Today we attended a lecture at BIFHSGO which is unusual for us but mostly just because we haven't had a chance to attend many meetings - time has escaped us. The lecture today was by a noted English researcher touring North America. Lady Mary Teviot speaking on "I never thought of that: a second look at problems." Lady Mary is President of the Federation of Family History Societies. Her lecture was quite good and she managed to give a taste of pretty well all of the records one would find in a Parish Chest plus other items of interest. Although I didn't learn anything new at all it was interesting to hear how she solved some interesting dilemmas. I had had my own dilemma with my paternal grandmother and discovering her birth/baptism records and the pattern for finding these records is basically quite similar. Find them on the census every ten years. If you cannot find them then start looking at their siblings (in this case half-siblings) and find the mother's maiden name. Once found then buy the marriage registration and you will then have her mother's father's name. Then look at the census again and in my case I found my grandmother with her grandparents as a child of five. Then I could order the birth registration and I also found her baptism. In this case it was exactly where my father had said she was baptized - it was the name not being the same through the census.
For some of my ancestral lines I can just move back easily through the parish records, land records, wills of a particular village and there is my line but for others it is a lot of deep searching through adjoining parishes (wondering how my families moved about so often in the 16th and 17th centuries!) looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. I only have one line that extends back into London (my 2x great grandfather Henry Christopher Buller's family) and the new release on Ancestry of the LMA parish registers has been a wondrous happening which will involve long hours of working my way through adjoining parishes to see if I can find the marriage of my 3x great grandparents Christopher Buller and Mary Beard (which fortunately Henry Beard my 4x great grandparent mentions in his will). Working my way back through the Beard family will also be a challenge although the marriage of my 4x great grandparents Henry Beard and Elizabeth Hemsley is known. A lot of her talk was looking at London records so again I found that interesting as she was verifying my thought on just how I am going to find some items. Parishes are very close together and people moved from one parish to another. I will need to do the hard slogging through the registers to find the details I am presently missing.
I spent the first part of the morning before going off to the lecture looking at the Routledge material once again. I know that I am descended from the Oakshaw Routledge family which means a lot of close Routledge marriages and already Mary (my 2x great grandmother) has six of her eight great grandparents with the surname Routledge, the other two surnames are Tweddle and Robson. I think it is highly likely that many of the 16 2x great grandparents are also Routledge and with others being Nixon, Tweddle, Robson, and Bushby. As more and more Oakshaw wills come to light that will assist me in putting together my Routledge family but I suspect that eventually I will come back to one or two Routledge lines with my ancestry collapsing as I move back rather than expanding! But then that is how it has to be as there were not millions and millions of people so at some point I have to have many many ?x great grandparents in common. I have three instances now - the Routledge family, the Blake family (two lines thus far) and the Knight family (two lines - two of my 3x great grandparents were first cousins - Eleanor Knight and Ellis Knight). This does have an impact on my family tree reducing the number of ancestors that I have.
I will start in on Parish Register 3 for Andover. I was debating where to start my transcriptions but I am really keen to have a close up look at this time period in Andover. I also need to work on Timberscombe as my one use usage of the Bishops Transcripts runs out in the spring and I need to have completed the transcription and sent it back to the co-ordinators so that it can be submitted to FreeREG and to the LDS. This winter will be a lot of transcription of the various registers that I have purchased in the last six years of doing genealogy. I want to complete everything before I begin purchasing of items once again. I still have a stack of printed documents for Andover (Foxcott in particular) to look at to discover more about my Blake family there.
I also have a number of Routledge wills that I need to transcribe. When I purchased them I did not have any real idea of which particular abode was theirs so I have a mixture of wills that seemed interesting. As it turns out I do know that some of my Routledge ancestors were from Oakshaw but other lines were from different areas so my purchases will all probably be quite interesting.
We purchased some material which I will make up into the pattern. My husband likes this material although I am partial to the velvet. We will see how it looks! My sewing begins on Monday. It actually shouldn't take very long. The longest part is sometimes the pressing.
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