Category Archives: research

Back From The Dead?

Posted on November 26, 2020 by Lifelines Research

This is the second part of the story of Stephen Willis, the Ramsgate hawker, and his parents, Stephen Willis senior and Ellen (née Foley). In the first part, we followed Stephen senior from his birth in Bishopsbourne near Canterbury in … Continue reading →

Posted in Document Sources, Local History, research, Stories, Surnames | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

A Waste of Time and Money

Posted on November 21, 2020 by Lifelines Research

I remember thinking, when I was just setting out on my family history research as a naïve fifteen year old, that this genealogy business was quite a simple affair. Once you’d found a record of someone’s birth, you looked for … Continue reading →

Posted in Local History, research, Stories | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Unhappy Differences

Posted on October 18, 2020 by Lifelines Research

It’s every family historian’s dream to have the opportunity to research and write about an ancestor who left a mark. It doesn’t even need to have been a big mark. Perhaps they were involved in a major political event or, … Continue reading →

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So, what next?

Posted on September 20, 2020 by Lifelines Research

Two weeks ago today, I sat down and composed a blog post entitled, Where Have All The Registers Gone? I referred to it as a ‘soapbox’ piece and my aim was to highlight what I saw as a serious problem … Continue reading →

Posted in Document Sources, research, Soapbox | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Where have all the registers gone?

Posted on September 6, 2020 by Lifelines Research

Let’s make something clear right from the start. I am a huge fan of digitisation and online access in genealogy. Both as an enthusiastic hobbyist and as a professional genealogist with 37 years’ experience, I have reason, on a daily … Continue reading →

Posted in Document Sources, research | Tagged , , , , , | 76 Comments

Blank spaces and circumstantial evidence

Posted on August 19, 2020 by Lifelines Research

This is the fourth part of the three-part story of the life of my great, great, great grandmother, Mary Ann Port, which aims to explain why, despite the absence of evidence that she ever had any children, I believe her … Continue reading →

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My friend Miss Mary Ann Port

Posted on August 15, 2020 by Lifelines Research

This is the third and final part of the story of my great, great, great grandmother, Mary Ann Port. You can read the first part here and the second part here. The long, drawn-out Chancery Case, Port v. Hovil[1], had … Continue reading →

Posted in research, Stories | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

All and every my child and children

Posted on July 18, 2020 by Lifelines Research

Our efforts to reconstruct the lives of our pre-Victorian ancestors are all-too-often thwarted by the lack of available source material. In an era before the decennial censuses and the (virtually) comprehensive civil registration system, our reference points can be severely … Continue reading →

Posted in Document Sources, research, Stories | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

1813 And All That

Posted on July 4, 2020 by Lifelines Research

A comment on Twitter this morning in response to a tweet of mine about George Rose’s Parish Register Act got me thinking. My original tweet suggested that the post-1813 printed burial registers introduced by Rose’s Act were “somewhat lacking in … Continue reading →

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Don’t Believe The Hints

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Lifelines Research

We’ve all been there. We’re following a line back, we’ve got our ancestor in the census, and we’ve found her marriage. We know the four key pieces of information that we ideally need to formulate a search for her birth; … Continue reading →

Posted in research | Tagged , , , , , , | 11 Comments