Digging into the past

Great grandmother

There is so much bad feeling on the internet right now that I am staying away from it!

Since my year with Find My Past has recently expired I am now exploring the UK Gov Census to see if it is any better or more accurate. I am happy to believe that our grandparents were not so hot on reading and writing, and that generations before them were almost illiterate, but I was unprepared for the variation in ages quoted for the same family member on each census. Some people quoted figures that varied by seven or eight years.

That got me thinking that if you didn't have a diary or an equivalent to hand, then how did you record such vital facts? You would have to rely on memory, or else pin the event to an important year. "The year the king died," or "the year Titanic went down." Even then people would remember and argue about the year. "It was 1912", says one. "No, it was 1914, just before the war broke out," says another.

Newspapers would have to be consulted, and to do that a trip to the nearest library that held archives would be necessary. Mostly, given the difficulty of travelling into town, they would give it their best guess when the enumerators came around every ten years. Hence the variation. I did notice that most ladies guessed their ages to be younger than they were!

Then there are the people who did the clerical stuff. Some of the names are spelled most imaginiatively. Towns are usually correctly labeled, but villages and hamlets have many variations. It was surprising how many men changed their profession during a lifetime. Agricultural labourer to colliery engine driver. Butcher to registrar of births, marriages and deaths. Obviously, they followed the work that was to be had, for their addresses changed as often as the jobs. Some followed a gradual upward trend, and others did the opposite. The unfortunate few ended their days in the poor house, or living with a family not their own - and labelled "pauper" on the census return.

Fascinating stuff. I just wish they hadDi begun doing the census earlier that 1841.

Family trees

Way behind because  of Createspace and my computer. All I can say is that the people who complain about the ease of self-publishing cannot have tried to publish a paperback! Writing the book was the easy part. Editing took time and effort, the cover was fun to do, but getting it all into Createspace is driving me nuts and doing my computer no good at all. (Either that or it still doesn't like Windows 10). Now that I'm almost at the end of the process, I think the book is priced way too high, but either I go with Amazon's  recommendation or I get no royalties. Some choice!

The other problem is that Createspace wants to publish the book as a Kindle e-book for me. There's no way to tell the system that it is already out in e-book Kindle format. Maybe I'll just have to publish and then delete my "original " Kindle - what a waste of effort!

On another front entirely, dh and I have become interested in family trees, both his and mine. I've discovered that a fair few of my maternal grandfather's forebears come from Cotherstone, which I believe is a few yards on the Yorkshire side of the river Tees, but I must check that. I wish the UK Census gave the surname of females who marry, as tracking them back in almost impossible. Birth dates seem flexible, but then  back in 1800 there would be many families who existed without a calendar or a diary to keep track of events and dates. I can well believe that by the time a man had reached 83 he could not recall if he was born in 1799, 1800, 1801 or 1802. (All dates are given!)

It is a fascinating process to track the lines back, though it isn't easy. It seems many didn't bother to report to the authorities when someone died, though most births are recorded. Even after 1837 when registration became law, there seem to have been those who died "unreported."