Classic cars forum & vehicle restoration.

[Rick]

Has anyone had luck in using online references to help research their family tree? I'd like to look into details of my Great Great Grandparents, and specifically the family of my Gt Gt Grandmother.

There seem to be a lot of online resources available, but the useful-looking ones require a paid subscription (eg ancestry.co.uk). Has anyone here used ancestry.co.uk and found it to be useful?

I don't mind coughing up a subscription, but any tales of success using the service would be interesting to hear about.

RJ
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[victor 101]

You will invariably end up paying for something but a good start is freebmd, having an unusual name makes the task a little easier but in the end you will need bmd certificates at £7 a time to be sure you've found the right person. It is quite rewarding to trace your family back a 100 years or more, but dont make the same mistake that I did, I sent my pc in for repair and was specific that my family history was the only thing I cared about, needless to say I lost everything, always make a back up file and store it on a stick or external hard drive.
Good luck.

[peter scott]

Hi Rick,

I don't know how relevant this will be but I wrote a bit for the JDC club mag. on tracing previous owners but it might help.

Peter


Tracing Previous Owners

Following on from June's piece about ‘tracing the history of your car’, Peter Scott has provided us with some very useful guidelines on how to find information on previous keepers. He provides a valuable insight into finding past owners through the various sources available in the UK. His narrative includes the tale of an amazing search to find the first owner of his SS; a real detective story.


With so much data available on the Internet people tracing has become very much easier than in the past. My own experience is limited to England and Wales and the following only relates to these areas of the country.

The sources that can be accessed with a pc are:

The Indexes of Births, Marriages and Deaths
Old UK phonebooks
1901 Census (the 1911 Census should be available shortly)

Sources that require library or postal access:

Copies of Birth, Marriage or Death Certificates
Voter's Role

There are other sources but I haven't found the need to access them.

So what information do the BMD indexes provide?

The Births Index allows you to establish in what quarter of a year the birth took place and it allows you to determine the maiden surname of the mother and where the birth was recorded.

The Marriage Index again tells you which quarter and where recorded and allows you to determine the name of the other partner when you only know one of the partners' names. The Death Index again tells you which quarter and where recorded and the age of the person at death.

The indexes cover the whole of England and Wales so in any one quarter there are rather a lot of names listed and your searches will simply take you to a single page of the index which will list all the names in the alphabetic range covering your person. If you don't know the exact date that you are looking for then you will have to trawl through many quarters of information having made some guess at the likely range of dates.

When accessing a page of an index I would suggest that you copy it to your hard drive. You might be tempted just to dismiss a page that doesn't appear to have anything relevant on it but it can sometimes be useful to revisit in the light of new information.

To give you an example I was trying to trace a Mr J. F. Hardie who was identified by the JHT as the first owner of my 1939 SS saloon. I thought it was most likely that he was deceased and so my starting point was to guess the likely date range and trawl through the Death Indexes. I had found two gentlemen with the name Hardie and the correct initials in the 1901 census records. Later census data being unavailable, I guessed that my two gentlemen might have died between 1940 and 1970. The first, a Mr John F. Hardie had died in 1955 and the other, a Mr James F. Hardie in 1959. Knowing that my car had been purchased in Manchester in 1939 by a Mr J. F. Hardie but had been scrapped in Somerset in 1964 I decided to follow-up on James F. Hardie because his census record had links to Bristol and Lancashire.

The next step was to obtain a copy of James F. Hardie's Death Certificate. Apart from giving the exact date and place of death the certificate will have details of the person who reported the death and with any luck they might be a generation younger than the deceased and be contactable. In my case the reporter was Hardie's brother in law and he had also died.

At this point I decided to look for other relatives. I found that Hardie had married in 1926 but looking in the Birth Indexes I failed to spot any children. From the Census record I knew that Hardie had a sister and an older brother. I got nowhere looking for children from the sister's marriage but did find that the brother had a son. At this point some of the Death Indexes that I had stored from when I was looking for James F. Hardie's death became useful again to check on his nephew. Unfortunately the nephew had also died but he had married and his widow had reported his death. I did manage to trace his widow from
the details on the death certificate but it turned out that her husband's side of the family didn't get on with my Mr Hardie so she couldn't tell me much about him.

In all this searching the Death Indexes for relevant Hardies I had failed to find my Mr Hardie's wife. This could mean either, she was still alive or that she had re-married. I had found her maiden name from the certificate of her first marriage and a search through the Marriage Indexes following Mr Hardie's death did indeed reveal that she had re-married. Then a further search of the Death Indexes showed that she had died in 1970. Fortunately her second husband had died before her and her own death was reported by a nephew. I was able to contact this nephew and he confirmed that my Mr Hardie had owned my car and he was able to give me quite a lot of interesting background. See the SS Register forum for more on this story:
http://www.jaguardriverforums.co.uk/showthread.php?t=95
You can see from the above that tracing simply involved scanning through the appropriate index and then obtaining copies of the certificates. The Census records are very helpful in determining the names of other family members but recent census records are simply not available. The old phonebooks are excellent for locating where someone lived and the electronic search avoids the trial and error methods needed with the BMD Indexes.

Various genealogy websites offer BMD search facilities. These are not free of charge but you can get to see a lot of index pages for quite small amounts of money.

The Census and BMD can be found at http://www.1901censusonline.com/c1911-census.asp


Good luck with your searches.
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1939 SS Jaguar 2 1/2 litre saloon

[Roger-hatchy]

I Have a cousin who is into Genealogy quite big.
So far over the last four to six years she has gone back to early 1700's. with our side of the family.
I think most of this was done before the genealogy sites started to appear.
She did say she wished they had been around earlier.

It can be good, but hard, work.

Be ready for a lot of skeletons and scandal to come tumbling out of the closets.

Roger

[roverdriver]

Free BMD is useful for post 1837 Birth Marriage and Death records. To really get anywhere though it is a case of locating someone (say a marriage) ordering the certificate, and on the certificate you will find the names and occupation as well as address of fathers. You could then search and buy the father's birth certificate etc.
http://www.freebmd.org.uk/

Family Search has a free look-up. With this one, information is gleaned from 1881 census plus BMD records as well as details posted bu subscribers. Can be useful, but you need to carefully check as some subscriber-posted info can be innaccurate.
http://www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp

The 1881 Census is free to access, and a good way of locating anyone who would have been alive at the time. You can google for that one.

If you have a locality for ancestors, some local genealogy groups have websites.

I have been lucky enough to find quite a bit from these and other sites, and even made contact with some distant relatives.

Hope that helps a bit Rick. Good Luck Dane.
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Dane- roverdriver but not a Viking.

[Rich5ltr]

Have you tried Genes Reunited (part of Friends Reunited) it's free if you avoid the request to up grade and I've found a few relatives via its facilities. It's got all the usual stuff back to about 1800. You can build a tree and save it etc. without subscribing.

[Ironhead]

hello Rick.i've just started researching my family tree,and i've found the free 1881 census usefull.luckily my father had an unusual middle name,the same as my great-grandfather.only last week,a local 1930's graves historian took me to my great-grandparents joint grave,which none of our surviving family new the whereabouts!i'm finding it fascinating.

[Rick]

Some good info here (and received via PM), thanks all

R
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