Picture Postcard Parade: Church and Lich Gate, Framfield, Sussex

This is another gem from the WSFHS Open Day and Family History Fair last weekend. The subject will need no introduction to readers of my blog. I have featured Framfield church several times because of its connection to my HEMSLEY ancestors.

This card was published by J. Frisby of Uckfield, it was posted in Uckfield on the 14th November 1912. It was sent to Mr J. Bolton of 11 Commercial Street, Scarborough. The message is a little cryptic: Dont think we have forgotten you altogether. We heard about you having one of our set in the Church. What do you think of the Lytch Gate.

A couple of different postcards of the church can be found in my posts Framfield Church postcard – another new addition to my collection and Framfield Photos: Part Three – Framfield church then and now

British Army WW1 Service Records now complete on Ancestry.co.uk

Yesterday Ancestry.co.uk announced the completion of the British Army WW1 Service Records. Records relating for surnames from A to N were previously available on the website, but now the collection is complete.

These records are known as the “burnt documents” because 60% of the original records were destroyed by enemy action during the Second World War. Previously they were only available to view on microfilm at the National Archives (series WO363).

The contents of each service record varies greatly, as does the legibility of some of the pages, many of which show clear signs of fire damage. According to Ancestry the service records “contain a variety of information concerning all aspects of the army careers of those who completed their duty or were either killed in action or executed, including the soldier’s name, date and place of birth, address, next-of-kin, former occupation, marital status, medical records, service history, regiment number, locations of service and discharge papers“.

It is not just military service information that you can find in these records, it was in the service record of William James GASSON that I first discovered that his father (and my 2x great-grandfather) George Thomas GASSON had been admitted to a lunatic asylum.

I had a quick look last night, and it looks like the only close relation is William Henry TROWER (my 1st cousin 3 times removed) and their doesn’t seem to be anything unusual contained within his documents. I am sure other relations will come to light once I carry out a more thorough search.

Introducing the HAYBITTLE family

I have spent a couple of evenings this week filling in the gaps in the HAYBITTLE family. My 3x great-grandparents Jane HAYBITTLE and Henry TROWER married in Henfield, Sussex on the 3rd November 1847. Together they had thirteen children including my 2x great-grandfather Ebenezer TROWER.

Jane HAYBITTLE was from the neighbouring parish of Ashurst, Sussex and was the daughter of John and Harriet HAYBITTLE, she baptised in Ashurst on the 16th December 1827.

Jane appears to have been one of nine children, although the youngest died as an infant. John HAYBITTLE and Harriet WOOD were married on the 8th November 1823 in nearby Steyning, Sussex although both were born in Ashurst.

John appears to be the youngest child of Thomas HAYBITTLE and Mary DALE, who were married in Washington, Sussex on the 13th May 1776. It looks like they had seven children in total, the first six being baptised in Ashington, Sussex and the last one, John, was baptised in Ashurst, Sussex.

It appears that some time between 1795 and 1800 the family moved from Ashington parish to Ashurst parish, which is not a great distance, about four or five miles. As well as the children of John and Harriet being baptised in Ashurst, there are a couple of other HAYBITTLE families, Thomas and Barbara and William and Ann, who were probably also the children of Thomas and Mary HAYBITTLE.

For this work I used the following sources: Census returns on Ancestry.co.uk, Ashurst parish register transcriptions from the Parish Register Transcription Society and the Sussex Marriage Index CD from the SFHG. The parish register entries will need checking at a later date for accuracy.

I have gone back a little bit further than I needed to for my Christmas Tree Project, but I feel I have a good understanding now of where my HAYBITTLE family came from and good base from which to carry out further research at a later date.

Picture Postcard Parade: Pine Avenue, Buxted Park, Sussex

This is one of the postcards I picked up last Saturday at the WSFHS Open Day and Family History Fair at Woking, Surrey.

There were three, no actually four reasons why I bought this card:

1. I thought it was such a charming picture.
2. When I went walking over at Buxted a few months ago I walked up the avenue and emerged through the gateway on to the road, conveniently next to a bus stop.
3. My great-grandmother Minnie DRIVER (later HEMSLEY) is said to have worked at Buxted Park, at the far end of the avenue.
4. The card was priced at £2.50, which I thought was a real bargain.

The card was sent on the 22nd July 1905, from Hadlow Down, Sussex to Miss H Player at North Cray Rectory, in Toats Cray (at least I think it is Toats Cray), Kent. The message reads:

Dear H?
This is a place not very far from us. I thought it would be nice for your album hope you are keeping well this hot weather with much love Annie

I seem to have started a collection of Buxted Park postcards now, what with the spotted deer and now the avenue, I really must try and find out if my great-grandmother did in fact work there before I get too carried away.

The entrance to Pine Avenue, Buxted Park hasn’t changed a great deal since this postcard was published.  Below is a photo I took of the entrance whilst I was waiting for the bus home. The house is partially hidden behind some trees now and the wall has been replaced (or covered) by a fence.

A SHORNDEN/LAY marriage certificate arrives, but what to do next?

The marriage certificate for Henry SHORNDEN and Sarah LAY arrived yesterday, and it has already been scanned and filed away. For once this appears to be a pretty straightforward marriage certificate, no unexpected surprises, in fact it confirms much of what I already know.

Henry SHORNDEN and Sarah LAY were married on the 25th December 1840 (I wonder how much it would cost to get married on Christmas Day now?) at the parish church in Milton next Gravesend, Kent. Henry was a bachelor and Sarah a spinster, but unfortunately their ages are only given as “full”. Both gave their residence as Milton.

I was pleased to see that Henry’s rank or profession was given as “Cutler”, that ties in nicely with information from the census and baptism records from Alton, Hampshire. Not surprisingly Sarah has no rank or profession shown.

Henry’s father is William SHORNDEN, this matches the information from the Ospringe parish registers, and he was a labourer. Henry’s profession and the name of his father mean this provides a nice link between the Henry from Ospringe, Kent and the one from Alton, Hampshire, adding to the evidence that suggests they are the same person.

Sarah’s father was Joseph LAY, and he to was a labourer. Joseph would be another of my 4x great grandfathers. That leaves me with only three left to find, including Joseph’s wife.

Interestingly neither Henry nor Sarah signed their names, I am sure this led to much of the confusion with different surname spellings once they got away from their native Kent. The other interesting thing is that the witnesses were William and Mary Ann WICKER, could these be relations of either the bride or the groom?

So where now? Well there are still two questions to be answered:

1) Where and when was Sarah born and who was her mother? I have an approximate date of birth (1821), but no definite place for Sarah’s birth, Kent seems most likely, so I need to check all the baptism registers for the places previous mentioned, Milton next Gravesend, Ospringe and surrounding parishes for a daughter of Joseph LAY.

2) What about the two daughters that Henry and Sarah had, who are shown in the 1851 census as being born before the couple were married? These two girls were most likely Henry and Sarah’s daughters, but as well as checking all the above parishes for their baptisms, I need to check for a variety of different surnames as well. It would be nice to find the family in the 1841 census, but their appears to be very few SHORNDENs in the south of England that year.

This family are certainly one of the most challenging I have worked on so far, they are the first case I have in my tree of a name change, rather than just different variants. I do feel however that this is a story worth investigating and I will probably try and put together a full report on the family once more of the facts emerge.

Christmas Tree Project update – fill in the gaps

I still have four missing people, hopefully I should find at least one of them this week when the marriage certificate for Henry SHORNDEN and Sarah LAY arrives, but nothing should be taken for granted with that family. Two other from Hampshire will probably have to wait a couple of weeks, before I can do any more work on them down at Winchester.

Now my focus has turned to filling in the gaps with the ancestors I have already located and think about what I want to display on my finished chart. For each individual I would like to have a date and place for each of the following events: birth, baptism, marriage, death and burial. Also I would like to find a census entry for them in every census for which they were alive.

For display purposes I would also like some sort of general sentence that describes where they lived and another describing what they did for a living. This will probably have to be hand written (or hand typed), summarising information contained in many different sources rather than using the residence and occupation attributes. I haven’t decided about education yet, I probably don’t have enough information at the education of my ancestors to make it worth including.

Last week I downloaded a query from the Family Historian User Group query store (thank you to whoever upload that), which reports which census years are present for each individual. I then modified it to show all the birth, baptism, marriage, death and burial information I want, plus restricted it to only include me and six generations of my direct ancestors. I then saved the output as a tab-delimited text file and opened it up in Microsoft Excel.

The result was slightly surprising and rather disappointing, the query had worked without any problem, it was just that there were an awful lot of holes in my data. I added in a few formulas at the bottom of the data and came up with some statistics on how complete my data was based on the 123 individuals I have already found.

Marriage data was the best, I have 85% (105 out of 123) of the marriages for my direct ancestors, and I know at least one couple were never married, so that is never going to be 100%.

Birth dates are at 65% and birth places at 63%. The low figures I think are due to the fact that I have not entered a birth date or place when I already have a baptism record, rather than assume that the person was born just before the baptism and in the same parish I have left it blank. I need to see if I can find other data to confirm place of birth from the census and the GRO Indexes.

Baptism data is surprisingly low at 42%. I thought I had found more baptism records than that, as that is where much of my early research was focused.

There is quite a discrepancy between the date of death (53%) and place of death (45%). This discrepancy is largely due to me not assuming that the person died in the same parish as they were living previously or where they were buried. This is never going to be 100%, at least not whilst I am still alive!

Perhaps the most surprising figure of all is that for burials, I only have dates and places for 28% of the individuals. Like baptisms I would have expected to have found more, but I guess I haven’t really been killing off my ancestors and burying them as diligently as I should have. Again this is never going to be 100% whilst I am still alive.

I haven’t paid too much attention to the census data. I will save that for once I have established birth and death (or baptism and burial) dates for as many as possible, although in some cases the census data helps find when an individual died leaving their spouse behind.

Now I need to stop analysing and start researching, I want to have as much data as possible in place for the end of November, so I can spend the first couple of weeks in December tweaking the chart and getting it printed.

Weekly Genealogy Preview (for week 45)

This wasn’t a good week for research, but a good week for organising. Another chunk of my stuff to sort folder has been sorted. I have ordered the marriage certificate for Henry SHORNDEN and Sarah LAY, and have discovered I am missing quite a bit of data on the ancestors I already have in my Christmas Tree Project.

• Continue working on my stuff to sort folder, I cleared quite a bit last week, and I think this week I will try and sort the few United States census pages that I printed out a few years ago.
• For my Christmas Tree Project I need to start filling in some of the gaps in my research, probably by trying to find all the GRO Index references for birth, marriages and deaths that I am missing.
• I should get the marriage certificate for Henry SHORNDEN and Sarah LAY this week. That should be interesting and may well generate some more follow up work.

Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2010 website goes live

I received an email today announcing that the website for Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2010 is now live. WDYTYA Live is the biggest family history event in the UK and will be held at Olympia, London from the 26th to 28th February 2010.

The email mentions a new Photography Gallery feature for the event, which will provide information on dating, identification, preserving, digitising and restoring old photographs. This sounds very interesting, after all who hasn’t got loads of old family photos that need sorting out.

Details on the website are still pretty basic, expect more as the event draws closer. Only one celebrity is mentioned so far, Tony Robinson, best known (to me at least) for his portrayal of Baldrick in the BBC comedy Blackadder and for presenting the Channel 4 archaeology programme Time Team.

This is one of the key events of the UK family history calendar, and this year I will probably try and go on all three days because there is sure to be plenty to see and do on all three days. I could quite easily spend three days listening to lectures. Tickets are due to go on sale soon.

WSFHS Open Day and Family History Fair

Today the West Surrey Family History Society (WSFHS) held it’s annual open day and family history fair at Woking Leisure Centre in the town of Woking, Surrey.

This was the first time I had been to the WSFHS fair, but not my first visit to Woking Leisure Centre, because it is also the venue of a postcard fair, although it has been several years since I last went there.

The leisure centre is a short walk (about 15 minutes) from Woking railway station, although it looked like I was the only one who was making my way there on foot. I arrived not long after the doors opened and the large hall soon began to fill up.

There was quite a variety of stalls, well over half of them were family or local history societies and organisations, including the Society of Genealogists and the Guild of One Name Studies. There were a couple of online data providers present, Findmypast.com and The Genealogist and several offline data providers selling microfiche, printed material and CDs, like the Parish Register Transcription Society.

First of all I checked out the stock of the three postcard dealers who were there. I struck gold on the first one, and came away with six postcards all of which were priced at £2.50 each, real bargains. After that the other two seemed over-priced, but there wasn’t really anything else that caught my eye, except for one that I already have in my collection which was marked up at £25. I was glad I already had a copy, which cost me £15 several years ago.

There wasn’t really anything or anyone special that I wanted see. I should have prepared some questions for some of the people on the various society stands, but I hadn’t. Instead I wandered around checking to see what resources they had on offer, to see if there was anything that might help with my research. I could quite easily filled several bookshelves with the various books and pamphlets that were on sale, but I was good and kept my wallet in my pocket most of the time.

I did come away with three CDs, which will hopefully help my research in the future. From the Parish Register Transcription Society I got the parish registers for Cowfold, Sussex (quite a few relations in there) and the Eastern Sussex Settlement Certificates & Bonds and Parish Apprentices, which will hopefully contain several of my East Sussex relations. The WSFHS had a special offer on the third edition of their Surrey Marriages CD, and although I already have the second edition I couldn’t resist the temptation of a half price CD.

There was much that I missed out on at the fair, I didn’t take advantage of the cafe, make use of the research room, or attend any of the talks. Next time I will be better prepared with lists of questions to ask the various stalls, I should have done this time, but it was just down to laziness on my part.

I certainly looked like the fair was well attended, it was starting to get a little too crowded for my liking, but I am sure the stall holders were loving it. I shall definitely go again next year if I get the chance.

More maps for my collection

These are my latest finds from my local Oxfam shop. Three Ordnance Survey maps of Sussex dating from around 1948-9. Not particularly old or in top condition, but they were real bargains, or at least I think so, at £1.99 each

The scale of all three is the same,  1:25,000 (about 2½ inches to one mile), which is detailed enough to show the locations and outlines of larger buildings and farms. Most of the farms are named as are many of the country roads.

The one on the left is of the Haywards Heath area. Not so many places of ancestral interest here, apart from the asylum and the village of Cuckfield.

The middle one covers an area from Washington and Thakeham in the west to Bramber and Partridge Green. This includes part of Henfield, where the TROWER family were, Ashurst (home to the HAYBITTLES) and part of West Grinstead, showing some of the places where the FAIRS family lived.

The one on the right covers many ancestral villages: Cowfold, Twineham (showing the location of Ridden’s Farm, believed to be home to my WELLER ancestors), Bolney, Slaugham and Warninglid.

Whilst I don’t expect to actually discover much new information from these maps, there is always a chance of finding the location of a previously unidentified family home, that has since been demolished or changed its name.

The real interest comes from studying the maps and comparing with the present-day maps, seeing how things have changed. For example, one thing that immediately stood out was the number of trig points on these old maps, and how few of them survive today.

They had a few others in the shop, from the same series, if they are still there on Monday I may well get another couple, although these were the only ones of real family interest for me. Although I think I need to make a list of the ones I already have because I am starting to build up quite a collection.