Ancestry

I am a happy Ancestry user having been a member for about 5 years now. I went to their site not long after I started taking my courses to have a look and without even doing the trial for two weeks I signed up. The first evening that I used it I found my 2x greatgrandparents (John Pincombe and Elizabeth Rew Pincombe and their five children arriving in the Port of New York on 7 Jan 1851. Boy was I happy! I had been trying to find them on immigration lists. Once the ship's lists project between Ancestry and Library and Archives Canada was digitized I found my father and his parents and my grandmother Pincombe. The English census have also been great although I subscribed to Origins in those days and found my grandparents and great grandparents and great great grandparents on there actually before I found them on Ancestry. I also located all of my grandmother's siblings who went to the United States on the American census for 1920 and 1930 making it a really handy tool that could look at families in my lifetime that I have known.

I have put my tree up on Ancestry (private) so that I can utilize their search engines and I usually go in every once in a while and look at their hints for family members. I was up to 142 people again so I went in and worked at that yesterday. I discovered that another member had put up images of parish registers for my Butt family which was absolutely wonderful. I thought the only way I was going to get to look at the original Dorset records for Winterborne Stickland, Winterborne Clenstone, Milton Abbas and Winterborne Houghton was to go to Dorchester, Dorset myself. Verification of those records was gratefully received. Once I open up my one name study trees on Ancestry to public view I may consider adding in the images for those particular individuals in the one name study.

I continued looking at the Blake family even going so far as to look at all the Blake entries on ancestry for Hampshire in various census. There are 994 in 1851, 1034 in 1861, 1134 in 1871, 1434 in 1881, 1231 in 1891, 1282 in 1901 and 294 in 1911. Given that that was too many to look at I then decided to look at Andover itself as birth place yielding 24 in 1851, 43 in 1861, 25 in 1871, 42 in 1881, 47 in 1891, 44 in 1901 and 24 in 1911. There could be spelling errors as I did an exact search only. This may be the way to look at Blake families from 1841 to 1911 in Hampshire and I will think about extracting the information on the various families. A search of the 1911 census for Blake in the United Kingdom revealed over 18800 entries. I was surprised to find only 294 in 1911 in Hampshire.

Today I will continue looking at the Blake and Hinxman families from the viewpoint of historical records. I want to check the Visitations for Hinxman families as I have never done that.