Top Tips To Get The Best From A Visit To An Archives Or Genealogy Centre

It is great if you can go along to an archive or genealogy centre to research your family history work in person. 

Burns Monument Centre

A visit to look at bmd, census records etc at the Scotland's People Centre in Edinburgh, the Mitchell Library in Glasgow or the Burns Monument Centre in Kilmarnock can save you a great deal of money as you pay a flat fee and can look at as many records as you wish over the course of the day.  

Even if you are not able to go in person due to distance or time isssues, it can still save you money financially to pay a researcher to go on your behalf. Kin Tree provides this service and as experts in family research, we can make the most of your time and money.  

Sometimes there is a need to trawl through records for a certain individual as there is no obvious record when looking online. For example, it's not uncommon  to look through  thirty or so records to find  the correct one for one individual. Often the record can hold the key to your future research but it would cost a fortune online!  

Also, even without any real problems in identifying people, the cost of looking at these records online is far, far more expensive than a day at the record's office.

We can also pool a day's work between a few people who only need a few records looked up.  This can be especially cost effective even if you can visit a centre yourself. Why pay for a whole day when you only need an hour or two? 

If you do intend visiting any archive/genealogy centre it is essential that you go prepared! We have some top tips to make your visit as successful as possible!

• Many centres are very busy and you will need to book a place in advance so check to see if this is the case.

• In some archives, specific archive staff will deal with your requests for information or to look at materials so contact them in advance as you may need to book an appointment with them.

• Check with staff that they have the materials in which you are interested.  For example, in some areas poor relief records are extensive, others have none about specific people and others have patchy coverage.  Staff will be able to advise you what is available.

• Archive material is often kept in storage and staff may need advanced notice that you would like to see it as it may be stored offsite.  

• Don't assume that all archives or genealogy centres operate in the the same way.  Even within Scotland's People records, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Kilmarnock have different rules about how materials can be copied, opening times etc

• If you want to use electronic equipment, it can be helpful to check if there is a power supply that you can use.  This can vary even within the same building!

• A pencil and paper are essentials for family research! Old documents for example, can be very fragile so you may find that you are only allowed to use a paper and pencil to record the information.

• If you are not recording information electronically, remember to bring along blank copies of any potential documents may need eg family group sheets, family trees, bmd forms, census etc.  Other than that, plenty of paper, pencils, rubbers and a pencil sharpener!

• Think about what you are trying to find out, make a plan of what you want to achieve and make notes of any thoughts you have before you go.  These can be helpful for keeping you focussed when you are presented with new and exciting information!

For more information on how we can help you, please get in touch for a no obligation chat.

kintree@ymail.com

Click on the links below to find us on 

facebook                    twitter

Ever come across conflicting evidence and wonder what to believe?

Sometimes you can come across conflicting evidence when researching family history.

In Scotland, birth, marriage and death certificates give detailed information not only of the person or people registered in the event but also give details of the parents.

Death certificates are a common source of conflicting evidence.  The person registering the death is likely to be upset and can give the wrong information accidentally.  They may not know some of the details or guess at them.  Dependent on the registrar taking the details, they may have been encouraged to provide an answer so that no gaps were left!

However, even in birth and marriage certificates, details can bee recorded incorrectly.

For birth certificates, it is often only one parent who attended to register the birth and they may not know the details of their partner's family or some forget their marriage date!  

With marriage certificates, there may be problems as one person may have filled in the details for both even though each person needs to sign the forms.  

For any documentation, it may simply be that your ancestors could not read or write and they were reliant on someone else recording the details with no way for them to correct any mistakes.

So how do we deal with these types of problems?

Where we can corroborate the evidence then there is much more likelihood that this will be the correct information.  Sometimes of course, when it has been recorded incorrectly once, then it may be repeated if the information is simply copied.  However, what is far more likely is that it will be recorded incorrectly once and correctly on other occasions.

There may only be two pieces of evidence however so how should you deal with this? If you are recording a birth for example and have conflicting dates with no way to choose between the two, then record anything that is certain.  

John Hunter

Using the example of the renowned physician and anatomist John Hunter who was born in 1728, we find that his birth was recorded in the parish records as being 14 July 1728.  However recorded evidence shows he celebrated and believed his birthday to be 13 February 1728. 

On a family tree therefore we can record the year of his birth and the place as neither of these facts are disputed and are corroborated.

Keep a record of the other information and put a note in your files about the disputed date as you do not know what other information may come to light in the future to help clarify this.

If you are writing a family history book then you can record the date but add in the information about the conflicting evidence on the day and month of birth.  This can be an interesting item to include and most of us enjoy the mystery and to think about what might have happened!

For more information on how we can help you sort through conflicting evidence, please get in touch for a no obligation chat.

kintree@ymail.com

Click on the links below to find us on 

facebook                    twitter

Making Your Best Possible Family History Book

Creating a family history book is one of the most popular activities for family historians.  Not only does it provide a family heirloom to be passed down but also brings together all the hard work that has been done into one place.

Planning your book is not only about the people you will write about or the images that it will show but it is also about creating a book that will last throughout the decades or even centuries and so the materials from which your book is made is also very important.

Do you have any ageing books that are looking a little dog-eared or yellowing? Sometimes even they may have the odd torn page. Choosing the paper on which you print your book is crucial if you are to preserve your book is excellent condition for more than about 20 years.

At Kin Tree, we use archival paper to print family history books and other similar documents that need preserving. Archival paper is the type of paper used for storing legal documents etc where a document must last over a long period of time. The paper we use lasts for around 200 years and is not only specially manufactured to stop it becoming brittle or yellowing but also is stronger than normal paper so far less likely to tear.

The ink that is used for printing is also very important because there is not much point in printing on archival paper if your ink then fades.  Kin Tree uses archival inks whether in a printer or for handwriting pens. If you are printing your own documents then we would always recommend this type of paper and ink.

It's important also to have a good quality cover for your book.  A variety of covers are available but Kin Tree use spring back binders.  These are binders that although they look like a book, allow you to take the cover off so that you can add more pages if you find more information on your family that you would like to add at a later stage.

For more information on how we can help you create the best possible family history book, please get in touch for a no obligation chat.

kintree@ymail.com

Click on the links below to find us on 

facebook                    twitter

Did Your Ancestor Work As A Puddler?

Old occupations and their names can leave us scratching our heads or sometimes even raising a smile at the unusual names.  

We can learn much about our ancestors' lives from their occupations and they can provide a social history as people moved from agricultural based jobs to industrial and white collar work.

So how do we find out what our ancestors did for a living and what other information can we find out from their occupation?

Usually we find out our ancestors' occupations from birth, marriage and death records along with census records.  There are many other sources of information too such as trade directories and even family papers that have been kept over the years.

Matching their occupation to where our ancestors lived means that we can research local workplaces to find out where they are likely to have worked. In some cases there is only one possible workplace but even if it's not possible initially to find only one potential workplace, with a list of probable employers, there is every possibility of finding lists of employees or trade directories which can highlight where your ancestor worked.

Another aspect of this research is to look at the conditions in which your ancestor worked.  Was it dangerous?  How many hours did they work?  What was the pay like?

Using a "puddler" as our example, we can see how expanding this basic information will build up a picture of someone's life.

A puddler was highly skilled and dangerous occupation which required physical strength, stamina and sustained concentration.

Puddlers were also known a iron puddlers and they were employed in iron works to turn brittle pig iron into malleable wrought iron during the late 18th century and the 19th century.  This meant that they had to be skilled practical chemists along with being strong and have great endurance and mental strength in extreme conditions.

They worked long hours and were unlikely to reach the age of 50 given the dangerous conditions in which they worked.  It could be a relatively well paid job due to its skill and danger however not everyone was paid well as some employers took advantage of their employees.

Iron Puddler

The process of changing the iron from pig iron to wrought iron involved adding chemicals to the iron at a very high temperature and with no monitoring devices, the puddlers had to gauge for themselves when the iron was ready for the next stage of the process.

Puddlers had to stir a ball of some five hundredweight of molten iron to expose it to the flame and often had to carry the molten balls around.

There was no safety equipment in those days and the puddlers worked in extreme heat. The trade paper "Iron" noted in 1882 that in warm weather it was no uncommon thing to see a puddler drop down dead.

As one puddler called JJ Davies recalled:

 I am like some frantic baker in the inferno kneading a batch of iron bread for the devil's breakfast.

If you are interested in finding out about your ancestors' occupations, then please get in touch for a no obligation chat to find how we can help.

Contact us at:

kintree@ymail.com

Click on the links below to find us on 

facebook                    twitter

Tracing 19th Century Military Personnel Records

One of our current clients has asked us to look for the details of an ancestor's military service in the 19th century.

It is possible to track down individual details alongside the general details of where people served in the 19th century even though individual service personnel were less well documented then than in later times. We have managed to track down the service details for our client's ancestor and have photos of his ancestor's grave which is located some many thousand miles away from Scotland. 

Many people joined the services in the 19th century but sometimes this does not sit easily with their descendants as it often involved the armed forces imposing rule on other countries' populations. This in itself though is not a reason to ignore this aspect of their lives.

There were many reasons why people joined the military and most people who joined up were certainly unaware of the life that they would lead overseas or the conditions that would be imposed on local communities.  Many were press ganged into the military and it is well documented that people were often plied with alcohol to entice them to take the king/queen's shilling.

Others joined because they believed the recruitment information that said that they would be offered a good life.  This was often true to a point.  Wages in industry could be more but there was an uncertainty to that life whilst the military offered an extended family along with a roof over your head, meals and clothing.  With a population shifting from place to place for work and dreadful conditions in many cities or poverty in the countryside, the military life could often seem like an attractive proposition.

Imagine what life must have been like for these recruits? Training tended to be square bashing without any specialist training for going overseas. They were sent overseas without any idea of when or if they would return.  For the officers, life was generally better but for the ordinary soldiers conditions were often basic and many died from disease or the poor conditions in which they lived.  In some cases, certain postings were seen as a death sentence whatever your rank.   

Thinking about how our ancestors coped with these conditions and what they must have thought of the politicians and senior military commanders who sent them to these places thousands of miles from home can be interesting and there are many documented accounts of conditions available from places such as the National Archives.

If you are interested in finding out about your ancestors' military service - in whatever century, then please get in touch to see how we can help.

Contact us at:

kintree@ymail.com

Click on the links below to find us on 

facebook                    twitter

Corroboration Is Key To Successful Family Tree Research

The excitement of discovering new members of our family tree is a highlight of most people's searches.  New discoveries usually bring more areas of the family to explore and more questions too!

It's important that before you embark on these new avenues, you check that your research can be corroborated or if you have not done this, how you can check that it is accurate.

Two stories come to mind with information that we have been asked to investigate which illustrate in different ways, why it is important to check information is accurate.

The first involves someone who was working back through the generations when they hit a brick wall.  They had little knowledge of one branch of the family but with an usual surname and a known location for where the family had lived at one time, they had decided to check birth records for their great grandfather who they thought was born towards the end of the 19th century.

Sure enough, they found a record for the correct name and father's name (they had not known the mother's name) and in the year that they were expecting to find the birth.  It had taken place in the neighbouring town to which they had known the family had lived at a later date.  Sensibly, they checked this unusual surname for anyone else living in the area but the only details that came up in that area was for the birth certificate of a sibling so all seemed well.  

They asked Kin Tree to look further into this as their great, great grandparents had come from Ireland and after hitting a brick wall, they wanted our expertise in Irish research to help reveal the next chapter of their family's story.  

Our first job is always to review the information that we have been given. We had asked why they were sure this was the birth of their great grandfather and they of course explained about the location.

Without that definite link, we decided to look further into their great grandfather's life and given his date of birth, we looked for a World War 1 record for him and discovered that he had died in 1917.  This was a key fact as the family's actual great grandfather had died in the late 1950s! 

We did track down the right family for them however and indeed their Irish family too.  This shows why it is important to not make assumptions!

The second example was based on a genuine mistake by a family rather than an assumption however it was compounded by accepting that someone else's family tree was accurate when it was not.

This time, there had been lots of work done on the tree in question including documents to corroborate the information.  Kin Tree had been contacted to see if we could take the tree further back or make suggestions for further investigation.  We were reviewing the information and checking it for accuracy and overall it was fine until we got to the early 1860s.  A mother had died in the same year that her baby was born, let's call the baby Mary Smith.  The family had noticed that the mother had not appeared in the 1871 census and checked for a death and found that the mother had indeed died the year that Mary was born.

The mother's name was quite common and she had been born before statutory records. Unfortunately they had been unable to track down a birth certificate for her.  It seemed too that the couple must have been married before statutory records had started too as they could find no record there either.

Next, the family turned to the family tree hints and suggestions that appear on some of the more popular family tree sites.  These can be great for swapping information and finding new branches of your family tree. There, they found someone else who had Mary's details and the details of Mary's descendants on their own tree. A distant relative it seemed! These matched the family's own research into Mary's descendants. 

As luck would have it, there were also details of Mary's mother and her ancestors.  Our family even went to the bother of contacting the other tree owner to find out how they had tracked down Mary's mother's birth,. This led to them realising that they had missed a vital record that had been there all the time.  The other tree holder was happy to swap information too.

What we discovered though when cross referencing the information was that the birth certificate that had been found for Mary belonged to a different Mary Smith!  Coincidence meant that they had the same name and their parents had the same names too.  (Mary's parents' names had come from Mary's marriage certificate). Also, both babies' mothers died when they were infants.  

The problem was that our family had only checked if there was a death for Mary's mother but had not taken a note of the specific details of the death.  When we checked it properly, we found that the lady in question had died the year that our Mary was born but some months before Mary's birth! The other family tree listing Mary's family incorrectly had made the same mistake it seemed - although they later said that they had copied the details from another tree and had not checked themselves!  

Both these cases show us the need to check information carefully and to not make assumptions.

So this reminds us to 

1. Check all records and take copies or notes of the details.
2. Don't assume that the first record you come to that seems to fit is the correct one unless you have overwhelming supporting evidence.
3. Fill in all details of these records into your family tree. 
4. Cross reference to highlight any anomalies. A family tree programme can help to flag these up.
5. Always review your information before moving on to the next task.
6. Be honest with yourself about your information as otherwise you could be wasting time and money barking up the wrong family tree!
7. If you are looking online at other people's family tree information remember that it may be inaccurate so check the details yourself. 
8. Contact Kin Tree for a review of your information or for further help on where to go next with your family tree.

For more information on researching your family tree:

Contact us at:

kintree@ymail.com

Click on the links below to find us on 

facebook                    twitter

How To Write About Your Own Life

Whilst researching your family history is in itself an absorbing and interesting hobby, most people also hope that they information that they have collated will be passed on down through the generations.

It can be easy to forget about your own personal story or feel that you have nothing to contribute. Don't forget though that as you are interested in your ancestors' lives, descendants will be interested in your own story.  Although we might record the big events in life and find them easy to document, it is often the small things that you find out that make your ancestors' stories really come to life.

So how do you start to do this in a meaningful way? What to write about and what to leave out?  What if you don't feel confident in writing about your own life?

A great way to start is by thinking about one of your ancestors who you did not get a chance to meet and think about what you would have liked to ask them if you had been given a chance.  

Write down a list of questions - it doesn't matter if it's a long or a short list. Sometimes it can be difficult to think of questions but usually once you get started, it gets easier as ideas start to flow.  You can try to write your list all in one go or over a period of time. If you like to write electronically then write your questions using this format and if you prefer pen and paper then use those.  The thing is to feel as comfortable as possible with the format.

After this and in your own time, start to answer these questions but for yourself.  If you can't think of something to write about a specific question then leave it.  Most of us can write down a few words at least about places where we have lived or worked.  It doesn't need to be a long piece of writing if you don't like writing much.  Anything that you write will be precious to your descendants.

It can also be good for inspiration to think about how things have changed in your lifetime.  The rate at which technology is changing our lives for example, is surprising and any observations that you make about changes that you have seen would be interesting to future family historians.

Radio Times listing

So what kind of observations might you make? 

It could be something as simple as tv schedules.  It is not long since everyone relied on a weekly magazine or magazines to check out what their next week's viewing would be for example.

Now with television guides available on your television set, catch up television and guides and news accessed online in a variety of ways, it would be interesting for future generations to know how much these magazines were a part of every day life. 

Your descendants will treasure your thoughts and memories even if they are simply a few notes on a scrap of paper.  However, it is also possible to expand on this by writing it up or by getting it written up into a fuller piece. Even if you don't have personal photos etc to add to this, a little research can easily be done to add some images.

At Kin Tree we are experts in writing up family stories so even if you are only looking for some advice or guidance, please get in touch for a chat.

For more information on researching  and writing about your family tree:

Contact us at:

kintree@ymail.com

Click on the links below to find us on 

facebook                    twitter