Reply #19: English, English, English, English!

[iverglas]

Just thought I'd start in this thread to say hello, and shock anyone who knows me from elsewhere at DU. Yes, I'm a genealogy geek.

All my grandparents immigrated to Canada from England -- two as children, two as a married couple. The families are from Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Wiltshire? via Kent, east London, south London, Cornwall, Devon ... some sedentary from the 1700s and likely long before, some apparently more peripatetic.

I have a couple of mysteries that I may never sort out. For starters, once I discovered FreeBMD and Ancestry.co.uk (don't get me started) almost two years ago, I very soon figured out that one of my gr-grfathers was not at all who we thought he was, and that, among other things, he had a sister who was an actress and married a very wealthy heir of a minor politician (whose sister married the only male heir of a family in a very wealthy branch of a Scottish clan, whose sister's daughter married a baron ...) and had three kids around 1880 ... before disappearing, after which her husband changed his surname and came up with a newer younger wife ... before he and the kids disappeared ...

Meanwhile, my great-grandfather himself was a factory worker. Talk about picking the wrong ancestors. But that mystery -- why he and his sister changed their name, who his father's family were ... I'm afraid I'm going to take the questions to my grave, just as he took the answers to his several decades ago.

And along the way, I've met a scad of long-lost distant cousins in the UK, the US and Canada, some of whom I've been able to give info I've dug out, and more of whom have provided me with reams of info, largely because they're on site in England and have been able to consult original documents, and also didn't lose the oral history / contact with other family members the way we here in Canada did after the immigration. I think my record at the moment is someone with whom I share grx8 grandparents in Leicestershire.

Anyhow. If anyone needs directions or assistance with Canadian genealogy info, I may be able to help. I can consult the non-free stuff, and also point to free resources on line (e.g. the 1901 and 1911 Canadian censuses, WWI enlistment and casualty records, BMD records for some time periods in some provinces, "Home Children" records). I'm fascinated by any genealogical mystery, and out of sheer curiosity I've solved a few for some complete strangers. A descendant of that Scottish clan branch in Australia now knows who her family was and has a whole batch of cousins, in Australia and Scotland (the present-day baron descended from my gr-grf's sister's husband's sister!), that I found for her. I also discovered that in another line she is descended from the founder of the De Havilland dynasty, in the 1100s (thanks to research that people have made available on line). And my family is still factory workers and housemaids and agricultural labourers (read: one meal away from the workhouse, where some did end up). And my branch of her illustrious family seems not to have reproduced after the 1890s. Of course, WWI and the obscene loss of young men in the war, including one of my actress's nephews, was one reason.

What I'd love is if someone could occasionally check a US census record for me. I do it by hit and miss -- guessing places and spouses and DOBs and the like -- but can't access the individual records because I refuse to pay the big whopping whole-world subscription fee. Speaking of which -- if anyone is considering paying for Ancestry, check out the Ancestry.co.uk and Ancestry.ca portals and do the currency conversion first. Sometimes the fees are lower there -- or if your family is recently from the UK, for instance, like mine, you might just want the UK databases, through .co.uk, and not all the rest.

I do pity you with the Irish search, CBH. That records fire, what a sad shame. My mysterious gr-grfather might in fact have had some connection to a prominent English family in Ireland for several generations, whose name was the one he changed his to and whom he told tales of being descended from on the wrong side of the blanket, but that info, if such there were, is probably lost to me.

One more obscure source that might help someone someday -- English soldiers in the Boer War. Kevin Asplin, a very helpful military historian, has put his whole database of the Imperial Yeomanry (and other British military info) on line:
http://hometown.aol.co.uk/KevinAsplin/home.html
-- I found my actress's son there by complete coincidence (googling for his given name and unusual alias surname -- he wasn't using that given name, but someone else on the page had it as a surname, so bob was my serendipitous uncle).

Oh yes, and for Anglo-Indian records (not defined as Anglo, but mostly Anglo): http://www.fibis.org/ -- good for some periods in the 1800s. Volunteers are wonderful people.

And free access to transcribed Channel Island censuses:
http://members.shaw.ca/Jerseymaid/

I haven't browsed the forum to see whether anybody else has mentioned some of these things, so forgive me if I'm being redundant!