Boundary significance

I should have been doing some family history last night, but I got side-tracked into fiddling about with the “new” Ordnance Survey getamap website. It is not really that new and is an updated version of the old website where you can view portions of Ordnance Survey mapping.

I have been struggling to get the website to print any more than a few pixels of any map, but I think I have a work-around for that now. I was then trying to work out whether it was worth subscribing to the website (£30 per year at the moment) to get extra features, but I was then distracted into looking at the county boundary that I cross every day to and from work.

I was playing with the route creating facility, it is really quite good as not only will it show you the distance but also the elevation and tell you how long it ought to take to walk (and run or cycle) the distance, practising using the route that I sometimes walk between Horley to Gatwick Airport.

With Henry GASSON in the back of my mind I started to study the route of the Sussex/Surrey border. I am pretty certain that the border has been moved since Henry’s time, and I am positive that Henry wouldn’t have recognised the land surrounding the boundary. I am not convinced that he would have realised that there was a boundary there in the first place, let alone placed any significance on the fact that he was moving his family from one side to the other.

For my own part though the boundary seemingly holds a significance which I can’t really explain. Measuring the distance from my place of work to the boundary I worked out I could make my way back over into my native Sussex in just under 15 minutes. The closest point is just under two-thirds of a mile away, admittedly it is not a particularly appealing part of Sussex, being on the outskirts of Gatwick Airport, but it is Sussex nevertheless.

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.
	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Henry GASSON – more census lessons learnt

In an effort to fill one of the small gaps in my family tree I have been trying to find out where and when my 4x great-grandfather Henry GASSON died and where he was subsequently buried. Henry GASSON holds a special place in my heart because it was he and his wife and children who brought my particular GASSON line over the border from Surrey into Sussex sometime around 1830.

What limited work I had done previously had left Henry in Slaugham, Sussex in 1851 and I had been unable to find him in the 1861 census. There was only one death registration in the GRO indexes between 1851 and 1861 (in Horsham Registration District in Q1 1860), so it seemed quite likely that this was my Henry, but I never pursued it further at the time.

Picking up from where I left off several years ago I decided that I needed to find a bit more evidence before I invested my hard-earned money in a copy of the death certificate for the 1860 death registration. It didn’t take long (with the help of the SFHG Data Archive) to find a burial at Horsham, Sussex in February 1860 for a two-year old Henry, clearly this wasn’t my 4x great-grandfather.

So back to the drawing board, but armed with this information it seemed likely that Henry should be somewhere in the 1861 census, waiting to be discovered. I headed back to Ancestry, Findmypast and The Genealogist and still no sign of my Henry. There was a Henry of the right age in Rye, Sussex but that was too far of a leap geographically. There was a Henry in Slaugham, Sussex but he was too young.

Then remembered my experience with FreeCen several months ago, and how it had come to my rescue. I was lost for words when once again FreeCen delivered the goods and came up with my Henry GASSON. He was the correct age and living in Slaugham, how could I and the three big names in online genealogy have missed him?

Now I knew where Henry was it was easy to find him on Ancestry, Findmypast and The Genealogist. The biggest surprise to me was that the transcribers for all three sites had made the same mistake, they had all recorded his age as 26 years and not 76 years. I know the numbers are not particularly clear (the vertical check mark on the left doesn’t help) but there is no horizontal stroke across the both of the 7 that would have made it a 2. Although I would have to admit that the top horizontal stroke looks a little rounded, but that doesn’t really make it into the number 2.

I shouldn’t really have been surprised that FreeCen had the correct age, after all I have had success before, but what really did surprise me was that all the other three sites had interpreted it the same. I know I would have found Henry eventually on any of the three main sites if I had persevered and dug a little deeper beyond the index entries, but to be honest I wouldn’t have expected such a large error on Henry’s age, perhaps a few years but not fifty years.

My next step would almost certainly have found him because I was going to progress to tracing all his children in the 1861 census. Henry is lodging with one of his married daughters, but the fact she was married might have slowed things down, plus Henry and his wife did have fourteen children so it might have taken me a while to get around to tracing the right child.

I would have been much simpler for me to have searched FreeCen at the start, something that I must remember in the future.

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.
	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What’s in it for me: Militia records on Findmypast.co.uk

Findmypast.co.uk have recently released a new record collection, the Militia Attestation Papers 1806-1915, containing indexed images from The National Archives series WO96. According to The National Archives website:

The Militia was a part-time voluntary force. It was organised by county and existed mainly to help defend Britain and Ireland.

Modern militias were created by the Militia Act of 1757 and have been through many changes since. They were absorbed into the Territorial Army in 1908.

These records only contain details for other ranks and not officers. According to the findmypast news article the records were created when the men joined up and “were annotated until the solider was discharged so provide full details of time in service. And, since the militia recruits were part-time, there are details of the jobs the men undertook for the rest of the time.”

Like other service records there was a medical examination involved in the attestation process so the records include a physical description of the individual including details of height, weight, chest measurement, complexion, eye colour, hair colour and distinctive marks, and marks indicating congenital peculiarities or previous disease.

So what’s in it for me…

This collection is one of those collections that I will need to go back to time and time again, as you never know who might have spent time in the militia, so anyone of the right age will need to be checked.

Some initial searches however did turn up a couple of interesting GASSON entries. I wasn’t really expecting to find either of them although one was more unexpected than the other.

The records were for two of my 2x great-uncles George GASSON and William James GASSON. Although they were brothers they don’t seem to have signed up together and their army careers were quite different.

George GASSON spent six years in the militia, and spent some time in South Africa. William James on the other hand was only briefly in the militia before transferring to the regular army. I knew that William James had spent time in the army from his First World War service record which showed he had served prior to 1914.

Tragically William James died in 1915, and is remembered on the war memorial in the church at Sayers Common, West Sussex. I have no idea whether George GASSON served during the First World War, I would think he probably did, but I need to check that.

When they attested they both listed their mother (Mary Ann GASSON) as their next of kin and not their father George Thomas GASSON who was by that time in an asylum. The interesting thing is they both give her address as Little Leigh Cottages, an address which I haven’t come across before.

I haven’t been able to locate where Little Leigh Cottages were/are yet. One entry records this as being in Hurstpierpoint, Sussex and the other as Cuckfield, Sussex. Perhaps it is somewhere between the two or maybe one is a postal address, with letters being directed to a nearer Post Office in a different parish. I can’t find it on any recent maps, so I may have to spend more time working on locating this one.

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.
	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

1911 census images on Ancestry.co.uk

When it comes to the Ancestry.co.uk website you never know quite what you are going to wake up to. This morning I took a look at the website and discovered that they have uploaded images from the 1911 census for England, Wales, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

The images are not indexed yet, or at least the index is not online yet. I am sure we will hear more about this when the news is officially released by Ancestry but for now you will need to have an idea where you should be looking, possibly using their previously released Census Summary Books.

According to their source information page: “They can be browsed by county, civil parish, sub-registration district, and enumeration district.”

I am certain a lot of people have been eagerly awaiting this release and even if you haven’t it will be good to have another alternative index available when it does go live. Unfortunately we still have to wait until next year to view the contents of the infirmity column.

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.
	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Familyrelatives.com celebrate their fifth birthday with a special offer

To celebrate their fifth birthday Familyrelatives.com have announced a special subscription offer, until the 31st May 2011 you can get 20% off an annual subscription. This means you will be paying £25 ($42 or €29) for a year’s access to the website.

Familyrelatives.com is not a name that comes up often on this blog or in the genealogy news and they obviously don’t have the same sort of budget as the big name data providers, and their collections are not as extensive but they do deserve a closer look.

What I really like about their website is that they have all their English collections listed and linked on one page along with links across the top of that page to collections for other countries.

There is quite a cross-section of records on the site. They have the GRO BMD Indexes (partially indexed), a selection army and navy records, a large selection of directories, school records and medical registers, as well as a selection of parish registers for a variety of places.

If you are not interested in a subscription there is a pay-per-view option for some of the records and they even have some free to view records (details here and here). If you are interested then don’t hang about, you don’t have long to take advantage of this special offer.

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.
	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.