FAMILY TREE ACADEMY: GETTING TO GRIPS WITH FAMILY RECONSTRUCTION
Improve your family history search skills with the Family Tree Academy. This issue, David Annal demonstrates how, by casting your net wide, and working methodically through the search results, you may be able to take your family tree research further
Family Tree Academy Tutor David Annal shows how, by casting your net wide, and by working methodically, you can make better progress on your family history research
Research skills
RThroughout 2021, the Family Tree Academy will be there to help you grow your genealogy skills. As ever, the aim will continue to be to help teach more about the search skills and source know-how needed to step
esearching 19th and 20th century ancestors in England and Wales is, in most cases, relatively straight forward. We have access to a number of remarkable sources, notably the General Register Office’s civil registration records of births, marriages and deaths stretching right back to 1837, and The National Archives’ collection of decennial census returns, covering the whole of the country from 1841 all the way up to 1911.
In theory at least, it’s all fairly plain sailing and, with easy access to online databases, tracing a line of descent back to someone who was born in the early part of the 19th century isn’t usually too much of a struggle.
The problem
up your family history research. In this issue, Family Tree Academy tutor David Annal discusses how to overcome a research roadblock by enlisting a research approach known as ‘family reconstruction’.
But what happens when we leave behind the comfort of the mid-to-late-19th century and venture into uncharted territories, without the safety net of the familiar births, marriages and deaths, and census returns? There’s still a lot of useful material but the surviving records don’t always tell us what we want to know. The Church of England’s pre-1837 marriage registers provide us with very little in the way of genealogical detail – no ages, no parents’ names – and the equivalent baptismal registers (which are the closest we have to genuine records of birth) only rarely include that crucial piece of information, the mother’s maiden surname.
It’s easy to get lost; to feel that there’s no hope of navigating your way through it all and identifying your ancestors with any degree of certainty. So what can you do?
A solution
Well, one answer is to use a method known as Family Reconstruction. It’s a way of imposing some order on what at first sight seems to be a mass of unconnected data and although it can be a laborious process it almost always helps you to gain a better understanding of what it is you’re looking at. The following case study shows you how to put the process into practice.
Family reconstruction case study
Our case study begins with a man called Charles Oliver whose name appears a number of times in the registers of Dorchester Gaol.
What do we know with confidence?
In February 1817, Charles was admitted to prison and held there pending the March Assizes, facing a charge of stealing a ‘fore quarter [of] Veal’. We learn from the register that Charles was aged 31, unmarried, and that he had been born in Yetminster, Dorset, vital information for someone who doesn’t appear in the later census returns. His later life is difficult to trace; he appears to have lived an itinerant lifestyle and slipped below the radar but we have enough information about him from the prison register to allow us to carry out an effective search for a record of his birth/ baptism.
A record which, it turns out, we can find quite easily and with a high degree of confidence that it’s the right one. Charles Oliver, the son of Richard and Susanna, was baptised at Yetminster on 5 December 1787, the same day as his brother, John. John was 1 week old, while Charles was 1 year and 3 quarters, and therefore born sometime around February/march 1786 – which ties in well with his stated age of 31 in February 1817.
We can quickly find the baptism of an older brother, Arthur, in November 1784 (when he was a ‘half year’ old) and, although there’s no sign of a marriage for Richard and Susanna at Yetminster it doesn’t take too long to track down a promising record in a nearby parish.
Richard Oliver and Susanna Taunton were married in the Dorset parish church of Sydling St Nicholas (just seven miles south of Yetminster) on 29 April 1783. And to remove any lingering doubt that this is the right marriage, the groom is described as Richard Oliver of the parish of Yetminster.
At what point do we get stuck?
Everything’s ticking along nicely, until, that is, we start to search for a record of Richard Oliver’s birth/baptism.
Since he was married in 1783, we would expect him to have been born sometime around 1760; in fact, the burial of the 56-year old Richard Oliver at Yetminster on 9 November 1816 suggests just this. But a search for his baptism fails to turn anything up. There is, however, a baptism of a Richard Oliver at Lytchett Matravers in 1758.
What choices are we faced with?
This is the point at which our research can go one of two ways. We could simply accept the 1758 baptism as ‘ours’ and move on from there. After all, it’s only a couple of years out and Lytchett Matravers is in the same county, so it could be the right person. And it’s just come up as a
'We could simply accept the 1758 baptism as ours and move on from there. After all, it's only a couple of years out... but'
‘suggested record’, so why not?
That’s one way to go, but it would be the wrong way. Because if we’re doing our research properly, we can quickly eliminate the Lytchett Matravers man. He died there in February 1836, aged 77, having, according to the burial register, spent 56 years as the Parish Clerk.
So this isn’t the answer; indeed blindly following ‘hints’ like this rarely is. We need, instead, to take a closer look at the Yetminster registers. And the first thing we notice is that, although there’s no record of the baptism of Richard Oliver, there are plenty of other Oliver events recorded in the Yetminster parish registers in the latter half of the 18th century as a search of the Dorset, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 database on the Ancestry website reveals.
In fact we get 31 ‘hits’ but at first sight it’s just a list of names and dates with no pattern or shape to it.
Step 1 Starting to order the records
Our task now is to make some sense of it all and the first step is to take the list of records and get them into some sort of order. There are lots of way of doing this; I’m going to take you through the process that I use.
COPYING DOWN THE DETAILS:
The first step is to copy the basic details from the website into a spreadsheet and split them into baptisms, marriages/banns and burials, sorting each list into chronological order. After a bit of rationalisation and editing of names I have a list of baptisms which looks like this:
COLOUR-CODING THE ENTRIES:
You’ll notice that I’ve copied them into a document file and that I’ve listed the baptisms in red. When I add in the marriages, burials and other records it can all start to get quite confusing so this is just a simple visual device to make it clear that the record in question relates to a birth/baptism. As you’ll see in a minute, I use green for marriages and purple for deaths/burials.
Step 2 Sort potential family groups
The next step is to split the baptisms into potential family groups. It’s important to note that what I’m doing here is theorising. I’m not saying that each one of these is definitely a discrete family group but, rather that they probably are. I constantly adjust things as new evidence suggests alternative solutions.
Step 3 Add in the burial details
Once I’ve got the hypothetical family groups together, I can add in the burials (including any post-1812 records) and assign them (where it’s possible to do so) to the relevant person. If it’s the burial of a child or an unmarried adult, I’ll add it underneath the record of their baptism but if it’s a married male, I’ll put the details (in bold font) underneath what I believe to be the family group relating to that person. I can then look at each of the marriages and attempt to assign them to the relevant family group, and, as out-of-parish marriages were so common, I’ll need to look beyond the boundaries of the parish of Yetminster.
By this stage my working list looks like this:
Step 4 Start cross-referencing
The ages at death/burial help enormously to work out who’s who and I can now start to cross-reference each person/group, which I do by assigning a number to each family group.
Step 5 Do a physical search to fill gaps
It soon becomes obvious (and this will almost always happen) that there are some gaps in the story, particularly, in this case, that a number baptisms and burials seem to be missing. There’s really no way around this; you need to do a physical search of the registers identifying the gaps, and looking for entries that might have been missed or mis-transcribed by the website. In this case, there are some significant omissions/ errors, notably the burial of Betty Oliver, the wife of the first Richard, who was buried on 15 May 1770 (the entry has been indexed as Boley Chevers) and the baptism of one of their daughters, Elizabeth, on 17 July 1738. To be fair to the transcribers, the quality of some of the pages in the register is appalling.
Step 6 Take a step back and see what you've accomplished
With all the groups numbered and the ‘missing’ entries added, the list is now really starting to take shape:
You’ll see that I’ve identified John (number 3) as the son of Richard (1) but that Arthur (2) and Richard (4) remain unassigned. Richard, you’ll remember was the subject of our search. We know that he was born around 1760 and, looking at our working list, we can see that there’s only one family group that he could possibly fit into; that of Arthur (2).
Step 7 Start to develop your theory
Of course, we don’t know that Richard was born in Yetminster but as he named his oldest son, Arthur, we can now start to develop a theory that he was the son of this Yetminster Arthur.
There’s a big clue in the 1768 burial record of Arthur Oliver to follow up; the clerk has added the words ‘from Brimpton’ next to Arthur’s name in the register.
'I constantly adjust things as new evidence suggests alternative solutions'
Step 8 Analyse place clues
This is where maps come into their own and it doesn’t take long to work out that ‘Brimpton’ refers to the parish of Brympton D’evercy, not far from Yetminster, but just over the county border in Somerset. We need to avoid getting sucked into the idea of our ancestors coming from a particular county and we should always use maps to get an idea of the geography of the area.
Armed with this new information, we can now find the baptisms of two children of Arthur and Elizabeth Oliver; Arthur at Brympton D’evercy in 1763 and John at West Coker (also in Somerset) in 1765. As Arthur and Elizabeth had married in 1756 we would expect there to have been at least two children born before Arthur junior. My theory is that our Richard was one of these children and that there was also a daughter, Elizabeth, born around 1758. An otherwise-unexplained Elizabeth Oliver married in Yetminster in 1790.
Remember, it's just a theory, but...
It’s a theory which has a lot be said for it and even without further evidence I would argue that it was compelling, but luckily, in this case, we do have some further evidence in the shape of a will. (See the entries – included in black – in the list pictured above.)
Step 9 Assess any further evidence
The first Richard Oliver (1) died in 1778. His burial doesn’t seem to be recorded in the Yetminster registers but he wrote his will on 30 March and it was proved on 10 April so there’s a fairly small timeframe in which he must have died. Richard’s will is a mine of information, naming no fewer than 21 relatives. And using our list, we can work out who they all are. Crucially, he mentions his three grandchildren, Richard Oliver, Arthur Oliver and John Oliver. We know that Arthur and John were the sons of his son Arthur (who had died in 1768) and the only logical conclusion here is that Richard was as well. And as a result, we can safely conclude that our theory was correct and that the Richard Oliver who married Susanna Taunton in 1783 and was the father of our Charles, was the son of Arthur Oliver and the grandson of Richard (1).
It's a theory that has a lot to be said for it and I would argue that it's compelling
In summary
The process has allowed us to reconstruct the family.
• The list of apparently random names and dates that we started with has taken shape and family groups have emerged.
• It’s not the end of the research process but it’s a framework on which we can now build. There’s always more to add.
• Our local record offices are full of material that we can use to add to our knowledge of our ancestors just waiting to be discovered.