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.

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!