Calling Attention to Three Search Sites Mentioned by Other Bloggers

Recently several bloggers have posted links to searchable websites that I thought worth highlighting and mentioning again.  Thank you to Michael John Neill, English Ancestors, and Teresa.
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At his blog, Genealogy Tip of the Day, Michael John Neill posted news about FamilySearch's experimental search website, United States Wills and Deeds, where FamilySearch is investigating new ways to access hard to find records.  Since this is an experimental website it may may be available for only a limited time.  I love the fact that the website's sole purpose is searching court records and that I can search by name and then narrow the search in a variety of ways such as location, years, etc.  It's already been helpful to me.  Go here to reach FamilySearch's United States Wills and Deeds Experimental Search.

If you have British ancestors, these two posts and links are for you.
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Teresa at writing my past told of her second great-grandmother's experience Testifying at the Old Bailey... and how she found the record.  Read her post at that link and search The Proceedings of the Old Bailey here.  The Old Bailey was London's Central Criminal Court.

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English Ancestors recently published the post Instant-access Birth and Death certificate images which are now available at the General Register Office website and explained the process for obtaining them, then compared the differences between these certificates and the PDF versions we obtain through email and the paper certificates that come through regular mail.  It's a great post and I recommend it if you have ancestors from England.  This is the link to the General Register Office.
Again, thank you to Michael John Neil, English Ancestors, and Teresa.  Great work, you three!

—Nancy.

Copyright © 2023 Nancy Messier.  All Rights Reserved. 
Do not copy or use any content from this blog without written permission from the owner. 
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Strategies for Ordering the Correct U.K. GRO Birth or Death Record (when you have too little information to know for sure)

There are times when it can be a challenge to order the correct birth or death certificate from the U.K. GRO (General Register Office) Online Ordering Service.  You need to know several items of information, some of which you may not have and which you hope to obtain from the certificate itself.   

The GRO search engine requires three specific pieces of information about your ancestor.
     ▸ Surname at death (or birth)
     ▸ Gender
     ▸ Year the death was registered within a 2-year range
 There are boxes for you to include optional information.
     ▸ Forename (first and/or middle) at death
     ▸ Age at death
     ▸ Quarter of death
     ▸ District where death was registered
     ▸ GRO Reference (Volume and Page) if you have them

The more of the above information you already have about your ancestor -- and the fewer guesses you have to make -- the more successful you will be in ordering the correct record. 

If  you have too little information about your ancestor, use every resource available to find enough information to narrow the possibilities.  Here are some strategies and resources that have been helpful to me.

Determine the Last Location Where You Found Your Ancestor Alive. 

• Be as specific as possible.  It's not enough to know to know the county, or even a city in that county.  Search deeper to find, if possible, a more specific location.  Old census records will name the county; they may also give a parish, a township, a town, a city, a municipal borough, hamlet, ecclesiastical district, and/or etc.
• Look at maps of the time period to determine how and where the locations overlapped.
• Search google for more information about the history of the location.  Wikipedia sometimes has specific details about locations in England and how and when boundary changes occurred.
• As much as possible narrow the location to the smallest geographic area, be it township, city, town, etc.

Use Church Parish Records to Help Locate Your Ancestor.

• FamilySearch has an excellent selection of parish records available online.  Use the catalog to search location.  Be sure to check whether digital images of microfilm are available online at home or at a FamilySearch Center.  Also check whether microfilms are digitized and, if so, whether they're available for home viewing and/or are indexed.
• Use FreeReg in conjunction with parish records at FamilySearch.  FreeReg offers partial transcriptions of parish records of baptisms and burials by county.  Search by name, year range, county, and/or record type. 

Look at Other U. K. Birth and Death Indexes before Going to the U.K. GRO Index.
Some indexes give more or different information than others.  Use as many as you can find.

• England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008 at FamilySearch
• England and Wales Death Registration Index 1837-2007 at FamilySearch 
• FreeBMD can be helpful because you can search on a name across many years.
• Ancestry and FindMyPast also have indexes (but they are not free)

Remember that the age in any index or record could be off by several years.  Names could be misspelled or suggest spelling variations.

After you narrow down the details of your ancestor's birth or death, head over to the U.K. GRO Index, log in or create an account, and click through to the index you'd like to use.

If you need basic information about using the U.K. GRO online record ordering service, see Paul Milner's excellent blog post, NEWS: New GRO Birth and Death Indexes and Digitized Certificates for reduced price – short time only, at Paul Milner Genealogy.  It was written a number of years ago when the GRO first initiated the limited-time pilot program for purchasing digitized certificates.  The dates in the post are not accurate but the rest of the information is.  The GRO is currently offering digitized certificates for a minimum of 9 months from October 12, 2017, which means until at least July, 2018.

Now, because I didn't do enough research the first time, I have available to anyone who wants it, the death record of Martha Richardson, widow of William Richardson.
 


If you want the PDF file please contact me.  Maybe this is your ancestor.  (She's definitely not mine.)

Happy searching to you.

--Nancy.

Copyright ©2018, Nancy Messier. All Rights Reserved.

Alternate Spelling Finder -Tuesday's Tip

In my early days as a family historian I expected that each family surname would be spelled exactly the same way on every document.  And then I learned about spelling variations.  Lots and lots of variations.  Still, some ancestors elude me.  Maybe there's another spelling variation I should try.

Datayze's Alternate Spelling Finder to the rescue.  Or, at least, maybe it will help.


This tool gives a broad range of variations, some of which may be more useful than others.  some strange variations but it's also given me some that hadn't occurred to me.

Type in the surname (or any word, for that matter) and press enter on your keyboard.  Voilà.  More variations than you might have known were possible.  Of course, some are more likely to have occurred in records than others.

These are variations for some of my surnames.

Armitage.

Bickerstaff.

Doyle.


Gerner.


Meinzen.

Maybe it will be a helpful resource.

--Nancy.

Another Kind of Genealogy Toolbox

Linda Stufflebean's post, A New Look at Bloggers' Toolboxes, reminded me of a draft I began several months ago about another kind of genealogy toolbox.  I decided to finish my thoughts and share them.  I hope you'll tell me what you think.

Most of us have genealogy toolboxes with direct links to resources on our blogs so we can easily access and share them.  Our toolboxes are often specific to our own individuals and families we wish to find and the locations where they lived.  They usually include links to online resources and sometimes information for repositories without online images.  We add all kinds of useful resources to our toolboxes.

I think there's another kind of toolbox, too, a toolbox that's even more personal, often private, with tools we need to go about our searches to find deceased family members.  It's a toolbox with our personal skills and abilities and those we want to obtain to help us become better genealogists and family historians.

Below are some of the most basic tools I think we need in this other toolbox.  Some are almost inherent in our personalities, some we've learned through our education and life experiences, and others can be learned through study and experience.

Essential Tools to Begin. 

• Interest.  Without an interest in our dead ancestors, or some information we can obtain from them (such as medical information), we would not search for them.
• Desire.  I separate desire from interest because we can be interested but have no desire to do the work to find our ancestors.  Interest can be wishful thinking.  Desire can be, too, I suppose.
• Motivation and Willingness to search happen when interest and desire together move a person to action.

Other Necessary Skills and Abilities (inherent and/or learned).  Some of these may be related to and/or overlap each other but I listed them separately because they're so important to the process of research and evaluation of results.  These are listed in no specific order.

• Analytical Thinking.  The ability to decide what information one wants to find, then think through the methods and means of finding the information is essential to family history research.  I think of analytical thinking as a pre-research activity and an aid in the process of research.
• Critical Thinking.  The ability to analyze and evaluate the results one finds.  Without it, one may make incorrect assumptions about results.   
• Math, especially addition and subtraction.  At minimum, one needs to be able to calculate the year of birth based on age in a census or on a ship's manifest.  There are other uses, too, of course.  I suppose this could be grouped with critical thinking but to me it's so important it needs its own line on the list.  Haven't we all seen an individual listed as a parent when he was four years old, or some similar situation?  Math would have prevented the problem, as would several of the others skills mentioned here.
• Organization and Record Keeping.  Without some system of organizing records, one may repeat the same searches a number of times.  What a waste of time!  There are plenty of other reasons to be organized, not the least of which is to be able to return to a record when other, contradictory information comes to light.
• Evaluation.  Assessing research findings and judging their worth can help a careful researcher separate the gold from dross.  All documents are not created equal and some documents may be about an individual who is not your ancestor.
• Desire to Continue Learning.  We can make more and better progress if we continue to learn, not only about our ancestors, but about the research process, about places to search, about evaluating and documenting our research.  The desire and ability to learn is a great skill to have.
• Ability to Interpret.  Does it mean this, or that?  I suspect knowing how to interpret records comes with experience, helped along by education.
• Problem Solving.  This skill goes along with some of the others, above.  There are all kinds of problems that can pop up when doing family history research.  Being able to solve problems can help us determine our next step in the research process.
• Sleuthing.  I often imagine family history research as a mystery in need of a good detective.  Sometimes we need the skills of a detective to move forward.  Where is the next place to search (in both online database and physical location) when an ancestor disappears.  Are there any "leads" to follow to indicate what happened to the ancestor?

Do you consider skills and abilities likes these part of your genealogoy toolbox?  What skills have I missed?  What skills do you have in your research toolbox that have helped you along the way?

--Nancy.

Copyright © 2009-2016 Nancy Messier. All Rights Reserved.

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Reevaluating My Research Log - Genealogy Do-Over / Do-Better

I've been reevaluating the format of my research log.  This is the one I currently use, created before I knew much about family history research and before so many sources were available online.  This is my Froman research log.

With one research log per surname, I've been using them to record letters I've written requesting documents that are not available online.  They've served that purpose well but with online research my logs have fallen short of the need.  (And I've fallen short in using them to record all the online searches I've done including what I've found, and especially what I've not found.)

I would not have thought about evaluating my research log except that it was one of the topics in the Genealogy Do-Over.  I've been looking at the ways others have created and organized their research logs. Here are some things I've found.

Earlier this year Diane Haddad of Family Tree Magazine wrote a post at Genealogy Insider about her research log.  Hers includes columns to record this information:  Status, Research Task, Repository/Site, Name, Place, Notes, Prep Work Needed, and Findings.  She keeps hers as a spreadsheet on Google Drive, which makes it available wherever she can connect to the internet.

The FamilySearch Wiki on Research Logs suggests recording this information in a log:  Ancestor's name and years; Researcher's name; Date of search; Place of research; Purpose (objective); Call number; Source Description; Scope of Your Search; Document Number; and Results.

In his post for Genealogy Do-Over Week 4, Thomas MacEntee indicated that he recorded the following information when tracking searches:  date of search; website; specific database; criteria of search (what he typed in the search box); results (with url); plus notes on the search and results including analysis or thoughts.

After reading about others' research logs and seeing the information they track, I think I'd like my research log to include

• Date of search or request
• Objective/Purpose of the search/Research Goal (the question I'm trying to answer, what I hope to find)
• Where I searched or who I asked:  repository, courthouse, library, website including addresses and contact info for all
• Specifics about search criteria (name, dates, and any other information used in the search)
• Results (what I found or didn't find) and date if different from search date
• Source (where I found the information with enough detail to let me return to the source easily)
• Copy?  Do I now have a copy, either hard or computer image?
• Next Possible Steps -- a to-do list, of sorts, based on what I found/didn't find (which I will also record in a separate To-Do list) 

My research logs are in tables in WordPerfect since I don't like spreadsheets.  I like having them there but I wonder if they may be less cumbersome to use if they are in a place like Evernote.  Colleen Greene wrote a post about her research log on Evernote which generated plenty of discussion in the comments section.  I will investigate further before completely changing my log to Evernote or any other online cloud storage system.  Evernote is currently free and available wherever I have access to a computer, but I know it may not always be so.  One can never depend on technology staying the same or continuing to be available for free in the future.

As an aside, I'd like to note that while I don't always use my research log for online searches I continue to save the results of searches plus all pertinent details (such as direct link, collection name, page and image numbers, and any other details I can find) by sending myself emails with the information.  It's very cumbersome.  Hence my need to become more serious about using a research log for all searches.

So, that's what I've been up to with my Genealogy Do-Over / Do-Better this past week.  I'm excited to create a new research log and begin using it.  Thanks to Thomas MacEntee for creating the Genealogy Do-Over.  Participating is showing me some of my shortcoming as a family history researcher.

Read more about the Genealogy Do-Over here at GeneaBloggers and here at bagtheweb.

--Nancy.

Copyright © 2015 Nancy Messier. All Rights Reserved.