So by 6am I had decided to give up and turn on the
laptop. Last week I split my family tree,
which was getting far too big to work efficiently, into separate families – one for
my ancestors, one for the OH’s and one for my children’s father, my first
husband. I have done this before and
regretted it as something usually gets lost.
In Family Historian you create a copy of the original tree and then
using the wizard supplied (that’s a pre-written programme for those who don’t
follow techno jargon) delete the items you don’t want. Unfortunately if, once you have tidied up the
people, you then tell it to delete all sources, notes and images without links
to people and it can remove something you want to keep because you didn’t link
it in to a person in the first place.
Yes, yes, I know that makes it my fault for not using the programme
properly and citing all my sources thoroughly dah, di, dah, di, dah … but many,
many years ago when I first started family history I didn’t know the importance
of recording sources and my own family tree is one of the older bits of my
research so the facts often have no citations and sources such as maps and
pictures are just floating around unattached. I'm working on it ...
William Satchell Hutton, the master mariner, married Ann
Bormond Smith in Walker, Northumberland in 1861. Her family had lived in Haswell, Durham up to
at least 1855 as that was the birth place of her youngest sibling. But by the April of 1861 in the census they
are in Walker on Church Lane, later Church Street, and that is the parish in
which Ann marries.
I have a map of Walker from 1864 and another from 1897 from
the Old Maps site – I take screen shots of the bits I’m interested in and
stitch them together in Photoshop – the more recent one have the Old Maps
imprint on them (I guess they caught on to what people were doing!) but they
are fine for reference.
 |
| Walker in 1864 (from Old Maps) |
Family Historian allows you to add an image and then link it
to a person – you can link the whole image or use a tool to outline a section
specific to the person – great for family group pictures, you can draw the
outlines around each face and attach them to the people in your tree and the
little sections then appear on the person’s individual record and in any
reports you produce. For maps I draw
around the relevant street, if the image is larger than the window on the
screen when you click on the person’s name it automatically moves the image
until the bit you want is on the screen – very clever – and great for
maps. You can add a fair sized piece of
map and select streets or even individual houses if the map is large scale enough. You can attach sources to an image – it sounds
a bit backwards – but imagine adding the map, with the church highlighted, to
the source record for the marriage certificate for William and Ann …
 |
| A screen shot of Family Historian showing a highlighting box around Church Lane, Walker This was the address of Thomas Smith in 1861 |
A lot of the way that I set up Family Historian is dictated
by the way in which Gedmill processes the records when it creates my familyhistory web pages. I learnt early on not
to just have one source for multiple records with images, that related to many
different people – an example was the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) website – yes, of course cite the main site, with some relevant text, but then I
create a separate source for each image so that on the web site you see the
right screen shot for a casualty, not every single image I’ve ever captured
from the CWGC site.
Back in Walker - with my two map sections on the screen I
decided to add some other ancestors that I knew lived in the same area. Family Historian has a new feature called
Plugins, they are like apps I suppose, other people can write them to work
along with Family Historian to do small tasks.
I have downloaded a plugin which searches your whole tree for a
specified word and presents you with a list – handy if you are looking for a particular
place across a number of different types of events – census, birth, death,
marriage etc. I entered Walker and was
surprised at the number of results.
There were a lot of duplicates, where people had remained in Walker over
more than one census return they had been listed each time, and of course each
child of a family was listed so in my typical large 19th century families
there were sometimes eight or nine entries for one family on the list. Even so some names appeared that I hadn’t
recalled as having any connection with Walker.
On my mother’s paternal side there were the Smiths, with whom I
started, the family of William S Hutton’s bride, Ann Bormond Smith, who were
there from around 1861 with a brother of Ann’s remaining there until sometime in
the middle of 1891. A cousin from that
side of the family turned up as well, Joseph Bormond, a nephew of Ann’s
mother. My family seems particularly
fond of using family surnames as middle names – which comes in very useful when
they are unusual. Sorting out Smiths is
a thankless task, but throw in a Bormond and there are no problems working out
which Ann Smith you are after!
On my mother’s maternal grandparents’ side, my 3x great
grandfather John Gibson lived there from before 1841, his son, another John
Gibson, moved to Byker, a few miles to
the west, but his son Thomas Harle Gibson (my great grandfather) was in Walker
in 1881 living with his widowed mother whose Harle family had been in Walker
since around 1851. Harle branches
persisted in Walker for as long as I’ve been able to trace them. The wonderfully named Elizabeth Decima Harle
(so you know how many children were in that family!), who was my half second
cousin twice removed, was born in Walker in 1901. Her family appear in the 1911 census for Walker where I see the family has been added to, now 11 children, all surviving to the census at least.
On my father’s maternal side my 3x great grandfather James
Russell died in Walker in 1888, he had been living his son George who was still
there in the 1911 census. George’s
grandchildren, Russells and Oswalds, more of my second cousins twice removed,
are being born in the Walker area up to 1922 and possibly beyond. One of George’s nephews, a George Deacon, passes
through between 1898 and 1908 judging by his children’s birthplaces.
My father’s paternal side seem to steer clear of Walker – although there are some Dixons and Robsons who come very close (Newcastle upon
Tyne) in the early 19th century!
I commented some time ago that researching my OH’s family
tree here in Barnsley in great depth has led to me finding out that his lines cross and interlink and that all kinds of people are related to each
other. It may be that if only I had all
the resources and time to do the same for Walker I might discover that my
branches do the same, as it does seem that wherever you turned in Walker in the
latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th
century you were likely to bump into my relatives!
