Searching for ancestors...

oooooh, I've found a new hobby :)


Was given a link to a couple of websites yesterday, one of them (ancestry.co.uk) set me off on the "tracing your ancestors" trail, and I think I'm hooked now.

I tried to do this four years ago, even bought some software that helped you draw up a family tree then left you high and dry to fill inthe details when I realised it was based on access to American registery web sites - the places you go to to check Births Marriages and Deaths.

Since then the UK seems to have caught up and grown up with the idea that ordinary citizens should have the right to browse public archives online and there are something like 150 years worth of public records available now.

In two hours yesterday I followed my family through the bits that I already knew back to the 1901 census where I found my paternal grandfather as a boy living with his parents and NINE other brothers and sisters in a pub in Meanwood, Leeds.

I knew about the pub because its still there and when my dad was alive he'd poin tit out every time we passed it, telling me that if his father had won the coin toss then we'd have been running the bloody pub instead of his cousins family, quite honestly I'm glad my grandad lost the pub, its a right shithole.

So I found my great-grandfather and now know how old he was in 1901 and hence his birth year, my next task is to trace his birth certificate and move further back -its addictive !

And then we started on Suzannes family.

Suzanne comes from a mining village background where it was common for families to have six or even ten children, Suzanne has five brothers and sisters and her mother is one of nine so her family tree is going to provide full time employment for the next six or seven years.

We chose her mothers fathers line to go back down and again found our way to 1901 very easily, especially as the 1901 census is free to access, ie you don't have to pay any fees to view the info unless you want to view the actual documents. I really wanted to view her families census form so I paid £5 for access to ten document downloads and got the page from the census that listed her great-grandfathers family at the time.

They lived in the next village to the one they are in now but as all the villages around there were attached to pits that were owned by the Delaval family then its not suprising that they moved three miles in 100 years, they would have moved to their current location when their own pit closed.

Her grandfather had three other siblings and the children and both parents all lived in one room, looking at the address it seems to have been a sub-divided house, the father is listed as "miner, hourly paid" which basically means he was the lowest of the low and only worked when there was a demand at the pit, one of the children was also working, the eldest boy was 14 years old and was listed as "miner, pony driver" which is self explanatory - its this sort of detail that I love to read about even though you are peeking at someone elses miserable lives.

In contrast my great-gradfathers family of ten had two of the boys old enough to work in 1901, one was an apprentice plasterer and the other at 21 years of age an auctioneer - this one is interesting because one generation down from him my fathers cousin ended up as a director of a large estate agents, not sure if there is a link yet but theres another branch to climb down :)

The two families seem poles apart, one scraping (literally) a living underground and the other running a succesful business producing sons who were succesful in their own lines of business, my grandad formed the company that I run now, another one of his brothers continued the pub business.

One thing is worthy of note though - none of the daughters of either family are listed as having jobs of any description.