Thursday 9 May 2013

This Week Thursday - Events from my Family Tree

Here are some events from my family tree with anniversaries in the next 7 days. (I have kept birth/marriage events to those over 100 years ago for privacy.)
  • Thursday 9th May
    • Edith Mabel KINSMAN was born in 1892 (121 years ago)
  • Friday 10th May
  • Saturday 11th May
  • Sunday 12th May 
  • Monday13th May
    • Elizabeth TILLIN was baptised in 1866 in Chelsea (147 years ago)
  • Tuesday 14th May
    • George MUTTER and Janet NEILSON were married in 1848 in Glasgow (165 years ago)
    • Peter GUTHRIE was born in 1888 in Pharis, Co Antrim, Northeren Ireland (125 years ago)
    • Daisy and Nellie ADAMS were born in Fareham, Hampshire in 1894 (119 years ago) 
  • Wednesday 15th April
    • Amy Ellen ADAMS (nee BARTHOLOMEW) died in 1972 in Portsmouth (41 years ago)

Thursday 18 April 2013

This Week Thursday - Events from my Family Tree



Here are some events from my family tree with anniversaries in the next 7 days.
  • Thursday 18th April
    • John GUTHRIE was born in Pharis, Co Antrim, Northern Ireland in 1903 (110 years ago)
  • Friday 19th April
  • Saturday 20th April
  • Sunday 21st April
    • David TILLING died in 1882 (131 years ago)
    • Alexander Birch and Agnes Jane CLIFT were married in Dover, Kent, England in 1900 (113 years ago)  
  • Monday 22nd April
  • Tuesday 23rd April
    • Ann TILLIN was baptised in Beenham, Berkshire, England in 1775 (238 years ago)
  • Wednesday 24th April
    • Harriet Matilda TILLIN was baptised in Teddington, Middlesex in 1825 (188 years ago)

Wednesday 17 April 2013

Wedding Wednesday - Tillin/Tillen/Tilling/Till?n England and Wales Marriages

One of the benefits of using Custodian as my records database is that I can quickly analyse the data and start to produce statistics about my Tillin One Name Study.

So I have started with Marriages.

If I filter my name index I find that there are 5,307 marriage index records in my database. But this doesn't mean there are 5,307 marriages as each name referenced counts as a separate record. So my next filter is by surname to include those with surnames starting with TILL. This reduces the number to 3,160 names. I then removed any references where the person with the surname starting with TILL was the spouse and not the primary Tillin reference. Finally, I got to 3,061 records from the indexes between 1837 and 2005 (according to Ancestry.co.uk) in England and Wales.

The split by surname was as follows

TILLING - 2679
TILLIN - 238
TILLEN - 136
TILLON - 4
TILLYN - 2
TILLAN - 2

which is what I would have expected as TILLING is a much more common surname.

To further analyse the data I exported it to an Excel spreadsheet and used a pivot table for easy analysis.
By decade, it looks like the most popular decade for marriages was the 1960s.



If I look at the TILLIN name itself the top 5 registration districts are Camberwell, Reading, Windsor, Kettering and Bradfield.  This is sort of what I would expect but the fact that Kettering has made the top 5 places was a bit of a surprise although all of these records were from 1936 onwards.

If I look at TILLING the top 5 registration districts are Bristol, Cheltenham, Swindon, Stroud and Warrington. This time Warrington is the surprise as I haven't had very many records from the North of England so that is a new area to look at.

The top 5 TILLEN registration districts were Newbury, Reading, Bradfield, Wokingham and Brentfield.

At the moment I'm not sure what this tells me but I find the geographical spread of the surnames quite interesting and maybe I need to look at some sort of mapping analysis.




Tuesday 16 April 2013

Tech Tuesday - You Tube with the man behind Family Historian software

As I've mentioned in a previous post I use Family Historian and have done since version 2.

Recently Simon Orde - the man behind Family Historian - was interviewed at RootsTech by Jill Ball and the video can be found below on You Tube.


If you'd like to find out a bit more about it I also found a great overview video of the product and I can definitely say that it does all the things it says in this video

Saturday 13 April 2013

Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2013 Speakers Handouts Available Online



For those who couldn't attend Who Do You Think You Are Live (and for those who did!) the speaker handouts are now available online at the Society of Genealogists website.


http://www.sog.org.uk/learn/who-do-you-think-you-are-2013-speakers-handouts/

Happy Reading and have a nice weekend!

Thursday 11 April 2013

This week in my family tree...



Here are some events from my family tree with anniversaries in the next 7 days.
  • Thursday 11th April
    • John ADAMS was baptised on 1851 in Isle Brewers, Somerset, England (162 years ago)
  • Friday 12th April
    • John TILLIN was born in 1835 in Ufton, Berkshire, England (178 years ago)
    • Alfred Arthur TILLIN and Isabella Amelia WHITE were married in 1909 in Mitcham, Surrey, England  (104 years ago)
  • Saturday 13th April
  • Sunday 14th April
  • Monday 15th April
  • Tuesday 16th April
  • Wednesday 17th April

Wednesday 10 April 2013

How I use Outwit Hub for the TILLIN One Name Study

Following my post on how I conduct my One Name Study I received a tweet from @genejean aka Pam Smith asking how I used Outwit Hub and following a couple more tweets this post was born. (Apologies for the poor quality photos but I'm not a great blogger expert yet!)

If I want to scrape some data I go to Outwit and open the page from within Outwit itself. I like to think of Outwit as a geeky internet browser which allows you to see what's behind the page as well as what you can normally see. For this example I'm going to search for all instances WILLIAM TILLIN in the 1841 England census to keep it small - 3 records.



Normally if I wanted to collect the information for each of these records I would go into each individual record as below and type the information from the screen into my database - or at best copy and paste the information using something like a Firefox addin.



But Outwit works slightly differently.

This is the page of data that I want to "scrape" and this is the page that my scraper will go to and collect the data. I've written the scraper myself based on the html behind this page but I won't go into too much detail here about how I did that as it will make this a really long post. I can do more of an explanation in another post if that would help anybody.

So using the back button in the top left hand corner (just like other web browsers) I get back to my original search results. Then I click on the links button (circled in red below) and this gives me a completely different view of the page.


Then I select the rows labelled View Record. These are going to act as an address for the scraper so it knows where to go and find the data. Once it gets there it will apply the rules within the scraper to the data it finds and then return that data to the data catch area.


So I highlight the rows and tell it to go and explore using my 1841 scraper (making sure I don't overutilize the resources of the site by exploring too many records too quickly) and this is the data it brings back in about 10-15 seconds
.

You can see the detailed information at the bottom based on the 3 records from the original search. The data can then be exported as a csv or excel file and added to the database.

I hope this makes sense - I've found it exceptionally useful for census data as well as civil registration data. I would not have all the data I have if I'd had to collate the information in the traditional way.

I'd be happy to provide some more examples or go into more detail - so please leave any questions in the comments below or ask me on twitter - you can find me @Wibblingjo - or on my google+ page +Wibbling Jo Genealogy



Tuesday 9 April 2013

Tech Tuesday - How I collect and analyse data for my One Name Study

I'm always interested in how people actually "do" their One Name Study on a practical level. My study is still in it's infancy so I've had quite a haphazard approach.

Recently I sat down and decided on a more structured plan of attack.

I knew that I wanted to collect some data, store the data somewhere and then start to group the individuals named in the data into families. Ultimately the goal would be to work out if everyone is related but that's a long way in the future.

As my first mission I decided that I wanted to collect all references to TILL?N and TILLING from the England Censuses 1841-1911 and the England and Wales Births, Marriages and Deaths Indices. I used Ancestry as the source as this is the website that I currently have a subscription to - ultimately I think I'd like to cross-reference with other sources (e.g. FindMyPast) to try and negate any transcribing errors.

To collect my data I used Outwit Hub. This scrapes the data from the internet and turns it into a csv or excel file.

I uploaded the output files into Custodian, which is database software written specifically for family history. This generates a Name Index where the references are consolidated allowing me to see all links to a particular name.

I already have some information in Family Historian so I've begun the process of going through each TILL?N and TILLING individual and allocating a personal and family reference to each record I now hold in Custodian. This is slow going but it's already shown me where I've missed people and is generating a new research list.

Once I've gone through the individuals I've already got in Family Historian I'll start to try and group the other individuals recorded in Custodian.

Already I've spotted where I've got unallocated records.


The picture above shows the name index filtered for everyone in my records with a forename starting Charles and the surname recorded as Tillin. From here i can start to group records together and spot records I've not allocated to people.

I'm looking forward to starting to fill in some gaps even though this will be a long process.

How do you conduct your One Name Study? Any tips? Do you use any of these programs?



Monday 25 March 2013

Lost Tillin Family Update

Thanks to Kirsty's comment on my previous post I started to try and track down Ulverscroft Road.

First I used FindMyPast's search by address function to confirm which district the road was in - this turned out to be Camberwell. Then I went over to Ancestry.co.uk where I have a subscription and went to the Search page for the 1881 England Census. On the search page I typed "ULVERSCROFT" into the keyword field to see what would happen and it brought up 491 records. I hit view on the first record then scanned the pages until I got to number 3 Ulverscroft Road.

3 Ulverscroft Road taken from GoogleStreetview (2013)
 But..... the house was described as uninhabited!!! So back to the drawing board....

I went to the 1891 Census record and looked at the address - 9 Alton Terrace - but I couldn't find this on a map. So I looked up the record on Ancestry and scrolled back a few pages until I found Landells Road. I googled Landells Road and it was in a similar location to Ulverscroft Road and not far from St John the Evangelist in East Dulwich so I felt I might be onto something.

Back to Ancestry and I typed in Edward Tilling as the search in Census records for the 1880's. It came back with results for the London Electoral registers for Dulwich in 1890 and Edward Tilling was registered as at 138 Landells Road. It looks like that's the earliest electoral register for Dulwich on Ancestry so let's head back to the 1881 census and see if I can find the road.

In 1891 the family were in District 34 of Camberwell so I started there. I was slightly waylaid by the fact that Landells Road is mistranscribed as Landele Road but once I had sorted that out I browsed every single page of district 34. Unfortunately this only went up to 114 Landells Road - not 138 that I need. So I browsed district 33 as well, page by page, and still no 138 Landells Road.

138 Landells Road taken from GoogleStreetView (2013)

I tried a search for Flo* Till?n on all records and stumbled across a school admission for Florence and her sister Rose in 1887 with the address of 138 Landells Road on it. I am now even more convinced that I'm on the right track. The school admission record was brilliant as it also confirmed the father's name as Edward and the date of birth for both girls.

But for now I still haven't found this elusive family in 1881...