Give me some old bloke from the 1500's and I'm perfectly happy to rummage about reading his Will and wondering whatever his daughter would be doing with a cow...I can find out how much he paid in taxes if the records remain and hazard a vague guess as to the cause of his eventual demise...sometimes he might have his very own page on Wikipedia showing all his relations back to the year dot.
His house may still be standing...open on Sunday afternoons for people to gawp at the beeswaxed floors and oil paintings, have tea in the adjoining tea-room...maybe buy a potted plant from the gardens. They'll go home wondering about the cost of the electricity to live in such a place and be thankful they have a neat bungalow by the sea with a white meter to help with the cost.
I like those people with their stables for the horses and the ragged little scullery maids, their faces marked with the scars from the Smallpox...the man whose sole task was to empty the piss-pots onto the manure heap every morning...it's easy to imagine the Kings Messenger calling every year for the taxes due...putting the gold pieces into his purse tucked safely into his saddle-bag.
Maybe his wife plucked her hair-line in keeping with the fashions of the day and wore a cloak trimmed in soft ermine...bathed in water scented with Lavender flowers and died birthing her tenth child.
Instead I'm more usually faced with late Victorians who told fibs about their children's births...who lied in their teeth when the census form plopped through the letter-box...who had the truly irritating habit of naming every first son John or William...that makes me have to check and check and check again I have the 'right' John or William and not one who was born two generations ago...
There are those who simply disappear into thin air and drive me to despair searching through emigration records in case they decided to run away to America...if they didn't, then where in heavens name did they go.
And then there are the Irish records.
Did you know that many essential records of births etc were pulped during the First World War...they were. Mashed up to produce more paper for the War effort. And that's not counting the archives that went up in flames in the 1920's...or the bloody-minded village priests who filled in the books with their own version of spellings and dates...even in the present day those old boys hang on like grim death to any records they have in their possession and you have to sweet talk them and cajole and promise oodles of money before they'll let you see inside the Parish chest...then they hover over you in case you run out of the Presbytery with vital information tucked under your arm...
Give me the Mediaeval Yeomen with their farms and their land...the Knights who attended the Royal Court and were privy to the secrets and gossip...those old Wills leaving monies to the 'poor of the parish' and the bed and linen to the eldest son...gloves of Rabbit skin to small Grandchildren and a Shilling to the gravedigger. The best pewter platter to a sister and 'my fine linen chest' to the favourite youngest son...
I know where I am with those people...
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It would make my job easier Vashti if a lot more had bothered to even register the children in the first place! I remember my adoptive mother telling me (she was born around 1890) that her Father didn't register any of the children and there were 8 of them! When she (and all her siblings) came to get their state pension, nobody knew who they were? She said that when her Mother gave him the money to go and register a new baby, he'd just go down the gin house and get drunk!
I do know what you mean about John and William, it drives me to distraction, as do Mary, Elizabeth and Ann, as every female child seemed to be named!
But I think the thing that annoys me most of all is the way that the American index people seem to have no idea about English counties? They put absolutely ridiculous things like ...
Born: Brighton, in the County: Hampshire, Essex, Kent.
If they don't know, why don't they look it up? It makes it so hard for people trying to find a certain area. I wouldn't last 5 minutes if I were to make errors like that!
Oh that struck a chord! I loathe the ones who happily say their ancestor born in 1400 came from Memphis...err...don't think so actually. It must make their completed tree look completely bizarre...
Lol, how right you are Vashti. I also like it when they Name some man in a family tree as i.e., William smith and his wife as Mrs Smith ...very helpful - not!
Mmm...just try and find Welsh ancestors...lots of Williams, Jones, Davies...they would have had nicknames to distinguish each other...Jones the butcher, or Williams the shop, but these were not written down.
Or you just have a nutty grandmother god rest her soul, who refused even after seeing the evidence in black and white to believe she was actually born in 1910 not 1. Nan you cant have been registered before you were born I told her, not to mention she wasn't registered in the name she told us as her mother never married.
No doubt you have noticed the huge number of people who died at Y, Somme, France. Took me a while to figure out that it was idjuts just putting 'y' to agree, yes they have died. Then it is the predictive text thingy suggesting to the next curious person to include that person, then it's sort of set in stone. Have you looked at Y on a map? It's smaller than where I live!
I love reading some of those old records, not so much for the intellectual content, so much as the really beautiful script that some of them managed to produce. Just a legible as the day it was written, maybe 200 years ago. Then there the next ones down the scale who produce perfectly readable notes, but they are so untidy in their writing. But the ones I don't really like are those which when you first look at it, you think 'that's neat' until you try to read it, but every letter looks the same. You end up trying to identify patterns to sort it out.
Seems to me you need the patience of a Saint for researching ancestry! Where I live people are known by the strangest nicknames......Dick my bike........one o one.........Ken stink......Pete spud...to name but a few.😁😘 xxx
American Notes by Charles Dickens covers his visit there I think it was before the West was opened up.
He tells of people building cabins, the visits to prisons that are awful, beyond belief. Then he visited the Deep South and went on the Mississippi. You might find the book interesting.
Intersting. My name belonged to a saint in the 4 th century who roamed in Russia. He is then found in the South of France, Digne where the trace disappeared.
digne is that place where Alexandra David Neel, the intrepid Parisian journalist who was the first woman to penetrate Lhassa. She had quite an eventful life going out with lamas and gurus, practising levitation and debunking some myths about Indian and Tibetan spirituality and exploring Buddhist sacred text. she was one of the first Parisian to learn Tibetan!
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Fanny and Johnny Cradock?
