Genealogy Chat

Thanks again, mgnv.

Allison - apologies for the following interruption. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

AllanC - Here's something else you might find useful.

Say I've found a young John Smith on the 1881 census with pob=Abbas-Combe, and I want his b.cert. Clearly, specifying the rego district in my search has some merits. So I look it up in Lewis:

"ABBAS-COMBE, or Temple-Combe (St. Mary), a parish, in the union of Wincanton..."

The first rego istricts were largely based on the 1837 poor law unions, so it looks like Wincanton is what I want. To check, I'll search for the death of a John in Wincanton 1837. There always seems to be one:

Deaths Sep 1837 (>99%)
BENGER John Wincanton 10 380

Next I'll click on FreeBMD's "Wincanton" link, then the more info "here" link. Abbas-Combe is indeed in Wincanton, and remains there thru 1974 (many places got redistricted), in particular it's there in the 1870s

Mgnv, thanks for the tip about Lewis's gazetteer. I've cut and pasted it into my own tips folder. A lot of villages had their own church, but were in fact chapelries of larger parishes so you need to know what the main parish was.

Working back the other way, just because an entry in a parish register may have OTP (= of this parish) it doesn't necessarily mean that the person(s) referred to lived in the said village - they may have lived in one or more of the chapelries. If villages A and B were chapelries of C, the register at C recording the marriage of a couple from A and B might say they were both OTP.

This can also explain discrepancies between censuses. In (for example) 1861 someone might give their birthplace as the actual village, but in 1871 give it as the parish their village was part of.

I did wonder about knowing which Parish I need to look at so that will be helpful. Thanks

It's worth checking what resources are listed at:
http://www.genuki.org.uk/

Also, if you're going to check parish records, you'll sometimes need to find out which parish some village is in, and here Lewis's gazetteer is useful:
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=445

The Record Search Pilot on familysearch has baptisms and marriages.

Some areas have online parish clerks - Lancashire's is particularly good:

http://www.lan-opc.org.uk/

and has links to others.

Google the parish(es) or counties you are interested plus genealogy.

Google the names plus a DOB

I am a member of Ancestry so can look there. I'll take a look at the other websites too. I don't live local to my searches but at least one of my families seem to be in one area so it might be worth looking at buying the discs.

Thanks

I am getting to a stage where I won't be able to get birth certificates from Ancestry or freebmd. Any tips for going further? Do you need to look at parish records for a certain area?

Thanks
Alli