents. I must find time to build out the tree of this couple and see where and how they fit in. It could set a load of dominoes falling to parse this branch more effectively.
15. A newly found family member shared…
…photos of her family members that showed we were definitely of the same line. Then the same thing happened on another branch of the same line, from another relative who didn’t know the first. We’re all so similar, the Seals definitely have a ‘look’.
16. I splashed out and purchased…
…a package of 40 courses at the National Institute for Genealogical Studies which will keep me busy for the next year or two! The perils of being the ‘lifelong learner’ type, it keeps you poor!
17. Another positive I would like to share is…
…a really helpful side effect from what has been such a tragic and challenging couple of years is the number of records that have been digitised and indexed and are now available to us via home access. So many long-term projects sped up, so many ongoing projects were completed. This has to be the greatest global achievement for 2021 in the genealogical world. I am so grateful to all those who have made this possible.
So how about you? What will you remember as YOUR genealogical achievements of 2021?
Inspired by digging into a long neglected family line last week, I decided that this week’s project was finding Esther. This was a good reminder of the value of returning to old research with new eyes periodically. If I could just find out who the mysterious Esther was, this would open up a whole new family for me and tumble a long-standing brick wall.
Esther Morter…
Esther Morter only appears in one document that I have found over the last couple of decades. She is named as the mother of John and Charles Morter, who were baptised together on 14th October 1796 at St Mary and All Saints, the parish church of Kidderminster in Worcestershire. Worcestershire is a difficult county to research unless you are lucky enough to be close to The Hive, their county archives. Currently, only transcripts of parish registers are available online with no access to digitised images. (A little bird tells me that their records are currently being digitised by Ancestry so watch this space over the next year or so, the situation is changing!). So, that was all I had to say that Esther existed. A transcript of a single document.
There was no record of she and Benjamin marrying. Although he married Elizabeth Cupee in 1798 there was no record of a burial for Esther, which was even more puzzling. To add to that, he described himself as a bachelor at that wedding. Did he not marry Esther at all?
Or is she Esther at all?
Digging back into researching Benjamin I found that he had a daughter Elizabeth with an Elizabeth in 1792, before he left London. Was this the same Elizabeth he’d eventually married? Did he just have an affair with Esther in Kidderminster and leave her behind there? Hypotheses were running thick and fast. It occurred to me that if the two Elizabeths were one and the same, she would have had the first child at the age of only 15. Could it be that her family disapproved of their relationship? Benjamin was ten years older.
Did they run off to Kidderminster together? It was another weaving area where he could easily find work. Was Esther really Elizabeth Cupee? This would account for the family of five being removed from Christ Church to Shoreditch after they returned to London in 1797. It would also mean that he was not lying when he said he was a bachelor, and their marriage coincided with her turning 21 and being able to marry without her parents’ consent. Finding Esther, and unravelling her story became even more of a pressing urge.
Finding Esther
I decided I couldn’t wait for the Worcestershire records to become available online. The key could be in that lone pair of entries in the parish register. I needed to see the vicar’s writing. The transcripts at both FamilySearch and TheGenealogist both said her name was Esther. But could it be a mistranscription, or even a mistake? The first theory could easily be proved or disproved by seeing the document at least.
I contacted The Hive. They responded very quickly to say that for the princely sum of 16 pounds they would photocopy and email it for me. I requested that they send the entire page rather than just the two entries so that I would have plenty of the vicar’s handwriting to compare against. Thank goodness I did.
The next day, I received an email with images of both the entries and the full page as requested. I looked at the entries. Sigh. Her name was clearly written as Esther for both baptism entries. The mistranscription theory was disproved immediately.
The baptism entries for Charles and John Morter, clearly showing Esther as their mother.
Esther is revealed
I looked at the full page. And there was what I believe to be the answer. The vicar made a mistake. Sometimes it happens. Indeed, Benjamin’s brother John had a son in Bethnal Green in 1809. The vicar there recorded him as a son of Benjamin, despite later documents including his will showing he was clearly John’s son. Perhaps this family never made themselves well known to the local clergy except for family occasions.
On October 14th 1796, the Kidderminster vicar baptised four babies, an unusually high number at one time for him. Of the four baptisms, three had the father Benjamin. Two were John and Charles Morter. The third was the child of Benjamin and ESTHER Hemmings. It also appears that one of the entries on the page is in the wrong place, non-chronological. I believe that the vicar may have written down the details on scraps of paper at the time and then neatly transcribed them into the parish register later. Somewhere along the way, all three entries with a Benjamin as father on that day ended up with Esther listed as the mother.
Reading the entire page shows where the vicar almost certainly messed up!
My current working hypothesis
Benjamin and Elizabeth got together in Bethnal Green when he was in his mid-20s and she in her mid teens. Her parents, Huguenots (Benjamin was not), strongly disapproved when she bore his child at the age of 15. The little family left together for Kidderminster, where they had the two boys. They then returned to the Spitalfields area in London by 1797, where they were described as a family of five on removal from the parish. Elizabeth was five months pregnant again in 1798 when they finally married quite truthfully as bachelor and spinster. She was now 21 and able to do so despite any parental objections. There was no finding Esther. Esther did not exist.
Obviously even though this hypothesis fits all documented facts known so far, it could contain a degree of confirmation bias. I am now digging through DNA matches to see if I can find a match with a descendant from the Cupee line. This of course means my new task is to build out her tree as much as possible to help with this. Previously thinking Elizabeth was a second wife I had done very little with her tree. So that’s what I’m doing now. When DNA matches are verified, I will be fully confident that not only do I have a document trail that works logically but that it is backed up by science! Finding Esther has taken a long time, but finding someone who never existed has been well worth the effort.
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?
Your ancestors’ occupations can reveal a great deal about their lives. They provide a huge amount of context for the way the whole family lived. So it’s super important to make sure you are paying attention to the jobs your ancestors held.
Often, the occupations of our ancestors are one of the easier facts to find out about them. They are listed on birth, marriage and death records, censuses and wills, some of the most common records we use. Let’s really squeeze what information we can out of knowing what they did for a living.
I’m planning on beginning a series of blogs soon, covering different fields of common ancestral occupations. So today’s blog is just an overview of why investigating your ancestors’ occupations is a valuable strategy for you to use.
Do you know what a toymaker was? It’s not what you may think. All will be revealed in a future post! From Bisset’s Magnificent Guide of Birmingham (1808).
What are the benefits of exploring your ancestors’ occupations?
They may lead you to record sources
If your ancestor’s occupation was a trade, have a look and see if there are apprenticeship records surviving. These may include his own indenture, or maybe when he was older he was a master who took on an apprentice. There may also be records in the appropriate trade company, for example, freeman’s records. These records can provide all sorts of juicy details including the father’s name, occupation and residence. Were your ancestors members of a trade union? What records survive for their union and what information might they hold?
Likewise, if your ancestor’s occupation was a profession, there might be records of his university education, which can often contain useful details of his background.
Do they appear in trade or commercial directories of the time? A great way to track movement over time. You may be lucky enough to find advertisements from them too!
Check out the Inland Revenue records at The National Archives too…remember it is still free to download digitised records at the moment.
There are often extensive records for ancestors who were part of the military. For example, sadly here a local paper’s tribute to their fallen. Look at all the Ryles boys from one family on my father’s side.
They may explain migration patterns or reveal the origin of your migrant ancestor
If you are wondering where a branch of your family disappeared to there may be clues in their occupation. Conversely, if you are wondering which part of the ‘old country’ your family came from, the same applies.
For example, coal mining families in the United Kingdom may have come from South Wales, or the Midlands (around the Black Country and North Warwickshire especially), or maybe Yorkshire or Scotland. They won’t be from Kent! If your family were all coal miners and you know your great great uncle emigrated, maybe try looking for him in places like Pennsylvania in the US, where coal mines were extremely common.
Where did your ancestors’ occupations ground them or send them?
Ancestors’ occupations may help you distinguish between families
This one is critical when you are researching families with common names. You’re not sure who belongs to who in the records. So how can knowing about their occupations help? If you know one William was a cordwainer, and the other was a glassblower, the two sons named John could be matched to their father by their job. This isn’t completely foolproof but it can help. So one John is a bootmaker, the other is a glass grinder. They don’t have exactly the same occupation as their fathers but they are in the same field. This sometimes requires a little deeper knowledge of the field they are in to provide this context.
Also, if you are looking for your ancestors in newspapers, their occupation was usually included in any reports about them. So with a little bit of luck, you can eliminate the Charlie Smith who was picked up for drunkenness if his job was completely different to your sober and hard-working (of course!) Charlie.
They may reveal the source of family traditions or heirlooms
Do you have any family sayings, songs, recipes, or items passed down that you have no idea about the origin of? They may be related to a family occupation in times past. If you can make the link, you are helping to tell your ancestors’ stories.
If you’re lucky you may have had creative ancestors. Is the old painting handed down over the years actually done by a family member? I don’t have this painting by my relative William Alfred Rollason, but I wish I did!
Stop Press!
Coincidentally, the University of Strathclyde has recently expanded its educational offering on Futurelearn, which I’ve previously talked about. There are now short, free courses covering three of the occupational fields that many of us would have had an ancestor or two in. Those fields are railways, coal mining and textile mills.
Westley’s ‘East Prospect’ of Birmingham in 1732, when it was still just a sleepy market town.
This week I’m sharing the story of my ongoing Grand Levy Book transcription project with you. When complete, I think it will turn out to be extremely helpful as a census substitute for those researching Birmingham ancestry in the late eighteenth century.
Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that much of my family history comes from the city of Birmingham in the Midlands of England. Birmingham began its existence as a small market town around a thousand years ago and indeed remained so for all but the last two hundred and fifty years or so. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, it rapidly grew and is now one of the major cities of the United Kingdom. How and why is a blog post in itself, which I may one day tackle!
The Plan of Birmingham, from William Hutton’s ‘The History of Birmingham’ published in 1782, the same year as the copy of the Grand Levy Book.
A few years ago, I stumbled across a published copy of the Grand Levy Book for Birmingham which was printed in the year 1782. This was a time of massive expansion of the population (around 50000 across 8000 households at that time). This was accompanied by all the stresses and strains on infrastructure which would be expected. The original annual Grand Levy Books for Birmingham are held by the Birmingham Archives. They are handwritten and available for consultation by appointment. So why was just this one printed for general circulation at the very time that it was in use?
The Library of Birmingham – here lie the original Grand Levy Books in the Birmingham Archives.
Collecting the Poor Rates
Firstly, let me explain what it was used for. Poor rates were collected around Easter time from occupants of any houses in Birmingham worth more than twelve pounds a year and were calculated on 2/3 of that property’s value. These rates were then redistributed and used as poor relief.
Birmingham at this time was technically still one parish despite its size. It was divided into twelve sections, one for each of the Overseers of the Poor, who were charged with collecting these rates. They would carry with them a rate book for their section and mark it off as they went. Afterwards, the twelve books were collated into one Grand Levy Book for the parish.
So back to the copy released publicly in a published form in 1782 – why did they choose to do this? The answers lie in the preface. It seems that at that time there was much grumbling amongst the ratepayers about perceived inequities in the rates they were levied. There was a challenge issued by publishing everyone’s rates, along the lines of ‘put up or shut up’. It was also used to publicly shame those who could pay but weren’t doing so.
So why transcribe this copy of the Grand Levy Book?
The Grand Levy Book of 1782 contains the names of the heads of households across all of Birmingham in order of the street they lived in. It gives an indication of the degree of their relative wealth and possibly the type of business they had. It may also give a hint of their character! The book is essentially an early head of household census at this time of great expansion in Birmingham. It is useful for finding the locations of ancestors, and in the case of those who immigrated to the town from other areas, confirmation that they were there by this time. Having the book listed in order of their address is helpful for cluster research too as you can see who the neighbours were as with the later censuses.
I had not seen this information anywhere else and the book is not easily searchable due to the print quality and font used. So I decided to transcribe it. So far I am about 3200 households in and about halfway through. It is a long labour of love assisted by this second lockdown period!
Will it ever be finished and available?
I’m trying very hard not to get sidetracked along the way with discoveries! Many of my family lines were in Birmingham at this time – some had already been there for several centuries, some were arriving from surrounding counties with the move from an agricultural to an industrial economy.
Initially, this was just a personal project. However as the broader value of this book to other researchers has become apparent, I plan to make it freely available once it’s complete (probably on this site).
As for the timeline, I hope it will be in the last quarter of this year, though I am tossing up whether to cross-reference it with contemporary trade directories to add occupations. Trade directories are nowhere near as complete as this list, especially at this time. It would provide an extra layer of information and context to a subset of the population though. This would naturally extend the time to completion. Thoughts, anyone?
But wait, there’s more…
I’m planning a sequel already! I recently found a copy of the Birmingham Out Poor List from October 1781. This was also published publicly in early 1782. The motive for the publication of this one appears to be the parish seeking justification for the rates that were being levied (probably again due to grumbling from the better off!). Between this list of those in receipt of poor relief and those who were (or should have been) paying poor rates, an almost complete picture of the population of Birmingham can be put together for this time. One thing at a time however, I’m only human!
Is anyone else making progress with longstanding projects while time outside has been limited? Comment below, I’d love to hear about them!
There are multiple tools available these days to help turn your ever-growing list of DNA matches into a wealth of useful genealogical information (and meet new cousins!). Each of the testing companies has its own suite of tools on their site. There are increasing numbers of excellent third-party tools also available to analyse your information using different and more specialised approaches. One of my favourites for the past year or two has been WATO (‘What Are The Odds?’).
What-oh is WATO?
WATO was the brainchild of Leah LaPerle Larkin, aka The DNA Geek. Andrew Millard turned it into an odds calculator, then Jonny Perl transformed it into a user-friendly form. It is now freely available at DNA Painter. WATO uses statistics to help you decide who belongs to who in your DNA zoo, and make sense of your DNA matches.
For anyone whose brain saw the word ‘statistics’ and began to prepare to explode, it’s not like that. You have a few shared matches, and you’ve been able to work out how they are connected to one another. You can now use WATO to work out how your DNA tester fits into their tree. Really really useful for cases of unknown parentage, and for any group of mysterious matches that make no sense on paper.
To make sense of your DNA matches you need to be clear on what you want to know about the DNA subject whose kit you are analysing. For example, “who is her father?”. With WATO v1 you also need to have matches of over 40cM in size. And you need your matches to have common ancestors to one another that you can find or build a tree for.
Previous limitations of WATO
I’ve had great success with this tool but there have been limitations.
Being of British birth, my match list of closer relatives is smaller than average. 40cM is not a match size often enough seen in my lists to have used WATO as much as I would have liked.
The original WATO is purely about the statistical odds. Hypotheses that are mathematically highly possible may be impossible in real life. The father is not going to be someone who was 3 years old at the time. So red herrings are possible.
The statistics are calculated for hypotheses that you as the user put forward. If there’s an angle you don’t think of, the odds won’t be calculated. This is especially important when you consider how many half-relationships are possible in any tree, and the likely source of the answer to your research question.
Introducing…..drumroll……The New and Improved WATO2!
This month WATO2 was released and the limitations listed above have been addressed. There have also been with some other improvements that have turned it from a great tool into a brilliant one which I’ll be able to use far more frequently!
Firstly, there is a reduced match size requirement. The information used to initially calculate probabilities has grown over time. It is now way more accurate for more distant relationships. Therefore the restriction to matches sharing over 40cM is gone.
Secondly, WATO2 is based on more than just the statistics. It has been ‘humanised’ for increased accuracy. You can add birth and death dates to the people in your tree and WATO2 will take them into consideration when calculating the odds.
Thirdly, you no longer have to think of all the possible places in a tree your DNA target could go. WATO2 will generate all the hypotheses with the click of a single button. I actually squealed when I found out about that! Then you can just weed out and delete any that are calculated to have zero probability, or that you know cannot work (because, for example, that person emigrated).
All my problems were solved! But wait, there was more…
Instead of having to build the tree manually at the DNA Painter site, there is now the option to import a GEDCOM to make the whole thing quicker and easier.
And the other super cool feature for those who have already been using the original WATO … you can easily switch between existing analyses to WATO2 (and back) to compare or update. So you don’t need to start again in order to make sense of your DNA matches!
What has WATO2 done for me?
I have already managed to identify an unknown father of one of my testers very quickly. He had only half a dozen shared matches. Only three of these could be used in the original WATO due to their small size. The probabilities were much more clearly contrasted in WATO2 as a result of this and the consideration of birth and death dates. Then, by looking at electoral rolls and other records I could eliminate several of the hypotheses. I am at the point where I am very comfortable that his father is identified. If I wasn’t, I could consider target testing to prove it.
How will I be using WATO2 next?
My next task is to unravel a large Irish family branch originating from Tralee in Kerry. There are multiple shared DNA matches on this line. I have a tree that links most of them. The other interesting aspect is that they all also link to another surname which is not so far present in the tree of my target, other than amongst baptismal sponsors.
Traditional research has not yet managed to unpick these large families with repeated forenames. I was unable to use the original WATO to help with this as we’re looking at the first half of the 19th century, the matches are much smaller than 40cM. Also, the tree is big and my time is scarce!
The plan now is to import the Gedcom, add the match sizes, hit the generate hypothesis button and see what happens. It will feel like a miracle if after all this time, it gets sorted out in an hour!
My Hearty Recommendation
If you are a WATO fan already, no doubt you’re already all over WATO2. If you’ve previously tried it but not had large or plentiful enough matches to answer your questions, now is the time to revisit it and regenerate your WATO hypotheses on WATO2. You can make sense of your DNA matches so much more easily than before. If you’re new to WATO, or even to DNA analysis, head over to DNA Painter and give it a go. It’s free, it’s not a huge time investment for the amount of information generated, and that time is saved multiple times over by narrowing down possibilities to investigate. Go knock down a few DNA brick walls!
