Category: family history
-
No Irish swearing please
A first cousin (twice removed) Mary Ellen Watts married Edward Arthur Feek in 1905. Edward’s parents were Elijah and Harriet (maiden name Meek). Can you guess the most frequent transcription error for the surname, perhaps from the title of this piece? Yes, Feck, although for one particularly badly written census record (1881) it comes out as Teek. As some family trees on Ancestry have what I believe is a stray child to Elijah and Harriet (the 1911 census clearly says they had 6 children, all still » »
-
Stacking the Deck with more Cutlocks
I have finally resolved, to my own satisfaction at least, the question posed back in March last year in ‘A matching pair of Elizabeth Cutlocks, or the same person?‘. At the time, a key baptism record which had been spotted on familysearch.org by someone else, for Harriet Cutlock born 1837/38 to Elizabeth and Thomas, could not be located on that site. But I was prompted to re-check the other day – after all the site had updated Norfolk and other parish records this year. » »
-
Tracing the Osborne inscriptions at Trealaw
The hundredth article on Cutlock & Co {1} is as good as any to re-visit the photographs taken at Trealaw Cemetery back in April 2011 {3}. This time it is a focus on the Osborne side. The grave of great great grandparents William and Mary Ann Osborne was perhaps the easiest to find – right next to one of the main paths. Son Daniel predeceased his parents, age just 19 in 1909. William reached 80 by his death in 1928, with Mary Ann (nee Sibley) » »
-
Family Tree Maker September update
An update for Family Tree Maker 2012 was released on Friday (see Note 1 for info on the upgrade process). Alongside improvements to the tree sync facility and bug fixes, it is definitely an upgrade as it introduces a number of new features. All very welcome, but see note 3 for a downside. Knowing one’s Place One of these new features, on the treatment of Place Names, almost addresses a wish-list item of mine. I had wanted a “way to select a group of place names » »
-
Double trouble
The Jeary family in America, descended from great great aunt Jane Watts and husband Robert who settled in Seward county, Nebraska, is quite extensive (see Going Abroad – America and global for some starters). Partly as a consequence, Robert Jeary’s siblings, who also emigrated to Nebraska from Norfolk, have been less researched by me to date. Robert became a farmer, as did his sister-in-law Emma Watt’s hubbie William Flowerday. But not all the Jearys took that path. Seeing double Edwin Jeary, born 1850 Stalham, has the » »
-
Making the news makes family history
This post was going to be about bringing together disparate sources to build a picture, but has evolved into one on the increasing availability and usefulness of newspaper archives. The British Newspaper Archive website went live late 2011, but while I have yet to use this, cuttings are increasingly adding to the data available. And the new series of Who Do You Think You Are? has featured newspaper extracts in each of the three episodes so far, with a particularly strong impact on Patrick Stewart’s » »