Expand Your Horizons

Looking further afield may reveal adventurous ancestors who changed country

Make sure you’re searching the website’s full range of collections, even if you have no reason to believe that your ancestors ever left the UK. This might mean changing the default settings on findmypast. co.uk to search the ‘World’, or ‘All Collections’ on ancestry.co.uk. Occasionally someone missing from the census over here pops up on the US census instead, or on a passenger list arriving in New York. When we started researching actor Anne Reid’s family tree, we had no idea that it was going to take us to Australia. We found the young children of her great great grandfather John Reid on the 1841 census with their grandparents in Fife, but couldn’t find John in Scotland or England. Eventually we located a transportation record revealing he was shipped off to Australia, after he had been convicted of forging his father-in-law’s signature on a bill that was worth thousands of pounds in today’s money.