Family History thread

[peanut]

The Language thread has given me the idea to start this .

How many have looked into their family history ? I have always been curious but never had the time or inclination until 4 years ago when I was laid up for 3 months with a back problem.

I thought it might be of interest if we shared our experience and contacts to help others research their Family History online.

Understanding where I have come from has been a fascinating and informative journey for me and has enabled me to understand more about myself and my ancestors .It has made me feel a lot closer to my roots .

My Grandfather was the youngest of 21 children and my Grandmother was one of 14 brothers and sisters! yes I have Catholic Irish roots

If you want to make an easy start you could do worse than look up your parents and grandparents on Free BMD (births deaths & marriages) here
http://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl
and try and find where they were living and what they did for a living in the Census taken every 10 years.
http://www.freecen.org.uk/cgi/search.pl
need help or want to chat to others from all over the world about your family history then nowhere better than the Rootschat.com forums.

 

[summerdays]

FreeBMD and FreeCEN aren't going to help if your rellies were still in Ireland. However the 1911 census for Ireland is hopefully going to be on-line later in the year, parts already are.

I've been looking at my family history since I was about 13 ... and I was staying with my gran trying to work out how I was related to all these people that visited (gran was 1 of 11, and on the other side of the family my grandfather was 1 of 10).

 

[peanut]

FreeBMD and FreeCEN aren't going to help if your rellies were still in Ireland. However the 1911 census for Ireland is hopefully going to be on-line later in the year, parts already are.

.

well it rather depends on when your ancestors emigrated doesn't it !
Most emigrated well before 1900 so the 1891 and 1901 census would be helpful as would the Free BMD if they subsequently married and had children born in the UK


Mine were decendants of John Finton-Lawlor (Irish revolution) who came to Lancs in 1880 and the D'Earleys who were decendants of John d' Earley
http://www.berkshirehistory.com/bios/jdearley.html

 

[summerdays]

My parents moved to England when I was wee... so I wait on the 1911 being online to find some missing great aunts and uncles.

 

[classic33]

You could always try
http://www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp
but remember that it caters more for those on the other side of the Atlantic.

Managed to trace both sides back over 600 years, with one side traced back over 800. Oddly enough to roughly the same part of this country.

 

[peanut]

My parents moved to England when I was wee... so I wait on the 1911 being online to find some missing great aunts and uncles.

have you no surviving relatives that can remember the early part of the century ? thats very unlucky. I have just my Dad and his Sister left. My Dad is 86 but fortunately remembers almost everything and has some fantastic stories.
I am hoping that any surviving photos and papers will come to me from my Aunt as I am the only one in the family that has done any research. I've only gone back to early 1800's so far so lots to do but with such a huge family its hard work

 

[Night Train]

I would like to be able to trace my family history. It was never something I was interested in previously but I am developing a greater interest.

The difficulty is that my parents came from the far east and that makes it difficult enough but I also don't speak Chinese and so it would make tracing back beyond a generation even more difficult for me.

What I know is that my Dad's family owned land in Hong Kong and that now belongs to China again. My Mum's parents were fairly weathy as her Dad was working in law and her Mum had bound feet. They were both killed by the Communists in China during the revolution because they were educated and had a good income. My GrandParents made sure all their children were scattered throughout the world with a ticket to anywhere with whatever they could carry before they were killed.

The interesting thing about my GrandMother was that she stood up against the system and prevented her daughters from having bound feet and made sure all her children learnt to cook and clean for themselves and sent the daughters off to school for a proper education. She must have been really something to have dared to have done that and my Grand Father must have been a very secure man to have agreed.

 

[peanut]

what a fascinating background Night train. It may be a difficult journey but all the more rewarding for it. You already know enough to whet your appetite. You owe it to your Grandmother to record your family history and show how your forebears stood tall to resist tyrany .
I would start at Rootschat forums . They are a truly vast community with over 100 post an hour sometimes .
Ask for help in the relevant section and i'm sure someone will be able to put you on the right path. Good luck

 

[summerdays]

have you no surviving relatives that can remember the early part of the century ? thats very unlucky. I have just my Dad and his Sister left. My Dad is 86 but fortunately remembers almost everything and has some fantastic stories.
I am hoping that any surviving photos and papers will come to me from my Aunt as I am the only one in the family that has done any research. I've only gone back to early 1800's so far so lots to do but with such a huge family its hard work

I've gone back to 1775 on one line but information in Ireland is sparse. However its just trying to find out where my missing great uncles were living, the ones who weren't living at home at the time, just to find out more information about them.

The hardest one I'm stuck on is the marriage of my great grandfather and great grandmother... one protestant, one catholic, and so far I can't find their marriage. Its certainly not in the places I've looked so far. And I can't follow her line back any further until I find out where she was from and who her parents were etc.

 

[gbb]

My dad traced ours back to (cant remembr the year) when they were building the first railways. Our ancestor, based in Dorset worked on these constructions, then settled in Somerset / Bristol.
Whittock is a relatively common name in that area, but very uncommon elsewhere. probably derived from hwit cocc, with medieval /anglo saxon origins, thought to mean white cock.

The advent of Facebook ought to make tracing easier...only because you can potentially come across unknown family members you'd never seen before...who may have done their homework too.

He said he spent bloody ages tracking and tracing, ages studying birth registrations etc etc...and the further you go back, you just hit a wall of nothing

 

[BigonaBianchi]

my family includs the henty bros who first took sheep to australia

 

[meenaghman]

In Ireland depending on timescales there's a few other resources..
Civil registration only started in 1864.. The index is now online on the LDS site..
go to europe and select Irish civil registration index from
http://search.labs.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html
Also the parish and civil records of various counties are online here..
http://www.irish-roots.ie
One has to register, but searching is free...Be careful though it could be a money pit. There are a few hints and tips on various sites which will save you money.
Also Jane Lyons has quite a number of extracts on her site -- www.from-ireland.net and links to some other sites she runs on there also like www.laoisgenealogy.com whre she has indexed the 1901 census head of households for Laois.

I had a surreal day last Saturday.. Did the mount Leinster challenge down in Enniscorthy in Wexford.. un and down mt Leinster in the pouring rain...Taoiseach Brian Cowen turns up as we're all finishing to hold an election rally.. took a detour to my great grandfathers ancestral home in the Laois coalfields on the way back (I live other end of the country) and 2nd house I called into was my dads second cousin. He directed me to where my great great grandfathers house used to be.. I had my garmin so noted gps reference and took some photos. In rural Ireland if you can trace the land using griffith valuation and then using the cancellation books then it can give a good idea as to who owns the land now, and its often still a relative.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

My Dad's family are a combination of:
1. on his father's side, a family of travelling players and vaudevillians, who came to the UK from the USA to work in the music halls at the very end of the C19th (although they originally hailed from the borders of Lancashire). My great-grandfather and his cousin were both well-known music hall comedians around WW1, so this side is quite easy to trace back some way despite the travelling player being a very disreputable profession!
2. on his mother's side, a mixture of Jewish refugees from the Ukrainian-Polish border area, who fled pogroms in the late C19th and came to London, and probably some folks from Norfolk who just came to London for work. The Jewish side is almost impossible to trace back, although with the help of the folks on the JewishGen site, I have at least been able to find out what their original surnames might have been (Jewish refugees tended to change them to sound less 'eastern' when they arrived here).

My mother's family are all Highland Scots (mainly Munro, with some Mackay, Mackenzie and Dunbar in there - they are pretty easy to trace to some way back through clan records), with a mixing of French Huguenot refugees who came to Scotland fleeing state persecution.

 

[Fnaar]

I've always found this area interesting, but never really looked very far into it, beyond grandparents, and I find enough to keep me fascinated in recent generations!... both the parents (both deceased 24 and 18yrs ago) were form large Irish families (dad was one of 10 kids, mum was one of 9 kids). I know they're pretty much Irish through and through, except for a Mr Porter from Somerset who put in some English genes in the early C20th; he was my great-grandfather, and he settled in Fermoy, county Cork. (I think I put this on another thread recently for some reason). My sister and I once counted 50+ first cousins, and I know some of them, but many are a mystery to me (my mum's family had some dodgy characters in, who I'm better off not knowing, tbh, prison, gbh, robbery etc). Dad's family (all thoroughly lovely people) apparently came from Glendalough, Wicklow and moved to Dublin city centre where dad was born; his mum died at the age of 36 having had 10 kids ( ), when dad was 10. His dad (imagine having 10 kids, as a bloke, on your own) worked in the Dublin sewers, opening sluice gates and maintaining stuff.
My other grandfather was at times a gasworker, a navvy (heathrow airport runways, apparently), and a general do-anything labourer. (He was also a fantastic sprinter, apparently) And I had an uncle (also deceased a long time ago) who was a good amateur cycle racer, and spectacular drinker. In fact the alcohol has put paid to many of my relatives, including mum.
Had another uncle (on dad's side) who despite being a staunch republican, joined the British army and went to Malaysia, but spent a lot of time locked up for insubordination.
My dad joined the IRA when he was unemployed, but disagreed with them, and came to England for work/get out of a hot situation. He was visited a few times in Liverpool, but after he moved south they left him alone. Dad worked in what was Lyons coffee bar nr Trafalgar Sq before going into nursing and meeting my mum, who'd been a waitress before also taking up nursing. In fact all of my Irish rellies (male and female) who moved to England took up nursing, and I myself did it for a bit (I was crap at it; square peg, round hole).
My mum's mum never worked (well, not in paid employment, anyway), but her first born (uncle Johnny) was severely mentally handicapped (blind, very limited skills) but had one amazing talent... ask him what day of the week it was on (say, for example) 25th October 1964, and he's think for a minute, then tell you it was a Saturday (or whatever it was)... we'd ask him a date we knew the day of, and he'd alsways be right. He was mad as a hatter, otherwise. But gran looked after him all the time (he couldn't feed himself, for example) and outlived him by 10 yrs.
Anyways, those are some snippets of the stuff that never ceases to amaze me... thanks for bringing this up; allowed me to take a trip down memory lane. Everyone has a story, and I like hearing other people's, too

 

[yello]

This is something I don't have any interest in. My sister in Aus has done some research into it but I genuinely don't give a rat's arse who or where I descended from. Oddly enough, my wife is the same way... and her family history has been traced (by her cousin) to late 1800s France and South Africa, to Mauritius in the early 1900s... but she is relatively (ho ho) unmoved by it all.