Surnames seem like something that have always been with us. So it can be surprising that the world’s population was once so small that first names were generally all that we needed. Everyone knew who Patty was and there was no need for formality. Surnames in Scotland evolved over time …
TheGenealogist.co.uk is a popular UK website and one that I haven’t used a lot. But it is always up in the top websites and has many people that love it. The website started through transcribing British census records starting with the 1891 census but has built up a collection of …
If you are looking for your British ancestors then you want to look for British newspapers online or specifically British Newspaper Archive website. Newspapers are the vibrant heart of what was going on at the time and give so many details when researching your family history. (In Australia, we turn to …
This week it’s like getting blood from a stone with South Australian births, death and marriages. (When only a few weeks ago, I did an article on Tasmania and wrote about the ease of finding records for family historians.) It’s confusing, it’s frustrating and it is painstaking work. A lot …
The Old Bailey online website is a great free website that holds the court proceedings of London’s central criminal courts from 1674 to 1913. Why do you want to use this website? Well, when convicts were sent to Australia, they had to go through the courts to get sentenced. On …
I have been amazed at the ease of my search for any Tasmanian records through their Names Index. At first, I thought I was being fooled by slick web pages and wondrous search filters. But I have kept on digging and have kept coming up happy. Obviously any digitalisation of …
On the front page of a genealogy is the surname of a male. The male line is followed through countless generations and the females related drop off into non existence. This is the tradition in genealogy and family history but in the future it may not be the way it’s …
How to order a British birth, death or marriage certificate may be a very basic task for a seasoned genealogist, but I think that if you are a beginner it’s a step that is all part of the learning process. It can seem very complicated when doing this for the …
It seems impossible to believe that there would be any roles that women wouldn’t be capable of. But before the Second World War, it was seen as an impossibility of a woman taking a man’s job. But with the death toll mounting and the need for more male recruits; the …
Before civil registration, records were held in the parish of our ancestors, or the church that was in charge of their neighbourhood/ village/ hamlet. The records were created by the clergy and the parish officers who were responsible for looking after the parish. It become compulsory to keep records from …
