Back! And up a different tree….

It has been ages since I updated – the main reason being work and a very young family, soon about to get bigger (as I am at the moment). Work on my own family tree has taken a back seat as I have been trying to finish off another project – the history of the road where I used to live, Notts Gardens in Swansea. A website for this has had various incarnations but now resides at: http://www.twistyoak.com/nottsgardens. The process of creating this has been interesting and Iwanted to record it somewhere, for my own reference more than anything as my memory is so bad….

The site has been created using a local installation of WordPress. This was a new thing for me – but I followed the “famous 5 minute install” with reference to my web space provider documentation and it went amazingly well. I was up and running in no time.

Next up was to find a template to use. I hunted around the web for the free ones and eventually plumped for “Zenlike” (links at the bottom of the website) as being usable and simple. I measured the size of the main image in the header and then compiled my own replacement one by merging 3 of my own photos. With a bit of tweaking, I was able to upload this and it displays OK I think. Not the most amazing design but it was quick and easy!

Next, I thought about the organisation of the site. Essentially I wanted to build up a database of content – the source material in chronological order. WordPress isn’t ideal for this but I think I got it sussed pretty good for my purposes. For a historical blog, ideally you would want to change the posting date to the historical date of the entrybut you can’t do this as no dates before about 1971 will work (a quirk of the underlying code). So the route I chose was to put the date in the title and then sort alphabetically (and therefore also numerically). Each “post” is a chunk of evidence – this may be a newspaper article, a birth/marriage/death entry, a census return. The title of the post has to start with the date in this format “yyyy/mm/dd” followed by whatever text I want. This ensures that the posts will be displayed in chronological order (once I add the tweak to get them displayed in alphabetical order).See for example the entries relating to the Shooting Range at Notts Gardens.

The next step was organising my contents – I have used categories for this, as listed under “Content”. So “the Shooting Range” above is a category. You can see on the page for that category, the “Category description” displayed at the top and then the posts filed under that category in chronological order.

I use tags too, but these are more for indexing. This is great for historical stuff – I have a tag cloud down the side which enables me to bring up all posts on any of my indexed terms. For example, here are all the posts that refer to John Henry Nott.

I also added a couple of “Pages” on About the Site and the Source Material.

To get this far I have had to do some very basic editing of the source files, mostly php or css or html. These are all part of the template so that does mean it would be hard for me to change my template now (tho I have kept notes on what I’ve done). The kind of things that required a bit of alteration: displaying posts alphabetically not in date order (as added), showing the category description, changing how posts are displayed in a list etc.

I’m still adding content to the site and I don’t think it’s particularly “user-friendly” yet. At the moment its a useful site for me to keep track of my research and that is my primary concern. I hope to improve it as time goes on. I have REALLY enjoyed finding out about WordPress and exploring what it can do. I am wondering about using it in a different way for family history. A lot of the Notts Gardens site concerns the history of the Nott family so it has a small genealogy component too.

New Website!

I have now officially given up hope of Rootschat ever restoring all the free webspace. It is a great shame – so many sites must be down /lost.  I don’t wish to run them down – it was such a good, generous idea – but the way it has just vanished with very sporadic updates on what is happening is a bit shabby for all those who use the service. I guess you get what you pay for.

In that spirit, I now have a new place for my website: http://www.twistyoak.com/sam/familytree

Updates here and there will be sporadic as I am busy with the latest addition to the family tree who is currently 9 months old.

My Website

Oh dear. The free Rootschat webspace seems to have vanished. My website has been unavailable for about 3 weeks now. Its soooo frustrating – up til now its been well used and people have contacted me after finding it on Google which is wonderful. I use it myself for easy access to my notes wherever I am.

There’s a thread in the Forums about it which keeps promising it will soon be back, but then it all goes quite again. Someone has posted we can’t really complain as it’s free. That’s true in one sense – and I have always been very grateful for them providing the webspace, with no adverts and no fuss. However, webspace is something that is virtually worthless if its not working or unreliable, so in that sense I think we can complain as has come to resemble the proverbial chocolate teapot. If I had known it was going to vanish, I would never have put my site there in the first place. I guess it proves once again there’s no such thing as a free lunch….

I may look to get my own URL for once and all. It’s time to go professional…..

1841 Census Map

I was reading about the TV program “Who do you think you are”, which led me on to the magazine which has a feature on the 1841 Census. This inspired me to use Google Maps to create an overview of where all my ancestors were living in 1841. I used the “My Maps” feature and added all the places I could. Some addresses are not there any more, in which case I took the nearest centre of town. It didn’t take too long, maybe an hour or so. Here’s my map.

As well as researching the minutiae of my family history, I also find myself thinking about the wider social history. Already in 1841 there are a lot of ancestors living in south London, many of whom I know moved there from other parts of the country. Most of the others were to later move there – by 1901 I think nearly all the lines on my tree were in London. Its strange to think that now my family and I are moving away from London, back to the countryside…

Ireland

I’m just back from a visit to Ireland so it’s been in my mind about my Irish ancestors. I do have some, but they are proving very elusive. Apparently the Fords had Irish roots but this is unsubstantiated and I have got nowhere on the Ford line to date (see below).

The definite connection is on the Maud Annie Jones line – definite in the sense that there are witnesses to Irish accents and customs! Her mother was Mary Ann Wallace / Wallis: no record of her being actually born in Ireland as all the census records say Deptford and her parents married at Greenwich (1872).

So that puts it back on her father: John Wallis / Wallace. His place of birth is not known: I have his marriage certificate to Mary Ann Longton where he is 23 and a painter. His father is John Wallis and he is deceased. I also don’t have any definite census records for him so I am, pretty much, stuck. Really frustrating! I don’t even know when he died.

Jones

I have 2 Jones lines in my tree so I live in hope there may be some Welsh blood there somewhere…. Anyway, I am lamentably stuck at the moment on John Jones (b.1872). The facts on him so far:

Dec 1890: he marries Mary Ann Wallace / Wallis. His father is John George Jones (deceased) and he was living at 8 Brockley Terrace, Walworth. He is 18 and a labourer. They married at St Saviour.

1891: Aged 18, living at 10 Blackhorse Road, Deptford with wife Mary Ann and her grandmother Mary Ann Longton and family. He is a dock labourer like his uncle-in-law Michael Howard.

In 1901 he is not with his wife and children (George, Albert and Maud Annie) as they are living in Deptford with his brother-in-law James.

The issues are as follows: I am not confident in his date of birth (1872) as he may have been lying on his marriage certificate if they were very young and also the 1891 Census information may have come from his grandma-in-law so again could have been an approximation. Was he born in Deptford?

Trying to look for a John Jones, son of John Jones, is very elusive! Also his dad could have died before 1881 in which case it is even harder to do.

So I have tried looking for a John George Jones who died between 1872 and 1890 in London, Kent and Surrey: Mar 1874 (47, Wandsworth), Jun 1877 (48, Strand) and Sep 1879 (47, Islington). None of them look wildly likely.

Still stuck. (

Perry

Randomly picked Martha Perry to work on tonight as she looked a bit sad. She was the first wife of our illustrious ancestor John Waterfall who left these shores and made it all the way to Salt Lake City. By far, the most adventurous ancestor. But he did all this with his 2nd wife as sadly Martha died in 1854. She died in childbirth and the child died too. She was only 39. Her daughter Ann went on to marry John Gibson, a sailor, and so on into the Gibson side of the tree.

Most fortunately, the fact that John Waterfall was a Mormon means that lots of people have already researched Martha Perry. So very little effort turned up a bit of her line – Henry Perry and Mary Ann Brittle seem to have been her parents. I can’t quite work out their movements as they seem to have come from Brompton / Chatham area of Kent, yet they got married at St Martin in the Fields, London no less. There is even some information on Mary Ann Brittle’s parents.

Always feels good to add in some new names to the tree…

Springett

A whole new branch! I knew that James Chapman married a Martha Sarah Springett but I’d not persued it until now. Luckily it was quite easy to find her parents – father Joseph a shoemaker, living in St George, Southwark and his wife Sarah Chamberlin. Already we are back to the 1780s but even better than that, I found IGI records from the parish of St Mary, Whitechapel, that give his parents – another Joseph Springett and his wife Frances Newberry.

Just found a good article on Horsleydown here.

There is also an article on Whitechapel here, the place where the Springetts are when we first come across them… It was a very poor area.

Perhaps the Springetts originated from outside London: the surname profiler shows the name is concentrated around Essex (Colchester) and also in Kent. This would fit with their later location in East London if they had moved in around the mid 18th Century. Only speculation….

Chapmans

Just wanted to check thru my Chapman line, as I seem to remember finding a problem with it a while back.

Definite: I have Samuel Furr marrying Martha Chapman on 13 May 1872 in St Olave, Southwark. She is 25, at 76 Tooley Street and her father is James Chapman, lighterman. He was also a witness. This puts her DOB at 1846/1847 but see below. Her place of birth in later census is shown as London.

However, her DOB from the marriage certificate seems to be wrong based on the other evidence. In 1881 she is 36 (1845) and 1891 45 (1845) and 1901 57 (1844).

In 1851, the only plausible Martha Chapman is aged 7, born Surrey St John living with James Chapman, waterman (34 = 1817, born Surrey St John), and his wife Martha (31= 1820, born Surrey St George the Martyr). She is their 2nd child after a son James (10) with other siblings Emily (5) and Sophia (4). There is also a Martha Sarah Chapman born Dec 1893 as the only plausible birth. She is also shown as 25, unmarried with James and Martha in the 1871 census. If so, this puts her neatly into the excellent family tree I was sent as the daughter of James Chapman, son of James Chapman, son of William Chapman – all watermen / lightermen on the Thames.

So I think my line is all checked and correct so far. Phew.

In Search of George Ford

So I’m trying http://www.familysearch.org and their excellent 1881 census search. If only Ancestry had such a good search engine. I’m trying:

George Ford, born 1875+/-2 years, head of household William Ford. I get 17 results – maybe one of them is the one!

I also checked the marriage record and he is down as “George F.” so I think it may be safe to assume he was George Frederick. Also, he died in July so that puts his earliest DOB at 1875, not 1874. Small steps but they may help….
Also went back to FreeBMD for birth of a George F. from 1875-1877. Found a few possibles. If I could match the two, I may have the George Frederick Fords who had a William Ford as a father…. Very hard work and not very conclusive.