Parish Registers

Time flies - and I have been actively searching out some more parish registers to place on my web site. It's amazing how many are available for free (if not to download then to read online). Many can be looked up on Googles book site. Other works of interest (certainly those that are out of copyright) can be found on the pages of the Gutenberg project. However, the biggest of them all for old publications is the million books project.

It's a great source of copies of publications from the last century and earlier, many of which you will never find in any local library. It includes publications from the major universities in the USA and Canada, as well as other sources.

You really cannot go wrong with this site - for almost any subject the site has something for everybody. I have found it invaluable. As these sources are digitized then those who wish to consult them may do so without further damage to the, often rare, originals. It's a shame that more institutions are not persauded of the virtues of such a scheme. Certainly at the university I attended, the only thing not encouraged in libraries.... were readers!

The addresses of the sites are:

Google Books: http://books.google.com/

Gutenberg : http://www.gutenberg.org/

Million Books: http://www.archive.org/details/millionbooks

Have fun...

Up and Running

At Last - I have my website up and running and started to get some data onto the net. The aim of my site is to find some of the free resources that are available and make them available to everybody. For example there are many transcripts available of parish registers - you just have to know where to look.

The time consuming part is trawling through all those pdf's to determine if it's what you want, and if it's old, what the heck it all means - certainly some of the spellings can vary wildly depending upon who was filling out the registers, and many people didn't know how to spell their own surnames anyway!

Anyway - I invite you to have a look at my site and tell me what you would like to see there. Also please feel free to ask for a search as I am happy to conduct basic look ups for free - so long as there aren't too many.

My main site can be found at http://www.yorkgen.com

Last Will and Testament

I managed to find a will for my most distant (in chronological terms) relative, my ggggg grandfather (there's probably a g too many their) - anyway - it seems that not only did he posess wealth but also property.

Several tennements in Huddersfield that were left to a James Brook to hold in trust on behalf of John Mellor, a clothdresser in Huddersfield, who died in 1812. The cottages (as they were variously described) were in the tenure of William Charters and Abraham Linnie at the time of his death.

Some relatives were left out of the will, and there is always the chance that some of the ascribed children are have been incorrectly so attributed. There is no doubt about the lineage of many of the offspring, who were very much involved with the luddites and their cause.

The will was obtained from the Borthwick Institute in York. They can be invaluable in helping with your search, but you may need to trawl through many indexes before you find anything at all....

MURDER !

It would be nice to think that someone in your families history has been famous - or even infamous - but when they turn out to be a supposed murderer, things start to get a bit more interesting and you start to delve a bit deeper.

Then you start to find that although they intended to do the deed, and deserved their punishment (as much as any deserve capital punishment), they probably didn't do it!

There is of course no evidence to prove this point of view - but there are a whole raft of circumstantial anecdotes to suggest that things are not what they first appear. That's when you start to get really interested and start to learn much more about your ancestor - start to put fleesh on the bones. Such was the case for my ancestor - George Mellor - the luddite hung at York on 6th January 1813 for the murder of William Horsfall, near Huddersfield in 1812.

My direct ancestor (ggg grandfather) was one Joseph Mellor and George was his cousin. Joseph's involvement was probably greater than was thought at the time, however nothing was ever proven at the time - indeed - it was contradictory evidence from Joseph and his family and few employees that led to the incarceration of his cousin George. It is worthy of note that two of the five people in Joseph's employ, disappeared. Mary Dyson was collected one night by a special constable and was never seen again. There is far more to this story than meets the eye...

A Family History

Have you ever wanted to research your family tree? Sometimes it can yield results incredibly quickly, other times the twists and turns leave you feeling lost and dizzy, there always seem to be too many options or none at all. However, the results are invariably rewarding - even if they are not what was expected!

Most families have a skeleton in their cupboard and mine has been no exception with a long family history of involvement with the Luddites and their struggles at the beginning of the 19th Century against intollerable working conditions, harsh justice and scarce food supplies.

Their solutions left much to be desired and ultimately represented a step too far for those who had rpeviously supported them. Ultimately this led to 13 being 'suffered at the new drop' at York Castle some 200 years ago, the greatest number ever executed in one day. One of them turned out to be an one of my families particular skeletons (no pun intented).

There are others however - and I shall hope to share them with you as I travel through the records and clues of the past to piece together a more complete family history. If you have any comments or find that some of your research coincides with that presented here, please feel free to contact me.

If you are stuck with your research, especially if it relates to the Yorkshire area, I may be able to help with a free look up service. I will post the records that can be searched on this blog and on my website (http://www.yorkgen.com/) once it's up and running at Easter.