Researching Family History

You can access Ancestry and Find my Past free of charge at your local library. A friend of mine has done a lot of research that way. Before you go, make a list of your parents and grandparents dates of birth, marriages and deaths, and where they lived, as far as you can, to get you started. Good luck. I find its quire addictive!

Thank you everyone, I shall take on board all your tips and ideas. I have been really lucky to have had a lovely lady actually find out a great deal for me and has given me a fabulous set of information that I can work from. I am so grateful to her for her kindness and time.

katykrunch if you have found your grt grandmothers name, DOB and where she lived, then the census records are your next port of call, from there you might find her with her whole family also age and place of birth, from there you can work back, however I have hit a couple of brick walls where people seem to have disappeared, also my Grandfather has no fathers name on his birth certificate and when his mother remarried he took her new husbands surname, so I was looking for the incorrect surname.

I had to trawl through an awful lots of census returns and BMD results to find him, his birth certificate proved my findings, but they were only £7 or so to buy back in the day.

I have an Ancestry subscription and they have enormous amounts of information, but I started of with the free LDS sight and found records of my family, then I went back to Ancestry and found the census returns.

But I will never get my Grandfathers paternal side of the tree. That’s how it goes I’m afraid.

No Elegran. nothing. I transcribed for Anglesey Registrars for five years, had acess to the archives too. This is how I am so sure William didn’t die there, I transcribed the births, deaths and marriages . I do know the family lived in a ‘poor house’, small cottages given to the church by land owners for poor but respectable ! families lived. Very close to them lived a tailor from a family of tailors. There is always a possibility that William had to serve an apprenticeship as part of the agreement allowing the family to live in a poor house. Anglesey is difficult , before the bridge they were cut off from the rest of Wales. I really want to find where William died . Thank you

Annie can you find any tailoring apprenticeship records for William?

I must have another shot with my father's side. I never knew his parents nor my mum's so had no grannies and granddads to grow up with. All dead before I was born but with help from a dear departed Manx cousin I have mum's tree going back to the mid 1600's. Cumbria and Norfolk had featured in hers. Cousin was fortunate enough to visit our relatives in New Zealand,Australia and here in Southend before a couple of them died. I know I have a cousin in New York as well. These far away cousins were the result of a second marriage of my maternal GF.
With dad's tree I've drawn a blank except for one or two snippets an uncle told me years ago about one ancestor being involved with Hadrians Wall, a jester for Henry VIII and a connection to Jerusalem. Just 3 pieces of a jigsaw.

To go back to the OP... you won't find everything that is online unless you look everywhere! Use any sites you can, free or pay.
And don't forget that there are local and national - and world! forums where you can ask any questions and they have helpful people who may be able to answer them!

Elegran I did think possibly he was disabled, I am speaking of a family , generations of stone masons, quarry workers, coal miners, a tailor and first born! Then moving from home to the other side of the bridge and living alone , this just didn’t happen, men couldn’t pour a mug of tea, they went into lodgings. I have a niggle about Liverpool , why not the quarries near home , a tailor ! Now I must find him, poor William .

Thank you x

It took me years to find DH's GGF because he was called by his step-father's name when his single mother married his step-father when GGF was about 12 months old. He then reverted back to his old family name when his step-father died 25 or so years later.

I keep finding that my father died 14 years before I was born!! Someone of the same name did die then, but not Dad. He'd been brought up by relatives (before official adoption came in) and changed his name so while I know this, it's not corroborated by any official records, so I can see it is an easy mistake to make.

Tailors were sometimes boys who were disabled and not fit for the more physical work their brothers went into. That could have been his reason for taking it up. A disability may have affected his chances of marrying?

Sailmaking and tailoring have some similarities, (but sails don't have to fit a fussy customer!) Perhaps he went from one to the other?

My William was still single age 37, he is a mystery, where did he go after Caernarfon, why were my lot born in Trewalchmai, why not Bodedern, easier to spell

I'm at some dead ends in my FH research but they're different dead ends from those of ten or fifteen years ago, because as more and more info comes online, those brick walls start to tumble.

Parish records in particular are becoming available which is v useful for pre-census/registration times.

Can I recommend Lost Cousins website, too? I haven't personally found anyone on it but it seems v helpful to a lot of people. www.lostcousins.com

We have a William who kept to-ing and fro-ing as well - they moved around a lot more than you think in those days Anniebach
He did get married and have a family but sometimes he was with them and sometimes living somewhere else not far away.

Some of these Welsh names are very difficult to track.
I'm not sure if our William deserves any daffodils if he kept leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves.
If only we knew.

Jalima. .i am so interested in William, eldest of six sons of a stone mason, five brothers were stone mason,William was a tailor . 1841 / 51/ 61 he was still with his parents, 1871 he was living in Caernarfonshire, still a tailor. What is strange he was living alone, single men went into lodgings . 1881 found a William Thomas lodging in Liverpool with a widow from Anglesey and two other Male lodgers from Caernarfon, but this William was a sail maker.

Was it my William , I don’t know, never will , he didn’t die in Caernarfonshire or Anglesey, I realy would like to know where he was buried, all his siblings , parents and grandparents buried on Anglesey , where is poor William ? I want to send my brother to wherever William is buried with bunch of daffodils and sprinkle some Welsh soil

You may solve it one day Anniel

It has taken me nearly 10 years to solve a mystery about one of DH's ancestors - but I did it in the end!

If you can track all his other movements you may be able to find the correct one. Is he on the 1841 census with parents? He would have been 13 or 14 then so perhaps still at home.

I have a g g grandmother , brn in Llanfaelog, Anglesey, brn in same village, baptised , married, had six children , died and buried in same village. On one census she was born in -
Donnington, Lincolnshire, !

I have just corrected something on Ancestry - quite a basic error in fact, as they had a transcribed record of someone joining the RN 39 years before he was born.

You do have to watch for mistranscriptions, not only in enumerators’ records (they seem to have misheard a lot and assumed they always heard correctly!) but also in later transcriptions from those records ie, official transcriptors trying to read the enumerators’ handwriting. Sometimes you think your ancestor has dropped off the planet, only to find he/she has been given a different name by someone misreading the handwriting.

I transcribe census records for FreeCen Anniebach and have come across quite a few Welsh names that are spelt very differently to how they really are lol. Good job there is a site to try and find them and to check what they are supposed to be. Some interesting overseas places too.

I found my family members on various census forms online. But it is harder if they have moved away from the area they were born.

I have been searching for years for g g g uncle William brn 1834 , why did he have to leave Anglesey , I am sure he went to Liverpool so big problems, no way would a census record him as born in Trewalchmai, they wouldn’t be able to say it, certaintly not spell it, they would settle for born in Wales !

the General Record Office are doing a pilot scheme supplying PDFs of birth and death certs for £6.
Thanks Elegran, I didn't know that!

I have a dead end with a great great grandfather born c1827. His name was John Miller and he gave his birthplace as Liverpool, Lambeth or Pymouth. I think the enumerator may have misheard with the last two.
He ended up in Liverpool and died there, but no baptismal record, birth cert ( as not compulsory registration until 1837)
This has disheartened me! I do not think i will ever solve the mystery despite having Ancestry and using Family Search.

FreeReg and FreeCen are very useful sites. You can search baptism/marriage/deaths and census records on them.
I have traced my families back to the early 1800's you just need patience and lots of cross referencing/checking.
Now you have your mum's grandmother you will have rough idea of marriage date/place, so try and find that. Then you can get her maiden name and find birth. If you know where they lived FreeCen may have records for there transcribed so you can see the household in Census years (1841, 1851, 1861 etc). Also look for free parish records for your county, lots of those are online - Online Parish Clerks.
Happy hunting, I've been searching records for years and still find things every now and again as more are transcribed every year.