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brightsolid wins Best Genealogy Organisation of 2011 award

We’re very pleased to announce that our parent company, brightsolid, has been awarded Best Genealogy Organisation of 2011 in the GeneAwards 2011.

The award recognises the millions of new records that findmypast.co.uk published last year and highlights our investment in quality records. Also cited are the launch of findmypast Ireland and the British Newspaper Archive, as well as Find My Past the TV show.

See all the details of why we won

AA Milne in our records on Winnie the Pooh’s 85th birthday

Today is Winnie the Pooh’s 85th birthday and to commemorate his author AA Milne, we’ve been investigating Milne’s family history.

Educational ancestors

We discovered that Milne came from a family of school teachers. Our first stop was the census records on findmypast.co.uk where we found Milne in the 1891 census. He is recorded at Henley House School, Mortimer Road, Hampstead, aged nine. He is listed as a scholar with his father, John Milne, the schoolmaster. John was born in Jamaica and was married to Sarah Heginbotham. See the record here:

Click to enlarge

Ten years later, the 1901 census tells us that Milne’s father had moved on from Henley House School and was the schoolmaster at Streete Court School, Westgate-on-Sea, Kent. Milne was living with his aunt and uncle as a Cambridge undergraduate at this time.

Milne’s uncle, Alexander Milne, was the principal of the Boys’ Private School, University School, Holmesdale Gardens, Hastings. Alexander is listed in the Teachers’ Registration Council Registers 1914-1948 on findmypast.co.uk. He registered on 1 July 1919 and his career in education spanned 1871 to 1932. View Alexander’s record here:

Click to enlarge

Our research revealed further evidence of teaching in Milne’s family. Milne’s mother and maternal grandmother, both named Sarah Heginbotham, were school mistresses at Brooklyn House, Wellington, Shropshire at the time of the 1871 census.

Milne’s paternal grandfather, William Milne, was recorded as being an inspector of schools in the 1861 census, which made us wonder whether he was the catalyst for the family’s teaching tradition.

At the time of the 1911 census, Milne was living at Broadgates, Steeple Bumpstead in Essex with his parents. Milne was recorded as being a journalist, working on his ‘own account and Punch‘. By this time, his father was a retired schoolmaster.

Milne on the move

We were intrigued to find Milne 20 years later in the passenger lists on findmypast.co.uk travelling as a first class passenger to the USA with his wife, Dorothy.

The couple were aboard the Aquitania, which departed Southampton for New York on 21 October 1931. In the detailed log, Milne is described as an author and his address is recorded as being 13 Mallord Street SW3. View the record here:

Click to enlarge

As Milne’s ancestry demonstrates, you can glean huge amounts of detail when you find your ancestors in the Teachers’ Registration Council Registers 1914-1948 on findmypast.co.uk. We are working in partnership with the Society of Genealogists to bring you these rich records.

AA Milne in our records on Winnie the Pooh's 85th birthday

Today is Winnie the Pooh’s 85th birthday and to commemorate his author AA Milne, we’ve been investigating Milne’s family history.

Educational ancestors

We discovered that Milne came from a family of school teachers. Our first stop was the census records on findmypast.co.uk where we found Milne in the 1891 census. He is recorded at Henley House School, Mortimer Road, Hampstead, aged nine. He is listed as a scholar with his father, John Milne, the schoolmaster. John was born in Jamaica and was married to Sarah Heginbotham. See the record here:

Click to enlarge

Ten years later, the 1901 census tells us that Milne’s father had moved on from Henley House School and was the schoolmaster at Streete Court School, Westgate-on-Sea, Kent. Milne was living with his aunt and uncle as a Cambridge undergraduate at this time.

Milne’s uncle, Alexander Milne, was the principal of the Boys’ Private School, University School, Holmesdale Gardens, Hastings. Alexander is listed in the Teachers’ Registration Council Registers 1914-1948 on findmypast.co.uk. He registered on 1 July 1919 and his career in education spanned 1871 to 1932. View Alexander’s record here:

Click to enlarge

Our research revealed further evidence of teaching in Milne’s family. Milne’s mother and maternal grandmother, both named Sarah Heginbotham, were school mistresses at Brooklyn House, Wellington, Shropshire at the time of the 1871 census.

Milne’s paternal grandfather, William Milne, was recorded as being an inspector of schools in the 1861 census, which made us wonder whether he was the catalyst for the family’s teaching tradition.

At the time of the 1911 census, Milne was living at Broadgates, Steeple Bumpstead in Essex with his parents. Milne was recorded as being a journalist, working on his ‘own account and Punch‘. By this time, his father was a retired schoolmaster.

Milne on the move

We were intrigued to find Milne 20 years later in the passenger lists on findmypast.co.uk travelling as a first class passenger to the USA with his wife, Dorothy.

The couple were aboard the Aquitania, which departed Southampton for New York on 21 October 1931. In the detailed log, Milne is described as an author and his address is recorded as being 13 Mallord Street SW3. View the record here:

Click to enlarge

As Milne’s ancestry demonstrates, you can glean huge amounts of detail when you find your ancestors in the Teachers’ Registration Council Registers 1914-1948 on findmypast.co.uk. We are working in partnership with the Society of Genealogists to bring you these rich records.

Saving your records – what's new, what's coming

Hello – I’m Ian Tester, the Product Manager for findmypast, and I wanted to let you know about a neat little project we’re in the middle of to make your experience of searching records a little better.

You may have noticed recently that small blue stars have started appearing next to your search results and wondered what’s going on. Usually, seeing stars before your eyes is a matter for concern, but not in this case – this is the first manifestation of our “Saved Records” project.

You’ve been telling us for some time that it would be incredibly useful to have a record of the records that you’ve already viewed to make your research easier. We’ve been thinking of various ways that we could do that for you, and have been beavering away in the background to make the first stage of this happen.

We’ve been making a number of changes behind the scenes for a few months now: the first was to make sure that we recorded the details of every record that you view in our database, against your account. We got this in place last year, meaning that we have been recording your search history since the end of 2010 in a much more structured way than we did before. We’ve also now started showing you which records you have viewed already, by adding a little blue star to your search results to mark the ones you’ve viewed most recently. It currently only shows you a few hundreds of your most recent views, but we’ll be expanding this number over the coming months into the thousands. So when you see a blue star today, that means that of all the records on the page, the records marked  with a blue star are ones that you’ve already had a look at. It works across most of the records on findmypast, with the exception of Living Relatives (but keep your eye on this blog for some more exciting news about living relatives records later in the year).

So what’s next? Well, it’s useful being able to see the records that you’ve already viewed in your search results, but we’ll also be providing you with a dedicated “Saved Records” area where you can see everything you’ve viewed – this will give you an instant insight into the research you’ve been doing recently and will also allow you to add basic notes that you can use later.

After that, we’ll be adding the ability to mark each record with how likely you think it is to be a match for the ancestor you’re actually looking for – we think this will be handy as you’ll instantly be able to ignore records that you’ve looked at and decided aren’t the right ones, and to return to those that you want to mark as possibilities and come back to later. Obviously, we’ll also provide you with tools to let you filter your saved records so you can go back and do more research on them later. You should see all these improvements arrive by the end of the year.

We hope this will make your research that little bit easier! One fringe benefit of Saved Records is that because we now store every record you’ve viewed against your account, there is no danger of being charged twice to view a record you have already seen if you’re a PayAsYouGo customer. And perhaps best of all, your Saved Records will be available even if (heaven forbid) your credits or subscription expires.

Do let us have any feedback or suggestions on how we could make this work better for you or even if you think this would be helpful or not – add a comment below!

Saving your records – what’s new, what’s coming

Hello – I’m Ian Tester, the Product Manager for findmypast, and I wanted to let you know about a neat little project we’re in the middle of to make your experience of searching records a little better.

You may have noticed recently that small blue stars have started appearing next to your search results and wondered what’s going on. Usually, seeing stars before your eyes is a matter for concern, but not in this case – this is the first manifestation of our “Saved Records” project.

You’ve been telling us for some time that it would be incredibly useful to have a record of the records that you’ve already viewed to make your research easier. We’ve been thinking of various ways that we could do that for you, and have been beavering away in the background to make the first stage of this happen.

We’ve been making a number of changes behind the scenes for a few months now: the first was to make sure that we recorded the details of every record that you view in our database, against your account. We got this in place last year, meaning that we have been recording your search history since the end of 2010 in a much more structured way than we did before. We’ve also now started showing you which records you have viewed already, by adding a little blue star to your search results to mark the ones you’ve viewed most recently. It currently only shows you a few hundreds of your most recent views, but we’ll be expanding this number over the coming months into the thousands. So when you see a blue star today, that means that of all the records on the page, the records marked  with a blue star are ones that you’ve already had a look at. It works across most of the records on findmypast, with the exception of Living Relatives (but keep your eye on this blog for some more exciting news about living relatives records later in the year).

So what’s next? Well, it’s useful being able to see the records that you’ve already viewed in your search results, but we’ll also be providing you with a dedicated “Saved Records” area where you can see everything you’ve viewed – this will give you an instant insight into the research you’ve been doing recently and will also allow you to add basic notes that you can use later.

After that, we’ll be adding the ability to mark each record with how likely you think it is to be a match for the ancestor you’re actually looking for – we think this will be handy as you’ll instantly be able to ignore records that you’ve looked at and decided aren’t the right ones, and to return to those that you want to mark as possibilities and come back to later. Obviously, we’ll also provide you with tools to let you filter your saved records so you can go back and do more research on them later. You should see all these improvements arrive by the end of the year.

We hope this will make your research that little bit easier! One fringe benefit of Saved Records is that because we now store every record you’ve viewed against your account, there is no danger of being charged twice to view a record you have already seen if you’re a PayAsYouGo customer. And perhaps best of all, your Saved Records will be available even if (heaven forbid) your credits or subscription expires.

Do let us have any feedback or suggestions on how we could make this work better for you or even if you think this would be helpful or not – add a comment below!

Behind the scenes: reinventing your marriage records search with Ian Tester

As you’re probably aware, one of the larger projects the findmypast.co.uk team has been working on this year is a complete revamp of our General Register Office (GRO) birth, marriage and death (BMD) indexes.

We’ve created a completely new, clearer set of images of the original records and we’ve also been working to transcribe each and every one of them for the very first time. This allows you to search directly for your ancestors, rather than having to browse several pages to find the person you are looking for.

Of course, some England & Wales BMD records are available elsewhere online, and some of them are even fully-indexed like our new ones, but to date, nobody else has provided a complete set of fully-indexed BMD records – another first for findmypast.co.uk, and a project which should be complete in early 2011 when we launch the death records. As always, our aim is to make your family history easier and this project is no different…

So, having launched the new birth records a few months ago, recently we’ve turned out attention to marriages.

Marriage search challenges

One of the main difficulties with searching marriages is the need to search for both spouses separately, and then compare the registration district, volume and page numbers to see if the two match up. Even worse, because more than one marriage is recorded on a single page of the GRO indexes, even if you manage to match up two potential partners, it is always possible that they actually married someone else on the same page of the index that you haven’t tracked down.

Another major challenge is finding wives when you do not know their maiden name. Often you will come across a new branch of your family in a census and identify a new husband and wife, listed under their married surname. Finding the husband in marriage records is generally possible, but without knowing the wife’s maiden name, tracking down the marriage can often be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Introducing MarriageMatch^TM

To help overcome these inherent difficulties, we’ve been developing a new search technology we call MarriageMatch^TM, which should make searching for marriages much easier, and should even help you unravel some mysteries in your tree.

MarriageMatch^TM does something very clever – rather than searching for one spouse in a marriage, it searches for both at the same time, and does the matching up for you. If you give the surnames of both spouses and they married after 1912, it will generally produce a list of exact matches – people with the surnames you are looking for who definitely got married to each other.

If they married before 1912, or if you only know the first name of one of the spouses, it will also show you all the potential matches on the GRO index page: in most cases you only have to choose between two (or occasionally four) people that your ancestor might have married. In any case, because it shows everybody on the same results page, you can be confident that one of the people on your results screen is the right one, and you don’t need to dig further.

Ian Tester, findmypast.co.uk's product manager

Where it really comes into its own is when you know the surname of the husband and just the first name of the wife – again, MarriageMatch^TM will find you all the records where, for example, a Thomas Smith married a Catherine. You can even use a variants search on either or both of the names if you are not 100% sure of the first name the wife may have been recorded under.

We have been testing it thoroughly at findmypast towers, and it has been incredibly valuable for us – it seems to have an uncanny ability to identify the marriage you are looking for from the millions of marriage records you might have been browsing for years, hoping to get lucky. I managed to crack five long-standing brick walls in my tree (husbands with common surnames marrying wives with common first names) in 20 minutes flat and we’re hoping you’ll find it just as useful.

We’re just doing some final tweaks to it now and will make it available on site in early December.

I’d really recommend that if you have any marriages that have left you baffled, you start digging them out now so you’re ready to see if MarriageMatch^TM really can solve some of those marriage mysteries…

Behind the scenes: creating new content with web editor Jess Moore

I’m Jess Moore, findmypast.co.uk’s web editor. I joined findmypast.co.uk in January 2010 and it’s been non-stop since then! I create and send out the monthly findmypast.co.uk newsletters and usually it’s me who updates the blog.

I’m also responsible for the content on the website. At the moment I’m working on a project to make our records more user-friendly. This will involve standardising the information for each set of records and making sure that you get the facts you need on each search page.

Background information on the records and the best ways to search them are crucial, so you can expect to see enhancements to this in the not-too-distant future.

Another project I’m working on is a host of new pages for the site. We think we should tell you more about us as a company (including biographies of each team member) and how we can benefit your family history research. I’m working on this with my colleagues Ian Tester, Paul Yates, Debra Chatfield and Amy Sell. So, keep a look out for exciting new pages on the site coming soon.

That’s all from me for now…I’ve got plenty to be getting on with in the run up to the festive season. That’s all I can say for now but I promise you won’t be disappointed!

Jess Moore

Behind the scenes: our expert, Stephen Rigden, on spelling variations

I’m findmypast.co.uk’s records development manager and resident genealogy expert. As well as answering your ‘Ask the Expert’ queries, I work with archives, family history societies and other owners of original historical records to digitise these for findmypast.co.uk

Recently I’ve been reviewing our Chelsea Pensioner data so as to understand and think about how we can go about enhancing it.

Stephen Rigden

The Chelsea Pensioner records extend over 150 years – from 1760 to 1913 – and those up to the middle of the 19th century are, in some ways, especially interesting from a data point of view. At that time, spelling of place names had not quite settled and been standardised, at least not the spelling as used within the British Army. In some ways this is inconvenient but in others it provides an intriguing insight into local history.

Many of the soldiers’ places of birth are given and spelt phonetically by the recruits or the recruiting sergeant on the attestation and discharge papers which form the surviving service record.

This week I have been looking at the places of birth of soldiers born in my home county of Kent. This requires some thinking about the local accent and local pronunciation of place names. For instance, ‘Settingbourne’ sometimes appears instead of Sittingbourne (older members of my own family still say ‘set’ instead of ‘sit’). Similarly, Erith is sometimes spelt ‘Earith’ and ‘Eariff’, which gives a close approximation to the way it is pronounced locally.

On one occasion it appears aspirated (if that is the right word), as ‘Hereif’. This is a common fate of Kentish places beginning with a vowel and, therefore, tempting the local to add a leading H. For example, occasionally Eltham can become ‘Heltham’, Eynsford becomes ‘Hainsford’, Eythorne is ‘Haythorne’, Ide Hill is rendered as ‘Hide Hill’, Iwade metamorphoses into ‘Highwade’, Ulcombe becomes ‘Hulcombe’, etc.

The reverse process also occurs, where a required initial H is dropped: Hadlow becomes ‘Adlow’, Halstead becomes ‘Alstead’, Harbledown turns into ‘Arbledown’, Headcorn becomes the delightful ‘Edcorn’ and so on. These are not transcription errors but bona fide reflections of what is written in the original papers.

Sometimes the spelling can tell you how a place was (and often is still) pronounced. For example, there are a number of villages in Kent called Boughton. The ‘ough’ combination of letters in English can be pronounced in a variety of different ways – think of ‘bough’ (of a tree) ‘cough’, ‘though’, ‘nought’ and so on. Here in Kent, however, this place name is always pronounced as it is sometimes spelt in the Chelsea Pensioners, as ‘Borton’. We know this as the qualifier can be present: ‘Borton Aluph’ instead of Boughton Aluph, or ‘Borton Mallet’ instead of Boughton Malherbe.

Kentish pronunciation also has a tendency to run letters together and not trouble to pronounce some letters or syllables. Thus we get ‘Harrisham’ instead of Harrietsham, ‘Harcus’ instead of Hawkhurst, ‘Lamhurst’ instead of Lamberhurst, and ‘Trosley’ instead of Trottiscliffe. Other places have changed over time. Today’s Molash usually appears in Chelsea Pensioners records as ‘Moldash’, while in the older records Faversham is often shown as ‘Feversham’.

Understanding this sort of variation in spelling and departure from received pronunciation – and especially the adding or subtraction of an H at the start of a word – can be helpful when researching your family history as of course it applies equally to personal names just as to place names.

Behind the scenes: software developer Scot McSweeny-Roberts gets technical

I’m Scot McSweeny-Roberts and I’m one of the software developers here at findmypast.co.uk. I thought I would let you know about one of the projects that all of us in the development team have been busy with over the last few months, namely our infrastructure upgrade.

One of the more challenging parts of software development is keeping up with the latest versions of the tools and technologies that we use to build and run our site with and it can be quite easy to get left behind with an environment that is unsupported or difficult to maintain. Besides general issues of support and maintenance, new versions also bring new features that we want to use to make the site even better, which is why over the last few months we’ve been migrating our code over to use the latest and greatest versions of our tools(*).

Scot McSweeny-Roberts

Upgrading software can sometimes be difficult as what used to work in a previous version might work differently or not at all in the latest version. Those differences can be subtle and lead to several days of work figuring out why something that used to work perfectly fine no longer does and then getting it to work correctly again. This can involve spending hours looking at source code you would never normally look at – personally, I now know more about a type of software known as a ‘Transaction Manager’ than I ever really wanted to know.

Once we had working versions of the site running our local machines, it was time to run a copy of the site on a test server. The test server is meant to be as similar as possible to a production server and occasionally surprises pop up due to differences between our local machines and the test server.

Once everything is running as expected on the test server it’s time to move it over to the production servers, which means an early morning for some of our team members as they make sure that everything still runs smoothly after switching over.

All the work involved is worth it though as newer tools are generally better tools. We’ll now be able to develop new features for the site in far less time and we’ll have more flexibility when it comes to scalability.

(*) While we were in the process upgrading, a very important bit of software known as the application server had an entirely new release. Sometimes new can be too new, so in this case we’ve stuck with the slightly older but potentially more stable version.

Behind the scenes: the Chelsea Pensioners records with Paul Nixon, content licensing manager

I joined findmypast.co.uk in August after seven years in India managing a team of software engineers. That’s probably about as far detached from family history as it gets. On the other hand, I have over 25 years’ experience researching British military history and have a number of military-related blogs including one on army service numbers between 1881 and 1918, a subject very close to my heart.

Paul Nixon with son Tauran

Findmypast.co.uk’s publication of the Chelsea Pensioners British Army Service Records (WO97) opens up a vast new range of military records dating from 1760 to 1913. What’s more, the records are in excellent condition and have been scanned in colour, which really makes them come alive.

The beauty of the WO97 series is that the records encompass many different numbering systems. My own data has focused on the numbering system introduced in 1881 as part of Cardwell’s reforms, but WO97 goes back a full 120 years before this, enabling today’s patient historian to really study British military history in depth. In terms of military campaigns, in this series alone you’ll find records of men who fought at Waterloo alongside those who fought the rebels in the Indian Mutiny; Egypt and Sudan campaign veterans, Boer War veterans; in fact records of ordinary soldiers who took part in virtually every British military campaign between 1760 and 1913.

I list below sample records for the 1st and 2nd (regular) battalions of The King’s Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment). The regiment was formed on 1 July 1881 from the 4th (King’s Own Royal) Regiment of Foot and was established as the newly formed regiment for North Lancashire. It started numbering from 1 in July 1881.

Use the information below to narrow down the date on which your ancestor joined this regiment. For instance, if he had the number 444, and was soldiering with the King’s Own in the late 19th Century, he must have joined between 2nd June 1883 and 21st March 1884.

A word of warning, however. Numbering in the British Army is far from a simple matter and regiments could and did start new number series for other battalions – or indeed the same battalions – within the regiment. For instance, by 1908, the King’s Own had five battalions and the number 444 had already been used four times, once for the 1st and 2nd Battalions, once for the 3rd (Special Reserve) Battalion, and once each for the 4th and 5th Territorial battalions.

The King’s Own – Regular enlistments 1881-1913

10 joined on 9 July 1881
271 joined on 16 December 1882
397 joined on 2 June 1883
599 joined on 21 March 1884
1012 joined on 12 March 1885
1632 joined on 22 July 1886
1923 joined on 1 January 1887
2300 joined on 19 January 1888
2561 joined on 15 January 1889
2981 joined on 11 June 1890
3244 joined on 24 June 1891
3506 joined on 31 January 1892
4061 joined on 24 July 1893
4317 joined on 17 February 1894
4650 joined on 12 January 1895
5019 joined on 29 January 1896
5311 joined on 3 May 1897
5671 joined on 14 April 1898
5923 joined on 24 March 1899
6288 joined on 2 April 1900

The 1st Volunteer Battalion, The King’s Own, sent over 150 of its volunteers to South Africa to serve with the 2nd Battalion. Such was the number of men wishing to serve with the Volunteers that a 2nd Volunteer Battalion was formed and its headquarters was set up at Lancaster. Those volunteers who made it to South Africa fought in several actions and guarded prisoners at Ladysmith.

Numbers within the range to 7200 to 7352 were issued to men serving in the 1st VSC. Numbers 7353 to 7448 were issued to men serving with the 2nd VSC. Numbers 7449 to 7468 were issued to men serving with the 3rd VSC and – as stated on the QSA medal roll – the Volunteer Service Section.

6665 joined on 4 January 1901
7003 joined on 17 February 1902
7652 joined on 5 January 1903
8079 joined on 11 January 1904
8489 joined on 9 January 1905
8847 joined on 9 March 1906
9134 joined on 1 January 1907
9800 joined on 20 August 1908
10076 joined on 21 April 1909
10178 joined on 14 February 1910
10439 joined on 20 April 1911
10649 joined on 3 May 1912
10836 joined on 3 January 1913

I hope you enjoy searching findmypast.co.uk’s Chelsea Pensioners collection for your military ancestors.