English Ancestors

10/03/2026

I’ll be giving a talk about voting before 1832, and how it all played out in the three Rotten and Pocket Boroughs of the Isle of Wight on 19th March. If you’re on the Isle of Wight, entry is £3 to non members of St Helens Historical Society.

This is going to be a fascinating talk about the murky history of elections on the Island prior to the Reform Act of 1832! Don't miss it!

09/03/2026

How beautiful is this?!
I too have a ‘Family Tree’ and it goes up each year when the Christmas tree comes down, but it has photos in little frames and a few small antique-looking baubles, rather than actual felt people. 🙂

06/03/2026

If you have Manchester/ Lancashire ancestry, or have an interest in letters from servicemen during WW1, you might be interested in this. The letters have been made freely available to the public.

Manchester & Lancashire FHS were contacted by a lady who asked if we would be interested in a number of letters written by servicemen during the Great War. This proved to be a substantial collection of around 350 letters written by some 70 servicemen. MLFHS agreed to take the letters under the condition that they were made freely available to the public; a condition to which the Society readily agreed.

The Letters cover the whole period of the war but most were written 1914-1915. Some correspondence is limited to a single letter while other men wrote as many as twenty. It is believed that the letters are only a selection of the correspondence.

All of the letters were addressed to Harold Hill.

When project work is complete, the letters will be deposited in Manchester Archives as part of the Zion Archive. to read the letters click the link https://mlfhs.uk/zion

19/02/2026

My latest blogpost has just published. It's about working with DNA results, working out where 'Half' relationships start, and why.
I wrote this post in response to a few comments about how difficult the concept of 'half cousins' can be.

Getting your head around ‘Half’ relationships can be tricky. In regular life we probably wouldn’t make a distinction between a half cousin and a full cousin. Yet when we’re …

12/02/2026

I’m sure a lot of you will understand!

24/01/2026

My latest blogpost has just published. It's about digitising old family photos and using them as the basis of mini family histories to share with family. I'm writing about it more as a ToDo List item rather than a success story, since I've been drowning under the weight of this self-imposed project...

The military band (marching band) of the 1st Battalion of the Green Howards. Location and precise year not known. ‘X’ marks my Granddad. About three years ago I set myself the challenge…

31/12/2025

Happy New Year!
If you need an accredited professional genealogist to help with your family history research, here’s where to look.
PS. I’m on there too. 😉

Wishing you and yours a very happy New Year. May it be filled with exciting research and discovery! https://www.agra.org.uk/

29/12/2025

My latest blogpost has just published. Wishing you all a Happy New Year, and hoping that those of you who celebrate are enjoying a happy Christmas period.

Getting to Christmas always feels like a marathon. So much to do to get everything ready before the arrival of family to spend a few days with us. I put a lot of time into baking Christmas cakes, c…

09/12/2025

Are you, or do you know a younger genealogist (under 35) who might be interested in this?

NextGEN: Call for presentations. The Society of Genealogists and Family History Federation are arranging an online conference for young genealogists on Saturday 14 November 2026. A talk on preparing proposals is on 12 July. https://portal.sog.org.uk/Event/view/1693744

20/11/2025

14/11/2025

My latest blog post has just published. It's about preparing to visit ancestors' former homes and localities.

This is part four in my ‘Ancestral Tourism’ series. It follows on from Part 1: Churches and Churchyards, Part 2: Municipal & other Public Cemeteries and Part 3: Graves and Gravestones. The focu…

11/11/2025

Don't forget that the cost of wills in England and Wales post-1858 is about to rise by almost 1000% (yes, you read that right!).

You have until midnight on Sunday to place an order for every will you would like, or think you might like, to get them at the current price of £1.50 instead of the £16 it will cost you one minute later.

I've spent this week going through as many of my own projects as I could, to find wills I might want at some point, and had been delaying because they weren't a priority. I've now spent £21 on 16 wills, instead of the £256 that truly I would never be able to justify.