Celia Heritage - Tracing Your Ancestors Through Death Records: A Guide for Family Historians

FAMILY HISTORY FROM PEN & SWORD

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Tracing Your Tank Ancestors
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Tracing Your Air Force Ancestors
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First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
P E N & S W O R D F A M I L Y H I S T O R Y
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright Celia Heritage 2013

PRINT ISBN 978 1 84884 784 2
PDF ISBN: 9781783376445
EPUB ISBN: 9781783376469
PRC ISBN: 9781783376452

The right of Celia Heritage to be identified as Author of this Work has been
asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.

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CONTENTS

This book is dedicated to my Mother who first kindled my interest in family history so many years ago.

Mary Heritage

19271993

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A lthough my name alone appears on the cover, many people have helped in the writing of this book. My warmest thanks are extended to the following, who kindly spent much time reading through various chapters and offering advice: Stewart Gillies of British Library Newspapers, Nicholas Rheinberg of the Coroners Society, Dr Andrew Gray of the Heraldry Society, Audrey Collins of the National Archives, Michael Gandy, Chris Paton, Jayne Shrimpton, and Dr David Wright. Also a special thank you to Dr Carolyn Huston, with whom I exchanged many late-night emails and who opened my eyes to the likely interpretations behind so many causes of death!

My family, friends and fellow genealogists on Twitter and elsewhere have offered not only moral support and encouragement, but have also helped track down useful examples and images; though sadly there was not room to include them all. Particular thanks to Ann Ballard, Pat Brady, Jackie Depelle, Christine Goulding, Brenda Green, Jan Feist, Ann McDermott, Barbara Meredith, Helen Parkhurst of the World Burial Index, Lynn Sharpe, Pam Smith, Shirley Smith and to my client HC Zachry, whose family tree has provided some excellent examples for the book.

Images permissions were also gratefully received from Ivychurch PCC, Preston and Kendal Record Offices, Ancestry, LMA, Findmypast, TheGenealogist and Scotlandspeople. Thanks to staff at LMA, IHGS, SOG, Worcester Record Office, to Beth Snow of The Genealogist and Amy Sell of Findmypast for their help during my research and also to www.markrobinsonphotography.co.uk for photographic advice and enhancements.

One of the most time-consuming parts of writing a book is proofreading and here I owe a big debt of gratitude to Jayne Holtom for her help. I would also like to thank Emma Jolly for giving me the push to approach Pen and Sword with my idea for the book and to commissioning editor Rupert Harding for his patience in answering my regular queries!

Whilst I acknowledge the help of all of the above the responsibility for any errors or omissions, of course, remains solely my own.

My final and biggest thank you has to go to my husband Jonathan Risby, without whose help and support I could not have written this book.

INTRODUCTION

F amily history has been part of my life since I was fifteen, and like many people I was initially preoccupied with trying to trace my pedigree as far back as I could. Once I had found one set of ancestors I had to find the next: it very quickly became addictive. As I progressed with my research I started to realize that there was a lot more to family history than just collecting names and dates and drawing up a family tree. I started to become interested in the places they had lived, and in discovering exactly what they did for a living. With this came a growing awareness that it was also useful to buy death certificates. One of my ancestors had died of typhus; another was killed by lightning, while the cause of death on my great-great-grandmothers certificate was Bad leg 14 years! General decay from age. Fascinating stuff!

But it was not until ten years ago, when I stumbled across the premature death of my ancestor Edwin Barnes, that realization dawned. Records connected to an ancestors death, such as death certificates, inquest records, obituaries, wills and gravestones are vital. They often shed more light on a persons life than those records actually created during their lifetime. In my ignorance I had totally overlooked Edwins death and its consequences. He had in fact died as a result of a tragic accident at work and his death had had a devastating effect on the family. Tragic as this was, my discovery yielded a wonderful amount of information about the family; far more than any other documents ever had. Most importantly, it helped me to see the family in a new and much more realistic light. It seems an irony that it is often records of death that bring our ancestors to life more than any other!

Its all very well tracing your ancestors from their birth or baptism, through to their marriages and the production of their own offspring, but so many of us leave it at that and fail to follow our ancestors lives through to their end. How can you really know your ancestor if you have no idea of how he died or what life was like for him in his later years? Family fortunes fluctuated and circumstances changed as the years went by. If you desert your ancestor at the time when he appears on his last census return or baptizing his last child, you are probably missing out on a vital chunk of your family history. If you are serious about your family history then killing off your ancestors is mandatory.

In this book I aim to lead you through the various types of death records available and not only show you how to access them, but also how to get the most from them. In many cases you can use them as springboards for furthering your family research in other areas.