For the #52ancestors challenge this week the topic is Negatives.
My first thought was the piles of photographic negatives which I am sure most of us have in our homes. We've even got a few glass negatives dating from the 1930's - 1940's, as well as early thicker film negative images, strips of negatives in plastic sleeves in wallets with the prints and even some from a now defunct Kodak Disk camera. Over the years we have even had some original photographs taken to a photographic shop for a negative to be produced for it. This was of course before the advent of scanners and mobile phone cameras. Today we can easily make digital copies of our treasured family photographs and can share these with the wider family, or copy precious images of ancestors which are owned by your relations.
My second thought however was those negative searches which family historians and genealogists accrue when trying to find the illusive birth, baptism, marriage, death, or burial for a family member.
The discovery of a baptism in a parish for a person with the same name
that you are looking for at about the right date cannot by itself be assumed to
have solved the issue of an ancestor’s baptism or parentage. There may be multiple people with the same
names in a locality.. Ideally a search in
the registers of Anglican and nonconformist churches and chapels within a fifteen-mile
radius of the supposed parish should be searched. An indicated parish, from evidence of census
return or other parish register entry, can be the parish in which the family
was living at a given date or the parish stated to have been the place of birth. Family historians in the UK will be familiar
with differences in birthplaces stated in the successive census’ in the 19th
century. The county might be correct, but not necessarily the town or
village. Some people just did not know
where or when they were born or were not sure. Ages can also a tad 'elastic' so if you can't find someone try widening the search to five or more years either side of the supposed birth, marriage or death date.
If you do find a likely entry in a parish register, try, and discover if that
person died young, unmarried or married a different spouse which can eliminate him or her from
being your ancestor. From a parish register entry it may be noted if someone is a widow or widower which can also narrow down a search. Only if the entry
you have found fails to disprove the identification can you conclude that you
have found the right candidate. If the
entry you have found is unconfirmed, try and disprove it by using other documentary evidence.
Not everyone in your family tree will be in the place you
think they should be for a life event.
Family stories can be ‘embroidered’ over the years and facts
become mangled so that following up on a supposed ‘fact’ can sometimes lead you
to a brick wall or off down a rabbit hole.
Start with what you do know about the relative in question and
can prove to be true from documentary sources such as UK Census records, GRO
BMD entries, parish register entries and wills, with added information from
gravestones, military records and a myriad of other online datasets and printed
sources.
But do beware of online family trees – many are full of
unsubstantiated data which has not been proved by evidence of documentary
sources. Just because a person of the
right name is born in the right parish doesn’t necessarily mean that it is your
ancestor – you need to check that he or she did not die young, or that there
are several children with the same name in the same parish, born in a 5-year search period. Children can be baptised as babies, and as
young children in a ‘job lot’ with siblings – sometimes the parish clerk will usefully
give a date of birth alongside a baptism so this evidence can tie up with a death
date, MI or marriage entry, together with proof of parentage. Kill them off if you can to narrow down the possible candidates.
If you search for a person in a
parish you think they were born in and come up with a blank, widen your search to parishes nearby, it
might bear fruit. Looking at a map of the
locality is useful. If you have the address of your ancestor from a census return, it may be that where your ancestor lived was nearer the parish church
of the neighbouring parish, so they worshipped there instead of in the main parish church of the town or village where they lived.
If your ancestor was the eldest in a family, check the
parish where the parents of the mother lived, she may have gone home for the
birth of her first child, with subsequent children being born in the parish in
which the young family lived.
Many agricultural workers in the UK moved about seasonally
in search of work, so children could be baptised in the parish of residence at
the time, not always the original parish of the father.
With my own Hertfordshire maternal line although most families lived in Hitchin, there are tentacles of the wider family in Kings Walden, St Pauls Walden, Offley, St Ippollitts, Preston, Willian, Baldock, Stevenage (well before the new town), Wymondley, Wheathampstead, Redbourn, South Mimms and into Bedfordshire with Luton, Southill, Biggleswade and Arlesey, and further afield into London and Yorkshire in the 19th century with the advent of the railways.
From: The Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers
The parishes of wives, if different, can often spread your family wider than the originating parish. Marriages can take place in the parish of the bride, or if by Licence in a parish in a different place altogether, but one which may have a family connection a few generations further back.
Sometimes, children were not baptised, people did not marry
but you can be certain that they died, somewhere. Not all our ancestors will leave all the
records that you hope they do. Not
everyone made a Will; not everyone has a gravestone. The clues we find in census returns and
parish register entries can lead us to other possibilities when searching for
life events and widening the search from the known to the less sure can lead
you to the treasure, or more even more questions.
The thrill of the chase is why we do our genealogy starting
with our immediate family and inevitably widening our research to include
families connected by marriage, siblings and their descendants and of course
trying to go back that one step further.
No comments:
Post a Comment