Family Trees

Yep. As some of you know on here my mom is British and my dad is American. Turns out they're both from exactly the same small town but my dads side ended up in Utah in the 1800s.

 

I've written a genealogy guide for newbies, unfortunately it's stuck in a broken down PC.
This is a condensed version.
To get anywhere you need to pay subscription fees to a genealogy website, you can’t get far FOC.
The main two I use are Ancestry at £13.99 per month and Findmypast...which is a bit cheaper, but better in some ways for UK genealogy.They both have pluses and minuses, but to be honest you need both.
There are others, but I’ve never used them.
Before you start, ask family for everything they know, find out who keeps the shoebox with the family BMD certificates in, that will be a great help. Write it all down and draw out the draft tree on paper. Try and copy any photos they have, including what may be written on the back.
Once you have surnames for married couples, use Freebmd.org (free as the name suggests) input the names and it will give you all their children (that were born after 1911 but before 1983)..much easier if one party at least has an unusual surname.
Pay for a month on one genealogy site and cancel the subscription straight away or they will automatically rebill you at the month end. Do as much as you can in the month and then try a month on the other....as a new customer to the genealogy sites they often offer a free trial period that gives you chance to get an idea of things.
Don't trust birthdates shown in census records, they are often out by several years....Birth, Marriage and Death certs are far more reliable.
Don't order Birth or death certs through the genealogy sites as they stick a hefty premium on...order them to come as Pdf's from the GRO at £7.00.
Don't take the census transcription as fact, sometimes the compilers get it wrong...look at the actual census return image.
If you hit brick walls, try mis-spelling names as they often change over time...bear in mind that in Victorian times people were mostly illiterate, so the name written would be the Curate's take on your ancestors pronunciation...e.g. my Grandmother was called Jewsbury...in the records it comes up as Joesbury, Jewsbery, Jewsbury, Goosberry, Dewsbury, Dewsberry etc. If you find a record always screenshot or note
It...just occasionally they can be hard to find again.
When you’ve made progress on your paper tree... transfer it to a publisher type program on the PC, I use Coreldraw,....start off with A4 page setup, when it starts to get full save it and copy the info to a new file with A3 setup....and so on.
If you do the above, you'll really get somewhere in just two months subs...for free sites Freebmd is great, Wikitree sometimes pays off and try Google...you never know what you'll find....if your ancestors are from West York's, Malcolm Bull's Calderdale Companion is good. If you are looking at Scottish ancestors the
Census returns are on a site called Scotland’s People...which I think is subscription only.
Findmypast can also give you access to The British Newspaper Archive ( If you pay for the extra subscription)...no Kings or Queens, but I've found thieves, prostitutes, wife deserters...all sorts of things, through this Archive ,this is one real score for FMP...I found much crucial info in the papers that doesn't come up in the usual records...We had a 1908 photo of a family wedding, only a few people were named and no other clues...FMP's Newspapers carried a report that told us where it was held...who hosted it, the Best man and Matron of Honour,...plus many other guests...wedding presents...description of the dresses etc...wonderful stuff you could find nowhere else.
Ancestry can be awesome at times as it's been established longer, although it leans heavily towards US subscribers and throws up connections to people of the same name that you're searching for in US records which can be a pain. It has an excellent feature that allows you too look at the trees of other people who you share ancestors with...from that it has a 'hints' system that allows you effectively to copy and paste their work into yours....if someone else is researching your line it can be a very fast way of building a tree, the snag is that often they are wrong, sometimes badly wrong so you need to double check everything they've done.
Findmypast is years behind with this facility but they are trying to catch up.
The DNA side can be great, I sent my test off and 6 weeks later the results dropped into my inbox showing I had 199 cousins of varying degrees ( it stands at 350 now) all over the world using the site...from that you can look at their results and tree to find the shared ancestor....not always much use as often people have very little detail in the tree or are obsessives who might have added 80 or 90 thousand very distant people.
but if the info comes up as first,second or third cousin you're really in with shout of making the connection....4th cousin and beyond can often be a waste of time. We did find that my Mum's Grandfather had sired another child to a girlfriend, when the descendents results popped up very closely related in my results....again, Findmypast is playing catch up.
Just a word of warning, Ancestry's tv ad gives the impression you buy the test and everything is sorted, that is not the case...you need to put the research in to make sense of it.
Findmypast is UK based and is simply better for purely UK results...more reliable on census and BMD returns, it also has the edge on UK WW1 and before military records...Ancestry does have other useful military bits but they make you pay extra through a sister site called Fold 3 which is annoying.
WW1 Service records can be invaluable, unfortunately over 60% were lost in the WW2 Blitz so you have a less than 40% chance of finding your relatives record. There are though a couple of sites that can often come up trumps. One site that can be a major disappointment is Forces War Records, promises a lot but doesn’t
usually have more than you can get elsewhere. Don't neglect local history sites or Facebook pages and
remember that not everything is online, when Covid is over local libraries often have good local and family
History information.
The final thing is to keep an open mind, you may well find things that don't fit the family narrative, just accept genealogy is warts 'n' all.

 

Just updated it a bit!!

 

Haha you're right about this! My great-great grandfather was an early Mormon polygamist so it was a challenge for sure.

 

The Mormons did a lot of work in South Yorkshire in Victorian times getting converts...quite a number from Sheffield went.

 

How far have you gone back....and what's the confusion?

 

How much info do you need to get started? Will the name of Grandparents and their brothers and sisters do?
Ta.

 

I didn't realise other families came up from Northants to work in Barnsley, I've never spoken to anyone about my tree before to be honest so thats interesting.

 

Thought you were born in 1780 John.

 

I'll do it for £50. It might not be strictly accurate and there might be some surprises in there but it'll go back some. Send me what you've got already.

 

My Great grandfather came over from Wigan to work at North Gawber. Might have been around 1910 , not sure. He was known as Wigan Jack in Mapplewell. Others pretty local I think.

 

Weren't they allowed to jump in Wigan in those days?

 

When I first moved to the Bay Area in 1996, I was in a bar, Left at Albuquerque, in Burlingame. The Midwestern couple sat next to me at the bar leaned over and commented on my "wonderful accent". The lady then went into a diatribe about how they'd traced their ancestry back to the 1700s in England. She then asked me about my family tree. I told her I had spent the last 25 years trying to find my father (a lie, BTW). Conversation stopped at that point.

 

I've spent the last 25 years trying to prevent my father finding me. (Another lie BTW).

 

Out if interest, which town did they come from?

 

not very far great grand parents and some great great then someone told me i was going the wrong way. just totally confused

 

Around the same time my grandfather fetched the family across from Wigan. One of my Dad's elder brothers was born in Wigan in 1910 but by the 1911 census they were all living in Jump.
It's a small world.

 

Just had a message from Ancestry.co.uk offering 4 months membership for 'only' £20 which would be a good starting point for you, good luck.

 

Yes, that's fine to make a start. Mine's already been done for me ( before the onset of t'internet) which is a shame as I'd enjoy doing it.

 

What area of Scotland? My grandad on my dad's side also came down to work in the pits, from Fife - Kirkcaldy to be precise.