Ok where to start.
This past weekend I've been researching two lines of my UK / Welsh family.
CASE 1: For my 1st family consisting of the last name of Palmer, Sayer, Peacock, Allen, Leggett, Pelfrey I could figure out where all the places where. And is some cases there were different names for the same place in the various records.
Google maps to the rescue. On a lark I started entering in the places to Google maps. For about a 100 yrs most were born, baptized, married and died in about a 3 sq mile area of London England. To keep track I used the direction function to get an idea of how far people had to travel. While definitely not genealogical proof, the clustering gave me confidence that the records I was finding matched the people I was researching. And if somebody was a 100 miles or even 20 miles away, I ignored them for the time being. Below is an example of such a plot done based on several of the points related to one family over a period of time.
CASE 2: My Welsh Evans, Price line. This family has been a tough nut to crack because of common name of John Evans. Making it harder was the fact in the 1881 and 1891 census his wife Anne Evans (nee Price) was shown without John but the number of kids grew, so somebody was coming home. So how to find John. I knew the names because I have the birth certificate and marriage certificate of their daughter, Margaret Ellen Evans (my great grandmother). Looking at my grandfathers birth certificate I found the house name with the parish and registration district. This also matched where Margaret Evans lived in the 1891 census.
How to find the house. Well the National Library of Scotland (start here and zoom in to area of interest - https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=5&lat=55.78537&lon=-3.16449&layers=1&b=1) to the rescue with it's maps from 1888-1913. Using the search function the best I seem to be able to do is the parish or town/village. Then it's sometimes just a matter of looking around the area. In my case the house name is Abertrinant in the census and birth certificate. Looking at houses on the census they also match up to other house on the same page. So I was able to find my grandfathers birthplace. A house which still exists today. The first picture is from the NLS site and the 2nd from Google Earth.
Margaret Evans birth certificate said she was born at Betting-du cottage. While it no longer exists it does show up on the NLS historic map.
You will notice the pins. I've started to 'drop' the pins at key locations in my families life. This way I can create a KMZ file to share where people have lived. You can also add links to the pins so you can have the NLS map show up in Google Earth. Or anything else you wish to share as shown below.
Hope this helps in figuring out where your people were and are from.
No comments:
Post a Comment