Parishmouse: Old books, parish registers & photos

Parishmouse is a blog which "contains free transcriptions of historical books and parish registers for England and Wales and a large collection of photos of churches and graves and illustrations from the old books".

 

 

The transcriptions cover many counties but Parishmouse is a particularly rich source of information for Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Most, but not all, of the old books seem to be directories.

I only came across Parishmouse yesterday and I've already obtained two important nuggets of information from it:

• about a Baptist minister who lived in our house in the late 18th century
• about the school in Tardebigge, Worcestershire where Frederick and Charlotte Davis taught in the 1850s

This is the kind of website where you never know what you will find until you look and the range is so wide you are almost bound to find something. There is a comprehensive list of records under Categories plus a built in Google site search. Multiple transcriptions are being added each day, so this is a site you'll want to either follow or bookmark and revisit. Do let me know if you find anything. Happy hunting!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - The Date I Was Born

Another Saturday night, another fun challenge from Randy Seaver:

1) What day of the week were you born? Tell us how you found out.

I was born on a Tuesday. My Mum told me that when I was very small. She used to quote from the old rhyme, "Tuesday's child is full of grace". Just to make sure I hadn't got it wrong, I checked my birthdate in the calendar in The Master Genealogist (TMG). It agrees that I was born on a Tuesday.

 

 

2) What has happened in recorded history on your birth date (day and month)? Tell us how you found out, and list five events.

I Googled "on this day 6 July" which produced 393 million results. Forced to choose only five events, I decided on:

• 6 July 1189: Richard I (Richard the Lionheart) became King of England, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, on the death of his father, Henry II. I saw Richard's beautifully decorated tomb when I visited the Abbey of Fontevraud in France in 2008. (Source: Wikipedia)

• July 1535: Sir Thomas More was executed for treason, having refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, acknowledging Henry VIII as Supreme Governor of the Church in England. On the scaffold he declared that he died, "The King's good servant, but God's first". (Source: Wikipedia)

• 6 July 1785: The United States Congress unanimously: "Resolved, That the money unit of the United States be one dollar.” (Source: The Freeman)

• 6 July 1942: Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in the "Secret Annexe", a sealed-off area above her father's office in an Amsterdam warehouse. The day before, Anne's older sister, Margot, had received a call-up notice to be deported to a Nazi "work camp." Anne was 13 when they went into hiding. (Source: History Channel & Wikipedia)

• 6 July 1964: The Beatles' first film, "A Hard Day's Night," premiered in London. Perhaps they chose the day because it was exactly seven years after John Lennon and Paul McCartney were first introduced to each other, on 6 July 1957. (Source: On This Day).

 

3)  What famous people have been born on your birth date?  Tell us how you found out, and list five of them.

As for (2) above, I Googled "on this day 6 July" and found:

• 6 July 1747: John Paul Jones, American naval commander. On 23 April 1778, Jones attacked the port of Whitehaven in Cumberland. Today there is a pub named after him in the town, which I visited in 2009. (Source: Wikipedia).

• 6 July 1781: Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore. I lived in Singapore from 1965 to 1968. (Source: Wikipedia).

• 6 July 1939: Jet Harris, bassist with Cliff Richard's backing group, The Shadows. As a child I had a huge crush on Jet and his quiff! (Source: Jet Harris)

• 6 July 1946: George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States - and Sylvester Stallone on the same day. (Source: Wikipedia)

• 6 July 1907: Frida Kahlo, Mexican painter. I love her naive, folk art style paintings. (Source: Frida Kahlo).

Googling for Grandma - Old News is Good News

Newspapers are my favourite sources. They put flesh on the bones of our ancestors, turning dry and dusty genealogy into living, breathing family history. They cover all aspects of society and all areas of the globe and you are as likely to find a dustman as a duke in their pages.

Newspapers find their stories wherever there is human interest. With far less access to information than today, newspapers in the past frequently copied material from each other, and this practice crossed international boundaries. So although my family history is focused on the British Isles, I have found gems of information in papers in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. In the case of newspapers, it really does pay to "search outside the box" - and this is where Google comes in.

In 2008 Google launched an initiative to digitise historic news archives and make them searchable and accessible online. Content is drawn from global media such as the BBC, Guardian, Time Magazine and the New York Times but also from hundreds of small local publications. The period covered by each news archive varies - some only cover recent years, whilst the New York Times goes all the way back to 1851 - but all this information can be accessed in one place using Google News Archive Search.

I have had particularly good results when searching for my policeman great grandfather, John McCarthy. His promotion to be head of the CID got a good deal of coverage. My favourite is this article from a Newfoundland newspaper, the Harbor Grace Standard, dated 21 August 1912. The details are delightful:

Nobody who has met John McCarthy grudges him his promotion. He is a man without enemies, unless they be some of those desperate international criminals whom he has tracked down and arrested ... this jolly looking man with something of the farmer squire about his appearance ... Tall and broad shouldered he is built on a generous frame above the average in physique. He has the twinkling blue eyes of the Irishman ... Latterly he was busy with the suffragette agitations, and such was his charm of manner and courtesy that the women agreed that it was a pleasure to be arrested by Mr McCarthy.

But I learned from another newspaper that John had been tempted to jump ship at an earlier stage in his career. The St John Sun of New Brunswick reported on 1 April 1907:

During a visit to England, King Alfonso XIII was apparently so impressed by Scotland Yard detectives that he decided to revolutionise Spanish police methods. John McCarthy was offered the job of heading the new CID in Madrid, on a salary of $5,000 a year plus expenses. According to the newspaper, he was reluctantly obliged to decline the offer because he had been specially chosen to protect King Edward VII.

Of course, these articles concern a man in a prominent position in public life but I have had equal success finding information about more obscure family members. My great grandfather's brother, Clement Lawrence Scott Davis, disappears from the English records after the 1871 census. A handwritten family tree records that he ended up in the Nokomai region of New Zealand, prospecting for gold. The Google News Archive includes material from Papers Past in New Zealand and a search on Davis and Nokomai turned up an article he had written for the Otago Witness in 1886, describing a prospecting expedition:

Shortly after writing this, Clement disappeared on another prospecting trip in the mountains. A young man in his 30s, he left no family, no photographs and few details of his life have come down to us. This lengthy newspaper article is the only link we have to the man and his personality.

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.