All Blog Posts Tagged 'family' (111)

These recent images capture the essence of a thriving City centre in Victorian Britain. Each one represents the life and livelihood of our past ancestors and the City’s history from William Gill the shoe maker who operated at 34 Bishop Lane to the now infamous Brown family of High Street. Slave abolitionist William Wilberforce walked these cobbled streets to and from…

Often, on the records, the people listed as "witnesses" to a wedding or "informants" of the information (births, deaths) are close family members. Pay attention to these people. Search them out. Knowing more about them will help you to know more about your ancestors.

For example, my great grandmother's wedding registration lists her sister, Janet, as a witness. This particular sister was one of three sisters that my great grandmother had. But she was the oldest sister and the eldest…

The Toll of Time….and Council’s

Still on the theme of local cemeteries. Following a visit to Eastern Cemetery in Kingston, I was astonished to witness in such a well kept cemetery that an eagerness to protect the visitors, the stones themselves were being damaged.

It looks to me as though the sinking of some older graves, very likely due to some flooding and…

A selection of my photographs from a recent exploration of cemeteries in Hull. Dating back to the early 1800’s, there is certainly much evidence of death, decay and disease. Many of the surviving stones had in fact been relocated from previous locations as the City expanded.

One of the most interesting finds was evidence of the 1849 Cholera epidemic in the City and the…

Being of the surname Billington, my family, though in Yorkshire for over 100 years, is often asked about its Lancashire origins and in particular I am often asked by historians if I have any connections to the Hangmen of Bolton. In the south of England the question is quite different and I am asked of my connections to John Billington who travelled with the Pilgrim father’s…

This week, I will be spending some time researching the Cemeteries of Kingston upon Hull, in East Yorkshire. Between 1880 and 1910, the Cemeteries grew at a rate only equalled by the continued growth of the City. From a tiny medieval town surrounded by green fields, Henry VIII’s favourite stop over expanded to more than 10 times its original size.

Recent records exist of…

I don't have a blog, rather I operate AncientFaces. I began the website back in 2000 and now it has over 50,000 family photos that were submitted by the genealogy community. I urge everyone to check for photos of their ancestors and to share their own. AncientFaces is 100% free and advertisement supported - so there is never a cost involved!

AncientFaces - Family…

A while back, my niece's husband asked me if I would help him look into his ancestry. (He thought that perhaps his family had “come from whales”.) Seeing as he was and still is serving our country in the Air Force, I was happy to see what I could help him find. In addition to showing him how to do basic census records research, I ran some searches on several of the online digitized book sites. We were both amazed at what I found about one of his ancestors in a book on HeritageQuest --…

 Quick up date, we have started sharing some information now in the FB group and one of our family members has a few documents that I did not have that she scanned and posted there. Now I can take those and blow them up and print them out for hard copies. Since they are marriage, death and birth records this is kind of major scoring. So taking the FB challenge to another level paid off for our research in this since. Sharing the information though digital images might not be as fun for some…

• Personal Family History and Family News. This blog, on Wordpress, is a log of our family history research, and also has snippets of information about our family, either family news in the present, or anecdotes from the past.
• General Genealogy Research: This is a more general blog (on Blogger) on family history and…