Ancestry

[JapanRed]

I’ve finally bit the bullet and started trying to dig up some info on mine and my wife’s family trees. For no reason other than it’s informative and might be nice to hand down to the kids when they are older.

Is anyone else on Ancestry? If so I would like a couple of pointers on how to read the information in birth and marriage records.

Eg the image below top line. Kitty Walker is child’s name. Walker would be fathers surname. Mother’s maiden name would be Rhodes. What does vol and page relate to?


Also, in the marriage records below, bottom line. William Mills married a girl with surname Marshall or Cantrill. Is this correct? If so, why Marshall or Cantrill? Surely the girl knew her own surname?

[K50 DEL]

Vol and Page are the source locations for the data that's been transcribed (you're reading a transcription here, not the original, if Ancestry.com then I think the transcriptions were done by Mormons.

Second part I've only ever seen when the original source text is partially illegible and can't be transcribed with 100% accuracy so they list possibilities.
There may be other reasons that I'm not aware of.

It's a great thing to do, I've been helping my Mum trace various branches of our family tree for almost 20 years now and we're back to the 1200s on some.
We've visited family graves not touched in several lifetimes, uncovered skeletons we never knew we had, stayed in buildings that family owned a couple of hundred years ago and walked down church aisles where relatives got married longer ago than that.

[BT Summers]

I went through this process about 5 years ago, I used Findmypast, simply because I found the information a little easier to follow.

The data that you are looking at is taken from a number of sources, I also found in my records that there were some odd comments on marriage records showing names of my ancestors and married to X or Y.

I found the best information was from census records starting at 1911 and working back from there.

I got back to 1650 with some degree of accuracy and found out some things about my grandparents and great grandparents that I would have been better off not knowing. My family were in Birlingham in Worcestershire at that time.

Other people in my family tree, that I didn't know about until I started this journey say that they have found information going back to about 900 but I would expect that there are a lot of assumptions in that research as opposed to referring to written records.

Edited by BT Summers on Thursday 12th August 16:23

[essayer]

volume and page relate to the location in the GRO's registers, you can use these to order copies of certificates etc

https://www.freebmd.org.uk/distvolpage.html

Ancestry accumulate lots of data from various sources some of which is free - but being able to collaborate with relatives is useful

[K50 DEL]

BT Summers said:

Other people in my family tree, that I didn't know about until I started this journey say that they have found information going back to about 900 but I would expect that there are a lot of assumptions in that research as opposed to referring to written records.

This is definitely something to be wary of... we've several branches of our tree that have come to a stop fairly early on as we can't say for absolutely 100% that the record refers to a member of our family - we're lucky in that the ancestral names are rare which makes it much easier but in general my Mum has required every entry to be corroborated before it goes onto the family tree - frustrating when you are 99% certain that the ancestor is the correct one, but I can understand her point of view.

[paul.deitch]

It's a great hobby. I recently got a DNA connection to a French family from 1660 that went to Scotland and then England then Canada. Probably Huegenots.

[Al Gorithum]

Yep. Turns out on my Mum's Mum side, we can be traced back to (minor) royalty at the battle of Hastings (the winning side), to Normandy then to Italy.

[Error_404_Username_not_found]

JapanRed said:

Also, in the marriage records below, bottom line. William Mills married a girl with surname Marshall or Cantrill. Is this correct? If so, why Marshall or Cantrill? Surely the girl knew her own surname?

It's likely that Ms. Marshall/Cantrill was previously married, presumably to Mr. Marshall or Mr. Cantrill but more likely the former.

[14]

I’ve only gone as far back as the 1830’s with my family tree, as that’s when records began being collected by the Government. The problem I had when I was researching paternal side of the family around 10 years ago, was that there weren’t any accurate records online that date before the 1830’s. My surname is very uncommon except in that particular region of Kent, so it’s meant that I haven’t looked any further for about 5 years - though my brother has somehow managed to find out that an ancestor was a well known politician.

[paul.deitch]

14 said:

I’ve only gone as far back as the 1830’s with my family tree, as that’s when records began being collected by the Government. The problem I had when I was researching paternal side of the family around 10 years ago, was that there weren’t any accurate records online that date before the 1830’s. My surname is very uncommon except in that particular region of Kent, so it’s meant that I haven’t looked any further for about 5 years - though my brother has somehow managed to find out that an ancestor was a well known politician.

So now you need to look at the church books if they exist.

[AJB88]

Me and sister started one before my dad died. Think we got dads side back to about 1700 and mums about 1850 so far. Its taken a lot of research, to be honest my sister has redone most of it because I made a bit of a mess of it.

Our surname is Barratt, quite often in the old records it changes to Barrat, Barrett,Barret.

As far as we were concerned we were always an English family, my red hair should of been the giveaway of past ancestorys moving around, when my DNA results came back with British, Irish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Normandy and Germanic Europe. We are yet to find anybody who wasn't born in England on our tree though, well apart from my Australian cousin but shes British through her farther being born here.