Friday, March 03, 2017

Five on Friday


It's Friday again and time to join in with Amy at Love Made my Home for the Five on Friday gathering.

I've been doing bits and pieces of family history again over the last few weeks and I've also been looking back at things I've found out over the years and places I have visited since I started researching my family tree.  I've usually managed to photograph the churches and churchyards we have visited that have connections with ancestors so I thought I'd share five of them with you.



1.  All Saints church, Aston on Trent is a pretty church and we were lucky that there was a key holder on hand to show us around the interior.  In the churchyard we found a memorial inscription to both John (d.1830) and Keturah Webb (d 1826) who were the parents of my 3x great grandfather Francis Webb.   Francis moved to Nottingham for work and there, in 1816, married Mary Palmer.  Francis's occupation on the 1841 census was lace maker and the family address was Park Square in the St Nicholas District of Nottingham.  Francis and Mary's daughter Rebecca was my 2 x great grandmother.  She married Alexander Young whose father John Young moved from Kirkaldy in Fife to Loughborough in the 1820s, both father and son were tailors.  Alexander and Rebecca's daughter Celia Palmer Young was my great grandmother.


 2.  St Peter's Church, Awsworth. My great great grandparents on my Mum's side of the family tree, Joseph and Alice Limb were buried here although there isn't a memorial stone.  This couple moved around quite a bit for work and can be found on census returns living in Shipley Wood in Derbyshire, Awsworth in Nottinghmashire, Staveley in Derbyshire and Shirebrook in Derbyshire.  Alice died in Shirebrook in 1903 but was brought back to her birthplace to be buried.  Joseph died in 1914 on Lace Street in Nottingham at the home of one of his daughters and was brought to Awsworth to be buried with Alice.  He was born in Shipley near Heanor in Derbyshire in 1837 and baptised at the Shipley Wood Primitive Methodist Chapel.



3.   All Saints, Dilhorne, Staffordshire.  My 3x great grandmother Mary Chell was born here in 1794, the daughter of Joseph and Mary Chell.  At some point she moved from Staffordshire to South Derbyshire.  For ages I didn't know where she was born but on one census return she gave her birthplace as Dillon, Staffordshire.  Dilhorne isn't very far away from where we live now and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps her accent or way of saying Dilhorne sounded like Dillon to the Census Enumerator for Newhall, who wouldn't have been familiar with either place or accent.  Equally it could have just been a misspelling.  We went to look at the church and found many Chells in the churchyard but not any that related to my direct line.



4.  St Peter's Church, Stapenhill.  Lots of my ancestors have associations with this church.  My 5 x great grandfather Thomas Gough was married to Sarah Boddis here in 1789 and my other 5x great grandparents were married here too. Robert Bridge and Mary Shaw were married two years earlier in 1787.  Robert and Mary's daughter Hannah married my 4 times great grandfather Benjamin Gough, son of Thomas and Sarah at the church in 1813.  Thomas Gough died in 1812 and was buried in the churchyard of St Peter's Church.  There are no Goughs recorded in the church records before his marriage to Sarah Boddis and the family always said that he came with a gang of men from the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire prospecting for coal.  Although others think he may have originally come from Shropshire. He worked with the Gresley family digging out bell pits to test for coal seams.  The records for this church were the first I ever looked at whilst researching my family tree.  I remember visiting the Archives at Matlock and looking at the actual register which was leather bound and presented on a soft cushion.  I had to wear cotton gloves and write only in pencil in my note book. I remember extracting anything I found useful at the time.  On later visits everything had been transferred to Microfilm and then later still to Microfiche.

5.  St John's Church, Newhall, Derbyshire.   Scene of the christenings, weddings and funerals of many of my ancestors on my father's side of the family tree. My 2, 3 and 4 x great grandparents are all buried in the churchyard as are some of their siblings.  Many of them were married and christened here too.


Click on the link below to find other bloggers who are joining in with Five on Friday this week. 

http://lovemademyhome.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/five-on-friday-linkup-post-13.html

Don't forget that after the 24th March there will be a new host, Tricky and Carly at Fast Blog, for Five on Friday see the link below to find out more

http://lovemademyhome.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/five-on-friday-linkup-post-13.html

38 comments:

  1. I enjoyed reading about five churches in your family history. It sounds like you are on quite an adventure researching your roots. My father did that for his family and as children we were often in cemeteries with him as he worked on his research. It's all in a little book that we are happy to have. And we should probably write an addition for the last few decades.

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    1. How wonderful that you have a book of all your father's researches and yes, it will need an addition sometime won't it?:)

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  2. How amazing. I drove through Aston on Trent - and past the church - only yesterday. I've had no luck in tracking down my ancestors (for various reasons) so I'm very jealous of the amount of information you have.

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    1. I still have many 'brick walls' especially in the Forest of Dean/Shropshire and Scotland, I first started in about 1988 so have been doing the research for some time but there is always something new that can be found:)

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  3. Lovely churches. It's really interesting how they feature in your family history. I have begun to learn about my family history but not as in depth as that. Very interesting.

    Thanks for sharing your Five on Friday

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    1. I think the main thing I regret is not thinking to ask people about family connections until it was too late. Having said that a lot of people don't like to talk about their family history when my grandparents were alive it just wasn't done or thought to be of no interest:)

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  4. How interesting to be able to find all that information. Our family is spread all over the United States and immigrated from numerous countries. Parts of my family have been fairly early to track down others not so much.

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    1. Sometimes the families you expect to be harder to trace turn out to be the easiest, it is always a fascinating thing to do:)

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  5. Great detective work! It's fascinating tracking everyone down. Much easier if they have unusual names as it gets so confusing when they all have the same name. 😊

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    1. I have a friend who is looking into her family tree and says it is difficult as all the men in one of the direct lines had the same name for generations so it is hard to work out which one is which. I am lucky to have some unusual surnames in my family:)

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  6. I've enjoyed seeing the five churches connected with your family history research. You've found out a lot about your family over the years. I like the example of thinking outside the box (wondering if Dillon might be Dilhorne). All Saints, Dilhorne has an unusual tower. The visit to look in the churchyard must have been interesting.

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    1. Often on the census returns if the person or people came from somewhere unusual or far away the enumerator would have difficulty with both spelling and accent, sometimes the people would know or remember where they were born, especially if their family moved around quite a bit. It is all fascinating:)

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  7. A wonderful post Rosie so interesting to read of your research into your family tree/history and see the churches you have visited that have family connections. You have found out so much information and done some great detective work :) I've nearly finished the Futurelearn Genealogy Course I have been doing and can't wait to start filling in some gaps in my family tree. Need to go along to the library and check out Ancestry and Find My Past to see if it would be worth subscribing myself. It is such a fascinating subject.

    Have a lovely weekend.

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    1. The course sounds fascinating and you should be able to access either Ancestry or Find my Past at your local studies library. There does seem to be more information on Ancestry than Find my Past, although the wartime census of 1939 is on Find My Past. I just have access to Ancestry at the moment we pay month by month so you can stop anytime you want rather than pay for a whole year. With Find my Past you can get vouchers for so many look ups if you don't want to subscribe straight away:)

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  8. That's fascinating! You have so much information and it must be so interesting to be able to piece things together. Language does constanly evolve so that was a good point you made about Dilhorne.

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    1. Thanks, I do have quite a bit of information found over the years. I keep it on line and in paper form, also on a family tree computer programme. I'm never sure how to keep and display the information:)

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  9. Wow! Very interesting! I would love to be able to visit the places of my ancestors. And those churches are beautiful! Thanks for sharing.

    Cindy

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    1. Thanks, Cindy glad you enjoyed the post, some of the churches are very beautiful others more functional I guess:)

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  10. What a fantastic Five on Friday post! I'm lucky that there is a genealogist in the family so I have our family tree back to the early 1600's, fascinating stuff!

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    1. Wow, how wonderful to have a family tree going back that far! The earliest I've got back is to the early 18th century:)

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  11. Family trees are fascinating things and to be able to visit the places people/family lived and worked must make it even more interesting :)

    Diana

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    1. I'm lucky that my family on both sides are more or less all from the counties in the East Midlands region of the UK so not too much travelling to find clues and places of interest. The internet helps too as you can do a lot from home and verify it later if possible:)

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  12. It's great to be able to find so many family churchyards. We often visit them when we are over in the hope of an odd relative or two. Spellings in the census weren't great were they' ! B x

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    1. No spellings are awful in some of the documents but the worst are the present day transcriptions of names and places that are done for services like Ancestry. I've found some really silly mistakes and spelling errors sometimes:)

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  13. How lovely to have links to all those churches and how different they all look! x

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    1. Thanks, Simone, glad you enjoyed the different churches:)

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  14. I find other people's family history fascinating as well as my own so I loved this post. When my girls were five and eleven years old I took them round Devon churchyards (in the rain!) looking for our early nineteenth century ancestors. Apparently, some people think this is strange! I have a monthly subscription to Find My Past and find it invaluable, especially now that you can view the actual documents rather than just transcriptions. I am hoping for another trip to the National Archives this year to chase up some military men. Hope you've had a good weekend. x

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    1. Thanks, Mrs T nothing strange about wandering around churchyards, so full of history both local and sometimes personal also some churchyrds are full of wildlife too so there is so much to find there. Some of those transciptions were very poor weren't they so it's good to see the actual documents and make your own transcriptions, I've lost and then found by other means ancestors transcribed wrongly:)

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  15. It is fascinating how much detail about your ancestors you have managed to discover. A remarkable journey back in time.

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    1. Thank you,I have been researching on and off since about 1988 so have amassed quite a lot of information:)

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  16. How wonderful to visit these 5 churches associated with your family who have been in England for a very long time, it appears. Don't you wonder about the stories they could tell? Genealogy is fascinating stuff.

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    1. It would be wonderful to know what they looked and sounded like I'm sure most of my ancestors worked hard and struggled to make ends meet but their daily lives would have been similar yet so different too:)

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  17. Interesting post for me as my maiden name is Chell. There seem to be a lot around the Cheadle area. My grandad George Chell was a miner and lived in the Stoke/Fenton area. I will have to ask my dad if any other family were more Cheadle way.

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    1. How lovely to see you here, Amanda. There do seem to be a lot of Chells in that area and there were quite a few familues of them at Dilhorne. My ancestor Mary was born in the late 18th century and lived well into the 19th, her daughter Rosanna married my 2 x great grandfather In Newhall, Derbyshire. Mary seemed to leave Dilhorne and move to that area, presumably for work as she didn't marry there until much later:)

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  18. I love seeing these fascinating churches through your eyes and reading more about them!

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    1. Thanks Amy, glad you enjoyed visiting the churches, all so very different:)

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