Recording place names

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In March I wrote about the additional layers to ‘geography’ that genealogists and historians have to be aware of. Today’s post builds on that, looking at how we might record information about places on our family trees in a way that makes sense not only for the logical flow of information about a person’s life, but also to the algorithms of any website we’re using to build our family tree.

The following are my own thoughts on this. How you choose to record places on your own tree is a matter for personal preference. My ideas are also based on personal experience of what works best when working with my online tree at Ancestry.co.uk. but the issues that inform this are not restricted to the Ancestry website, so if you have an online tree somewhere else some of the issues might be the same, others quite different.  The point is to develop a system that works for you, based on good practice but also one that the particular website’s search engine understands.

On Ancestry, there are two ways of adding new information/ ‘event’s to our tree. The first is by following Hints, by a Search from that profile page, or by starting a Search from the top menu bar. The second is when we enter new life events that we’ve located from different sources. Although we’re more likely to move onto this method as we progress, we’ll start here by looking at this first, because it’s here that we really need to think about what information the different ‘fields’, including specifically here, the Location field, are asking for.

Entering ‘Location’ information on a new life event

There are all kinds of reasons why you might be entering information yourself, rather than linking from information offered up to you by the website. Here are some examples:

  • You went to a cemetery and found a gravestone with dates and additional family members
  • You’re entering information from a family Bible, or from original Birth/ Marriage/ Death certificates or other special documents or artefacts handed down within your family
  • You found information on another website: genealogy website, Family History Society, newspaper archive, etc
  • You went to the local Record Office and found a record that relates to your ancestors, such as a Settlement Hearing

On Ancestry, to enter this kind of information, we click Add above the list of Life Events on the person’s profile page. A pop-up box appears: Add fact or event, with a list of life events to choose from, or you can make your own ‘Custom Event’.

Now we must fill in all the fields ourselves. Having to do this really makes us think about what the issues are, and why this may not be as straightforward as it might seem. Remember that in this post we’re just thinking about the Location.

In the pop-up box above, the words ‘City, County, State, Country’ is our hint as to how to arrange our place name. Of course, that’s based on the USA rather than UK, where we don’t have separate ‘states’.

Write place names as they are on the record, not what would be correct today
For example, today, Brighton is in East Sussex, but historically was in Sussex.  We should input the county as it is on the record, which before 1974 would have been Sussex.  Similarly, Gisburn was in the West Riding of Yorkshire, but since 1974 has been in Lancashire, so a 1980 birth should be recorded in Lancashire; a birth in the same house in 1970 would be recorded as Yorkshire.  Some of the newer counties didn’t even exist when the record was created.  For example, Wolverhampton, now in the ‘West Midlands’, was formerly in Staffordshire.

The further back we go, there may be even more archaic county names, for example, the Isle of Wight was in ‘the County of Southampton’. These ancient counties don’t work with Ancestry. I always record this as ‘Hampshire’, but would use the description box (see image above) to record that ‘the County of Southampton’ was given on the record.

Use official place descriptions, not ‘the way we referred to it in our family’
When I was little I used to write to my great uncle who lived in a village called Methley, about ten miles from Leeds.  My mother showed me how to write the address as ‘Methley, nr. Leeds, Yorkshire’. When I started my family tree it seemed important to me to preserve this memory, so I wrote ‘Methley, nr. Leeds, Yorkshire’ for the location of that great uncle.  This was my family history, after all! I also referenced every incidence of the main church in Leeds as ‘Leeds Parish Church’, that being how it was referred to locally. Sadly, algorithms don’t understand our happy memories! We can still include this information, but put it in the little box for ‘description of this event’ rather than in the ‘Location’ field.

When entering residence, limit this to the place, not the actual street address
If you include the full address in the location, forever more when you write the place name, Ancestry will offer up every single address you’ve ever written in that location for you to select. Below, here’s what happens every time I write ‘Hunslet’. You can still write the full address if that’s the way you want to do it, but it’s better to put it in the Description box linked to the event. 

Recording church names for baptisms, marriages and burials
One of my ancestors was baptised at St Leonard’s church in Bilston, Staffordshire. If I write this information in the Location box on Ancestry, this could be confused with the town called St Leonards, which is in East Sussex. Similarly, St Helen’s church could be confused with the town of that name in Merseyside; St David’s after the Welsh city, and so on. For this reason I always put the placename first, then the church: Bilston, St Leonard, Staffordshire, England. Usually, I only include the church name when recording religious rites that took place within the church.

Recording the historic parish name in cities of multiple parishes
There is an important exception to the last sentence in my above ‘rule’. In larger historic towns and cities that developed around the 11th Century there tended to be many small parishes within the walls, and since the Anglican parish was also the administrative unit for secular administration, it’s useful to record this parish information for all events. I wrote about this previously, using Norwich as an example. There, prior to the introduction of Civil Births, Marriages and Deaths in 1837, I would record a birthplace and place of death like this: ‘Norwich, St Martin at Oak, Norfolk, England’. It is true and accurate, and it gives us additional information about where, precisely, in Norwich, the event occurred. The same applies for London, Winchester, York, and other historic towns.

When recording the Registration District doesn’t tell the true story
Since 1837, Civil Births, Marriages and Deaths are recorded within Registration Districts. You’ll find a list of every single Registration District (RD) that has existed since then on the UKBMD website [here]. Often, these make perfect sense. For example, a birth between 1837 and 1998 in the Wiltshire town of Devizes will have been registered in the RD of Devizes. However, as the UKBMD page for the Devizes RD shows, many other settlements in the area came within its boundaries. So if your ancestor was baptised in Pewsey, 11 miles to the east of Devizes but registered in Devizes, what location do you record for the birth? What if you also know from subsequent censuses that your ancestor was in fact born in the village of Sharcott that lies within the ancient parish of Pewsey? Which one would you record as this person’s place of birth? This is what I would do:

  • Record the birth as the actual village if I know it, but also add the General Register Office reference in the description box. This includes the RD of Devizes. e.g. Name xxx; Mother’s Maiden Name xxx; GRO Reference: 1837 D Quarter in DEVIZES IN THE COUNTY OF WILTS Volume 08 Page 250
  • Record the baptism with the name of the parish church in Pewsey.

Remember to add county and country
As you can see from my ‘Hunslet’ example, above, I didn’t always do this when I was starting out, and am still plagued by the fact!

The problem with simply writing the town or city is that many places in the New World settled by British migrants were given the names of former hometowns of the settlers. See what happens when I just type ‘Portland’.

In future searches, the search engine doesn’t know if we mean Portland in Dorset or one of these other Portlands, and may offer up all kinds of unrelated records.

If, instead, we consistently record the county and country, it helps the search engine and also helps us to keep our research tidy, enabling us to see at a glance where the person was.

If you’re an old hand at this family history research, all this is nothing new to you – but if so, please do share any examples from your own research, showing how you dealt with an unusual location situation. If you’re fairly new to researching your own family tree, I’m guessing you never knew there could be so much to recording someone’s ‘location’!

Linking a new event after searching on Ancestry

Most of the above points apply to building your own tree, whatever application you’re using to record the information. Let’s move on now to how information gets added to our trees when we’ve done a search on the Ancestry website. If you’re using a different subscription website for your tree the process will be different but the same issues may apply.

If we search for records from the person’s profile page, or by following a ‘Hint’, or by filling in details on the general search pages, when we find a record we want to add to our person’s profile page, the information fields will already be completed. This information is based on someone else’s transcription of the record, and how it was indexed. Here’s an example:

In this box information I already had, and new information, are separated out. Any differences between the two are highlighted. We can edit, accept or decline any changes to existing information. In the above example I decided to accept it as it is (although I can see a problem), and now, on this person’s profile page, if I click on the entry for his burial, I get a similar pop-up box as the one at the top of this post, but with some of the facts filled in – actually in this case, just the location:

The problem here is that the location for this record is not indexed in a way the Ancestry algorithms will understand. Hunslet is good. Leeds is sufficient without the ‘Metropolitan Borough of’ part (although I would not necessarily include ‘Leeds’). West Yorkshire did not exist in 1945; it is a county level authority that was created in 1974, so the county should just be ‘Yorkshire’. Although the country is the United Kingdom, since the law and administrative arrangements are different in Scotland and Northern Ireland, in ancestry research we usually just refer to England, Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales, therefore the country here is England (which you can’t see because of the length of the location information) and is correct on this record. For me, this location should simply be ‘Hunslet, Yorkshire, England’, or ‘Hunslet, Leeds, Yorkshire, England’, and that is how I would amend it.

Yorkshire ‘Ridings’
Some of the old Yorkshire records include the ‘Riding’ in the indexing.  Unfortunately, Ancestry cannot cope with this at all. If we leave it in, the record entry will forever default to Riding in Northumberland – a place I cannot find on the map, but which has definitely caused me some problems over the years.  So my advice is to remove any reference to the Riding from old Yorkshire records.  If you want to include the Riding, do it in the ‘Description’ box attached to the Event.

Be vigilant!

The lesson here is that just because information is presented to you in a certain way, does not mean it is correct, and does not even mean it is algorithm-friendly on that website! If we have our own sense of what is needed for recording the location – what we personally would like, and what we have come to understand the website requires – we can record information more consistently, more correctly and in a manner that makes future Hints and Searches more effective.

I hope you’ve found something useful in all this.

April Fool’s Trees

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Hand on heart, this is a family tree chart based on the plot of a well-known series of novels and TV adaptation.

Look closely!
I found myself breaking out in a cold sweat when I realised the DNA implications…

A drop line family tree chart based on the plot of a well-known book in which time travel features.

Some of you will know the series as soon as you look at the chart. Please don’t give it away in the comments in case it might spoil the enjoyment of someone yet to read it!

The rest of the trees in this post are genuine. The next three are from my own family tree. There’s something unusual about each of them. If you’re not practised at interpreting the symbols on family tree charts, look at each one to work out what’s happening before reading the explanation below each chart.

What’s happening here?

Drop line family tree showing two couples and one child of each. After the death of the wife of one and the husband of the other, the remaining man and woman married. Their children also then married.

Explanation: Joseph was married to Susanna and was widowed in 1865 when Susanna died. Jane was married to William and was widowed in 1872 when William died. After this, Joseph and Jane met, and they married in 1873. Through them, two of the children from their first marriages also met, and they married in 1874. So the children of this married couple are also a married couple.

What’s happening here?

Drop line family tree chart showing marriage of man to his late wife's niece, after death of the first wife

Explanation: Edwin and Mary Ann had two children, Frederick and Ada Harriot. Frederick had a daughter: Ada Mary. His sister, Ada Harriot married Richard Barton. Ada Harriot died in 1887. Four years later Richard remarried. His new wife was his niece-by-marriage, Ada Mary. Richard’s older children by his first wife are cousins of their new stepmother. They are half siblings and first cousins once removed to the children of that second marriage. The late Ada Harriot is great aunt to the children of her widower’s second marriage.

My natural tendency would be to put a diagonal ‘ = ‘ (indicating marriage) between Ada Mary and Richard on the line above. If I was sketching this out by hand that’s what I would do. However, it wouldn’t be ‘proper’… although I do think it illustrates more immediately what the situation is than this formal version, which keeps to set lines for the generations and has Richard and Ada Mary in their proper places, each therefore appearing twice.

This is an example of an avunculate marriage. It was actually forbidden in England and Wales until two years before Ada Mary’s death – and I suspect the couple knew this, since they married 200 miles from home. The Marriage (Prohibited Degrees) Relationship Act of 1931 removed the barrier to marriage between widowed uncle-by-marriage and niece.

What’s happening here?

Drop line family tree chart showing one woman with two marriages, and a son from each marriage. These two sons (consecutively) both married the same woman. Children were born to both these marriages.

Explanation: Harriet had two husbands: Marcus, and then when widowed she married John in 1862. She bore several children within each marriage, including Edward, son of Marcus; and Thomas, son of John.

Edward married (or possibly cohabited with) Jane. After Edward’s death, Jane married (or possibly cohabited with) Edward’s half brother, Thomas. Jane had seven children with Edward and one child with Thomas. This child was half sibling to the others, and also their cousin.

This marriage was also prohibited in England & Wales, until the passing of the Deceased Brother’s Widow’s Marriage Act in 1921. In the particular example above, no marriage record has been found for a marriage between Jane and either brother, so the forbidden marriage situation may not have been an issue.

The next one is based on an online article I saw a couple of weeks ago. You might have realised from the above that I have a fascination with people with multiple connections, and how to illustrate them in a family tree chart.

What’s happening here?

I shared a post about this family on my English Ancestors page on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. Here is a fuller article about the family, from The Independent. Identical twins Josh and Jeremy married identical twins Brittany and Brianna. Each of the couples had a baby early in 2021. As sons of two sets of identical twins (whose genetic information is identical) the children are cousins, but also, since it was exactly the same DNA that created both, they are genetic brothers. If they took an ancestry test they would show as brothers.

There is a serious side to looking at these unusual family trees. They help us to become more practised at using family tree symbols, as well as thinking about the most ‘elegant’ way to illustrate unusual relationships.

All of these family tree charts were drawn using PowerPoint. Doing this provides more control over what you include, and how to illustrate it, than a lot of the tree-building applications on genealogy software or websites. Online family history education providers like IHGS and the Society of Genealogists offer courses and one-off tutorials about using PowerPoint for tree-building. They include the functions of PowerPoint you will use, but also the rules about building pedigree charts, and the information to be included for each person. In the above charts I limited the information included to the story I wanted to tell, but a standard tree chart would include more. We also need to know about the standard abbreviations. In the first chart I had to make up a symbol – the one for ‘several generations between the two people shown’, but the rest are standard. Just a note that in the last tree I didn’t know if the two sets of twins actually have any siblings, but included them as a possibility just to highlight the difference in how we show single births and twins.

Hope you enjoyed. How about you – what unusual connections or multiple connections have you found in your trees?

Geography for Genealogists

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My knowledge of the geography of places where I do genealogy research has come on in leaps and bounds over the years of doing this, and I’m sure it will be the same for most of you too. There are places I’ve never even visited in real life, yet can visualise their location on the map, together with surrounding villages or parishes. When we come across a likely record in an unfamiliar place, we need to assess the probability of this being our person.  Finding the place is a village just two miles from the expected location adds weight to that possibility. It goes without saying that maps, old and new, become our friend, but I thought it would be interesting to think of how ‘geography for genealogists’ differs from the geographical needs of regular people just finding their way from A to B or planning to visit a new area.

Essentially, of course, we need to understand the geography not only as it is today, but also as it was at different periods through history. It’s almost as if we have to peel back the layers to get to the place as it was during our period of interest.

Knowing all the names that apply to a specific place
Historically, our towns and villages have been organised into different administrative levels. We need to know what these are – what they were called, the nature of the administrative level bearing that name, the historical period in which it operated, and why each one is sometimes the place-name used… but not always. It all boils down to different types of record and where they were created. These different types of places and administrative levels include:

  • County
  • Hundred / wapentake / rape
  • Town or village
  • District
  • Parish
  • Diocese
  • Civil Registration District
  • Poor Law Union
  • Manor
  • Another name grouping places together, such as ‘Upper Wharfedale’ or ‘Cinque Ports’, or in Yorkshire the three Ridings.

Some of these are more important as we progress our trees further back; others come into play in the nineteenth century.

I wrote about some of these different administrative levels in a couple of posts back in 2019, and how confusing it can be to find a death recorded in two apparently different places – the parish and the registration district – particularly when neither of these named places is the known abode of the deceased. When we understand the function of all these administrative levels, these apparent ‘discrepancies’ fall into place. Even so, if we’re working with a new, unfamiliar area, we’re likely to have a bit of researching to do before it will all fall into place.

Good sources of information around all this include:

  • The UKBMD website, useful for helping you work out which Registration District your place of interest was in.
  • GENUKI has listings and information about all parishes, arranged by county.
  • FamilySearch Maps enables you to search for the parish on a map, to see other place names within the parish, to locate it in amongst adjacent parishes, and to see what ‘jurisdictions’ it fell within before or as at 1851, including the county, Registration District, diocese, Poor Law Union and others.
  • You’ll find useful information on Wikipedia, for example a search for “high peak district wapentake” returned this page about Hundreds of Derbyshire.
  • Also try FamilySearch Research Wiki, which you can access via the home page → Search → Research Wiki, or you can access simply by Googling “FamilySearch” and the name of a place you’re interested in. Using both methods, I searched for “Staffordshire”, and from there navigated to the parish of Kinver, which has a good selection of historical/geographical information about that parish.
  • The Manorial Documents Register on the National Archives Discovery pages enables you to search for manors by name or within specific parishes.
  • In addition to any old maps you can find, the National Library of Scotland Side by Side maps can really help you to pinpoint and understand where a specific place used to be.
  • A Family History or Local History group’s website is likely to have other relevant information.
  • And of course your search engine of choice.

Historic accent and dialect
An additional feature of ‘genealogical geography’ is that in a time when many people could not read and write, and even before that when rules for spelling were not as established as they are now, place names were written as they sounded, or as the scribe heard them. It can take much poring over online maps to work out what a placename was meant to be, or what we would call it today. It’s easier if you’re familiar with the local accent or dialect. One that had me stumped for years was ‘Aul Court Somersetshire’, recorded as grandfather’s place of origin on a Dade style baptism register in York. If it hadn’t been for a friend who used to live in this long-elusive and mysterious place, I would still not know that this is a reference to the parish of Walcot, today part of Bath. It does give us a bit of extra information though, about the person who gave this place-name to the clerk. She spoke with a Somerset accent with which the York-based clerk was unfamiliar.

Variations in information given about places
Sometimes our ancestors gave different information about key places on different records. Often, we can explain this by distance – and the same would apply today. If I lived in Tedburn St Mary, about 5 miles west of Exeter, and I was talking to someone in Exeter, I would say I lived in Tedburn St Mary. If I moved to Norwich and was asked where I was from, I might say ‘Exeter’. In other circumstances I might say ‘The West Country of England’.

Map showing the area around Hopperton in North Yorkshire, including the villages of Coneythorpe, Cowthorpe, Great Ouseburn and Little Ouseburn.

It would have been just the same for our ancestors who migrated.

However, this doesn’t explain why a person I previously researched gave his place of origin variously as ‘Coneythorpe’, ‘Cowthorpe’, ‘Hopperton’, Ouseburn’ and ‘York’. Even if we accept York as the nearest big place and therefore more likely to be reported to a stranger, it still doesn’t explain why this person gave so many tiny places as his birthplace on different documents.

We have to be prepared to think out of the box!

Some places have disappeared
Sometimes the only geographical indication that a place ever existed is a lane bearing that name, and presumably once leading to it. The only modern day indication of a place of significance to one of my 6x great grandfathers is a Service Station bearing that name. On these occasions we may just have to take what we can and accept that our place of interest is ’round about here somewhere’.

Knowing the lay of the land
Going further back in time, knowledge of other geological features such as mountain ranges could be useful in indicating where networks are unlikely to extend. Conversely, historic places such as abbeys, and the trading routes once linked to them, or the land holdings of important families, might explain why people did turn up in unexpected places.

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Some of the above, of course, applies equally to local history, while the nature of the records we use means that some of the challenges are more prevalent for family historians. I’m sure you’ll be able to think of examples of all this from your own research, and perhaps other aspects of geography that have extra layers when researching our family histories. If you do, please do tell us about it in a comment.

My response to MoJ consultation: Storage and retention of original wills

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Only four days remain before the deadline of the Ministry of Justice consultation paper regarding proposals to destroy all post-1858 original Wills and related documents, with the exception of those of famous people, and to retain only digital files of the rest. The full consultation paper may be viewed here.

You can respond directly at the following address or by email: civil_justice_poli@justice.gov.uk

Will Storage consultation
Ministry of Justice
Civil Justice and Law Division,
Postpoint 5.25
102 Petty France
London
SW1H 9AJ

The deadline for replies is this coming Friday, 23 February.

Below, is my own response in full, which was emailed this morning.

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Response to the Ministry of Justice Open consultation paper: Storage and retention of original will documents, Published 15 December 2023

Question 3: Are there any reasons why the High Court should store original paper Will documents on a permanent basis, as opposed to just retaining a digitised copy of that material?

Yes.  As a professional genealogist/ researcher working with documents in archives as well as online digitised copies of certain documents, I object strongly to proposals set down in the above consultation paper to destroy the majority of Wills and related documents after a prescribed period, replacing them with digital images of the same.  My reasons are below.

Question 5: Do you agree that there is equivalence between paper and digital copies of wills so that the ECA 2000 can be used?

No.  In archival terms  paper wills and digital copies are not equivalent.  Only the original is ‘the original’.  A digital copy of that, no matter how perfect, is a stand-in: a ‘surrogate’.  Even the citation appropriate for these types of documents is different: if a researcher is in the presence of the original document, the citation will be to that document and its location; if using a ‘digital copy’ of that, the citation requires extra information: what, precisely was viewed, via what website or other source, and when was it accessed?  There is a reason for this: only the original can be guaranteed to include every mark and every page.

Digital preservation is not infallible.  Despite the ‘huge advances that technology has made over recent years’ (Point 27) it does not follow that ‘digital copies of original documents can be extremely detailed and all relevant marks on the original will be retained in the digital version.’  JPEGs are ‘lossy’ files.  Lossy compression compresses an image, making it smaller (and more economical) to store, but the trade-off is a permanent loss of detail.  As a researcher who regularly downloads images from archives and commercial genealogy websites I know that those images are much-reduced JPEGs.  Consequently, there are times when only the original will do, for example when comparing signatures with other documents to confirm this is the same person; or if a stain on the original document renders text illegible in digital format: in a good light, the eyes may be able to decipher the original. 

Digital files can also corrupt, resulting in permanent loss of all contents.  In any case, the technology available to us now may be surpassed in the not too distant future. 

There is also the issue of human error.  During the photographing process, it is possible to turn over two pages at once, to leave off useful information on the rear of a document, or even to omit an entire document.  All researchers using online digital images will have experience of this.  On occasion, too, documents may be incorrectly indexed, making the correct digital files very difficult to find.  In 2023 entries on the GRO Births and Deaths registers were made available for direct download – a development greeted with delight by the genealogy world; and yet some of the digital photographs of the entries are not usable, owing to having been photographed at an angle, thereby cutting off essential information.  The point with all these difficulties is that the original documents remain intact: they have not been destroyed.  The digitisation is a great thing, but we need the originals too.

Question 4: Do you agree that after a certain time original paper documents (from 1858 onwards) may be destroyed (other than for famous individuals)?

No.  History is not just about ‘famous people’.  Concepts have changed.  History is also about the many millions of others who were impacted by decisions of the powerful.  Their Wills are important too.

Question 6: Are there any other matters directly related to the retention of digital or paper wills that are not covered by the proposed exercise of the powers in the ECA 2000 that you consider are necessary?

It is clear from the wording of the consultation paper that a rather narrow understanding of the enduring value of Wills and Probate documents is at play.  Point 27 asserts that ‘All parties and courts will […] be equally able to rely on digital copies of wills to challenge the validity of that will or another as they would be if relying on the paper will.’  Undoubtedly that is true; and in this regard legal issues such as time limits for contesting a Will are relevant, and the comparison with time limits for retention of other Court documents (Point 45) is valid.

However, once Probate is granted, the Will and associated documents become public documents.  As such, the original purpose of the Will and Probate documents is not its enduring value.  It is not appropriate to restrict considerations to the immediate legal purposes and to the emotional attachment of the testator’s nearest and dearest.  The wider value of a Will may become apparent many years into the future.  Genealogists use them to learn about the immediate and wider family of the individual, their lifestyle and social standing.  Historians and social scientists may take a much broader approach, for example examining Wills made by individuals in a particular location, or a particular ‘type’ of person, using their findings to draw conclusions about, and better understand that location, or our society more generally in the past.

Question 9: Do you agree with the principle that wills of famous people should be preserved in the original paper form for historic interest?

I agree of course that wills of famous people should be preserved, but not that this should be the exception to the rule of mass destruction.

The suggestion (Point 51) that this already happens for pre-1858 Wills is misleading and untrue.  Before 1858, Probate was a matter for the ecclesiastical courts, and these valuable historic documents are stored in diocesan archives, with some original and copy Wills of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury held at The National Archives.  While it is true that Prerogative Court of Canterbury: Wills of Selected Famous Persons have been separated out and stored in record series PROB 1, the implication that only these Wills have been kept is false.  Not a single Will was destroyed; Wills of individuals not deemed ‘Famous Persons’ are archived within a different part of the collection.

Question 10: Do you have any initial suggestions on the criteria which should be adopted for identifying famous/historic figures whose original paper will document should be preserved permanently?

The mere posing of this question illustrates the problem: there is a value judgement linked to this.  Since your values may be different to mine, who will decide?  Might society’s assessment change over time?  A suffragist in the nineteenth century might be considered a tiresome person, yet that same person today may be considered a trailblazer, playing an important part in the road to universal suffrage.  What a travesty if it turned out this person’s Will was destroyed because they were not sufficiently ‘famous’, or their fame did not accord with contemporary values.

Janice Heppenstall

Save Our Wills!

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First of all, a very Happy New Year to you all.

You may already know about the UK Ministry of Justice’s proposals to destroy original copies of post-1857 Wills after 25 years. The proposal is to retain only a digital copy of each Will. Information about the proposals is contained in the Ministry of Justice’s Consultation Paper, which you will find [here].

As genealogists we are all in favour of digitisation of documents, and easy availability online. The government’s online Wills and Probate service is an example of this, allowing us to search, and for just £1.50, to receive a digital copy of the relevant Will by email.

However good the digital image, though, there is a difference between it and the original document. In archivist terms, it is only the original which is the ‘original document’. The digital images we mostly use via subscription websites or indeed the GRO’s online Wills and Probate service, are termed ‘surrogates’. There is always the possibility that part of a document is not included, that one page is blurred, that part of one page is missing, or that a few handwritten words on the reverse that might just be the clue to a mystery are not included. As all of us who work regularly with genealogy websites know, it could be months or years before such a problem is noticed. If the original exists somewhere this can be resolved. However, if the original has already been destroyed, valuable information is lost for ever.

Genealogist and former archivist of many years at The National Archives, Dave Annal, has put together an excellent video in which he summarises in just over five minutes the main problems with these proposals.

My friend and colleague Richard Holt has taken a particular interest in this matter from before the launch of the present proposals and consultation by the Ministry of Justice. In his blogpost Justice for Wills and Probate Documents he writes about times in his research when only an original will do. Initially his concern was with the operation of the Freedom of Information request process, but since the launch of the proposals to digitise and destroy original post-1857 Wills, his concerns have increased, and these are covered in the second half of that blogpost. 

I will not spend time adding my own thoughts to those of Richard and Dave, since I do agree with all they say. Indeed, online and via any groups that you are part of, you will find an increasing number of articles and robust responses from other genealogists, historians, archivists and societies/ associations linked to these fields.

So what can we do about it?

Richard has launched a petition to the UK Government and Parliament: Do not allow original wills to be destroyed after 25 years – Petitions (parliament.uk). If you are a UK citizen or resident you will be able to sign it. At the time of writing this, there are 7410 signatures.

You can also respond directly to the Ministry of Justice’s consultation. This option is open to anyone, anywhere in the world – and of course many people have UK ancestry so this affects all of us. Replies must be received by 23 February, using the email civil_justice_poli@justice.gov.uk or the following address:

Will Storage consultation
Ministry of Justice
Civil Justice and Law Division,
Postpoint 5.25
102 Petty France
London
SW1H 9AJ

Finally, please share this information with others who you think will be concerned by these proposals.

#SaveOurWills

Happy Xmas (and other abbreviations)

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So go on then… you have a pile of cards to write and a hundred other things to do before Christmas Day. What do you write on your cards – ‘Christmas’, or ‘Xmas’?

I always write ‘Merry Christmas’ in full – at some point in my teen years I decided it was lazy not to write the full word. Your decision may have been for more serious reasons, like the campaign to “Keep the ‘Christ’ in Christmas” or concerns about the over-commercialisation and secularisation of the religious event, as seemingly represented by the word ‘Xmas’. All the more so because it’s well-known that in algebra ‘X’ stands in for ‘the unknown’.

It came as a surprise then, as my family research progressed, when I started to notice ‘X’ as an abbreviation for ‘Christ’ in church records. 

In this extract from the parish register of Norwich St Martin at Oak, an 1819 Baptism entry was amended in 1836 to correct the mother’s name of Sophia: ‘This Xpn name sh[oul]d be Lucy…’

Baptism record for James Sword, son of Thmas and Sophia Mann. A later note on the register indicates that the mother's Christian name should be Lucy, not Sophia. The abbreviation 'Xpn' is used instead of the full word 'Christian' being written out in full.

Instead of ‘Christian’, the letters ‘Xpn’ are used.

There are also of course many examples of the name Christopher being recorded as Xpher or Xpoferus. Thankfully, I have not found any document in which my 5x Great Grandfather Christopher Christian is recorded as Xpher Xpn. (Perhaps he is, but no one indexed it correctly!)

These seemed to me to fall foul on all counts – first, because this was supposed to be a solemn record and teenage me had already decided such documents needed to be written in full; and secondly in that these were *Church* records, where Christ was by definition at the forefront of procedings.

There had to be another explanation; and of course there is. In fact, in English ‘X’ was first used as a scribal abbreviation for ‘Christ’ in 1100; in 1551 ‘X’temmas’ appeared; and by 1721 ‘Xmas’ was in regular use as an abbreviation for ‘Christmas’. (See: Wikipedia: Xmas) It is thought that these abbreviations came about as a cost-saving practice: the cost of parchment was so expensive that any ways of saving space in the text were welcomed.

However, the history behind the abbreviation is even more susprising. The first letter is not actually Latin script, but a Greek X, pronounced Ch (as in ‘Christmas’). In the abbreviation for Christopher (Xpher) the second letter is not necessarily part of the ‘pher’: the Greek letter ‘ρ’ is pronounced ‘r’; and in Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Church of England and Episcopalian forms of Christianity, the ‘Xρ’ has long been an accepted abbreviation for Christ, or ‘Christos’ (Χριστός). Over time, in English scribal abbreviations, the second letter – the ‘ρ’/ ‘r’ – was dropped in the word ‘Xmas’.

So there you are - when we write ‘Xmas’, we’re not being lazy; we’re following a long tradition in Christian scripts of abbreviating using the ancient Greek alphabet.

Now… since this is supposed to be a blog about genealogy research, not linguistics, I hope you’ll find the following link useful: more abbreviations you may find in parish registers and other genealogy records, courtesy of FamilySearch.

And on that note all that remains is for me to wish you a very Happy Christmas (or Xmas, if you wish) and a Happy and Healthy New Year. See you in January.

Will there be another Census for England & Wales?

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As genealogists we know that the historic records we rely upon were not created with us in mind. Always, there was a significant contemporary reason behind the collection of data. The list of heads of household may have been compiled to keep track of who had paid taxes, or rentals. The list of adult males may have been required for selection of local militia. Parish registers, while being a record of religious rites, were also a means of keeping track of the population, and so on.

When the first censuses were carried out in 1801-1831 the purpose was to collect basic information about numbers of inhabited/ uninhabited houses, numbers of families occupying them, numbers of people (male/female) with a very basic breakdown of their occupations, and information about numbers of baptisms, marriages and burials. It was not until 1841 that names, ages and occupations of individual household members were collected, along with a rough indication of birthplace. The real need at that time was to get a handle on the size of the population (for military purposes and food requirements) and to understand migration within the country. Since then, with every new decade, changing societal conditions and increased understanding of links between, for example, living conditions and health, led to additional questions. In more recent decades, there has been a need to understand religious diversity, language needs as a result of immigration, gender identity, and so on. This then feeds into planning of services and facilities.

However, there has been another huge change in the past thirty years: information technology. Such is the ‘ready’ availability of timely data that the need for a decennial snapshot of the nation is in question. In June of this year the Office for National Statistics (ONS) produced a consultation paper on its proposals for The future of population and migration statistics in England and Wales.

In it, they explain their proposals to replace reliance on a decennial census, creating information that is essentially out of date as soon as it is published by instead using administrative data collected by a range of state organisations as a by-product of their work. This, they say, would enable the ONS to provide completely accurate, up-to-date information, when needed, and at a fraction of the cost. It is estimated that the cost of the 2021 Census was around £1 billion.

In response to these proposals a group of leading academics whose work draws heavily on data provided by the censuses have published an Open Letter in which they express their concerns.

Whereas we, as genealogists, are interested in personal information – and we’re not permitted to access that personal information until one hundred years have lapsed – impersonal statistical information from each census is released very soon after the information is collected. Already, a good deal of data is available following the 2021 census, and undoubtedly this is the data essential to the work of the sociologists, medical sociologists, criminologists, epidemiologists, social policy, population and health experts who signed the Open Letter.

Reading their letter, it is interesting to note that, despite the differences in our use of the census data, they broadly use the census in a very similar way to us: as a decennial benchmark against which the representativeness of other data may be assessed. For them, that would be statistics and other studies; for us it is Civil BMDs or parish register entries. Administrative data produced as a by-product of a service, they say, cannot fulfil this function. Although the census completion is not actually 100 percent, it is a legal requirement and completion is in fact very high. By contrast there is no mechanism for administrative data owners to be held accountable for the quality of their data. There are also opt-outs, not to mention the fact that some people are not even registered with the services in the first place and would therefore slip through the net. Their suggestion is that if the alternative ‘patchwork of administrative data’ is seriously to be considered as a replacement for the census, then at least in 2031 the two systems should be run in tandem, to ensure complete coverage and a smooth handover. They also assess that the cost of collection of data from these other sources and bringing them together as a seamless whole would be about the same cost as the decennial census.

Essentially, of course, our interest is in the genealogists of 2131 and beyond. It is with them in mind, as well as my own privacy concerns, that I am worried about the future of family history. The contents of our medical records and other information collected or created about us in the operation of public services should remain private – but a census is different. Whilst fully mindful of the real, administrative benefits to the nation of collecting all that information, on a personal level I enjoy sharing my information (my choice what to share) on the census. I think of it as a message to my descendants. In Ireland, last year, the 2022 Census even had space for a Time Capsule Message to be available to descendants in 2122. How wonderful would it be to open that!

Anyway… what do you think? Have you been involved in any of the consultation surrounding this? Do you have strong views either way? Do leave a comment.

Using wills to identify community networks

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Diagram showing the networks provided by the Wills of three men in a small village in Wharfedale between 1693/94 and 1712/13, plus the Probate Register entry of another man. The network seen through these documents includes a total of 36 people.

The ‘All About That Place’ event, as well as a short course I was doing at the same time: Progressing Your Local History Research (346) through Pharos Tutors, inspired me to start a couple of ‘One Place Studies’, and to register them with the Society for One Place Studies.

One of my studies, Starbotton in Wharfedale, focuses on the Early Modern period – roughly 1500-1750, although depending on the records available, it may end up homing in on just part of that period. Starbotton is part of the parish of Kettlewell and importantly, no parish registers for the period before 1698/ 1700 have survived. Although there are some Bishop’s Transcripts for the seventeenth century, survival of these records too is limited and patchy. This means I have no continuous register of any kind to use as a foundation for rebuilding the community of people in Starbotton before the last fifty years of my period of interest. The primary challenge will be to locate as many alternative sources as possible and then find ways to make them work together.

Prior to the Local History course my research in Starbotton had focused on my Simondson family. I already had Wills for three of the Simondson men who died between 1693/4 and 1712/13, plus the Probate register entry only for another, John, who died in 1705 and named Anthony as his executor. Christopher’s was a holographic Will, meaning a group of trusted family and friends gathered at his deathbed, helped him to organise his thoughts, and wrote up the document after his death, all of them signing to verify that the contents were the wishes of the deceased. The Wills of Lister and Christopher are accompanied by Inventories, which are also signed by everyone involved in that process.

Something I had previously noticed – both here and in another small village where I’ve accessed quite a few Wills – was the sense of community evoked through all the people involved in the Probate process – witnesses, executors, the men doing the inventory, bondsmen and so on – and that’s in addition to the named beneficiaries. They all pulled together to help each other at this time of need, and to ensure the wives and children were properly cared for.

With this in mind I decided to ‘map’ the network created by the three Simondson Wills, plus John’s Probate Register entry. Every fact, and every single person shown on the network chart at the top of this post came from a close reading of these Probate documents. I do have some additional information about some of the people, gained from other records. For example, it is Thomas Simondson who is my direct ancestor, and I have more information about him and his family, but his Will does not seem to have survived. I was surprised to find that, excluding beneficiaries, there were twenty people involved in this network-mapping process: nineteen men and one woman. Adding in the named beneficiaries brings the total to thirty-seven: eleven women/ girls and six men/ boys are named beneficiaries. This younger generation will make my job a bit easier since most of them undergo some religious rite or other that brings them into the period of the surviving parish registers.

Homing in on householders though – which in itself would be a great step forward – these Wills have given me a LOT of information about the village community. I do recognise most of the surnames and in some cases the first names too. Comparison with a transcript of the 1672 Lady Day Hearth Tax return, and also with a list of churchwardens from all available Bishop’s Transcripts indicates that most are from the parish. However, the parish includes Kettlewell as well as Starbotton, so there is still work to do in trying to separate out the two.

A person’s ‘community’ is not necessarily restricted to his or her village. In addition to the village community there will be wider networks too, based on friendships, marriages, worship (e.g. Nonconformists in rural locations would have a geographically wider network), business, market days, and so on. Based just on my Simondson family, I know that they had family connections throughout Wharfedale and into what is now Lancashire too. This also seems to me to be part of the history of a Place: where were the wider networks and connections? What were the reasons for this? And was it different for people from different social levels?

I’ve now located about ten more Wills for the same period for other testators living in Starbotton and will gradually collect and transcribe these, looking for overlaps, and comparing the findings to other records known to be for residents of Starbotton.

Not such ‘little’ lives after all…

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One of my great grandfathers, George, was adopted. This was in the 1860s, so it was an informal arrangement and the couple who took him in were his biological father’s older sister and her husband, whose name was Feargus.

Feargus had a middle name: O’Connor; and although I was new to genealogy at the time of discovering all this, I already understood enough to know there was a strong likelihood that this was a maiden name, probably from his mother’s side and probably the two names indicating an Irish connection. However, following back Feargus’s mother’s and father’s lines for a few generations, I could see they were solid Yorkshire stock. No Irish, and no O’Connors. It was a mystery.

The solving of the mystery, when it came, was from a surprising source. But before going onto that, I want to tell you something about Feargus’s parents.

They were nail-makers, and they lived in the village of Hoylandswaine, not far from Barnsley. I found a little book published by the Barnsley Family History Society: The Nail-Makers of Hoylandswaine, collated and compiled by Cynthia Dalton. It includes not only the history of nail-making in Hoylandswaine, but a description of the life, together with potted biographies of the nail-makers recorded in the censuses. I learned that the life of a nail-maker was a hard one. Some had their own forges and worked as a family unit; others rented space in someone else’s forge; and yet more worked for a nail master on his premises.

Click here to see a surviving Hoylandswaine nail forge, now a museum.

Usually, the men started work at 6am, and might keep going until 10pm, with breaks only for meals throughout the day. Pay was low, and since some of the nail masters were also the village shopkeepers or inn-keepers who couldn’t resist squeezing a little extra profit from their workers, payment may have been made in the form of provisions from that other business. Women did the work too, for less money, and alongside taking care of the house and children.

Hoylandswaine nailers go rat-a-tat-tat,
On thin watter porridge, and no’ much o’ that

Anon. (In: Cynthia Dillon: The Nail-Makers of Hoylandswaine)

It seemed a very small life: long hours of repetitive work, isolation, hardship, trapped by low wages and unscrupulous employment practices, and no power to change any of that. I wondered what time was left for enjoyment, or if life was one long slog from beginning to end; and then I set aside Feargus’s family and moved on to other lines.

It was years later – early 2019 – when the riddle of Feargus’s Irish connection was solved. It came while I was reading John Waller’s The Real Oliver Twist – the true story of pauper apprentice Robert Blincoe. Part two (p.79) begins with a quote – and I gasped when I saw the name:

‘Scores of poor children, taken from workhouses or kid-napped in the streets of the metropolis, used to be brought down by […] coach to Manchester and slid into a cellar in Mosley Street as if they had been stones or any other inanimate substance.’

Feargus O’Connor (1836)

I looked him up… and realised I had known Feargus O’Connor all along – I learned about him in ‘A’ Level history at school, and in view of the Leeds connection (below) we would have spent some time on him, but my brain had mostly opted to remember the activities of ‘Orator’ Hunt.

Stipple engraving portrait of Chartist leader Feargus Edward O'Connor.
Feargus Edward O’Connor (c.1796-1855)
Stipple engraving portrait by unknown artist
Source: Wikipedia. This file has been extracted from another file, Public Domain

Feargus Edward O’Connor was an Irish landowner and lawyer, elected as M.P. for Cork in 1832. (Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, so his seat was in Parliament at Westminster.) In 1835 he was re-elected but disqualified on the grounds that he had insufficient property to qualify as an M.P. (although it seems that was not so). It was from this time onwards that he began to agitate for radical reform in England, speaking at rallies and meetings and emerging as the leader of the Chartist cause. He campaigned for the ‘Five Cardinal Points of Radicalism’, which would later be five of the six points embodied in the People’s Charter. In 1837 he founded the radical Northern Star newspaper in Leeds; and then in 1840 was arrested for sedition, serving fifteen months in York Castle gaol.

1840 was the year my adoptive great great grandfather was born. His parents’ choice of name – Feargus O’Connor Heppenstall – speaks volumes. It turns out they did know the conditions in which they were working were unjust. They could imagine a better life. And what’s more, they knew of developments throughout the country and the movement for change; and through the work of Feargus O’Connor, they saw a way to achieve that. It turns out their lives were not so little after all. They were fighting for a better world at a time when that was much-needed; and I am proud of them.

In fact my tale is awash with Feargus O’Connors, all of them in Leeds. As a young man my adoptive great great grandfather Feargus made his way to Leeds and became a butcher. His adopted son, my great grandfather George, would go on to name his own first son Feargus O’Connor Heppenstall too, although I don’t think George was a political man, and believe this was a tribute to the man he considered his father rather than to the Chartist leader.

The original Feargus O’Connor was not a man without controversy. Undoubtedly charismatic, he was admired for his energy and powerful oratory, but also criticised for advocating physical force if necessary in order to achieve his goal of universal male suffrage. In this, he went further than the moderate line taken by other Chartists.

I was reminded of all this last week, while watching videos recorded by experts for All About That Place. One such expert was Mark Crail, who has a website and a blog about Chartist Ancestors, as well as a separate website about Trade Union Ancestors. There is also a page dedicated to the Six Points of the People’s Charter. Some of the articles focus on Chartism in different parts of the country; some on leaders. There are quite a few blog posts dedicated to Feargus O’Connor’s life and work. If your ancestors were in the industrial heartlands during the nineteenth century, or if you know they were active in the Trade Union movement, you might be interested to explore these sites.

This is what I love about family history. The most ordinary seeming people can have surprising stories to tell if you delve a little deeper. It is through these stories that we can learn about the lived experiences of people in different places, classes and at different times throughout our history.

All About That Place

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Advertising image for All About That Place, featuring the words 'Join All About That Place, a unique challenge event #OnePlace'

Today is Day 2 of All About That Place. I’m sure at least some of you will already know about it, and have been watching videos. I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am. For everyone else… this is time sensitive information!

All About That Place is a ten-day event to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Society for One-Place Studies. It has been developed through collaboration between the Society of Genealogists, the Society for One-Place Studies, Genealogy Stories, and the British Association for Local History. However, other organisations are sponsoring specific days.

The event is being run via a pop-up Facebook Group and YouTube channel. I couldn’t find a pop-up YouTube channel specific to the event but was guided via a request for information on Facebook towards the Society of Genealogists channel. However you access the videos, they last approximately ten minutes each, and a new one appears every hour of every day, between 8am and 7pm British Summer Time. However, the time is not critical, since each video will remain online until 1st October, after which some will disappear but others will remain a little longer – only until later in October though… which is why I said this is time sensitive. By late October this post will be obsolete…

There are over a hundred pre-recorded talks to watch. They are free. My plan was to watch only the ones that interested me, but so far almost all of them have done so. I didn’t expect this to be as brilliant as it is! Clearly a great deal of work has gone into organising it.

The talks so far have looked at maps, including some great websites where mapping resources are available – some of which I’m sure you’ll already know, but others will be new to you. There have also been introductions to the kinds of resources specific organisations hold, and how they can help you in your research, like the Society of Genealogists. Some videos are about specific One-Place Studies.

As this is all about the Society for One-Place Studies, what they really want is for you to be fired up and start your own Study. They are reporting a good few new registrations already, so from that perspective this has already been a success. However, the enthusiasm amongst people participating, hosting or like me just watching is tremendous. Although all these origanisations are in the UK, people are watching from other parts of the world, and some of the One-Place Studies are in other parts of the world too.

Do give it a go!