Elsie May THOMAS - another look at the 1921 census

Back in January 2022, I wrote about the release of the UK 1921 census, which is currently only available through FindMyPast, and about those ancestors I had expected to find in it. [That post, "First look at the 1921 census" can be seen here ]

At the time, I was unable to find my grandmother, Elsie May THOMAS, who was not at home with her parents, George and Rose THOMAS in Collington.  Six of her siblings were with them, including Elsie's older brother, Ernest:

As can be seen, the four youngest children are all aged under fourteen, and still in full time education, but Matilda, at 15, is already working as a servant for someone else in nearby Wolferlow.

Since the ages of the 'missing' older girls ranged from seventeen to twenty four, I suspected they were all living away from home, probably employed in some form of domestic service.  This was soon confirmed to be the case for the eldest girl, Edith, aged 24, who I found with her grandparents, John and Priscilla THOMAS, in Stoke Bliss, recorded as working for John, dealing with the poultry and dairy work.

The other two girls were not difficult to find: 

Hilda Mary THOMAS, aged 22, was in Mamble, Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire, employed as a "Help" to a farmer and his wife, who had an eight month old baby.

And Ada Annie, at 17, was a domestic servant for another family in Collington. 

But there was no sign of Elsie.  I suspected that she was in the database somewhere, probably local to the rest of the family, but just mistranscribed to such an extent that it made her difficult to find.  I did try some possible alternative spellings, but without success.

This is always a problem when using computerised databases - if you don't search using the spellings that match what is recorded in the database, even with the use of wildcards, it can be impossible to find people.

Fortunately, in October last year, FindMyPast introduced an additional subscription covering the 1921 census.  So, for a relatively small payment (compared to what I could have previously spent trying out "possible" entries), I would be able to view all of the 1921 census images.  This meant that I could go back to using the "old" method for finding someone in a census, ie ploughing through the images page by page.

And it didn't take long.  

As I had suspected, Elsie was still local, in Upper Sapey, just a few miles from Collington, working as a general domestic servant.  She had been transcribed under the name of "Elsie Mary NAMAS"

 

After obtaining confirmation from some of the other Guild members, who agreed with me that it was "May," rather than "Mary," and also that the surname was more likely to be THOMAS, than NAMAS, I contacted FindMyPast, who also agreed and soon made the correction.

With hindsight, it becomes easy to ask, "Why didn't I try.... combination of search terms?" In my defence, all I can say is that I did my best, especially given that it was past midnight, and many of the combinations I did try were producing hundreds, if not thousands, of results. 

So I am just happy that Elsie had a job fairly locally and that the 'old' method therefore worked quite quickly.

The family of George THOMAS and Rose Hannah HAYNES

We're now at the end of week 17 of the year and I am only just posting what should have been week 10 of my "52 ancestors and their descendants".  Stuff Happens! 🙂

I am glad I have attempted the "52 ancestors in 52 weeks" principle again, even if I wasn't sticking to the suggested topics.  But it is clear to me that I currently do not have the research documented well enough to try working to that schedule.  Hence I won't be including that as part of the title anymore and will remove the badge from the blog, as well.  From now on, I shall just be posting about my ancestors, and their descendants, as and when it suits the research carried out.

Anyway, on with my second set of paternal great grandparents, my Dad's maternal grandparents, George THOMAS and Rose Hannah HAYNES.

George and Rose were married on the 25th December 1895, in Bromyard parish Church.  Although Rose Hannah's names had been recorded as "Rose Hannah" at her birth, and "Rosannah" in the 1881 census, perhaps indicating that the family did make common use of her middle name, at her marriage only the name "Rose" is recorded:

The 1895 marriage certificate of George THOMAS & Rose HAYNES

Marriage dates like this always tend to stand out, when I come across them in the records.  Why marry on the 25th December - Christmas Day? It is probably not a date that many of us in the UK these days would consider getting married on.

But, in George and Rose Hannah's time, there weren't the 'holiday entitlements' that the majority of working folk enjoy now.  Most people worked six days a week and, if they didn't work, they didn't get paid.  So taking time off to get married was often not an option.  Weddings were therefore planned for the few public holidays that existed.

When George and Rose Hannah married, George was 24, working as a carter and living at Stoke Bliss, and Rose was 21, a domestic servant, resident in Bromyard.  The certified copy of the certificate that I have was hand written in 1980, so does not contain any of the genuine signatures, but it appears that both George and Rose, as well as their two witnesses, Henry JAMES and Lilly THOMAS (probably one of George's sisters) were able to sign for themselves.

George and Rose's first child, Edith, was born on the 30th October 1896.  At that time they were living at Brick Barns, Underley, Wolferlow, in Herefordshire.

In the 1891 census, there were three properties called "Underley" (Lower, Middle and Upper), as well as two cottages called "Underley Cottage"  The Brick Barns were enumerated in between Middle Underley and Upper Underley and two of George's sisters, Matilda and Annie, were working as servants at Upper Underley.  The two girls were living with the family of a Samuel JONES.  But a William BALDWIN lived at Lower Underley and I believe, from family stories, that various members of the THOMAS family have worked for the BALDWINs over the years.

Both Upper Underley and Lower Underley are listed buildings, the former a medieval hall house, the latter dating from the late eighteenth century.  A barn to the north west of Lower Underley, dating from the early nineteenth century, is also a listed building. Described as a "large red brick barn with twin gabled wing. Tile roof with gable ends," one wonders if this might have been where George and Rose were living when Edith was born.

However, based on the enumeration order, since "Middle Underley" was further north than the listed barn (which is within the same group of buildings as Lower Underley), it seems more likely that the relevant "Brick Barns" was closer to Upper Underley.

George and Rose's second child, Ernest, was born on the 2nd May 1899.  The address this time is just given as Underley, Wolferlow, so it is impossible to identify which of the Underley properties the family were living in.

But when their third child, Hilda Mary, is born on the 13th November 1900, their address is again listed as Brick Barns, Underley, so it seems plausible they had been living there all the time.

By the time of the 1901 census, the family had moved to Coombs Wood, Collington - still in Herefordshire.  I suspect this was somewhere in the region identified as "Cwm Wood" on contemporary maps.

It was here that my grandmother, Elsie May, was born on the 3rd April 1902.  George, who had been described as a "general laborer" for their first three children's births, was this time described as a "Farmer".

However, when their fifth child, Ada Annie, was born on the 20th April 1904, his occupation was once again "General Laborer".  George was the informant for each of these births so one wonders why the variation.  Perhaps, as I have found with other ancestors, George was engaged in some small scale farming for himself, whilst also labouring on behalf of an employer, so both occupations were correct.

Matilda Jane was the next child, born on the 17th May 1906, followed by Emily, on the 25th April 1908. Emily's is the first birth registered by their mother, Rose.  One suspects registration had initially been forgotten, as the birth isn't registered until the 11th June 1908, five days over the 42 day time limit.  They might have been fined for this late registration, but perhaps there was some leeway as to when fines were applied.  Since the Registrar was the same one who had registered all of their previous children, he would be in a position to identify that they were not generally a family who were 'non-compliant', so I hope he was able to waive the fine.  (I wonder if the Registrars kept records of fines?)

On the 30th April 1910, the eighth child and second son, George John, was born.

The 1911 census shows the family at "Coombs Wood in Whitbourne, Worcester" - I suspect this is yet another case where the family haven't moved but the county boundary (at least, administratively for the census) has!  Present are George, Rose, Ernest, Hilda, Elsie, Ada, Matilda, Emily and George.

The oldest daughter, Edith, aged 14, is working as a general domestic servant at Butterley Mill Bromyard.  Although it is often difficult to identify individuals working as servants away from their families, I think the fact that Edith's birth place is recorded as "Barn House Woffellow", I can be quite confident about this entry.🙂

In the years following the census, two further children were born, both girls, Olive, on the 5th December 1912, and finally, Dorothy Rose, on the 1st June 1915.

From my point of view, there is a benefit from this number of children being in the family - it has led to there being many descendants, which increases the chances of some of them deciding to take a DNA test.

George and Rose had twenty nine grandchildren (that I know of) and I am aware of at least fifty two other great grandchildren.  Since these great grandchildren are all within the range of 'siblings to second cousins' to me, any of them that take a DNA test should show up as matching me.

Already, I have a cluster of "shared matches" as a result, and any new matches that also match people in this cluster can therefore be identified as connected to my THOMAS/HAYNES ancestral lines in some way, even if I don't know the exact link.

It is wonderful to be able to confirm my genealogy through the use of DNA like this.


References
Christmas Day weddings - https://www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/discoveries/christmas-day-weddings

Historic England Listings for Underley, Herefordshire:
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/results/?searchType=NHLE+Simple&search=underley%2C+herefordshire

Census 
1891: (Matilda and Annie THOMAS) Class RG12; Piece: 2071; Folio: 12; Page: 2
1901: Class: RG13; Piece: 2491; Folio: 8; Page: 7
1911: Class: RG14; Piece: 15795; Schedule Number: 20
1911 (Edith): Class: RG14; Piece: 15787; Schedule Number: 50  

2020 52anc. Wk 9: Rose Hannah HAYNES (1874-1958)

Rose Hannah HAYNES, one of my paternal great grandmothers, was born on the 20th December 1874, the daughter of George HAYNES and Caroline HARRIS.  At the time, the family were living at 16 Henry Street, St Mary, Cardiff, Glamorganshire.

By the time of the 1881 census, the family were living in Bromyard, Herefordshire - which is where both of Rose Hannah's parents had been born.  What they were doing in Cardiff at the time of her birth is currently unknown and mobility is always an interesting subject, so I'll try researching that when I consider her parents as a couple.

These are the 1881 census details:
[Class: RG11; Piece: 2601; Folio: 30; Page: 11;]
Bromyard, Herefordshire
Brick Clamp

Geo. Haynes, Head, Mar, 25, Ag Labourer, Herefordshire Bromyard

Caroline Haynes, Wife, Mar, 27, Herefordshire Bromyard

Rosannah Haynes, Daur, 6, Scholar, Cardiff

Albert Haynes, Son, 4, Herefordshire Bromyard

George Haynes, Son, 3, Herefordshire Bromyard

Emma Haynes, Daur, 1, Herefordshire Bromyard

So it is clear the family moved back to Bromyard relatively soon after Rose Hannah's birth and a baptism entry for "Rosanna Haynes", with the parents George and Caroline, took place in Bromyard on the 8 Nov 1875, so it is possibly safe to assume they had moved back by then.

Further siblings arrived in the years before the next census and I imagine Rose Hannah helped around the house and with her younger siblings. However, by 1891 she is out at work, as a domestic servant:

1891 census
[Class: RG12; Piece: 2070; Folio: 30; Page: 4; ]
Much Cowarne, Herefordshire, England
Leighton Court
(The DENT family, a farmer, with his wife and six children aged between 13 - 19)
Rose HAYNES, Serv, S, 19, General Servant Domestic, Wales Cardiff

I haven't just assumed that this is the correct entry, especially given the couple of years discrepancy on her age.  However, whilst searching on Ancestry for Ros* Haynes, +/-5 years of her birth year, and no birth place specified, does produce a number of results, none of them look likely to be an entry for "my" Rose Hannah in 1891, nor is there any person in the other years', or database, results, who could be this one in 1891.  So, at the moment, my conclusion is that either she had added a few years to her age, or there was just a mistake in recording it.  There are some other age variations across the various records for the family, which I shall look into in the future.

Her parents and siblings are still living at Brick Clamp in Bromyard in 1891:

[Class: RG12; Piece: 2069; Folio: 26; Page: 9;]
Brick Clamp, Bromyard
George Haynes, Head, M, 35, General Labourer, Herefordshire, Bromyard
Caroline Haynes, Wife, M, 38, Machinist, Herefordshire, Bromyard
Albert Haynes, Son, S, 16, Agricultural Labourer, Herefordshire, Bromyard
George Haynes, Son, 14, Agricultural Labourer, Herefordshire, Bromyard
Emily Haynes, Daur, 13, Scholar, Herefordshire, Bromyard
Henry Haynes, Son, 8,  Scholar, Herefordshire, Bromyard
Ann Haynes, Daur, 5, Herefordshire, Bromyard
Jane Haynes, Daur, 3, Herefordshire, Bromyard
Ernest Haynes, Son, 2, Herefordshire, Bromyard
Florence Haynes, Daur, 7mo, Herefordshire, Bromyard

Rose Hannah HAYNES married George THOMAS in the Bromyard parish church, on the 25th December 1895.  Their married life, and descendants, will be the topic for my next post.

Ancestry shared matches and a new connection

This post continues my general theme of looking for strategies to deal with my DNA results - in this case, results from AncestryDNA.

I have 225 pages of matches at Ancestry, which equates to almost 11,250 matches.  I use the DNAGedcom Client app to download the information.  That gives me three files - a list of my matches, a file showing which of the matches are in common with each other (based around fourth cousins and closer only), and details from my match's trees.  This latter, 'ancestors', file has over 345,000 lines of data in it, which seems a staggering amount to consider dealing with - especially as, unfortunately, most of it is probably not relevant to my connections with my matches, as the majority of them are in the USA and few have traced their connection back to the UK, which is where most of my pedigree information relates to.

Although I do have three Ancestry Hints, which have been helpful, I don't appear in any 'DNA Circles'.  So I've been looking at the "shared matches", to see what clues I can garner from those. Ancestry provides details of my matches that are fourth cousins and closer, and indicates where they share DNA with another of my close matches.   They do also show the more distant matches that are shared matches to the closer cousins - but only by showing the closer match on the more distant match's profile.  Given how many thousands of distant matches I have, I do not check each of their profiles individually to see if they just happen to match a closer cousin.  So the app download makes this feature more useful, by picking up those more distant matches who are in common with the fourth cousins, as well as providing the information in a more convenient, (ie spreadsheet) format.

I have 59 matches within the '4th cousins or closer' category and 379 rows in the ICW* file downloaded by the Client app, which, as far as I am aware, includes each individual who connects to one of my '4th cousins or closer' matches.  That's probably not many in comparison to people with colonial US ancestry but I imagine it's about average for those of us in the UK.  And it is enough to do some simple 'network analysis', which I hope might allow me to make more sense of the data.

Let me say here that I don't really know anything about proper network analysis - I think that's complicated computing, with thousand of entries, which produces things like the Genetic Communities.  It involves lots of statistical calculations and terms that I don't even understand the meaning of, yet alone know how to use! But most of us are probably capable of using some simple techniques - the basic concept for what I am doing I learnt when studying for a GCSE in psychology, so that's a qualification designed for teenagers. In that course, we were using it to analyse friendship patterns in a class of schoolchildren.  The "sociometric" technique simply consisted of asking each child in a class who their three best friends in the class were.  One then drew a diagram something like the following, where each dot is a person and the arrow shows the direction of the 'choice'.

It occurred to me some years ago that this type of diagram could possibly be used to help analyse genealogical networks and I had hoped to use it in my Parry One-Name Study to try to sort out the potential relationships among the lower gentry of Herefordshire (which contains numerous Parry connections that may, or may not, relate to the same Parry family). I came across a (free!) program* that looked like it would be useful for actually drawing the diagram (although it is easy to do by hand, if there's a lot to draw, a computer obviously does make it easier) but I never managed to get all the pedigrees typed up sufficiently to try it out for my study.  Now, with doing genetic genealogy, it seems to me that the same principle could be used with shared matches.

And so the following diagram shows the connections between my shared matches at Ancestry:

In this image, each red dot represents one of my matches, and the blue lines indicate the other matches that they also match.  I am not using arrows, just lines, as the genetic relationships will be in both directions.

As you can see, the matches fall into groups, Sometimes these are made up of just two or three people who are shared matches with each other.  But there's also some larger groups, one of about 50 connections, and the other with over 150 connections.

It was interesting to see how the data plotted, but how does this help me?

Well, my theory, as you've possibly guessed by now, is that the people in the same group are likely to connect to me (at some level) through the same ancestral line.

So, firstly, I allocated everyone in each group an 'AncestryICW Group Number' (both in the Notes section of my view of their DNA profile on Ancestry and in my spreadsheet) to help me keep track of the Groups.   I also added any information about potential surname connections.  Here's the same diagram, with those numbers added and also some additional symbols based on my family history. (Key in the bottom right corner of image)

As you can see, the Group 1 (derived just from the genetic relationships provided by Ancestry), contains two people who share the surname NAYLOR with me. One of these I have discovered the potential connection to, the other currently just has the surname in common with me.

I've also 'starred' one match - over the weekend, I carried out a new download of the shared matches file. There were 32 new rows added since the previous download, which, once charted, increased the size of some of the existing groups and also created a few new ones.  (NB these are not new 'fourth cousins or closer' - these are more distantly related new matches, who just happen to connect to my fourth cousins and closer.  As such, I would not normally have checked them out, among the many new distant matches that keep being added.)

I was just starting to work through them, adding the group numbers to my spreadsheet and checking if the people had trees attached to their account, when I noticed the surname NAYLOR.  Yes, one of the new additional matches in Group 1 also had a NAYLOR in their tree!  It was just one, a NAYLOR female marrying into their SMITH family, with no other information about her except her husband's name, and their child's details.  And the family were in the 'wrong' place in the UK (up in Lancashire, rather than in London) - but obviously I didn't leave it there.

By initially working on the husband of the SMITH child, and then finding him and his wife in the 1939 Register, I was able to obtain her proper birth date (1895, not 1885 as shown on the pedigree). That correction meant that I could then find her in the 1901 and 1911 censuses with her parents - her mother being the NAYLOR by birth. Those censuses gave me sufficient information to get back to the previous generation - who traced back to London and the entries I believe relate to my family in 1841!

All of this still needs confirming properly, especially the early censuses for the family, which I had found some months ago when identifying the other NAYLOR connection, who is in Australia.

But it all looks very promising that my new match and I are fourth cousins through the NAYLOR line.

So, just the process of simply grouping my shared matches, on the basis of who they are in common with, has been sufficient for me to spot a connection that I may not have seen otherwise, since the new match was identified by Ancestry as a more distant 5th-8th cousin, sharing just 9.7cM across 1 DNA segment. Although I understand that there may be other reasons for shared DNA of that quantity, unless I can find other evidence to contradict it, the simplest explanation, that the three matches in Group 1 who all share the NAYLOR surname with me obtained it from a common NAYLOR ancestry, does seem to be logical.


*
Network analysis program used for drawing chart: Pajek (http://mrvar.fdv.uni-lj.si/pajek/ )  [One day, I hope to learn to use the program properly, as I am sure it could potentially display the DNA information more effectively, taking account of features such as the closeness of relationships etc]

ICW - stands for "in common with" - the term often used for matches who also match someone else you match.

Genealogy Do-Over week 6

The topics for week 6 of the Genealogy Do-Over were:

1. Evaluating Evidence

2. Reviewing Online Education Options

Collecting data, or "evidence", is easy - I do it all the time, particularly for my one-name study.  A new database is announced, I visit the site, search for "Parry", and then collect any results.  Sometimes this is only at the index level as, depending on the format of the database, extraction of any additional details can be quite time consuming.  And often, because the Parry ONS is a fairly large study, that is as far as I get.  Yes, eventually, when I am identifying individuals, and tracking the events of their lives, the expectation is that I will take a closer look at the details and be able to add the information to a person in a pedigree.  But that does not always happen to start with, and even an index level of detail can have value for a one-name study, so that's okay.  It is still progress on the study.

However, it is another step to actually evaluate the evidence found.  But this is an essential step, if we're aiming to produce reliable pedigrees, or life histories, or even just statistics from the original database.  After all, how complete *is* that database?  Are the results really representative of what I think they are?

Sometimes the need for evaluation of a source is obvious.  When I first started collecting any references to the Parry surname, I soon realised that there were certain "well known" Parry families.  For example, 'The Parrys of Poston', in Herefordshire, who are frequently noted because descendants include Blanche Parry, Chief Gentlewoman to Queen Elizabeth I.   But, when I found the often quoted source, a pedigree for the family in the "History of Breconshire", warning bells began to ring.  It wasn't just the tracing of the tree back into the 'myths of time', from "Catherine, widow of Thomas Lord Laci", through "Idio Wyllt, Earl of Desmond",  and back to the kings of Ireland, but basic issues, such as the almost total absence of dates, and even occasionally names, for some of the more recent individuals in the pedigree. 

Clearly there are questions to be asked about the accuracy and reliability of such a work. 

But the necessity for evaluation of all sources is easy to forget when dealing with some of the more recent "evidence" we collect.  So we take documents such as census records or birth certificates at face value.  Occasionally, we might perhaps spot an anomaly that causes us to ponder but, generally, we can be tempted to think, "it's an official record, it must be accurate".  We can also fall into the trap of assuming that, just because we can only find one entry for the name we're looking for, then that *must* be the relevant one.  I was amused to see a blog post recently, by Cherie Tabor Cayemberg, which illustrated exactly this point, as she was searching for the death date of a relative with what seemed to be a rare combination of names, but found two possibilities in the same area.  How easy it would have been to be misled, if there had only been one obituary available (Tuesday's Tip - The Case of the Two Viola Vanias http://haveyouseenmyroots.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/tuesdays-tip-case-of-two-viola-vanias.html ) 

These days, it is so easy to add details to a family tree without going through a process of evaluation (especially when the tree is on the same site as the databases themselves, such as on Ancestry, with their "Save to person in your tree" button).  Once entered into a tree, there's even less chance of a later reader examining why a particular connection was made, or how strong the evidence was for a stated fact.   Good research, that produces results which can be relied upon, requires a better examination of every source, or piece of evidence, and a ranking of reliability.  That was something I was aiming at with my Colston Parry pedigree at http://freepages.family.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~parryresearch/colston.htm , but I still have some way to go to build this process into my practice. 

The principles of evaluating genealogical evidence, usually based on the work of Elizabeth Shown Mills (see https://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/quicklesson-17-evidence-analysis-process-map ), can be found on many sites. Thomas MacEntee added the relevant considerations as columns in his Research Log spreadsheet but, for a working reference sheet, I quite like the way Dawn Kogutkiewicz formatting the items as questions ( at http://dawninggenealogy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/genealogy-do-over-week-6.html?spref=fB ).  So these are now entered into my OneNote Research Notebooks, to be referred to whenever I am collecting data.  I have also added a note to develop some questions for myself, that I can apply to a whole database prior to even looking at individual entries, as evaluation at that level will be necessary if I am drawing conclusions based on index level information.

Reviewing Online Education Options

This topic made me laugh - as, if "doing the Do-Over" wasn't enough of an example of online education, I don't know what is!

We all need to keep learning, as Thomas MacEntee says, not just to improve our own research, but to keep up with new developments and to learn about new areas of research.  So, do I need a specific 'education plan, as he suggests setting?  One needs to remember that those whose livelihood involves genealogical education will keep on producing 'new' courses, webinars, etc., as long as people keep attending them.  The danger is that there is so much information 'out there', that we can easily spend all our time trying to learn everything, and we never actually 'do' anything.

So, no, I am not going to create a new 'education plan' this week - in a sense, I already have one, because the goals that I set out initially for this year of my Do-Over, such as mastering the new techniques and new programs that I am using, involves a lot of learning.  So I shall continue to focus on the items already specified and trying to ensure that what I learn actually gets embedded into my practice.