Hidden Ancestors?
Even the most experienced genealogists get stuck sometimes. Here Simon Fowler shares ideas to overcome problems in your research
Simon Fowler reveals how you can reboot your research with a fresh approach to brick walls
We have all been there. Happily pursuing somebody on the family tree, when the trail goes dry. A great granny just disappears into thin air. Or a great great grandfather just appears from nowhere, almost as if he had been dropped by a UFO.
So, what to do?
Start Again
Yes, I know you have the intimate lives of all your forebears off-byheart. People avoid you at parties because of this. But trust me here. If your ancestor has gone missing, the first thing to do is to double-check your notes just in case a mistake has been made. Are the dates of birth or baptism, wedding and death correct? Were they christened or married where you thought they were? Are their names correct? It’s dull work and potentially embarrassing, but this is the vital first step to overcoming that brick wall.
Also, don’t forget to check surname variations. Just because you spell your name Psmyth, it doesn’t mean that your forebears did. Clerks will often misspell names, and spellings subtly change over the generations for reasons that have long been lost.
A surprisingly common error is that your ancestor’s forenames may have been reversed. I was once asked to research a George William Millett in the First World War records. My client had spent years on the search. However, within five minutes I found that the Army had him as William George, and in 10 minutes I had traced his whole career. I felt rather guilty at how easy it was.
And it does no harm to leave the problem for a few months and come back to it fresh. It’s like setting aside a puzzle and when returning to it you immediately spot the missing clue.
Assumptions
Repeat after me: “I will not make any assumptions in my family history.” Assumptions, for good reasons and bad, create more brick walls than any other aspect of family history. And it’s so easy to do without realising. Just because your relations were living in Portsmouth, it does not mean that they were in the Navy. And just because your great gran was a servant and had an illegitimate baby, it does not mean that the father was the son of the household.
Family stories are a common source of assumptions: “Just because Granny told me, it must be true.” Unfortunately, the chances are that it won’t be, or perhaps rather that there might be only a glimmer of truth. One of the family names in my pedigree is Belcher, and the story went that we were descended from Admiral Sir Edward Belcher who ran the expedition to find Sir John Franklin in the NorthWest Passage. It turns out that Sir Edward was a lot of things, but never a father. But since many of my ancestors were seamen, somebody put two and two together to make three.
If I were you, I would regularly apply Occam’s razor to your family tree. William of Ockham (or Occam) was a 14th-century philosopher who came up with
‘If I were you, I would regularly apply Occam’s razor to your tree’
the statement that “other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones”. Or sometimes, “The simplest explanation is generally the right one.”
Why don’t your forebears appear in the census, for example? Well, the simplest explanation is that the enumerator did not knock on their door – the registrar general’s reports on how the census was conducted usually admit that roughly 5 per cent of households were not contacted for one reason or another. Alternatively, your relations were away from home on census night so they were enumerated where they were staying, although it may be impossible to identify them. Both of these explanations are dull and less exciting than if they had emigrated to America or were away driving steam engines in Egypt. Of course, your ancestors might have gone to America or driven locos along the Nile, but it is far more likely they didn’t. You must verify everything. If there is a family story that great uncle James returned home from the Congo with his weight in diamonds, try to find out what happened to them. After all, the wealth did not pass down the generations! Check his will, see what the newspapers have to say, and then come to the conclusion that the nearest he came to diamonds was a deck of cards.
Context
It’s not always clear, particularly with older legal records, why they were created in the first place. Remember that the records were never written with genealogists in mind. They had another purpose, and you may have to understand what it is before they will release their secrets. For example, on the surface the Registers of Soldiers’ Effects from the First World War, available on ancestry.co.uk, just give the man’s next of kin, and a sum of money. But understanding how the sum was calculated can tell you more about his service and his family circumstances. It’s like driving a car. You don’t need to know what goes on under the bonnet, but your experience is much improved if you do.
Although subscription sites often provide basic guidance about why their records were created, they tend to assume (probably correctly) that most of their users just want to find their forebears’ information, rather than to understand why they’re included in the first place.
This is where books and magazines like this one come in useful. A magazine can keep you up to date about new records going online, and give context to the record being released. Although older books may be out of date as far as online resources go, the advice they give about the actual record doesn’t date.
An alternative is the research guides published by archives explaining the records they hold. The best and most comprehensive come from The National Archives ( nationalarchives.gov.uk), but they are all useful. And look out for detailed introductory notes in online catalogues that explain a series of records in more detail.
Finally, GENUKI ( www.genuki.
org.uk) and FamilySearch’s wiki ( familysearch.org/wiki) can also provide useful background.
Take Another Turn
Britain has perhaps the most complete set of records in the world. With a bit of luck and a lot of Latin it is possible to research your ancestors back seven or eight centuries if you have the will, and the time.
But not everything survives. For example, the vast majority of First World War Army service records were destroyed during the Blitz. The 1931 census went up in another wartime fire. And great chunks of merchant seamen’s records have also been lost. Lots of other material has been deliberately destroyed over time, such as tax records, and gaps in the parish registers may be due to over-enthusiastic churchwardens having a clear-out.
However, if one set of records has been lost, there may well be an alternative or surrogate source with similar information. The British government in particular has always kept vast amounts of paperwork, much of it duplicates.
From 1837 in England and Wales, birth, marriage and death records were maintained by local registrars who sent copies of their registers to the General Register Office in Somerset House. If you can’t find a person’s birth, marriage or death in the central registers, and you know where it took place, it is worth approaching the local registrar to see whether they can help. Of course, there are also church baptismal, marriage and burial registers that contain much the same information as the civil records, and are increasingly available online.
In workhouses, creed registers
‘If records have been lost, there may well be an alternative source‘
contain similar information to the admission and discharge registers. The only real difference is that a pauper’s religion is given too.
There are less obvious surrogates. If you can’t find a family in the census, try the street and trade directories. However, generally only the (male) head of household is given in the directories, and the information may be a year or two out of date.
Unfortunately, many surrogates are not online and, to boot, are often difficult to use, such as Bishops’ Transcripts (BTs). Anglican clergymen were supposed to make a copy of entries in their parish registers and send it to the archdeacon or bishop every year. They are not always complete or accurate, but BTs are invaluable where no parish registers survive. Records for a few dioceses are online, but most are only to be found at local record offices.
What The Records Won’t Tell You
One of the most frustrating things for family historians is how often the records don’t provide the vital piece of information. This is because, to repeat myself, the records were created for other purposes than we use them today.
Most of our ancestors do not appear in the records because there was nothing to record about them. In 1800 a person might find their baptism, marriage and death recorded in a parish register. If she was poor, she might appear in the Poor Law records in the parish chest or criminal registers; if he was rich, there might be a will or legal documents on the purchase and sale of property
and land. By 1900 there was also the decennial census, and trade directories and local newspapers were at their most comprehensive. But if your forebear was neither poor nor rich and kept out of trouble, you may not be able to find very much.
Also, we are used to providing a lot of personal details every day when filling in forms online and in person – name, address, date of birth and so on. This would have shocked our ancestors, who assumed that only the bare minimum of personal data would be recorded. Take pre-1914 Army records for example. I’m often asked about the details of a soldier’s family they might hold. But there is very little, largely because the British Army was not interested in such information.
Acceptance
A management rule known as the Pareto Principle states that 20 per cent of the effort produces 80 per cent of the result. Or you might prefer the law of diminishing returns. In effect, the longer you search, the less likely it is that you will find your relation. After 10 years’ hunting in archives around the world, you might discover that your runaway ancestor ended up as a beggar on the Mile End Road. But was it worth it just to tick off a name on the family tree?
At some stage you need to accept that your tree will remain incomplete. This is no reflection on your research skills. Not every aspect of human existence has been recorded, especially when it comes to our humbler forebears. That’s all there is to it. Let it go.