The 6 People You Need in Your Genealogy Corner

 

 

This afternoon, Marian Pierre-Louis shared this article from Forbes on Facebook. Reading the article I immediately recognised that these six “people” are variants of the Belbin team roles which I used when training senior managers at the Civil Service College.

The descriptions also put me in mind of some leading lights in genealogy. We may not know them personally (though I am privileged to count some of these people amongst my friends) but, because of their generosity in sharing their expertise with the wider genealogy community, we can all have them on our “team”.

Here are my picks for the 6 key genealogy players in my life:

The Instigator: Someone who pushes you, who makes you think. Who motivates you to get up and go, and try, and make things happen. You want to keep this person energized, and enthusiastic. This is the voice of inspiration.

This is Thomas Macentee, genealogy ninja, of Geneabloggers, High Definition Genealogy, Flip-Pal, Wikitree and so much else it makes me breathless. Thomas is constantly pushing at the boundaries between genealogy and technology, innovating, inspiring and encouraging the rest of us to get involved. Thomas is the living embodiment of energy and enthusiasm, all wrapped up in one larger than life personality, with the greatest sense of humour in the genealogy universe. Thomas inspired me to create this blog and my websites. Thomas also showed me how to do it. Every webinar with Thomas is a motivation to “get up and go, and try, and make things happen”. If you haven’t yet caught his enthusiasm and sheer zest for life, check out his back catalogue at Legacy Family Tree webinars.

The Cheerleader: This person is a huge fan, a strong supporter, and a rabid evangelist for you and your work. Work to make this person rewarded, to keep them engaged. This is the voice of motivation.

This is you, Dear Reader! It’s the 23 people who have connected to this blog via Google Friend Connect, the 20 via Networked Blogs and the 40 who have liked my Facebook page. It’s everyone who has ever left a kind comment on one of my websites or sent me a supportive email. It’s your uncritical support and enthusiasm for my work which keeps me researching, blogging and sharing, even when my own family recoil in horror at the very mention of the word genealogy. You are the unsung heroes and heroines who make the worldwide genealogy community such a supportive and nurturing place.

The Doubter: This is the devil’s advocate, who asks the hard questions and sees problems before they arise. You need this person’s perspective. They are looking out for you, and want you to be as safe as you are successful. This is the voice of reason.

This is Elizabeth Shown Mills. When you find a possible ancestor and are about to enter your findings in your family history software, it is Elizabeth’s voice you hear, urging caution and restraint. She reminds you of the genealogical proof standard, the nature of a reasonably exhaustive search and the difference between sources, information, evidence and proof. Like the wisest mother, she does not do it to spoil your fun but to keep you from getting hurt. And she does it all with exquisite Southern grace and courtesy.

The Taskmaster: This is the loud and belligerent voice that demands you gets things done. This person is the steward of momentum, making sure deadlines are met and goals are reached. This is the voice of progress.

I started by having difficulty with this one. The loud and belligerent voices in the genealogy community were the ones I blocked long ago on mailing lists and unfriended on Facebook. And then I realised that it’s me! My harshest critic and the one who lashes me into action is myself. Apart from my professional clients, I have few deadlines but I nonetheless impose them on myself. I set high standards for my own genealogical development and I am a perfectionist when it comes to revising my writing and tweaking my websites. I’m the despair of my husband, whose mantra is “Thursday not perfect”, but I will sit up late on Wednesday night to ensure I meet both goals.

The Connector: This person can help you find new avenues and new allies. This person breaks through roadblocks to finds ways to make magic happen. You need this person to reach people and places you can’t. This is the voice of cooperation and community.

I actually have two candidates for this role - Dick Eastman of EOGN and Cyndi Ingle Howells of Cyndi’s List. Dick started a genealogy bulletin board forum on Compuserve in the mid 1980s. He launched his EOGN newsletter in 1996 with 100 subscribers. Today he has over 60,000. That same year, Cyndi first published her famous list online, with 1,025 links. Today it has over 319,000. Through their efforts, genealogists worldwide have been introduced to new sources, software, societies and social media. Both provide a fantastic service to the worldwide genealogy community for which I doubt either will see much reward in this world. We owe them both an enormous debt of gratitude.

The Example: This is your mentor, your hero, your North Star. This is the person who you seek to emulate. This is your guiding entity, someone whose presence acts as a constant reminder that you, too, can do amazing things. You want to make this person proud. This is the voice of true authority.

This is Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, Megan is the person who made genealogy cool. Megan gets to meet Presidents, appear on TV and rendezvous with FBI agents in parking lots. Megan didn’t need to make up a distinctive name for herself like Madonna or Lady Gaga, she just married well. She is also extremely smart – she has two Masters degrees and has written six books. Oh, and did I say that she regularly gives her money away in grants to help fellow genealogists? To cap it all she’s pretty and a very nice person.

It’s interesting that, although I am a Brit, all my choices are Americans. There is a reason but that’s a subject for another day.

I’d love to know who you would pick for these 6 roles in your genealogy life. Do let me know in the comments.

Googling for Grandma

Googling for Grandma was the title of a lecture by the incomparable Cyndi Howells which I attended on the 2007 Wholly Genes Genealogy Conference and Cruise. Cyndi's excellent lecture equipped me with many new and exciting Google tools for extending my family research into the nooks and crannies of the internet.

In time, I became proficient enough to give my own talk on the subject to our local U3A Family History Group. I hope Cyndi will forgive me for stealing her catchy title. At the end of my talk I invited members of the audience to give me family history subjects, about which they would like to find more information, for me to Google then and there.

The first request was from a lady who had recently discovered that her ancestor, William Cooksley, ran a factory in Bristol. Would there be anything about him or his factory online? A Google search on <+Cooksley +factory +Bristol> immediately threw up a hit which stunned us all. William Cooksley's modest Bristol nail making business was mentioned in the pages of Karl Marx's "Das Kapital":

In my experience, this kind of spectacular result is far from unique. I have already blogged about my black sheep ancestor Rev Frederick Davis and his unlicensed lunatic asylum. I first became aware of this story because of Google Books. A search on <"Manor House" +Northfleet +Davis> led me to an article from the German psychiatry magazine Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medizin, Volume 35, 1879. (Google Translate tells me that this is the General journal of psychiatry and psycho-forensic medicine.)

Only a "snippet view" of the article was shown but it was enough to inform me that Frederick had appeared before the magistrates at Rochester, Kent on Friday 29 June to face a charge by the Lunacy Commissioners under the Lunacy Act. From this, I was able to do further research.

Last Wednesday marked a further stage in my Google education, as I attended a webinar by the equally awesome Thomas MacEntee on Google for Genealogists. It is Thomas' fault that I have not blogged since then - I have been too busy trying out all the new Google toys he gave me to play with. But chatting with Cyndi and Thomas after the webinar gave me the idea for a series of blog posts about how Google has helped my genealogy research, of which this is the first. I hope that, as the series goes on, you will learn some new tips and tricks and make some new research discoveries of your own. Please let me know if you do.

Wordless Wednesday - The Ark, Prince Rupert, BC

 

 

The house in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada, where my mother was born in 1919. For obvious reasons, it was known to the family as "the Ark".

 

UPDATE

 

The legendary Cyndi Howells asked me why the house was built that way. As taught by Cyndi herself, I did a targeted Google search on "Prince Rupert" +houses +stilts. Up popped a result from Google Books - an article from Popular Mechanics magazine dated July 1922. It contains another photograph of the house:

 

 

The article explains that:

The city of Prince Rupert, BC, is situated on very hilly ground, and in some instances houses were built before the grading operations were completed, which has led to many unusual sights. In one case a house was built with the first floor level with the street, but the ground was so far below the street level that it was necessary to support the basement on long timbers. A narrow wooden bridge leads from the sidewalk to the first floor of the house.

As it happens, I have a photograph of my grandmother, holding my mother in her arms, standing on that narrow wooden bridge:

 

 

I think this story illustrates three important genealogy lessons:

1. Sharing your research in a website or blog leads directly to new discoveries.
2. There is a good reason why professional genealogists like Cyndi teach us to ask the "who, what, where, when, why" questions about our research.
3. It is simply amazing what you can find on Google Books.

Thrifty Thursday - Save £££ using a Library

I've been a bookworm ever since I learned to read. I've been a library user for almost as long. Aged 10, I was given special permission to use the adult library because I'd read everything in the children's section. I cried when I realised there were more books in the world than I would ever be able to read.

My love for books carries over to my family history research - they are amongst my most valuable sources of information. Since Cyndi Howells first taught me how to do well targeted searches using Google, I have regularly trawled Google Books for family information. I rarely come away empty handed. I found an article about a British ancestor's unlicensed lunatic asylum in a German psychiatry magazine and have traced the career of a 19th century King's Messenger entirely through books found online. I even found The Boating Man's Vade Mecum, written by my husband's great grandfather, William Winn.

For books still in copyright, Google Books only provides a snippet view - or sometimes no preview at all. This can be very frustrating. No-one wants to buy an expensive book just to obtain the nugget of genealogy information contained in a footnote on page 169. Fortunately, there is no need to do so, if you belong to a library.

When I find a book of interest, my first stop is the website of my local library consortium - Libraries West. Using their online catalogue, I can search for the book in over 100 libraries in a region extending from the Cotswolds to Exmoor, including major public libraries in the cities of Bath and Bristol. Obscure books can be found in the most unlikely places. I located a book about an East India Company family which had been placed into storage by the Somerset County Library service - it had last been borrowed in the 1960s. A book about London's worst Victorian slum was gathering dust on the sleepy shelves of a library in a Gloucestershire market town.

If I find the book in the Libraries West catalogue, I can reserve it for collection at my local library, 100 yards from my front door, for the princely sum of 90p. If I do not find it, all is not lost. I next turn to WorldCat to locate the nearest library with a copy. WorldCat covers institutional libraries as well as the public library service. I recently found a rare book very close to my home in the library of my old alma mater, Bristol University. Armed with details of the holding library, and the call number of the book I require, I go back to the Libraries West website and put in a request for an inter-library loan. The fee for this service is higher, at £2.20 per book, but still much cheaper than buying my own copy - cheaper even than the postage on my own copy.

And inter-library loans are not restricted to published books. In my time I have borrowed a typed manuscript from a library in the Orkneys and even borrowed microfilm copies of an ancestor's journals from the Hudson's Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg, Canada. For £2.20, that has to be the bargain of a lifetime.

All the nice girls love a sailor - 1

Marian Pierre-Louis has kindly publicised my search for the elusive Captain John Winn in her excellent Roots and Rambles blog, so I thought I’d start my blogging journey with him.

John Winn is my husband’s earliest known Winn ancestor and a huge stumbling block to tracing the family tree any further back in time. He first appears in the records with his marriage to Heneretta Tomlin on 5 October 1829 at St Mary-le-Bow, London, when he was stated to be “of this parish”. The witnesses to the marriage were Heneretta’s father, William Tomlin, and a so far unidentified man named John Nickless.

John and Heneretta had only one child, William, baptised on 29 August 1830 at St Dunstan's, Stepney. The baptismal register shows that the family were living in Mile End Old Town and that John was a master mariner i.e. the captain of  a merchant ship.

I could not find John Winn in the 1841 census, which did not surprise me, given his occupation. Heneretta was living with her sister and brother-in-law, James and Mary Ann Horn, in Green Street, Bethnal Green, a short distance from her father’s business premises at Twig Folly, Bethnal Green. William Winn cannot be identified with any certainty, the most likely candidate being an 11 year old pupil at a boarding school in the township of Roby in Lancashire.

Heneretta’s father, William Tomlin, was a prosperous man, the owner of lighters and barges which transported coal from the docks at Limehouse along the Regent's Canal. His grandson, William Winn, would later take over the family business and eventually serve two terms as Master of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen. No formal apprenticeship records for William Winn can be found but it is likely that he served some sort of apprenticeship in the London docks, for which a baptismal certificate would be required.

It was probably in this way that Heneretta discovered that her unusual name had been wrongly recorded as Hannah in William’s baptismal entry. For on 25 February 1847 she swore a formal oath before the magistrates in the Thames Police Court, in order to get the entry corrected. In her affidavit she described herself as the “wife of John Winn of 6 Waterloo Terrace Commercial Road in the Parish of St Dunstan Stepney”.

Heneretta clearly still regarded herself as the wife of John Winn but that was not how her father saw things one year later. On 10 February 1848, William Tomlin wrote his will, in which he described his daughter as:

Heneretta Winn the wife or widow of John Winn who some years since went to North America and whose existence is uncertain.

By the time of the 1851 census, William Winn described his mother as a widow:

and when she made her own will on 9 July 1856, she did the same:

but eight days later, when William Winn married, he made no mention of his father being dead:

When Heneretta died in Southampton on 15 August 1857, her death certificate described her as the “widow of John Winn master mariner”.  That is the last mention of John Winn in any records I can find.

In Part 2 of this post I will describe the efforts I have made to find additional information about this wayward matelot, who appears to have no beginning and no end!

Welcome

I’ve started this blog to share some of the fascinating stories I’ve uncovered during 25 years of researching my family history. I’m also aiming to share some tips on how I broke down “brick walls” in my genealogical research and point readers towards new sources of information for their own families.

Ancestral Places

My research interests are global – mainly in the UK but also in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. From time to time I’ll focus on some of these ancestral places.

Ancestral Faces

I’m fortunate to have a wonderful collection of old family photographs. Some were given to me by my mother but many others have been shared by generous cousins around the world. Using some of these ancestral faces, I’ll show how the clues in a family photograph can lead to new avenues of research and fascinating new information about the lives of your ancestors.

Friends and Mentors

Genealogy is the most clubbable of hobbies. I’ve made firm friendships online with family historians I may never meet in person, “pen pals” for the 21st century. I’ve also been privileged to learn from some outstanding professional genealogists. Although I’m British, and focused mainly on UK research, most of these friends and mentors have been Americans and Canadians. To all of you – and you know who you are – this blog is dedicated.