Not Another Family History Blog

I’d just like to take a moment to wish everyone a belated Merry Christmas!  I hope it was full of family fun and frivolities.

Christmas for me means a mad rush to get everything I’m making ready in time to give on Christmas day, which is why I haven’t blogged here for some time now. 

The other trouble with the Christmas period is that everywhere is closed!  My ongoing saga with my grandfather’s gravesite requires I somehow manage to acquire a plot map of West Derby Cemetery, but of course everyone is still off work until the new year.

I have finally finished adding all the Turners I could find related to me on the censuses, and boy has it been hard work, especially since I seem to have only accrued 39 of them!  John Turner was the earliest I have found – he died some time before the baptism of his son (also named John) in 1788.  Some of those missing from this list will be children of Turners with a different surname, but it does feel like I’ve entered more than a hundred names and facts!  I’m glad I decided to re-do my tree as I’ve been more able to concentrate on each branch as it comes, and I think I’ve managed to include people I would have otherwise overlooked.

The Turner’s seem to have originated in London, and had very large families.  After migrating through Yorkshire, they arrived in Liverpool and seemed to thrive there – through the latter end of the 19th century most of the Turner families lived in Wavertree, an area of Liverpool that was certainly comfortable, if not actually wealthy.  Most of these families started out in the courts located near to the docks and urban areas of Liverpool, so it seems that they earned their status through old fashioned hard work!

My next focus will be on Mary Charnock who was my 2X Great Grandmother, who married Frederick Turner and was Mary Alice Turner’s Mother.  I wonder how many more people I will find?

Over the weekend we went for a walk in Anfield cemetery in the hopes of finding my paternal grandfather’s grave, and possibly my great grandmother’s too.  The trouble, as we found out when we arrived, is that Anfield (like most urban cemeteries) is HUGE.  This is the first lesson of the day – always check the place out on the internet before turning up there!  We did however find a useful phone number on one of the signs – the one for the Liverpool Cemeteries people.  So we gave them a call and were promised someone would be in touch soon.

I’d almost forgotten about it until we got a phone call from them this morning, asking for more details.  Turns out my granddad isn’t buried at Anfield as we’d originally thought, but the nice people at the cemeteries office had found him in West Derby Cemetery and now we have an exact locator for his headstone.  Even more helpful than that though is that we asked for any details of the burial of my Great Grandmother, Mary Alice FOX (nee TURNER) and they were also able to find her in the Roman Catholic Section of the same cemetery.  This confirms my theory that Mary Alice TURNER converted to Roman Catholicism when she married Henry FOX, as my granddad Alexander BLUNDELL, and his two other brothers all belonged to the Church of England.

I just wanted to take a minute to thank the cemetery people for their help, without which I’d still be wandering around Anfield cemetery looking very lost!

As some of you may know, the 1st of the month is (or should be) backup day for genealogists, where all of your family tree data should be saved somewhere safe just in case.  It really is vital you do this – you don’t notice the time you spend adding people and all their little facts, let alone all the research you have done over the years.  Even if you have paper copies of all the evidence you have collected it still takes forever if you have to rebuild your tree.  I’m telling you this because my pet project of the last week or so (and probably for a long while to come!) has been manually inputting my family tree from Family Tree Maker 2009 to RootsMagic 4.  A weeks worth of this work turns out to be 68 people added in 26 families, 129 events for those people proven by 159 citations of 68 sources.

Reading through some of my previous posts you may begin to see a pattern of my complaints regarding Family Tree Maker and it’s ailing memory (much like an elderly relative, in fact).  After the rave reviews on the Geneabloggers FaceBook group and my own curiosity towards RootsMagic 4 I decided to download their free working demo, RootsMagic 4 essentials.  It’s a no-frills version of the full software, but it does what most people would require of it without a fuss, without sources going missing and without being a memory hog. 

Both pieces of software are GEDCOM compatible and I could just transfer my tree with the click of a mouse, but I had the idea that if I did the transfer manually I could check for wrong dates, make sure sources were included if available and that I hadn’t missed too many people off.  This has already paid off as I have caught a lot of little errors, but so far I’ve only really been involved with my recent ancestors and relatives – we’ll see when I start going back in time if my tree changes at all because of this!

During the course of this work I uncovered a relatively recent story of my Great Uncle Bill’s (my paternal side) First wife Kitty (short for Catherine).  She married my uncle in 1934 at the age of 20 but only four years later tragically died of Tuberculosis, taking their young child with her.  My uncle remarried some years later to my aunty Peggy (short for Margaret, took me a while to work that one out!), and the two of them used to go out dancing with my maternal grandparents.  Wouldn’t they have been excited to know they would be joined as a family two decades later?

I’ve already thought about whether this series of publications was authored by an ancestor of mine, and the answer unfortunately is probably not.  However it has proved helpful in looking for my ancestors in Liverpool, so i wanted to tell you all a it about it.

Gore’s Directory of Liverpool and Surrounding areas is Primarily a street  directory and index of people living in Liverpool (and surrounding areas!), along the same lines as Kelly’s Directory, which covered various parts of the UK, including some parts of Ireland.  The directory only covers heads of households, but due to the layout, it is easy to see when a male sibling or child has set up home in the local area.  Although very little information is included (compared to a census), in some cases the head’s profession is included.  It makes for a handy resource when trying to find your ancestors between censuses, and has more recent editions available when compared to the censuses, of those the most recent being of course the recently released 1911 Census.

At one stage, Gore’s Directory could be found in most if not all Law offices, as it was a convenient (if not the only) way of finding addresses to send documents to.  Now that behemoth printed books and ledgers have given way to digital storage however, a Gore’s Directory (in relatively good condition) for most years is a rare find and can retail for around £50 each.  It’s worth noting that currently being sold on Ebay is a small selection of digitised Directories, although I’ve never bought any so I couldn’t testify to their quality.

My local library (Huyton Library) has a good selection from the 1800’s, although there are gaps in it’s collection.  It’s interesting to note that the early 1800’s volumes are maybe about half an inch thick, where as the one I borrowed today was a good two inches thick and weighed half a tonne!

1. Except for snippets on family and local history society websites, parish records are not online
2. Parish Records are located all over the country in the areas they are relevant to (for example most of Liverpool’s records are at Liverpool Central Library, whilst some of Knowsley’s parish records are in Huyton library)
3. (See reason number 2) I get REALLY travelsick when I’m not in control of the vehicle!
4. A day unsuccessfully spent at more distant libraries leaves me feeling drained, disheartened and hopeless.
5. The information contained within parish records may not always be complete or correct (especially with illegitimacies or bigamist marriages)
6. It can sometimes be difficult to find out what parish an ancestor lived in, and whether or not they attended that church still isn’t guaranteed!
7. Parishes merged and divided all the time, so maps needed redrawing every few years.
8. Finding the right map for the area you need in the time period you need is a royal pain in the ass!
9. Neither Liverpool nor Huyton Library has an online list of the parish records they hold, which means a trip up there to find out (and I’m not paying eight pound for a booklet that tells me where they are, especially since (so far) it’s only a handful of parishes I need to find anyway!)
10. If the record keeper of the church had handwriting that is difficult to read you’ll end up spending a lot longer with one record (and possibly still misread what it contains!)

It’s official, I’m now the wrong side of twenty five, if only by a few days.  I wanted to share this with you because on my birthday something unexpectedly genealogical happened.  My dad was going through a jewellery box of his mother’s, and found her mother’s wedding ring (that’s his grandmother and my great grandmother).  So I’ve sort of inherited that, partly because I’m the only one in the family with fingers skinny enough that it will fit.  It now joins my maternal grandmother’s engagement/wedding ring, just to confuse people! 

The theme of the Graveyard Rabbits November 2009 Carnival is Epitaphs, specifically what I would choose as my own epitaph.  It didn’t take much thinking up and just came to me, a bit worrying!

I am a knitter, and a knit-blogger as well as a genealogist and genoblogger, so marrying the two skills together is almost elementary.  When I’m working on my family tree I am always aware of the virgin soil I tread on – as far as I know I am the only person in my direct family that is tracing our shared history, and it feels very much like trying to piece together a vase shattered long before anyone can remember what shape it was.

Whilst twittering last night, I was sent a link to The Encyclopaedia of Genealogy (thanks mdiane_rogers!).  The concept is a collection of articles written by readers (a bit like a wiki) on the subject of Genealogy, and so far I’ve found it really insightful, in particular articles like this one listing United Kingdom Census Dates.  That may seem a strange choice of favourites until you realise that all the censuses were taken on different dates, and this article records all census dates from 1801 (the 1801-1831 censuses were little more than headcounts, and their accuracy was dubious) to 2001.  This data is invaluable when you think that someone may have been only days away from their birthday at the time of a census and so may appear almost a year younger than they actually are.