How I discovered old things were once new.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m searching for my relatives in census returns I do like to click along to the next few households to see who their neighbours were. This can be a useful thing to do because you can often find members of an extended family living quite close to each other, but I would do it anyway because I’m nosey LOL. However, you can also discover other interesting facts.

Last night, while looking through the 1881 UK census for Yardley (Birmingham), I noticed a few of the houses in the area my great grandmother Blanche Wayne and her parents were living, were empty. Initially, I did wonder if they resided in some run-down location and others residents had moved out, but as I went on, I came across others that were only partly built. It was light bulb moment! I actually know that part of Birmingham quite well, and the houses would have been built around the 1880s. I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of this before, I suppose they just seemed like old houses and it hadn’t occurred to me that at some point they would have been new.  Now I know, it’s quite nice to think of them filling out the census in their new home in, what was then, a small suburb quite separate from the main city where they had been living at the time of Blanche’s birth.

A rose by any other name . . .

When I began my journey into my family’s past I learnt one thing very quickly – don’t take transcriptions of records at face value. On the whole most are accurate and the transcribers do a very good job. However, sometimes things don’t go as planned and the odd mistake does crop up. It’s easy to see why, the transcribers have to wade through long lists of data, which may not have scanned all that well, plus many earlier records were hand written. Therefore, one does occasionally see a surname spelt incorrectly, for example one of my great, great grandfathers was listed as GILLY rather than GILBY. It is easy to figure out an error involving one letter, but there are some spelling mistakes that really do leave the researcher scratching their head.

I was searching through a census database for information about one of my great grandmothers and was rather surprised to discover she apparently had a sibling called Araisbida. No mention was made of the gender of this exotically named child, and searches of forename databases revealed no such name in existence. Had my great, great grandparents decided to invent this extravagent moniker? Or was it a transcription error? After much thought and deliberation (and a little more searching) I realised it was the latter – Araisbida was in fact my great, great uncle, Archibald.

The moral of this story is do make sure you verify any information you find, and if you seem to be drawing a blank in searching for an actual name, try a variation of it, an alternative spelling, or even a complete misspelling.

But which foreign field

“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.
There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed.
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware.”
Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier”

One afternoon, when I was about 15 I remember helping my grandmother sort through some boxes of old family photos. They were mostly the usual type of thing – my grandad looking very smart in his first suit, my mother as a 5 year old, squinting into the sun on Blackpool beach and so on. However, one old black and white photo caught my eye. The subject was a young man in army uniform, leaning quite casually against a pillar looking as though he didn’t have a care in the world. He bore a remarkable resemblance to my mother’s youngest brother, and I guess this is why he stood out. At the time it seemed odd to see such a familiar face in such an old photo.

I handed the photo to my gran and asked her who this chap was. She sighed and replied that this was my great-grandfather’s brother, who had died during World War 1, as far as she could remember in Ypres, 1915.

It was quite a poignant moment. Of course, I knew about the First World War, and I knew my great grandfather had fought on the Somme, but until then I had no idea that someone connected to me, someone so closely related that it was possible to see a strong family resemblance, had died in the awful carnage. This young man, my great, great uncle John, has been in my thoughts ever since. Not in a strange obsessive way, but I think of him whenever I see documentaries about the so called Great War, or at this time of year when Remembrance Sunday is drawing near.

So, this afternoon I set out to find him. It seems that because of where he died, and because his body was never found, he should be listed on the Menem Gate Memorial. Except he isn’t. I have searched and searched, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of him anywhere. Well, I’m guessing he is there, I’m just not finding him. The fact that he had quite a common surname, and that I don’t know which regiment he belonged to does make the search a bit of an uphill struggle. I must admit I am a little disappointed, but I’ll keep looking.

If you have a relative who died or was listed as missing in WW1, you may find these sites of interest:

• Commonwealth War Graves Commission
• The British War Memorial Project

Build it and they will come

That idea seldom works with most sites or blogs, but in genealogy it does seem to be true. I have just received a message from a cousin in New Zealand who found this blog! How great is that I suppose it is slightly easier for my long lost relatives to track me down, I do have quite an unusual surname, but even so, I’m sure it can work for the more popular names too. After all, there may be lots of Browns, for example, but how many of them lived in the same locale as your family, and did the same jobs etc.

So, my tip for the day, build a site, or set up a blog. Both are a great way of storing and organising your data, and you never know who might drop by!