In the beginning
I’ve been involved in family history research for long enough to remember the days when everything you wanted to look at came in the form of a physical document and you had to go to a record office or a library to look at it.
I was there at the very beginnings of digitisation and I’ve watched it all develop over the past twenty years or so. I’m a big fan of the changes that digitisation has brought with it and I most definitely wouldn’t want to go back to the way things were.
The benefits are clear and plentiful. The archives that hold the documents can make many of their key collections available to researchers all around the world, without clogging up their desperately underresourced reading rooms, and without risking any damage to the documents, while at the same time providing them with some much needed revenue.
For researchers, the benefits are obvious as well. Unrestricted access (for a fee!) to some of the most important sources for family history, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year – all from the comfort of our own homes – allows us to carry out our research in ways that were simply inconceivable to researchers of previous generations.
And of course there are benefits for the commercial websites that provide the access too; making new records available leads to new subscribers, which in turn delivers increased income. It’s not rocket science.
The major genealogical websites are designed to make your research journey as smooth as possible. Every search you carry out is accompanied by hints and suggestions, pointing you towards other potentially relevant records.
This sounds like a great idea – and it often
is – but there’s a very real danger that the inexperienced researcher will accept hints without question and end up with someone else’s ancestors on their tree.
And we’re encouraged to share the results of our research, adding the names, dates and other details of our ancestors to online family trees, all linked to digital images of the original documents.
The way that the big commercial websites present it to us, it really couldn’t be any easier. You just type in your name and out comes your family tree...
It couldn't be easier. But...
But there’s a problem. You see family history research isn’t easy. The records that we use weren’t designed with us in mind, so as family historians we have to learn to tease the information out of them. We need to get to know what the records are telling us and we need to familiarise ourselves with other records which we can use to find out more about our ancestors.
The records don’t provide the links themselves – or at least they rarely do. English and Welsh birth, marriage and death certificates, census returns and parish registers contain very little in the way of direct linkage. Unlike in other parts of the world, there is no explicit link between the record of someone’s birth and that of their marriage or death. As researchers we have to make those links ourselves. And that’s rarely a straightforward task.
The research risk
My fear is that by providing researchers with hints and suggestions, generated by complex algorithms, the commercial websites are just as likely to point people in the wrong direction as they are to suggest the ‘right’ answers.
As a professional researcher I frequently come across examples of this phenomenon. A case I was working on recently involved a man called Thomas Bennett, the Lord of the Manor of Little Warley, in Essex in the mid-to-late-17th century. Thomas appears in a number of family trees on the Ancestry website – nearly 100 of them at the time of writing – and on the vast majority of these, he is said to have died in Buckinghamshire in 1703.
Suspiciously ‘unsourced'
No source is given for this event and no
attempt seems to have been made to check the details; the basic skill which all researchers should learn to develop – namely, to question everything – has evidently not been applied. The information has simply been copied from other trees.
However, it’s really not too hard to show that Thomas didn’t die in 1703. A single document does the job, in this case the apprenticeship indenture of Thomas’s son John, which is available on Ancestry’s Freedom of the City of London Admission Papers database. The indenture is dated 7
December 1685 and it tells us that Thomas was already dead by then. The absence of a burial record for Thomas can easily be explained by the gap in the Little Warley registers at the time when he died.
It’s up to us to analyse
Research the hints So, we need to be wary of the hints and suggestions offered to us by the commercial websites. By all means look at them and ask yourself, ‘Could this be the person I’m looking for?’, but don’t simply adopt them as yours without carrying out the appropriate research.
Think about the geography Most people were born, lived and died within a relatively small area. So your Lancashire agricultural labourer probably didn’t get married in Sussex and she probably didn’t die in Cornwall.
Don’t focus on the name Think about other aspects of their lives such as their social class and their occupations.
It’s up to us to assess
Amongst the most useful resources provided by the big commercial websites are the various county-wide parish register collections, which now cover most English counties. The implication, even if it’s not an explicit claim, is that, in each case, what we’re looking at is the parish register collection for the whole county. But is it? Are the collections really as ‘complete’ as we’re led to believe they are?
Well, no, and realistically they can’t be. For a start relatively few parishes have registers going right back to 1538 when Thomas Cromwell passed his order requiring registers to be kept recording ‘every wedding, christening and burying’ in each parish.
The ravages of time, the effects of fire and water and damage caused by rodents and other pests have led to significant losses and even when the physical registers have survived intact, their contents can often leave a lot to be desired. Parish registers were kept by local officials and although there was a degree of ‘supervision’ on the part of the local diocesan authorities, they were largely left to their own devices. As a result, the standard of record-keeping varied greatly from parish-to-parish and some registers were badly kept or not kept at all for significant periods. You’ll often see notes in registers made by newly-appointed vicars lamenting the state of the registers now in their care.
The depositing of parish registers is an ongoing process so some registers now held by the record office may not have been held by them at the time the original digitisation project took place, while a small but significant number of parishes have chosen to retain their registers rather than deposit them with the relevant record office. It’s also worth noting that some county record offices don’t cover the whole of the ancient county and that records for some parishes may therefore be held elsewhere. It’s not all bad news. Some of these gaps may be plugged by the survival of Bishops Transcripts which are often held by the same archive as the parish registers and you’ll often find these as part of an online collection.
What else must we watch out for?
It’s clear then that there are any number of reasons why the county-wide collection may not be as comprehensive as you’d like it to be. But you’d like to think that at the very least, the records available online as part of a county-wide collection represented a comprehensive collection of the relevant holdings of the archive in question.
But do they? Well again, I’m afraid, the answer is ‘no’.
I have come across countless instances where it’s clear that a register which should form part of an online ‘county-wide’ collection simply isn’t there – and not for any of the reasons mentioned above.
By way of example
Take my local parish, Bushey in Hertfordshire. The Findmypast website has a very useful parish list to accompany its Hertfordshire parish register collection. The list is, by necessity, lacking in detail – it simply shows ‘from and to’ coverage dates for each parish – but it tells us that the collection includes marriages for the parish of Bushey between 1685 and 1915.
However, if you try to find a marriage occurring in Bushey between 1837 and 1865 you will fail. A register covering the period from July 1836 to June 1866, which is clearly listed in the archives’ catalogue, is missing from the online collection. The register in question (Hertfordshire Archives reference DP26/1/6) includes 500 marriages. And there are some much bigger gaps in Ancestry’s London, England, Church of England Deaths and Burials database. For example, four whole registers for the parish of St Matthew, Bethnal Green, including nearly 10,000 burials which took place in this bustling East End parish between April 1823 and August 1836, are missing. And, again, these are records which should all be accessible on the Ancestry website. The London Metropolitan Archives’ catalogue even tells us that they are. But they’re not. These are not isolated examples. The county-wide collections are full of gaps and omissions like this. And the problem with it all is that it’s easy to assume that by searching the relevant database, you’ve covered these registers and assume, when you don’t find it, that the record they’re looking for doesn’t exist. Or worse than that, you’ll find a record that looks like it could be the right one and wrongly assume that it is.
What’s the solution?
We need to be aware of this when we’re carrying out our searches – the absence of a particular record doesn’t necessarily mean that the record doesn’t exist. It may just be that it’s not part of the collection that you’re viewing. And that may be for one of the reasons mentioned earlier, but it might be because something has gone wrong during the digitisation process and the record that should be there is missing.