FergysBlog

Parish Registers where art thou!

2011-07-17T16:29:00.001+01:00

For genealogy purposes the English/Welsh parish register indexes are in a mess, on the internet they are stored everywhere and nowhere. Naturally, the one needed is not there. Many have been transcribed and indexed by various Family History Societies (FHS) and to improve their finances they have done various deals with the common subscription sites. The only way to find if any of them holds the one required is to visit these sites and have a look. I will not be considering these sites, instead I will be concentrating on the free sites - why they haven't pooled their resources I cannot begin to understand.

For the sake of convenience the registers may be broken down into two categories pre and post July 1837, at which time national registration was introduced, however the registration of births was not compulsory until 1875 and prior to that date some records may only be found in the parish baptism records.

Post July 1837

Free BMD is the workhorse of the post July 1837 registrations, giving the GRO Reference for recorded births, marriage and deaths. Whilst these are normally regarded as the source for obtaining the certificates, they can also be used for finding parish marriage registrations using Marriage Locator.

Marriage Locator is a new site which aims to decode the GRO marriage registration code to give the registration district and the name of the church at which the registration took place. Thus, instead of having to buy the certificate the details can easily be found in the local parish registers or using sites such as On-Line Parish Clerks (Genealogy) which are listed under parish and church names. Marriage Locator was set up by the Guild of One-Name Studies but help with this project is open to all volunteers, please contact mary.rix@one-name.org if you have access to local records, and wish to assist.

UK BMD is another site where volunteers have indexed the parish registers from within their counties, again from 1837. On going to the site, click the "Local BMD" button on the left and the counties which have taken part in this project can be found. Each uses a standard format and may include the reference for a local office from which a copy certificate can be obtained.

Pre July 1837

The On-Line Parish Clerks project covers the earlier records as well as those post 1837. Usually it is possible to search all the records for each church, but not across all the churches in a parish. Hence it is better to try and establish the likely church for the registration. A number of the records contain an LDS film number, and it is not clear whether the LDS transcriptions have been used, or it is the reference for the microfilm in the local office - I hope it is the latter?

FreeReg aims to cover the whole of the UK, and probably has better coverage than other sites mentioned (except Free BMD post 1837). As with all volunteer projects coverage varies between different counties and parishes, however coverage has improved significantly in recent years. FreeReg probably gives more record details than other sites.

Of course, one site which must not be forgotten is Family Search, especially since the revisions which are currently in hand. It was on this site that after a number of years of searching that I found my 5th great grandfather, born in the early 1700s

General

When viewing all these sites it is worth remembering that they are secondary sources (unless the images are provided), and some of the originals, and not necessarily only the very old ones, can be difficult to read. The spelling of names may also vary, particularly if the informant was illiterate. Ages, especially for marriages, should be treated with care as some would have declared themselves as of "full age" when in reality they were under 21 and needed parental consent. Ages at death may be nothing more than a guess.

Finally, There are numerous small, e.g. family, sites which contain abstractions of parish registers. Many of these may be found on a CD available from One Stop Genealogy . The repositories for all registration districts are given by GENUKI.

© Ron Ferguson 2011

Genealogy History - Later

2011-03-04T16:33:00.001Z

In my last blog I talked mainly of the WW2 years, one aspect I did not really mention was that of food which was, like pretty well everything else, on ration. One food which wasn't was rabbit, these were sold by the green-grocer and were suspended from hooks from the top of the shop's window. At Christmas there were no turkeys but our parents did manage to get chickens (probably from a farm near to us) which we used to pluck in front of the fire. I remember one Christmas, when my mother was in a nursing home following the birth of my sister, my father won a goose in the work's raffle. Now whether it was my taste or his lack of culinary skills I don't know, but it was far too greasy for me, and I could not eat it. I cannot say who was more upset, me or my dad. It also provided us with what seemed to be a lifetime's supply of goose-grease for rubbing on our chests every time we were wheezy!

Rationing continued for years after the war, but in 1949 they first took sweets off ration, a day all us kids looked forward to with great anticipation. Unfortunately supply was nowhere near enough to meet the demand, and few of us managed to get any, I still think that the adults nicked them! So they were rapidly put back on ration until 1953 when rationing was abolished.

At the top of the road where I lived was a large field, on the right there was a cotton mill, and on the far side the Bridgewater Canal with the Royal Ordnance Factory on the other side. On this field there was a least one barrage balloon with the associated anti-aircraft guns and soldiers. Although we were not allowed on the field, great fun could be had wriggling under the wire fence and being chased off!

I spent VE celebrations at my aunty's in St. Helens where they had a big bonfire, and then for VJ day we had a street party at home. It was a great year for the kids, it was like having three Christmases in one year! After this time we started to have regular visits into Manchester, and saw the many bombsites for the first time. Often, on these were street entertainers, many of whom I suspect were ex-servicemen. In particular I remember one man who put a slab of concrete across his chest whilst a colleague smashed it with a sledgehammer.

At the time I was 12 yrs old there was still a fuel shortage and an uncle had a business providing peat for burning on house fires. On Friday evenings and Saturday mornings my father linked up with him to set up sales and delivery rounds near where we lived, and I was enlisted to help. This was my first introduction to the working life! I continued with this work until I was about fifteen when I found a part time job with more pay - although fifteen years of age was the official school leaving age, I was still a pupil. At home there was something of a strained atmosphere for a while!

In 1953 I was on a train going for a day out to Blackpool, when I read in the newspaper that the Korean War was over. Joined with the ascent of Everest and the Queen's Coronation this made for a momentous year, but what struck me most was that this was the first time since just after I was born that the UK was not involved in a major war. It is nice to say that since 1945 I have not experienced England being bombed, although since I was a regular visitor to Northern Ireland between 1971 to 1980, it was not the last time when I heard bombs going off. I do not wish to hear that noise again!

© Ron Ferguson 2011

Genealogy History - Now!

2011-02-04T12:57:00.001Z

History is, of course, what we are taught in schools. Or is it? If I subtract my current age from that at which I was born, then the Suez Canal had not opened, boys climbed and swept chimneys, there were no telephones, Britain still had its Empire, and no compulsory schooling. Oh! And registration of births and deaths was not yet mandatory.

This is some of the history which I was taught in school, and equally it is now the case that my grand children are being taught, in history, life as it was at the time I was born (and after for that matter). Those of my age tend to forget that this is history because, to us, it is still real.

So what was it like? Well, thank goodness, Britain still had its Empire because the second world war broke out very shortly after I was born, and for some years our only support came from its constituent countries. I was too young to remember the early part of the war, only from around 1943 onwards. I lived just on the edge of Salford, not far from the major industrial centre of Trafford Park, and the sound of bombs going off was not an unusual experience.

I was fortunate in that my father was in a 'reserved occupation' being a crankshaft turner at Gardners Diesel Engines. At this time the company employed a large number of women on the factory floor, mainly for the less heavy work. He also had to become a member of the Home Guard. He used to come home for lunch, and, often, that time, first thing in the morning, and some Sundays, would be the only times I would see him. A normal working week was then 12 hours a day for six or seven days a week.
Interestingly, Gardners made the engines for the midget submarines which were responsible for many attacks on European dockyards.

Being brought up in the 'blackout', so called because nearly all street lights were off, and the few that weren't were heavily shaded, we had one benefit which today's urban children miss. We could see the stars! Admittedly, this was only in the morning as we then had double summer time - clocks were 2 hours forward from GMT., so we went to school in the dark, and to bed in daylight. Imagine trying to get a kid to bed when it's bright sunlight!

It must have been 1946 before I first saw the streets lit up. My parents took me into their bedroom which looked across the fields to a main road where I could see the lights come on for the first time. It was like our personal Blackpool Illuminations - which didn't exist then, by the way! It was about this time that I met my first banana, I knew it must be food, but had to ask my mother what to do with it.

During the blackout it was not allowed for any house light to be visible from the outside, and the ARP (Air Raid Precaution) patrols would have very stiff words, or even take to court, any householder who committed such an offence. We had black roller blinds to cover all our windows, and care had to be taken to ensure that no light escaped from the edges. At that time most houses had coal fires, and it was also an offence to allow sparks to be emitted from the chimney. These lessons were drilled into us virtually from birth.

On going to school we had to ensure that we all took our gas masks in their brown boxes. Now and again there were collections for the soldiers of things like knitted goods, and books, which we also took to school for forwarding. In our early years paper and pencils were not available; we did our work using chalk on a slate! From time to time the air-raid sirens would go off , sometimes for practice, at others for real, and we would march in an orderly fashion to the shelter at the top of the school road, with absolute, but no doubt misplaced, confidence in its security.

Our leisure time was filled with the usual street games, not only football and cricket (skipping and rounders for the girls!), but hopscotch, hide and seek, and a variety of catching games. Instead of cowboys and Indians, which we really didn't come across until later, we had war games of goodies versus baddies. It had to be so named because nobody would play at being a German! Holidays were pretty well non-existent, mainly comprising day trips to more distant relatives.

In my next blog I will concentrate on life in the post war years.

© Ron Ferguson 2011

Genealogy websites 2011

2011-01-10T21:25:00.000Z

One returning from my Christmas break I started to think about a suitable blog with which to start the New Year. Initially I thought about a review of 2010, but then we've done that and got the T-shirt! So, how about 2011, and what will it bring? Since my main interests are genealogy and creating websites, the exciting happenings in website development, and the possible effects on our websites is an obvious. But first, I would like you to look at The Wilderness Years to do so you will need lots of memory and preferably the Google Chrome Browser, if you haven't got it, it is worthwhile downloading for this site alone. It will just about run on the latest Firefox (but not well), and I could not get it to run at all on the latest Beta version of IE9. When asked for your town, I would suggest that you enter a large city, or at least a place where Google Earth will have lots of photos.

Now that site is based on the new HTML5 coding, and I am not suggesting that it will have much effect on research sites such as Ancestry, or Findmypast, but I am certain that it will be used by people, like myself, who write their own websites. It will also be used in conjunction with another new language, CSS3, which is used to code the positioning and layout of the pages.

Will this affect the User?

Yes, it will! Already the latest browsers are starting to incorporate the functionality which they need in order to read HTML5 and CSS3. Chrome is probably the best at present but it is steadily being introduced into Firefox, Opera, IE9 and other major browsers. The figures below are taken from visitors to my own website.
1) Browsers used:

As might be expected IE is at the top of the list whilst at the bottom are the mobile phone browsers. In general, it is fair to say that non-IE users tend to be very dedicated in updating their browsers to the latest version, and IE users less so as the table below shows:

2) IE Users:

At last some three-quarters are now using IE8 but there is still over 5% using IE6 or earlier. Those users are going to have problems because only the latest browser will be able to read the new codings, and their problem is that little will be done to get the sites to display properly when using them. Even IE7 and IE8 users will not get the full benefit of the new technology, although the probability is that the sites will degrade gracefully for these users.

IE users with the XP operating system also have a big problem since it would seem that IE9 will only be available for Vista and Win7 operating systems - a change to Chrome could be their best option.

Website Generators

To generate my Pedigree web pages I use the HTML generator included in the Legacy Family Tree program. I still consider this to be the best program around for these types of web pages, but it is now getting old and tired as it is written in very basic HTML. It has received a boost with the publishing of a program from LTools which enables the conversion to CSS/HTML, but, in my view, will shortly need to be rewritten - this comment also applies to most similar programs.

The Future

This year promises to be one of the most exciting in website development for many years but for the new techniques to achieve their potential depends not only on the website developers but also relies on the users to upgrade their browsers and the software manufacturers to improve their generators - before we reinvent the wheel!!

Disclosure

The author is a volunteer beta tester for Legacy Family Tree.

© Ron Ferguson 2011

A Genealogy Gem for a Website

2010-11-28T16:23:00.000Z

Ever since I launched my Ferguson One-Name website some 3 years ago, I have not been very happy with the Family Group style web pages compiled from Legacy, nor did I really like the output from TNG Software. So, I have regularly browsed the web to look for an alternative.

At last, I think I have found it in HuMo-gen which is made by Hubb Mons, who says: "I originally wrote this software for myself, because I was dissatisfied with the features of other Gedcom-to-HTML converters, but I readily offer HuMo-gen for use by the wider public". Exactly my thoughts!!

And furthermore it is free, open source software. What more could one ask for?!

You can select what to include on the Main Index (Opening Page), as shown below:

Whilst it is written in PHP, it is claimed that no knowledge of PHP or HTML is required in order to use the program. I agree, in fact anybody used to Wordpress will find it very easy.

This shows the options available from within the program, but with only a little knowledge of PHP and HTML one can easily customise this page to include other items, for example a picture of oneself, or maybe a brief description of the site. On this page there is also a Person Search Box.

It is possible to select various levels of permissions, for example one can limit the display of Sources, to say, oneself, or family etc. or, as I do, publish them for all to see, as on the right.

Clicking the filing card icon next to the name produces as a range of other options, such as different report formats, and a range of tree charts. From these charts clicking a name will go to the report for that person.

As can be seen, the sources on this screen are links and these lead to others who use this source.

I think that this software is relatively new, from the HuMo-gen website I would think around 2009, so are there any snags? Well, yes, but none are terribly important and most can easily be overcome, some are specific to its use with Legacy. Like similar programs which rely on importing GEDCOMs it suffers from the limitations of the long outdated technology of this format.

For my usage, the fields for the genealogy sources are too short, but should be easy to enlarge in the MySQL database (I haven't done this yet). The PHP scripts are, understandably, largely in Dutch which makes following them more difficult for those of us who do not speak this language (I am not monolingual btw.) and in the Sources List, the descriptions have yet to be translated, but nevertheless the meaning of them is pretty clear.

I recommend that anyone trying this program should first try it on their own PC and not the web. This involves installing a stand-alone server and the manual gives a full description of how to to this for XAMPP-lite. This also a free open-source application. Be prepared to do some work for yourself to get the output to that which you wish, but if you do hit problems the site has a Forum which I have found to be very responsive and helpful.

I have yet to put my site on-line using HuMo-gen, but only because I wish to fully familiarise myself with its workings, and I will do so at the end of December. To those, who like me, are not happy with what has been around for a while, I would say "give it a run".

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Genealogy Patience Pays!!

2010-10-21T21:06:00.000+01:00

We all know of the seemingly impenetrable brick walls which we bump into on a fairly regular basis. I hit one one these with my 4th great-grandfather, Benjamin Ferguson, who, according to the 1841 census was living in Kendal, and born in 1766 in England but not in the county of Westmorland. He did not appear on the 1851 census, so I assumed that he had moved on to higher things.

Over the years I have tried to find out more about him, visiting the Kendal Archives to find his burial, but without any luck, in fact I cannot even find the christenings of his children in the Kendal Parish Registers. My research has not been helped by the fact that northern England is an outpost of internet indexing, meaning that the Union Tavern in Kendal is almost a second home!

Regularly I search new registers which come on-line, and three months ago I had a minor break through, I found a Benjamin Ferguson born in 1776 in Pardshaw, Cockermouth, Cumberland, on the Beta Family Search site. OK, the surname was spelt "Furgison", but the given names of the family were those commonly found in my family. Could this be my long lost relative? With still some way to go, I contacted Kendal Archives again to see if they had the Kendal Settlement Certificates for the period between 1770 and 1790, but unfortunately they only had those to 1734.

Every now and again I switch the main search site which I use, and this month moved back to Findmypast. As always, I carried out a quick check on my brick walls and nearly fell off my chair when I found my Benjamin on the 1851 census living with his, now married, daughter Mary Airey, of whom I had never heard! This time his surname was given as "Ferginson" and his place of birth Cockermouth - Eureka!! I am left with another brick wall though - where does his father "Samual Furgison" (sic), date of birth unknown, come from??

Advances can happen in most unusual ways. Like many of you I try and help other researchers whenever I can, and this week received an email asking if an Ann Owen born 1807, father George, had any connection with the Owen family of Prescot, Lancashire, in my tree. Not having an Ann in my Owen family I asked for more details, only to be be told that since her Ann and my family came from the same area she wondered if there may be a connection.

A Richard Owen born 1791 is my one of the 3rd great grandfathers on my maternal side, and I wondered if Richard might have had a brother called George who might have been Ann's father. I have not even looked at this side of my family for years, so I started by looking for his birth in Lancashire OnLine Parish Clerk, and there was his christening, and the names of my previously unknown 4th great grandparents.

Yes, persistence does pay, as time goes by it may not seem like it, but consistently checking records and revisiting sites which may well have been updated since last time often brings results. Now, if only I could get my hands on the person who ignited the 1851 Salford Census records and with it my 3rd great grandfather's history, but congratulations to Manchester & Lancashire FHS who have recovered so much of them.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Are Genealogy Fairs Worthwhile?

2010-09-23T13:08:00.000+01:00

Although I have been involved in genealogy for some 10 years for various reasons I have not visited Genealogy Fairs until this year. I have attended fairs at Stockport, York and Newcastle on Tyne, and broadly speaking my reaction has been favourable. But why?

Visiting the various companies displaying their software, books, charts etc. is interesting, but hardly earth shattering, although I have usually found two or three things which are of use to me, usually books or specific data discs. If I was asked whether I would go specifically to have a look at the wares on sale, then probably not.

No, what has been of most use has been the help available from "information providers". Whilst companies such as Ancestry, Findmypast, and The Genealogist are frequently represented at these fairs, it is not these to which I refer, largely because I am reasonably familiar with their range of services, but I do recognize that they will be valuable to those who are not. Their stands are always very busy, maybe because they often offer free access!

What I find most attractive are the genealogy organisations, the local family history societies and national organisations, such as The Genealogy Society, Local and National Archives, and many others, strictly speaking some may not be genealogy societies but concern themselves with aspects of out history, eg. The Indian Army. Following my visit to the York Fair, I am pretty sure that I have found my 5th great-grandfather from an idea I picked up at a local fhs stall.

If you are considering going to one of these fairs my recommendation would be to look carefully at which societies will be exhibiting rather than at the commercial concerns who, in general, will be there anyhow. Look for family history societies and local archivists from the areas in which you are researching. The national organisations can also give invaluable advice on where to look for information.

Finally, before going do ensure that you have noted exactly what you need to know. There is nothing worse than going to a stall and not be able to remember a name or place. Take my word for it - I know!

© Ron Ferguson 2010

English & Welsh Birth Registration

2010-08-22T10:52:00.001+01:00

Birth registrations are of great importance when studying genealogy, and for this reason I looked at the total registrations for the Fergusons as part of my Ferguson one-name study.

Initially, I examined the total births, given in Free BMD, which showed an increase between the years 1841 and 1910, tending to flatten off after about 1880. I then looked at the percentage change in the birth rate in 10 year blocks, using 1841-1850 as the base point. I was shocked! The graph on the right show an increase in the rate of growth from around 25% to 28% up to 1881 and then a massive fall to an average of around 6% thereafter. Why?

My first thought was that because birth registration was not compulsory until 1872, more and more people were registering up to that date, and then the rate levelled off, but I could not believe this. So could it be due to immigration from Ireland and Scotland?

To check this, I looked at my brother-in-law's family, the Grimshaws, a family which I know to have been English born and bred from at least the 16th century. His graph showed a steady decline, even going negative at one point! My next step was to compare these results for the total registered births and the censuses (from the ONS) between 1841 and 1910/11. The results are shown in the graph below:

Interestingly, the path taken by the rate of change for my Fergusons follows that of the total births for England and Wales (T%Change), although the changes for the Fergusons are much more pronounced before 1891. The Grimshaw results seem to be completely anomalous, Alan Grimshaw swears that this is due to an extremely high level of female births in his family!

It is also of interest that the changes in the birth rates and censuses follow the same trend until 1880 when they, arguably, diverge. It is said that both the censuses and birth registrations understated the true figures for this period and by the fall in the rate of change post 1880/81 this does seem to be the case.

To summarise, we may conclude that prior to birth registrations becoming compulsory there was significant under registration, and, similarly, the censuses did not settle down until after 1881 (and we know that even after that they were incomplete). The high figure for the rate of births for the Fergusons can only, therefore, be explained by immigration from Ireland and Scotland, and this factor, I would suggest, should also be applied when considering others with a name associated with these countries.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Create a Search Engine Sitemap

2010-08-11T16:32:00.000+01:00

Although my genealogy website has been on line for many years I have not bothered to include an XML Sitemap for use by search engines, although, naturally, I had a sitemap for humans. However, to have a decent ranking it is becoming more important that an XML sitemap is included, especially for Google and Bing.

Naturally, being a genealogist, I am a reluctant payer, and I searched for a free sitemap creation program. I could not get the Google Sitemap Creator to install on my PC, so I looked at site after site using Google, all of which had a limit on their free entries of between 500 and, say, 3000 pages. I have almost 9,000 pages on my site, so they were not of much use. I then came across Xenu.

Unlike the other programs which created the sitemap on-line, with Xeno you download the program, and run it on your own PC, which was when I realised that there was an unexpected bonus with this program, it has a Link Checker! Actually, this may be the main function of the program, but by this time I was suffering from tunnel vision! So I ran it, and it tested the links on my 8,600 pages in 44 minutes, identifying a number of broken links of which I was unaware - brilliant.

The XML Search Engine Sitemap was created in no time at all, and I uploaded it to the root of my site and submitted it to every Search Engine I knew. I now await with interest to see if the visits to my site increase. The program also produces a report of its activities whilst searching your pages but, probably because of the size and depth of my site, it took far too long for me to wait until it completed its work.

It was never my intention to use this Blog to promote software, however I am making this exception for Xeno because (a) it is free and (b) it is perfect for the job I wanted it to do, and more. I rank this program as my "Find of the year".

Your Genealogy Websites and Mobiles

2010-07-13T21:00:00.001+01:00

From the day when mobile phones first came onto the market I have avoided them! I didn't want them intruding into my private life, and that of others in public areas. A definite No, No! However, technology catches up with us all, and for a while I have been watching the growth of the internet on mobiles. A month ago I asked a friend if I could view my home page on his mobile, only to see that it split! Nothing for it - I had to buy one, not an iphone, I might add, but an economical windows.

The image on the right shows my index page after I had made a number of changes to the coding and you may like to compare it with the PC version at My Website. In this view it is now not too bad, and can be scrolled to the left to see the off-screen portion, and if the phone is rotated to a horizontal position then it fits fine.

There are still some problems, the left hand column is pushed left, so is partly obscured by the background, and if the view is enlarged then the Guild of One-Name Studies blue logo pushes the footer down so that a brown background space appears.

Styling

The page was already built with the design being separate from the content using CSS, which fortunately makes changes easier, and there were quite a number to make. When designing the site I had only given consideration to the appearance when the width is not less than 800px, with mobiles we are talking about a maximum of 480px - quite a difference, and as a result the above is a compromise, as I was not willing to change the overall design of the PC version. For example the tree image is a background-image called by the CSS and not the HTML which means that its proportions relative to the space available cannot be changed, hence the left-hand column being partially obscured.

What I was able to do though, was to convert all the font and image sizes to ems so that they would change proportionately. Similarly the margins and spaces were also changed from pixels to ems and the overflow for the two columns was changed to "hidden". Unfortunately the Guild logo is already in place before the hidden statement kicks in, hence the brown space mentioned above.

The Problems

They are just presentational problems, but the main one is that mobiles do not have a hover state, which is unfortunate because my CSS based navigation comprises drop-down menus hidden in the blue bar, Sure, when the bar is tapped they drop-down OK, but they do not respond when tapped as the site is already on its merry way to the default link for each header! There is no way that I wish to change the navigation on the main site.

What Now

It is clear that the only way I can resolve the navigation is to write an app style navigation system to replace the drop-down menus for each of the sections for which they apply. It is a little more complex than this, though, as my main site has around 7000 pages which currently use my "blue bar" navigation I would like all to be accessible from a mobile. As far as I can see, this means that I am going to have to design a separate app style navigation linking back to the main and sub menus.

Comment

I hope that I might have given some thoughts which may help those considering a similar project, and would welcome comments on my proposed app style navigation.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Genealogy Websites are Boring!

2010-06-22T21:07:00.000+01:00

So said a recent tweeter. My instinctive reaction was that part of the problem was that the designers are trying to cater for the higher proportion than average of genealogists who still use IE6. But on reflection I think this to be unfair.

Is it True?

I made the basic assumption that the comment did not refer to the research aids, such as Ancestry.com, so over the past month I have made a point of looking at many genealogists' own sites. and, regrettably, I think that it is probably fair comment.

Part of the problem is that the sites are presented by genealogists many of whom, I suspect, have little or no experience of designing and coding websites. Many are, therefore forced to use sites such as Rootsweb, rely on their database program, or use a program which converts a GEDCOM into webpages. This is not a criticism, in fact I applaud the efforts made by all who seek to make their work available to others, and I know how hard they try to overcome the problems which they inevitably meet. Indeed I have used a standard template for this blog!

The image above is of my own website; now I am not a designer but can code, so the design is one which I have put together from looking at pages in books or on-screen. I make no pretence about it being of a high standard, but at least I'm happy with it! I have shown this to illustrate that it is not necessary for all pages to look dull. This is true for the many different types of pages which can be added to a site, for example, forums, blogs, tutorials, biographies etc. etc.

Options

However, I suspect that the tweeter was referring to a lack of dynamic pages, and with the best will in the world, here we have a problem; which is that the family genealogy which we may wish to display basically comprises a list of names and other data. No matter what one does with it, it is still a list. The Next Generation of Genealogy Software, based on PHP and SQL overcomes this by using selections of family trees from which one can link to details of each individual.

My personal favourite is the Pedigree style from Legacy where the notes are included on the same page as the tree, which I prefer, although it is not as dynamic as TNG. It also has another problem in that it requires one page per individual, which means it is not really suitable for very large sites, I currently have around some 6000 such pages. I do include a dynamic family tree, made using DftCom2 based on Java, on a separate page of my site.

When it comes to other formats, Descendant, Ancestor, Family Group, Individual, we are down to lists, they may be formatted differently but they are still lists. For very large sites there may be no alternative other than to use one of these options, or TNG. There are a few other programs but the user experience is similar to those mentioned. I understand some university work is being carried out on alternative formatting, but as yet this has not been taken up.

What can we do?

At present, the best solution would seem to be to create a wide selection of attractive pages to complement the lists of genealogy data from which we hope others will contact us, and hence expand our knowledge and/or trees

© Ron Ferguson 2010

New - Your Family History Magazine

2010-06-03T10:41:00.001+01:00

With Nick Barratt, best known as a lead genealogist in the UK's "Who Do You Think You Are", as Editor-in-Chief we would expect the new Your Family History to provide a high standard of content. The question is: does it live up to expectations?

Priced at a reasonable £3.99 (I do hate 1p change!) contains 74 pages, excluding the cover, about 25 pages less than comparable magazines, and is printed on a heavier paper. The presentation is attractive, but what about the content?

Statistics!

After two issues the pattern is beginning to settle. There are twelve pages of advertising, two pages for the content and another two on news items. A feature I have not noticed elsewhere is a page devoted to media reviews and another four reviewing books, CDs and multimedia. Apart from his editorial Nick Barratt has an opinion page, and there is the usual couple of pages for readers to "Ask the Experts".

Content

Your Family History does not seem to be affiliated to any software or service provider, so I would expect the content to be free and impartial in its presentation. I am less than sure that this is always the case. In the first edition there was a two page article on arcalite on-line storage, and in the second a similar article about using My Heritage Family Tree Builder software, accompanied by a free disk. It is not clear as to whether these are advertorials, or not; specifically, it was the article on the latter which made me wonder, as it played down the necessity to pay the premium to get anything remotely useful. In fairness, later in the publication Peter Christian gives a "warts an' all" comparison of the Premium Account with Family Tree Maker. It would be helpful if the publisher would clarify this.

Some six pages in the first two issues have been devoted to beginners which should prove useful to them (although I did again notice emphasis on My Heritage in the second edition). Whilst it is too early to judge, the section on Local Archives detailed those available in south of England counties (Sussex and Kent). Since the publishers are in the north, perhaps we may hope for more balance in the future. The sections on Casebook, Social History, History Mysteries and The People's Archive provide interesting, and useful, social commentary on past lives or events, as well as giving information on the more unusual reference sources.

Finally, The "How To..." articles covered tracing shipwrecks and the aristocracy (I'm rather glad that they got the latter over with early!) and gave ample references for sources available to enable one to follow up leads in one's own research.

Opinion

I enjoyed reading the first two issues and hope that Your Family History will continue to provide more specialist information, as in the "How To.." articles, in the future. In general it has a nice balance between content for the beginner, the more experienced, and for general interest. As to whether I will take out a subscription, or just purchase when something interests me, I will withhold judgement for a few more issues.

Disclaimer

I have no connection with this magazine, nor any other, nor have I any connection with the software mentioned nor the competitors, although I am a voluntary tester for Legacy.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Family Search - Mapping

2010-05-17T11:59:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday I attended the Genealogy Mapping Seminar organised by the Guild of One-Name Studies at which Judy Jones from Family Search gave a presentation on "English Jurisdictions 1851".

What is it? Since mapping is a visual tool, so is this blog. Basically it is a website enabling you to select a town in England, I have chosen Kendal, Westmorland, and show maps of the relevant jurisdictions, with links as to where the information may be found.

The map shows the boundaries of the jurisdictions selected from the Layers option below (some have contiguous boundaries).

The Layers list from which the boundaries in the above map have been selected. Note that for the map, instead of selecting the Ordnance Survey Map for the background I have chosen the more colourful Google Map which can be done elsewhere.

Selecting a jurisdiction on the map gives a bubble which shows general information about it. Including, in the case of Kendal, places within the Parish, the dates records began and non-conformist records.

As can be seen, at the top of the bubble are three tabs, and the second of which is shown below, and the Options on the right.

It can be seen that each tab holds a number of links from which further information may be obtained. My trials using Kendal gave me immediate access to websites and information which had taken me years to accumulate by myself, to say I'm impressed would be like saying chocolate cake is only OK, the system is brilliant!

We were advised that site is not fully operational as yet. but it is available to the public from here. Judy expressed the wish that eventually she hoped that all the new databases which Family Search are developing will be fully interlinked, so the future looks really exciting.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Pin it on Google Earth

2010-05-02T15:35:00.001+01:00

I was stimulated to examine whether it was possible to enter location pins onto Google Earth from my Legacy database by two articles written by Howard Mathieson¹ who used GenMap as his starting point. Although I have used Legacy which is an Access DB, the method should apply to any DB where the construction is known and accessible.

The method used involves extracting the required details using OpenOffice.org, putting this into a MySQL DB and using PHP to extract the data in the required format for importing into Earth Plot which will put the pins into Google Earth.

One interesting problem was that Legacy stores location co-ordinates (latitude/longitude) in the format Degrees:Minutes:Seconds.xxx whereas Earth Plot requires them in decimal. A wide search on Google failed to provide a PHP script which made the calculation, so I ended up having to write one! The basic PHP, including this calculation, is given in the Map Using Google Earth tutorial on my FergysWebsite.

This tutorial describes how to use the method to plot the locations of the Fergusons born before 1902 who are entered into my One-Name DB. Looking towards the future, when I will have many more records - at present there are around 1500 - I would hope to have come up with a way of plotting their movements with respect to time. I suspect that this will not be too easy!

Acknowledgement

1. Grateful acknowledgement is made to Howard Mathieson for his articles in the Vol 10 Issue 5 and Issue 6 editions of the Journal of One-Name Studies, the quarterly publication of the Guild of One-Name Studies (non-members: £2.00/copy) which stimulated my interest in this subject and introduced me to Earth Plot.

Website Update: Complete!

2010-04-06T21:18:00.000+01:00

Finally my revised website is now up and running, and I would like to review some of the lessons which I learned during the process of revising a genealogy site with some 7000 - 8000 pages. This was the first major rewrite for 5 years, during which time coding techniques have changed, and visitors are looking for increasingly greater interaction and usability.

I started thinking about the design in November 2009, with the major changes being to the index pages and applying a common theme throughout the site. The headers for the Pedigree pages and some others I decided to leave, except for colour changes. I have said before, but I will repeat, design is not one of my strengths, so it took two or three weeks before I decided to use a scheme based on the colours of nature, mainly blue, green and brown, with an index page design to suit.

To write and verify the coding took another two months of work (actually three months but one was lost through illness and holidays). I like to work to dead lines, so in November I settled on 1st March for the launch, revised to 1st April, and it actually went on-line on 2nd April.

Relaxation

I recommend taking regular breaks! In the early hours of one morning I was working away trying to get rid of a bug, and nothing which I did seemed to make any difference. I simply could not understand it! Only after a short break did I realise that the screen I was looking at was on-line and not the one I was working on using my PC.

Tools used

The Pedigree pages were created using Legacy modified to CSS with the excellent LTools designed for use with Legacy. For my text (HTML, PHP and CSS) editor I use PSPad which allows batch search and replace. Because I have inserted some PHP in all my Pedigree pages I have to change all the file extensions from .HTML to .PHP using Ken Rename, and, finally, I also have to insert some script into the coding. This can only be done after the previous processing and hence requires the use of Regular Expressions to locate the point of insertion. To batch process I use Actual Search and Replace, but note that it cannot write the search and replace the strings for you!

Testing

Arguably this is the most important bit, it is certainly the most time consuming! Because of the use of PHP, I cannot test the Pedigree pages in IE unless it is actually on the web, which is something of a pain. I do, of course, have a folder on the server which I only use for testing purposes, but there always seems to be a difference between how something behaves in that folder and real life!

Links can be tested on-line using the W3C Link Checker, and do remember that for a 404 Error Page all links have to comprise the full URL ie. "http://www...."otherwise even your CSS won't work. This will not quite be the end of it, though, as you, or your visitors, will probably find a few missed bugs for a few days afterwards - make sure they can readily find a way of contacting you!

Finally

Ensure a plentiful supply of coffee, and enjoy!

Website Updates: Latest

2010-03-20T10:51:00.000Z

During the past month it feels like the updating of my website has taken control of my life! The important bits, like the navbars, are working correctly, although they have yet to be tested in browsers other than Firefox and IE.

I am happy with the Index page, my Pedigree pages work, the Tutorials have been completed, as have the Books and Links pages. Yesterday I commenced work on the Photo Albums. During the past year I have taken a number of photos in England and Europe which need to be added to the collections, so I have have decided to split them, on a fairly arbitrary basis to Northern & Southern England, and Central & Southern Europe.

My existing albums were created in flash using SWF Quicker and one of their templates. I considered writing Dynamic CSS based albums, but after consideration, I decided that I couldn't really improve on the Album which I am using. So apart from changing the contents and the background colour I am sticking with what I have.

After this is completed, the next major task will be to transfer my Ferguson One-Name Site to my main site. On the one-name site are over 2000 names, about two thirds of which are Fergusons from northern England, and the format of the pages is that of Family Groups. It also has quite a different background style, so there is much work to be done here.

At present, the remaining eleven days for completion and testing appears to be a remarkably short space of time, so I can imagine a number of sleepless nights between now and the end of the month!

Genealogy Website: The Nav Bars

2010-03-11T16:45:00.001Z

A web page can be considered as being built on layers, the first being the base, or blank page, usually white but it can be given a colour. For my new site I have put another, slightly smaller, background layer on top, followed by the data and images. In my case I consider the nav bars as being a new layer since the drop-downs must sit on top of any data and images. One point about images, IE6, and earlier, do not recognise the ".png" transparency. Google will find many scripts to cure this, one of which is to be found here.

To date, I have used javascript for my drop-down menus, however it is now possible to write these in CSS. Unfortunately, because to do this the latest CSS standard is used there are problems with older browsers, in particular with IE6. The image on the right is a sneak preview of a section of my new index page, and as can be seen the drop-down sits on top.

To make them display on top of images is easy, simply use the "z-index" CSS style. However for other image forms it can be quite tricky. For Flash, within the "Object" tag the line < param name="wmode" value="transparent" > needs to be included. IFrames present a different problem, and to date, despite having tested varying "solutions", I have yet to find a way of stopping the nav bars from going behind the image for IE7 and earlier. Still, I've three weeks left!

Now, the above are the easy problems, again it is IE6 which causes the real head ache, because CSS drop-down menus simply do not work! To the rescue comes Suckerfish and the Sons of Suckerfish, which for my purposes I had to modify even further.

In my first Blog in this series I mentioned that I wished to eliminate/minimise the use of javascript, and for the navigation this has largely been achieved. As you will see to get them to work in the early versions of IE, and I no longer bother writing for IE5.5 and earlier, javascript has been a necessity, this I feel is a fair compromise. If those using IE6 do not have javascript enabled the navigation will not work, but it is still possible for visitors to get round the site albeit with more difficulty. (If you are viewing this using IE6, please upgrade, especially as you can now see our headaches!)

My final point concerns testing, I use Firefox for most of my development work and test in IE8, Opera, Safari, Chrome, Sea Monkey and Bing, these I have on my PC. As I do not have a Mac. I rather hope that if it works with Safari it will be OK (not really satisfactory, but there we go!). So how do I test in earlier versions of IE? A nice free piece of kit called IE Tester enables this to be acheived.; although still in Alpha version, and not every bit works fully, it does do the job, and for me is a life saver.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Genealogy Website, New, Improved, & How 2

2010-03-04T05:15:00.000Z

Everything had been going swimmingly with my new site, until I received from Dennis of Ltools a sneak preview of his forthcoming program update. He has made a couple of alterations to this program which changes the Legacy Pedigree web page output into validating CSS.

One of the functions of this program enables your own custom HTML, which Legacy allows you to incorporate into their code, to be exempted from processing by Ltools. I use this twice on a Pedigree page, for the header and footer. The changes which Dennis has made improve the logic behind the program, but in so doing tighten the way way in which we must write our code. I have detailed the couple of restrictions involved in my tutorial.

Naturally, my coding didn't comply, and since I work on the principle of "only as a last resort read the instructions", it took me a while to sort out what was going on! Basically they are that the start and end tags of an HTML section eg. a <DIV> must both be either inside or outside the custom section, and nesting of comments when using Javascript should be avoided.

The race to get my site update completed by the end of March is now definitely on!

Genealogy Websites: New, Improved, Updated & How

2010-02-25T15:34:00.000Z

My current site Fergy's Website has been in its current form for over a year, except for the Pedigree pages having been converted to CSS. I commenced work on the new site in November 2009 with a view to launch on 1 March 2010, although this was pushed back to 1 April 2010 mainly due to illness.

What I hope to do over my next few Blogs is to illustrate the objectives and problems and how these were overcome. Please do not think that this is going to be so technical it will over your head, some of it perhaps, but most can be applied with little knowledge of programming.

It is essential to draw up the criteria which need to be met for the revised site, mine are:

It must be based on the Legacy Pedigree Web creation function, for no other reason that I really like this layout. I have looked at formats such as The Next Generation, and others, most of which require a GEDCOM upload, but, for me, Legacy was the one.
To maximise the use of CSS to separate out the design from the HTML data.
To replace the Javascript navigation with CSS, and in general, minimise the use of Javascript.
Where possible apply the most modern CSS and HTML standards.
To ensure cross-browser compliance, including IE6 - which continues to be used by a surprisingly high percentage of genealogists!
To redesign the Index page, which given that I do not pretend to be a designer is no mean feat!
To ensure W3C standards are met.

Some of the above aims obviously conflict with each other, so compromises have to be made. These will be described later.

The first problem is that the Legacy Pedigree web pages are not W3C compliant and are written exclusively in HTML. Whilst I had converted the major design components to CSS, to convert all would have meant writing a program to automate this, or using a program which would use Regular Expressions to convert each tag individually - ugh! Unfortunately the first alternative I thought to be beyond my VB.Net programming skills.

However, in 2009 Ltools released a program for Legacy users which validates the HTML and converts all to CSS, and it was this which I used last year to overcome this main stumbling block to achieving a major aim. Some information on the use of this tool is also given in my tutorial here.

The other items will be considered in future Blogs, so watch this space!

Genealogy: Out of a test tube!

2010-02-02T10:26:00.002Z

I have many reservations about prescriptive answers to genealogy presentations, much preferring them to reflect the rich tapestry of life. However with relationships I am less than certain. This question is not an ethical question, as many types of relationship exist in the real world, as we well know.

At present there is much discussion on how modern relationships, such as same sex partnerships, a surrogate parent and test tube children should be recorded by genealogy software, and much of this discussion has revolved around the differences between "true" genealogy and family history. I would ask are we asking the right question to the right people?

Let us consider the question of web browsers. Until recently (if now) browsers were designed in accordance with the ideas of the company designers. As a consequence web designers have for years suffered in trying to design sites which look the same in all varieties of browser, notwithstanding the existence of world wide web standards. Similarly, are we not in danger of genealogy software companies deciding for us what, in their varied opinions, is the best solution as to how the many types of relationships should be handled? I would suggest that this is not the way forward.

The laws regarding varying relationships differ from country to country, and it would be wrong, therefore, for any standard to be based on what is legal in any one country, but the laws in most, if not all countries, should be considered. These days genealogy software is international, and surely the time has now arrived for a new approach to be made.

I would suggest that a cooperative venture between the national genealogy societies and the software companies be initiated to develop a format acceptable to most, but preferably all, participants. And who should pay for this? Why not the software companies by releasing their staff to attend meetings and providing the administrative back up, and perhaps supporting the attendance of the voluntary officials of the genealogy societies.

What I would like to see now is a proper international debate on this subject by genealogists and software companies, rather than comments, complaints and suggestions made by users of specific software to their supplier. As we saw from browser development, a standard may not resolve all the problems, but it would, I believe, be a big improvement on the ad-hoc arrangement we have today.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Lies, Damn Lies and Genealogy

2010-01-20T11:34:00.000Z

As we say up north, Martha Lydia seems to have been a bit of of a lass! She was the illegitimate daughter of Margaret who later married Joe, and had three illegitimate children herself before marrying Bill, with whom she had another six children. Whilst the details which follow relate to England, the principles are generally applicable.

Certificates

One point to remember is that although registration started in 1827, it was voluntary for births and deaths until 1875, so the absence of a certificate is not unusual. For births it is also possible to give a child any name one likes. Our Martha Lydia used her own surname ie. her mother's maiden name, for her first child and that of her step father for the next two. However, She did marry using her own name and left the father's name blank, unlike another illegitimate relative who decided to invent a deceased father when he got married.

In the great English tradition of telling officials what one thinks they would like to hear, where there was a disparity in ages between the couple, or maybe one of them is a little too young for marriage without parental consent, then some age adjustment was perfectly acceptable. Whilst talking about ages, an age at death is that which the reporter of the death thinks it is, which need not necessarily be the chronological age.

Censuses

A census provides an excellent opportunity for the head of a household to demonstrate their creativity. To come back to Martha Lydia, her stepfather came from a very religious family and it simply would not do for illegitimacy to be 'exposed' on a census return! This was resolved by giving the children the same surname as his, and describing them as "son" and "daughters". It was only after Joe died that Margaret recorded the true relationship.

Ages on censuses suffer from many variables, there are those whose increasing age is not related to the passage of time, and others where an accurate disclosure would reveal an illegal act. In particular, during the mid 1800s there were the Factory Acts which increased the minimum working age and restricted the hours of work. Naturally, the age of working juveniles had to comply with the law.

During the 19th century, divorce was the prerogative of the rich, bigamy was not uncommon, and clearly did not show on censuses. Even where there was no bigamous marriage partners would be recorded as a spouse, or maybe a 'housekeeper'. It was, of course, incumbent on all to maintain Victorian standards of morality.

Armed Forces Registration

Surely the details given on registration for service in the armed forces will be accurate? Well, no, especially during the first world war. At this time there was much peer pressure to serve 'King and Country' and there are many recorded instances of people enlisting and inflating their age in order to be eligible to join up and serve overseas.

Transcriptions

Even excluding those so called genealogists whose aim to to prove that they are descended from royalty, rather than to establish the truth, personal family trees must be treated with extreme care. Genealogist may well publish trees in which they clearly state that a relationship is a probability rather than an established fact, but by the time it has been copied and recopied by those who exercise less care this probability has been transcribed into the definitive family history.

With respect to censuses the images which we see, prior to 1911, are transcriptions and are, therefore, subject to both enumerator's and transcriber's errors. Certificates are written by an official, who might be ecclesiastical or civil, and particularly during the period when illiteracy was high the spelling of names is likely to be phonetic.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

The Genealogists' Revenge

2009-12-13T13:05:00.002Z

For those who use Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome, and, in the last couple of months, have downloaded the new Google toolbar you may have seen a little writing pad icon, usually at the bottom left of a page. This is the new Google Sidewiki, click it and one can enter a comment which will remain attached to that page.
If there is an entry in the Sidewiki on a page then the icon on the left, which turns yellow on hovering over it, will be seen at the top of the page. One can also use the Sidewiki icon on the Google Toolbar.

Visitors and webmasters may have different views as to the benefit, or otherwise, of this facility, and I am not going to enter into this discussion, but rather look at how by correct usage it can advantage both. However, it is initially necessary to look at some of the controversal aspects:

Can a webmaster switch it off? No, although I understand it does not appear on secure sites
Can a webmaster edit a visitor's entry? No
Can a webmaster delete a visitor's entry: No
Google says that it will check for inappropriate entries - if flagged
Entries are entered in a priority list as determined by Google

The potential pitfalls for webmasters are obvious, but there are some steps which can be taken to minimise these.

Take part-ownership of the Sidewiki

It is necessary to first register your site with Google Webmasters, you will need to register yourself with Google for this. You will then be given the option of including a meta tag in your script (see my Web Creation Blogs) or uploading an html script to the root of your site. There is also an automatic link to Blogger. Once done your own entry can be permanently entered to the top of the list on every page - although I have not been able to get the "all pages" check box to appear on my sites using Firefox!

Check all entries

The entries which visitors make can also be read by the webmaster using either your Google Profile or from an RSS feed using the URL: http://www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/domainpath/www.MY DOMAIN.COM%2Ffergys%2F/default?includeLessUseful=true, replace "MY DOMAIN.COM with your own domain name and delete the "www." if not included in your URL. Using this is somewhat messy, so I suggest that you use a feed generator.

What use is it?

If used properly then the Sidewiki offers an opportunity for commenting on, and discussing, individual entries in a genealogy website, such as: whether Joe Blogs has the correct parents. This can be done in a most convenient way compared with having to go to a comments page or sending an email, and it is open for other interested parties to enter the debate.

And why do I title this piece the "Genealogists' Revenge"? Well, when we now see our research published on a website by someone else, and without attribution, we can now claim it back! If the cap fits I advise caution.

© Ron Ferguson 2009

Genealogy Searches - What Now?

2009-12-01T17:06:00.008Z

The publishing of the complete England/Welsh 1851 census by Findmypast.com raises the interesting question as to whether to subscribe to that site or Ancestry.co.uk, particularly since the former includes the English/Welsh 1911 census. I hope that the following may help you decide (For England, in the table, please read England/Wales - with apologies).

Comparison Table

For the purpose of this comparison I have chosen to compare the Ancestry Premium subscription with the Findmypast Explorer.

Description	Ancestry	Findmypast
Full English Censuses	NO	YES
Complete BMD's	YES	YES*
Family Trees	YES	YES
Parish Records	YES	YES
Irish Records	YES	NO
Scottish Records	YES**	NO+
Full WW1 Records	YES	NO
Other UK Military Records	NO	YES
Complete Eng. Emigration Records	NO	YES
Annual Cost UKPs++	£107.40++	£149.90***

Notes

Ancestry does not include the 1911 census
* Not directly searchable before 1984
** transcript only
+ Scotlands People is a sister site to Findmypast
++ Ancestry Essentials subscription at £84.40 excludes Parish and Irish Records
*** Findmypast Explorer costs £89.95 but excludes the 1911 census (available [you've guessed!] at £59.95/annum)

Both companies offer vouchers, but, as might be expected, comparison is not easy! Ancestry offer 12 record views for £6.95. valid 14 days, and Findmypast 60 credits also at £6.95 valid 90 days. It should be noted that to view a Findmypast image usually costs up to 10 credits, although the top rate is for the 1911 census - 10 credits to view the transcript, but a massive 30 credits to view the image!

I know that the above will not answer the question as to which is the most appropriate, and it is clear that the choice will depend on your particular circumstances. It seems that it would be best to take out a subscription with the company which has the majority of searches which you will need, and buy vouchers for the other - but note Ancestry's very short life-span.

The assessments which I have given are based on my own use of these sites, rather than on the owners' blurbs, and I have only included their major databases. Both sites have other data of more specialist interest.

© Ron Ferguson 2009

Of this Parish...

2009-11-15T12:11:00.004Z

In England and Wales, Parish Registrations of births, marriages and deaths started in 1538, prior to that date details were kept on sheets of paper, and 13 years later in 1531 for Scotland. Civil Registrations were not introduced in England and Wales until 1837 and 1854 in Scotland.

Prior to the above dates Wales was using the patronymic system of naming, eg. Evan Ab Evan (Evan the son of Evan, or "vench" meaning daughter of). Whilst the lowlands of Scotland used recognisable surnames before the 16c, it was not until the 16c - 17c that most highlanders adopted the name of their clan chief. However, it would be quite wrong to think that we have a guaranteed way of tracing or ancestors back to the 16c, I wish!

Unfortunately, the Scottish showed their admirable resistance to "government interference" and most of their 900 parishes kept, at best, only partial records until just before 1854. These may be found at Scotlands People. In England between 1653 and 1660 the keeping of records was transferred from the churches to a civil office, confusingly, also know as the "Parish Register". Suffice to say that few of these records exist - who said that governments losing data is a new thing :-). The full timeline for registration law can be found on my website.

It is only since 1992 that all birth and baptism records over 150 years old have had to be kept safe, usually in County Record Offices, so many of the older registers are damaged and difficult to read, and before the 17c - 18c are often in Latin! The parish priests were, from 1598, obliged to compile records to send to their bishop, known as "Bishops Transcripts", but these are incomplete and transcription errors common.

In the south of England the ecclesiastic parishes are usually coterminous with the civil parishes, but this is much less true in the north where the former could encompass a number of townships, each of which, or a combination of them, were later to become civil parishes. If an entry cannot be found where expected, do look in adjacent parishes since there was quite a high, but local, migration.

All transcriptions, whilst welcome, cannot beat reading the original. Apart from transcription errors, much is often omitted; names of putative fathers; occupations; and especially odd comments from the vicar immediately come to mind. Finally, do not ignore the records post 1837 in England and Wales (1854, Scotland) because: registration was voluntary before 1875 in England and Wales, they can contain details omitted from the certificate, and will resolve incorrect copying of the register which may be found in the certificate. Yes, it does happen!

Websites

The best website for finding where a parish register is likely to be stored is probably the Society of Genealogists. Not many parishes have published their record details, but it is always worth trying Google. A growing collection of sites which should not be ignored is the on-line Parish Clerk which for a number of counties offers transcripts of the parish registers. Last, but not least is the IGI at Family Search.

© Ron Ferguson

Location, Location, Location and the UK

2009-11-04T10:55:00.007Z

I am British, it is difficult to describe myself otherwise as my father is descended from Scottish ancestors, my mother from Welsh and I was born in England. It may be because of this hybrid background that I am sensitive to the way in which UK locations are entered in genealogy reports.

Let us start with the meaning of the UK; it is (now) the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but prior to the establishment of the Republic of Ireland in 1922 it included the whole of Ireland. This, of course, leads to the question as to what is Great Britain; put simply, it is the largest island within the British Isles the latter being merely a geographical description which also includes, the whole of Ireland and the Isle of Man. Often the Channel Isles are included as well but this is not strictly accurate. Great Britain comprises the countries of Scotland, England and Wales. The first two are Kingdoms and the latter a principality - but never suggest to the Welsh that Wales is not a country, it is :-).

Northern Ireland is a province of the UK, created from 6 counties in 1922, and is not the same as Ulster which contains two additional counties, now in the Republic. The Isle of Man and the Channel Isles are not, and never have been, part of the UK, but are Crown Dependencies. The former having the oldest parliament in the world, The Tynwald. The Channel Isles has two separate states, Jersey and Guernsey with their own governments, and the other islands are dependencies of Guernsey.

For further information please refer to The British Isles and all That.

After only a short time studying genealogy one meets the "four field convention" for naming locations. Let us be perfectly clear - this does not work for UK locations. To start with we do not have states, and England, Scotland and Wales are countries not states of the UK or GB. The correct description of location in these three countries would basically be: Parish/County/Country or Parish/Town/County/Country. There are variations, but these are the basic formats.

Thus, the correct location of Southampton is "Southampton, Hampshire, England", and not as I have recently seen "Southampton, ,Hampshire, Engand". There is not another tier between Southampton and Hampshire. We never add "UK" or "GB" to the end of a location, in particular, the latter is simply wrong and the former unacceptable. Arguably it could be said that "Northern Ireland, UK" is correct, although I would not include "UK".

Ouch! I hear, the Geolocation finders no longer work, well they don't, they were designed to fit the four field system, which doesn't work for us (and much of the world outside of America for that matter). I would suggest that accuracy should come before convenience and where I need to use the locator (rarely) I first enter the data incorrectly so that it fits the four field system, get the latitude and longitude, and then correct the location fields. A little more trouble, yes, but at least the output is accurate.

For further information on the history of English locations you are referred to English Counties, Parish, etc. for Genealogists.

In conclusion, for me, to expect a system of naming which has developed over nearly 2000 years to fit a convention developed only in the 20c is beyond my comprehension, and I look forward to the day when we will see our locations accurately reported.

© Ron Ferguson

We All Have One Thing In Common

2009-10-17T23:12:00.004+01:00

I was watching, on BBC TV, a programme about Darwin's Theory of Evolution when the presenter, his grandson, made an observation which is both obscure and self-evident. It doesn't matter whether one believes in the theory, wholly, partially or not at all, and it is that we all have one thing in common - we are the children of survivors. His point was, of course, that the weaker members of society did not survive, leaving the stronger to advance the species. This is not my point, but it did get me thinking.

From the late 1930s, I was brought up in Eccles, Lancashire, England, which was then a town on the western edge of Salford, although it is now part of that city. From being a rural area Eccles had developed into a mixed industrial and farming town following the construction of the Bridgewater Canal in 1763; the main industries being cotton and engineering. Where I lived, in a house built in 1938, we had farmland facing us and to the west, but at the top of the road, to the east, was a cotton mill and over the Bridgewater Canal the Royal Ordnance Factory. My father was a crankshaft turner for Gardeners' Diesel Engines, a couple of miles away. Interestingly, during WW2 the field near the cotton mill and facing the ordnance factory was a barrage balloon site, with its ack-ack guns, always an attraction for us kids!

I have given this description to illustrate that Eccles was a mixed town with a variety of housing and people, and cannot be stereotyped as a poor industrial area with people living in cramped accommodation lacking basic facilities. Yes, there were some areas like that, but they were atypical.

When I was a kid we all suffered from what we called childhood illnesses, measles, mumps, whooping cough etc. and although medicines were less advanced than now I do not recollect anyone dying from them. There were the odd cases of polio and TB from which there were some deaths, but my two sisters and brother all got scarlet fever and survived, I had nearly 2 months off school, in isolation, as a result - great! I can remember very well the men coming round and using a sulphur spray around the house in order to kill the infection.

What brought all this back to mind, was a visit to Manchester Central Library researching the Eccles Parish Burial Registers between 1835 and 1850 when I was forcibly struck by the mortality rates for children. I recorded details of seventy people with one of two surnames, so the selection was reasonably random and found that 59% of the deaths were children, that is died before the age of 21 years. Obviously during the 100 years between then and the period to which I refer above there were improvements in housing, sanitation and medicine. But we still had no vaccines and, other than the new penicillin, no antibiotics, so if one became ill it was very much a matter of letting the illness take its course "in a quiet darkened room" (from a 1930s medical book).

This does indicate, therefore, that our forefathers who did survive had a greater, natural resistance to childhood illnesses than those who died, and maybe passed this on to the next generation. Or did they?

© Ron Ferguson 2009

What to do With Genealogy Source Images!

2009-10-02T14:05:00.000+01:00

A regular question on genealogy forums, and not only from beginners, is how to store and use images from genealogy websites, such as Amazon and Findmypast, on one's PC. The question of storage depends on which genealogy program is being used and whether it only stores the paths to the images or embeds the image in the Source.

For myself, I use Legacy Software which only stores the path, thus only one instance of an image is required to source a number of Events, whereas some other software will embed the image in the Source. In the latter case the number of images increases as the number of times a specific Source increases and is, therefore, very memory intensive. In the latter case, it is better to use the image once only eg. a census may be linked only to the head of a family, but do try to be consistent. When only the path is linked then it can be linked to every instance the Source is used with very little extra memory being taken up. Remember also that images in grey scale use less memory than those using RGB..

Why link the images in the first place?

I find on an almost daily basis when working on my data that I need to check something with the original data, it maybe just a date of birth, and having it only one click of a button away is so much more convenient and faster than going back to the website or searching through a load of hard copies.

How can I publish the images?

This can be tricky! Although the data may be copyright free, the images and indexes are almost certainly not. The answer to this question is to always read the small print on the original source very carefully. The UK censuses, for example, are Crown Copyright, and as I have no wish have action taken against me by Her Majesty the Queen I do not publish these images. Similarly the indexes will be the copyright of the organisation which compiled the index, and how these may be used is determined by that organisation.

I have on my web site some searchable parish registers, this data is copyright free but the format and coding is my copyright. So, abstracting and using the data is fine, but that is all! (I will happily allow copying, with my express consent, provided that my site is acknowledged as the source).

There is another problem with publishing many images, and that is their physical size. For hard copy of censuses a new page will be needed, otherwise they will be virtually unreadable, and for web pages the most convenient way is to use expandable thumbnails.

© Ronald Ferguson 2009

Tips for Family Tree Webpages 3

2009-09-18T10:44:00.011+01:00

The one aspect of attracting visitors to our site which we have not yet considered is that of promotion. The main point being that what we need to do is to sell the site, I can already hear the shouts of "Sell? But this is a hobby!", so I will repeat myself, yes, sell! In the first part of this trilogy we looked at why we create websites, and to achieve any of the objects described we have the need to attract visitors, so how can we do this, free and from our armchairs?

A little knowledge of HTML is helpful, but not essential in considering this section. The code of any web page can be viewed in your browser by using View>Source, or something very similar. At the start we have the head which lies between two tags: <head> and </head>. Within this lies the title and some meta tags, the latter we will come to later.

For many, the first page visited will be the index page, so the title for this page should describe succinctly the whole of the sites contents, mine has the title "Fergys Website of Genealogy, Software and Social", which is what the site is about. If it was only about my family tree then I could have called it "The Ferguson Family Tree", the quotes are not required. If at all possible the title should be at the top of the head. Below is a screen shot of part of my index page head.

From this we can see the two meta tags which are important for our purposes viz. "Description" and "Keywords". The former should contain a general description of the site and the latter the keywords which you believe will attract people to your site, in particular the aspects which you wish to emphasize and which you feel will best attract visitors. I have seen genealogy sites where every surname has been included in the Keywords of the index page. This is not necessary as search engines will get them from the index, or individual pages.

That's it for your website, now for the selling! As a minimum, we should to tell Google and Yahoo, these URLs will take you to the pages to register your site with them, but do not expect an instant inclusion in the lists, it may take over a month. Nor should I worry about page rankings as it is very unlikely that a genealogy site will generate enough traffic to warrant inclusion - I think I have only one page which has the lowest ranking of 1 and that is not a genealogy page! This does not mean, however, that your site is consigned to number 1,245,000 on the lists, mine are consistently near the top, especially in the UK list.

Try and get others to include your URL on their site, I try and make it a condition that anyone publishing my data also includes my URL, not easily enforced but does produce results. Include the URL in your signature to public mailing groups, the more a search engine sees your URL the higher up the list it goes. Include it in your Blogs, on Facebook and Twitter etc. and if you can get it in your local press or elsewhere then so much the better. Create a demand, but do not expect instant results, my site has been active for a number of years.

Which brings me to my final point, regularly update, because search engines take more interest in sites which are clearly active; I update mine every month, sometimes the changes may be small, but nevertheless it shows the site is not dormant.

More information can be found on Fergys Website in the Tutorials section - still selling :-) - where I look into the creation of websites, often using Legacy Software which automatically adds a basic title to each individual page.

Good luck

© Ronald Ferguson 2009

Tips for Family Tree Webpages 2

2009-09-08T11:38:00.007+01:00

In my last blog we looked at measuring and analysing the number who visit your web pages. I now wish to turn to attracting people to your websites. After all, if we didn't wish for visitors we wouldn't have the site in the first place!

For my genealogy pages I use Legacy to generate the Pedigree Pages, in my Fergys Website and the Family Group pages for my north west England Fergusons. On their own these pages are not particularly attractive, so I wrap them in headers and footers to make them more appealing, and add pictures where possible. This is my first point, visitors need to like the site which they visit. I also consider the index page, for many their first impression of the site, should be a visually attractive page. Unfortunately I am not good on design, so I try to make them a little different to the norm (or use a template).

Another essential is the ease of navigation. There is nothing worse than going to a site and not being able to find the area within which wishes to look. If javascript is used then do ensure that there is a noscript option for those who do not have javascript enabled, otherwise your site could fail at the first page. Talking of javascript reminds me that not all search engines read it, so the noscript option is needed for them also. It goes without saying that the links must work on your server, and not just on your PC, and similarly that your pictures must be displayed; not the empty box with a red cross!

Finally we have the content. The names pages in genealogy sites will attract only those who are looking for John Smith so try adding other pages. I have a relative who was murdered and his story attracts quite a few visits, but for some reason the most popular page on my site is a biopic of all the British Prime Ministers. It is also very worthwhile to ensure that the title of each page emphases the content of that page.

In the next blog I will look at search engines and promoting the site.

© Ronald Ferguson 2009

Tips for Family Tree Websites

2009-08-18T23:51:00.002+01:00

We have differing reasons for creating genealogy web sites: to show off what we can do, the hope of attracting people who can fill in the gaps, to help others, we enjoy coding, or a combination of any or all. These aims have one thing in common, people need to be attracted to the site, and we would like them to stay there for a bit and return from time to time.

This blog is the first of a short series and here I will be concentrating on measuring a site's effectiveness. Now one might think that this should be the last in the series but I disagree, as it is easier to implement at the start of a project, and right from the start one will be able to measure the effectiveness of changes to the site once up and running.

No knowledge of HTML is required except that the file can be opened in Notepad to expose the code, and the last tag is the "close body" tag which looks like </body>. I will be concentrating on Google Analytics. After signing, up one can obtain a piece of code which is copied and pasted just before the close body tag in every web page.

Now the hard bit's done, what can Google Analytics do? Well, as might be expected, it can tell you the number of visitors to each page, but more than that, which country they came from, which browsers have been used, how long each visit lasted and the bounce rate - that means the number of visitors who enter and leave on the same page. I should emphasise that all data is strictly anonymous.

When I first created my current site, FergysWebsite I noticed that the bounce rate from my opening page was much higher than I would have expected. I knew that IE6 browser is still widely used and suspected that my index page might not be compatible. Sure enough it wasn't, and by correcting that page I cut my overall bounce rate by more than 10%. This means, I hope, that more visitors will visit again.

The one option I really like is called "Benchmarking" and will be found under "Visitors" on the top left of the site report. It takes the statistics for the site and compares them with the averages for sites of a similar size and type. For "genealogy" click on "Open category" near the top of the Benchmark screen, then select Lifestyles>Parenting & Family>Genealogy and the charts will superimpose the average on the chart for your site. For example, the bounce rate, which is naturally high on genealogy pages, can now be compared with those on other genealogy sites, brilliant!

© Ronald Ferguson

Genealogy in the Cloud

2009-08-09T10:23:00.004+01:00

It is often said that the future lies in cloud computing. That no longer will we have masses of data on our PCs but the data will be stored on large servers. We have seen suggestions that all our family trees can be linked to form one unified family, but are these ideas realisable?

Perhaps, but there are many questions yet to be answered. In my view one of the most important is the question of the ownership of the data. Should I put my family tree on a host server then I would wish to retain ownership of this data, and would resist changes being made without my consent. Closely allied to this is the question of privacy. Like many genealogists, my data includes much information which I wish to keep private, not only details relating to living people but also sensitive matters concerning people who may be recently deceased. I need not, of course, load this onto the host in the sky, but then I would need to retain my large database on my PC which some may feel rather defeats the object.

I would also need rather more assurances about privacy than that which we have present, it is quite wrong for the host to claim that once the tree is on their server it becomes their property, and they can do what they like with it. Another consideration is government regulation, not only that of the country in which one might live, but that of the countries in which the servers are located. What "rights" have those governments granted themselves?

Consideration should also be given as to how this is to be financed. Often many feel that everything on the internet should be free, but this is an impossibility. The storage of everybody's data will cost a tremendous amount of money. The cost per byte may be very low, but not the total cost. Advertising is not going to pay for this. Already returns from internet advertising are falling, as can be seen by newspapers' proposals to charge for access. To me, it seems highly likely that in the future the costs of on-line storage will be passed onto the user.

Of importance to all is the stability of the data banks, which in one sense is clearly related to costs. However, in another sense, one should consider the action of hackers. Of, course they can attack all servers including the ones which we presently use, but we only have to look at the recent attack on twitter (and I still cannot tweet 4 days after the event!) to see the temptation to have a go at a large unit.

Please do not think that I am against cloud computing, that would be far from the truth, and I currently use on-line storage. I have trees on Ancestry and other sites; my point is that the questions I raise have yet to be answered to my satisfaction.

© Ronald Ferguson

Genealogy and Politics

2009-07-20T20:32:00.006+01:00

I was recently thinking about my family tree just after having been involved in a political discussion, and I realised that they have a lot in common.

In a sense one's family history is a reflection of the political situation at any given time. I was recently asked by a distant relative from Westmorland, a beautiful rural area encompassing a large part of the Lake District why my ancestor had moved south to the industrial centre of Salford. The answer must have been, of course, work. At the time he was a marble mason and clearly there would be more work in an industrial centre.

The reason behind much of the growth of our cities is due to technology, but often it is the actions of, or pressure from, our politicians which create population movements. More obvious was the effect the politicians, of both the trade unions and the government, had in the decline of the English mining villages during the 1980s. We have had periods of very high taxation when people would emigrate to avoid them, and other times when the government has restricted the funding of research leading to the so called "brain drain".

Today we are seeing the loss of young people from the villages of England because the more wealthy city dwellers are buying second homes and driving house prices out of reach of those whose families have lived there for generations. A perfect local example of the movement of people in order to improve their lot, a situation worsened for the villagers by the European Agriculture and Fisheries policies.

It is said that the way ahead for western economies is to maximise the high-tech skills of the people. If that is the case we can expect a large influx of people to take over service jobs, such as bar-tenders, labouring and other manual jobs. This was recently illustrated by the number of east Europeans who came to England to take such jobs, and left when our economy crashed.

My aim here is not to take sides, but to illustrate how genealogy and political history are interwoven by the action or inaction of our politicians, even in (relative) peace time!

© Ron Ferguson 2009