A View from Kew

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How to hunt your man Not all documented “facts” are correct. David Annal suggests ways of sifting errors and lies to find the truth

Shropshire Star

I

’ve often discussed in this column the need for family historians to adopt an open and questioning mind when dealing with their ancestors and the clues they’ve left behind in various documents.

The challenge is to work out which of the “facts” about their lives are true and which are not.

This is, of course, easier said than done. The untruths we come up against comprise a wide range of eventualities.

As well as honest errors, there’s a whole host of mistranscriptions to deal with (both contemporary and modern).

Then there are the misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Lastly, and perhaps everyone’s favourite, the downright lies.

So how do we spot the mistakes, the lies and the half-truths? How do we separate the wheat from the chaff?

We base our searches on what we already know about our ancestors – a combination of the details we’ve garnered from previous searches and information passed down to us by our relatives – and we tend to use a fairly limited number of “facts” to structure our search.

Or at least we do if we’re researching properly; I hope that the principle of “less is more” is firmly ingrained in the minds of regular readers of this column when it comes to interrogating family history databases.

Ludlow Castle, photographed in the early 20th century.

As long as the facts we’re using are accurately recorded – or rather, recorded as we’re expecting them to be – we should, in theory, be able to find the people we’re looking for fairly easily. But as we know, it’s not always that simple – the facts often don’t match, and our searches fail.

Let’s consider a typical search for a birth certificate. Our starting point is Alfred Henry Genner’s marriage certificate, on which he is said to be 22 (in February 1909) and his father is named as Richard Genner, a publican.

The obvious next step would be to look for Alfred in the 1901 census; but

...places of birth given in censuses can cause all sorts of difficulties.

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all we know is that he should be aged around 14 and that his father was called Richard. His father’s occupation may also help us, and it’s possible that the family will be living somewhere in Yorkshire (where Alfred married) but it’s not a lot to go on.

And if just one of these “facts” from the marriage certificate is inaccurate, or if any of the facts we’re trying to match with the census has been recorded wrongly, mistranscribed or any of the other possibilities outlined above, then we’re going to struggle to find our man.

I wrote last month about the complications surrounding our ancestors’ names, so this time I want to concentrate on other factors that affect our ability to find them.

Ages can present us with a number of significant challenges. In Alfred’s case, all we know is that he said he

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was 22 when he married in 1909. But how do we know this is true?

Remember, people had to be 21 in order to marry without parental consent, so it would be quite tempting for a man of 20, or even a year or two younger, whose father didn’t approve of the marriage, to claim he was older than he was.

There was no requirement to provide proof of age; so as long as he looked 21 he was unlikely to be challenged.

Another troubling aspect of ages on marriage certificates is the fondness some of our ancestors seem to have displayed for narrowing the gap between the groom’s and the bride’s ages, as it was thought to be improper for there to be too big a difference.

The simple solution was to lop a year or two off the groom’s age and add it to the bride’s, or vice versa.

But there’s another potential problem to consider: namely that

The Bellman wades ashore in his hunt for the Snark, in this illustration by Henry Holliday.

Alfred might well have been 14 at the time of the census but, for one reason or another, this may not be the age that appears on the form.

Children’s ages are rarely more than a year or two out (and for that reason I would always advise researchers to search for children rather than adults), but you have to allow for the possibility that the age could have been misread: 14 could end up as four, 17 or even 44!

If you’re too restrictive in your search terms, this sort of error is going to result in failure.

However, in this case the search is successful. We find an Alfred who appears to tick all the right boxes.

He’s aged 13; his father is an innkeeper called Richard and, best of all, the family are living in the same village (Tollerton) that Alfred was to marry in some eight years later.

So we now have a place of birth for him (Ludlow in Shropshire), as well as more family members and other clues to help with our future research.

But beware – places of birth given in censuses can cause all sorts of difficulties.

Part of the problem is that our ancestors often didn’t know where they were born. The biggest stumbling block, however, is the habit they had of giving different answers at different times. This is partly explained by their tendency to be less precise when describing a birthplace, the further they were away from it. A Shropshire man like Richard Genner might well give a Yorkshire census enumerator the name of the market town nearest to the village where his son was born instead of the name of the village itself.

In this case, though, we have a different sort of problem, which has as much to do with our country’s often confusing geographical and administrative borders: in the 1891 census Alfred’s place of birth is given as Hereford!

Digging a bit deeper, we discover

that Ludlow is only a few miles from the Shropshire/Herefordshire border – indeed the Ludlow registration district includes several parishes which are actually situated in Herefordshire.

It turns out that Alfred was born in one of these parishes – a small village called Ludford.

An 1871 directory of Shropshire summarises the geographical difficulties rather neatly: “Ludford is a parish joining Ludlow…and only separated from the town by the River Teme. The village and church of Ludford is in the county of Hereford, and the townships are in Salop [ie Shropshire].”

So we have two different places of birth for Alfred in the two censuses and neither of them are, strictly speaking, “correct”.

It would have been very easy to trace Alfred’s birth certificate using the FreeBMD website. There are only two entries on the database for the name Alfred Henry Genner: his marriage registered in Easingwold in 1909 and his birth in Ludlow in 1887.

However, I do believe that you still need to do the hard work, and I would always advise researchers to track down individuals in each of the censuses. It’s only by doing this that you can start to see patterns and, hopefully, spot the “rogue” entries.

In Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, the Bellman informs his crew that: “What I tell you three times is true,” which works as quite a good rule of thumb for family historians. If you’ve found the same piece of evidence from three different sources it’s probably true. Of course you have to be wary of the possibility that the three sources may each have taken their information from the same (flawed) place but, nonetheless, it’s a fairly good rule to bear in mind.

And nobody said it was going to be easy, did they?

David Annal is Development Manager at the Family Records Centre.

OCTOBER 2007

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