Berwick-upon-Tweed Archive Study Day

For all you Borders based folk (and beyond!)...

A free Archive Study Day is being organised by Berwick-upon-Tweed Record Office on Sat 9 Oct 10-4 at The Parish Centre, The Parade, Berwick. It will include using photographs, documents and newspapers for research. Deciphering old handwriting will also feature. There are limited places available and although the closing date is not until 30 Sept it’s advisable to book early as places will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.

There is no charge for this day which includes lunch as the event is being sponsored by The Co-operative Membership. It is one of a series of events for the year-long celebration of the 30th anniversary of Berwick Record Office.

Apply by email to lbankier@woodhorn.org.uk or Tel: 01289 301865

(With thanks to Philippa McCray of the Federation of Family History Societies and to Valerie Glass, Friends of Berwick and District Museum and Archives)

Chris

www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
Professional genealogical problem solving and research
http://twitter.com/ChrisMPaton
Researching Scottish Family History (New book)

Access the internet at the ScotlandsPeople Centre

One of the greatest developments at the ScotlandsPeople Centre is the ability to access the internet from the system's latest computer system. Last week after the Who Do You Think You Are episode featuring Monty Don, I blogged that the way that the centre was represented by the BBC was misleading. The programme apparently showed the celebrity having obtained an English GRO certificate from there, and also looking at the English and Channel Islands censuses. The first part is of course nonsense, English GRO certificates come from the English GRO or from local superintendent registrars' offices in England, but it is possible to access the English census using sites such as FreeCEN, Ancestry and FindmyPast at the centre. In fact there are many websites that the centre will allow access to, but as I mentioned in my post, the caveat is that with pay-to-use sites, you need to have your own personal subscription.

I am grateful to the centre for now for sending out the following screengrabs to show how access to these sites is obtained.

1) Click on "About Our Records" tab at the top of the home page.




2) A completely new screen will pop up - on this, now click on the "Research" tab.






3) Next, click on the left hand menu margin on the option that states "Useful websites"





4) A submenu will appear in that margin with various categories of website that can now be accessed.



Incidentally, if you know the site URL that you wish to access, you can just type it straight into the browser once the new screen pops up.


Many who are used to the old DIGROS system, currently still available for access in the Dundas Room, will still argue that this older system is much better than the new ScotlandsPeople System, making the point about certain functions that could be carried out on DIGROS that the new system did not replicate when it first launched e.g. the ability to step through a year at a time on the return of search results. The difference between DIGROS in the old GROS centre however, and the new system in the ScotlandsPeople Centre, is that the new set up is part of a family history centre, not a vital records centre, and family history is much more than accessing just the BMD records. The criticism that certain functions were not present on the news system is fast becoming obsolete as such functions continue to be introduced to the new set up, and any errors picked up on and addressed.

The ability to access external; websites at the centre can make a heck of a difference in your research. The following is an example from my book Researching Scottish Family History on how this might make a difference if you are doing research into a military ancestor:

"In addition, the centre holds many other useful sources, and its computers can also be used to access a collection of externally based website resources during your research. A useful example would be if you were to discover a soldier in your family who died fighting during the First World War. A death certificate will provide the soldier’s basic details such as name, service number, regiment and date and place of death. However, Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk) might provide you with his full service record if it has survived, as well as a medal index card, the NAS catalogue will allow you to look for a will which may have been registered whilst he was on active service, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website (www.cwgc.org.uk) can help to identify where he was buried, and other sites such as FindmyPast (www.findmypast.co.uk) may provide access to an entry within the Soldiers Who Died in the Great War collection, which might include additional information such as a birthplace."

The ability to use more than just the centre's own resources online whilst seated at your terminal could make your day's research considerably more fruitful, so if you have yet to look to see what can be accessed, it is well worth exploring on your next trip there.

Chris

www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
Professional genealogical problem solving and research
http://twitter.com/ChrisMPaton
Researching Scottish Family History (New book)

Wills and valuation rolls at NAS

I was at the National Archives of Scotland yesterday (Thurs), for the first time in a couple of months (it's been a busy summer!), doing some work for a client, and have a few things to report. The first is that I finally had to update my reader's ticket, my previous non-photographic one having expired. It didn't help when I arrived at Glasgow Central this morning to find all four passport photo machines were broken - thankfully standards were just a little higher at Queen Street Station! You'll need two passport photos and a form of photo ID with an address if you need to renew. You'll get a temporary pass at the old Sasine Office entrance to the rear, and then will need to obtain the actual reader's ticket upstair in the NAS, it only takes a few minutes.

The next thing to mention is that, as Kirsty Wilkinson kindly stated on a comment on another post yesterday, the NAS held wills have now been digitised up to 1925 and can be accessed on the Virtual Volumes computers. That's the good news, the bad is that they have not been indexed yet, so you need to use the Calendars of Confirmations and Inventories to get the date of confirmation (i.e. the Scottish equivalent of 'probate'), and then browse the relevant volume. I did not get a chance to test it properly, but one of the staff explained it to me, and will do to you also if you ask nicely! lol :)

Secondly, there is a glitch on Virtual Volumes which I thought had been there before, but which I was told only kicked in about a week ago. I was doing a bit of research on the post-1855 Valuation Rolls - once I did a name search and found a result, I clicked on the accession number returned, which took me through to the record on Virtual Volumes. However, when I clicked next or previous page, the site crashed. The same also happened on the digitised wills.

The solution is to get your search result, then to copy the accession number, open up Virtual Volumes from the main menu, and paste the number in. Here's an example.

Search for William Henderson on Valuation Rolls:

Type in his name, his place of abode (Forgandenny) and year (in this case 1865-66)

Details returned - William Henderson, Farm of Mount Stewart and clickable link to record at VR113/11/51

Don't click on the link. Instead copy the number VR113/11 (without the last part) and open Virtual Volumes from the main menu - paste it into the first search field as it opens, and then open up the programme properly when prompted. Once in, type the last part of the number, in this case 51, into the page number box. Click to return it and the page will reload. You will now be able to go up or down a page at a time without it crashing.

This probably sounds like Double Dutch, but trust me, if you want to use Virtual Volumes to look at kirk session material, wills or valuation rolls, print this off and take it with you!

Also, another tip. The Valuation Rolls are indexed for every tenth year from 1855-56, 1865-66 etc. So how do you check the in between years? Simple, change the accession number when you go to input it. If the number for a roll from 1885-86 is VR113/30/84, change the middle number if you want the previous year to 29, i.e. VR113/29/84. This will take you to the same page number the year before i.e. 1884-85- though you may find that your property is on the page before or after. But it will get you in the right ball park.

Obviously once it is on ScotlandsPeople everyone will have a chance to play with it! Until then, the NAS is the only place to get digitised copies, so you'll need to know how to work your way around Virtual Volumes.

If I haven't confused the pants off you, I hope that helps! :)

PS: Discovered on Tuesday that my book's sold out again in the ScotlandsPeople Centre - awfully flattering! lol :)

Chris

www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
Professional genealogical problem solving and research
http://twitter.com/ChrisMPaton
Researching Scottish Family History (New book)

National Strategy for Business Archives

A new 5 year long National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland is to be officially launched in the Autumn, but can be read online now at the Business Archives Scotland blog at http://businessarchivesscotland.blogspot.com/2010/08/strategy-is-now-available.html - it's in downloadable PDF format, and 22 pages long.

Any comments on the strategy should be sent to kiara.king@glasgow.ac.uk or bacs@archives.gla.ac.uk.

(With thanks to Kiara King)

Chris

www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
Professional genealogical problem solving and research
http://twitter.com/ChrisMPaton
Researching Scottish Family History (New book)

More on Ancestry's new probate records

Ancestry has a new front page for the probate records collection for England and Wales announced on this blog yesterday, located at www.ancestry.co.uk/probate.

It also includes a short UK produced video with Dan Jones from the company and gives a bit of a behind the scenes as to how they were scanned, but mainly shows what they can be used for. (Pah - who needs Hollywood!)

Incidentally, equivalent probate calendars for Scottish records exist from 1877-1959, and can be found at the National Archives of Scotland and at various local institutions - the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, for example, has copies up to the 1930s, and if you are overseas, the FamilySearch catalogue has them listed, so they can be ordered up in microform. Further Scottish wills are currently being digitised beyond 1902 up to 1925 by the NAS/ScotlandsPeople folk and will be made available in the near future.

But do check the English calendars on Ancestry also for Scots - as Caroline Gurney pointed out in her comment on my last post, there are some 113,000 Scots mentioned including instances where confirmation was granted in Scotland and also recorded by the English court. Irish entries will also be there (and I've just heard from Bob Forrest over in Northern Ireland that there are some 69150 entries under Ireland, 3780 for Derry, 23,363 for Dublin etc - thanks Bob).

So that's English and Welsh records now online for the 20th century, and Scotland soon to add more. (Ahem, Ireland, ahem!) Terrible cough I'm developing...! :)




Chris

www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
Professional genealogical problem solving and research
http://twitter.com/ChrisMPaton
Researching Scottish Family History (New book)

Modern English & Welsh wills calendars now online

A MAJOR release from Ancestry today - the probate calendars to English and Welsh wills from 1861-1941.

Here's the blurb from the Ancestry site:

This collection contains summaries of the vast majority of probate cases in England and Wales between 1861 and 1941. It effectively forms an index to wills and probate records for this period.

The records were created by the Probate Registry, which took control of proving wills and administrations in 1858. Before this, four different types of ecclesiastical (church) courts dealt with these cases. A Principal Probate Registry was established in London in January 1858, and several district probate registries were created around the country. From then on, the registries oversaw all grants of probate and letters of administration. This collection is the Calendar of these grants.

The Calendar is separated into a different volume for each year. The entries in each volume are then alphabetised by surname. Information varies across different entries, but each typically includes:

•Probate date
•Full name of the deceased
•Death date
•Death place
•Registry where issued

Missing volumes:

Our collection covers 80 years from 1861 to 1941. We currently do not have the books for the years 1858-1860 and there are some gaps for the years 1863, 1868, 1873, 1876, 1877, 1883, 1888, 1899-1903 and 1910-1911. However, we hope to add records for these years as soon as possible.

Ordering wills:

Unfortunately it is not currently possible to order a copy of the will from us. If you wish to order a copy of a will or grant mentioned in this collection, you can do so for a fee from the Principal Probate Registry at First Avenue House or any district probate registry. You’ll need to provide the full name of the deceased, the date of the grant and the registry where it was issued.

For more information, please visit the Probate Registry’s website.

I must admit to being surprised to see this. I had a discussion with one of the probate people at the last WDYTYA Live in London, and I got the impression it was a non-starter from their POV. Nevertheless, this is a seriously useful dataset, albeit currently incomplete, but one which will really add meat to the bones of your southern research.

Nice one, Ancestry!

Chris

www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
Professional genealogical problem solving and research
http://twitter.com/ChrisMPaton
Researching Scottish Family History (New book)

Monty Don and ScotlandsPeople (WDYTYA)

I enjoyed the Monty Don edition of WDYTYA last night, though it was quite slow in parts. However, having just returned from the ScotlandsPeople Centre today, I've already heard people there ask how they can access the English censuses whilst there?!

In fact, you can look at them - each terminal of the new ScotlandsPeople computer system allows access to sites such as FindmyPast, Ancestry etc. However - there's a BUT! - you need to have your own subscription to the sites. So it can be done, but it is not included in your £10 subscription, only the access to the interent is (and that is also restricted only to certain genealogy sites).

The really big question mark though, is how did they get an English birth certificate?! lol Just to clarify - they come from England! You can however, view the indexes for English and Welsh records on microfilm, and there is a database of Northern Irish births from 1922 to the 1990s in the Dundas Room also.

In television terms, it's known as a fudge...! :)

Chris

www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
Professional genealogical problem solving and research
http://twitter.com/ChrisMPaton
Researching Scottish Family History (New book)

There's been a murrrderrr...!!!!

I recently discovered, thanks to a Freedom of Information request by the BBC, that the murder of my 3 x great grandmother Janet Rogers, nee Henderson, at her brother's farm in 1866 is in fact the UK's longest unsolved murder case by the police. It was all news to me, despite having spent the last eight years researching it! Janet was murdered at Mount Stewart farm by the Perthshire village of Forgandenny - the murder would later drive her brother, the farm owner, completely insane. The story was featured a couple of years ago on the Radio Scotland "Digging Up Your Roots" series.

The BBC has now done an update on the original story, with an interview featuring yours truly! The story has gone online today at the BBC News Magazine pages at www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10885914.

Enjoy...!

Chris

www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
Professional genealogical problem solving and research
http://twitter.com/ChrisMPaton
Researching Scottish Family History (New book)

Response on birth/baptism issue on IFHF site

I mentioned on July 30th that I had made a purchase on the new Roots Ireland website and had been horrified to discover that civil birth records transcriptions for Belfast were being issued from the site with only a baptism date and not a birth date, despite the fact that both had been issued on the website of the Ulster Historical Foundation, which had supplied the records to the IFHF. Following an irritating automatic response telling me that the site was truly wonderful, I queried the point again, and this morning received a welcome response from a human being!

Dear Chris

Thanks for your email and sorry for the auto response.

The vast majority of the records we have only have one valid date - usually the date of birth, but some also have the date of baptism, and in some cases only the date of baptism is recorded.

Therefore we display one date as the date of Baptism/Birth and in most cases this is the date of birth. If both dates do exist the software will display the birth date. However you have uncovered a bug in this for the UHF records which had its dates formatted differently such that the date of baptism was being displayed in preference to the date of birth.

This has now been corrected, and if you re-view your purchases, it should show the correct date of birth.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused and please let me know if you have any further questions.

Regards

RootsIreland.ie


I am very grateful to the IFHF for responding. The site is now a wonderful and much superior resource compared to its previous incarnation, and I no longer have a problem recommending it, but I do find it a pity still that if both dates are available in a record, only one is being issued online. Thankfully the birth date is now the default, and not the baptismal date, which to me is genealogically more important, though both of course tell their own story. I'm just not sure why there would be a problem giving both - the UHF does, after all. I asked if in due course this might be something that the IFHF can have another look at, and received the response "We endeavour to the make the site as user friendly as possible, and combining the data from so many sources has been challenging. We will look into displaying both date of birth and date of christening when available." Which is fair enough.

I did in fact make another query to IFHF about a separate issue - and on that one I was wrong. I had made another purchase on birth/baptism records in south Kilkenny for the kids of another couple, and had received eight responses. The following day I did the same search, and discovered ten returns, but was told I had only paid for eight, and would need to pay for the additional two. I thought the searches were the same - but in fact they were not.

In the first search I had placed the child's surname and both forename and surname of the each parent as the search parameters, and received eight hits. However, I had also narrowed it down geographically to Carrick-on-Suir (CP), the setting for the town's civil records database. On the following day, I repeated the search, but instead of selecting Carrick-on-Suir (CP), I left it on all county basis, and found ten responses. So why the other two? Very simple - they were held on a different database, Carrick-on-Suir (RC), the Roman Catholic baptisms for the parish, hence why I was asked for another 8 Euros. In fact, I completely agree with that approach, as the flexibility to discern between civil and religious parish records is useful to have. If they were combined, you might find sixteen records returned on a search, and then discover eight of those are civil records and the other eight the baptism records - and if you are budget conscious, you may be happy to settle for just one set. So fair play to the IFHF for setting me right on that one - and it is a useful lesson that you should perform the searches on different criteria before selecting which you wish to pay for.

So I'm a happy bunny once again, and only too happy to recommend the site at www.rootsireland.ie!

UPDATE: the site has now added Cork, Mayo and Donegal to its Advanced Search capability.

Chris

www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
Professional genealogical problem solving and research
http://twitter.com/ChrisMPaton
Researching Scottish Family History (New book)

TNA Rediscovers the Record

The National Archives' David Thomas, Director of Technology and Chief Information Officer, has blogged about some significant developments to be hitting the TNA website soon through the Rediscovering the Record project - most notably a new platform for the National Archives online catalogue, which has jumped from 5 million searchable terms in 1998 to over 11 million today. The new version will provide the ability for users to add to add to the catalogue entries themselves (I assume on a Wiki based system such as the Your Archives project?), and there will also be new smartphone apps developed.

The post is well worth reading at http://ht.ly/2m29l, and there is more to come, so do bookmark the site!

Chris

www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
Professional genealogical problem solving and research
http://twitter.com/ChrisMPaton
Researching Scottish Family History (New book)