brickwalls Archives

June 14, 2019June 14, 2019

Your Ancestors’ Wills – Part 1 – Where There’s A Will, There’s Information Galore!

I had a wonderful stroke of luck this week! I broke through a longstanding brick wall on my Field line, confirmed using my ancestors’ wills. As suspected, the middle name Palmer used across several generations was a massive clue. However, the partnership that brought it about was back at the turn of the eighteenth century and in a different place. Therefore, it’s taken a while to find it.

Because the find was not where I expected it to be, I was extra-specially careful to ensure I had all my ducks lined up evidence-wise. I couldn’t claim this Edward Field as my own just because he was born at the right time and married a Palmer. These are both common names, and extremely common at the time in the parish where I found them. They were both prominent families in the area, and both had many branches. Using ancestors’ wills and wills of others in these local families allowed me to pinpoint where they fit in, and why the name Francis popped up as the eldest son’s forename for several generations too! Now I’ve untangled all the Field and Palmer lines I can sense a couple of one-name studies in the wind. I know how I’m wired…

I spent all this week burying my head in wills, so I was reminded why it would be a good topic for this week’s blog. They are sadly often under-utilised as a resource, and often so rich with detail.

Why You Should Look For Your Ancestors’ Wills

Wills are a treasure trove of information. Some of the uses you can put them to are:

Confirming your research
Untangling family branches
- Very useful when the same names are appearing over and over in different branches. Wills will often make it clear who is who.
Determining not only family relationships but often their quality
- Who did they leave out that was still alive or who did they leave an insultingly trivial amount of money? (A caveat, a child ‘cut off with only a shilling’ may have received their inheritance already. Their parent may have set them up in a business or home, and the ‘shilling’ is just to prevent them arguing that they were left out of the will as an oversight).
- Sometimes they used very blunt and/or revealing comments to explain why certain bequests were made. (See the snippet of another of my ancestor’s wills below as an example!)
Discovering the married names of the daughters
- The testator would often list their children’s names. The daughters were listed using their married surnames. Possibly the husband’s name and the names of their children would appear too.
Finding an unexpected place of origin
- The testator would usually give instructions regarding their burial preferences. Many just specified the local churchyard. However, if they had moved to the vicinity during their life they may have asked to be buried in a family vault in their original village’s church for example.
Hearing the voice of your ancestor
- Not literally of course! But this is one of the few common documents where you will get a feel for your ancestor’s personality. It’s a lot more freeform than certificates for example. Unless your ancestor left a journal, diary or memoir this may be as close as you get to reading their thoughts and opinions in their own voice.

old wills charles girling — A snippet of Charles Girling’s will, naming his housekeeper’s five children (plus one on the way!) as his own. He clearly showed a will to live, rather poignantly also covering any further children he may have by her in this will.

What Is Contained In Your Ancestors’ Wills?

This can vary a little, but a formal will often follows this fairly standard pattern:

Their name, occupation and location
A statement that they are of sound mind
Their burial request
Who they appoint as their executor
- Often a spouse or adult child if widowed
- Sometimes a brother, brother in law or close friend
Instructions for distribution of their property, listing their beneficiaries
The date the will was prepared
- This could be very close to the death date, or years before if they were organised!
The signature (or ‘cross’ if they were illiterate) of the testator and the witnesses.
The date probate was granted
- This could also be very close to the death date if straightforward, or years afterwards if it was complicated or contested!

What Won’t You (Usually) Find?

Wills of married women
- these are rare before 1882 as up till then, women did not have their own property. Anything they brought into the marriage became the property of their husband. Therefore she had no legal right to leave anything to anyone.
- Wills of spinsters, on the other hand, can be gold, especially if there were a lot of nieces and nephews!
- Once a woman was widowed, she may have had a will drawn up if she did not intend to get remarried.
A list of every possession
- This is called an ‘inventory’ and is a separate document to the will. If it survives, it will be located in the probate file.
- The inventory is well worth looking for, as literally EVERYTHING got listed. It provides a fascinating snapshot into your ancestor’s life. My ancestor John Girling (father of the Charles named above) made his own inventory. This was quite unusual and slightly OCD, as he also repeatedly updated it over the years. He went into excruciating detail which was great, as it revealed his previously unknown military life, but sadly not the identity of his mother. He noted the subject, artist and value of every painting he owned except her portrait, about which he was irritatingly vague.
Dates of births, marriages and deaths
- This is not the document for finding these details. You may find out from the will that marriages have happened, or children are still minors, or other family members are deceased, but the dates will not appear. However, using the date the will was signed can help narrow down a timeframe for those events and help you locate them in the appropriate sources.

Stay tuned for the next gripping episode…

Next week I will be looking at and dismantling some of the reasons why wills are so commonly ignored, as well as how to find and use them.

In the meantime, has anyone found anything in wills that they never would have known without seeing their will? For me, finding out Charles Girling’s ‘wife’ was actually his housekeeper was an eye-opener, and has saved me countless hours of continuing searches for their marriage! Leave your comments below…

June 7, 2019June 7, 2019

Cluster Research in Genealogy – Let’s Go FAN Clubbing!

Cluster research is a fantastic methodology to use when you’re stuck. You’ve sucked the well dry in terms of finding records for your direct ancestors. Or perhaps there are too many records for people of similar names and you can’t differentiate between which are your ancestor and which are not. Maybe a female ancestor has got ‘lost’ and you can’t find her maiden name. It’s time for some lateral thinking.

What is a FAN Club?

Cluster research in genealogy refers to utilising the FAN club (Family, Associates and Neighbours) of your direct ancestors to access information that you can’t find simply by researching them alone. The term ‘FAN club’ was coined by respected genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills many years ago. It’s a great way to remind yourself of what other sources of potential information to look for.

Your ancestors did not live in a bubble. They lived in a community, and probably several subgroups of that larger community such as their immediate neighbourhood, extended family, church, sporting or social clubs, workplaces, and political groups. Therefore they were coming into contact with other people every day and probably left their footprints across some of those peoples’ documents and stories in one way or another. Every cluster that they were a part of provides context about their life at the very least.

FAN Club Cluster research — The FAN Club consists of Family, Associates and Neighbours.

When we research our family trees, we often stick to direct ancestors. Indeed, people can be very critical of those who go down the rabbit hole of researching collateral lines, calling them ‘name collectors’ and casting aspersions on the larger size of their family tree. Do not be put off by this. Those people don’t know what they are missing!

Family Cluster Research

Collateral lines (or ‘extended family’) can provide gold when you’ve hit a brick wall. Was your direct ancestor not registered at birth or baptised, did he have no knowledgeable informant of his death, you can’t find his marriage certificate and there was no obituary published? You could be up the proverbial creek. But wait! He had siblings! Suddenly you have several potential sources for his parents’ names via each sibling’s records. For males, military records often contained parents’ names too.

Collateral family members can also help confirm which similarly-named person in a community is yours. Is a known brother with a less common name following the same occupation as your ancestor? Is the naming pattern of their children similar?

Extended family often lived close by, especially when families migrated somewhere together, so check censuses for them. They often witnessed each other’s weddings, were sponsors at their children’s baptisms and mentioned in each other’s wills – their lives frequently intersected. They often appeared in each other’s family photos, especially of large events. If you ‘lose’ a child from your direct ancestor’s family in a census, check that they weren’t actually in the home of their grandparents or aunts and uncles for the night! It can be very helpful when this happens. Sometimes the aunt was a previously lost sister of the child’s father whose married name wasn’t known!

Associates Cluster Research

Associates include people who were part of the same school/university, church/religion, workplace, professional association/union, sporting clubs, political associations or military units. They may have been business partners, their lawyer, doctor or any other sub-unit of the community. These people’s or group’s stories can often give a broader background to, and understanding of your ancestor’s life. If you are lucky your ancestor may be directly mentioned in surviving records or newspaper reports of these groups or workplaces, or journals of an associate’s life.

Cluster research Sports club — Many young men in particular were involved in local sports clubs.

I was able to find an account of an ancestor’s funeral in the newspaper because the only photo I had of him showed some masonic-looking regalia. This regalia turned out to be of the Ancient Order of Foresters who had put a notice in the paper. There were no notices from family as he’d left the state alone after his wife died and moved 2000km west!

cluster research freemasons — The masonic regalia on this ancestor helped to find a newspaper announcement of his funeral across the other side of the continent!

Neighbours Cluster Research

Find neighbours using resources such as directories, censuses and electoral rolls. These are the people that were often interacted with most frequently outside of the immediate family. The bonds could be very tight, especially among immigrant families. You will often find in these cases that the families immigrated together, either knowing each other before the journey or meeting aboard the ship. If you are looking for a town of origin and your family records aren’t providing it, you may possibly discover it via the neighbours they came into the country with!

cluster research neighbours — Neighbours’ lives were closely intertwined.

Neighbouring families commonly intermarried. ‘Marrying the boy next door’ was not just a myth. Of course not every romance ended up as a marriage. It’s probably a good idea to check close to home for potential fathers of illegitimate ancestors. If there are bastardy bonds available check those. If there aren’t, all is not lost however…DNA is beginning to uncover these dalliances by matching descendants of both families as cousins!

Neighbours can also be useful for finding a commonly named ancestor in subsequent censuses. If they had more unusual names than your ancestor and were still living in the surrounding premises, you’ve found him! If journals, memoirs or group photos from neighbouring families survive, you may well find that your ancestors are mentioned, so keep an eye out for those!

FANning Out…

Now you know a little about cluster research, I hope you take advantage of using some of these connections to your ancestors. You may break down a brick wall completely. You may find supporting evidence for a hypothesis or a clue for another direction to go in. At the very least you will add context to your family’s story – a little more flesh on the bones. That’s always a good thing.

Remember, family, associates and neighbours weren’t mutually exclusive – some people may fit in all three categories. If they do, I advise focussing on these ones first. They overlap your ancestor in so many aspects of their life they stand a really good chance of bearing information you can utilise!

May 3, 2019December 6, 2020

Taking a Wrecking Ball to Your Genealogy Brick Wall

Do You Have a Brick Wall Ancestor?

Assembling your family history is not always easy, despite some of the recent major advances in accessibility to a broad range of records online. Most family historians will inevitably run into an ancestral brick wall at some point. These are ancestors who seem to have somehow dodged every way of leaving a useful documentary footprint. We know they were born, we know they had at least one child, we know they died. That may be all we know. Somehow they resist our every effort to pinpoint where they came from.

Brick Wall Smashing Ideas

Start with what you KNOW.

I don’t mean what you think you know. Especially if you’ve been working on this ancestor for a while, you may have unwittingly gathered some assumptions that you are now working from. They may be leading you down the wrong path. Start from scratch. Relook at every piece of both evidence and hearsay with a critical fresh eye. If you have been well-organised and cited all your sources, it will be an easy task to gather everything in front of you and begin again. If not, rummage through it all till you have everything.

Reassess each piece of evidence one by one.

Are you sure each one pertains to your ancestor? Is there any chance that one or more of them refers to another person of a similar name? Eliminate any red herrings.
Do you have the primary source of that evidence? If what you have is a transcription or an extract from an index, or you have found it in someone else’s tree, or just heard it on the grapevine you need to find the actual document if possible. It may well contain more information and is less likely to contain errors.
Are there potential clues that you overlooked first time around? For example, witnesses and informants who may be related to or close friends of the brick wall ancestor, or causes of death which may lead you to a newspaper report of an accident.

Make a timeline

Now, construct a timeline of their life using your evidence to see what’s missing. You may find you have a reasonable picture of their later life but they seem to have popped up out of nowhere as an adult.

Focus

Looking at the information you have, decide what is the most critical question you need to answer about this person to move forward and focus on that with laser intensity. A scattergun approach will not serve you well. Don’t forget to document what you’ve checked as you go to prevent you from going over the same ground multiple times.

Where are the gaps?

For example, do you have a birth record or a baptism? Probably not, or they wouldn’t be a brick wall! What sources do you have that may give a clue to their approximate year and/or place of birth? Censuses, marriage records, death or burial records, obituaries, school records, military records, passport applications, electoral rolls, immigration records? Do they appear in any newspapers of the time? Find out what sources are available for the area that your ancestor was in at the time that might contain this information, and plunder them all mercilessly. If you’re pretty sure you know where your brick wall ancestor was probably baptised but they don’t appear in indexed searches, go to the parish register images and browse through every page in case they were missed or mistranscribed.

A rose by any other name…

Try every variant of the person’s name. There are often spelling variants for both given and surnames, especially before widespread literacy became the norm. Their given and middle names may be transposed in documents (they may have been known by their middle name in later life). Check for contractions or pet forms of their names, for example, Robert may be Bob or Rob or Bobby or Robbie. Sometimes they’re not so obvious – Mary Anns often became Polly!

Think big

What was happening in the local area at that point in history? If they didn’t originally come from there, what might have brought them to the area and where from? Look for local histories, newspapers etc that will give you a better idea of the broader social history that influenced their life. Check here for a good source of local histories.

Think wide

‘FAN’ out! FAN stands for ‘Family, Associates and Neighbours’. By researching those around your brick wall ancestor, you may uncover clues to their origins. I will be dedicating an entire blog to the importance of FAN-ning, so stay tuned for that one!

Recheck periodically

If you do all these things and still don’t break the brick wall, put it aside for a few months and carry on researching a different part of your tree. It can be good to come back with fresh eyes, because you may see a pattern you didn’t notice the last time. Also, more and more records are becoming accessible every day. Therefore, what you can’t access now may well be easy to get to the next time you try.

Have you tried DNA?

If you haven’t already had your DNA done, consider it for this purpose. I’ve had a few brick walls smashed by utilizing information gained from matching with others and working out the common ancestor between us. Ethnicity estimates may also in some cases be a signpost to where to look, but are not specific or accurate enough yet to be taken as standalone evidence.

Consider professional help

If you are despairing of finding your brick wall ancestor’s origins, try a professional genealogist who has some experience of researching the country or area where your family’s history takes place (for British or Australian brick walls, in particular, you are welcome to contact me!). They often know of more obscure sources that may contain the information you need and will be able to contextualize the information you have to come up with some new ideas of how to find the information. Make sure you have logged everything you have already done and cited sources to minimise the time you will be paying for. Sometimes a professional can bring a breakthrough in just hours on a problem that has held you up for years!

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