Citing your sources

Posted on 11th Aug 2026 by English Ancestors

My last post was about the Genealogical Proof Standard. It focused on four of the five elements of the Standards:

Reasonably exhaustive research;
Analysis and correlation of the collected information;
Resolution of any conflicting evidence; and
A soundly reasoned, coherently written conclusion.

The remaining element, left for consideration in today’s post is this:

Complete and accurate source citations.

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What do we mean by ‘citation’?
A citation states the source of information used in a piece of writing or research. It typically includes the author’s name, title of the work, publication date and publisher. However, genealogical citations differ from this standard, in that they must pinpoint the exact physical location of a unique, handwritten record.

Why are citations so important in genealogy?
A family tree with no supporting evidence could be built on castles in the air. Indeed, some family stories do turn out to be castles in the air. What we need is to prove the facts of an ancestor’s life one way or the other; and for that we need evidence. My last post focused on using various sources in conjunction to build a reasoned argument and conclusion. However, before these various documents can be transformed into the evidence we need, we need to be sure that every single document is traceable. Citations are how we do that.

Citing your sources therefore provides:

Essential information giving you a way of finding the same documents/ evidence again quickly
Proof of your conclusions
Essential information for someone else looking at our work and deciding whether they can trust our conclusions. This might be another family historian now, or in the future. If they can see what we looked at, they can also see what we didn’t look at. Perhaps something we missed, or didn’t know about. Possibly something that has come online since we did our research, or maybe something that’s available only at the local County Record Office that we were not able to visit.

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The Art and Mystery of Citations!
But how do we create a citation. How do we know what to put in it?
For a long time citations puzzled me. I understood entirely why they were necessary but had no idea how to construct one. They seemed to be some sort of magic spell. You had to have all the right words, and all in the right order, but it seemed you had to be a member of the Magic Circle to be in on what the words or the order were.

With more understanding and experience, eventually it dawned on me. The precise order of the words is not what’s important. To a certain extent even absolutely specific words are not always important. What is important is the information we provide. But how do we know what information is important? And when is a citation ‘complete and accurate’?

What a citation needs to include

the precise identifying details of the document (points 1-4 below)
where the original of that record is kept, and their reference for it (5-6 below)
where you saw it (7-8 below)

Breaking that down, it looks like this:

The name of the person to whom the record relates
The purpose of the record, e.g. baptism or probate and the date
The body/organisation that created the record, e.g. church (which one and where), school, the General Register Office
What, precisely, it was that you saw, e.g. the original papers, a microfilm copy, a transcript
Where the original record is kept, e.g. The National Archives, the local County Record Office, the town’s Local History Library
The title given to the record set in that repository, and the reference they use for it
Where you saw it, e.g. at the County Record Office in person, online at FindMyPast. In other words, your Source
If online – the date you accessed it.

Based on that, a citation for a baptism record would look something like this:

John Robert Payne, Baptism Register entry, 17 February 1791, Bloomsbury, St George. Original located at: The London Archives: London Church of England Parish Registers, Reference P82/GEO1/002. Source: www.ancestry.co.uk Accessed 14 July 2026

Note that if you’re studying a recognised genealogy programme, or if you provide work for a publishing house, or if you work for a larger organisation dealing with genealogy, they will have their own precise way of creating citations, and you will have to comply with that. If you’re not, you’re at liberty to create citations that make sense to you. You may find your own word order that you like better than mine. What matters is what’s included, and being consistent and understandable to anyone else in the future.

Where does the information about the archive and their reference details come from?
If you’re working online, there should be details of the original data along with the version of the record that you’re looking at. You may need to look around the transcript information linked to the record to gather all the information you need.

On Ancestry, if you key in the name, year and location for the John Robert Payne baptism, that record will be close to the top of those returned. Click on the ‘Record’ (not the image) and scroll down. You’ll see ‘Source Citation’, and that’s the information I’ve used for the ‘Original located at’ part of my citation. I have changed the words ‘London Metropolitan Archives’ to ‘The London Archives’ because the name of that archives has recently changed.

On FindMyPast the information is to be found when you click to view the Transcript of the record, but it’s not presented in such a way that you can just copy and paste. You have to gather the required information from several lines.

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If you are working at the archives this information will be on their own catalogue. You will need the reference number to request the documents, and the document itself or the box in which it’s stored will show the reference number.

Example:

Charles Burden Baptism Register entry, 31 January 1813, St Helens. Source: original parish register at Isle of Wight County Record Office: ST.H/REG/BAP/1A

Why do we need to include ‘precisely what we saw’ in the citation?
Below are three records. They are presented here in the order I found them. That was more than a decade ago, but it was some years between locating the first and the last of the three.

Apologies for the poor quality of the first document, which has faded terribly over the last 200-plus years. The first column says “bap 15th; born 13th”. Then we have “James Sword son of Tho[ma]s & Sophia Mann of this parish, Weaver, and the signature of the officiating priest.

Thomas is my 3x great grandfather, but my 3x great grandmother is Lucy, not Sophia. When I found this I assumed Sophia had died, perhaps shortly after son James was born. I looked for a death for Sophia but couldn’t find one. Some time later I bought the civil Birth record for my 2x great grandfather, son of Thomas and Lucy and was surprised to find that Lucy’s maiden name was Sword – the same as James’s middle name. So was Lucy the sister of the Sophia in this record? (A second marriage to the sister of his deceased first wife would not have been legal at that time.)

At around the same time I found this:

James Sword Mann, Baptism Record entry (Index transcript), 15 August 1819, Norwich. Source: “England, Births and Christenings, 1538-1975”, database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/) Accessed 14 July 2026

This is from FamilySearch’s record set England, Births and Christenings, 1538-1975. On their website they now refer to this as a ‘Legacy Collection’, meaning no more records will be added to this set. It was intended as an index of records, rather than a full transcription of the records themselves. However, since FamilySearch is a free-to-use website, it offers easy access to records that may be unavailable to anyone without a subscription to a commercial genealogy site; and indeed, if your locality of interest does not have a licence arrangement with one of the commercial websites for digitising and offering their parish registers online, it may be the only means of gathering information about your ancestors.

It’s difficult to give a full citation including the original data location unless you already know it because that information is not included on the citation FamilySearch ask you to include, which is this:

“England, Births and Christenings, 1538-1975”, , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:N1MZ-5HW : 4 February 2023), James Mann, 1819.

This doesn’t fit with my own preferred citation layout. It doesn’t give the actual source of the original information (Norfolk Record Office). Also, since the volunteers creating this Index were required to fit all information into prescribed boxes (fields), a very important piece of information has been omitted. A map dating from the exact year of the baptism of James Sword Mann shows that there were 36 parish churches in the historic city in that year – in an area a little over one square mile – and in earlier times there had been as many as 63 parishes. At the Norfolk Record Office, all of these records are arranged by parish, and we really do need to have that additional information if we are to locate the original record.

Moving on…
The final record was first brought to my attention by a distant cousin working on the same line. I had the first of these three records in my collection; he had the final one, below. What I had was the Bishop’s Transcript, a contemporary copy of the original entry on the parish register, sent to the Bishop at the end of the year. What he had found was the original entry on the parish register.

We can see that the information sent to the Bishop was absolutely correct. It is identical to the original. However, seventeen years later, the parish clerk added the following text to the original:
“This [Chris]t[ia]n name sh[oul]d be Lucy as appears to me from street enquiry Geo[rge] Pearce 14 Aug 1836]”

This solves the original mystery about who Sophia is. ‘Sophia’ is Lucy! It was a mistake. It does of course create another mystery: why on earth was the parish clerk cross-referencing the 1819 Baptism Register in the year 1836?!

The point of all this is that each of these records purports to provide information about the same event, and yet all have different information. The original has a mistake. This mistake was faithfully copied over on to the Bishop’s Transcript in 1819. It was also copied onto the modern Index created by FamilySearch. Seventeen years later the error was corrected on the original, but not on the Bishop’s Transcript; and even though the indexer may have been looking at the original record with the correction, they did not include the additional words which really do change the significance of this record. They were also not able to include the actual parish. This is why we need to cite exactly what we saw. Was it the original? Was it the BT? Was it a transcript? Was it a full transcription or an Index? Did we see the actual original document or were we looking online, or perhaps we viewed a microfilm image of it. Any one of these variations may be significant; and in future years a better version coming to light may change our conclusions.

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For other types of document, this basic layout of the details + what/ where the original is + where you saw it can be adapted, sometimes in reduced format. For example, a family bible with lists of births and baptisms could be cited as:

‘Joe Brown, baptised (date), (location). Information transcribed from family bible in the possession of his 2x great granddaughter Margaret Jones.’

If creating your own citations is new to you, try piecing one together using the elements I set out above, and looking online for the additional information.

The Genealogical Proof Standard

Posted on 11th Jul 2026 by English Ancestors

The Genealogical Proof Standard is an internationally accepted guide for establishing the reliability of a conclusion reached in genealogical research. It’s a vital concept for professional genealogists, but all family historians should be aiming for this standard. After all, our goal should always be to ensure the people we’re researching are actually our ancestors.

There are five elements to the Genealogical Proof Standard:

Reasonably exhaustive research
Complete and accurate source citations
Analysis and correlation of the collected information
Resolution of any conflicting evidence
A soundly reasoned, coherently written conclusion.

In today’s post I’m going to work through an example to illustrate the first, third, fourth and fifth elements. Discussion of citations will follow in my next post.

My research objective here is to answer this question:

What happened to Mary Ann Ingham after the death of her parents?

Mary Ann is my 2x great aunt. I first came across her about twenty years ago, in the relatively early years of online genealogy records. I lost track of her following the death of her parents. I do like to follow through on siblings of my direct line, but back then, Death Certificates were available only as paper copies, and the cost of buying speculative certificates for siblings of my ancestors was prohibitive. Today, a digital download of the same information costs just £3. So it’s time to take another look…

What I already know about Mary Ann

Mary Ann is the older sister of one of my great grandmothers, the second of six children born to my 2x great grandparents. Her entry on the GRO online Birth Index indicates that her birth was registered in the December quarter of 1850 in Hunslet. This means it was registered between 1st September and 31st December, but the birth could have been up to six weeks before that.
1851 Census. Mary Ann’s age is recorded as 5 months. The date of the 1851 Census was Sunday, 30 March 1851, suggesting she was probably born in October 1850. It may be a couple of weeks out, but it’s good enough for my needs.
1861 Census. Mary Ann is ten years old. In the final column, where information is requested regarding whether any person is ‘Blind, or Deaf-and-Dumb’, we learn that Mary Ann has been ‘Deaf from Birth’.
1871 Census. The family have moved from Hunslet to New Wortley. Oldest sister Maria has married, and two younger siblings have died since the last census. Mary Ann, aged twenty, is listed without an occupation. Possibly this is because of her deafness. Her mother is listed with an occupation outside the house, suggesting that it is Mary Ann who takes care of the house.
1881 Census. Only Mary Ann and the youngest sister are now living at home with their parents. Both daughters are employed as Cloth Finishers.
1991 Census. The youngest sister has married and moved away. Mary Ann, now forty years old, is living at home with both parents. She has no occupation outside the home, and once more the final column includes the information that she has been ‘Deaf from childhood’.
Mary Ann’s father died in October 1892, and her mother in July 1894.

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My ‘Reasonably Exhaustive Research’

First, what are the possibilities?

Mary Ann might have married after 1894. She was only 43 years old when her mother died, and first marriages at this age, perhaps to a widower, were not uncommon. If she did marry she would be recorded on the 1901 Census with a different surname. However, Mary Ann’s deafness does seem to have been a significant disability for her.
She might have died before the next census, 1911.
She could still be single in 1911, recorded on the census with the same name, and living alone or with another person or family.

Her immediate whereabouts was soon established when a search on Ancestry found her living in 1901 with her older sister Maria, plus Maria’s husband and family. She had been there all along, of course, and I had that record linked to Maria and her family. However, because Mary Ann was recorded on that document as ‘Sister-in-Law’ to the head of household she wasn’t included when the record attached automatically to family members. Twenty years ago I missed this; and of course after all this time I had forgotten.

Perhaps this living arrangement might have continued, but in January 1903 sister Maria died. What happened next?

Q. Did Mary Ann move in with either of her surviving sisters and their families?
A quick check on the 1911 Census for both of these indicates that, certainly by 1911, she was not living with either of her sisters.

Q. Is Mary Ann on the 1911 Census elsewhere – alone or with someone else?
No. Searches on Ancestry and FindMyPast for Mary Ann Ingham, born 1850 +/- 2 years in the Leeds area returned no searches.

Q. Did Mary Ann marry?
Searches on Ancestry, FindMyPast and FreeBMD for a marriage for Mary Ann Ingham, between 1901 and 1921 and in the Leeds area (using several local Registration District names for FreeBMD) returned two records:

A Mary Ann Ingham married either John Bradshaw Mann or Charles Watson April-June 1903. The other man married Annie McCaragher
A Mary Ingham married John Hardaker January-March 1904

Digital images of these marriages are not available online, nor as digital downloads. Therefore without buying the civil records (which I did not want to do, as each would cost £12.50) I needed to identify these people using other online records, and find a way to discount some or all of these marriages.

A search on Ancestry for Charles Watson, location Hunslet, and filtering for any record between 1901-1911 returned the following birth record:
Charles Hilary Watson’s birth was registered October 1906 in Hunslet. Keying these details in at the GRO online Birth Register index, I found that the mother’s maiden name was McCaragher. I now know that Charles Watson married Annie McCaragher, therefore it was John Bradshaw Mann who married Mary Ann Ingham in 1903.

A search on Ancestry for John Bradshaw Mann, location Hunslet, and filtering for any record between 1901-1911 indicated that this couple too had named their firstborn child after the father, and the GRO website confirmed that the mother’s maiden name was Ingham. I now had a birth year for a family member: 1906, and could use this additional information to locate the family. Although it was extremely unlikely (to say the least) that my now 55 year-old 2x great aunt Mary Ann would have given birth, finding the actual age of the Mary Ann that married John Bradshaw Mann would enable me to discount this marriage. A search of the 1911 Census for John Bradshaw Mann, location Hunslet and birth year 1906, proved fruitless. However, by removing the ‘Bradshaw’, 5 year-old John Mann was located, along with his father John Mann and his mother Mary née Ingham. Mary was born in Hunslet but was only 31 years old. This is not my Mary Ann.

A search for John Hardaker, also for Mary Hardaker after the marriage, proved more difficult:

Since the birth of children had proved to be a fast-track method of discounting the marriages so far, a search was carried out on the GRO online Births index for a child with the surname Hardaker and mother’s maiden name Ingham, any location, for the years 1904 to 1920. This search was carried out for females and males. There were no births.
Next a search on Ancestry and FindMyPast for Mary Ann Hardaker, born 1850 +/- 5 years. This search filtered first for the 1911 Census and then on Deaths 1904-1914. There were no records.
Then a search on Ancestry and FindMyPast for John Hardaker. With no year of birth for John, the birth year search parameters were set for 1830 to 1870. There were some John Hardakers on the 1911 Census but none had a wife named Mary.

This search was inconclusive. A John Hardaker had married a Mary Ingham in 1904 but they seem to have disappeared. That said, my Mary Ann has consistently been referred to in all records located to date as ‘Mary Ann’, rather than simply ‘Mary’. On this basis it seems likely that this is not my Mary Ann, but that does not amount to evidence either way.

Q. Did Mary Ann die before the 1911 Census?
A search for Mary Ann Ingham on the GRO online Death Index for the years 1903 +/- 2 years and 1907 +/- 2 years signposted the following record. The details were generally a good fit for Mary Ann, although the age is two years out. I paid my £3 and downloaded the image. If the informant – the person reporting the death to the Registrar – was a family member whose name I recognised, I would know for sure that this is my Mary Ann. Unfortunately this was not the case. Mary Ann died at a local infirmary after a fall, and the informant was the Coroner for the City of Leeds. (Click for BIG)

Residences
Can we ascertain anything from the usual address of the late Mary Ann Ingham on this Death record? She was living at 22 Oswald Place in New Wortley. We can compare this to other records for herself and the two Ingham sisters, Maria and Jane:

In 1901 Mary Ann was living with her sister Maria and family at 22 Oswald Terrace.
In 1901 sister Jane and her family were living at 12 Oswald Place. They would be at the same house in 1911 and 1921. This is a close family!
After Maria’s death, her husband is recorded as living in 1904 at Danube Terrace.
Therefore the usual residence of Mary Ann in 1909, as given on her Death Certificate, is just a few doors from her sister Jane.

This is not ‘proof’ that this Mary Ann and my Mary Ann are the same person. However, it does add weight to the likelihood.

OS 25-inch England and Wales: Yorkshire CCXVIII.5: Revised: 1906, Published: 1908. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. National Library of Scotland Maps.

Mary Ann’s burial
Finally, a search on the FindAGrave index gave me the definite proof I was looking for. It revealed that this Mary Ann Ingham, who died on 11th December 1909, was buried on 17th December 1909 at New Wortley Cemetery. This is the same cemetery where my 2x great grandparents had been buried in 1892 and 1894. The records reveal that Mary Ann was buried in the same plot as her parents.

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Analysis and correlation of the collected information

It was important to start by establishing all of the possibilities, and then to work through them until such time as one established the certainty I was looking for. It was almost certain that Mary did not marry after 1901, yet she was not located on the 1911 Census as Mary Ann Ingham. We must always be aware of faulty transcriptions and missing entries, therefore the absence of a record is not in itself proof.

Moving on to the Death record, this was generally a reasonable fit for Mary Ann. However, the age is wrong: Mary was 59 in December 1909, not 61. This, together with the absence of a family member on the record meant it too did not provide certainty, although combined with the information about addresses it pointed to a ‘strong likelihood’ that this was my Mary Ann.

Although I could say the research carried out to get to this point had been reasonably exhaustive, there would have remained the possibility that my conclusion was not correct. In such cases we must always be receptive to any new information, and be prepared to review and change our interim conclusions. I could, for example, have accepted this as the likely death for Mary Ann, but could have reviewed newspaper archives for any news items about the death, or about the Coroner’s Inquest. I could also have explored whether the Coroner’s notes were available at West Yorkshire Archives. The truth is that, for a 2x great aunt, I would probably not have ever got around to doing this, but there might have been other circumstances where having absolute proof was important.

In the event, none of this was necessary. The final piece of evidence is that the Mary Ann who died on 11th December 1909 was buried one week later in the same plot as my 2x great grandparents, Mary Ann’s parents. This is certainly my Mary Ann.

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Resolution of any conflicting evidence

The only part of the evidence that is actually conflicting is Mary Ann’s age at death. It can be explained by the fact that the information was given by a family member – perhaps sister Jane, or perhaps one of Mary Ann’s brothers in law, or the younger sister who lived a short distance away, also in New Wortley. The person giving this information made a mistake. As a piece of conflicting evidence it no longer matters, since we have found our actual proof via other documentation.

That said, there was a lot of conflicting information in the hints showing up on Ancestry.co.uk. These hints formed two completely different ‘stories’. First, another Mary Ann Ingham of almost exactly the same age, living in an area that ‘made sense’ in the context of the Ingham family’s movements, and with the same father’s name, was married at Leeds parish church in 1867. It would have been easy to fall into the trap of accepting this as my Mary Ann, and giving her a completely false life, were it not for the fact that (a) records showed that my Mary Ann was still living with her parents, and (b) there was just one detail on the marriage record indicating that this was a different family: the father’s occupation was different.

The second lot of hints consistently confused Mary Ann with her older sister, Maria. In fact none of the hints actually related to the correct Mary Ann Ingham.

This illustrates and emphasises an important point:
Information on hints and on other people’s online trees is never ‘reasonably exhaustive research’.
People make mistakes. Hints are, at best, just ‘hints’: suggestions. They are there for you to explore and see if you agree, but they are based on what other people with the same family names have added to their trees. Unfortunately, the more people who accept this often false information and add it to their trees, the more determined the algorithms will be to persuade us that the records on offer are the right ones.

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A soundly reasoned, coherently written conclusion

The analysis above supports the conclusion that Mary Ann Ingham died on 11th December 1909. After the death of her mother in 1894 Mary Ann lived with her sister Maria and family, and afterwards seems to have lived very close by her sister Jane, but not in the same house. Reading between the lines, Mary Ann’s deafness seems to have prevented her from living life to the full outside the family, to the extent that she seems, at some point, to have taken on the main household duties while her mother earned a little money away from the home. Mary Ann’s sisters seem to have looked out for her, and it is touching that they had her buried with their parents. It would be interesting to explore what deafness from birth meant for a person in the second half of the nineteenth century. What assistance and education would have been available? Was Mary Ann able to attend a school offering facilities for deaf children? Or perhaps she had no education at all.

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The final point to make here is that this was necessarily a fairly straightforward example of ‘Reasonably Exhaustive Research’. The wealth of records we have after the introduction of Civil Births, Marriages and Deaths in 1837, and with the advent of the decennial Census, alongside the parish records and other documents such as Coroners’ Inquests, newspaper accounts and so on, means we can generally be sure when our search has been reasonably exhaustive. Earlier than this, it gets harder. ‘Reasonably Exhaustive’ may run into scores of hours, and in the end may not find an answer, or may result in a ‘likelihood’ rather than proof. Nevertheless, the principles are the same: Set your objective; Define your questions; Search, Analyse, consider any Conflicting Information, and be prepared to Revise your Conclusions if new information comes to light.

Finding John Mann’s family: a case study

Posted on 11th Jun 2026 by English Ancestors

John Mann was born 26th December 1792 and baptised four days later at Norwich St Michael at Thorn. He is my 4x great uncle, but for years I knew nothing more about him. He seemed simply to have disappeared. Eventually, a set of military discharge papers came online via FindMyPast.¹ Through them I learned something really exciting: My 4x great uncle John was at the Battle of Waterloo!

A close reading of the nine pages of his discharge papers provided the following information:

He enlisted with the Royal Horse Artillery in 1807, when he was fourteen (…so that’s where he went!)
He served at the Battle of Waterloo as a Driver (meaning he rode a horse, working as part of a team that pulled cannon, ammunition limbers, and wagons), after which he served in France as part of the Army of Occupation
All other service was in England and Ireland; no dates or locations were given
On 1st July 1820 he was promoted to the rank of Trumpeter
He was discharged on 30th September 1832 after treatment in the Royal Ordnance Hospital following a fit of palsy fourteen months earlier, in Dublin.
There were testimonies from several high-ranking officers: John was held in high regard.
One tantalising piece of information was a comment from Lieutenant Colonel Whinyates, who stated that John had a large family and had ‘brought them up in a most creditable manner’.

Tantalising, of course, because I had absolutely no idea of any of their names, nor where they were born, nor even how many children there were. Since the discharge papers are dated 1832, these children were clearly all born before the introduction of Civil Births, Marriages and Deaths, and before the first name-rich decennial census in 1841. Clearly, the marriage, too would have taken place before these changes.

My research objective was to use all these clues to find John, his wife, and all his children

But where to start?
John Mann is a common Norfolk name. The only search parameters I had were “John Mann” + “born Norwich 1792” with effectively a nationwide search. The search was further compromised by a tendency for modern transcribers to get this surname wildly wrong. e.g. Although original spellings are always Mann or Man, I have seen it indexed as ‘Cooke’.

One more document was on my radar. There was a John Mann of the right age with the right birthplace living in Leeds at the time of the 1851 Census. There was no evidence at all to confirm that this was my John Mann, and in fact my assumption was that it was not. John was the brother of my 3x great grandfather who had been a silk weaver in Norwich, migrated to Blubberhouses in Yorkshire for work, and eventually moved to the Leeds area for work at a large mill in Holbeck. It seemed too tidy that his brother John, having led quite a different life, would coincidentally have ended up living just a mile away in the same large northern industrial town, for no apparent reason. If I were to be able to accept this as my John Mann, definite corroborative evidence would be needed.

A stroke of luck: locating the 1841 Census entry
The eventual location of the 1841 Census entry for a John Mann and family in Leeds permitted further research. It had not previously been identified because it had been indexed on Ancestry.co.uk as “Marson”. This document was key: all later discoveries about John and his family flow from it.

John Mann (age 45, occupation: ‘M[ale] S[ervant] & Army P[ensioner]’) was living at Brick Street, Leeds, with Mary (45), Emma (15), William (15) and John (10). William and Eliza Hallawell (both 20) were at the same property. Birthplaces are significant: John senior’s birthplace was England or Wales but not Yorkshire, while John junior was born in Ireland: his age and birthplace fit with information on John senior’s Discharge Papers which indicate he was in Ireland prior to and until July 1831. Everyone else was born in Yorkshire.²

This was almost certainly the same couple previously identified in the 1851 Census: John Mann (58, occupation ‘Groom Pensioner’) and wife Mary (54), residing 21 Brick Street. Therefore John, born Norwich, c.1793, now receiving a pension, had worked with horses in a military capacity. Mary’s birthplace was Pontefract. Age discrepancies are explained by the 1841 census instruction to enumerators to round down the ages of people over fifteen years to the nearest five.

Information flowing from death records
Neither John nor Mary being located on the 1861 Census, both were found on the General Register Office (GRO) Death Index and local cemetery register (Beckett Street), and also a photograph of the headstone. John, 58, died 17 September 1851, and was buried 21 September. Still resident at Brick Street, the occupation recorded was ‘servant’. Mary, dying 30 August 1857, was buried 2 September. She was 62/63 and widowed. Both were buried as Nonconformists.

The headstone image³ provided further useful information:

Son John died 17 June 1849, aged 18. This ties in with the 1830-31 birth in Ireland.
Grandson Arthur William Cudbartson died 4 September 1855
Walter Ernest Hallewell died 6 March 1857, aged 17 months.
Hallewell being the second surname at the family home in 1841, this suggests the Eliza Hallewell on that record is the oldest child of John and Mary, and that William Ernest is her son. It also suggests Cudbartson as the married name of daughter Emma. All new information from the headstone was verified by GRO Birth and Death Indexes. Both birth records indicate mothers’ maiden name of Mann.

These suspected marriages were then confirmed by parish register entries (online digital images of original documents).

Eliza married William Hallewell 18 July 1840 at Leeds
Emma married Charles Frederick Cudbartson 8 April 1849 at Leeds
Son William married Elizabeth Taylor 15 March 1847 at Rothwell

Pontefract: baptisms
Armed with marriage details we can now identify Eliza, Emma and William in the 1851 Census. (Online digital images of original documents.) This provides us with the actual birthplace for each, which of course is not available on the 1841 Census. The various entries indicate the birthplace for all as Pontefract, Yorkshire.

This new information regarding specific birthplaces facilitated location of baptisms:

Eliza: Eliza, 25 June 1820
Emma: 10 Nov 1822
William: 11 April 1824

All three baptisms took place at Pontefract St Giles/ St Mary. The marriage of John Mann and Mary Dawson is recorded at the same church on 6 September 1819. As noted above, Pontefract is also Mary’s birthplace.

Apart from son John who died 17 June 1849, aged 18, and is known to have been born in Ireland, only one more son has been identified as the child of John and Mary. A birth record for Alfred Robert Mann was located on the GRO Index. The mother’s maiden name of Dawson is correct. Alfred Robert died in August 1840, aged fourteen months. The ‘abode’ recorded on the burial record is Brick Street, which matches the 1841 and 1851 Censuses. The baptism and burial services at St Peter’s Wesleyan Chapel, are consistent with the move to Nonconformity, suggesting John and Mary’s own religious burial records may also be found here.

Detailed examination of the Pontefract registers reveals no further children for John and Mary there. This might point to miscarriage, stillbirth, simply no pregnancy, or removal to Ireland, where son John was born, 1830-31. Without a precise location, no attempt has yet been made to locate John’s or any other baptism/burial in Irish parish records. Indeed, any such records may not have survived. If there were other children, their births would have predated the introduction of Civil Births, Marriages and Deaths; and given that the movements of John and his family are not fully known, finding all additional children could not be guaranteed. Certainly, no other children survived to adulthood.

Using the same records to develop John’s military timeline
The Pontefract baptism and marriage records outlined above also provide information about John’s Royal Horse Artillery career. Not only do they suggest he was stationed there for the years the children were born; the register entries themselves record details of his progress within the Royal Horse Artillery. Only Emily’s and William’s baptisms record John as Trumpeter. This supports evidence on the Discharge Papers of his promotion on 1 July 1820, and that was six days after Eliza’s baptism.

These records evidence that John was stationed in Pontefract from before September 1819 to some time after April 1824. Wider examination of Pontefract baptism registers from 1818 to 1830 shows that between 1820-1825 forty-eight babies of fathers serving with the RHA were baptised. After this, baptisms reduce to just four in 1826-27, and then none. This could point to mobilisation to Ireland circa 1827.

Ongoing research
It is interesting that this research into John started with a little information on his military Discharge Papers – just enough clues to permit corroboration of, and following through on, the information on the Leeds Census documentation. That information, followed up with newspaper reports, military records and wider reading, then enabled the placement of John within a specific Troop during the years after Waterloo and before his discharge in 1832. What has not yet been possible is locating him within a definite Troop at Waterloo, although this has been narrowed down to two. Within the next year I plan to do more research focused on the Royal Horse Artillery troops to try to locate him at a specific place in Ireland, and also to try to find out more about the two troops at Waterloo. After that I would like to visit Waterloo. The circle would be completed if this information also helped me to locate a baptism for son John in Ireland and perhaps any other births of children at the same location.

However, for now, I’m happy to have achieved something that, initially, I didn’t think would be achievable. I have followed up on a single phrase on John’s discharge papers: that John had a large family and had ‘brought them up in a most creditable manner’, and I have tracked down him and all those children. One thing I wish I knew, and never will: did John and his brother Thomas (my 3x great grandfather) each know the other was in Leeds? I like to think they might, but both arrived there by complete coincidence and it’s entirely possible that they lived a mile or so apart for eight years without ever knowing the other was there.

This is the resulting family tree. Click for a better view.

John Mann, Royal Hospital Chelsea: Soldiers Service Documents 1760-1854, Original data: The National Archives WO 97/1249/78. Source: www.findmypast.co.uk ↩︎
John Marson [Mann], 1841 England Census. Original data: The National Archives, Class: HO107; Piece: 1347; Book: 2; Civil Parish: Leeds Town; Enumeration District: 24; Folio: 20; Page: 2. Source: www.ancestry.co.uk ↩︎
John Mann, Family burial plot, UK and Ireland Find A Grace Index entry with headstone photograph, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/234824558/john-mann ↩︎

Shackleton’s Fold: Exploring the area

Posted on 30th Apr 2026 by English Ancestors

This is the second video post in my Shackleton’s Fold One Place Study series.

A One Place Study brings together aspects of family history, local history and even house history. They are often carried out by family historians looking to learn more about their ancestors. A One Place Study might add new records, broaden out the focus or just bring a new perspective to our research.

Shackleton’s Fold was a small ‘street’ of just nineteen houses that stood in the New Wortley area of Leeds for more than ninety years. It was demolished by the end of the 1930s. In the video linked below I use maps and old photos to try to explore the area where it once stood.

I found this process so useful in helping me to imagine what Shackleton’s Fold was like. Poring over old maps and finding photographs of buildings all around the Fold – alas none of Shackleton’s Fold itself – really helped me to focus.

I hope this video will be of interest to family historians, local historians and people doing or thinking of doing a One Place Study. In addition, people with a general interest in Leeds history, specifically the history of New Wortley may find it interesting.

I’m particularly keen to attract other family historians whose research has taken them back to Shackleton’s Fold between the mid 1840s and 1938. Alongside this visual exploration, I’m in the process of creating a database of every person on the censuses and every voter listed on the electoral registers. I’m looking for stories and photographs and would be very grateful if anyone could help out in that regard. I’ve already found some interesting stories.

If you fall into any of these categories, or know someone who does, please do share a link to this post and/or the YouTube link – and please ‘Like’ the video if you have a YouTube account. I hope you’ll find it useful.

Information and Links for photos and maps used

All photographs from Leodis: https://Leodis.net
Go to Advanced search and key in the ID given.

JR Holmes and Star Maltings on Wortley Road, 1965. ID: 2003729_72382754
Star Maltings and Shackleton’s Fold on Wortley Road, 1965. ID: 2003729_99482364
View from St John’s Street to side view of Star Maltings and former Shackleton’s Fold, 1965. ID: 2003729_88186282
107-109 Whitehall Road, with view of St John’s Street, 1965. ID: 2003729_31147402
Whitehall Road School and Kildare Terrace, 1948. ID: 5624
Whitehall Road School, 1948. ID: 2818
Whitehall Road at the junction with Gelderd Road, Trolley and Tram Junction, undated but possibly 1911. ID: 2011127_173010
St John’s Sunday School (bombed 24th/25th August 1940). ID: 200828_166072
St John’s Street, from L to R: 11 to 15, 1965. ID: 2003729_52465457

Tithe apportionment of Wortley (township in the parish of Leeds)
1846. The National Archives, Kew. Reference: IR 29/43/444

Ordnance Survey Maps located at National Library of Scotland Maps: https://maps.nls.uk
Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

OS: Leeds Sheet 13: Surveyed: 1847, Published: 1850. (Railway revision to c. 1862)
https://maps.nls.uk/view/229947003

OS: Leeds Sheet 17: Surveyed: 1847, Published: 1850. (Railway revision to c. 1854)
https://maps.nls.uk/view/229947015

OS 25-inch England and Wales: Leeds – Yorkshire CCXVIII.5.13: Surveyed: 1888, Revised: 1910, Published: 1911
https://maps.nls.uk/view/229947306

OS 25-inch England and Wales: Yorkshire CCXVIII.5: Revised: 1906, Published: 1908
https://maps.nls.uk/view/125642449

O.S: Yorkshire CCXVIII.5: Revised: 1932 to 1933, Published: 1934
https://maps.nls.uk/view/125642455

In search of Shackleton’s Fold (and other lost places)

Posted on 26th Mar 2026 by English Ancestors

Ordnance Survey: Leeds Sheet 13: Surveyed: 1847. Published: 1850.
Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland
https://maps.nls.uk/view/229947003

The last post I published in my ‘Ancestral Tourism’ series focused on preparing for visiting former ancestral homes and business premises that are still standing. I said I would cover trying to locate buildings no longer in existence in a future post.

This is that future post. It finishes my Ancestral Tourism theme, and also forms part of my One Place Study on Shackleton’s Fold.

In this video linked below I provide two examples from my own family history of using maps, censuses, technology and sheer determination to work out where a property used to be. The first example is in Birmingham’s Deritend and Bordesley; the second is Shackleton’s Fold. If you have ‘disappeared’ houses in your ancestry, I hope you’ll find it helpful.

Please do ‘like’ it if you have a YouTube account. You could even ‘Subscribe’ to the channel if you want. It’s free. 🙂

As far as the Shackleton’s Fold theme is concerned, there will be at least two follow-on videos (currently in preparation). The first of these will use maps and old photos to focus on the area where it stood. In the second I turn detective and try to gather as many clues as possible about what Shackleton’s Fold looked like.

If you have ancestry in Shackleton’s Fold, New Wortley, Leeds (1840s-c.1938) and have an interesting family story about it, or a photograph of the street, I would love to hear from you. If you don’t have ancestry there but have access to a photograph of the street, again, please do contact me.

*****

The maps used in this video came from the National Libraries of Scotland Maps website, and as part of their permission to use I’m required to provide a link to each of the maps. Although I did put this information at the end of the video, these were not usable as hyperlinks to the original map online. I therefore provide all map information and links below.

Borough of Birmingham by J. Pigott-Smith: Sheet 190, Published: 1855
Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons)
This map is also available at the National Library of Scotland:
https://maps.nls.uk/view/260803014

Side by Side Map: Google Maps, 2025:
Part of New Wortley, Leeds

The following maps are reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland:

OS: Leeds Sheet 13
Surveyed: 1847, Published: 1850. (Railway revision to c.1862)
https://maps.nls.uk/view/229947003

OS: OS 25-inch England and Wales: Yorkshire CCXVIII.5
Surveyed: 1888 to 1890, Published: 1893
https://maps.nls.uk/view/125642446

Ancestral Tourism 4: Houses & Business Premises

Posted on 14th Nov 2025 by English Ancestors

This is part four in my ‘Ancestral Tourism’ series. It follows on from Part 1: Churches and Churchyards, Part 2: Municipal & other Public Cemeteries and Part 3: Graves and Gravestones. The focus in this little series is on planning ahead so that you can spend the time when you’re there exploring, wandering, taking photographs and soaking up the vibes of the place.

In this post we’re looking at preparing for visiting former ancestral homes and business premises that are still standing. Trying to locate buildings no longer in existence will be covered in a future post.

Before you go

How do we know where our ancestors lived?
A range of documents may include the specific address or property name, or other clues as to the location of a former home or business of our ancestors. Examples are:

Church records, such as Baptism, Marriage, Burial and maybe wider parish records
Civil Registration: Birth, Marriage and Death Certificates
Census records
Correspondence between the person and an official body, sometimes found in archives, e.g. National Archives
Directories
Electoral Rolls
Family business records
Family documents, including letters and perhaps a family bible or other religious text
Immigration and Naturalisation documents
Military Records, including attestations and next of kin
Newspaper reports
Poll Books
Probate Records, Wills, etc
Property and Land records, including deeds, local tax, etc
Public and Municipal Cemetery registers
School records

It’s certainly easier to track our more recent ancestors.
For earlier generations, even where we find an abode in the examples above, often an exact ‘address’ was not used. A street name without house number, or for smaller places even just the name of the village or hamlet may be the closest we’ll get. During the second half of the 19th century we find more documents that include information to guide us to a specific property. Earlier this year I visited Kinver in Staffordshire, where my 2x great grandfather and some of his siblings were born. The image below shows the extent of Kinver now, as viewed from the churchyard high on a hill above the village. The main High Street, dating from medieval times, is clearly seen in the image. Most of the properties beyond that are more recent. ‘Somewhere in this photo’ is the closest I will ever get to knowing where my ancestors lived here – but I’m happy with that.

Kinver viewed from the church. © Janice Heppenstall

Beware! House names and even house numbers can change
Even when documents do bear a house number or name, these may have changed – particularly if there was much additional building in the twentieth century. I researched the history of a house built around 1837 in what is now a built-up area of the Isle of Wight. The house number is 21, and my clients had already done some research into the nineteenth century inhabitants of ‘number 21’. However, using maps and other documentation I found that the house became number 21 only in the early twentieth century. For the first eighty or so years it was number 3. The change had become necessary to accommodate new building over the previous decades.

Similarly, a few years ago, I visited York to see my family’s properties there. Census records had my 4xG grandparents at 58 Stonegate. I found the property and photographed it, but afterwards realised Stonegate had been renumbered. Eventually I worked out that their shop (and the floors above above, where they lived) had been this well-known corner plot, below, that was later taken over by Banks & Sons. I had been sitting right opposite this shop (in Betty’s tearoom, for those who know!) without knowing it was my ancestral home. It took a lot of research to work this out. But this is what happens when we don’t do our homework before we set off! Now I have to go back to York to step inside this lovely shop. Luckily, visiting York is never a chore.

An early twentieth century scene from York, showing part of Stonegate and featuring the corner shop at that time occuped by Banks and Sons Music Sellers. York Minster is visible in the background — Junction of Stonegate with St Helen’s Square, York. Image in public domain, photographer unknown.

Changes in house name can be even more difficult to work with, particularly if several houses on the street seem to have changed name, and possibly more houses may have been built between the original ones.

So how can we be sure we have the right house?
Here are some ideas.

Photographs
If you’re lucky you may have an old family photo of the house. Even photos of people standing outside a property may provide visual clues in the form of distinctive architectural features. You can then use Google Street View to ‘walk’ along the road to find the property, if it’s still there.

Family and Local History groups on Facebook are also extremely useful for identifying the exact location of a photograph. I once witnessed someone posting an ancestral holiday snap and asking if anyone knew where in the world it could be. Within fifteen minutes it was identified as beneath a specific lamp post in a named piazza in Rome!

It’s also worth exploring whether there’s a website with old photos of your area of interest. The best one I know is Leodis, a photographic archive with over 62,000 images of Leeds, managed by the Local and Family History team at Leeds Libraries. I have found many old images of houses my ancestors lived in on there – in streets that now no longer exist. If you know of such a website for any of your areas of interest, please do share in a comment.

Maps
Mention has already been made of Google Street View. Modern day maps – including Google and other online maps – can be scrutinised alongside historic maps. My go-to place for online Ordnance Survey maps is here: https://maps.nls.uk/os/ I’ve written before about their Side-by-Side maps, but there are many other features. Something you could do is find a detailed historic map (the 25 inches to one mile series if possible) on the nls site, and see if you can compare the shapes of buildings then to existing buildings on satellite view now.

‘Walking the route’ with the census enumerator
With no photos and only documents to go on, it may be possible, using modern and contemporary maps, to ‘follow the route’ of a census enumerator. Using landmarks and occurences of smaller streets, you may be able to find the house, or at the very least to work out its general whereabouts, even if it’s not possible to narrow it down to a specific property.

Getting to know the neighbours
Using census returns for the street where your ancestors lived, it might be possible to track any changes in housenames or numbers of specific families whose occupation spans two or more decades. If the Jones family live at number 42, the Smiths at 44 and the Browns at 46, and then ten years later the same three families are at 58, 60 and 62, it is more likely that the numbering has changed than that all three families relocated together further along the same street. You can do the same thing far more accurately by consulting Electoral Registers. In the example above of my clients’ house starting out as Number 3 and eventually becoming Number 21, I could see from the Electoral Registers that this change happened in 1931. However, Electoral Registers are often not accessible online, meaning this may be something you could do only when you arrive in the area. Local archives and central libraries will usually have these registers.

What if your family’s presence predates the census?
Below is part of Starbotton, in Upper Wharfedale, where my period of interest, before 1750, predates the census. Before going I ‘walked the route’ using Google ‘Map View’ on one device and ‘Street View’ on another to be sure to cover the whole village. By the time I visited, last summer, I knew this small village like the back of my hand. However, I had no idea which house had been owned by my 8x great grandparents and later their son, my 7x great grandfather. Apart from church records and similar, indicating that the family lived in ‘Starbotton’, I was very lucky to come across a collection of property reports made over the years by the Yorkshire Vernacular Buildings Study Group. These, in turn, drew upon other property documentation at the County Record Office. I was able to identify several specific houses formerly owned by my wider ancestral family in Starbotton, and to pay special attention to them when I visited. I never did find out where my 7x and 8x grandparents lived, though, and it’s possible their house may no longer be standing. However, I can name the late seventeenth century inhabitants of around half of the properties, and I know that most of mine lived in the part of the village pictured below.

A rural village scene with seventeenth century stone houses surrounded by hills and trees — Part of Starbotton, Upper Wharfedale, Yorkshire. © Janice Heppenstall

When you arrive

If the occupants were in the garden I would probably chat to them, tell them about my connection and ask permission to photograph the house from the street. If they wanted to know more about who lived there I would tell them. If they were not there I’d take the photos anyway. Just taking a few photos, wandering up and down the street, touching the wall… I find all these things bring me closer to my ancestors who lived there.

If your ancestors had a shop or public house, if the school they attended is now a business centre, or if for some other reason their former home or premises are open to the public, it would be lovely to step inside and spend a little time there.

I also enjoy seeing historic buildings and landmarks that my ancestors would have known, and just getting a feel for the area and the local history. You can do this even if the house they lived in is no longer there.

Depending on the size of the place you’re visiting, and its historic importance or embracing of tourism, you might be able to pre-book a tour with an accredited guide.

If you can’t get there

It really does make a difference going there, but if that’s not possible, just doing the research outlined above will leave you knowing a great deal more about your ancestral homes and the localities they lived in. You can also take a screen shot of your ancestral properties using Google Street View, and of course connect with online and local groups to find out more and see if anyone has any photos.

*****

If you have other ideas please do leave a comment.

Getting the most from cemetery records

Posted on 24th Oct 2025 by English Ancestors

Today’s post is an interloper amongst my little ‘Ancestral Tourism’ series. It follows on from Part 1: Churches and Churchyards, Part 2: Municipal & other Public Cemeteries and Part 3: Graves and Gravestones. I’ve stepped away from the ‘Ancestral Tourism’ series here because this is something you can do online, whether you visit the grave or not – although it is, of course, also great preparation for a trip to the actual cemeteries.

The aim here is to show how the information from various records relating to burials, and even the same records on different platforms – including the gravestone itself if there is one – can be combined to give a greater depth of knowledge and understanding about an ancestor and their family. This technique of layering up information from different records works equally well with other aspects of an ancestor’s life, of course, but here I’m focusing on burial.

I hope this will be of interest to readers researching at Intermediate level, or moving on from Beginner to Intermediate level.

First, a comparison of records from two different cemeteries

Precisely what is included on the record varies from one cemetery to another, and possibly from time to time. I can illustrate this by comparing burial records for two of my ancestors: a 4xG grandmother and a 2xG grandmother. Both died after the introduction of Civil Birth, Marriages and Deaths, and I had already located the death entries on the General Register Office (GRO) online register, and bought one of the Death Certificates.

What the records include
This first record is from York’s Fulford Cemetery. It includes so much information that there is no need to buy a Death Certificate. CLICK FOR BIG!

Burial record of Sarah Wade, 14 Mar 1860, Fulford Cemetery York. Source: FamilySearch.org York: Cemetery Records 1837–1871, image 363/812

Here, we see that Sarah Wade, bottom entry, was buried in the York Public Cemetery at Fulford Road in 1860. She has the burial reference ID of 11,365 and is interred in Grave number 3837. She died on 9th March 1860 and was buried on 14th March. Sarah was 75 when she died and was the wife of John Wade, gentleman. They lived in Stonegate, York, but the number of the property is not given. Cause of death was pneumonia. The informant was Edwin Wade of 4 Coney Street, York. The final column is the name of the officiating minister.

There is more to this information than meets the eye. Sarah is the wife of John Wade. This means he is still living. You can see that the entry above Sarah’s describes the deceased, Emily Johnstone, as ‘Relict of the late Spearman Johnstone, Gentleman’. A less formal term would simply be ‘Widow’.

The second and third entries in this extract are both men. One is a Captain in the Militia; the other a Fishmonger. Men, then, are described by their Trade, Occupation or Profession. Women are described by their marital status, or ‘condition as to marriage’. The top entry is a child. Children are described as ‘Son/Daughter of’ followed by the father’s name.

The informant is not John the husband, but another man with the surname Wade, therefore probably related. He is in fact the oldest son of Sarah and John, and he is clearly used to signing documents with a flourish!

*****

The next record is from Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds. The cream line just indicates where I have removed several lines from the page because it’s only Annie E Cass that we’re considering here.

Extract from a burial register dated 1926. The original image has been edited to remove several entries, leaving only the top one, plus the headings for each of the columns, and the record of Annie E Cass who was buried on 17th December 1926. — Burial record of Annie E Cass, 17th December 1926, Beckett Street Cemetery, Leeds.
Source: ancestry.co.uk Leeds, England, Beckett Street Cemetery, 1845-1987

In this record we see that Annie E Cass, bottom entry, was buried at The ‘Leeds Burial Ground’. This is the same as ‘Beckett Street Cemetery’. She was buried in the consecrated portion on 17th December 1926. Address at time of death was 76 Institution Street, Leeds. Annie was 76 years old and a Widow – again, we see that the top entry, a man, is described by his profession. Annie in fact ran a business after her husband’s death 28 years earlier, but this is not mentioned. The penultimate column is for the signature or name of officiating clergyman or minister, and finally we have the Grave plot number, which is 9419.

There is not as much information as on the Fulford Cemetery entry above. We don’t have an informant or date of death, and the late husband’s name is not included. We also don’t have a cause of death. To cover all bases on this one we might want to purchase the Death Certificate. What we do know, however, is that Annie was buried in the Consecrated Portion of the cemetery. She was therefore Church of England. (I already knew that as I have her baptism record, but sometimes every little helps!)

*****

Gathering information from several documents and platforms

Now I’m going to home in on Annie, or Annie Elizabeth Cass to use her full married name. I want to see if I can add to my knowledge and understanding of her life and family by looking closely at all the records I can find relating to her burial.

The information from FindAGrave (below) is a transcript compiled directly from Annie’s burial entry above. You can see that all the information is accurate, but the marital status is not included, and it is not clear whether Annie died on 17th December or was buried on that date. This is why seeing the original is always preferable, but if that’s not possible, a transcript is infinitely better than nothing. In fact I do already know that Annie died on 14th December, because I did previously buy a copy of her Death Certificate. I also know that she was in hospital when she died, not at her home in Institution Street; and I know which of her children was the informant, and his address at the time – which in turn tells me he was still living in December 1926.

Screenshot from FindAGrave showing information about the burial place of Anne E Cass, including the location of the plot and a transcript of information from the original burial register. — Extract from FindAGrave showing burial information for Annie E Cass. © FindAGrave

So why did I bother looking at FindAGrave?
In this case I had two reasons for doing so:

I wanted to see if there was a photograph of the gravestone;
I was creating a list of all my ancestors and their children buried at Beckett Street Cemetery, and since I already had information from the GRO online register about the deaths of each, the search process on FindAGrave is much quicker and easier than searching on Ancestry. The resulting list is below:

A table created in Word with a list of people, all with the surname 'Cass', and other information about each of them, specifically about their place of burial.

By compiling a list of all my ancestors and their children at this cemetery I was able to see which ones were buried in the same plots as other family members. Here, I identified six members of the Cass family, all in Plot 9419. I made similar lists for all my family members at various public and municipal cemeteries. This will make it easier to navigate the cemeteries when I visit.

The fact that Annie Elizabeth and her husband John William Cass were able to purchase a family plot tells me something about the financial situation of this family. Many of my ancestors at this time couldn’t do so. I already knew they had a family business so this was not a surprise. I expected, too, that there would be an inscribed headstone. However, although many of the entries at FindAGrave are accompanied by a photograph of the grave, this one isn’t. My plan was to take a photograph when I visited myself.

Additional information on Friends of Becket Street Cemetery website
This was the point I had reached when I wrote my last post, about Municipal and Public Cemeteries; and that was when I found the fantastic Friends of Beckett Street Cemetery website.

Using the public search facilities on the Friends website, and bearing in mind I already had a lot of information about this family, including the plot number where they are buried, I was able to do the following:

View the cemetery register. I already had access to this register via my subscription to Ancestry.co.uk. so there was nothing new for me personally here.
Locate the grave on a map of the cemetery.
Locate the grave on a spreadsheet. Here, it is recorded that in fact there is no headstone for the family plot. This surprised me.
The spreadsheet also provided a tantalising promise of some extra information. I found there were seven people buried in this plot, rather than the six I already knew about. However, to see the list of people (and more) I needed to become a Friend of the cemetery. This costs £10 per year. Bearing in mind the number of ancestors I have in this cemetery, and the good work the Friends do, this was worth it.
Having paid the membership fee I could now view the names of all occupants of this plot, and use various methods of searching the dedicated Beckett Street Cemetery database, which yielded better results than searching on the huge Ancestry database.
There is also a virtual walk along the various paths so that you can locate and see the plot you’re interested in.

**Obviously, every ‘Friends Of’ group will provide different search facilities.**

Here’s the new information I got about this family, and how I was able to use it

The first thing to note is that the ‘Person ID’ on the FindAGrave website is a ‘FindAGrave’ ID. The cemetery Person ID/Reference is different, so I have amended my lists to include both.

Next, I was anticipating the the unknown additional person could be a missing child. My research showed that Annie Elizabeth lost four of her children in infancy, but on the 1911 Census she wrote that she had lost seven children and had six still living. I knew this to be inaccurate, because seven of the children were still living in 1911. However, this still suggests two missing babies. Might one of them be buried in the family plot?

Alternatively, could the extra person be Annie Elizabeth’s oldest daughter. Aged 40, she was still living with her mother in 1911 but was nowhere to be found in 1921. Had she died? It seemed inconceivable that she wouldn’t have been buried in the family plot.

The extra person turned out to be Annie Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, Elizabeth Cass. Elizabeth died in 1878. She is the mother of Annie Elizabeth’s second husband, John William Cass, and they are not my ancestors. Although I had her name and some brief details from a census record I had not researched her. This record provided her burial dates and also her address, which was the same shop and living quarters above the shop that I knew to be the home of Annie Elizabeth and husband John William Cass in the 1870s.

This prompted me to look for a burial record for Elizabeth’s husband, William Cass, located quickly on the Friends of Beckett Street Cemetery website. He too had died at the same address, five years earlier. Using death certificates and baptism records for several of Annie Elizabeth’s children, I was able to calculate that she had moved into the shop with her husband and children after the death of Elizabeth’s husband/ John William’s father. The possibility that they had taken over an existing family business was not something I had previously considered.

As for the missing deceased children – the little ones are still missing. I suspect Annie Elizabeth may have included stillborn children in her totals. I have long suspected that women did this on the 1911 Census as a way of commemorating their children who never had a proper burial.

However, this new information also prompted me to renew my efforts to find Annie Elizabeth’s oldest daughter. I found she had married shortly after the 1911 census and in 1921 was living with her husband and a daughter, whose life I will now have to follow through.

How strange that all this should be resolved as a result of examining cemetery records! Plus I am now a member of the Friends of Beckett Street Cemetery!

It all goes to show we should examine closely, keep an open mind, follow all leads and cross-reference. I hope you’ve found this useful, and that it might prompt you to look again at some of your mysteries.

Ancestral Tourism 3: How to read a cemetery

Posted on 23rd Sep 2025 by English Ancestors

Ryde Cemetery, Isle of Wight. © Janice Heppenstall

This is the third in my ‘Ancestral Tourism’ series, and follows on from posts about preparing for visiting Churches and Churchyards and Public & Municipal Centuries featuring in our ancestry. In those previous posts, the focus was on knowing the history, finding the records and then finding any maps of the churchyards and cemeteries. In this post we’re going to be ‘reading’ the burial ground. What can we deduce from the location, the headstone (or absence of a headstone), the symbolism and anything else that will give us clues as to our ancestor’s life and social standing?

Please be prepared before applying what follows to your own family that there is a possibility that not all your ancestors will have well-kept headstones in peaceful and picturesque settings within the churchyard or cemetery. Some may have been buried with unrelated people in common graves, with or without a headstone. This is part of their story, and the story of the times in which they lived, but it can be upsetting to find.

Consecrated or Unconsecrated?

As outlined in my last post, from the middle of the nineteenth century the Burial Acts required that half of any new Municipal or Public cemetery was to remain ‘unconsecrated’. The other half would therefore be ‘consecrated’. What does this mean?

Consecrated

Dedicated to a sacred purpose; made sacred; hallowed, sanctified.

Dedicated, ‘sacred’ to a tutelary divinity.

figurative. Sanctioned by general observance or usage.

Oxford English Dictionary (Online)

Although the online Oxford English Dictionary gives the above definition, in relation specifically to burial grounds in England and Wales it is a centuries-old term referring to land that has been blessed and set apart for Christian burial according to the rites of the Church of England (in Wales now, Church in Wales). ‘Unconsecrated’ referred to any portion not blessed or made sacred according to those rites. Before the mid-1800s, when most burials took place in the graveyard of the parish church, the official burial had to be conducted by an Anglican clergyman in accordance with the Church of England prayer book service. This applied even to those who had, in life, followed different religious practices. However, such people were not eligible for burial within the Consecrated area of the graveyard. They were buried in a separate Unconsecrated section. This applied also to babies who died before they were baptised and, before 1823, to suicides.

Also mentioned in my last post, the development of the new Public Cemeteries from the 1820s and Municipal Cemeteries from the 1840s coincided with a greater acceptance and recognition of different religious practices. Here, the term ‘Consecrated’ was kept but now, in the ‘Unconsecrated’ portion of the cemetery, the burial service itself was likely to have been carried out in accordance with the rites of the deceased’s religion. Today there is greater recognition of the different rites and practices developed by different religions and cultures in commemorating their dead. Although some dedicated cemeteries exist, there are also separate areas for specific faiths within public cemeteries. However, back when our ancestors were being buried it was simply ‘Consecrated’ or ‘Unconsecrated’, and eventually over time the terms ‘Anglican’ and ‘Nonconformist’ came to be used. Although in England and Wales today we use the latter term for Protestants who are not part of the Church of England, in earlier times it was used for anyone whose religious beliefs differed from the established church, the Church of England. It therefore referred also to Roman Catholics, for example. As can be seen from the image above and that below, separate registers were kept for these two sections of the cemetery.

Follow the clues

Finding your ancestor in one or the other may come as a surprise. If so, this is extra valuable information about your ancestors. Precisely what it tells you will depend on the context. For example, all in the same cemetery:

My Irish-born 2x great grandfather’s burial is recorded on the very page you see above. He was buried in the Unconsecrated part because he was Roman Catholic.
My 4x great uncle’s burial is also in the Unconsecrated part. This is because he and his family worshipped at the Wesleyan chapel.
I had a question mark about the denomination of an ancestor from Ulster. He was buried in the Consecrated portion of the cemetery, but his first child with his English, Anglican, wife was baptised in the Roman Catholic church. His burial seem to settle the question… or did it? There remains the possibility that he was simply not a church goer, and by the time of his death his adult children just didn’t know he was actually Roman Catholic.
The burial of another 2x great grandfather in the Anglican part of the cemetery in 1898 was interesting because he took his own life. This gave me a reason to research the burial of suicides. Suicides had traditionally been buried at a crossroads, sometimes with a stake through the heart. The Burial of Suicides Act, 1823, banned such practices. It permitted burial of suicides in consecrated ground, but only at night and without a Christian service. With the passage of the nineteenth century came a greater understanding of mental health, and the term ‘Of unsound mind’ came to be used by Coroners. In 1882, the 1823 Act was repealed, and replaced with the Internments (felo de se) Act. This permitted the burial of those who had taken their own lives at any hour and with the usual religious rites, including in a churchyard at any hour. However, suicide would not be decriminalised until 1961.

Burying in style!

There were great differences between the funeral and burial practices of rich and poor. For the wealthy, this could be a no-expense-spared event from start to finish: an opportunity to be seen to be ‘doing things properly’ according to the etiquette that had grown up around funerals. Obituaries in the newspapers will give you an idea of the size and scale of a grand funeral.

In the cemetery there are more clues. These include the location of the grave. A prime position with good views cost more. It may also have been possible to pay extra for a nine foot deep grave rather than the usual six feet, although you won’t be able to see that from the grave itself. A deeper burial was thought to help preserve the body.

A range of funerary monuments were also available, ranging from mausolea, cenotaphs, tomb chests and sculptures to headstones and more simple marker stones. Historic England have produced a guide to Caring for Historic Cemetery and Graveyard Monuments which includes descriptions of the various types.

If you’d like to know more about a whole range of roles, customs and traditions linked to death and funerals, Friends of Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds have compiled an excellent overview of Victorian funeral traditions and etiquette. Some of these would have been de rigeur amongst the wealthier folk but others applied more widely. Even when I was growing up I remember people closing the sitting room curtains after a death in the home.

Symbolism

Victorians loved symbolism, and the various monuments and gravestones were the perfect canvas for this form of expression. On their website, Arnos Vale Cemetery, Bristol, make the point that when larger public cemeteries started to appear, much of the population was not literate. The symbols found on graves made them more meaningful for someone who may not be able to read the words. Even today, if we understand the symbolism, a whole new layer of understanding opens up to us as we walk amongst the gravestones. Perhaps there might be clues on the gravestones of some of your ancestors, letting you know what was important to them and their loved ones. You might even come across some symbolism pointing you to membership of the Freemasons or similar, which would then open up a new line of research for you. The Funeral Directors association and Family Tree Magazine have also published useful lists of symbolism and meanings.

It was a surprise to walk around Ryde Cemetery after reading them and to note the symbolism on a lot of the stones and monuments. This ‘broken’ column represents a life cut short, and the anchor symbolises EITHER hope, steadfastness, and the secure connection to God or eternal life OR a seafaring life, perhaps with the Navy – or perhaps both. Since Ryde is on an island, either is possible and now I’m thinking I should have spent longer and read the inscription to find out more…

Symbolism of elaborate headstone in Ryde Cemetery, Isle of Wight. Image © Janice Heppenstall

Different types of grave

For those with the ability to pay for a private grave, there were:

single plots, intended for one person in a coffin
companion plots, intended for a couple, perhaps side by side
family plots, where several members of the same family can be buried together.

A certificate or “grave paper” documented the purchase. (I have one of these, purchased by a 2xG grandfather on the death of his wife in 1875.)

A purchased plot does not necessarily mean our ancestors will also have purchased a headstone, so you may need to navigate to your ancestor’s final resting place with the aid of only the plot number and a site map. The location of such plots, amongst others with headstones, should enable you to differentiate them from the common graves detailed below.

One of the motivations for the publicly-funded Municipal Cemeteries was the ability to provide for all social levels, including some lower cost options so that the labouring classes could afford to bury their dead with dignity.

A Common grave was a plot that belonged to the cemetery, not an individual or family, and was used to bury unrelated people. There were several different types of common grave, and the costs for the different types varied:

Lock-up graves: these were the cheapest type of grave. They were filled over the course of a few days as more bodies became ready for burial. Between each burial the soil was not replaced. Instead, a wooden ‘door’ was locked in place over the grave. When the grave had the required number of deceased people, the earth was piled on top. These were also called Open graves.
Public graves: like lock-up graves, these were filled up as newly deceased unrelated individuals became ready for burial. The difference is that these graves were refilled with earth after each new burial. They were therefore a little more expensive.
Note that ‘Pauper’s grave’ was not an official term and probably more rightly refers to the burial administration rather than to the grave itself – a Pauper’s burial. Essentially, before 1834, paupers were buried at the expense of the parish, and after that at the expense of the Board of Guardians. There was no unnecessary expense. The actual grave would have been one of the above types of common grave with no inscription, probably a lock-up grave where that was an option. Local authorities remain responsible today for the burial of a deceased person leaving no funds for a funeral and no one else to arrange it.
Inscription graves: For a small additional fee, a deceased person could be buried in a common grave but with a headstone inscribed with the name, date of death and age of every occupant. Some of the headstones may have had bodies arranged on both sides with inscriptions on both sides of the stone. These are a feature of the municipal cemeteries in Leeds – in fact every reference I have come across online relates to Beckett Street or another of the Leeds cemeteries. Here, they are known as ‘Guinea Graves’, that being the original cost of burial in one of these Inscription graves. If you are aware of this type of grave (Inscription or Guinea Graves) elsewhere in the country, please leave a comment saying where and by what term they are known – thanks.

Guinea Graves at Hunslet Cemetery © Stephen Craven at Wikipedia Commons

Some notes

For overseas readers (or very young British readers, perhaps!), a guinea was a British coin, originally minted in 1663 with a value of £1 (One Pound). Eventually it came to have the value of £1 – 1 s (One pound one shilling, i.e. 21 shillings). Even after the guinea coin ceased to circulate, the term remained as a unit of account worth 21 shillings. As late as the 1970s it was used for the quoting of professional fees and luxury items.

I have previously written about how to ‘read’ a Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery [here].

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I have become rather more fascinated with municipal cemeteries than anticipated! My next post will be about getting the most from different cemetery records, before returning in the post after that to Ancestral Tourism: houses and places our ancestors knew.

Ancestral Tourism 2: Public & Municipal Cemeteries

Posted on 2nd Sep 2025 by English Ancestors

This follows on from my last post: Ancestral Tourism 1: Churches and Churchyards. It focuses on locating and visiting graves of our ancestors whose final resting place is in one of the large municipal or other public cemeteries in our towns and cities rather than in a church graveyard.

First, a bit of history

The emergence of large public cemeteries is an interesting part of our social history, connecting with several other developments of the nineteenth century that will be familiar to local and family historians. The migrations and population booms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created not only a lack of housing for the living but also of burial grounds for the dead – and all the more so in the growing industrial towns and cities. The historic churchyard burial grounds posed problems on several fronts: they were generally small, overcrowded, often laid out in a haphazard manner; and as knowledge of hygiene and sanitation developed, there were concerns about the spread of disease, particularly since in towns and cities these small burial grounds were generally alongside the church and surrounded by closely packed housing.

The initial response to this problem was to turn to the private sector. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s a number of ‘garden cemeteries’ were established to serve big industrial towns, including Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle and later, London. These cemeteries were private commercial ventures set up under individual Acts of Parliament. They were large, well-planned spaces, often designed by the same architects and landscape designers who created public parks. Some of these garden cemeteries may be well-known to us. They include Highgate in London, Undercliffe in Bradford and Arnos Vale in Bristol.

Some of the early cemeteries were developed by and for Nonconformists. As outlined in my last post, the general practice was for Nonconformists to be buried in the parish churchyard and the service officiated by the Anglican vicar. Many prominent philanthropic capitalists were Nonconformists, and by this time were able to use their wealth and influence to bring about changes including, here, the freedom to bury their dead and conduct services according to their own beliefs and traditions. Well-known Nonconformist cemeteries include Chorlton Row Cemetery in Manchester, which opened in 1821, Low Hill Cemetery in Liverpool, opened 1825, and Woodhouse Cemetery in Leeds, 1835. It is interesting to note that it was around the same time that the State removed control of recording births (or rather baptisms), marriages and deaths (or rather burials) from the Church of England and placed that responsibility with a new General Register Office: the introduction of Civil BMDs in 1837.

Generally speaking, though, these cemeteries were money-making enterprises, serving the upper and middle classes. There was no increase in provision for the labouring classes. The response from some local authorities was to develop more cemeteries but funded by public money. Early examples are St Bartholomew’s Cemetery in Exeter, which opened in 1837, Beckett Street and Hunslet Cemeteries in Leeds, both opened 1845, and Southampton Old Cemetery, 1846. This was the beginning of the Municipal Cemeteries – publicly funded, and owned/ managed by the local corporation.

The Metropolitan Burial Act of 1852, and other Acts of Parliament that followed, empowered local authorities to establish public cemeteries and close previous overcrowded burial grounds. The new cemeteries would have uniform hygiene standards and procedures for burial, would cater for all social levels, including some lower cost options for decent burials, and would offer burial options with dedicated areas for people of all religious affiliations. Half of any new cemetery was to remain unconsecrated, allowing for burials without the Church of England service. Later, in 1879, the The Public Health (Interments) Act made it a duty of local health authorities to provide cemeteries if local conditions required it.

Historic England have produced a List of Registered Cemeteries, arranged in date order. Information is provided for each, including design, designer, whether private or municipal, and important or interesting features.

There is also a nationwide map published by the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management which includes every cemetery and crematorium in the land. I’ve checked out all the ones I know and they are all present and correct.

Since there is a similarity in records of these different types of public cemetery, the following notes about how to plan for your visit is intended to cover all of them. There are in any case differences from one cemetery to another, regardless of how they came into being.

Planning your visit

Allow plenty of time for this – there is a lot of research and planning to do!

Locating the records

Needless to say, the first thing you need is to know the cemetery in which your ancestor is buried. We’ll start by looking at who holds the records, moving on to which of them might be online.
Since Municipal Cemeteries are managed by the local authority, it is they who hold the records for these cemeteries. Often, this team is known as ‘Cemeteries and Crematoria’, or ‘Cems and Crems’ for short. You can find them online by using either of these phrases as search terms and adding the name of your town or city of interest.
Some local authorities offer a look-up service. For example, Leeds Cems and Crems provide a list of all cemeteries, together with opening date. They require the name of the deceased, the date of burial and the cemetery, and will ‘check the records and if the information is correct […] let you know the grave number and section or where in the grounds the cremated remains were strewn.’ Some Cems and Crems teams charge for this service; others do not.
Some local authorities have databases available online so you can check for yourself. For example, Birmingham Cems and Crems have separate online searchable databases for each of their twelve cemeteries.
Privately owned cemeteries keep their own records. Information can be accessed via their websites. For example, at the time of writing, Highgate Cemetery charges £40 for a search. However, they also state that copies of all their records are free to consult at Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre.
That said, digital images of the records of some cemeteries are available online. You might find records from your cemetery of interest on your genealogy subscription website; or try looking on FamilySearch. From the home page navigate to Search > Images > insert the name of your place of interest and then select the appropriate era from the drop-down list. From here, you will have to scroll through to see if the records you need are included, and if they are, you will need to browse through the images of the records. Knowing the death date or at least month of death will speed things up. I found all the records from York’s Fulford Cemetery on here – and they are excellent!
Transcripts of the records of your cemetery of interest may have been included on FindAGrave (free to use). I have found on there most of my ancestors and their families who were buried in a municipal cemetery, but it is primarily run by volunteers so is inevitably a work in progress.
There is also DeceasedOnline, which helps burial authorities and crematoria to convert their register records, maps and photographs into digital form and bring them together into a central searchable collection. There is a fee to see the individual records, and I have not used this website, but it is there as an option should you wish to use it.

Locating a Map of the Cemetery

The cemetery records will hold certain essential information about your ancestor: name, address, date of burial, occupation. There may be more information, but this little lot will enable you to identify the person and be sure it’s your ancestor. There will be one other very important piece of information: the number of the grave or plot where your ancestor is buried.

Armed with this, what you need now is a map. And on this point it’s a question of digging about online. Here are some places to look:

The cemetery’s own website, if they have one. Example: York’s Fulford Cemetery provide section maps on their website.
Local authority Cems & Crems may have pages for each of their cemeteries, possibly including maps. Example: Isle of Wight have plot maps of all their cemeteries available for download, for a fee.
A lot of the cemeteries have ‘Friends’, and these often have a website with maps. Examples: Friends of Beckett Street Cemetery have an astonishingly good series of online tools to help you locate and navigate your way to your ancestor’s plot. These include locations of plots, numbers and names of occupants in each, whether there is a monument or gravestone, and whether this has been photographed. A different approach is taken at Friends of Southampton Old Cemetery. They provide assistance in locating graves and request a small donation towards their conservation work. Some ‘Friends’ groups have even carried out research into the lives of those buried in the cemetery.
Local history or heritage groups may have websites with maps. One the best set of static maps I have found to date is for Ryde Cemetery by Ryde Social Heritage Group. Every plot is shown with the names of the occupants.
The local Family History Society may have mapped the cemetery. Example: Isle of Wight.
There may be a site map at the cemetery itself, but you will need to know this in advance to avoid disappointment.

Going alone or with a companion
In the course of researching this post I have located every one of my ancestors and all of their children buried in Municipal and Public Cemeteries. Armed with this information, including details of family plots, plus a better understanding of the significance of each of the cemeteries, I feel sufficiently well-informed to be able to make a decision as to whether to inflict a visit to any of them on my nearest, dearest, yet genealogically disinterested. Based on this, I consider one cemetery in Leeds with a single family plot of interest to be acceptable, and another in York with just three relevant family plots. The rest have far too many plots that I would need to visit; and although one – Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds – may be acceptable on grounds of social history, I simply couldn’t put anyone else through the monotony of locating and visiting the number of graves. Definitely, these will have to be solitary trips for me.

Part of the problem leading to this decision is that although the nineteenth century cemeteries were intended as public landscapes, and are of great historic and heritage value, lack of funding means that many of them have now become neglected. It is here that ‘Friends of’ the individual cemeteries provide a valuable service, carrying out conservation and environmental work and delivering ecological benefits – but not every cemetery has a Friends group, and some are less active than others.

You might find that the ‘Friends of’ your cemetery of interest provide tours from time to time. It might be possible to arrange your visit to coincide with that, then stay on afterwards to visit your family’s graves. Interesting for you and they will appreciate the income.

If you can’t go

There is so much information to be found online. By doing the research outlined above, making full use of online material and even, where possible, via the ‘Friends of’ website, FindAGrave or a Facebook page, requesting a photo. You can also search online for images of the cemetery. Adding “wikimedia commons” to your search term will return a selection of images that are free to use provided you credit the photographer.

Be forewarned though that the inscription on images is not always legible. This could be because of sunlight conditions on the day, severe weathering over time, or possibly just because of the quality of the image when reduced for web use. The following wonderfully clear image is from FindAGrave, but some of the images of my family’s gravestones cannot be read at all.

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I hope this has given you some ideas for how to plan for a visit to a Municipal or Public Cemetery. Researching it has certainly focused my mind and I’ve found it fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that I will be slotting in an extra couple of posts about cemeteries before progressing to finding about former homes and business premises of our ancestors in the post after that. 🙂

Hierarchies of evidence and thinking outside the box

Posted on 9th Aug 2024 by English Ancestors

I was recently asked to do some research to assist with an application for British citizenship by descent. Clearly, something like this requires a very high degree of certainty in the evidence, and doing it prompted me to compare my own standards of evidence to that expected by the Passport authorities.

Not all ‘evidence’ is equal
Essentially, government authorities are interested in official documents: Birth, Marriage and Death Certificates; official Immigration documentation; dated Ships’ Manifests; Naturalisation documentation; and official documentation for any name changes. There is a clear difference between these types of documents, made during or just after the event and reported to an official person or office, and documents requiring the individual or their representative to give information many years later. In the latter documents, the information may be inaccurate, mis-remembered or even false. We have to give higher credence to the former.

Working on this research I was mindful of the ‘Windrush generation’: people from the Caribbean who were invited to the UK to help rebuild post-war Britain between 1948 and 1971. A few years ago, many of these people had their legal status in the UK called into question. Some were deported back to their country of origin where, after five or more decades in the UK, they had no connections, no close family and little or no personal history. I was confused. They had been paying taxes and made pension contributions: they must have left a solid paper trail. It’s just a question of gathering together school records, NHS, National Insurance numbers, births of children, bank records and so on… right?

It transpired that the reason for these problems was that the Home Office did not keep records of the ‘Windrush’ people to whom it granted indefinite leave to remain in the 1970s. Consequently, they were now requiring each person to provide four pieces of evidence for each year they had been in the UK. If any of them could not do this, or if they had left the country for a period of two or more years and had not applied for UK citizenship since the granting of their right to remain, they would be found to have relinquished that right. That’s a huge burden of proof.

Thinking about all this, I realised that essentially, the difference between sound genealogy research for family interest, and that required for a government body like the Home Office, does not necessarily rest on the standard of the research; it’s about the respective goals of each. The goal of any form of research should be an objective search for the truth. In this case, we’re looking for evidence to prove or disprove a connection between one generation and the next. Yet the Passport authorities are gatekeepers, and their role is more akin to an audit: ‘We require originals or certified copies of documents A, B, C, D and E. Alternative documentation may be offered, but our decision is final.’ The default position is ‘No’, and the highly rigorous burden of proof is on the applicant.

If we, as genealogists, were so inflexible in our evidence requirements, we would pretty soon find many of our ancestral lines coming to a halt. One of the skills we need to develop is ‘thinking outside the box’. Getting to the truth is essential, but if we can’t find the standard documentation evidencing a connection between two people, we have to come at it from another direction. We find another way, and then we look at it in the round: taken together, does all this documentation point to X being the parent of Y? If there is any doubt, this must remain a ‘probable hypothesis’. For me, this is one of the most enjoyable parts of the research: the detective work, and the satisfaction when it all comes together and we can reflect on the creativity that went into working it all out. But in the event of an essential document being missing, would a Home Office civil servant be prepared to consider my ‘work-arounds’? This was something of which I had to be ever-mindful during that research.

Thinking of all this more generally, it presents a perfect opportunity to reflect on the varying ‘credibility’ of the different types of evidence we use to demonstrate a familial connection between named individuals. Let’s consider this now in relation to just one official document. Let’s say the Birth Certificate of person B, parent and therefore essential in the lineage from person A in another country to B’s own parent, person C who was a British-born UK citizen, is missing; and we don’t even know in which of the two countries person B was born. Perhaps the country in question didn’t have Civil Birth Registration at the time of the birth, or perhaps the records of the entire country were destroyed, as happened in Ireland. What does a Birth Certificate prove? And therefore, in its absence, what information is ‘lost’ and may need to be proven via another route?

I have a Birth Certificate in front of me. It includes:

Name and sex at birth
Date and place of birth
Name of both parents, including mother’s maiden name and father’s occupation
Name and address of informant, and the date on which it was registered.
Detail of the Registration District, some reference numbers, the name of the Registrar and, if this is the original, that person’s signature.
If I search for this birth online, I see a summary of some of that information, together with the volume and page of the entry in the England & Wales Civil Registration Birth Index.

It’s the official version of ‘the truth’ of the birth. Yet even official Birth Certificates are not necessarily entirely true. There are cases in the past of parents giving a later birth date to avoid paying a late entry fee. There are, of course, named fathers who are not the biological father. Historically, there might even have been grandmothers who registered the child as their own to avoid an official record of their very young daughter giving birth to a child out of wedlock.

Despite these possible inaccuracies, the Birth Registration is the accepted, official version of where and when a person was born. When trying to prove the right to citizenship on grounds of ancestry, it’s an essential document, but even when simply working in the pursuit of family history with no legal consequences, it’s a vital document. What alternative forms of evidence might we draw upon; and to what extent do these alternatives have equivalence with the original?

Baptism records
These usually link the named person to named parents and therefore demonstrate parentage. The baptism of a baby evidences that the child was born by the date of the event, and if the record includes the date of birth, a recent birthdate is highly likely to be correct. However, sometimes children are baptised as a group, when some of them will be older, even teenagers. They place the named people in that certain place at that certain time. What these ‘batch’ baptisms cannot do, however, is evidence the birthplace – town or even country – of the named person. They might also not evidence the parental link if, for example, one of the parents has remarried before the batch baptism, and that step-parent is named.

Census records
These link the person to their parents (or adoptive parents, or a step parent) and place them in the family setting. They can also help us to home in on a year of birth, and will also help us to narrow down the year of any migration (between countries or between different parts of the UK) since different children may have different birthplaces.

However, the information on censuses is provided by the head of household. At the strictest level of interpretation, all they really evidence in terms of location is that all the named people were at that address on the night of that census – and even that might not be true. For example, if your teenager was having a sleepover at a friend’s house you would probably include them at your home, even though they were actually ‘visiting’ at the other house. Here are three examples from the records to illustrate how what is recorded may not be true.

In the following example George Henry is recorded as having been born in Marshall Street, Leeds. The person who completed this census form was George Henry’s wife. She is my great grandmother, and I love her for all the extra, un-asked for, pieces of information she included on it! The name of the street, here, for example, was not required, but the fact that she wrote it really beefs up the likelihood that George was born there. Only, he wasn’t! He was born in Crewe, Cheshire; and all other censuses, together with his actual birth certificate, evidence that. I would assess this as a genuine mistake.

An entry on the 1911 Census of England and Wales. The birthplace of the person is recorded as Marshall Street Leeds. — Click for BIG!

In the next example, Joseph Appleyard is shown living with three children. Daughter Rachel is 22, son Joseph is 17 and son James is one year old. However, James is not Joseph’s son. In fact he was born eighteen months after Joseph’s wife died. He is Rachel’s son, and the birth certificate shows this. Yet if the birth certificate could not be found this fact would be mere speculation. I would assess this as either a desire to cover up the birth out of wedlock OR possibly an assumption on the part of the enumerator.

Extract from 1851 census showing Joseph Appleyard with 3 children: a daughter Rachel, aged 22; a son Joseph, aged 17; and a son James, aged 1 year.

Finally, the following example shows an extract from the United States Census of 1930. Alice Edelson is the daughter of Solomon Rudow whose connection to family in the UK was featured in my last two posts. My research around Solomon and his family was focused on identifying a birthplace for him, so that it could be compared to that of his UK-based sister, and by extension, the likelihood of the family having roots in that place of birth. Given that this family immigrated to the US, the recording of Alice’s birthplace was important to my research. It would also, of course, be important in any application for citizenship back in the country of origin for descendants of Alice, where the number of generations since the birth of an ancestor on that soil is critical. Here, Alice’s place of birth is recorded as New York, yet in every other Census it is recorded as Poland or Russia.

Extract from 1930 US Census showing Aaron Edelson and his wife Alice. Aaron is shown with a birthplace of Poland. Alice's birthplace is given as New York. — Click for BIG!

Birth announcements in newspapers
We would certainly accept a newspaper announcement of the birth as evidence of the date, place and parentage of a child, and provided the announcement appeared in the newspaper shortly after the birthdate shown, there seems little reason for a legal authority to refuse to accept this, particularly if combined with other documentation pointing to the same facts.

Wills
A Will is unlikely to evidence country of birth, but can certainly evidence parentage or other familial connection, and possibly help to narrow down a birthyear. For example, a Will may refer to ‘my oldest child Isabelle’, thereby indicating that Isabelle was born before the second child, whose birthdate may be known, but probably after the marriage of the parents. This could narrow down a likely birthyear to just three or four years. Alternatively, a testator known to be the sister of Isabel’s mother, may refer to ‘my niece Isabel Bloggs’, thereby evidencing the parentage from a different direction.

Any record in an adoptive country in which someone provides place of birth
We have already looked at Census records, and noted how they might be incorrect. Working with Birth and Death records in a number of countries with a very large population of first or second generation immigrants, I note that information was often asked about the person’s place of birth, and even sometimes the place of origin of the parents. Death records in particular have weaknesses when it comes to this matter, since the information is necessarily provided by someone other than the deceased. For us as genealogists, this information can be very useful because it points us to where we might find a birth record. However, it might not be true: the informant may have guessed. The birthplace of a 3x great uncle of mine who was transported to Western Australia in 1867 was recorded on his death record as Yorkshire West Riding. All UK census records before his transportation indicate that he was born before the family migrated to England from Northern Ireland. He was very young at the time and may possibly have never known.

DNA
Provided the right ‘cousins’ have also tested, DNA can prove beyond any doubt that a person is descended from a parent, grandparent or great grandparent, but it will not of course evidence where the person was born.

Records relating to others
Marriage records for the parents and any records relating to other children, such as birth or baptism records, have value in helping us to home in on likely dates. They do not prove anything in relation to the birth of our person of focus (unless the Birth certificate in front of us is the twin of our person) but have value in helping us to build a picture.

To summarise
The more experienced we are, and the more we focus on getting to the truth of the matter, the better we become at finding and combining information from a selection of sources to build a picture of the facts. Individually, none of the above alternative records fully evidence all the facts on the Birth Certificate – although Birth announcements in the newspaper and very early Baptisms may come close. However, by combining evidence from several of them we may be able to arrive at a pretty close picture that we, as genealogists, can accept as proof of an individual’s date and place of birth and their parentage. Ultimately, the difference between the level of proof of an excellent genealogist and family historian researching for personal interest, and that required by government bodies such as the Passport Office may not rest on the research itself, but on the point at which the weight of the evidence is accepted by the authorities as tipping the balance. Nevertheless, this has been a useful comparison in encouraging us to hold a light up to our own standards and consider if they truly are watertight.