Category: London
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Hanging by a thread
Discovering the Smith family
Discovering the Smith family Discovering more about the Smith part of the family tree has proved remarkably easy, after having put off looking for ages due to the very common surname. See Entirely to the Water from Birth for first stages. Now it was time to find great great grandmother Harriet Smith’s siblings and their immediate offspring. The practice of using the mother’s (or grandmother’s) surname as a middle name was very helpful – Bacchus for two of the girls, Harper (the grandmother’s name) for one » »
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Sixty years on
Today, 6th December 2012, marks 60 years since the height of the great smog in London. The Guardian has produced a picture gallery of those days and other smogs in London and Manchester. And 60 years since the day my paternal grandfather Sydney Charles Howes died after cycling in the smog from his teaching job in Nunhead to home in New Cross. As previously mentioned here last year, when a photo blog featuring similar photos surfaced. See The London smog of 1952 for the blog link. » »
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Exploring Historical Maps
It is gradually getting easier to find old maps, or rather current maps with historical details, online. Two areas of interest to me have recently come my way, and are reasonably new. Not forgetting some pointers on using the 1851 England boundary maps available on FamilySearch. Historical Maps of Norfolk Norfolk County Council has a historic maps section to its website. With the interactive map explorer you can view historical maps alongside historical aerial survey data and modern day Ordnance Survey maps. Plus there are some » »
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Making a Case for the Myhills
Samuel Myhill (born about 1856, Dilham, Norfolk) featured here almost a year ago with the first results of a scanning session on old family photos. He married my great great aunt Mary Watts in 1879. I have finally been able to get a better picture of what happened to most of their children, appearing as adults in one of the photos, largely thanks to the latest 1911 census update on Ancestry. Original caption: Uncle Sam and family: Laura, Syd, Emma, Kate, and Sam To work backwards, » »
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See your ancestors get the vote
NB. Key to abbreviations at the end of this article, followed by some info on entitlement to vote. The latest collection of records available from Ancestry.co.uk is the ‘London Electoral Registers 1835-1965’ which “includes over 150 million names from right across the old counties of London and Middlesex”. Of course many of these names are repeated over the years, and the information contained is largely just name and address, but you could find fuller names (e.g. I’ve discovered one person’s middle initial of M was for » »
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The Beasor connection
A fascinating start to 2012 and the addition of a Beasor family page to Cutlock & Co. A cousin to my nephews uploaded some old Beasor photos to Ancestry.co.uk following a Christmas visit to his (and their) gran. Almost as soon as I created a link to these on my Ancestry tree, my dad’s second cousin Muriel spotted them and realised she knew this Beasor family. Deptford Church group photo – see below for ‘all the names’ The church photo in Muriel’s possession helps to tell » »