What to do in the boring bit

What to do in the boring bit twixt Christmas & New Year

Laura Hayes of Lincoln set the ball rolling with the question of where I found the information for last week’s column.  She has been carrying out research into the THISTLEWOOD family for some time and so with everyone’s family getting together for the festive season now is the time to ask the questions.  Where does the family come from? How long it lived there? What are the Grandparents names and where did they live? And so on and so forth. Paul at paul@pthistleton1739.freeserve.co.uk gave me the first part but then it was on line and from the census material which is readily available. Information from all the censuses can be found via the national Archives website at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census/ and the IGI and 1881 census can be found at the Latter Day Saints site www.familysearch.org where you can also get the Personal Ancestral File program.  Back ground material and some free forms to record your data can be accessed at http://genealogy.about.com/.
There are 129 different directories containing Lincolnshire information  that is available for you to look at  on the Leicestershire University website at www.historicaldirectories.org/hd/index.asp.  Historical Directories is a digital library of local and trade directories for England and Wales, from 1750 to 1919. It contains high quality reproductions of comparatively rare books, essential tools for research into local and genealogical history. The Historical Directories project came to the end of its funding on 31st October 2004 but the will remain freely available for the next 3 years.  These directories have a mass of data on the villages that your ancestor lived in.  If he was the butcher, baker or maybe the candlestickmaker he could be listed.  You can, if you so wish, buy your own copies of Lincolnshire Directories via the Archive Books site at www.rod-neep.co.uk/acatalog/lin.html where you can also purchase some of the census material on CD.
For a look at the village layout where your ancestors lived and worked then the www.old-maps.co.uk/ site is the place to go to.  There is a gazetteer that puts you in the right area and the maps are very high quality and detailed.  You  can purchase a copy if you wish.  The one I looked at was dated 1854 with the option to print, look at an aerial version, see a modern map, then even enlarge or buy it.
To pinpoint a specific individual then take a look at www.freebmd.org.uk/. FreeBMD is an ongoing project, the aim of which is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to the transcribed records. It is a part of the FreeUKGEN family, which also includes FreeCEN (Census data) and FreeREG (Parish Registers).   Here we are talking about 135,000,000 records.  I’ll type that in again – its 135 million records.  Many of these are the certificate information you will need to get a certificate from www.gro.gov.uk/gro/. The index reference number is the code that is allocated to every event of birth, marriage or death registered in England and Wales relating to the year, quarter, and district in which the event was registered. It is particularly important that you make a note of this, as you will need to quote it when you apply for a certificate in order for the GRO to identify the correct entry.   I put in DRUST as I usually do when I want to make engines really work and found the Leonard DRUST was registered at Caistor in June 1910 in volume 7a page 678.  If I sent this information to the GRO I would receive in quick time a copy of his birth certificate.  I happen to know that his father was William Johnson DRUST and he was named after his uncle who died in 1875 and William’s marriage is at freebmd but they have not yet indexed his death.
All you need to do now is to have a long chat to all your relatives and you have started on a hobby that will last a lifetime or two.
Bits and Bobs
October 8th 1790 Marriage: On Thursday last was married at Donington, Richard NICHOLS, (commonly called ´Saucy Nichols´) aged 71 to Ann DIXON aged 22. The good old man, hoping to avoid the ridicule of the multitude, led his Bride elect along a bye lane to the Church.
Lincolnshire Family History Society – at www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/LIN/lfhs/