Category: family history
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In praise of .. Ancestry’s Member Connect Activity feature
The Ancestry website has a flexible (personalised) front page, where you can arrange or hide various modules showing particular information. I have chosen to have ‘Recent Member Connect Activity’ as the the top left box, which I find a bit addictive. It highlights activity by other Ancestry members connected with records which are on your own tree (or the ‘shoebox’ save-for-later area). There’s something new every week, often most days, usually just showing you who else has some vague interest in a particular person in the » »
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All at sea with a new cousin
So this makes the nice large wall chart of dad’s family “out of date”, if that’s the right phrase for having newly discovered historic information. With a bit of help from the Ancestry Facebook page {1}, I’ve downloaded the 1911 census form for my ‘half great great uncle’ William John Cullum from the actual Ancestry site. And yes, there is another offspring who was not recorded in the 1901 version. I had guessed there would be two, so I won’t make any great claims here. (Doesn’t » »
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Following four brothers from Somerset
Merriott to Australia, and NZ
Merriott to Australia, and NZ Back to filling out the foreign connections ‘down under’. The trip to Tonypandy in April resulted in acquiring a copy of ‘Descendants of Joseph Osborne’, compiled by Sue Osborne in Brisbane, Australia. This is referred to as JOT (Joseph Osborne Tree) in my notes. Sue has traced her husband’s line back to Joseph, born around 1803 in Merriott, Somerset, who was my 4 x great grandfather. Much of the information is available on the Merriott Families Genealogy website, also created by » »
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Displaying the family tree
At what point do you decide that the data on your family tree is good enough to be reproduced in printed form? Not just your usual stack of A4 printout, but as a decent quality wallchart? That has been my dilemma for about the last year, with Dad first dropping hints that it would be good to have, then more recently being rather more definite that he would like to to be able to see the connections between all the ‘new’ family members that I had » »
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Brookstone in Leeds, Manchester, New York and Tonypandy
One of the earliest articles on Cutlock and Co was about tracking down the background to the Brookstone family, connected via great great aunt Lily Osborne’s husband Jonny. See Finding that elusive Jewish connection. Jonny’s younger sister Eva, born about 1883 Leeds, gets a mention there, but I couldn’t be sure where she went after 1901. With a full Ancestry sub I can now be confident that a voyage to New York in 1920 was indeed hers, with the full passenger list giving the right » »
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Kiwi cousins
I’ve spent nearly all the long weekend in foreign parts – Canada, USA, Australia and just a touch of the New Zealands. Yes, virtually of course, having splashed out on a Worldwide sub on Ancestry (for a month). All sorts of loose ends tidied up and quite a few new third cousins found, although most seem to have been born rather a long time ago, and are no more. One of the first on the list for investigation was great aunt Daisy Maud May (originally Scott » »