Collins Tracing Your Family History

PROSE ACCOUNT

THE LIFE OF JOHN FAIRFAX

JOHN FAIRFAX was born in 1710, four years before the death of Queen Anne ushered in the reign of George I and the start of the Hanoverian period. Growing up in rural Suffolk, he was variously described as a grocer and draper in the village of Coddenham, indicating either an enterprising mind or (less likely in view of the relative prosperity of his children) an inability to find the right niche in life. He married Mary Hayward on 16 September 1735 at Framlingham, a market town some ten miles from Coddenham, and, indeed, going to market there may have been how he met her. He wrote his will in 1751, making her and her brother John his executors, and it was proved, indicating he had died by then, in 1758, two years before the death of King George II.

John’s children included Frances, Mary, two Johns and Catherine, of whom Frances and the first John died young. To his surviving son JOHN FAIRFAX he left his watch ‘that was my cousin Smith’s’ and £63 to apprentice him ‘to some proper business at a fit age’. This younger John married Penelope Wright at St James’s, Bury St Edmund’s, on 5 May 1770 and obviously benefited from his apprenticeship, as he became a freeman of Bury St Edmunds in 1802. He died in a fit on 12 February 1805 while visiting his nephew, the artist Perry Nursey, at Little Bealings. He had two children, Penelope and Catherine.

John senior’s daughter Catherine, born 7 September 1742, received a bequest of land from her father’s cousin Catherine Fairfax in 1750 and, perhaps as a result of this, made a good marriage to the local surgeon, John Nursey of Coddenham. They married there by licence on 4 April 1764. She was mother of the artist Perry Nursey (baptised on 25 June 1771 at Stonham Aspall), at whose house her brother died in 1805.

FAMILY TREE

CHAPTER THREE ANCESTRAL PICTURES

Most of this book is about finding records of ancestors. Pictures can be records, too; even a photographer’s address on the back of an old snap could provide a clue as to where the depicted ancestor came from. But they are also valuable in their own right as a fantastic way of bringing your family history to life.

My cousin Ernest Rietschel of Dresden, a renowned German Sculptor, who was born in Pulsnitz in 1804 and died in Dresden in 1861.

Before the invention of photography in the 19th century, some of our ancestors were depicted in paintings, sketches, silhouettes and even busts and sculptures. From grand Van Dycks to amateur scribbles, such pictures are always worth seeking out, for, especially in family history, a picture really can be worth a thousand words.

WHERE TO SEARCH
PAINTERS AND PAINTINGS

For painters and paintings, look to M. Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers (London, 1903–4) and F. Spalding’s 20th-century Painters and Sculptors (Antique Collectors Club, 1991).

The best places to make searches are in London at Westminster Central Reference Library, the National Portrait Gallery (which has a database of over 500,000 portraits and engravings), and the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Of course, many ‘painters’ in the past were no more than jobbing artisans and many, such as engravers, herald painters and so on, appear in routine apprenticeship records. A detailed article on sources for artists and their subjects is in Family History Monthly, March 2003.

QUICK REFERENCE

WESTMINSTER CENTRAL REFERENCE LIBRARY

www.westminster.gov.uk/services/libraries/findalibrary/westref/

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

www.npg.org.uk/search

NATIONAL ART LIBRARY

www.vam.ac.uk/page/n/national-art-library

Gainsborough’s famous family portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews, c.1748–9.

PHOTOGRAPHERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

Photography began in earnest in the 1850s and portrait photographs of people who became our ancestors took off in the 1870s. Collections of photographs are at county record offices, libraries and elsewhere, often enabling you to see what places where your ancestors lived looked like and, if you are very lucky, you might even find a picture of your ancestor.

WHERE TO SEARCH
PHOTOGRAPHERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

The largest collection in Europe is the Hulton Getty Collection with a staggering 12 million pictures. The National Monuments Record Centre has 6.5 million pictures, mostly of buildings around the time of the Second World War, indexed by parish.

There are many commercial outlets for old photographs and reprints from old negatives, such as the Francis Frith Collection. There will often be a book of old photographs of the places where your ancestors lived.

There are also several excellent guides to dating old pictures, including R. Pol’s Dating Old Photographs (FFHS, 1998). Many other sources for pictures are listed in J. Foster and J. Sheppard’s British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2002). Another guide to collections is R. Eakins’ Picture Sources UK (Macdonald, 1985).

QUICK REFERENCE

HULTON GETTY COLLECTION

www.hultongetty.com

NATIONAL MONUMENTS RECORD CENTRE

www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/national-monuments-record-centre

FRANCIS FRITH COLLECTION

www.francisfrith.co.uk

CHAPTER FOUR BEFORE YOU BEGIN

Before starting with the main sources for tracing ancestry it is important to understand a little about how and where records are kept, starting with the main archives, and the different ways of gaining access to them. Reading this chapter now may save you a great deal of head-scratching and wasted time later on.

ARCHIVES

There are many organisations that hold archives of records. Be aware that most exist to preserve records, and not primarily to let you finger them. Most of the help you will receive from such organisations will be provided out of kindness, not obligation. Courtesy and thanks never go amiss, whoever you are dealing with.

If you are thinking of visiting an archive to undertake some research, always make sure it will be open, find out if you need to book and also do your best to establish that the records you want to see are actually there. Remember that sometimes records are temporarily removed from their permanent homes for restoration, rebinding and other reasons. Most are free but require a reader’s ticket, so if you do not have one, take some identification, preferably a passport.

USING THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES

GETTING HOLD of material from TNA couldn’t be easier:

You can establish what documents you want to see on www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue and pre-order them so they will be ready when you arrive.

You can also have photocopies made on the spot or take a digital camera with you and photograph the records you want while you are there.

Finally, you can also order documents once you are there for delivery to your home address.

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (TNA)

This was formed in 2003 through a merger of the Public Record Office and the Historic Manuscripts Commission (HMC). TNA is the principal repository for British national records, which are referred to constantly in this book. Among those records that are used the most by family historians are censuses and Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills and records relating to soldiers and sailors.

The main task of the HMC, also called the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, is to catalogue collections of records outside TNA. Its published reports cover a vast array of manuscripts in public and private hands, from the House of Lords to Longleat, and including businesses, solicitors’ papers, county record offices and so on.

The indexes to the printed reports can make surprising and rewarding ‘lucky dip’ searches, and the HMC’s on-going work is indexed centrally in the National Register of Archives, accessible via TNA’s website. This includes a search facility for those personal names and topics that have been indexed within the records and leads direct to contact details for the relevant archive.

TNA’s website provides a great deal of information about how to get to and use the archives and its records, and also enables you to download any of its many very informative information leaflets which will tell you more about many of the most commonly used records. Look at the website before you go to TNA, not least because you can pre-order the documents and have them ready and waiting for you when you walk in. The website also contains some very useful databases, particularly the main catalogue, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue, which you can use as a short cut for specific searches or as a general trawl for references to the names that interest you. You are highly likely to find them cropping up in categories of documents you never expected, or even categories of documents you had never heard of before. Stella Colwell’s The National Archives, (TNA, 2006) is geared specifically to genealogists.

TNA also maintains Access to Archives, an online catalogue to material held in many British archives, including the county record offices. Once you have found material that interests you it also provides links to the Archon Directory www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon, to give you full contact details for the archive concerned.

In the old days censuses were kept at Portugal Street, and General Registration records of birth, marriage and death were kept at Somerset House, then St Catherine’s House, and then the Family Records Centre. Now all are on file/fiche at TNA, and are increasingly available online.

OTHER ARCHIVES

Wales: Wales was officially subsumed by England in 1536, but it has its own archives in the National Library of Wales.

Scotland: Scotland’s National Archives of Scotland (NAS), are now part of the new ScotlandsPeople Centre. The catalogues of this and most other Scottish archives are available at www.scan.org.uk.

Ireland: Both Eire and Northern Ireland have central archives, the National Archives of Ireland and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). (Contact details for these addresses in Ireland are given in the Quick Reference panel below.)

COUNTY RECORD OFFICES

Unlike TNA, county record offices are a relatively new innovation, starting from the archiving work of George Herbert Fowler in 1913.

The county record offices grew out of the old diocesan record offices and their main achievement was bringing together many of each county’s public records under one roof, and it was this that helped fuel the first boom in family history research in the 1970s. Most county record office catalogues are now accessible through Access to Archives. Offline, an excellent guide to the county record offices is J. Gibson and P. Peskett’s Record Offices: How to find them (FFHS, 1996).

OTHER ARCHIVES

The best guide to specialist archives is J. Foster and J. Sheppard’s British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2002). One page alone gives details of the Carpenters’ Company archives in the City of London, which date from the Middle Ages; the Carlton Club, with registers of members from 1832; and Camden Local Studies Centre, whose holdings include records of the Manor of Hampstead 1742–1843 and the papers of George Bernard Shaw.

MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES

Both are excellent for background information on what places were like when your ancestors lived there, but they can also hold extraordinary collections that may include information on your families. Foremost is the British Library, whose website includes its catalogue to manuscripts and printed books, enabling you to search for what you want and order it before you go.

Local museums and libraries, especially local studies libraries, hold photographic collections for the locality, and the librarians themselves are often very knowledgeable about the area, electoral registers, local maps, and so on.

MORMON WEBSITE AND FAMILY HISTORY CENTRES

With its world HQ at the Family History Library, the Mormon church, officially the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, maintains about 100 Mormon Family History Centres around the UK, freely open to the public and containing many useful genealogical resources. The church’s interest in family history is religious – its aim ultimately is to identify as many people as possible, living and dead, in the context of their family relationships. To this end, they have amassed a vast collection of microfilms of original records from all over the world, including many British archives and many records described in this book. Any of these can be ordered to your local centre. The timorous should be reassured that visitors are entirely safe from any attempt to convert them – far from it: Mormons have made an immense contribution to this field, accessed for free. The Mormons’ free website, www.familysearch.org, is described in detail here. Another Salt Lake-based organisation, MyFamily.Com, which owns Ancestry.Com, has a pay-to-view website (www.ancestry.com), which contains a great and growing number of records, especially drawn from censuses.

QUICK REFERENCE

HISTORIC MANUSCRIPTS COMMISSION (HMC)

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector/hmc.htm

NATIONAL ARCHIVES (TNA)

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

NATIONAL REGISTER OF ARCHIVES

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra

ACCESS TO ARCHIVES

www.A2A.org.uk

ARCHON DIRECTORY

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon

GENERAL REGISTER OFFICE (GRO)

www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF WALES

(LLYFRGELL GENEDLAETHOL CYMRU)

www.llgc.org.uk

NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF SCOTLAND (NAS)

www.nas.gov.uk/

NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF IRELAND

www.nationalarchives.ie

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE OF NORTHERN IRELAND (PRONI)

http://www.proni.gov.uk/

BRITISH LIBRARY

http://blpc.bl.uk

MORMON FAMILY HISTORY CENTRES

www.familysearch.org

OTHER WEBSITES
SCOTLANDSPEOPLE

Scotland’s Old Parochial Registers, censuses, testaments (wills) and much of its General Registration is online at a pay-to-view site.

Scotland’s very own research website home page.

GENES REUNITED

There are a number of websites that aim to link up family trees, but the most exciting is www.genesreunited.co.uk. The site allows you to enter details of your family (or upload a family tree already typed in ‘Gedcom’ format), building an online family tree, which is easily altered and amended.

A number of search tools then enable you to find out if surnames on your tree appear on other trees on the site. In return for a £9.50 a year membership fee, you can email the contributors of other possibly relevant names and work out if you do indeed have ancestors in common, and if so create a link between the two trees. Those with common surnames will be relieved to know that the searches can be honed, by personal name, year of birth and by place of birth.

The site was launched in November 2002 and at the time of writing has 8 million members worldwide and over 111 million names. It is therefore becoming a formidable research tool, which can already be used to localise where people with particular surnames were born and communicate with people actively researching them. The site is one of several that provides access to many important sets of data, particularly the quarterly indexes to General Registration indexes and 1841–1901 census returns.

OTHER GENERAL WEBSITES

The internet, as everyone knows, contains a great many websites of use to genealogists. There is no official central portal for these, but there is an unofficial one, www.cyndislist.com, which has assumed this role and contains categorised links to pretty much everything that’s out there.

A British version of this is www.genuki.org.uk, containing links to many useful websites for the whole British Isles. Genuki also hosts a plethora of newsgroups and mailing lists, searchable under areas and topics, that you can join. An overview of other important websites is given here.

SOCIETIES

Many countries have societies formed by genealogists to help each other. The main one in Britain is the Society of Genealogists (SoG). Its library is the finest of its kind, including the Great Card Index (3.5 million slips from a vast array of sources) and a huge collection of pedigrees submitted by members, varying enormously in quality but including many of very high standard. The contents of its library together with many searchable databases are on its website. It publishes the Genealogists’ Magazine.

A curiosity in English genealogy is the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies (IHGS). It organises a graded series of courses and qualifications in genealogy. It also has a library that is open to the public for a fee and produces a journal, Family History.

Most counties (sometimes even parts of counties) and some specialist areas such as Catholic and Anglo-German have family history societies. They come under the umbrella of the Federation of Family History Societies (FFHS). Membership includes many Commonwealth and United States societies too, and it publishes Family History News and Digest biannually, summarising the contents of the different journals. Family History Societies have membership worldwide and their journals include articles on relevant sources and case studies, lists of members’ interests and ancestral names. Many also have their own libraries and organise projects to index records such as gravestones and censuses. It is often a good idea to join your nearest Family History Society even if you do not have any local ancestors, because many of the talks will be of more general application, and many organise reciprocal research via other societies.

ONE-NAME SOCIETIES

THESE SOCIETIES concern those interested in specific names, such as the Fairfax Society. Many are members of the FFHS and Guild of One-Name Studies (‘GOONS’!). Many produce journals or newsletters, and besides collecting and tracing individual family trees for a name, many systematically extract all references to the name from categories of records such as General Registration indexes, so are well worth consulting.

Large libraries, such as the SoG, have collections of journals from societies outside Britain. The FFHS and www.cyndislist.com can put you in touch with relevant societies abroad.

QUICK REFERENCE

SOCIETY OF GENEALOGISTS (SoG)

www.sog.org.uk

INSTITUTE OF HERALDIC AND GENEALOGICAL STUDIES (IHGS)

www.ihgs.ac.uk

FEDERATION OF FAMILY HISTORY SOCIETIES (FFHS)

www.ffhs.org.uk

GUILD OF ONE-NAME STUDIES (GOONS)

www.one-name.org