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General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: HJC2013 on Thursday 19 September 13 15:36 BST (UK)
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Hello! I hope that this is the right place to post this.
I am looking for a huge favour. I am a post-graduate student currently writing my dissertation
on the census.
Primarily, I am looking to discuss the experiences of individuals who used the census before the introduction of mass digitalisation and online transcriptions on websites such as FindMyPast, etc, in order to discuss the differences newer technologies have made to genealogy research.
It does not matter if your initial experience was many years ago, or if you only briefly began searching before giving up, all experiences would be very helpful.
If you would not mind discussing your experiences with me, please respond to this topic or send me a private message.
This is just an initial post to gauge interest, but I promise that the actual research (probably a quick online interview/questionnaire) will be very short, and will take only a few minutes of your time, but will be invaluable to my research!
Thank you for your time!
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I began my research long before online records were available. I recall having to visit somewhere in London to view the census returns on microfilm.
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Welcome to rootschat HJC2013.
Sadly I am unable to help you as my research is relatively recent, but I believe there are many rootschat members who did begin their research many years ago so I hope they will be willing to participate.
Good luck. :)
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I'll help you.
I started researching before online records - and remember well reeling through censuses on microfilm. Of course, if the person had moved far out of area, you hadnt a hope!
But I quite liked, in a funny sort of way, going through the big Birth Marriage and Death index books - quarter after quarter, year after year! But wouldnt go back to that really - a couple of clicks on freebmd or similar is much less hassle!
The downside that I have seen of having so much on the internet, is that often folk cease to see it as a 'tool', a bonus, but that lots of stuff is still out there that isnt on the net, that has to be searched by hand in person. Rather what is on the net is seen as conclusive, and research is often wrongly restricted to that, so if someone pops up on a search that vaguely matches, it is immediately deemed to be the right person. More in depth research often reveals that families do not always take a predictable pattern in their lives, so just because Mr A marries Miss B, doesnt necessarily mean either had that name at birth (remarriages, step parents etc), so an internet check may not be as reliable as a physical look through the parish records.
I waffle on - just ignore me!!!!!!!!
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Welcome to Rootschat HJC2013.
In the early 1980s, under the watchful eye of my cousin, who knew how to do it, I gradually learned how to operate the microfilm readers without jamming them, to trawl through entire villages looking for 'our' names. I was clueless at the beginning. We would travel to Bradford and York by train, then discuss our findings and deductions on the way home, where we would write up our notes in longhand as neither of us had a computer. It gave great satisfaction to find the right family and was exciting and great fun but very different to the way our hobby is approached now.
Maggie :)
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I began my research long before online records were available. I recall having to visit somewhere in London to view the census returns on microfilm.
Yes, the family record centre in Angel Islington.I used to pay £10 for a days trip down there on a coach twice a year. I also managed to drag (a very patient) hubby to a few record offices over the country,on the premise of holidaying nearby !
I also did a lot of my early research at the local LDS (mormon) church rooms.You could search the 1881 census for free ;D Films of parish records could be obtained for a small fee from head office and they would keep them at their office for a month.
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Hi and welcome to rootschat.
I am happy to help. Like Liz I well remember scrolling through census films and leafing through those heavy BMD indexes!
Barbara
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This thread is duplicated here:
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=662052.msg5075220;topicseen#new
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In the 1980s and even 1990s, out here in Oz, we had to rely on indexes (and very occasionally transcripts) done by FH societies in UK. We didn't have the luxury of spending £10 for a day trip to go and see the microfiche or anything else, for ourselves.
The big project of the 1881 census was probably the catalyst for so much more of them being available online.
Dawn M
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For me in western Canada in the 1970's and 80's it was all done at local FH centres with film and fiche orders placed to Salt Lake City. Used to wait weeks for the records to arrive and then spent hours scrolling through them. Of course they weren't always the right ones so the process would be repeated again and again.
Its faster now and I'm constantly amazed by the amount of resources that are online, but I do miss the camaraderie of those old research days.
sami
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Yes, the family record centre in Angel Islington.
I remember it well. And before that - St Catherines House. Did you ever go there?
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I started my researching at Somerset House. I think that was before St Catherine's House. It was, however, only the births, marriages and deaths records. We didn't have computers in those days! I must admit that having had that experience - which was truly hard work - it does make me very careful and methodical when I use the internet for all the other amazing records that we can now access.
My original interest was sparked by a handwritten copy made in 1955 of a document which started in 1625 and ran until 1825. I was assured by my late father (we are talking early1970's here) that it was connected to my grandmother's family. It took me years to find the missing link, by patiently getting the binders down off the shelf and making a note of the record, before applying for a certificate.
....BUT only recently, certain Parish records have become available on-line, and I have been able to see scanned copies of documents dated from the 1700's. It is so amazing to see the record of the births, marriages and deaths of these people. Also now available on-line are wills, censuses and apprentice records and a host of other documents. It makes everything so much easier. (But I do think people are careless these days, and just add things to their trees because they seem to fit.)
Sorry, that this is such a long posting - and I am not sure whether I have answered the original question or not!
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Happy to take part but until you have made 3 postings unable to PM you my e-mail address.
Started my research in 1981 and well remember looking up details on microfilm. Lots remember it quite fondly but I absolutely hated it. My research area was Suffolk and lived in London at the time - would come 'home' for a weekend and spend all day Saturday in Ipswich Record Office. One could spend all day there searching for what you wanted (very tiring too) and end up coming away with nothing either because records hard to read or family had moved to another area - so frustrating.
So I, personally, bless the details now on the internet.
Annette
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Yes, Somerset House was before St Catherines. When BMD's moved to St Catherines, Wills remained at Somerset House. I remember going there to look at Wills. They are now at the Probate Registry in Holborn.
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One could spend all day there searching for what you wanted (very tiring too) and end up coming away with nothing either because records hard to read or family had moved to another area - so frustrating.
I still can do that! Not all PR's are on the net. So visits to record offices to plough through PRs on microfiche are still very much part of my research. As well as the host of other records that Local Record Offices hold, which can reveal all sorts of interesting and useful information about our ancestors.
But for post 1837 BMD's and Censuses, and some PRs (if you are sure the one that has been transcribed on to the internet is the right person) , having it easily accessible and indexed is fantastic.
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I started my research in the early 70's. Parish records were held in the churches rather than in county records offices. So there was a lot of letter writing & visits to churches back then. Quite an experience sitting in a church vestry going through these huge books!
There is so much online these days that puts flesh on the bones of our ancestors that would have been missed back then. Things like wills, newspaper articles, criminal records etc. Before computers you had to rely on books to tell you what was available & where, now we have forums like RootsChat that we can utilise when we get stuck :)
Jane
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Hi
Ah, I remember it well. My history teacher got my class started on our family history after GCE exams in 1967. I remember my first visit to look at census records somewhere in London either late 1960's or early 1970's. I can't remember where it was except that it was their first day in a new building and they were a bit at sixes and sevens.
I must have had a lot of help as I didn't have a clue what I was doing. What I do remember very clearly is that my nanna Hopkinson had told me that she had aunties Jemima and Annie Benedicta, and the electrifying excitement when I found them.
I would be very happy to help.
Valerie
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I started my research in the early 70's.
As did I (as a teenager). The bmd indexes were in two buildings either side of the entrance to Somerset House, where there wasn't nearly enough room to put down the indices (or even move past people); the Society of Genealogists was in a large old house in Kensington; but worst was the censuses. Before the move to the luxury of Chancery Lane, they were in Portugal Street where you had to fill in a slip for each microfilm and then wait twenty minutes for it to turn up (only one allowed at a time). If that turned out to be the wrong one, it was then another twenty minute wait...
Looking through parish registers in the churches could be bizarre. In one church I was locked into the vestry (the vicar probably didn't trust a sixteen year old) and in another I looked through the registers behind a pillar, on the other side of which two people were getting married in front of a full congregation.
Beginning to sound a bit like the four Monty Python Yorkshiremen.
Richard
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It's wonderful to be able to access the Census online, at home. Previously, I could only study my local, Leicestershire family, but I have been able to find my out-of-county lines, as well as 'do' friends' families online. That is very pleasurable, and a great advance.
But the magic atmosphere of the Record Office was a joy. From the first nervous fumbling with the machine, trawling through whole parishes, then finally finding the family - "Oh, there she is!" out loud (a no-no really) to the understanding amusement of fellow trawlers. I remember too, 3 Americans, quite loudly chattering which drew frowns, suddenly nailing their quarry: " Oh gee, look - it's Uncle Joe!". And everyone in the room laughed because we knew the feeling. That is one of the special things about searching at the RO, the actual presence of other dedicated searchers. Instant finding is great for ease and speed, but there really is a special satisfaction in the long process of discovery. And apart from the Census, which of course is on microfilm, there is the joy of handling the actual records.
The news that the Census is to be discontinued comes as no surprise, it was never meant for our convenience after all, and there are other records for future family historians, But no other record lists the whole family, visitors, ages, occupations and places of birth in one place, so that you can be sure (in most cases) that you have the right family and can cross-reference. So we are lucky in our time to have both methods of accessing the Census, RO and online.
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When I began researching my family history in the 1990s it was a long-drawn out and expensive hobby. I used to go to both St Catherine's House to search the BMD indices and to Portugal Street to look at the census films. What with the ordering and waiting around it took an absolute age to get anywhere. The things that I can achieve online in a day now would have taken weeks, or more probably months, then. That said, it is still quite an expensive hobby but the less said about that the better 8) Chrisann
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Welcome to rootschat
Well...... most records are still not available online, and reality is that anything other than an image of the real record is just a clue and so you still need to check back and find the real record...
What 'online' has done is make it quicker and easier... as it is the database that finds possible ancestors,not only in the county you live in but the country and in many other countries to, so you no longer have to physically wind a whole reel of census film to see if you can spot from the difficult to read script the one person you are looking for and then rewind the reel before you could use the next reel and it may have took several 'looks' before you find the person you are looking for and if they were not there, then it means they were either missing on census night or maybe they were in another county, meaning that was a trip to another counties records office to check their county census, 'just in case' they were there.
Unless you went down to London which was a twice /three times a year trip for me that way you had the whole countries census films/fiche, although the size of the Archives at first certainly made me feel 'lost' in those early years, not sure what to look at and where to find it.
It was certainly very labour intensive and time consuming and unless you were lucky in making an educated guess which county your ancestor might be in, you could end up looking at many counties census without much luck in finding who you wanted.
Because 'online' is quick, easy, instant, just like emails to write and send, text messages etc and the glaring errors those can cause, it is not treated with the same respect and consideration as if you write a letter with pen and paper, put in an envelope and post, so time, consideration of what you write and time to think about and absorb before it 'goes' in the post box, so I am pleased I know how to research having seen 'internet researchers' trees and some of the glaring errors they make simply as they never check back to real records and the number of them that have no idea what records are available, when civil registration began all they know is what one particular database shows when they put a name in.... so for many their experience and knowledge can be very limited.
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Hear Hear
What wise words.
The internet is a great tool.
But it is not the master. It can help us find things, it can point us in the right direction, and it makes some of the searches a lot quicker and easier.
But it is a mistake to think it is the be all and end all. So many records, and so much information isnt there.
To conclude that something is correct because it is the nearest match that comes up on an internet search results in all sorts of errors.
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One branch of my family are the Wimpenny's of Holmfirth, West Yorks. I did a lot of research on-line but was much helped by a lady who specialises in the Wimpenny's.She had traced the family back to the 1600's, doing all the research well before data was available on-line.
The lady in question has a Wimpenny one-name web-site and could be contacted through it.
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My earliest research memories are looking at the BMD indexes in London at St. Catherines House at the bottom of Kingsway. Large books per quarter. Took al long time a lot of effort to move 5 years worth from the shelves to the desks on top. Eventually they came on to microfiche and were available at our local library. If i remember correctly census returns were only available at the local county (Cheshire) record office and then only for Cheshire.
My families were from Northumberland and Dumfriesshire :(
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Duplicate thread here but OP hasn't logged in since starting the 2 topics so not sure if they are interested in replies (and probably needs 1 more post to use PM system).
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=662052.msg5075173#msg5075173
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Well, I hope the OP will be back to harvest these responses ... there's a lot of people here willing to put themselves out to help.
My own first experience of genealogical research was as a young trainee solicitor in late 1990 or early 1991, when I was sent to Seamen's Hall in Somerset House to go through the quarterly volumes of death registrations looking for the death, some time between 1970 and 1980 (probably ...) of Ivy Knott, and then when I had a date of birth to see if there was a grant of probate and will, and if so to obtain a copy ...
I think I went there every day for two weeks ... because there were MILLIONS of Ivy Knotts all dropping off their perches in the decade in question. I came to the conclusion that it had been thought of as a frightfully witty pun, in the late Victorian era, to name your daughter Ivy if your surname was Knott (as in a knot of ivy ...) and of course, these were the generation whose menfolk were slaughtered in wholesale numbers on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, leaving all those maiden aunts of the 1930s - 1950s, who started dying off in the 1960s and 1970s.
And the only way to test it all was to bespeak (that was the technical term for it) copies of the grants of probate and to look at the associated wills (you needed to have the probate in order to get the reference for the will, as I recall) and then look at the will to see if it was the "right" Ivy Knott or not. It took a long time; but slowly, one by one, I eliminated them from my enquiries until finally we hit the right one.
Less than a year ago, I started researching my family tree with the assistance of computerized tools for census, BMD and parish records. I have achieved more in a year than could be done in a lifetime before computerization. I have identified all of my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and great x2 grandparents. I have identified 31 out of 32 great x3; 44 out of 64 great x4; 53 out of 128 great x5; 60 out of 256 great x6; 52 out of 512 great x7; 51 out of 1,024 great x8; 38 out of 2,048 great x9; 30 out of 4,096 great x10; 33 out of 8,192 great x11; 31 out of 16,384 great x12; 19 out of 32,768 great x13 and 4 out of 65,653 great x14 grandparents. Some of these identifications are necessarily tentative, and I am now searching out the further evidence that will confirm or deny. And I have a stack of about 300 index cards each identifying further enquiries and look-ups for County Record Offices, relating to records which are not yet available in digital format. Each of these may yield further identifications, or the hard evidence to firm up on a tentative identification; and when I do so, they may give a lead to another rich seam of information which is available online.
The real difficulty I am having now is that the flow of information is in danger of swamping my ability to assimilate, organize, and write it all up. So visits to record offices are put on hold until all of the information from the last one has been written up, and any further digital records to which it points me has been harvested.
I think, however, that the most powerful tool which the digital revolution has given us - and the one which enables us to increase our efficiency many times over when searching for records - is the ability to find in an instant if the answer to a particular enquiry is "no". In the old days, if there was no record there, then it was difficult to know when to throw in the towel and accept that that was probably the case. You could spend whole days looking in the hope that there was something, somewhere, to be found ... when now, the computer will tell you in a matter of seconds that your search returned no hits. And if that is the case, you know to move on to your next enquiry ... and THAT has made a TREMENDOUS difference to the speed with which you can home in on the extant records which are of some use or value to you ...
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Yes, I know that you have to be careful when using the internet - if the research isn't right you're just wasting your time. But I recently found my husband's gt gt aunt Jessie with the help of Family Search - sending off for her birth certificate to double check of course - but also found her on Census with her grandparents who I hadn't been able to trace as I was looking for his second christian name, so I was able to go a generation back, and was so pleased.
I have very fond memories of hunting through microfiche in Birmingham Local Studies Library - a marvellous place - and always very helpful, even if there were points at which I was waiting after someone who was using the same microfiche. But, not having a car, the internet allows me to trace families I wouldn't otherwise be able to, and I've got in touch with several distant relatives via the Internet too, which has been lovely. And that's apart from all the help and advice fellow Rootschatters have given me.
Derby Girl
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I started my research early 70's and how I loved travelling to various parts of the country to churches and records offices . I felt so privileged to both see and touch those old records an amazing feeling to be touching the past. I spent many a year travelling the UK helping Americans trace their trees as they couldn't access information at that time. Wish I was still able to do it.
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Although the internet can be a valuable tool it's often innacurate and trees aren't always researched just copied , causing extra work if you can be bothered to do it. The trees that have been compiled by adding a dozen other trees of the same surname but don't actually fit , makes me wonder why they put them online.
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I think they like the idea of an on-line presence?
I was quite proud of myself having a web-site (not a family tree one), but when yahoo closed down the free websites, I didn't bother to revive it (yet!).
eadaoin
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I started my research early 70's and how I loved travelling to various parts of the country to churches and records offices . I felt so privileged to both see and touch those old records an amazing feeling to be touching the past. I spent many a year travelling the UK helping Americans trace their trees as they couldn't access information at that time. Wish I was still able to do it.
Wonderful, handling the actual registers! I remember opening an early one, a Leicestershire village but can't remember which, and the Vicar had decorated a whole page proclaiming Elizabeth I's accession (he must have done it retrospectively). Beautifully coloured and illuminated, it was lovely to come across that.
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Wonderful, handling the actual registers! I remember opening an early one, a Leicestershire village but can't remember which, and the Vicar had decorated a whole page proclaiming Elizabeth I's accession (he must have done it retrospectively). Beautifully coloured and illuminated, it was lovely to come across that.
It is indeed wonderful - but also every time we handle them it is, ultimately, destructive of the records themselves in some small degree.
I think it is important that we all assist one another by using the digital / microfiche / microfilmed / transcribed versions as much as we can, and only ask to see and handle the original records when it is truly necessary to resolve a query which we cannot resolve in any other way.
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Wonderful, handling the actual registers! I remember opening an early one, a Leicestershire village but can't remember which, and the Vicar had decorated a whole page proclaiming Elizabeth I's accession (he must have done it retrospectively). Beautifully coloured and illuminated, it was lovely to come across that.
It is indeed wonderful - but also every time we handle them it is, ultimately, destructive of the records themselves in some small degree.
I think it is important that we all assist one another by using the digital / microfiche / microfilmed / transcribed versions as much as we can, and only ask to see and handle the original records when it is truly necessary to resolve a query which we cannot resolve in any other way.
True. Though I never got used to the microfiches, I was never sure if I'd read every section on each! But your point reminded me of one time: I sat opposite someone leafing through a register...and she licked her finger before turning each page. >:(
That type of behaviour, from a very small minority I think, no doubt went a long way to the registers being withdrawn from normal use.
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I started in the 80s and had no idea how to start, I originally went to the local library where a librarian was wonderful, but had limited resources, so was sent off to the local record office. What a difference, they did not want amateurs .They were down right unpleasant. So back to the library for help, the librarian told me what to ask for and how to go about it, so I spent half my time walking backwards and forwards, library to Record Office. Later I went to do some research for the school that I was teaching at, things had not improved. I recently went back, and they were not so off hand but compared with the Welsh Record Offices that cannot do enough to help, the English offices that I have visited, they are not always user friendly, they really need to be more helpful to beginners, and visiters that do not know where things are kept. Sorry for those Record Offices that are friendly, but I am only writing how I have been treated, I do not expect to have them wait on me or do my research, just be friendly, and if I ask for some advice as to where I can look next if I have hit a brick wall try to be helpful.
So much as I love to see the original copies I welcome the use of digital records that I can access from home.
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For those of us who were able to work with original records , I think we were so incredibly lucky to have had that opportunity . The youngsters who follow will not have that priviledge.
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For those of us who were able to work with original records , I think we were so incredibly lucky to have had that opportunity . The youngsters who follow will not have that priviledge.
I think it varies from place to place, to be fair.
On my first visit to Northampton Records Office, I encountered a register entry which was very difficult to construe ... so they toddled off and fetched me the Bishop's Transcripts, and ten minutes later I was leafing (carefully!!) through a clip of 17th century parchments.