Oh dear. Ancestry, you have really outdone yourself this time.
I have just found the will of someone called...
Wait for it...
....
....
Are you still there...?
...
... the will of
... Willans Jestament
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
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Lifelines Research
@Dave_Lifelines
Dave Annal. Family historian, lecturer, author. Former Principal Family History Specialist at The National Archives. 40 years in the business. Loves a good map.
Lifelines Research’s Tweets
I'm sorry to be the bearer of some terribly sad news. My good friend, former colleague and co-author, Audrey Collins, passed away at the weekend after a short illness. I know that Audrey’s loss will be felt by genealogists all around the world and that she will be sorely missed.
Well what do you know...!?!?
I've been elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society!
As someone who left school (and formal education) after doing my O'Levels in 1976, I really couldn't be more proud.
Huge thanks to for supporting my application.
Pleased to hear and the medical expert saying that our ancestors would have been just as distressed by the deaths of their children as we are today. We often hear people spouting the idea that they didn't care as much because it happened so often. #AHouseThroughTime
So this, ladies & gentlemen, boys & girls, is why we should ALWAYS look at original documents and not rely on transcripts and indexes.
A family tree, scribbled on the back of a Bedfordshire administration bond, dating from 1743. And yes, it relates to the subject(s) of the bond.
One of the youngest people I've ever found recorded in the census. This is from 1891 and they only just made it in time...!
I am very proud and honoured to announce that I have been awarded a Fellowship of the Society of Genealogists. A big thank you to whoever nominated me (I have a sneaking suspicion!) and to everyone at the Society who supported my nomination. David Annal F.S.G. Who’d have thought!
Let's raise a glass to Richard Davies, the Vicar of Holywell, Flintshire. Beginning a new marriage register in August 1782 he decided to record extra information about the couples getting married - their ages and their parents' names, sometimes including the mother's maiden name!
Has anyone else ever overdosed on family history research? I’ve spent so much time working on one particular case over the past couple of weeks that I actually woke up this morning feeling that I needed a whole day away from anything of a genealogical nature…
Time for my Neat Handwriting of the day award.
Today's example is the early 18th century work of the clerk of St Botolph, Aldersgate.
Do we have a winner...?
Just heard that Jeremy Gibson died last week. One of the biggest names in UK genealogy and someone to whom all genealogists owe a huge debt of gratitude. His vast body of work will serve as a fitting memorial to the man. #RIPJeremyGibson
One day I'm going to publish a book celebrating the work of Bored Clerks Through The Ages.
Here we have a Royal Naval clerk, with a wonderful piece of nautical time wasting from 1815, which appears in the ship's musters for HMS Grasshopper...
( ref: ADM 37/5660)
Clerk: Damn! I've made a mistake.
Other clerk: Just cross it out. They'll never notice...
I've just been working through the will of a 17th century Bedfordshire yeoman farmer who died unmarried in 1661, aged 83.
He names more than 50 beneficiaries, most of them nephews and nieces, great nephews and great nieces and assorted cousins.
It's a one document family tree!
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Your regular reminder NOT to pay the extortionate prices quoted by Ancestry to supply you with GRO certificates. You can pay £24.99 to Ancestry or get the exact same thing direct from the GRO for £11.00. All Ancestry do is order the certificate from the GRO and send it to you...
I've said it before, and I will undoubtedly say it again, but there are few more beautiful things on this earth than a good, mid-to-late 19th century, hand-coloured, 25 inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map.
I mean, feast your eyes on this...
#AncestryHour
Today I walked in my ancestors' footsteps. I saw the house where my 3xGt Grandmother worked as a governess; I went to the churchyard where she was buried; I went to the chapel where my 2xGt Grandfather worshipped and I walked along the road where his son was born.
Good evening #AncestryHour
We had to say goodbye to our cat, Misty, at the weekend 😢and it got me thinking about the importance of pets in our ancestors' lives.
So I though it might be nice to share photos of ancestral pets. Here's one of my grandma's Siamese cat, Samson.
I'm going to have to be careful Googling this placename...
Is it just me or is there something intrinsically pleasing about the juxtaposition of a 16th century manor court roll and a 21st century laptop…?
Things our ancestors lied about:
- their age
- their name
- their birthplace
- their parentage
- their marital status
Things they didn't lie about:
- errr...
- uhmmm...
- 🤔
-🤷♂️
#RootsTechLondon #MyAncestorWasALiar #Genealogy #FamilyHistory
Spending the day sorting the items from #MyGrannysTreasureChest
Everything’s going - unfolded - into acid-free pockets/folders.
Currently in phase #1 - known in the business as the ‘Where The Hell Do I Start?’ phase…
My client’s ancestor married 4 times. She had details of #1, #2 & #4 and a theory about #3. In 48 hours I’ve disproved the theory about #3 and raised doubts about #4. She now knows less about her family than when I started.
Lifelines Research: destroying family trees since 1984!
I think I may have tweeted this when I photographed the document a couple of months ago but I've been working on the document today and I just felt that it needs to be seen by as many people as possible.
If that's not a work of art, what is...?
We said goodbye to our beautiful Misty today. She was nearly 18 years old and without question the most loved cat ever.
RIP my lovely 🥰 😢
There should be some sort of retrospective genealogical medal awarded to people who used ancestral surnames as middle names for their children...
I've decided to adopt a new approach to reporting transcription errors to Ancestry.
Too passive-aggressive...?
Another productive weekend spent sorting out boxes in the attic. Found this collection of my mother-in-law’s diaries dating from 1948. We also have larger ones for 1943 & 44 covering her life as a ‘Mischling’ in wartime Berlin. Not quite Anne Frank but there’s some amazing stuff.
I know it’s not all about size, but I’m quite pleased to have completed a 21- generation family tree for my client...
I've said it before and I will undoubtedly say it again: the Ordnance Survey hand-coloured 1st Edition 25" maps are a work of art and a thing of beauty.
And you can view them free of charge on the website. maps.nls.uk/os/
Well, what are you waiting for...?
Well, I've gone and written another 'ranty' blog post!
This one is all about the current obession with user-provided content on the major commercial genealogical websites.
Personally, I think it's killing 'proper' family history research...
Fifteen years ago today I was forced to leave my dream job when the Family Records Centre closed its doors for the last time.
Excuse the emotive language but I still can't bring myself to forgive those who made the decision to close down the best public service there ever was...
Your regular reminder that you should NEVER order GRO certificates from Ancestry.
Certificates cost £11.00 from the GRO (£7.00 for pdf copies of births 1837-1921 and deaths 1837-1957).
Ancestry will charge you £24.99 for exactly the same product.
#Outrageous #Profiteering
A tip for genealogists.
If you're struggling to find the origins of an ancestor who was born sometime around 1817, have a look for the record of her second marriage in 1897.
No idea why I didn't think of that sooner... 🤷♂️
The only remotely disappointing thing about John Rocque’s stunning 1745 map of London on the Locating London’s Past website is that the little yellow man icon doesn’t take you to an 18th century London street view!
#BigScreenThursday - it’s a thing
About twenty five years ago, I got a copy of my 2xGt Grandfather, Thomas PORT's will. My grandma was the illegitimate daughter of Thomas's oldest son and we knew nothing about the family. The will mentioned a family bible and a few minutes ago I was sent this...
I am buzzing!
In a previous life, I was involved in planning and delivering the release of the 1901 and 1911 censuses. Now, I’m delighted to announce my involvement in the release of yet another online census.
How have I never come across this before? The Poor Law Unions' Gazette: a weekly newspaper that published the names & other details of people who had deserted their families. Available on and from 1857-1903 and packed full of the names of ordinary people!
When you’re trying to prove that Person A (married 1815, 10 children) is the same as Person B (convicted of receiving stolen goods and sent to prison for a year in 1817) it’s nice to find a record of the 1817 baptism of his second child giving *this* as his abode! #AncestryHour
Name something better than hand-coloured 19th century 25" to the mile maps. Go on...
It's not often you can fit the entire text of a will into a single tweet and still have characters to spare...
Juanarey 2:1739 40
I make Marey Cole My
Hole and Sole Exoteris
I mene my Wife Marey Cole
P[e]r. John Cole
And that, boys and girls, that seemingly-inconsequential little word in brackets, is why we should ALWAYS seek out the original and not just rely on what the transcript tells us. Even when it appears to be a pretty good transcript...
#365Relatives #365Anniversaries
The subject of today's family anniversary is ... me!
David ANNAL was born on 6 January 1961 at the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh.
60 years old. How did that happen...? 🤷♂️
I genuinely think that we've reached the point where the amount of utter nonsense contained in personal Ancestry Family Trees is drowning out the proper research and the actual sources. How are beginners supposed to differentiate? I begin to despair for the future of genealogy...
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Good evening #AncestryHour
I've been working on a new project - my own family for once!
I've created a spreadsheet to record addresses for each of my 8 Gt Grandparents on a yearly basis. I'm going through every document I have relating to each of them and extracting the details.
Driving back from a lovely (but very windy!) walk and what do you know...? The road’s full of ducks...
🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆
#OnlyInShropshire
We bought ourselves one of those flatpack cat kits. Unfortunately it didn’t come with any instructions and I’m not sure that we’ve put it together properly…
If I could give one piece of advice to family historians just setting out on their research, it would be this: if you can possibly manage it, have ancestors from Cardington in Bedfordshire. The 1782 inhabitants list is one of the most remarkable documents I’ve ever come across…
You see, the problem with just blindly accepting hints and adding names to your family tree without doing any sort of evidence-based research is that not only do you risk ending up with the wrong people on your tree but you also stop looking for the right people... #Genealogy
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42/52 It’s quite rare to have pictures of our ancestors at work, particularly our female ones. So I’m delighted to have this photo of my granny, which helpfully has a note on the back, written by my mum. “Mother at Boot’s, Argyle Place”. Edinburgh, mid-1920s?
#MyFamilyHistory52
This is a public service announcement. Don't EVER order your GRO certificates through Ancestry. Why pay £24.99 for something which will cost you just £11.00 if you order direct from the GRO.
Be wise.
Don't let them rip you off.
#Profiteering #RipOff
gro.gov.uk/gro/content/ce
In 1808 Napoleon issued a decree, ordering “the Jews of our states” to adopt fixed surnames. Last night I found one of the most remarkable family documents I’ve ever come across; the signed declaration of my wife’s 4xGt Grandfather, stating that he’d adopted the surname SCHWARTZ.
She seems to have married in 1974 and was living in Manchester in 2002.
A pie chart to illustrate an important research point...*
* based on 100% made-up data
Are online family trees and ‘hints’ killing genealogy? I’ve found so much misleading rubbish online recently and I’m beginning to despair. I was sitting next to someone today whose ‘research’ was entirely based on trees and hints. It’s not research, its nosearch! #AncestryHour
I was looking for the baptism of a woman born c.1764 this afternoon. No trace under the surname so I searched for an illegitimate child with the right first name and found one in the right time & place. Three years on the mother married a man with the right surname. #AncestryHour
Picture the scene.
It's 1603.
You're the clerk of a small City of London parish.
A new king has just ascended the throne.
How do you choose to mark the event?
Like this, of course...
Good Evening #AncestryHour
Well, despite being rejected by and plagued by , this has actually been a good week. I finished my talk for and found this photo of my 3xGt Grandfather, Robert SINCLAIR - a man I’d never seen a picture of before!
I finally got around to reading 's The Five and what can I say? A magnificent example to all family and social historians of how to reconstruct the lives of our ordinary working class ancestors. And, of course, a well-directed, political tour de force as well...
#AncestryHour I stumbled across this earlier today and I can safely say that I’ve never seen anything like it before. A man names his two sons as beneficiaries in his will and gives their dates of birth and places of baptism!
Now, wouldn’t it be nice if all testators did that...
I suspect that my grandma, as an only child, and the illegitimate daughter of a man of substance, was, shall we say, 'indulged' as a young girl...
This is what I was working on yesterday. 18 generations from my client back to Anne Boleyn’s grandfather. Not a bad day’s work...
Calling all cat-loving #Twitterstorians
We’re about to be adopted by these two feline reprobates.
So what are we going to call them? (The ginger one identifies as male and the black one as female.)
Go…
Here's a great example of why you should ALWAYS check the original and not rely on a transcript. This is the surname recorded at the baptism of an illegitimate child. Look closely and you can just make out another name. And guess what? It turns out to be the father's surname...
My #Archive30 #FavouriteItem is actually a collection of favourite items; my mother-in-law's diaries, from 1943 to 1994. Not every year is there but collectively, they are the highlight of our family archive, particularly the earliest ones, covering her life in Berlin during WW2.
Dear everyone. I think I've just found your ancestor...
"A poore man died by the
high waye whose names
could not be knowen"
Bishop's Transcripts, Stondon, Hertfordshire 26 March 1630
So, you're aged 32 and you're a widower? You've been married for 20 years, you're stepfather to a 28-year old and three others, and you've had 2 children, 4 of whom are still alive?
The author of this work of fiction from the 1911 census will be the subject of my next blog post.
And the winner of today's Neat Handwriting award is...
The clerk of St Bride's, Fleet Street in the late 1790s!
Good evening #AncestryHour
I have just, in the last few minutes, discovered that my grandma had an older brother who died aged just 7 weeks.
I'm still reeling a bit from the discovery...
New blog post alert!
This one's a case study that I worked on recently (published with permission from my client) and I've used it to illustrate the dangers inherent in blindly accepting online hints and suggestions from the big commercial websites.
I've been writing a client report this morning and I'm currently struggling through the bit that goes:
"And this couple had six children born between 1842 and 1849, five of whom died before reaching their first birthday."
That one survivor must have been so precious to them...
One of the great things about owning maps is that, unlike text books, which quickly become out of date, maps actually improve with age. My collection of (mostly) forty year-old OS Landranger maps is now a useful historical record of a largely pre-motorway Britain.
Apologies for an off-topic Tweet but I was pretty pleased with this photo I took of a redwing in the holly tree in my garden this morning.
#birdphotography #BirdsOfTwitter #birdwatching #BBCSpringwatch
The response to my Tweet about Audrey has been incredible. I knew how much she was loved and respected but it's been so moving to read your comments. I'll make sure the family see them.
I've somehow managed to get an article written today. Now I think it's time for a lie down.
I feel that a neat handwriting award is long overdue. Here's a candidate ... the nameless clerk who scribed this will in 1723.
I'd give a lot to be able to write like this...
My mum died twenty years ago today.
It feels like a lifetime ago but it also seems like it just happened yesterday.
She pops in my dreams from time to time so we still get to have a little chat...
RIP Kathleen Flynn (25 August 1927 - 13 October 2002)
Three months ago today, my friend died.
There hasn't been a day since then that I haven't thought about her, usually because I want to ask her or tell her about something interesting that I've found.
I don't suppose that will ever go away...
Replying to
Send him down to the Archives so that he can be properly cat-alogued... #SorryNotSorry
Received a GRO marriage certificate in the post today. My hunch was right. They were marrying 15 years AFTER their first child was born! I now know that he was a widower so my theory is that they couldn’t marry before as his first wife was still alive. A fun day‘s research ahead.
Am I imagining this or does my zoomed-right-out family tree look like a WW2 warship?
An early candidate for the neatest handwriting in the 1921 census...
My #Genealogy tip of the day...
When searching records like rate books & tax records, try leaving the first name out of your search. People are often listed as 'Mr' or 'Widow' or even 'Wife of'. By including the first name you risk filtering out the records you're looking for.
One of my aims for 2023 is to sort out the box of photos, documents and ephemera that I inherited when my granny died in 1991. Which I realise now was nearly half my life ago…
My research day just got even better.
The family I’m researching had a bucher’s shop in the Fleet Market and I just found this contemporary image of the market - which looks magnificent on the BIG SCREEN!
I may have to go and have a little lie down...
#BigScreenThursday
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is no single more important part of the research process, than the part where you write it all up.
It’s only by bringing it all together into a chronological, coherent narrative that you can really start to make sense of it all.
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Just got the feedback from London 2019. 4.83 out of 5 for the ‘class’ and 4.85 for the presenter! Really pleased with all the comments. My two favourites: ‘he is a great storyteller’ and ‘expert but not musty’. I’m putting that on my business card!
This is the first of an occasional series of blog posts in which I'll focus on particular areas of UK genealogical research and try to demonstrate how we can shed light on our ancestors and see them as real people instead of just names on a family tree.
lifelinesresearch.co.uk/2020/01/12/the
Just finished my talk and the sun’s come out so I took a quick stroll across the road to Bunhill Fields where I noticed a stone which perfectly illustrates what every gravestone in my family DOES’NT look like...
Welcome to my first blog post of 2022!
It's an attempt to address people's concerns regarding the charges to view the 1921 census and comprises a very brief history of the releases of the English & Welsh census returns
Sometimes you need to print things out and scribble on them to really understand what’s going on…
Wow - that's brilliant! I have a similar picture of my granny working in Boots in Argyle Place, Edinburgh in the early 1920s...
For me, 2019 has been very much about our lying ancestors. In 2020 I’ll be focusing on the impact of illegitimacy on our ancestors’ lives. And here’s a good example that I found this week. The vicar clearly wasn’t going to allow this young bride to lie about her parentage.
Transcribing a mid-16th century will is so much easier when you can use a BIG screen...
Happy New Year to all my Twitter friends. I know that some parts of Twitter can be very dark indeed but those bits inhabited by the genealogy and history community are (mostly!) havens of sanity!
Hopefully this won't be Twitter's last year but if it is, well, it's been a blast...
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