Jonathan Scott - Tracing Your British and Irish Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians

FAMILY HISTORY FROM PEN & SWORD

Tracing Secret Service Ancestors

Tracing Your Air Force Ancestors

Tracing Your Ancestors

Tracing Your Ancestors from 1066 to 1837

Tracing Your Ancestors Through

Death Records

Tracing Your Ancestors Through

Family Photographs

Tracing Your Ancestors Using the Census

Tracing Your Ancestors Childhood

Tracing Your Ancestors Parish Records

Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors

Tracing Your Army Ancestors 2nd Edition

Tracing Your Birmingham Ancestors

Tracing Your Black Country Ancestors

Tracing Your British Indian Ancestors

Tracing Your Canal Ancestors

Tracing Your Channel Islands Ancestors

Tracing Your Coalmining Ancestors

Tracing Your Criminal Ancestors

Tracing Your East Anglian Ancestors

Tracing Your East End Ancestors

Tracing Your Edinburgh Ancestors

Tracing Your First World War Ancestors

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors:

The Gallipoli Campaign

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: The Somme

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: Ypres

Tracing Your Huguenot Ancestors

Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors

Tracing Your Labour Movement Ancestors

Tracing Your Lancashire Ancestors

Tracing Your Leeds Ancestors

Tracing Your Legal Ancestors

Tracing Your Liverpool Ancestors

Tracing Your London Ancestors

Tracing Your Medical Ancestors

Tracing Your Merchant Navy Ancestors

Tracing Your Naval Ancestors

Tracing Your Northern Ancestors

Tracing Your Pauper Ancestors

Tracing Your Police Ancestors

Tracing Your Prisoner of War Ancestors:

The First World War

Tracing Your Railway Ancestors

Tracing Your Royal Marine Ancestors

Tracing Your Rural Ancestors

Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors

Tracing Your Second World War Ancestors

Tracing Your Servant Ancestors

Tracing Your Service Women Ancestors

Tracing Your Shipbuilding Ancestors

Tracing Your Tank Ancestors

Tracing Your Textile Ancestors

Tracing Your Trade and Craftsmen Ancestors

Tracing Your Welsh Ancestors

Tracing Your West Country Ancestors

Tracing Your Yorkshire Ancestors

First published in Great Britain in 2016

PEN & SWORD FAMI LY HI STORY

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street ,

Barnsley

South Yorkshire ,

S70 2AS

Copyright Jonathan Scott , 2016

ISBN 978 147385 325 6

The right of Jonathan Scott to be identified as Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright , Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means , electronic or mechanical including photocopying , recording or by any information storage and retrieval system , without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Typeset in Palatino by CHIC GRAPHICS

Printed and bound in England by

CPI Group (UK) , Croydon , CR0 4YY

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of Pen & Sword Archaeology , Atlas , Aviation , Battleground , Discovery , Family History , History , Maritime , Military , Naval , Politics , Railways , Select , Social History , Transport , True Crime , Claymore Press , Frontline Books , Leo Cooper , Praetorian Press , Remember When , Seaforth Publishing and Wharncliffe.

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

PEN & SWORD BOOKS LTD

47 Church Street , Barnsley , South Yorkshire , S70 2AS , England

E-mail:

Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

But itll leave us practically penniless!
For Genevieve

Imagine this: youve just woken up and found yourself alone, on top of a hill. You stand up. You have no idea where you are or how you got there. Lets throw in some fog. There, its foggy. You need to get home, but to do that you need to figure out where you are. What do you do first? You look around.

Pennie, Penrose, Kate, Warren. Just some of the names my mother goes by.

Family history, to begin with, is much the same. You start by taking a look around. You need to check the ground beneath your feet, to check what youre standing on is firm. You need to remove any assumptions, you need to try and forget everything you think you know and concentrate on facts. And very slowly, like a person with arms outstretched feeling their way through a foggy landscape, you move from the known into the unknown, checking your footing with every step.

Take your mothers first name. Most of you will assume you know your mothers first name. But do you actually know it? Do you have her name recorded on a birth certificate nestled away in your family archive? Can you lay your hands on irreversible proof that the name you have just jotted down is the same as the name that the state holds?

If you had met me just fifteen years ago and asked me my mothers first name, the answer I would have given you would have been wrong. Indeed, the answer she would give you today would not be the same as the answer the state would give. I was in my twenties by the time I finally picked up a letter and asked: Why does your bank always call you Kate? I was expecting a tale of misunderstanding never put right, but it turned out her name is Kate. It was the name she was born with, baptised with and registered with, just not the name she ever went by. And this is more common than you might think. People often dont go by the names they were given. I went to school with a boy who veered between calling himself Simon (his middle name) and Piers (his first name).

I can trace my family back to 1066 dont you know! The author as irritating youth.

When you enter the first antechamber of genealogical research you not only need be aware of what you dont yet know, but also what you think you already know . It may sound unimportant, but checking birth, marriage and death indexes is the first chore for many a researcher, and its amazing just how many family historians are almost immediately thwarted often because of erroneous assumptions and family myths. As an irritating, corduroyed youth, I would boast to anyone who would listen that I could trace my family back to 1066. In the words of my former editor Simon Fowler, that turned out to be rubbish. (He actually used a different word.)

Now, this book is aimed at researchers from all over the world tracing British and Irish roots, the emphasis being toward readers who cant easily travel here to conduct research first hand. Thats not to say I will ignore physical sources that have to be checked in person far from it but the focus will predominantly be on sources, services, finding aids and advice that can be found online.

Go to wherever you keep your old stuff and take it out. If you dont have any kind of family archive, dont worry, just skip to the next chapter. But if you do, dive in, lay it all over a carpeted floor while a radio plays something you like, and organise it into categories. Your categories could be Immediate Family (if you find the short-form birth certificate of your mother, put this here), Wider Family (a named photograph of a great uncle in his service uniform would be put here), Unknown (for any unnamed photographs/items) and Miscellaneous (for random ephemera such as ancient bills or uniform buttons).