How well are we doing?

[Merry]

It would seem I'm definitely not making enough effort!!

A lot of the places my research takes me don't have and surviving parish registers before about 1700 or a few years before so if there are no wills and no PRs I tend to think I can't do anything, but clearly this hasn't stopped a lot of people, so.... how do you do it?

I won't be back until this evening, so not ignoring. If you see my light on I'm probably on my phone which hates this website, so I won't be responding to anything! lol

[kiterunner]

I got back to John de Bradbrugge by being lucky enough to find an online book which had details of various land transactions, which gave family relationships. I had been looking them up in the TNA Catalogue but it is difficult when you get so far back that the surname spellings vary wildly.

[Olde Crone]

One of my most useful finds ever, was mention in the 1800s of a small field which was part of a dowry. The bundle of papers concerning this dowry went back in seamless detail to a marriage in 1232!

Another useful find, again concerning a modest field, went to Chancery and took over 70 years to resolve. There was much genealogical information in that, most of which I was able to prove because I knew who I was looking for and which of the myriad John Holdens were implicated.

One useful trick I learned early on was to look at the front and the back of parish registers for extra information, such as confirmations, excommunication s, Sunday school registers, gifts and benefices...all sorts of stuff which doesn't (or didn't) get transcribed.

OC

[ElizabethHerts]

OC, now more PRs are available online, I often find the pages where odd details are written. Sometimes you find a copy of a will, sometimes donations from the parish to other places where an accident or calamity had happened. Also payments for various services are recorded. For one parish in Lincolnshire I found that my ancestors had been barred from the church as they were deemed to be non-conformists.

[kiterunner]

Originally Posted by Merry

Ancestry's insistence on you entering two characters at the start or end of a word before you can add wild cards is very irritating!

They don't any more.

[Merry]

That's strange, because I quite often forget or mistype and then get zero results for something where I would expect quite a lot (off the top of my head the last time that happened was some time last week), but I just did a random test and got results with only one initial letter. So, there are definitely still some restrictions on wild cards, but not that one! I will be on the lookout now!

Thanks Kate, I can not look again for my Eglingtons with more variety!

[Phoenix]

As my program doesn't add things up for you:

19 13th gen
13 14th gen
5 15th gen
2 16th gen

I can go further back on printed pedigrees, but these are my own efforts.

Typically, Henry Youle and his wife Katherine are my 16th gen, he making his will in 1598, but other branches go back further in fewer generations.

This, too, is purely Mum's side. Dad's side made a habit of descending on Portsmouth and dying in the 1840s, possessed of very common names