I’m still not able to use my left arm for very much following breaking my wrist several weeks back, so today’s post is deliberately ‘typing light’. It’s a beginner’s level introduction to using Artificial Intelligence for genealogy.
I have to admit to having mixed feelings about Artificial Intelligence. I’m unhappy about its use in faking information, and about products of AI being passed off as someone’s work, for example using it to create an image, a video or a text without making clear that’s how the piece was created. In photography, for example, this seems to be devaluing genuine talent, when accusations of ‘fake!’ are called for an image that a fellow photographer can clearly see has been achieved through skill, planning and use of top-notch equipment.
That said, as genealogists working online, we already benefit from aspects of AI. Hints, Stories, Thrulines and Theories of Relativity, for example, are all brought to us courtesy of AI. Based on these, what we can say is that AI is useful but it is only a starting point. It must be used with caution. We must analyse and verify the information presented to us, but having done so it can be a great help.
The following FindMyPast video with Blaine Bettinger is a good introduction to how we might use AI more widely in genealogy. In the video, Blaine and Jen Baldwin introduce ways we can use it. They also set down a few guidelines:
AI is not the same as ‘Google’. It deals with words, not facts
In research, it’s useful as a starting point – for brainstorming
It’s like a torch, shining a light to guide us towards relevant information; our job then is to decide what’s relevant, what’s not, and where we need more information
Since it’s a new area, there remain concerns about its use: bias, ethics, plagiarism and copyright issues
Although that video is a good introduction to the themes, we need more information about practical ways to use it. In the follow-on video the same people discuss useful ‘prompts’. A prompt is what is written to outline the precise output the user is seeking. Prompts can be refined to move closer to the desired outcome. Through these example prompts, Blaine gives us an idea of how we could use AI. Some of them may not appeal to you at all; others might. It’s about each of us finding how AI could work for us – how it might help.
Those two videos are more than a year old, and it’s clear that a year is a long time in AI. However, they are useful starting points.
If this is something you’d like to explore there are two Facebook groups you might like to join:
You will quickly realise that everyone on the groups is still learning. Some are further along the line than others. A lot of the posts seem to be from people reporting on an experiment they’ve carried out to see how well AI can cope with a particular prompt or a particular approach.
There is also a podcast series: The Family History AI Show with Mark Thompson and Steve Little comes highly recommended and is bang up to date with the latest developments.
In my next post I’ll include some small experiments of my own. I’m very much at the starting point here. I’d like to find ways to make AI work for me, but I have some definite red lines, and other areas where I’m not sure how the output would be any better than simply doing it myself. I, for example, would never use AI for writing; and there are some research tasks in which I believe the time spent working on a document help me to get an in-depth understanding of a family. Simply reading a list of statements about its content wouldn’t give me that deep-dive familiarisation.
Have you used AI? Do leave a comment with your experiences.
One of my motivations as a genealogist and family historian is to uncover – and pass on – stories from the past. A recent unexpected turn of events brought about a merging of a story from 1936 with my own life in 2024. In this post I’m going to tell you about both of these stories.
On 27th September 1936, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, organised a rally in Leeds. Accompanied by 1000 Blackshirts, his twin aims were to intimidate the Jewish communities based in Leylands, an area just to the north-east of Leeds city centre; and to drum up support for fascism amongst the working classes. The first of these aims was thwarted when the Leeds Watch Committee forbade any march through the Leylands area. However, the wider demonstration was allowed to go ahead. The Blackshirts’ march commenced right in the heart of Leeds. They then crossed the river into Hunslet, through to Beeston Hill – where they were joined by Mosley – and on to Holbeck Moor. Here, the plan was, Mosley would deliver a rousing speech.
The choice of Holbeck Moor was no accident. Holbeck and the adjacent areas of Hunslet and New Wortley were industrial areas with smoke-belching factories and railways lines interspersed with row upon row of poor quality back-to-back housing. This was the tail end of the Depression, and Mosley believed he would be able to drum up support for fascist politics. However, upon learning of the intended march, anti-fascist political activists spread the word. The Jews in Leylands were warned, and the presence of whoever was able, was requested at Holbeck Moor. When Mosley and his Blackshirts arrived, 30,000 Leeds residents were waiting for them.
From the article in The Leeds Mercury on Monday 28 September 1936. Source: FindMyPast.co.uk
When my Mum was in her eighties she told me about the day she saw Oswald Mosley march onto Holbeck Moor. She lived half a mile from there, and in fact hers was just the kind of family Mosley was targetting, since her father had been unable to find regular work for several years. However, he understood very well that his lack of employment had nothing to do with Jewish people living in other parts of Leeds. Remembering clearly the events of that day, my Mum described the hate written all over the faces of the young Blackshirts. Mosley, she said, hadn’t reckoned on ‘the men of Leeds’, who were waiting on Holbeck Moor, armed with stones and determined to prevent him from speaking.
It was some years after my Mum’s death that I came across an online article entitled ‘The Battle of Holbeck Moor’. At the time I was researching the events of the Civil War in Leeds, and thought this might have been one of the local battles associated with that; but as I read, I realised it was the event my mother had attended. This, in fact, gave me a date, and I was able to work out that she had been just twelve years old at the time… I wondered if her parents had known she was there!
The article gave me more details about the event. Perhaps my Mum had told me about some of them, and perhaps I had forgotten. I learned that Mosley used a van as a makeshift stage, but that every time he tried to speak, 30,000 voices roared out ‘The Red Flag’ to drown him out. Clearly, as a young girl standing at the back of the crowd my Mum wasn’t an active participant in the event. For her, its importance was the impact it had on her developing understanding of the reality of fascism – something with which, unfortunately, everyone in attendance would have nine more years to become better acquainted. Certainly, it was clear that, nearly 70 years later, she remained proud of the fact that Leeds had defeated Oswald Mosley. I left a comment at the end of the article, saying my mother had been there, and that her recollection of the event many years later tallied with the account. Then I added the info to my timeline about my Mum’s life and thought no more about it.
In August this year I received an email inviting me to be part of a special reception at the unveiling of a Leeds Civic Trust Blue Plaque commemorating the Battle of Holbeck Moor. I had been traced from that comment written some years earlier, and would be representing my mother. I was so happy to be invited to do this, and made preparations for the trip. I would be accompanied by my nephew and my second cousin and his wife. I was asked to write something about my mother for the display, to be kept permanently at the West Yorkshire Archives, and to provide some photos. Having done all that, I was then asked if I would be prepared to make a short speech on the day.
The rather surreal nature of this turn of events was not lost on me: the idea that one day in September 1936 my mother, then aged twelve, witnessed ‘the men of Leeds’ turning back the leader of the British Union of Fascists, and that 88 years later, her own daughter would be standing on the same spot talking about her was quite overwhelming. My Mum was never a political person but she always had a strong sense of right and wrong, and she knew that hatred and scapegoating had no place in politics. In life she had rarely done anything to attract attention, but now I wanted her story to be known.
I was due to travel up to Leeds on Saturday 28th September, ready for the ceremony the following day. Instead, on Friday evening, while putting the finishing touches to my preparations, I fell and broke my wrist.
Leeds MPs Fabian Hamilton, Richard Burgon and Hilary Benn, with Sam Kirk from Stand Up To Racism. Photo: P Heppenstall
The event on Sunday 29th September was well-attended. The unveiling was done by three Leeds Members of Parliament. It all went well, but I was not there. I was mostly lying on the sofa, asleep. Even now, I’m typing this with one hand.
Representatives of families of some of those who were present at the Battle of Holbeck Moor on 27th September 1936. Photo: C & J Battensby
Several descendants of those present on the day had been traced, and were photographed together with photos of their family members. One of those represented had not attended the demonstration at Holbeck Moor, but was a Jewish pharmacist who gave First Aid to Blackshirts who had been injured by the stones. My nephew represented my Mum, his Grandma; and my speech was wonderfully delivered with his own twist by my second cousin. The two of them, plus my cousin’s wife, sent lots of photos and videos, and it almost felt like I was there. I was gutted to miss out on a Battle of Holbeck Moor cupcake!
Blue Plaque cupcakes were given out after the ceremony! Photo: C & J Battensby
Of course I was very disappointed to miss the event, but the important thing is that on that day my Mum’s voice, representing 30,000 others, was heard. She would be very surprised to know she also got a mention in the local press, on the BBC and in a number of national papers, including The Guardian.
The Battle of Holbeck Moor was not the only clash between Mosley and anti-fascist demonstrators. Exactly one week later, the far better known Battle of Cable Street in London’s East End took place. By coincidence, one of those anti-fascist demonstrators was a young man who, several decades later, would become my father-in-law.
All of this came about because several people, including myself, left comments online in response to articles about the events at Holbeck Moor of 27th September 1936. As a result, this story is now owned by more family members who previously were not aware of their own family connection. More than that, the inclusion of the stories of those who attended brings a personal dimension to the history. And surely, breathing life into those memories of ordinary people is what researching family history is all about.
Leave comments! Tell the stories! You never know where it might lead.
This post is published to coincide with the release of my video presentation for All About That Place 2024: The Rotten and Pocket Boroughs of the Isle of Wight.
The 15-minute video starts with an overview of some useful information and terminology about voting arrangements for counties and boroughs throughout the United Kingdom before the Reform Act of 1832. This could be of relevance to your research interests if you have ancestry or a special place of interest anywhere in the UK. The information presented below the video will help you to find out if your place was a borough or a parliamentary borough; and if the latter, what the voting arrangements were. It will also help you to work out if your place was a rotten or pocket borough, and why. Some of the linked articles are quick and easy to navigate and will provide the information you need. Others are longer, in-depth reads. I hope you’ll find it all useful and interesting.
If you’d like to know more about the three places on the Isle of Wight mentioned in the video, there are links to more information about them too.
Information about the ‘Unreformed House of Commons’ (before 1832)
Check if your place of interest was a borough: Wikipedia: Ancient Boroughs Here you’ll find information about the history of boroughs right back to Anglo-Saxon times. Towards the end there is a list of English boroughs during the period 1307-1660 and an incomplete list of Welsh boroughs (with a request for additional information). You’ll notice some surprising ommissions. e.g. Manchester was granted borough status in 1301 but lost it in a court case in 1359. Wikipedia: List of burghs in Scotland In this list the ‘earlier burghal history’ of each modern day burgh ‘from the coming into force of the Burgh Police (Scotland) Act 1892’ is included. This is not, therefore, a complete list of all ancient Scottish burghs.
For a more scholarly and in-depth look at medieval borough charters, see: John West: Town Records, 1983. London, Phillimore. Chapter 4: Medieval Borough Charters c.1042-1500. Here we learn, for example, that Birmingham, omitted from the Wikipedia article, was granted the right to hold a weekly market in 1166 but this is known only by virtue of alternative records: no charter has survived.
Check the voting qualification for your parliamentary borough (constituency): The voting qualification is given in the List of counties and boroughs indicated above, but See also: Wikipedia: Unreformed House of Commons Scroll halfway down the page for a description of the different types of borough franchise. Rural Historia: What is a Medieval Burgage Plot?
***Remember! Depending on the voting qualification type of your borough, there could be name-rich documents showing the names of the voters and how they voted.***
Check if your place was a ‘Rotten borough’ or ‘Pocket borough’: See: ECPPEC: Rotten Boroughs This article includes a map showing all the Rotten Boroughs. They are all in England. Wikipedia: Rotten and Pocket Boroughs There’s an interesting list of references to Rotten Boroughs in literature and popular culture at the end of this page. Wikipedia: List of constituencies enfranchised and disfranchised by the Reform Act 1832 The 1832 Reform Act did not resolve all ills in the political landscape, but it was a start. Some were disenfranchised entirely in 1832; for others, changes were made to their entitlement to political representation. History of Parliament Online: The Constituencies [1754-1790] A long read. Scroll down about one fifth of the page to reach the long section on The Boroughs. Dealing with each type of borough in turn (Freeholder, Corporation, etc) it shows how bribery, corruption and ‘patronage’ were at large in almost all of the boroughs at some level or another, not just in Rotten and Pocket boroughs. Examples of specific boroughs are given throughout so you may well find info about your place of interest here.
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Information about Newport, Newtown and Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight
Yarmouth Wikipedia: Yarmouth, I.O.W. History of Parliamentary Constituency Wikipedia: Yarmouth Town Hall, I.O.W. Visit Isle of Wight: Yarmouth C.W.R. Winter: The Ancient Town of Yarmouth, 1981, Isle of Wight Country Press, Newport. Viewed at: Isle of Wight Record Office. A.G. Cole: Yarmouth Isle of Wight, 3rd edition, 1951,Isle of Wight Country Press, Newport. Viewed at: Isle of Wight Record Office.
There is a detailed discussion of the three Isle of Wight boroughs in: Jack Donald Lavers: The Parliamentary History of the Isle of Wight 1779-1886, March 1991: M Phil thesis. Viewed at: Isle of Wight Record Office
Hallie Ribenhold: The Scandalous Lady W: an eighteenth century tale of sex, scandal and divorce. 2008, Vintage, London Relates the story of Lady Seymour Worsley and her abusive husband, Sir Richard Worsley, baronet, of Appuldurcombe House, wroxall, I.O.W. He was MP for Newport 1774-1784, then for Newtown 1790-93 and 1796-1801. A fascinating read, which encompasses the position of women before the Married Women’s Property Acts and the availability of divorce, as well as rotten and pocket boroughs in operation. With the backing of other landed families, the Worsley family regularly represented all three of the Island’s boroughs.
“THE EDITUR OF THE TIMES PAPER Sur, — May we beg and beseech your proteckshion and power. We are Sur, as it may be, livin in a Wilderniss, so far as the rest of London knows anything of us, or as the rich and great people care about. We live in muck and filth. We aint got no priviz, no dust bins, no drains, no water-splies, and no drain or suer in the hole place. The Suer Company, in Greek St., Soho Square, all great, rich and powerfool men, take no notice watsomdever of our complaints. The Stenche of a Gully-hole is disgustin. We all of us suffer, and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us.
Some gentlemans comed yesterday, and we thought they was comishioners from the Suer Company, but they was complaining of the noosance and stenche our lanes and corts was to them in New Oxforde Strect. They was much surprized to see the seller in No. 12, Carrier St., in our lane, where a child was dyin from fever, and would not believe that Sixty persons sleep in it every night. This here seller you couldent swing a cat in, and the rent is five shillings a week; but theare are greate many sich deare sellars. Sur, we hope you will let us have our complaints put into your hinfluenshall paper, and make these landlords of our houses and these comishioners (the friends we spose of the landlords) make our houses decent for Christions to live in. Preaye Sir com and see us, for we are living like piggs, and it aint faire we shoulde be so ill treted.
We are your respeckfull servents in Church Lane, Carrier St., and the other corts. Teusday, Juley 3, 1849.”
This letter was signed by fifty-four residents of the St Giles ‘rookery’ in London. Published on 5 July 1849 under the headline ‘A Sanitary Remonstrance‘.
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The rapid expansion of our large industrial towns and cities started in the eighteenth century but was particularly so during the first half of the nineteenth, as increasing numbers of people migrated from rural areas and from Ireland. Between 1800-1850 the percentage of English citizens living in urban areas in the country as a whole increased from 30 to 50%, but in certain major industrial towns the growth was much greater. In Birmingham, between 1801 and 1851, the population increased from 71,000 to 233,000. In the same period Liverpool’s population grew from 82,000 to 376,000. In just one decade from 1821-31 Bradford’s population increased by 78%.
How on earth did these towns cope with housing and facilities for all these additional people? The simple answer is that they did not.
The thinking was that needs would be served by demand: employers would build factories, and speculative builders would build the housing needed for the incoming labourers. Of course the builders required a profit for their work, and the problem was that the workers were paid very little. Even the cheapest housing meant some workers were paying a quarter of a very meagre income on rent. By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly one third of the population would be considered ‘the very poor’.
There were several consequences. One was that purpose-built housing for the masses was of very poor quality, often built with just twenty or so years left on a land lease and deliberately built to last for just that length of time. Walls were the thickness of a single row of bricks, and the bricks themselves were often insufficently fired. Proper foundations were not dug out, meaning floor boards on the lower levels could be laid just a couple of inches above bare earth. In the Midlands and the North, back-to-backs became common. Each house had a party wall on three sides, with the door and windows only on the remaining side. Sometimes these were built in rows along parallel streets, but often they were arranged around courtyards, with the outer properties facing the street and the (cheaper) inner properties accessed via an alley or tunnel. Consequently, not only was there no possibility of air flow from one side of the house to the other, but the courtyard itself would have very little movement of air.
Room sizes were small, and despite the generally large family sizes, most purpose-built housing for the labouring classes had just two rooms: one up and one down, plus possibly an attic space. In the 1870s 43% of married women had 5 to 9 children; 18% had more than ten children. Hence as a matter of course, most individual family homes for the workers would be overcrowded.
As an alternative there was the option of repurposing existing housing. The large family homes built in the Georgian period for better-off families might now be sub-divided, with rooms on each floor let to different families. Repurposing in this way was always cheaper than purpose-built, but it did mean that the facilities and level of privacy originally intended for one family were now to be shared amongst several.
For the poorest of all, these already inadequate spaces were shared. Two, three or even more families would share small houses, designated rooms on a floor, or even one room.
Worst of all, the cellars of larger houses were rented out as dwellings – and even they might house more than one family. Some families even kept livestock in a pen alongside the family. There was, of course, no drainage. What’s more, the floors were bare earth and often they were below the water table, meaning they regularly flooded.
As the nineteenth century progressed and towns prospered, local authorities started to erect grand buildings as a testament to civic pride. Roads were widened to facilitate easier passage of large numbers of hansom cabs, and towns were redrawn to make way for railway lines and their stations. All of this required clearance of existing housing, and often the routes and locations selected specifically targetted the housing of the working classes. This was generally thought to be a good thing, since the housing was filthy, a health hazard and an eyesore. However, no new housing was built. Consquently, these grand developments meant worse overcrowding since more families had to cram into the buildings that remained. There were also raised rents, since unscrupulous landlords sought to take advantage of the scarcity of housing. In London, 120,000 people were displaced, and no new housing built to accomodate them.
Vast ‘rookeries‘, already unfit for human habitation, were the only areas available for the very poor. These were characterised by narrow alleyways and poorly-constructed multiple-storey dwellings crammed into whatever space was available. St Giles in London, where the signatories of the above letter to The Times lived, was a rookery. So too was the ‘Devil’s Acre’: the land on which Victoria Street in Westminster was built.
To this perfect storm of poor quality, inadequate housing, overcrowding and lack of ventilation, we must add one more fact of life: People need toilets.
The flushing toilet, or water closet, depends upon ready availability of water and a system of sewers, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that these started to be installed as standard. Prior to that there were dry closets neutralised by earth or ashes; and cess pits. ‘Night soil’ would be collected by men whose job it was to take it to market gardens outside the towns, where it could be used as fertiliser. In some houses the cess pit was actually in the cellar, so that waste collected immediately below the floor boards of the ground floor dwelling rooms. Perhaps it was the rapid growth of towns and cities that meant these arrangements did not always go to plan, but we do know that collection of sewage and general waste was not always carried out. In one infamous rookery in Leeds called the Boot-and-Shoe Yard, no waste was collected for more than six months. When eventually this was remedied, over seventy cart loads were taken away. In any case, privies were shared between households – maybe as many as three hundred people, although the St Giles signatories claimed to have none at all: “We live in muck and filth. We aint got no priviz, no dust bins, no drains, no water-splies, and no drain or suer in the hole place.”
In 1842 serious concerns about the insanitary conditions in Leeds’s Boot-and-Shoe Yard led to the demolition of this rookery just off one of the main streets in the town. The 1841 census is therefore the only snapshot we have of the number and occupations of the residents. As can be seen from this extract, many of them were migrants from Ireland.
Citation: 1841 Census of England and Wales. Original data: The National Archives. Source: Find My Past – the ‘I’ in the last column indicates those who were from Ireland
The popular view was that the muck and filfth was the fault of the residents, whose standards, lifestyle and morals were unacceptable.
It wasn’t until well into the second half of the nineteenth century that change gradually came. Prior to this there were no planning laws or building regulations. Gradually, local authorities were empowered to require builders to conform to certain minimum requirements, but many did not act on this because of the extra cost to the ratepayer. Increasingly it came to be understood that the health crisis and the housing crisis were two strands of the same issue, and permissive powers evolved into mandatory, but it would take the slum clearance and demolition programmes before finally these living conditions were consigned to the history books.
How can we make use of this information in our family history research? Armed with this understanding of living conditions we can look for clues to learn more about the conditions in which our ancestors lived. Often, but not always, the worst conditions were occupied by immigrants. Here are some ideas:
Look for multiple households at one address in the census In this extract from the 1901 census we see three households including 23 people living in one house. In fact this is only part of the return for number 5 Brick Lane: the rest are recorded on the following page. In total there are four households totalling 31 people. Three of the households have lodgers – a total of five lodgers altogether in the house.
Citation: 1901 Census of England and Wales. Original data: The National Archives. Source: ancestry.co.uk
Look for families living in cellars The houses in Liverpool’s Edmund Street had cellars, and as with many of the larger properties in Liverpool, these were let as separate dwellings. The main house at number 56 is a lodging house, with five lodgers, but another family is recorded in the cellar.
Citation: 1851 Census of England and Wales. Original data: The National Archives. Source: ancestry.co.uk
Use the largest scale maps you can find to identify yards or courtyards, especially with back-to-backs This small section of Lee’s Square is taken from an 1850 map of Leeds. Unfortunately the rest of the Square is on the next Ordnance Survey sheet. Thanks to the large scale of this map we can see individual properties. What we see is that most of the properties in Lee’s Square are back-to-backs. The property behind each abode has the door and windows looking out on to the street. The rents for those properties will be slightly higher. Although we can’t see from this map section, the privy will be inside the Square, also the water pump. This, added to the obvious lack of free-flowing circulation of air, will mean the inner properties are less healthy places to live than the outer.
Citation: Ordnance Survey Town Plan of Leeds, Surveyed 1847, published 1850. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. [Click here] for link to the full map.
Look for old photos of the addresses where your families lived Ideally, you’ll be able to compare these with contemporary maps. The image below shows the same portion of Lee’s Square as you see on the map above. You can see the two sets of steps leading to the doors of two of the houses, and a cellar of some sort below. The photo is dated 1901 – fifty years after the map was surveyed and published, and the lean-to appears to have been added in the intervening years. The buildings on the southern side of the square seem to be lower and perhaps don’t have the substructure. This is of particular interest to me because my 2x great grandfather was living here in the 1890s. Thanks to a Coroner’s Report after his death I know that his house was above a stable, but it isn’t clear from this photo or its partner (looking east) where the dwellings above a stable would be.
Citation: ‘Lee’s Square looking west, 1901’ Source: Leodis. [Click here] for link to image on Leodis website.
If you have ancestors who might be classed as ‘urban poor’ in the nineteenth century, I hope these ideas will help you.
I’m also developing a presentation on the subject of Housing the Urban Poor in 19th Century England. If this is of interest to you and your local or family history society, please take a look at my Public Speaking page, and follow the link at the bottom of that page to contact me.
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Sources
David Olusoga & Melanie Backe-Hansen: A House Through Time, 2021. Picador, London
John Burnett: A Social History of Housing 1815-1970, 1978. David & Charles, Newton Abbot
Stanley D Chapman (Ed): The History of Working-Class Housing, 1971. David & Charles, Newton Abbot – this book has separate chapters on London, Glasgow, Leeds, Nottingham, Liverpool, Birmingham, South-East Lancashire/ Pennines, Ebbw Vale.
B R Mitchell and Phyllis Deane: Abstract of British Historical Statistics, 1962. Cambridge University Press.
It’s something I hear often when I tell people I’m a genealogist.
I always reply that the records are in fact, mostly free. Provided you know which archive they will be held in, you can book an appointment, walk in, and get looking.
Of course… you need to know how to search, and where to start, and you have to know about different record sets, and take into consideration that your ancestors might not have stayed in one place, so that even within that one archive you might have to guess at which parish they came from before the one you know about… because at the archive, although every volume or box of records is catalogued, individual entries within them are not indexed. The image below is, genuinely, all the boxes that were waiting for me (by advance request) on one of my trips to the West Yorkshire Archives in Leeds, together with part of my To Do List in the foreground. I think there were fourteen boxes all together for me to tackle over two full days.
Before the advent of the Internet, and dedicated websites for genealogy, this is how all family research was, but it was slow going and hard work. I’m going to explain the difficulties with reference to just two generations of one of my ancestral lines.
My 3x great grandfather, Thomas Mann, was born in Norwich, but I only learned this because I found his birthplace on the 1851 Census. My family had no idea that they had roots to that part of the country before this. Following up on this, I found Thomas’s baptism, and learned this took place at St Peter Mancroft, one of roughly fifty-eight parish churches in the square mile or so that we would now think of as Norwich’s city centre. From that record I found the name of his father: Robert, and mother: Hannah née Christian.
Later, after Thomas’s death, I found an entry for one of his daughters on the 1861 census. She gave her birthplace as Norwich St Martin at Oak. This was some years before Norwich’s baptism records were available fully indexed on any subscription website, but I found a way to browse records online, and in that way found several other baptisms for children of Thomas and my 3x great grandmother Lucy, all in Norwich St Martin at Oak; and that was how I learned that Thomas and his wife lived in that parish until they migrated to Yorkshire.
So far all this research has been led by the Censuses. If the censuses were not online I would have had to go the The National Archives in London. The originals are now no longer available to view, but presumably would have been prior to the digitisation… but without the indexing, how on earth would I find them? In 1830 the population of Norwich numbered around 36,000, while that of Leeds in 1851 (which is where they were when I first found reference to birthplaces in Norwich) was 249,992. Simply finding them at their house in Leeds could have taken months.
Back in Norwich, Thomas’s father, my 4x great grandfather Robert, died just before the 1841 census, so everything I know about him comes from baptisms of his children, plus his own baptism, marriage and burial records, a civil death record and an apprenticeship record. I’m confident that Robert lived his entire life within the county of Norfolk – and therefore all the local records relating to him are lodged at Norfolk County Record Office. He was baptised at Great Yarmouth, apprenticed to a master at Wymondham, and then moved to Norwich where he remained for the rest of his life. However, there, he moved around several of the fifty-eight parishes, marrying at St Peter Mancroft and baptising children there, plus others in the parishes of St Stephen, St Michael at Thorn and St Peter Parmentergate. Later, he moved to the parish of St Stephen and was buried at All Saints parish church. I know all this not because I spent many months scouring the free-to-consult records at the Norfolk Archives, but because I input a few details on the commercial Ancestry and FindMyPast websites and managed to work it all out from the selections of records returned for my consideration by their powerful search engines.
Robert’s children did not all remain in Norfolk. Apart from my own ancestor, Thomas, who travelled with his family to West Yorkshire and eventually ended up in Leeds, two sons joined the Royal Horse Artillery. One of those retired in Woolwich where he had a family; the other married a lady from Pontefract and he too eventually settled in Leeds after a military career involving the Battle of Waterloo. Leaving aside the information about the military years (mostly at The National Archives), that involves records from four more County Record Offices. And yet, apart from one Settlement hearing for my Thomas and his family, there is nothing in the archives at Norwich to suggest any of that: mentions in the records for those migrating individuals simply cease. Again, I learned about most of it with the click of a few buttons and browsing digital images of original records online, although I have also followed up some of this information in targetted examination of specific records at the Norfolk Archives and The National Archives. That research involved browsing through lots of images on microfiche, or examining the pages of original volumes in search of mentions of my people.
It’s the indexing that is so important. It points us directly to records that, based on our search terms, would appear to be relevant.
The records we find online are made available to the commercial websites by licence from the original archives; and they have to pay a small amount to the relevant archive every time someone clicks on the records. However, it is the commercial websites that photograph them and have them indexed. The archives hold far more than what we see online – even though the amount online is increasing all the time. It tends to be the more local and much older records that have not yet been (and perhaps never will be) photographed and indexed and made available online. However, having located an ancestor in a specific place, if we do visit the archives, thanks to all the online stuff, we can approach it with a To Do List or a Wish List of information we would like to locate and examine.
The following video gives an insight into the amount of work involved in photographing, alongside carrying out essential conservation work, for a huge nationwide record set like the census.
It’s true that some records or transcriptions of records are available freely online. Invariably, these are made available through the work of volunteers. Their work can help us enormously, and we must be grateful for the dedication of those who do this, either by giving their time to develop records of a big website like Family Search; as part of a local Family or Local History Society; or as a personal project/ labour of love. But we can’t expect everything to be done on a voluntary basis.
The big subscription websites do offer a valuable service. What they do is far more than simply taking public records and charging for them. The photographing, conservation and indexing of a large set of records is an enormous undertaking, involving professional archivist and conservationist input as well as teams of indexers. Quite simply, if they didn’t do this, it wouldn’t get done – there is just too much demand on public funding and this is way down the list. That’s not to say I agree always with the level of the charges, or the introduction of additional charges for some aspects of the service that used to be part of the original fee. I also would prefer that indexers with local knowledge were used. It is much easier to make out a scribbled place name if you know the area. Which seems like a good time to mention possibly the worst transcription/ indexing I’ve ever seen: a Land Army Index card. The name ‘Muriel’ was indexed as ‘Kendriel’; ‘Crescent’ was indexed as ‘Cusad’; ‘Beeston’ as ‘Beeka’; and the job ‘Edging Machine Operation’ as ‘Edjcing Hadine Dpersior’. I mean… those last three words just don’t exist!
Times are hard and not everyone can afford subscriptions. Back in June 2019 I wrote a blogpost about Genealogy on a Budget. I hope there’s some tips in there that will help to bring down the costs for everyone.
However, in general, the next time anyone tells us they think records about our ancestors are ours, and should be free… this is why they are not!
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
At the end of June/ beginning of July I spent a week in the Yorkshire Dales. We were based in Starbotton in Upper Wharfedale, which is the location of one of my two One-Place Studies. Although this was a holiday, not a research trip, we managed to fit in several places of importance in my family history, and I went off most early evenings for a walk around Starbotton.
I meant to write something about how it felt to be in this village I’ve spent so many hours thinking about, and how just being there moved on my understanding of the place. Then, one evening as I wandered around, I realised that sense of connection and immediacy would best be communicated through a short video.
What started out as one woman with very little by way of plan standing on a hill above a village and talking into a phone while recording a static scene… eventually turned into downloading video editing software, inserting additional images, creating intro and outro pages and finally launching a YouTube channel. The sound is a bit dodgy in places – it was windy and my phone doesn’t have one of those big fluffy microphone covers! – so I had to learn how to do subtitles too. I also made the mistake of recording in profile, but hopefully the extra images will compensate for that.
You don’t need a YouTube account to watch, but if you do, please give me a ‘Like’. I enjoyed the process very much and suspect there will be another video, so if you’re feeling kind and you have a YouTube account you might also like to ‘Subscribe’ to my channel – it’s all free of charge of course; it just means I’ll show up in your list if I publish something else.
Any constructive feedback would be much appreciated, particularly if you know about bitspeeds, frames per second and the like. Ideally, I need someone to tell me what settings I need to use for my exact phone model when I ‘produce’ the final version as an MP4. But that aside, here it is. I’m pleased with it, and hope you like it too. 🙂
In my last post I showed how we can use DNA matches to home in on a common ancestral homeland. I then used a different DNA match to follow up on a document linking an immigrant entering the US with the name Nachman/ Nathan Zirklin to another with the name Solomon Rudow, to prove that these two men were, respectively, the son and brother of a certain Fanny Chirklin née Rudow in England.
In this post we remain with Solomon Rudow and Nachman/Nathan Chirklin, but leave the DNA behind, focusing now on documentation about them.
Now confident of the connection between Solomon and Fanny (brother), and also between Nathan and the Chirklin family in England (son), there was another way of using these connections. Certain documents in the US required citizens to provide information that was not, at that time, required of UK citizens. These relate to languages, countries of origin and on some documents, the naming of parents. It’s clear why this was necessary in the US at the beginning of the twentieth century. The large numbers of immigrant families from all over Europe meant that the authorities needed to know what languages were spoken, and what facilities needed to be put in place to accommodate the needs of these diverse populations. In my own family research – Irish migrants in my case – I’ve used this method to learn more about the life and language of my County Mayo ancestry through responses of ancestors of my DNA matches to questions asked on US censuses and death certificates. Now, I would be looking for information about Eastern European languages and Jewish migration. My goal here was not just to learn about Solomon and Nachman/ Nathan for their own sake, but more particularly what this said about their close family who, like them, had migrated from an area within modern-day Belarus but had settled in the UK. The fact that, through these US documents, I’ve learned that my own great great grandparents would have spoken Irish Gaelic rather than English, along with information needs of the London-based family of Solomon and Nachman/Nathan suggest that it would have been worthwhile if the UK authorities had included this on UK censuses too.
This is what I found.
Solomon The following records were consulted, all via Ancestry.co.uk:
US City Directories: New York
US Federal Census 1910-1950
New York State Census 1915, 1936
New York Death Index
The following information was revealed:
No precise birthplace is given on any record so far located: he is from ‘Russia’. Solomon was naturalised, but no Naturalisation record has been located online.
However, the Naturalisation application of Solomon’s daughter’s husband gives her place of birth in 1900 as Dzisna, Russia. In my last post it was established that at least two of Solomon’s sister’s children had been born in this town.
Two ‘mother tongues’ are given: Polish and Yiddish. The language question is also asked with regards each individual’s parents (even if they are not in the US), and for them Solomon gives the same information: Polish and Yiddish.
Initially, Solomon and his wife are unable to speak English. Despite immigrating in 1902, as of 1910 they still do not speak English. This changes by 1920.
In 1930 only, the birthplace changes – now all parties concerned are stated to have been born in Poland rather than Russia.
Solomon and his wife have seven children, all born in ‘Russia’, and no records located for any of them that gives a more precise birthplace.
If I had been able to locate a death certificate for Solomon, or indeed a gravestone, these would likely have confirmed the names of his parents. Unfortunately these have not so far come to light.
Nachman/ Nathan The following records were consulted, all via Ancestry.co.uk:
US City Directories, Minnesota
US WW1 Draft Registration Cards
Naturalisation documentation
US Federal Census 1930-1950
Illinois Death Index
The following information was revealed:
Once settled in the US, Nachman adopts the name Nathan and amends his surname to Sirkin. My enquiries indicate that both Nachman and Nathan are names in use in the home countries, but since Nathan is also in common usage in the English-speaking world, a person originally named Nachman would often adopt the more usual ‘Nathan’ after immigration.
From Nathan’s US census records we learn that his birthplace, and that of both parents, is alternately Russia or Poland. However, his actual place of birth is given on his Naturalisation Declaration: “Disna, Russia, Poland” (sic.), confirming without doubt his connection to the London Chirklins.
On that declaration Nathan has to renounce all allegiance to his former nation, and here two nations are stamped: ‘The Republic of Poland’ and ‘The Present Government of Russia’.
Also on this document he gives his last foreign residence as Poland, but this is at odds with information on the ship’s manifest (see last post), and a period of eight months with his family in London seems probable. A likely explanation is that the purpose of the US requesting the previous nations was not, in fact, about residence, but about allegiance; and Nathan had never sworn allegiance to the UK during his eight months of residence.
His mother tongue, and that of his parents, is given as Yiddish.
Conclusions: What we can extrapolate from these US records about the UK Chirklin family?
Clearly, there is now a good deal of documented evidence for two distant family members: Fanny’s brother Solomon, and all his descendants in New York; and Marks and Fanny’s son Nathan, who settled in the US and did not marry.
We have evidence that, at least for a specified period when two of their children were born, the Chirklins lived in Dzisna, now in Belarus, but at various times considered to be in Russia and/or Poland. If the descendants of the family would like to research further, we now know that a researcher local to this town would be the best starting point. A local researcher would understand all of the national and local history, including movement, settlement, persecution and emigration of Jewish families.
We also have evidence that Solomon was living in Dzisna, at least at the time his final daughter was born, in 1900. This seems to suggest the two families – the Rudows and the Chirklins – could have been settled in Dzisna, and may have known each other before the marriage of Marks Chirklin and Fanny née Rudow.
As mentioned above and in the previous post, Nathan’s entry on the 1907 ship’s manifest, and the reference to eight months living in London suggests a likely immigration date for the whole family of around July 1906.
We can also narrow down the original Cyrillic spelling of the Chirklin surname. It is only the initial sound that is in question, since all versions of this surname end with IRKLIN or ERKLIN. Enquiries via a Belarusian genealogy group on Facebook indicate that the likely original spelling would be Цирклин. This is an important piece of information that might help in any ongoing search for records in Belarus.
Language, Culture and Nationality are also of interest. Whilst Yiddish and Hebrew languages were to be expected, with a confirmed homeland of what is now Belarus, and usual birthplace citations as ‘Russia’ on UK records, the Polish language was unexpected. Standing back, all of this explains the family belief that the Chirklins were from Lithuania or Poland. What we are seeing here is evidence of the fluctuating borders and overlapping cultures between these countries. This is evidenced by information on a few Wikipedia pages, although more in-depth research would provide further detail and will now be undertaken.
Drawing upon Solomon’s experience in New York where he would have been surrounded by people from the homelands and therefore did not develop his English as quickly as he might have hoped, it seems likely that the same would have applied to the Chirklins in London.
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Together with my last post, this shows how we can benefit in several ways from targetted research of distant cousins and closer relatives found via DNA matches. Although these two posts have focused on Eastern European and Jewish ancestry, I have used the same methods for Irish emigrés and indeed people within the UK who have a connection to my own ancestral lines. It’s a question of getting to know the basic records and learning what information is requested on each. We also need to bear in mind that online availability of these various record sets varied from state to state.
Many of us will have the odd ancestral family member who emigrated from or immigrated to the UK. If this applies to you, I hope you will find something in this post that will help you to progress.
I’ve often heard people who are interested in their family history say they won’t take a DNA test because they’re not interested in connecting with 3rd or 4th cousins: they just want to know about their own ancestors. This is a misunderstanding of how DNA matching works. The point is that we share 2x great grandparents with our 3rd cousins, and we share 3x great grandparents with our 4th cousins. Unless our ancestors have lived extraordinarily long lives and reproduced the following generation at scandalously early ages, none of those ancestors of ours will still be living. However, if we can connect with other people who are descended from them via siblings of our direct line, we might learn new stories about them that were passed down their line but not ours. We might even find new photographs or documents, or a family bible. If we’re not absolutely sure that we have the correct parentage assigned to one of our forbears, the DNA will prove that and help us to work out who the correct person is. If all this seems like an impossible puzzle – well, yes, there is a lot to learn. Sometimes the connection is very clear; other times we have to work hard to find it. But it’s worth it.
In my own family research I’ve used DNA to home in on birthplaces in Ireland (from where my ancestors migrated before the advent of civil registration and before the big fire in Dublin); to verify a hypothesis I had about a mysterious ancestor; to help several other people to find missing grandfathers; and to connect with people who had photos. However, this post is not about my own ancestry.
Today I’m going to share with you how I used three unknown DNA matches of a person whose DNA I manage:
to identify beyond doubt the birthplace in modern-day Belarus of certain named individuals;
to identify beyond doubt two family members, brothers of direct ancestors, about whom very little was known.
All this is published here with that person’s permission.
The case is complicated because it involves several countries, constantly changing national boundaries, two continents, several languages and two types of script: the Latin script we use in English, and the Cyrillic script used in Russia and Belarus. It involves people of Jewish heritage, where the high incidence of endogamy can skew estimates of cousin matches, making them appear closer than they really are. At no time did I make contact with any of the DNA matches. All research was carried out using only the sparse information they each had on the trees linked to their DNA results as my starting point.
The research relates to Marks Chirklin, his wife Fanny Chirklin née Rudow and one of their daughters, who I will not name here.
The Chirklins immigrated to the UK early in the twentieth century, and were believed by their living descendants to have come from Poland or Lithuania. In the 1911 census their country of birth is recorded as ‘Russia’. None of this is incompatible, since boundaries changed regularly. However, the Russian Empire was huge, so this documentary evidence did nothing to permit a homing in on the actual birthplace of the family.
In all UK records the name of this family is written as Chirklin or Cherklin. This too is not without complications. For any of our ancestors originating in a non-English speaking country, names may have been anglicised. If they have come from a place where an alphabet other than our Latin script is used, the complications are even greater. Often in such cases we lack a letter to write the sounds required to pronounce the original word. In the case of immigrants this will impact on names of people and also place-names. As we shall see, both of these were an issue in this research.
Using records and DNA matches to locate a birthplace for the Chirklins
In the 1921 UK census Marks and Fanny gave their birthplaces as Vilna. Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania, but ‘Vilna’ is a government district, or ‘Oblast’. Although it did include Vilnius, it was much larger, including territories in present-day Belarus as well as Lithuania. At the time the family came to the UK it was part of the Russian Empire.
However, in the same census, the now-married daughter of Marks and Fanny gave her birthplace as ‘Dishna, Russia’. This was problematic for the linguistic reasons outlined above. Just writing this down involved transforming the sounds of her homeland and somehow finding a way to make sense of these sounds in English language and script. So ‘Dishna’ was unlikely to be entirely correct, but it was a starting point; and since the rest of the family were born in the Vilna Oblast, this narrowed down the search for a town within Vilna with a name that sounded like ‘Dishna’.
I had already noticed that the Chirklin descendant whose DNA I manage had two reasonably close DNA matches with names in their trees similar to Chirklin. Specifically, those names were Tsirklin and Tzerklin. One was in the US; the other location not known. Both were showing with a probability of a 2nd-3rd cousin match. For reasons outlined above, this estimated match level needed to be taken with a pinch of salt to some extent. Even so, a DNA match stretching back far enough to be just out of reach as far as our UK and US records are concerned seemed likely – perhaps a 3rd-4th cousin match.
Should my linking of Chirklin, Cherklin, Tsirklin and Tzerklin require any explanation, it’s easily explained by the linguistic conversion of the sounds of one language family to another. There is often even a difference between the way surnames were recorded upon immigration into the US and immigration into the UK. (For example the name pronounced phonetically in the US as Pet-Raow-Skee is both spelled and pronounced differently in the UK: Piotrowski and Pee-Ot-Roff-Skee.) In a new language which doesn’t have an equivalent sound, ‘Tz’ could easily be the same sound as ‘Ch’.
I had no way of knowing how these Tsirklins and Tzerklins were connected to the Chirklins. The family trees linked to the DNA results were sparse, and it seemed clear that any connection would be back in the old homeland. What I could see, however, was that the earliest known Tsirklin was from ‘Volintsi’ in Belarus, and the earliest known Tzerklin from Polatsk in Belarus. These towns are about 35 km apart – but Polatsk is a much larger town and could easily have been a ‘shorthand’ for “I come from a tiny settlement called XXX about 10 miles from Polatsk”.
Locating these on the map I then searched for ‘Dishna, Belarus’ and found it: Dzisna – just a short distance south of Volyntsy. By combining the documentary evidence of the placename given on the 1921 census with the location of these reasonably close DNA matches with the same family name, we finally had a definite birthplace for this Chirklin daughter and possibly for her siblings and parents too.
Location of Volyntsy, Dzisna and Polatsk in Belarus. Google Maps.
There are various spellings of this town’s name. I have come across Disna, Dysna, Dzisna (Polish), but also in the Russian Cyrillic script Дзісна in Belarusian (which is pronounced Dzisna, as in the Polish pronunciation), and Дисна in Russian, which would be pronounced as Disna. Today, the boundaries of the Oblasts have also changed. Dzisna is now within the Molodechno Oblast of Belarus.
Using records and a third DNA match to identify and locate two missing family members
In addition to the known siblings living with the family at the time of the censuses, the Chirklins were thought to have another son: Nathan. The descendants of the family knew of him only from a reference on a memorial headstone. He was generally assumed to have gone to America, but no one knew for sure. One of the descendants found a new document via Ancestry.com, and thought this could be him.
The new document was a ship’s manifest, dated 1907, including the passenger Nachman Zirklin. Could ‘Zirklin’ be yet another anglicisation of Chirklin/ Cherklin/ Tzerklin/ Tsirklin? And could ‘Nachman’ be the missing person thought to be Nathan?
Nachman Zirklin, Ship’s Manifest entry, March 1907, Liverpool to Philadelpia PA. CLICK FOR BIGGER
According to the ship’s manifest, Nachman Zirklin was 21 years old in 1907 – the right sort of age to be the missing brother. He was departing from Liverpool, bound for Philadelphia, PA, and his last place of residence was London, where he had lived for eight months. The immigration date of the Chirklins into the UK was not known but was likely to be around this time. Therefore if this Nachman was the correct person, this record would also give us a likely immigration date for the whole family of around July 1906. Nachman’s birthplace is noted as ‘Lisna’, which is very similar to Disna and an easy mistake to make if the clerk has never heard of the place and has noted down what they thought the person with very little English has said, or indeed if that information is being copied from another document where the upper round stroke of the ‘D’ was very faint.
There was one other very interesting piece of information. Nachman was heading for New York City, where he would be staying with his uncle, a Mr Rudoff. Rudoff, of course, is a phonetic spelling of Rudow, which is, as we knew, the maiden name of Fanny, the mother of the Chirklin family in England. It looked very much like Fanny had a brother in New York, and that her son Nathan/ Nachman was going to stay with him.
As luck would have it, there was another DNA match, estimated 2nd-3rd cousin, to a US-based person with Rudow ancestry. Again the linked tree was very sparse, and while acknowledging the obvious surname link between that family and Fanny back in London, there were no clues at all as to how they might fit in. The earliest known Rudow ancestor on that tree was a Solomon, with an estimated birth year of 1866 and a birthplace of ‘Russia’. However, when I went now to look at this DNA match again I saw that the Ancestry algorithms had been hard at work, and had found a link between ancestors that this match didn’t even have on her tree and two people on the one I had created for the person whose DNA I manage. The two people were Fanny’s parents. I had been given their names by family members and knew nothing more about them. However, Ancestry was suggesting these people were also the parents of Solomon Rudow in New York. If correct, this would make Solomon Fanny’s brother, and therefore the uncle of Nathan/ Nachman.
We should never simply accept hints on Ancestry or any other genealogy website. Hints are suggestions, nothing more. It’s up to us to prove or disprove them. So I now set about researching Solomon Rudow of New York. Through a series of US Federal and NY State censuses I tracked him from his arrival circa 1902 to his death in 1956. On the 1906 US directory I found his address: right next door to that given the following year by Nathan/ Nachman as the address of his uncle Mr Rudoff, on the ship’s manifest. We have our man! This Solomon Rudow is indeed the uncle of Nathan Zirklin/ Chirklin, younger brother of Fanny née Rudow; and Nathan is the son of Marks and Fanny.
This post has looked at how DNA was used to confirm birthplaces, plus connections to two missing people who had emigrated to the USA. In view of the lack of information amongst the living descendants of the Chirklin family, I couldn’t have proven any of this without the DNA.
While in this post we have been looking from England to find out more about people who went to America, in my next post I’ll be staying with Solomon Rudow and Nachman/ Nathan Zirklin/ Chirklin, and investigating what might be learned about the family back in England and their origins in Dzisna/ modern day Belarus by looking at the US records about the two of them.
Ever since genealogist and historian Janet Few’s book Tracing Your Marginalised Ancestors: a guide for family historians, was published earlier this year, I’ve been looking forward to having the time to read it. I finally got around to it this week.
Our ancestors may have been marginalised for several reasons. Janet deals with the possibilities across eleven chapters: Poverty; Criminality; Immigration and Ethnicity; Prostitution; Illegitimacy; The Inebriate; Sickness and Disability; Mental Ill-Health; The Romany and Traveller Community, Witchcraft; and Other Marginalised Groups. Almost all of us are sure to have ancestors that fall into at least some of those groups.
The Introduction sets the tone of the book. This is not about sensationalising the antics of our ancestors; it’s about understanding what might have been going on in their lives or in the wider society to bring about the situation they found themselves in. For many of the issues, attitudes have changed considerably over the decades/centuries. Indeed, even the language used in relation to groups of people has changed, so that for some of these marginalised groups our own discomfort may be more about the words used and the treatment of individuals than about their lifestyle, condition or behaviours that were so unacceptable in past times. We have all seen, for example, the columns in the earlier censuses for the enumerator to tick if an individual was an ‘Imbecile, Idiot or Lunatic’ – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Janet deals with this very thoughtfully, to the extent that her text was read and edited for ‘sensitivity’ by an expert prior to publication.
This need for sensitivity extends to us too, and to what we do with the information when we’ve discovered it. Older generations may be uncomfortable, embarassed or ashamed when learning of certain ancestral behaviours, and all the more so if they knew the people involved. In the case of my own parents, I realised long ago that, if they were still living, some of the discoveries I’ve made about their ancestors would be off limits for them.
Each chapter/ topic commences with an overview of the issues including the attitudes of the day. Poor people, for example, were blamed for their own poverty and considered lazy. Prostitution was considered a necessary evil, but the women were punished while their male clients were not. Even ill health – which of course led to poverty – was not excusable, since it was considered to be a result of an imbalance of the four humors, and since keeping these in balance was the responsibility of the individual: a belief that was sanctioned by the Church. All of this is important, since we need to understand that the world our ancestors inhabited was often very different to the one we know. We cannot judge them or their society from our standpoint, and the more we learn about their times, the more we will understand their lives.
Following from the above, there is then an overview of the kinds of records that you might find. In general, books published by Pen & Sword for family historians are pitched at a certain level. As beginners we tend to be led by what records are available on our subscription website of choice (Ancestry, FindMyPast, MyHeritage, TheGenealogist…). However, as we progress, we realise that even though the number of records on these websites increases constantly, it is still only a limited amount of what is actually available – and is there only by licence from the relevant archives. We have to turn our thinking on its head. It is no longer a case of ‘I found this on Ancestry’, but ‘These records are lodged at XXX archive and are available on FindMyPast’. It is the location of the originals that is the most important part of our citation, even though we should add that what we viewed was the digital image on a named website. So of course, this is how Janet refers to the types of records available. Sometimes the records are part of a national set and lodged at The National Archives, in which case Janet provides references for the sets. Others, such as Quarter Sessions records, are of uniform application but will be lodged at local county archives. Certain incidents or events will also have been reported in newspapers, which may be available online or locally. Other types of records of a more local nature may or may not have survived, but Janet gives specific examples of the types of records that may hold the information we seek. Knowing what might be possible is then our starting point for browsing the archives’ online catalogues or speaking to the archivist.
Each chapter ends with a case study of an individual whose story has been traced through the relevant records. Some of these case studies demonstrate that sometimes the full story cannot be found – for example in the case of a woman whose range of pseudonyms prevented the location of a definite baptism.
Covering such a range of societal issues, the book is inevitably a starting point for each one. If you want to go further, there is a list of further reading for each chapter, and of course more in-depth books will be found via those.
To conclude, this is a very useful book suitable for anyone who has moved or is ready to move away from the comfort of the subscription website and prepared to look wider and actively seek out records that will help you to progress. The individual chapters are interesting, sensitively dealt with, and the lists of record sets within each chapter will be a useful resource for the future should a particular type of marginalisation come to light within your own ancestry.
Click the image below to find this book on Amazon.co.uk.
English Ancestors 