My Soul Belongs to the Village Hall This Weekend

[jacey]

... At least that's what it feels like. I spent all day today setting up the local history photo exhibition and I'll spend most of tomorrow sitting with it and talking to people about it.

Can I have my life back please?

Yeah I know I'm only doing family history research and that's only like local history research but different, yes?

Well... yes... but my brain's on the family history thing at the moment and I've broken the 1600 barrier on a couple of lines. It's as much fun and much more productive than playing sudoku or solitaire on line. I'm following every line back for as far as I can go... so every generation I have twice as many relatives to follow.

Scary thought. I might only have 2 parents and 4 grandparents but I've got 64 g-g-g-g-grandparents and by the time I get ten generations back (I've got 12 generations back on the Lacey line (Christopher Lacey, Derbyshire, b.1670) and so I can reasonably hope to go to at least ten with some of the others, i think) there are 2052 of the buggers. And because I'm doing this family tree for my kids, I'm doing Best Beloved's family too, so the numbers double.  12 gens for every dividing line is 8208 relatives!

Thing is... I'm not going to run out of puzzles to do any time soon, am I? I'm currently working my way back through the Lockyer family and have some suspects as early as late 1500s.  I've not quite connected the dots yet but I'm looking at a Richard Lokier who died in 1609 in Clutton (Radstock, Somerset) within a few days of two of his daughters (plague? epidemic?). I don't know when he was born but it was obviously the 1500s since he had daughters, Edith and Christian, by 1609. It's quite amazing to think I may have found a relative who was alive when good queen Bess was on the throne and Shakespeare was already working up to inserting himself into the school curriculum.
:-)

Comments

[tychist.livejournal.com]

Very unusual in my experience. Yes, it's very addictive, I've lost whole days, weeks, hell even months obsessively following every clue I could find. Once I had so much data that I could not possibly keep it all straight in my head, I found the urges lessened. I still have my moments though. :) (and many large files of certificates, printouts, family trees etc). Comes in handy for naming characters in stories.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I did a lot of work on this about three years ago and then let it drop, but something sparked me off again about two months ago and I'm currently in an obsessive phase again.

I've taken a paid subscription to Genes Reunited (until December) which gives me unlimited access to census data and BMD.

The subscriptioins aren't cheap but I'm getting a lot out of it and... well... I'm from Yorkshire. I might not renew my sub in December and I want to make sure I get my money's worth out of it while I can.
:-)

I'd like a sub to ancestry.com, but that's even more expensive so I go down to the local library and use theirs - usually once every couple of weeks. The big advantage to that is that ypou have to stop after an hour (or two at the most) because of the blocks of time you can book on the computers there.

[tychist.livejournal.com]

I had an ancestry subscription - the uk one - which was very useful. I've let it lapse now that I'm not in an active research phase but I will renew it at some point. When I do, I'll let you know and you can tell me what you want looking up. Sometimes it's worth it to double check esp census data, where there are so many transcription errors.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

There's something I just don't get... If I can't find somthing in the census index on Genes Reunited I can sometimes find it in the census index on ancestry.com, but surely indexing the census returns for all the years from 1841 through to 1891 is such an enormous job that there can't be more than one index out there... Surely...

I had assumed that any subscription would access the same index. Any ideas?

[tychist.livejournal.com]

They are most definitely different. I had one census lookup on - I cannot for the life of me remember what it's called now but it used to be something like 1837 something or other (sorry, I'll look it up) - which gave an address for one of the Spouses ancestors as 'cluster of nuts'. This was how it was transcribed. Ancestry resolved the problem and gave me 'Cleadon House'.

Just looked it up, it used to be 1837online.org.uk and now it's findmypast.com

It's not that findmypast is worse than the others, it's just different. I like to check a lot with freebmd, then the jolly mormons, then whatever I have a subscription for and then run a search online for available cds etc for parish records. Almost everything I'm stuck on now is pre-census or in Devon, or both. So no chance of getting info online.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I used to use 1837.com when I first started (now findmypast) but I never had a subscription I used to pay-per-view.

If I could afford it - or more likely if I could justify the expense to myself - I'd have a sub to both Genes Reunited (which has been tremendously helpful so far, especially cross-referencing other people's trees) and to ancestry.com, but it seems superfluous and I can access ancestry.com at the little library down the road in the next village for free.

The transcription errors are a hoot sometimes. I suspect it's mostly due to a lack of local knowledge, and obviously some of the originals are poor, but I found a Caroline transcribed as Caratine last week.

Re your Cornish parish records... every year more parish records seem to find their way on to the web courtesy of local family history societies, so it's always worth re-checking even if they weren't there last time yu looked. And the IGI has a lot of parish stuff even though some of it is inaccurate, so has to be treated with caution. That's at familysearch.org, the LDS site.

[tychist.livejournal.com]

You're right about the parish records, the Cornish ones were very useful. I think anywhere in England that has a lot of American interest - like descendants of Cornish immigrants - tends to be more readily available, at least I think so. The Cornish parish baptismal record was a useful guide to estimating the accuracy of the IGI in that area. Turned out the IGI was very good - as long as one stuck to the extracted records of course - for my area of interest. More locally, a lot of the IGI is less useful. I found one of Spouse's ancestors given as Kyo Saruent. Kyo is the name of the parish and Saruent turned out to be a line-slip error (I forget what the word was supposed to be).
Their transcription of the 1881 census has been very handy, though. When I've got time I'm going to do a fresh start trawl through all my research, starting again from the beginning and re-check what I have, then see what else is available. When I start drooling over catalogues of genealogy cds that I can't afford, I shall stop.
Probably.