Genealogy Chat

not just for myself but anyone else who cares to read has anyone out there got tips on progressing back further, not just london but rural areas to. ok i knowe there is parish records, but is there any other methods? for those who cant get on the ground so to speak!! and how far back if ones not of royal blood can one expect to go? look forward to your ideas on these subject and anythig else youd like to mention

Parish records really are all there is. It is the condition of the various records that is likely to cause the biggest problems. Plenty of registers are partially illegible (ink blots, poor binding, faded or water-damaged pages), others still are completely missing or destroyed in natural disasters such as fires. The earliest ones begin in 1538. If you have ever seen a register (or any document such as a will) dated this early then to be confronted by 'secretary hand' is quite frightening and not at all easy to get to grips with as compared to the 19thC writing you might be more used to. It is obviously easier to search in rural areas and for slightly more unusual surnames. I pity the people in Wales who try searching for Jones, the same way I feel for anybody with a John Smith in their tree. I'm rather glad that my 3x great grandma was the only sibling who had a somewhat unusual first name - otherwise I might never have found her baptism. Thankfully, there weren't too many people in the 1790s in Cornwall saddled with the name 'Philadelphia'! If she had been called 'Mary', I'd probably still be looking! London and indeed any large city can be a complete nightmare. You are looking at dozens or hundreds of possible churches to sift through. At least in a small rural community you can be fairly confident that anyone with the same name is probably related. In London the system all goes to pot. If you are following all the branches of your family both maternal and paternal, then you would be really unlucky indeed not to be able to take at least one of them back into the 1500s. This assumes that they actually stayed put in one place for 500 years, which one cannot guarantee. Most of my lines fizzle out in the mid-to-late 1700s and the record-keeping just isn't really there for the good old Agricultural Labourer like my lot were. The first stop is undoubtedly the Mormons at familysearch.org. If you happen to have ancestors in the right area for the right years then you are halfway there. Otherwise you need to scan through the records yourself, which invariably means a trip to a County Record Office sited halfway across the country. It is possible to get your local Mormon Family History Centre to order in pretty much anything from their huge vaults at Salt Lake City, for which there is only a nominal fee - they have them to view, even if they are not indexed online on the IGI. Very handy if you have such a centre near you and can't travel the country.

Don't forget that your LOCAL library can get you any book in the national library system. There are often obscure books written about a particular area and these have been invaluable to me, as they often mention local families, particular places etc. I use the LDS library catalogue to ferret out what I might be interested in and then order the book from my local public library - you cannot often borrow books from the LDS library. Wills and Land Documents have also been invaluable. Even the humblest ag lab left a will, if he had tenancy of a bit of land. And your humble ag lab often turns out to have been a farmer a few generations before, and a yeoman a few generations before that. Work out what the local Manor would have been and look at manorial records. These vary but some are VERY full and go back to the 1100s. You really do have to go to a County Records Office at some point - otherwise you are missing out on a treasure trove of information. Most CROs are putting their indexes on line and its worth trawling through to see if your surname crops up. A2A is also another useful index, to more 'important' documents, although it is a pain to search. I have successfully got one line back to the 1100s, but it has taken me 35 years to do it! Another, who lived in the same farmhouse for 350 years, I can take back with certainty to 1498, and speculatively before that. OC

Yes, try FamilyHistoryOnline's website: It's pay per view but good value. I've just spent a fiver and got tons of info and haven't used up all my credits yet. http://www.familyhistoryonline.net/ Cheers, Horatia

Thank you for all your coments, old crone you have helped me before and appeciate your help. i got my willson line back to 1790 in devon arround the Topsham area ,and like the person said with help of mormon site. the prob is i cnt garantee that this is where the family started from seeing they were mariners .its poss they sailed arround there own coast a bit . see i got a william willson 1791born topsham ,married in london now the most likely parents going by age seem to be william wilson and betty rapjohns. who married in topsham in 1790.now i figured out that rapjohns was spelt wrong as there is few of them but plenty of rabjohns. but can i garantee that william her hubby .that his father was william too? or could he be another name? like john another family name passed down and usually the second son. i found a john from otter-st -mary who fits but likewise i found a william from Brixham . just down coast not far by boat