A record turnout for an August meeting, 30 people. Barry Newman gave another very different exciting talk starting with the familiar refrain that my ancestors were boring and there is nothing exciting to talk about. Fortunately for him, and for us, he persevered. Checking ancestry hints, other people’s trees and, to my mind, one of the best sources, FamilySearch. The hard-faced lady with the icy stare on his first slide turned out to be a very caring and incredibly determined pioneer of the American west. Despite marrying in a protestant church in London in 1851, she and her husband became Mormons and in the mid 1850’s emigrated to Salt Lake City. Even more fortunate her story of their journey from Liverpool to Boston by sea, then overland by rail and covered wagon to Utah was documented in detail, along with the stories of other women pioneers, in a book, which I noted from the slides had over 1460 pages. It was an eventful and far from easy journey. Had Barry not followed up uncles as well as direct ancestors he would never have found such an interesting story. (see below for some information on how you may be able to find similar interesting information about your ancestors)
At the September meeting we will have the tables set out for small groups of 5 people and so please bring an object, or photo or story you can talk about to the small group. This format seems to be popular and gets more people actively involved.
At the October meeting the idea is again to have the theme of “Those who Served” Not just those who served in the Military but also the other less publicised ways people served their country during times of conflict. Womens Land Army, War production etc etc. It can be anything from a 2 minute talk with no material to 20 mins with slides. I am happy to put any slides together if you do not have the facility to do this yourself.
The theme for the November meeting is “The Sea” and I am looking for volunteers, again anything from a few minutes to a full hour. Ancestors on holiday on the beach, Merchant Marine, Royal Navy, Customs men, whatever. Please let me know if you can contribute and see below for some hints.
Barry found much of his information because other people had attached the documents to the relevant people on the FamilySearch tree. Old newspapers and increasingly going online although in most cases you need to pay a subscription to see them.
There is a new facility on FamilySearch which may find such documents not yet on the FamilySearch tree. I was at a talk a few weeks ago on a new feature on the FamilySearch website which enables searches on some of the vast collection of, as yet, unindexed documents FamilySearch have. This link will take you to it.
https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/full-text
Before this AI facility, until documents had been manually indexed you could not use the search facilities, and the only option was to look at each page, similar to the days of microfiche. Now using Optical Caracter Recognition, which works on both type and hand written documents you can search within these documents. Have a play and see what you can find.
Many of you will have been at the talk I gave about Jessie Charleson who successfully sued David Stewart for breach of promise to marry. At the trial David stated he had sailed with Jessie’s grandfather. I put Daniel Charleson and the one of the ships he sailed in into this search and the third document that came up was the crew agreement, with David’s name and signature. Proving he had indeed been a crew member with Jessie’s grandfather on his ship, when he was only 15 years old. With crew agreements, newspaper reports on Marine Intelligence you can track Merchant ships and seamen over time. Another useful site is CLIP, Crew List Index Project, which has lists of merchant vessels with their official ships number, place of build and registration and links to other information about them such as ships logs, crew agreements and fate of the ship.
https://www.crewlist.org.uk/#top
Happy researching
Best regards
Rob