Genealogy
A discipline which starts as a
science, but finds richness as an art
Some notes on the sources and methods
used to compile and bring alive the lineage of a family
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Types of
Families
Where a
family descends from noble and aristocratic lines, the records are extensive
and pave a course well back in time. Sometimes families can find a gateway
ancestor, a link to a relative of pedigree, whose ancestry has already been
studied and recorded in detail and which might provide a direct route to
medieval noblemen and perhaps royalty. The Farndale family are not such a
family. That would be no fun.
The
Farndales, like most British families, were not aristocratic folk. Such
families bind and explain the social fabric of society through the ages. They
are the bedrock of society, and it is their graft and experience which provided
the engine room for a nation’s story. So if we can take such a family, and
explore it through time, it is likely to provide a unique insight into British
social history.
Surnames are generally of four types.
Occupational
surnames derive from historical jobs, like Baker which was my grandmother’s
name, until the names become fixed over time.
Patronymic
names allow a fellow with a Christian name to link himself to his father,
providing more continuity to who he is, like Orm Gamalson, who we meet in the Anglo-Saxon-Scandinavian
history of Farndale Story, the Saxon/Viking feudal lord of Kirkbymoorside.
Descriptive
names originated in nicknames until they became fixed as surnames, like
Whitelock from the complexion of hair, or Pybus from pikebush
describing a prickly character, both being examples of families who have
married Farndales.
The fourth
type of surname is a locative name. Those fortunate to have a locative name
have an advantage in genealogy, because as the records dim over time, there is
still a route to find more about the people who lived in the place, and about
the place itself. Where that placed is relatively small, and easy to place in
time, particularly a rural spot which is nevertheless identified and described
in history, then it becomes possible to build up the fullest history back to
the earliest of times.
The three
eras of genealogy
A
genealogist perceives history in three distinct eras.
1560 to
Date
For
genealogists of English history, their exploration becomes easier when
exploring their ancestors from 1538, when parish records started to be made,
and even easier as births deaths and marriages were recorded more formally and
centrally, and census records started from 1801.
In reality
parish records often did not permeate into local parishes until a little later
in the sixteenth century. So the period from about 1560 to date is a period
about which, if pursued with enough passion and belief, a comprehensive family
record can be compiled. Sometimes a record is missing and a dilemma just can’t
be resolved, but generally the whole family and its inter-relationships, can be
compiled from about 1560, if pursued with sufficient determination.
1200 to
1560
Before 1560
genealogists don’t have clear records of family relationships. That means, save
some aristocratic and royal family lines where lineages have been recorded, it
is not possible to construct a definitive family tree. However, that does not
mean that the family story ends in about 1560. There are extensive medieval
records available from the Norman Conquest.
Names which passed down through generations
did not start to be used by most ordinary families until the thirteenth
century. So medieval records do not assist until then because they simply don’t
record individual people who might have been members of the family being
researched. However if you start a search in the medieval records, you might
just start to find individual records as building blocks from which to compile
a family story, as they start to emerge in the thirteenth century. The task of
compiling such a story from the medieval period might just be too difficult for
the Petersons, the Smiths or the Taylors. However if a family has the privilege
of a locative name of some uniqueness, the magic of recovery of a medieval
history becomes a possibility. For every time Farndale appears in the medieval
records, it will inevitably be a reference to the place where our ancestors
lived, or to an individual person. Sometimes those records even provide
evidence of relationships, where for instance they refer to Robert,
son of Simon the
Miller of Farndale, being caught poaching. With enough records, it becomes
possible to build a picture of some accuracy of the relationships and lives of
a family back to the thirteenth century.
The art of medieval genealogy is explored
in another webpage.
Before
1200
Before the
time individuals started to use heritable names, it follows that individual
stories can’t be followed. However that may not be the end of a genealogical
journey. If you can link back the genealogical story to a particular place, the
story of that place is the likely to hold a story of deeper ancestry.
If you can
trace your family history to a particular place, particularly where the family
adopted a locative name which is rooted in that place, there is value in
continuing your journey to explore the community who lived there, since that is
likely to be the story of the family’s deeper history. Having traced the
Farndales to the valley from which they took their name, it turned out that the
valley was part of a larger estate which was relatively stable from Roman,
through Anglo Saxon and Scandinavian, to Norman times. So whilst I was not able
to identify individual ancestors before the thirteenth century, I was able to
explore the history of the valley and the wider estate of which my more distant
ancestors were likely to have been associated. Of course that exploration
should take account of historic migrations and fluidity of populations, but
where the history stumbles across a place of mobility, the historical and
archaeological record is likely to provide a useful tool in pushing the
boundaries of a family’s history further back in time.
For anyone
beginning a genealogical journey, I suggest you start by understanding the
distinct disciplines of research for the periods (1) 1560 to date; (2) 1200 to
1560; and (3) before 1200. The first begins an exercise in pure genealogy, but
which can be enhanced by the context of a wider historical understanding. The
second is an exercise in medieval
genealogy, which may take a very different approach, sometimes more like
detective work, but which has the capacity to provide passage to more distant
worlds. The third is a historical and archaeological exercise, to explore the
place of ancestry, and take a journey back into deep time.
The
approach to historical evidence
My
professional discipline is in law. I was involved in the resolution of complex
construction and engineering disputes in court and arbitration. The heart of my
discilpine was an understanding of the legal rules of
evidence, which determined how facts would be interpreted, and from which legal
conclusions, and judgements, could be made. I have therefore tended to approach
genealogy from the stand point of my legal experience.
There are
two distinct standards by which legal evidence is assessed. The first standard
is a tougher one, by which criminal cases are assessed, since they can lead to
a loss of freedom or other privilege. The standard requires facts to be
determined beyond reasonable doubt. There must be near certainty that a
fact is a true fact, if it is to form part of the jigsaw to determining an
outcome. In a legal context this often involves corroboration, so that a fact
is proved from more than one source. I think this standard might reasonably be
used by a genealogist as the gold standard to which he or she aspires. Finding
two sources of a fact might well be helpful, but sometimes a single record,
such as a birth certificate, might be enough to put beyond doubt the basic
facts of an individual’s history, and it might provide certainty on such
relationships as a person’s parents. The approach I take is, particularly for
the period 1560 to date, that a genealogist should strive to prove each primary
fact to this higher standard of proof in the first instance.
The second
standard of proof is used in civil cases where rights and obligations between
individuals or organisations have to be weighed up and assessed. It is a
balancing act, and the standard of proof reflects that. Civil cases are proved
on a balance of probabilities, that is on the basis that a fact is
accepted if it is more likely than not. Generally this is taken to be a
51% likelihood that a fact is correct. When piecing together a family story for
the period before 1560, it is likely that the higher standard of proof will not
be possible to reach. Yet it is possible to assemble a rich body of evidence
which can still be pieced together to establish the most likely factual
narrative. Sometimes for the period after 1560, try as you might, it is possible
that a vital factual clue has been lost from the records. There again, it is
not necessary to accept defeat and give in, but rather to accept the reality,
and consider the body of evidence that is most likely, and build the family
story based on the most probable interpretation of the facts. Weigh up each
fact, and where certainty is not possible, follow the most likely
interpretation. Of course if facts subsequently come to light that disprove an
assumption, such factual interpretation will need to be reassessed. Yet by
following this approach, the narrative will be the most likely one, and by
building on the most likely factual interpretation, a bigger picture will
emerge, which can itself make more sense of the family story.
Having built
the factual narrative, adopting the highest standard of assessing evidence that
is practical to achieve, it is possible to start to narrate a story, which
binds the whole together, into a journey into the past. There is I think even a
place for borrowing literary accounts of the past to enhance that story. The
depth of Shakespeare’s prose can sometimes enhance an encounter with medieval
history. The starkness of Dickens’ descriptions of Victorian social change can
bring aspects of a family story to life. The perception of Flora Thompson in
her descriptions of late Victorian rural life can make sense of experiences
which our own ancestors must have felt.
Historical
fiction is a discipline which is governed by its own rules. It starts from
historical facts which are known and established. If authentically approached,
the historical facts are not altered but historical novelists use their
imagination to fill the gaps between those facts with what is perceived to be a
likely scenario. Of course the aim is to write an interesting story, and
novelists may well be attracted to the more interesting scenario. Yet such
novelists fill an important void, in capturing likely, if imagined, pictures of
what might well have been, where the historical facts will never reveal what
actually was.
Genealogy
must start as a science, cold and disciplined. We should start work in the
mindset of Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind. Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach
these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant
nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of
reasoning animals upon Facts. Nothing else will ever be of any service to them.
This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the
principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir! We start
the exercise bound by the rules of a criminal prosecutor, to strive to prove
each fact, methodically, beyond reasonable doubt.
We then
continue, having relaxed the rules a little, to pull together the evidence
which is available, to find paths through the what can be ascertained to
provide the most likely interpretation. Having started the exercise like Mr
Gradgrind, this slightly less formal approach will help to build a broader
picture of a family’s history.
Finally,
though never seeking to alter the facts which have been already established by
the first two stages of the exercise, we leave the discipline of science, and
adopt the approach of the artist, to tell a story which will take us on a
journey through time. That might involve the application of imagination, of
which Gradgrind would disapprove.
The
Scaffolding
The
genealogical journey therefore begins by the construction the scaffolding. It
is a scientific pursuit. At first the tools are very limited, and it’s best to
keep them so.
A
genealogical novice will first be encouraged to speak to immediate relatives,
and that must be the sagest advice. The starting point must be to build up a
simple family tree to link together a family’s relationship as deeply and
broadly as it is possible to do from family knowledge.
I was
fortunate because my father, Martin Farndale, had extensively researched the
family’s history before me, though in pre computer days when remarkably he had
to work painstakingly through written records in different parishes and other
sources. So when I took over responsibility for the work at about the turn of
the Millenium, the structure was already well in place.
It might be
tempting to leap to an interesting individual of the right name and see if a
link can be found. Occasionally there might be a place for such an exercise,
but certainly not early on. Gradgrind would disapprove of that approach. If you
start from the known fact of a more contemporary relative, it is far better to
work backwards in a more methodical way, taking each step backwards in time in
a more confident way, establishing the route as a scientist, from known fact to
new known fact. As a rule, it is always best, indeed it is essential really, to
work backwards, from what is known with certainty, into the unknown past. So
the work should start in the modern age, with trails followed backwards. When
trying to solve a problem, start with what is known for certain in more modern
times, and work back to try to use records to fill in what happened in earlier
times.
There are
occasions when a scattergun approach can help. With a name like Farndale, it is
certainly worth finding a medieval record set, and just searching the name to
find what comes up. That will help with some building blocks, then to be
slotted in. It is not though the place to start.
Having
exhausted family knowledge, there are then two key tools which can be used to
continue the scaffolding construction project. The first tool is records of
births, marriages and deaths, or “BMD” as generally abbreviated. The
second tool, available in English genealogy from 1801 (though generally
becoming more useful from 1841), is census records. You might also find help in
more recent voter registration records, but I tend to find these records of
secondary use to BMD and census records.
Records of
BMD will be found from about 1560 in parish records, and more recently in the
form of formal certificates, which provide more information.
A record of
birth will generally provide a date of birth, which will help to define an
individual and locate them on a timeline. Hopefully they will also provide
information of that individual’s father
and hopefully (but not always) their mother and mother’s maiden name. It should
also provide a place of birth. It might provide some more information of interest, such as parents’ occupations.
Sometimes the record is of a baptism rather than a birth, and the date might be
the date of baptism. Generally, though not always, this will be close to the
date of birth. It is more likely that baptisms were soon after birth as you go
further back in time.
William Farndale’s
baptism recorded in Skelton Parish Records in 1599
Catherine Lindsay’s birth
certificate, 1854
A birth
record is the basic building block to create a tree of family relationships. By
linking an individual to their parents, a family tree can be created. If the
parents’ birth records can be found too, the family tree can be expanded. Birth
records alone have the potential to establish the whole scaffolding of a family
story.
There is
more help from parish records and from official certificates, because they also
provide evidence of marriages. Sometimes the information provided will be
limited to a date and record of the betrothed. However over time, marriage
records started to include records of fathers (rarely mothers until more
recently), so that they also provide corroborative evidence to an individuals’
line of descent. They might also provide a record of the occupation of those
getting married and of a father’s occupation, so the marriage record of a son
or daughter might help to build up the occupational record of their father at
the date of the marriage. There are sometimes additional records of banns of
marriage available, which rarely provide more evidence than the marriage record
itself, but might serve as a substitute if the marriage record itself can’t be
found.
William
Farndale’s marriage to Margaret Atkinson, recorded in Campsall Parish
records in 1564
Record of
the marriage of Matthew
Farndale and Hannah Thompson in Brotton Parish records Marriage Certificate of Elisha Farndale
and Mary Ann Carling, 1846
The third
event of an individual life which generally appears in records after about
1560, is their last, a record of their death. Where such a record appears
shortly after parish records started to be kept, as Nicholas
Farndale’s death in 1572, and Agnes
Farndale’s death in 1586, both in Kirkleatham, it might be all we know. Yet
from that information, we might conclude that it is likely that Nicholas and
Agnes were married, and that they might have been born in the early sixteenth
century, allowing us to predict a possible year of birth. Then, if we find that
another, called Jean Farndale,
was married in that same place, Kirlleatham on 16 October 1567, we might
conclude that Jean was probably their daughter. A snippet of information can
unlock the basis of a family tree.
The death of Nicholas
Farndale, recorded in Kirkleatham in 1572
A death certicate enables us to draw out the timeline of a peson’s life,
from birth to death. It might corroborate the name of their spouse, where they
lived, sometimes their occupation or that from which they had by then retired,
and often the cause of their death.
Catherine Lindsay’s death certificate,
1911
BMD thus
provide the building blocks of a family story, and alone might allow an
accurate family tree to be compiled to take the story back to about 1560, with
estimated birth dates extending the family story into the Tudor age of Henry
VIII.
The spelling
of surnames was not always consistent in more distant records. A little
detective work is sometimes requires to decide whether ffarndaile,
or farndell, is an individual from the same
family Farndale, or from some other tribe. Contemporary search tools sometimes
make it easier to recover likely variations of a spelling, and once you get
your eye in, when considering new facts against the wider factual narrative
which has already emerged, it is generally possible to solve these dilemmas.
Then there
is another tool, which can consolidate your work, available from 1801, but more
useful from 1841, and that is census records.
1881
Census Records showing Martin
Farndale’s family
Census
record of Jim
Farndale’s family in Las Vegas, USA in 1930
Census
records pull together the story of a whole family at a particular place and
time. They corroborate relationships and generally show a whole family – mum
and dad and siblings, together in a place. They give an age and place of birth
from which the date of birth of each individual can be calculated. Occasionally
some interpretation is necessary. What might appear to be a son, might be a
nephew, in years where this is not clearly recorded. Combine the information
from a census record, and the powerful tool of BMD is corroborated and
sometimes missing pieces can be found. Furthermore census records provide
additional information often including addresses and occupations.
Census
records are presently available until 1921 for data protection reasons, but for
a historical journey, that is likely to provide everything that might be
needed. In addition though there was a register of occupations taken
immediately before the Second World War in 1939, which like a census record
places individuals into their family groups at that time, locates them, and
records their occupation. Furthermore, unlike the earlier census records, the
1939 records include a date of birth, and this can sometimes fill that piece of
the jigsaw where other clues have failed.
1939
Register, John and
Elsie Farndale of Tidkinhow
BMD and
census records of the tools for Thomas Gradgrind. They provide us with facts
and nothing else. They enable us to build the scaffolding for a family story.
So far, we have adopted the discipline of the scientist, starting with facts,
sometimes experimenting with the facts to find how they properly link together,
but never departing from the constraints of the historical record.
Whereas
Martin Farndale had to travel from church to church to find parish records and
build up his analysis, we can do so from a personal computer. There are
genealogical databases which are available to provide direct access to the
material, and they are almost always fully searchable. I subscribe to both Ancestry and Find my Past, which provide direct
access to available parish records and to census records. They will provide
links to the material itself, but also provide search tools, to assemble all
the relevant material. They make the task much easier. There is also a free database
of family records called Family Search, which
is the resource of the Mormon Church in Utah, which does also provide access to
a wealth of information. The International
Genealogical Index (“IGI”) is the main database of their genealogical
records, originally created in 1969.
Dipping
into wider record sets
The
scientific journey does not end there, but it will probably make the research
easier in the longer term, to hold back from venturing beyond BMD and census
records, until a reasonable effort is made to compile the wider family tree.
There are
tools which further enhance the preliminary exercise of building up the basic
structure. For instance Find a grave
is a database of millions of memorials across the world, and if nothing else it
is worth searching against the surname of interest to see what it reveals. It
can provide further building block information, and may provide additional
historical narrative, including a photograph of an individual’s memorial.
Wills and
probate records are a very helpful. Probate records generally confirm the exact
date of death and residence and often include details of next of kin.
Wills can
provide much more detailed narratives, that not only provide evidence of family
tree relationships, but can provide extraordinary details of a person’s life.
The will of Richard
Farndale (1357 to 1435) includes a description of his impressive armoury of
military equipment, which transports us to a world of medieval warfare.
The Will
of William
Farndale of Sheriff Hutton, 1397
There are
extensive military records available, which sometimes provide access to
Victorian military records, and are rich in detail in the twentieth century,
providing a wealth of information about servicemen who served in the first and
second world Wars. They can provide descriptive details of height and eye
colour and confirm the date of enlistment and the units in which they served.
Sometimes they provide a record of theatres of service. These rich records sets
can then be enhanced by exploring the history of particular units at the places
where an individual was known to have served, including war diaries and other
accounts of particular battles.
Alf
Farndale’s transfer papers, 1917
Emigrations
were often recorded in the passenger records of sea voyages. These can provide important material in a
family’s story. I have found records of the emigrations of my grandfather and
his siblings across
the Atlantic at about the time of the Titanic sinking. It can be
interesting to explore the history of the ships in which they sailed. A search
of the Ellis island
database might reveal individuals who emigrated to the United States.
The
emigration of the Australian
Farndales in 1853
Taxation
records have provided a valuable source material from the earliest times. The
Yorkshire Lay Subsidy of 1301 provides an invaluable glimpse into all the
tenants of Farndale at the beginning of the fourteenth century.
Hearth tax
returns provide evidence of relative wealth in the seventeenth century. Land tax assessments
and Church Rates take the story into the eighteenth century, as do overseers accounts
and churchwardens accounts. Extraordinary insights can be gathered from
terriers, which recorded field names, acreages and land usages within tenanted
farms, as well as value and rent.
Terrier,
1809, William
Farndale
The Official
Gazette provides access to notifications of many official events from
bankruptcy to honours. The
London (and Edinburgh and Belfast) Gazette provides free on line access.
The National Archives (often
referred to as “TNA”) comprise the national collection of historical records at
Kew. They provide access to a wealth of historical information, manorial
records, and medieval record sets, and includes helpful guidance to make best
use of the collection. Many records are available online and the site gives
access to a monthly limit of records after free registration.
County
Records offices are also helpful and the Farndale Story has benefitted from the
resources provided by the North
Yorkshire County Record Office, Malpas Road, Northallerton, North
Yorkshire, DL7 8TB, open Tuesday to Friday, 9.30am - 4.30pm. The
catalogue can be searched online, but it might be necessary to visit in
person to access material which is often still available in hard copy form,
including microfiche storage.
It’s not
really necessary to visit Parish Churches to access parish records, but many
churches do still have books of records which are available to flick through,
if you visit a relevant church. Church records can often help to identify
relevant gravestones, to avoid painstakingly viewing every gravestone in a
relevant church to try to find an ancestor. Sometimes history groups have
formed and helpfully catalogued all the parish records of a relevant parish.
For instance the Skelton
History Group provides a searchable database of that parish’s registers of
births, marriages and deaths. This should coincide with the information that is
likely to be available in datasets of such organisations as Ancestry and Find
my Past, but sometimes they provide an alternative course from which to find
something new.
There are
similar organisations which provide a focus for family research and membership
might provide access to new streams of information. An example is the Cleveland Family History Society.
Similarly
there are helpful local history societies, which can help to fill gaps, such as
the Skelton History Group,
and the invaluable timeline, Skelton-in-Cleveland
History, created by Bill Danby and which is maintained on line by the
History Group.
Another rich
source of primary historical information can be found in local museums, such as
the
Kirkleatham Museum; the Yorkshire
Museum at York, and the Land of Iron
at Skinningrove.
In general
these sources help to build on the scaffolding of family relationships, to
start to bring out the activities and experiences of a family story.
Newspapers
Newspapers
are an invaluable source and Find my Past provides access to The British Newspaper Archive
and Ancestry to Newspapers.com,
which are both a rich resource of archived newspaper records. It is worth
holding back a newspaper search until a little later in a genealogical project.
For a name like mine, it is possible to follow a generic search for my surname,
and to recover multiple records which are all potentially valuable. If the
structure of the genealogy is already completed, it is much easier to match
newspaper record to individual. The alternative is to try to search for
everything that can be found about a particular individual, but that can
sometimes be challenging.
The result
is the recovery of a rich source of stories, which perhaps more than any other
records, can bring the family story to life. There are for instance extensive
records of individuals such as Joseph
Farndale, the Victorian Chief Constable of Birmingham and William
Edward Farndale, the President of the Presbyterian Church, from which a
detailed life story can be built.
Obituaries are
very useful when they can be found, as they summarise a whole life.
DNA
It is now
possible to unlock ancestral secrets by spitting into a test tube and waiting a
few weeks for its analysis. Ancestry will do this for you. You may shy away
from the data protection implications of sharing your DNA, though there are
some assurances given about that. The exercise is unlikely to reveal much that
you can’t uncover from the more thorough exercise of genealogical research. Yet
it can be interesting to understand the geographical makeup of your genes,
which can be split between your male and female lines of descent. The exercise can also connect you with other
relatives who have done the same thing, and who have some interest in their
family history too.
Organising
the data
It is likely
that it won’t be too long before an exercise in genealogical research will
recover an extremely large dataset. Some organisation to continued research
then becomes a necessity. In the early days Martin Farndale used card indexes
to try to make sense of the family records. He then settled on a directory
which listed every individual member of the family in the order of their birth.
The Farndale Directory still
exists and it is a part of the Farndale Family Website. It is quite a useful
tool to enable someone interested to find an individual they know, perhaps
their direct relative, and then follow relationships through the website.
We quickly
found that giving each individual a reference number is helpful. It is best to
do this at a later stage when most of the individuals have already ben found, so that the numbering system can be
chronological from the earlier records. Each individual member of the family
has a reference number starting FAR00001. That means that the computer will
sort individual records into their chronological order. Gaps in numbering are
left to allow for some later additions and when there are no gaps left, individuals
can be added by giving them a prefix, FAR00301A, FAR00301B and so on. Sometimes
I have started to work on a related family and explored that family in more or
less depth. For my grandmother’s family I have therefore used a similar system,
but starting BAK00001.
I soon
progressed to use Microsoft Excel to sort the primary data about each
individual. I might have used Microsoft Access which was designed as a
database, but Excel does much the same thing and I find it more suitable. My
Excel Chart has columns for the Reference number (FAR00001 etc); the last
review date (so I know when I last worked on an individual record; Name; Sex;
Geographical locations with which the person was associated; Comments to allow
some free text; the Family Line into which I have placed the person; the
Directory Volume in which the person appears; Occupations; birth date; marriage
date; death date; Mother’s surname; Wife’s Christian and surname; Where buried;
Significant emigration; Military service; and a column for issues needing more
work/resolution.
It is a
brilliant tool as it can be easily organised in different ways and searched
against. For instance the whole dataset of individuals can be searched for
wives’ maiden names, when trying to identify a new individual whose mother’s
maiden name is known. When I find a newspaper article the excel table generally
pieces together some clues to identify who it is in seconds.
The
relationships between an extended family through time can give rise to a very
large family tree. Both Ancestry and Find My Past provide tools to organise
data into family trees and I use both as organisational tools to help explore
the structure of the whole family. However I have also found that it is useful
to break the family down into family lines, which are logically structured
generally to coincide with new geographical locations where sections of the
family formed themselves into new branches. I have thus divided the Farndale
family into 84
family lines, which can each be managed more easily to better understand
the narrative of each part of the family. They can be drawn together by the interface chart,
which links the family lines together in a master family tree.
This creates
a hierarchy from the Interface Chart to each Family Line to each Individual.
Presenting
the story
I explored
genealogy programmes, which form family trees and provide databases to organise
information, but found them too restrictive, because in the end they provide a
finite structure within which the family story has to be told. I concluded that
the best approach to display the family story is to revert to the most basic of
contemporary tool, and that is word processing software which seems to have
universally adopted the form of Microsoft Word. By starting with a generic
tool, I have found that I can build the family story exactly as I want to tell
it.
There is one
simple invention in the evolution of computer programmes, which makes
everything work. That is the hyperlink. A hyperlink provides the chance to
build up complex stories by linking related stories to each other. Instead of
the constraints of a single page of text, or even the flow of a single book, a
story can be told in easily digestible chunks, from which hyperlinks will lead
to related parts of the story, which can be visited at the whim of the reader.
In a complex story like a genealogy that quickly builds up to multiple paths,
which creates a whole cohesive story, but one which has a multiplicity of
different paths. It can be consumed by the particular interest of the reader,
not being overwhelmed by too much information at once, but digesting each
stage, and moving on to the next stage in a way that best suits them.
The simple
starting point is to create a page
for every individual who makes up the whole family. I create a page even
for the child who died as it was born, and didn’t have the time to construct a
complex story. Each page includes details of the individual’s parents, their
spouse, and their children and each is linked by a hyperlink that will take you
to their relatives story. It therefore becomes possible to follow your own
direct lineage through each of your direct relatives, to the earliest
characters who ap[pear in the family story. If you choose you can follow side paths
through uncles and aunts to explore other parts of your lineage.
I save each
word document not in the usual fashion of the .doc format, but as a webpage
ending .html. That immediately unlocks the usual constraints of a printable
page, and allows the look of a page to be enhanced with colour and structure.
More importantly, in this format, the page can be published on the internet, to
be shared with others who might be interested.
Each family line can
be portrayed in similar fashion, showing their family tree structure, with
hyperlink built in to the family trees to link directly back to individual
pages.
As the
structure of the individual pages and family lines was built up, a story
emerged, which could be told in the form of the
Farndale Story, which I chose to structure as a time traveller’s portal to
pages which each tell a part of the story, which I wrote in consecutive Acts,
with explanatory pages to expand each era of the story.
The exercise
of posting the story onto the internet involves first purchasing a domain name
– I use names.com for that. You then need a
server on which to upload your work. A friendly IT specialist helps me with
that. I use a tool called FileZilla
to upload material from my computer onto the server.
When
organising the material its important to keep it all
together in a single folder. I use a single folder for my whole family website
material, which can then be divided into folders for individuals, family lines,
the narrative story pages etc.
Once the
structure is up and running I just post the material up onto the website from
time to time and it all works well. This structure, based on simple word
documents, creates a project with the scope to develop indefinitely and I much
refer it to the constraints of a bespoke genealogy programme.
Context
As the
family story has grown, it is helpful to explore Local History and wider
historical paths. Sometimes this is through web searches or museum collections.
Sometimes it is through journeys to the places that feature in our story.
Sometimes the family story provides a route into history books, which take on
far more meaning than they would if read in isolation. Those journeys provide
context, which in turn refine the family story.
Archaeological
records are particularly useful for the earlier history. The
Ryedale Historian is a useful source for my own family story, as is the Yorkshire Archaeological & Historical
Society, and the journals and other material which it produces.
Historical
Novels can provide some gloss and provide context for rural communities. They
can help tell the story, to bring life to the underlying historical evidence.
Contemporary works paint a picture of the experiences of the time, and can add
a new perspective to genealogical story telling. Works which can be helpful in
this regard are the books by Thomas Hardy; by Charles Dickens including David
Copperfield, The
Pickwick Papers, Little Dorrit
and Hard
Times. Middlemarch,
1869, by George Elliot, is set in a fictional English Midlands town in 1829 to
1832, and topics include the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism,
self-interest, religion, hypocrisy, political reform, and education, the 1832
Reform Act, early railways, and the accession of King William IV, medicine of
the time and reactionary views in a settled community facing unwelcome change. Lark
Rise written in 1939, Over to Candleford in 1941 and Candleford Green in 1943, by Flora Thompson, are
descriptive of late nineteenth century rural communities in Oxfordshire. Cider
with Rosie, 1959, by Laurie Lee, is a record of a childhood in
Gloucestershire in the period just after the First World War.
If you start
with historical facts, and then work on context and tools which help to fill
the gaps and bring out the story, a fuller picture will emerge, which will help
to capture the spirit of the family story.