Paul also mentioned another potential "gotcha" for members discussing or sharing Ancestry records - a URL copied from a record located in the Library version will not find it in your home subscription version (and vice versa), so take care.
Paul's second presentation concerned some of his Tuppen flock who he discovered marrying in Switzerland. (He called the talk Swiss Family Robinson, but I think my pun is better!) It involved vital records collected by the British consul in Berne that were preserved in the Ancestry subscription site. When I tried to replicate his search in the dataset UK, Foreign and Overseas Registers of British Subjects, 1628-1969, I was unable to locate the records Paul had used. A quick review showed that Ancestry has ANOTHER much smaller dataset UK, Registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths From British Consulates, 1810-1968 that did include them. So while it is good practice to search individual datasets selected from the Card Catalog (rather than doing a general front page search for a name) you do need to take care that there may be more than one possibility and you should check them all. In this case, I filtered the catalogue by Europe then UK and searched for the keyword "overseas" to get a list of four datasets to try (although searching for "foreign" would also have worked).
Paul also mentioned another potential "gotcha" for members discussing or sharing Ancestry records - a URL copied from a record located in the Library version will not find it in your home subscription version (and vice versa), so take care.
0 Comments
Paul extended the discussion from our previous meeting (on using a cloud service to keep a backup copy of your family files) by explaining how he keeps all his family history research data on his Dropbox account. This enables him to work on his research anywhere that he has an internet connection and to have the reassurance that if anything happens to his laptop or home PC, he can recover all his vital data from the online version.
You can view his slides again and watch the explanatory video on YouTube (The Beginner's Guide to Dropbox for Windows - Cloud Storage) that is linked at the end.
Members listed some of the interesting (or challenging) family names from their trees and we tried to identify the category of origin within which each one fell. Resources available to do this include:
In the OCCUPATIONAL category, we placed Dance, Pepper, Miller, Fuller (and Voller), Smith (and Schmidt), Draper, Cook, Knight, Walker, Mariner, Cartwright and Tuppen. Religious occupations or callings gave us Bidgood and Deakin.
We found just one example derived from an EMPLOYER'S NAME, Shanks; but naturally the name had an earlier origin in the case of that employer (in this case, appearance). The APPEARANCE category was not very populous in our trees; but we did find Coley (dark or swarthy), Lloyd (grey), Short and Cameron (crooked nose). Names showing CLAN allegiance included Johnstone, Ferguson, McAllister, McDonald and MacDun. This group overlaps strongly with the patrilineal names (see below). Names derived from general GEOGRAPHIC FEATURES (literally from ...) were rich in variety and included Line, Snare, Medwell, Burton, Lamprecht, Selk, Hawthornthwaite and Winterflood. SPECIFIC LOCATION names were represented by Nutley, Brimelow, Norton and Thorpe. But no doubt some researchers would include some of the general geographic group here when they identify use of the same term for a particular place. The category of PATRILINEAL names was among the largest including Thompson, Jackson, Robinson, Donaldson, Petersen, Peters, Wilson, Ferguson, Davies, Evans, Pritchard, Mackie, Donaghey, O'Brien and Noyes. Perhaps the prize for the name with the most possible interpretations goes to Keane, which seems to have histories in different places that locate it in every category. The LOTE category attracted a lot of candidates but we were able to re-allocate a number such as
Our final category was unimaginatively labelled Help. From there, we were able to reallocate a number of examples such as Attewell (living near a stream or well), Walton (the name of village "lost" since the 7th century), Gault (from the old Norse goltr, a wild boar), Cruickshank (Scots, bow-legged), and Binnie (Saxon, living in the bend of a stream). Of course there will always be some mysteries in family history. Might the name Eyers (or Eyears) once have signified the branch of the family that expected to inherit the property? Is Geritz an anglicised version of Gerritjs from the Netherlands? Why does Ancestry have a page called Iszlaub Family History when there is not one single piece of useful information on it?
How much do you recall from the discussion about the origins of names? You can test yourself with a short quiz of 10 multiple choice questions. All the answers and scoring take place in your computer, so no-one will know how well you do (unless you choose to boast about it of course!)
|
Search This Site
Archives
November 2022
|