Genealogical and local history articles and research services
Family Tree Services
How I can help you develop your family tree.
Scope
It's not uncommon for those of us alive today to not know who our ancestors of 200 years past were; what they did, where they lived, and how their movements and interactions resulted in your specific circumstance today.
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Stories that have been lost and forgotten are waiting to be rediscovered - in records, newspapers and local archives.
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Such an investigation may seem a daunting task for many, but is a passion for me.
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My services focus on the United Kingdom and the records it holds for its historical administrations. A lot of this information is available online, but a larger amount resides in physical form only in archives across the country. I also have access to worldwide online records via subscription websites for digitised records.
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In order for us to understand what you require and what can be done for you, our first port of call will be a telephone or video conversation of about half an hour.
Your Seize Quartiers
Your seize quartiers is your pedigree back to sixteen great-great grandparents (2GG); a total of 31 individuals in all, including yourself. It presents the dates and locations of birth/baptism, marriages, and death/burials where applicable, as well as occupations.
It is the most basic insight into your genealogical journey and a great starting point, detailing ancestors born in the early to mid 1800s. Typically, the records used to confirm this information will be the civil indices, censuses, the 1939 Register and, more often than not, your 2GGs will feature on family trees published by other genealogists online.
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Further information to add to these individuals' stories may be gleaned from the electoral register, the probate register, monumental inscriptions, war records and newspaper archives. Local history research into the localities and buildings in which these individuals lived may give context to their actions and movements.
Illuminating Your Living Connections
With your seize quartiers in place and research into the appropriate records completed, it is tempting to push back into the past again. We can repeat the seize quartiers process for each of your 2GGs to arrive at your 6GGs, likely born in the mid to late 1600s, using parish records.
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However, first I would recommend deepening the connection with your 1GGs and 2GGs that we already know a good deal about by opening communication with their descendants. Thanks to the popularity of social media and even small amounts of genealogical interest registered by others on various sites, it should be relatively easy to make contact with second and third cousins and their descendants; people who you may have met briefly at weddings and funerals decades ago, or perhaps not at all.
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These people are valuable, as they can provide, or point the way to, family records of your direct ancestors; photographs, diaries, records and stories that have been handed down to a single descendant out of many and perhaps lost to your branch of the family. Conversely, you may be the keeper of such heirlooms, information about which would be gratefully received by such cousins.
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By making contact with these individuals via a professional service such as myself, you can maintain anonymity if you wish. As an independent party I am able to sensitively, and yet with a detached perspective, address topics of conversation which may otherwise prove difficult. I have successful experience communicating with adoptees, half-siblings, absent parents and those with longer-term familial grievances.
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Overall, this stage may be the most rewarding to your genealogical journey. Collaboration can save a huge amount of research time, as long as any shared work is fully verified. Finding someone with a common interest makes for new friendships. If one pair of 2GGs and their ancestors are being comprehensively covered by a third cousin, it allows you to focus my research on other pairs.
Extending Your Ancestry
We are now at the point where it is appropriate to repeat the seize quartiers process for each of your 2GGs.
This section is best tackled in stages, picking a single 2GG at a time and focusing on their ancestry. Which order you pick these in is completely up to you. Many people prioritise the ancestors which bore their own birth surnames. However, it's equally as valid to first look at ancestors with prestigious or unique surnames, or ancestors from a particular area, especially if they were close to where you currently are.
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These ancestors' records will most prominently be discoverable via the baptism/marriage/burial records of the parish they lived in. These records nominally go back to 1537 and should encompass all of your 6GGs who could well have been born in the mid to late 1600s. Starting c.1700, newspapers and other printed matter are an invaluable tool in tracing occupations and movements. A good amount of wills have been published online, which can illuminate entire generations and relationships. Specific surname collaborations ('one-name studies') can put us in contact with very distant cousins who have been researching the individuals in question for years.
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During this process, it is not uncommon to have hit what genealogists refer to as a 'brick wall'. Seemingly no records of an ancestor are discoverable, perhaps because they have moved across the country, perhaps because records were neglected during the Interregnum (1649 -1660), or pertinent records haven't been digitised or have been mis-transcribed.
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If this turns out to be the case, I wholly recommend organising submission of your DNA to genealogical databases. I will happily guide you through this process, and explain what it involves and how it can help here.
Life Stories
It is likely that, of all of your ancestors found, only a few have stories which seemingly go beyond the very respectable yet mundane sequence of: birth, work, marriage, children, death.
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Yet if we begin to lie these stories out in prose, supplement it with maps that illustrate their movement, find pictures of the houses they lived in, include the events of their family, they begin to come alive once more.
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Highlighting global, national and local events amongst their personal stories is valuable in understanding why a career may have changed, a move occurred, or the financial stresses they may have been under.
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Eventually, this gives a deeper insight into who these people are. An example can be found in the life story of my own great-grandfather here. Contrast that with the story of my third great-grandmother, here, and you will see two wholly different kinds of story.
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Of course, a number of our ancestors will have led lives that left more of a footprint. Soldiers, business owners, landowners, professionals, politicians, authors, artists and gentry will all have documented evidence of their lives and works that can be collated and put into context within their family history.
You may even be fortunate enough to have had an ancestor for whom biographies have already been written, which I will be happy to direct you towards.
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It is also worth mentioning here that often you will find great-uncles and aunts who had incredible life stories, but due to the significant actions in their life, have no direct descendants of their own. As descendants of their siblings, it falls to you to include them in your family story, even if they are not direct ancestors.
Field Research
Whereas the vast majority of the work completed so far will have been a desk-based exercise, this stage involves gathering information from settlements, churches, local archives, genealogical archives and libraries that is not available online.
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My location in the Midlands of England situates me well for such endeavours across England & Wales, but I am willing and capable to travel further afield when necessary. The major restriction for such further investigation is your financial budget.
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Using the information we have gained thus far from previous steps (or your own information if you have been able to complete those steps yourself), it is sensible to combine research for multiple of your 2GG seize quartiers in the case that more than one originate from the same county. We would also combine any research for individuals in your own seize quartiers that are in similar locations.
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As each family story is different, the exact fruits of my labours will necessarily vary. A guideline as to what you might expect from me can include, but is not limited to, the following:
Photographs of historical monuments, buildings and settlements where your ancestors lived, worked and died.
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Research at county and city archives and local libraries, including transcription or copy of documents and manuscripts.
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Research with local museums, antique dealers and historical societies that can shed light on the lives and lifestyles of your ancestors.
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Research at national archives, genealogical society archives and specialist libraries that hold a vast wealth of un-digitized information.
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A planned itinerary of vetted places you may wish to visit on your own ancestral tour.
Publication
The work I undertake for you is a commission. However many stages you decide to undertake, the information we have discovered is published at your discretion. You may prefer a privately published book, numbering just a few copies, for your own shelves and those of close relatives. Such a folio would prove utterly invaluable to your curious descendants a few hundred years from now.
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You may consider an online publication, which I will happily host on this site, for ease of sharing with distant cousins that we have met along the way. This also has the advantage of being a live document, discoverable by any connected to the Internet in years to come who may link themselves to your story and perhaps even provide new information based on their own research. On a number of occasions, I have responded to forum or blog posts over 20 years old with new information and received immediate replies from the authors.
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If you like the idea of sharing information for discovery, we can easily submit your family tree to genealogical websites (some free for now, some which require subscription access) and genealogical libraries.
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If my experience so far is anything to go by, you may have uncovered one or two compelling stories with regards to an individual, a settlement, or a family involved in your ancestry. You may decide that it is worth re-telling in a more accessible medium than the genealogical history that we have made, for example a book or film. I would be pleased to offer further consultations to whichever writers or producers are involved with the sharing of those stories.