Genealogy Chat

About our ancestors, I only seem to know when they were born how many children they had and what they did for a living, what do you look for possibly at the record office etc.

Local newspapers might have obituaries which mention something the person had done in life, wills give extra information, settlement hearings or court cases involving your relatives might be indexed. Try the A2A website (www.A2A.org.uk) for an online index of some documents held by local archives - I found a gt gt grandfather who had been a parish constable in this way.

Type genfair into Google and have a look at the huge variety of books there are on family history. What you can find out about an ancestor's life depends on the surviving records. Some parts of the country are much better for wills, poorlaw etc. There will be local history books or online sites which will describe the area. Museums can give a flavour of the period. Maps can show what the place looked like. Records survive for various occupations. I know what tattoes a naval uncle had on his arm, and whether a merchant seaman could read. Type places or occupations into Google. There really is masses out there. Enjoy. Brenda

Wills can be quite interesting. Some of these are available to download for £3.50 from the Documents Online website of the National Archives. I found my family vault from a mention in a will. Very interesting and gothic. The same website also has details of people who fought in the world wars and were awarded medals.

I would endorse the value of local newspapers! I have had a lot of success scanning through newspapers in areas where groups of ancestors lived. I would suggest starting by looking around dates of marriages/deaths. Sometimes articles/obituaries about someone who has died can contain helpful information about things they might have done locally. I was surprised very recently to find that a funeral of my great great grandfather made front page news with quite a long article. It gave details about the funeral, names of those who attended and/or sent flowers and about things he had done in his life for the local community, many of which I had not known about before. Not everybody gets an article of this depth but when you find one it is a goldmine. You don't know till you look. Angela

Chaseing little clues can get you some intresting facts. "Fair ground owner". on my g/grand fathers Census entry lead me to finding out I am part Romaney and he owned the fair that was sited at the Brentford end of Kew bridge.

Hi Sue, if your ancestors had a trade try historicaldirectories*org . I have found a few of mine on there.

Hi One of my g-great uncles was a City Constable, according to the 1881 census, so I contacted the Corporation of London - archives - (via their website) and they sent me a chunk of info plus the fact that he'd been with Surrey Police before he joined the City Police. When I contacted the Surrey Police Museum, their archivist was also extremelyhelpful and sent me a proforma document about his (two separate!) spells of service with them. this included a physical description, as well. It really seemed to make him much more real. I was also able to identify him (through 1901 census) as a tobacconist in Islington after he'd retired and found he was named in the PO Directory of 1895 as a tobacconist - and that gave the address, of course, too. A great uncle of mine served in WW1, and we'd known he'd been killed then so I found some info about him on CWGC website - and made it a project to have him changed from "age unknown" by supplying them with some relevant info. That took me to Kew where I was fortunate to find not only his service record but his younger brother's (my grandfather) about whose army service I learned a lot that we hadn't known before - including the spooky fact that he'd been injured (shell-shocked badly enough to be moved away from front-line service) the same day that the elder brother had been killed. Their service records also gave info about appearance and previous occupation and so on. I guess these are amongst the most valuable links for that kind of info: http://www.a2a.org.uk/ http://www.historicaldirectories.org/ http://www.armymuseums.org.uk/ http://www.1914-1918.net http://www.angelfire.*com/de/BobSanders/Site.html http://www.georgianindex.net/ (remove asterisks) But there are lots of possibilities - not least just putting names and places and dates and occupations - in various combinations - into a search engine. Christine