I do try the tactic of searching all the wills of the right period for a village or town to see if my ancestor is mentioned, but not so easy when it's a city, though you can sometimes concentrate on those of a particular occupation.
I remember a breakthrough with a PCC will in the old days before they were on ancestry and you had to pay £3.50 to download each one from TNA's website. Our local archives had an event where you could access as many as you wanted to, for free, so I looked at some that I would never have considered paying for and I found one which mentioned some people on my Brown line, helping me to go back several generations.
|