26th September 2021

Hello! I’m back for my second blog post! It’s been a while since my first post in July so this one is long overdue (for me anyway). Here we go.

Life wise it has been busy with school summer holidays, working, a few staycation holidays, working on adding stories to the Horton Cemetery charity website, a visit to the site of Horton Cemetery, and working on the story of Neville Moyce who is buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s Church in Ashfield-cum-Thorpe.

As I’m not finished with the Neville Moyce story I thought I would use this blog to talk about different things I have learned over the last few months in my amateur genealogy quest.

First up, I’ve subscribed to the Who Do You Think You Are magazine (you can subscribe here). This magazine and website has so many tips and hints to help you with researching your family tree. Here are some of the things I have learnt over the past few months:

• The 1921 Census will be available to search on the Find My Past website in early 2022
• Parish Registers: Different websites have access to different Parish Registers. In the July 2021 edition of the magazine, the magazine gives you a run down of which website has access to which Parish Register
• An estimated 48,000 British women married a Canadian serviceman by the end of 1946. The first war-bride marriage occurred on 29th January 1940. The majority of these women arrived in Canada between August 1944 and January 1947, most in 1946. As a result, an estimated one in 30 Canadians has an ancestor who was a war bride
• If tracing an ancestor before civil registrations began, try a church’s pew rental records. They are rich with the names of local families, and because you know how much people were paying, you can get a sense of their wealth and social status
• If you’re looking for records of soldiers before the First World War, try the Chelsea Pensioners’ Records. So named because the Royal Hospital Chelsea was the administrative centre for British army pensions until 1955
• Did you relative serve at Waterloo? If yes, they will have been awarded an extra two years’ service
• Generally speaking you will not be able to view patient records less than 100 years old
• The Census of 1871 provides some much-needed insight into our ancestor’s mental health, as for the first time, a column was added asking if the resident was “1 Deaf-and-Dumb, 2 Blind, 3 Imbecile or Idiot, or 4 Lunatic”
• The employment records for Jameson Distillery can be found on Ancestry
• Can’t find your relatives on the Census? Try these records instead: Directories, Electoral Registers, Rate Books, Irish Dog Licence Registers, Phone Books, Griffith’s Valuation, School Registers, and the 1939 Register
• The Census of 1881 reflected working life more accurately that any previous Census
• 10.7 million Scottish records including baptisms, marriage and burial records have recently been published on Find My Past. They have also made available more than one million British newspaper pages
• Records of more than 78,000 US soldiers who were killed in the First World War have been published on Fold3
• Try The Gazette website to search over 350 years of significant historical moments and public records including WW1 and WW2 notices – it’s free!
• The Census of 1901 was held at a time when the nation was still in official mourning for the death of Queen Victoria on 22nd January 1901 and identified that 0.93% of the proportion enumerated said they were born outside of the UK
• Family historians who have a teacher in their tree from 1870 onwards might find them in the records of the Teachers’ Registration Council which have been digitised by Find My Past

I hope these hints and tips help you in your quest as much as they have helped me.

I’m going to leave you with one fact I found while researching Neville Moyce. It shows us how small our world really is.

Neville Moyce was born in the third quarter of 1944 in Gipping, Suffolk. He died aged 14 months on 15th November 1945. His great, great grandparents were William and Harriet Moyce. One of their children was Charles Moyce, Neville’s great grandfather. Their youngest child was Dorothy Moyce, Neville’s great, great aunt, who married Cedric George on 19th February 1917 in India. When Dorothy and Cedric George die in 1964 a month apart from each other, they are living at Russells Crescent in Horley. Horley is the town where I live and I have friends who live on this road! A small world indeed.

I hope you have enjoyed this blog entry. Till next time!