Graeme Davis - Solving Genealogy Problems: How to break down brick walls and build your family tree

Other titles for genealogists from How To Books

YOUR FAMILY TREE ON-LINE
How to trace your ancestry from your own computer
Dr Graeme Davis

RESEARCH YOUR SURNAME
and your family tree
Dr Graeme Davis

HOW TO TRACE YOUR IRISH ANCESTORS
An essential guide to researching and documenting the family histories of Irelands people
lan Maxwell

WRITE YOUR LIFE STORY
How to organise and record your memories for family and friends to enjoy
Micheal Oke

Write or phone for a catalogue to:
How To Books
Spring Hill House
Spring hill Road
Begbroke
Oxford
OX5 1RX
Tel. 01865 375794

Or email:

Vist our website www.howtobooks.co.uk
to find out more about us and our books

Like our Facebook page How To Books & Spring Hill

Follow us on Twitter @Howtobooksltd

Read our books online www.howto.co.uk

Published by How To Books Ltd
Spring Hill House, Spring Hill Road,
Begbroke, Oxford OX5 1RX
Tel: (01865) 375794. Fax: (01865) 379162
www.howtobooks.co.uk

How To Books greatly reduce the carbon footprint of their books by sourcing their typesetting and printing in the UK.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or stored in an information retrieval system (other than for purposes of review) without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

The right of Graeme Davis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

2012 Graeme Davis

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978 1 84528 477 0

Cover design by Baseline Arts Ltd, Oxford
Produced for How To Books by Deer Park Productions Tavistock Devon Typeset by PDQ Typesetting, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffs. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

NOTE: The material contained in this book is set out in good faith for general guidance and no liability can be accepted for loss or expense incurred as a result of relying in particular circumstances on statements made in the book. Laws and regulations are complex and liable to change, and readers should check the current position with the relevant authorities before making personal arrangements.

List of illustrations

1. Somerset House, London, once the home of BMD and probate indices, a role now largely replaced by the Internet.
2. An early copy of an English birth certificate.
3. Genealogists familiar with searching databases which index parish registers may forget the practical difficulties of reading an eighteenth-century parish register.
4. Hustings: did your ancestors who lived before the Great Reform Act vote?
5. The suffragettes campaign for Votes for Women resulted in women voting from 1918.
6. Old maps such as this 1896 one for Surrey are a better guide to your ancestors home than a modern map.
7. Antiquarian maps can support your understanding of local history.
8. Waiting for the Train: this 1864 painting by Erskine Nicol evokes the spirit of migration by train in the British Isles.
9. A 1902 sketch of Trafalgar Square and St Martin-in-the-Fields by Mortimer Menpes.
10. A Scots Guard may be identified by his tunic buttons in groups of three far more visible than the cap badge in this 1912 photograph.
11. Women also saw service overseas in wars, as these First World War VAD nurses.
12. The Last Muster, Sunday at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea. This 1875 picture by Sir Herbert von Herkomer appears to show the death of a Chelsea pensioner sitting at the end of the second row.
13. 13 The home of an English cottager, as depicted by Mortimer Menpes.
14. A pieman, 1884 a typical urban occupation of the age.
15. The railways were one of the largest employers of the late Victorian age. These porters are around 1885.
16. Dublins Four Courts, the scene of the 1922 fire which destroyed many of Irelands archives.
17. This 1926 photograph has several dating clues. The photographers serial number on the deckchair (right) is characteristic of the 1920s, while mens boots (as here) were mostly replaced by shoes in the 1930s. The custom of wearing Sunday Best on the beach declined during the interwar years.
18. Who Do You Think You Are? Live! the biggest genealogy meeting in the British Isles, at Earls Court.

Breaking through brick walls

The brick walls presented by genealogy problems are challenges which can often be solved. The central idea of this book is that, however intractable a genealogy problem may appear, there is always something else that can be tried. There is also the expectation that with ever more records coming available and the development of new techniques (including genetic genealogy), problems which now seem beyond any possible solution will one day be solved.

This book offers practical ideas for solving your genealogy problems. It suggests how to make better use of the familiar genealogical records and explores some of the less common records which researchers may not use often but which provide new sources of information. With this book you will be able to make some progress on some of your genealogical sticking points.

PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

There are of course problems which will remain with a solution outstanding. Sooner or later every line reaches a point beyond which it simply cannot be traced because there are not records. Or you may find ancestors did a very good job in hiding their family background. Common names frequently cause problems for the researcher. Yet with all these restrictions noted, a great deal can none the less be done.

There is a very good chance of being able to take almost any British Isles line back to the early nineteenth century, and a reasonable expectation of being able to take many lines back another couple of centuries. The utmost reach of most British Isles genealogy is the late Middle Ages unless of course you link to the royal line or the pedigree of a handful of noble families. You may travel back half a millennium or even further before sooner or later all lines come to a point where they can be taken no further they hit the unbreakable brick wall of a lack of records. Perhaps one day genetics will break down even this barrier, but for the moment genealogy ends with the earliest records. Before you hit that ultimate brick wall there are the sort of problems that may be solved with the ideas in this book.

Presented here is a way of thinking to tackle brick walls along with a selection of ideas most likely to be of use to solve problems of this nature. The focus is on the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, the centuries of most genealogical research, but there is consideration of both earlier and later sources. A selection of ideas and sources are presented, those which are believed to be the most likely to break down brick walls.

COMING TO DEAD ENDS IN RESEARCH

Genealogists have come to use the term brick wall to mean a research dead end, the situations where family tree research does not respond to the usual tools for advancing a line and all further progress is stopped. There are two primary types of brick wall. When:

a birth or christening cannot be found, with the result that information about parentage is not available; and