Where Do I Start

00:00:01 hello everybody and welcome to the cornwall family history society my name is jackie cassan and i am the education officer for the family history society in cornwall having been a teacher and a head teacher for about 32 years and having looked at my own family started researching it in the early 1980s and researching for family and friends i’m now a professional genealogist so today’s talk is called where do i start and it really is a basic talk so for anybody just starting out with their family history

00:00:41 it should be suitable for yourself and if you have done a little bit of work on your family history it might be suitable for you too so where do i start well today these are the things we’re going to be looking at first of all family sources and i’m hoping by the end that you’ll know three different kind of family sources we’ll also look at record keeping so you know what to record and why you’re doing it then we’ll have a look at surnames so by the end you should know the four main types of surname

00:01:17 and finally we’ll look at something called general registration which in england and wales began in 1837. the question was how do i start well if you’re like me you’ve probably watched the program called who do you think you are on television and this particular series always starts or pretty much always starts in the same way when the researchers speak to the family of the celebrity and they talk through dates names they often get out photographs and i would suggest that’s exactly how you need to start

00:01:58 so interview your family i often wish i’d been able to speak to my cornish grandmother before she died but there was never the opportunity when you talk to your family you will need to think about sensitivity because there are people particularly those of the older generation who find it difficult to talk openly about things that have been kept secret and perhaps they have strong views about what should be kept secret within the family and what can be discussed more openly and it’s better to ask an open question

00:02:36 rather than a closed question i’ll give you an example of a closed question and this is where somebody might ask what was the date of grandma’s birth whereas an open question would be something like oh tell me about grandma and obviously you get much more information from the tell me about grandma question than you would about a specific question collect all this information collect as much as you can dates places names and if you’re lucky look out for a family bible because in the front of those you might

00:03:13 well find names and dates of previous generations you’ll also probably be told lots of stories don’t dismiss them out of hand if they appear to be rather far-fetched some of them actually have a grain of truth the other thing to look out for are photographs and here i’ve used one of the photographs that i have my grandfather is amongst those particular boys there and i do worry sometimes about the phones that we have now that we use as cameras because who’s going to know what’s on them and you need a password

00:03:54 usually to get in in the good old days when you actually had photographs most people wrote on the back exactly who the people were and i was lucky with this one i could tell my grandfather but i didn’t know the other boys and they were all named with a date when the photograph was taken on the back here is another of my own photographs obviously a wedding and in the middle this is my grandfather with his bride my grandmother and at one time i got an elderly aunt to tell me who exactly every person was on

00:04:31 this photograph and i was able to make a tracing of the photograph and then give each person a number and make a list and amazingly i discovered that i had three generations on this photograph my grandparents in the middle my great grandparents on this side and my great great grandparents so i want to find three generations in one photograph also you might want to look out family papers see if anybody’s got any of those hidden away people had shops people ran businesses people might have birth marriages and

00:05:12 death certificates hidden in their attics and here’s a document that my father had in a chest in the loft and it’s the date when my grandfather took over the family business of his bride my grandmother and gives me the date the name and even where the business was look out for artifacts or objects now i suspect that almost all of us will have somebody a relative who fought in either the first or second world wars or later conflicts and you might find a medal now around the edge on the side of this particular medal

00:05:55 i was able to find the name of the person who had been awarded the medal his soldier number and the battalion to which he belonged so all that is really useful information because if you want to find out more about that particular person you’ll need those facts to be able to start research pocket watch again this is my grandfather’s given to me by my father and when i turned it over it had his name it had a date and it also had the people who gave it to him what a lovely thing to have these belonged to my cornish grandmother

00:06:37 and as you can see she was a nurse a sister in one of the hospitals down in cornwall and again on the back of that badge nurse’s badge was her name but it was her first name and her maiden name and that was really useful because if i hadn’t known that that would enable me to find her marriage to my grandfather and if you were in the second world war he would have had one of these a national registration identity card and again a name inside and some dates and in this case some useful little scribbles about the family

00:07:16 so again look out for these ask your relatives to look in their lofts and do a quick search so a little bit about keeping records what should i record well i can tell you absolutely everything and you need to start from what you know so start with yourself and work backwards so yourself your parents your grandparents their parents and so on don’t for a moment assume that you’re related to somebody famous in the past or somebody in the present and try and work forwards from that particular person even if you’ve got the

00:07:57 same name it’s virtually impossible to do that you need to go with what you know and work backwards and make sure that you know everything you can possibly find out about the person you’re researching so if it’s one of your parents for example so you’ve got a birth a marriage and a death for them before you start working to the next generation because if you don’t do that and what we would say is kill off your ancestors then you might be following somebody who in actual fact had the same name as your

00:08:30 relative but died when they were an infant so just keep an eye out for that here we go record everything i can tell you exactly what i was doing on certain days in 1982 and where i was because that’s roughly when i started researching so write down where you are in this case it more than likely is going to be the internet make sure you write down the sites you’re on the dates you’re doing the research and if you are in an actual archive or record office which one you’re in believe me you will forget

00:09:08 reference numbers all birth marriages and deaths for certificates have a reference number and you will need to know that if you want to buy the certificate you will i’m afraid end up having to buy some because information you might need or definitely will need will be on that certificate and make a name of the resource so if it’s a birth certificate make sure you note it’s a birth if it’s a baptism make sure you note it’s a baptism these are two different things and some people were baptized as adults

00:09:46 or as older children rather than babies and so of course the year of birth that you’re looking for will change and of course there is a difference between a death and a burial as well now do keep a note of the dates that you’ve actually searched so if you’re looking for somebody between 1920 and 1930 but you’ve only researched 1925 to 1930 make a note because otherwise and again i speak from experience here you will end up doing that research all over again and what a waste of time that will be

00:10:28 so write it down and the other thing you’re going to come across are people in your family generation after generation sometimes with exactly the same name so for example here you might have a john smith who was named after his father who was also john smith who was named after his father who is also a john smith so people kept to very strict naming patterns when they gave the children their children their names so if you keep a code so start in this case with john smith as js1 the next john smithers js2 and so on

00:11:10 hopefully that will keep you from muddling them all up now keeping the actual notes well these days you can keep a chart on a pc or a laptop so produce ones fill in and here’s one that i found on the bbc dot co dot uk forward slash family history site produced by simon fowler of the national archives here’s one that gives you all the information on one sheet so up here you’ve got the shaped number you’ve got if it’s continued from a previous sheet the name of the person you’re researching their relation to you

00:11:54 birth date and the place death date and the place whether they got married husband or wife’s name and we’ve got two spaces here you might even need more because especially in the past particularly for women who died quite young sometimes in childbirth a husband might marry several times you’ve got space for the children and you’ve got a space for the occupation of the person you’re researching where they lived and any other information that might be useful now you can produce one of those yourself or you can have a look at this

00:12:32 one as i say on the bbc site i just acknowledge that we have used that site or as i continue to do set yourself some notebooks go and get yourself some notebooks i find it more accessible for myself just have blank pages and write information down problem is of course i don’t always remember to note every single bit of detail whereas a chart you’ve got spaces to fill that in whichever way you do it make sure it works for you it’s got to be something that’s easy for you to use i know somebody who puts charts similar

00:13:12 to this in files and there’s one section of the file for each family so make it workable make it work for you okay we’re going to move on to surnames and spelling and first of all why do we have surnames what’s the point how did they come about well here’s a picture that you might recognize a picture of part of the bio tapestry which was produced after william the conqueror and the normans came to england and conquered the country and on the right here we’ve got the normans on their horses and on the left

00:13:57 we’ve got the anglo-saxons or english behind their shield wall and it’s really after the norman invasion that we begin to get our surnames and the reasons a couple of reasons first of all the population begins to grow and you need to be able to identify which person is which you need to be able to distinguish between people with the same first name and there was a very small pool of names so you get lots of john’s williams henry’s thomas’s and you need to separate all the thomases in the village one from

00:14:41 the other now the normans needed to record whoever who lived in various places around the country and this was because it goes back to money i’m afraid well even the conqueror wanted to be able to tax people so we needed to know who owned which bits of land and how big those bits of land were and here’s a rather simplified version of how this happened you get norman officials being sent out to villages and towns and they ask the local people for names where they live and as i say how big the area was that they were farming

00:15:24 so the normal official will say to the first person who comes up to his table okay what’s your name and the chat replies i’m john i’m john and i live over there there’s that hill you see the hill over there i live towards the bottom of that hill second person comes up um i’m john and i’m the miller and the normal official ah that’s a bit tricky to john’s third person comes up well i’m also john norman official needs to be able to say which is which so he comes up with a solution okay you said you were john who lives by

00:16:04 the hill so we’ll call you john of the hill of course that gets shortened to john hill second chap well you said you were john the miller okay we’ll call you john the miller that gets shortened to john miller and finally well you said you were john um oh i can see you’ve got lovely red hair we’ll call you john the redhead because that becomes john redhead as i say rather simplified version of how it all happened so in england most people have surnames by the 13th century although in cornwall and some more isolated places it was a

00:16:44 bit later than that so where did they come from well we’ve really talked a bit about that already so places most of you or some of you will know the author called jack london who wrote call of the wild presumably his ancestors originally came from london and of course the current england football manager is gareth southgate so perhaps at one time his family came from somewhere where there was a south gate and it’s stuck i have a picture of some bread neck some sliced bread and you must be thinking

00:17:19 what on earth is she going on about well this is just to remind you about occupations of surnames so if you have the surname baker it’s almost certain that your ancestor was a baker and of course we’ve heard about miller already could be a priest it could be a bishop it could be a farmer next we come to patronimics so these are surnames that come from a father’s given name or in other words his first name so here i’ve got a couple of examples you have somebody called donald and their son becomes donald’s son

00:17:59 we have somebody called stephen and he becomes stevenson or stevens if the owen gets dropped and we talked a bit about nicknames some of you might remember brian redhead who was on radio 4 some years back and i’m going to mention one more which is a metronimic now this comes from a female’s given name or first name so the mother and it happens to be my surname is kassen so cass would have been the mother and then cassie’s son it becomes caston and of course if you live in scotland wales or ireland you might have a prefix

00:18:50 so you might have mac muk o or app at the beginning of your surname all of those pretty much mean son of so if you have the surname macdonald it means son of donald now in cornwall i’ve already mentioned that surnames arrived a little bit later than the rest of england and i’m going to give you another scenario as to how surnames came in to being in cornwall because a bit like wales we have numerous examples of surnames that really are first names so things like thomas william jones and so on and here’s a scenario again a very

00:19:38 simplified version of how this might have come about so here we have a lovely tapestry showing a group of lads going off hunting and you’ve got two chaps watching them and one says the other use that likely bunch that those likely lads going off hunting with their dogs and the other chap says well they’re all the sons of william and the name william stix is the surname so you might have thomas william john william henry william and so on there’s also another way this could have happened a bit like um in wales

00:20:15 as i’ve said we have surnames in cornwall things like thomas william and martin and so on now in wales i’m going to give you a welsh example you might have the father being called griffin thomas and when his son is born instead of being william thomas he’s called william griffin he takes the father’s first name as his surname as i say that’s quite a simplified version a little bit about spelling and one of the things you have to be aware of is that you don’t want to get hung up on spelling if your name is barrett and you spell it

00:20:55 with two r’s and you come across the surname barrett with one r if everything else fits this is likely to be your relative your ancestor and the reason being is that of course until really the latter half of the 19th century the majority of the population couldn’t read or write so if you go along to the vicar to baptize your baby have your your little child baptized you tell the vicar what the name is and the figure writes it down as to how he thinks is going to be spelt and particularly if he comes from

00:21:34 another place another area he may not be familiar with the accent so the word gets changed slightly we call those variants so try not to get hung up on the spelling so something about general registration next and this is all to do with birth marriage and death certificates in england a centralized system came into being england and wales in 1837 in scotland 1855 and ireland with a couple of little bits beforehand it comes really into play in 1866 and it was decided to have a centralized system so that all births marriages and

00:22:22 deaths were recorded in a centralized system now i’m going to look first of all at a birth certificate you’ll notice there are some redacted parts names and things blacked out that’s to protect the innocent over here we have the year it gives you the place so in this case stephanie and then you’ve got a series of boxes that the registar would fill in and first of all i’ve got where and when the person was born their name whether they were a boy or girl the name surname of the father and this next column

00:23:03 really important the name surname and maiden surname of the mother because if you don’t know the maiden surname of the mother it’s going to be very hard to find a marriage for this couple who had this child then you have occupation of the father in this case a brush maker journeyman and a journeyman was somebody who had more than likely finished their apprenticeship they hadn’t been able to set themselves up as a master for whatever reason and they were working for other people perhaps traveling around

00:23:37 then we have a column for the signature and description and residence of the informant so when it says description here it’s the mother so the informant is the person who went to the registrar to explain about the birth and then we’ve got the information about when this was registered don’t worry about the date at the bottom that’s when i actually purchased this certificate now next we’re going to look at a marriage so this is in green same sort of thing place for the date where it took place in this case the

00:24:12 paris church in the parish of st john susic and the county of surrey a date december the 27th and here we have a box for the name of the groom followed by the bride and then we get the age now this one is really irritating because that says full age so basically it’s only telling you that the couple were over 21. what you really want to see in that box is a specific age even though it might not be very accurate bit more about that in a moment but at least it’ll give you the chance to give you a rough idea of when these

00:24:50 people were born so you can look for births tells you their condition so in other words were they a bachelor or spinster a widower divorced rank profession now as you can see the bride apparently has no rank or profession in other words occupation whereas the groom has his which is as a gun maker believe me women would have had occupations whether it was a lawn dress or some dress making looking after the home but of course it wasn’t written down then you have the residence at the time of the marriage again this one isn’t

00:25:30 very helpful because it just isn’t john’s it’s not very specific you get the father’s name and surname of both the bride and groom and you get the france occupation now interestingly in the 21st century 2021 finally we’re going to have the mother’s name and occupation recorded on our marriage certificates now they would have signed the bride and groom would have signed or they would have you’ve probably heard this term before made their mark which meant that they couldn’t read and write and they would make a cross or a

00:26:10 squiggle of some kind to show that they had signed and over here we get the names of the witnesses now look very carefully at the witnesses don’t ignore them quite often you will find it was another relative so it could be a father it could be a brother it could be an aunt could be an uncle grandparent even so keep a note and here we have the final certificate in this section the death certificate as you can see it’s in black similar to the others we’ve got a space for the year over here the place

00:26:50 that the death was registered and here when and where that person died now keep a note of addresses they can be very important i once was able to link a grandchild with his grandfather because the grandchild had the same address on his birth certificate as the grandfather had on his death certificate next box name and surname whether they were male or female and their age now i said i would talk a little bit more about ages you just need to be very careful about ages on certificates and come to that in parish registers

00:27:32 not everybody actually remembered or knew how old they were because we’re talking about times when people couldn’t read and write when they had no calendars they were too poor to have any paper or something to write with i forget how old i am and i’ve got a calendar and another reason is because ladies in particular when we got married if our groom happened to be younger than us we might take a few years off our age because it wasn’t socially acceptable so that age for them to stick i once found somebody who was aged 72 i

00:28:12 think it was and in fact when i actually found their birth they were 82 so this lady had taken off 10 years then we have a place for their occupation this case a book marbler the cause of death sometimes you might have all sorts of things written in there in which case you might need to look up what they actually meant in this case case it’s quite apparent it was a sudden death the doctor decided it was a rupture of a blood vessel in the head and interestingly there was a coroner’s inquest now that’s really useful because you can

00:28:51 then in most cases you could then look at a newspaper and see if there is a recording an article about that particular death and you might even find the coroner’s reports now sadly in this case i found neither but it was a good try and finally of course you’ve got when the death was registered and the name of the registrar so few facts and figures about general registration i mentioned the year for england and wales although it wasn’t actually enforced properly until 1875 and of course once money was involved

00:29:31 everybody rushed to get their child and his birth or her birth registered before they were fined in the good old days when you actually went to a record office you used to get down massive volumes where the indexes were recorded and i’m saying index is not the actual certificates you had to buy those you still have to buy them and the year would be divided into four quarters so we have january february march april may june and so on nowadays the registration numbers the reference numbers begin quarter one quarter two quarter three

00:30:13 quarter four and in the indexes they were in alphabetical order nowadays you’ll find the indexes again not the certificates you’ll find them on free sites like for example free bmd but they’re not always complete because they’re relying on volunteers and well done to those volunteers for making them free so that the volunteers have mostly got up to about mid 20th century perhaps a little bit beyond that now otherwise you have to look at a commercial site and you have to either have a subscription obviously pay

00:30:54 for it or you might find a free weekend being offered so ancestry find my past the genealogists and so on those are the places you’ll find the indexes now if you’re in ireland or you’ve got irish ancestors you’re very lucky because the irish government put onto a site not just the indexes but the actual certificates so you don’t have to buy them which is wonderful now it could be the case that you can’t find the person you’re looking for we call that a nil return and there is an estimate for example in

00:31:33 england of wales that between 1837 and 1847 15 of the births are actually missing from the indexes and that’s as we explained it wasn’t really the system wasn’t really enforced properly another reason you might not find the correct person is illiteracy we’ve already talked about spelling that the wrong spelling has been put down and again if you can’t read and write and you’ve gone along to the registrar to get married then they write down what they hear rather than how you think your surname should be spelled or even

00:32:14 your first name come to that now all the big sites all the big websites have ways of getting around that problem by using a wild card or looking for variants do be careful though because sometimes not all the variants come up so you might yourself have to think of different ways of spelling your that name i often say when i run these courses in person try speaking to yourself hide away somewhere if you do this because otherwise people will think you’re a bit strange try sounding out your surname but

00:32:49 pretending you’ve got a really bad cold and see how it sounds the other possibility of not finding the person is that there are transcription errors so in other words when the indexes were copied to go on the internet the people who copied them made mistakes or when they are originally copied when the original certificates were copied onto indexes somebody made a mistake and of course you might have the wrong name entirely i have an aunt who was always known by one particular name but she was actually

00:33:32 born with two different names her surname and her first name were different you might find that somebody you know uncle fred was actually that was his middle name and so therefore he was recorded by the registrar as john fred and then the surname so again you need to think outside the box a little bit here so some solutions well obviously try some different spellings try some different dates remember the lady i said he was actually 10 years older than she really was and look at other sources such as census

00:34:13 or parish registers and finally here’s something about the cornwall family history society some things you might not know about us so we are a charity based in truro in cornwall and we do rely very much on memberships and donations to keep going so if you have enjoyed today’s course or you think you’ve learned quite a bit perhaps you’d like to make a donation so if you are able and you’d like to here’s the link you are able to scribble that down quickly thank you very much indeed we have a library down in truro and

00:34:56 this money will go to support that library we have members all over the world as you know people from cornwall left for various reasons a lot for economic reasons and they now want to research their family history so perhaps you’d like to join us and again if you’d like to be a member here is a link to that membership which you can scribble down finally we offer a research service and if you are stuck with those ancestors then we might be able to help we do make a little charge for this again as i say it goes to help keep us

00:35:35 open and if you remember you receive a discount and here is a link for that we’re also always looking for volunteers we have volunteers who help our visitors down in the library in truro so that would be lovely if you’d like to join us and we have people putting data into our computer to go on our database we have a really amazing database i have to say we have birth marriages and burials pre-1837 all of them are on the database at the moment and that’s why we need people to help us do data entry

00:36:22 if you haven’t been able to scribble that down then put cornwall family history society into google other search engines are available and see what turns up look at the website and you’ll find information on all these aspects i’ll leave that there for a little bit longer and here’s a summary of what we’ve looked at today so we’ve talked about family sources so if you think back to family bibles stories bits of paper documents that people have got in their lofts we looked at record keeping and you can produce the charts these

00:37:06 days on a computer we looked at surnames how they came about and also about avoiding becoming hung up if somebody’s surname is felt differently to ourselves even though we’re pretty sure they are an ancestor and we looked at general registration and it’s the birth death and marriage certificates that we really need to get hold of to make any progress going back with our research so at home you could start by looking for family artifacts or objects in the loft you can interview a member of your family

00:37:52 and you can produce a chart and you can make an effort to fill it in and the last thing i would say is enjoy your search happy hunting if you’re not careful it will become an obsession good luck