Saturday, May 21, 2005

PARISH REGISTER TRANSCRIPTIONS

WEST SOMERSET
St. George's church, Bicknoller

Crowcombe church, (Holy Ghost)

Elworthy church, (St. Martin de Tours).

Monksilver church, (All Saints)

Nettlecombe church, (St. Mary's)

St. Decuman's church, (Watchet)

St. George's church, Sampford Brett

St. Mary the Virgin church, Stogumber

Priory church of St. Andrew, Stogursey

St. James's church, Taunton


Friday, May 20, 2005

Google Search: link:www.arkivalieronline.dk/

Google Search: link:www.arkivalieronline.dk/ this is a who knows who of Danish genealogy

The Rosetta Project: View Swadesh Lists

The Rosetta Project: View Swadesh List

Danish -- Ethnologue code: DNS

new to me

Although the use of the Swadesh list for absolute dating remains controversial, it has gained popularity in the field of translation in defining core concepts that are universal to all human languages

Rasmus Rask historical-linguistics and
historical-mythologies

FIRST NAME SEARCHES

Don't underestimate the value of doing a first-name-only search on
Ancestry.com for a family member, even if it is a common name like
Elizabeth.

I was unable to find my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Stiltz, in
the 1880 New Jersey census for Burlington County, even after doing a
Soundex search. That is, until I put in her first name, the name of
the county, and the town in which she likely lived in the 1880
census. Up came a long list of people named Elizabeth in the town
with their surnames in alphabetical order. I clicked on the page of
hits with surnames beginning with "S" and came up with the right
Elizabeth Stiltz. She was incorrectly indexed as Shltz.

If I don't know the town where a person likely lived, I use the birth
year for the person, allowing for a couple of years leeway on either
side of the year as permitted in the search process--along with the
person's first name, the name of the state, and the name of the
county. Using this method of listing the birth year without a town
produces an alphabetical listing of the towns in the county
containing individuals with that particular first name which may,
admittedly, involve a more intensive time search, but one which has
been well worth it in my experience.

This method has helped me break through quite a number of brick walls
involving my census research.

Carl Roache

Ancestry.com - What You Can Learn from Deed Books

Thursday, May 19, 2005

LAPHAM was 885 and now 1000

RootsWeb's WorldConnect Project: LAPHAM one-name study

find of the day one HANAH LAPHAM brothel keeper age 41 born Ireland in Cardiff Gaol in 1871

Hanah Lapham 1830 Waterford, Ireland Prisoner Cardiff St John Glamorgan

the church's dog-whippers

: " 'Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms
When they translated David's Psalms,
To make the heart more glad;
But had it been poor David's fate
To hear thee sing and them translate,
By Jove, 'twould have drove him mad.'"

Williton church ... among the church's dog-whippers was a
certain Robert LAPHAM 1619-1648
which lead me to find out what that was !

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

How accurate are ages on census forms?

from Google Groups : soc.genealogy.britain

Hi,


I'm new at researching family history and I'm afraid I may include
people in the family tree that don't belong but I've found a family
that have the right given names, surname and live in the right area
but two out of three are at least a year out with their ages. Even
allowing for the censuses being taken at slightly different times of
the year. There are no other candidates that come close to fitting the
circumstances. Did the Victorians often miscalculate their ages?


Al


and an answer by Roy at his very best !

You exhibit a common error amongst newcomers to genealogy in allowing
yourself to think in a modern, present-day mindset! One of the very
first things you must learn in family history is that our ancestors
simply did not think or act in the same way as we do today, therefore
you have to try and forget how you see things and try to project
yourself back into their time and into their minds.

The plain fact is that things we tend to regard as sacrosanct, like
the correct spelling of our names and getting our ages right, simply
weren't so important to them. They had fewer dealings with authority
and officialdom than we do, rarely sent or received letters and
didn't have to carry around the copious bits of paper etc for
identification that we do. Their dealings with authority, when they
had to have them, were frequently tinged with suspicion and doubt,
since they took the view that if the government was interfering in
their lives, then it was probably up to no good.


There are numerous reasons why not just ages but also places of birth
differ from one census to another and are frequently at variance with
ages on birth and marriage certificates etc. In the case of those
born before civil registration came in in 1837 they may well
genuinely not have known precisely how old they were or where they
were born, since there was no piece of paper to tell them, only what
they might have been told by parents or grandparents and this could
easily be in error. Another reason was that people quite often lied
about their ages, perhaps because they had lied to a spouse when
marrying and had to keep up the lie. They also lied about their jobs
and means in order to advance their social status.


You will find as you gain more experience that varying ages in census
returns are the norm - a year or two is nothing at all unusual, often
it is quite dramatically more. People's given birthplaces can also
alter bewilderingly as well. And of course, enumerators made errors,
too! They were only human and if they had difficulty in reading what
someone had written on a schedule they wrote into their book what
they thought it was, or if they couldn't understand someone's accent
in describing their name or birth place, and the person giving the
information was illiterate, they wrote down what they thought they
heard.


As I said, you must try and suspend all ideas of looking at your
ancestors with a modern set of values. Try and see things as THEY saw
them, otherwise you will flounder around in the dark.


Roy Stockdill
Web page of the Guild of One-Name Studies
Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History


"Familiarity breeds contempt - and children."


Mark Twain


Tuesday, May 17, 2005

New Zealand - Indexes for One-Name Studies

New Zealand - Indexes for One-Name Studies

Census
All were routinely destroyed for privacy until 1966 - so none are available.

The only advantage New Zealand has for genealogists is that it was the first
country in the world to allow women to vote, thus the electoral rolls from
1893 contain women's names.

LAPHAM one-name study

RootsWeb's WorldConnect Project
well I took the plunge and uploaded the work in progress

the WMUB Help Desk Blog

the WMUB Help Desk Blog: "ftosub.exe Information. This was a file a listener's spyware catcher had flagged. It seems to be a file needed by a genealogy program."

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Jeff Knaggs - Genealogy - 1901 Institutions

Jeff Knaggs - Genealogy - 1901 Institutions

Jeff Knaggs Autobiography - the 40s

My first memory is of the street party to celebrate the end of the war (I suppose it must have been VE day). My mum says that I couldn't possibly remember it as I was too young, but I distinctly remember being sat in a high-chair next to a piano

(the art of poking a fire will soon be lost to humanity),

Our West Country Family

Jim and Gina's Family'
my first blog this using the button in the Mozilla Firefox Googlebar mozdev.org - googlebar: index

The Googlebar project was initially created to address the widespread desire in the mozilla community for the Google toolbar to support the Netscape 7, Mozilla, and Firefox web browsers. In the past, the Google toolbar was only available for IE on windows. While we are in no way affiliated with Google inc, our current release emulates all of the basic search functionality of the toolbar, allowing users to easily access almost all of Google's specialty searches (some of which are not yet supported by the original Google toolbar!) from one convenient toolbar