Wisdom Wednesday: Dating Letters

Genealogists have to be history detectives too. A woman in one of my groups recently asked how to date a letter with no envelope and just the month and day noted at the top of page one. I think a little history of the U.S. Postal Service and the Royal Mail might help.

                Envelopes

First, I would consider whether the letter ever had an envelope. In the U.S., envelopes came into use at the time of the Civil War. Until then, writers would fold the letter sheet into quarters, seal the edges with wax, and then write the address on the outside. From the many pages and the one horizontal fold, it seems an envelope would have been the only way to secure the above example so it probably dates after 1860.

Hand-made envelopes were all that were available for both commercial and domestic uses until a British patent for the first envelope-making machine was granted in 1845. However, nearly 50 years passed before a commercially successful machine appeared for effectively producing the pre-gummed envelopes we know today.

Not having envelopes made postal workers jobs easier because they could determine the number of sheets of paper used and the distance it had come quickly.  These two factors determined the postage until the advent of stamps. One piece of paper cost one price and two sheets of paper cost double the first amount. The fee for the distance the missive traveled was harder to calculate.

                Stamps

If a letter is folded twice with an address on the outside, it is early correspondence. You should take note if there is a stamp.  In the earliest days, postage was paid by the receiver.  Postage stamps were first used in Britain in 1840 and in the U.S. in 1847.  Before that postal workers wrote ‘paid’ on the letter.

The Royal Mail can be traced back to 1516 when Henry VIII established a "Master of the Posts". The Uniform Penny Post Law was enacted on 10 January 1840 establishing a single rate for mail delivery anywhere in Great Britain and Ireland that was pre-paid by the sender.  A few months later on 6 May, a sender could affix the first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, to certify that postage had been paid on a letter.

Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General of the United States, appointed in 1775. Here are some significant dates from the Postal Service’s first one hundred years of operation:

1847 - U.S. postage stamps issued
1855 - Prepayment of postage required
1860 - Pony Express began 

Wisdom Wednesday: Essex Police Museum

The Federation of Family History Society recently emailed a message from the Essex Police Museum. They have a large archives and a website to help people tracing their family history. The museum is open every Saturday from 10 am to 4 pm, although the office is staffed Monday to Friday for enquiries and group tours. Further information can be found on their website http://www.essex.police.uk/museum/

Note: This seemed like a small museum that may only help a few people, but their website is a big surprise. I recommend you spend some time reviewing its features, and I wonder if other counties have similar facilities or websites.

It is easy to look for the service records of an ancestor that you suspect might have been a policeman in Essex. I entered the surname “BRETT” and got four results. They had the full records for one person, and I could order the file for £20. The other three were considered incomplete, but here is one as an example which I think contains a fair amount of information.

145 Alfred Brett served between 1842-05-24 - 1842-07-31

Unfortunately we have no complete record of service for Alfred Brett but we do have the following information:

Date of birth: 1814

Place of birth: West Hanningfield

Occupation: Labourer

Date of death: 0000-00-00

Reason left force: Discharged - Incapacity

Comments:

Copyright: the Essex Police Museum

The museum also publishes a series of booklets collectively known as ‘History Notebooks’. There are over 50 titles many of which have a person’s name included, such as ‘The Murder of Sergeant Eves’. Each one is downloadable as a pdf file at no charge.

Contact:

Becky Wash, Museum Curator
Direct Dial: 01245 457 150
Essex Police Museum, PO Box 2, Headquarters, Springfield, Chelmsford, Essex, CM2 6DA
www.essex.police.uk/museum

Are there other police museums out there? Yes! I googled ‘police museum UK’ and got the following and a few more.

Greater Manchester Police Museum www.gmpmuseum.com
City of London Police Museum www.citypolicemuseum.org.uk
West Midlands www.westmidlandspolicemuseum.co.uk

Wisdom Wednesday: First Jewish Family History Fair

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain (www.jgsgb.org) has announced its First Family History Fair, being held at:

The De Vere Village Urban Resort

Elstree’s Centennial Park
7th July 2013 - 10am to 6pm.

The JGSGB is a national organization with close-to-a-thousand members. Their announcement of the event says that "as well as offering its unrivaled expertise in Jewish immigration, settlement, naming patterns and genealogy, it has access to extensive sources, including exclusive online databases" Its website will also give you membership information, regional Jewish genealogy groups to consult and publications to order. Their journal is called Shemot.

 
The 1st JGSGB Family History Fair is supported by ancestry.com, familysearch.org, findmypast.co.uk. myheritage.com and the London Jewish Cultural Council.

If I was going to be in London, I would attend with a smile on my face.

Wisdom Wednesday: Heritage Productions

I’m back! It’s been awhile since I posted here, so let me tell you about the Ohio State Genealogy Conference in Cincinnati and a new resource for books and online classes for UK, US, Irish and Canadian research.

1.       The OGS Conference was great with about 700 people registered. My travel plans went without a hitch even though the air controllers were having a job action due to the Sequester.  Thus I arrived on Thursday and only missed the morning keynote speaker.

I spoke twice on Saturday about land records and had a large number each time. They applauded at the end so I must have done something right.

Next year’s OGS Conference is in the northern part state in Sandusky at a facility called the Kalahari Resort and Convention Center from April 30-May 4, 2014.

2 .      Last year at NGS, I bought a book at the Heritage Productions booth, titled Researching English Non-Anglican Ancestors by Dr. Penelope Christensen. You can see that I referred to it many times through the year as I wrote about researching religious groups in the UK who were not affiliated with the Church of England. This year in Cincinnati, I picked up another of Dr. Christensen’s books, Researching English Poor Law and Parish Chest Records.

This publisher based in Toronto, Ontario, has a huge number of books arranged into a number of series on their website www.genealogystore.com. There are over twenty titles in their General Series, which I would term the non-geographically specific books about organizing data or writing a family history.  Then there are a number of books grouped together in the American Series, the Canadian Series, the English Series, the Irish Series and the Scottish Series. Finally there are several books about research in other European countries.

Heritage Productions is an arm of the National Institute for Genealogical Studies. They have online courses which you can take for pleasure or to receive a certificate for genealogy research in either Australia, Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, Scotland or the United States. Check this out at www.genealogicalstudies.com.

Wisdom Wednesday: What Genealogists Want

As I write, I am also preparing a talk about “Accessing Land Records Online” that I will give at the Ohio Genealogy Society Conference. I was thinking about what features a good land website would have. Then I realized that they were the same basic features I wanted from any site – ancestry.com or familysearch.org. My list includes:

                -search by name

                -see original document on the screen

                -print or save the original document, free

There are over 3000 land records offices in the U.S. with little coordination between them, but in this day and age, almost all have a web presence. You will find offices with a bare minimum of data online, that is, only their contact information, address, phone and email. Some reach my criteria for a perfect site. The vast majority of the web sites are between the minimum and the ideal.

Fees for copies are common when you visit an office in person.  Losing this revenue when the world went digital was a fiscal issue in many land offices. If a recorder needs or wants to charge and then puts its images online, many genealogists are clever enough to take screen shots to bypass payment so the records offices may not post the images either.

Charges range from $.50 to about $2.00 per page. The copies are cheap when compared to prices for vital records, so that is the silver lining.

The websites are very exciting so go to the one where your ancestors lived and see what is available.

Wisdom Wednesday: UK Catholic Records

Continuing a thread of posts started last summer about non-Anglican church records, let’s look at Roman Catholic records in the UK. A good place to begin is the National Archives for a quick tutorial: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/catholics.htm

Dr. Penelope Christensen reminds us that most people with British ancestry have Catholics in their family tree before Henry the VIII’s split with the Church of Rome in the 1530’s. “There was little or no tolerance for the Roman Catholic religion in England between 1558 and 1829…” (Page 127) Statutes passed by parliament at that time are referred to as ‘penal laws.’

There are several groups trying to make pre-1837 Catholic records accessible. One website will lead you to most of them: www.catholic-history.org.uk/index.php. From this very humble home page, there are nine buttons to click across the top. Beginning with the first on the left, ‘cas’, click to link to the site of the Catholic Archives Society, www.catholicarchivesociety.org . This group promotes preservation of documents and trains archivists who do the day to day work. They do not have a collection of documents for genealogists.
 
The next link is to the CFHS (Catholic Family History Society) that accepts memberships from people who are researching their English and Irish ancestors in England, Scotland and Wales, www.catholic-history.org.uk/cfhs/index.htm . They publish a journal called the Catholic Ancestor, once known as the ECA Journal. The titles of the journal articles since 1983 are listed at the site. The bookshop has books and CD-ROMs available from transcription projects in London, Manchester and Lancashire.

The third link is to the Catholic Records Society, www.catholicrecordsociety.co.uk that according to its web site is “the premier Catholic historical society in the United Kingdom and is devoted to the study of Roman Catholicism in the British Isles from the Reformation period to the present day.” Since 1904, it has been producing transcriptions of records. The National Archives web site notes that “the majority of Catholic registers remain in the custody of parish priests, although a number have been transcribed and indexed by the Catholic Record Society.” (See above.)

The fourth link is to Benedictine history, www.plantata.org.uk. There is a searchable list of monks and nuns of the order.

The five links on the right connect with regional Catholic history societies with journals and publications, and dues in the £10 per year range. Note they are not ‘family’ history societies.

Last but not least, a resource you may want to check is the Catholic National Library www.catholic-library.org.uk which has most of the transcripts from the Catholic Record Society in its 70,000 volume collection. The Library is located at St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough, Hampshire and is open three days each week.

Source: Christensen, Dr. Penelope. Researching English Non-Anglican Records. Toronto, Canada: Heritage Productions 2003.

Wisdom Wednesday: How Catholicism Survived the Penal Laws

There was great political and social, really personal , upheaval when Henry VIII decided to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and the pope did not give his permission. After long negotiations and threats, Henry declared himself head of the church in England. The king’s decision affected his realm well into the nineteenth century.

Not all of the aristocrats, much less the people, were one hundred percent convinced that this was a good idea so Henry imposed a series of laws that outlawed Roman Catholic worship in the realm. Catholics could not attend university, own land or serve in Parliament.

How did Catholicism survive?

-After decreasing to only one percent of the population in the mid-1700s, the numbers of Catholics began to climb with the immigration of Irish and Italian craftsmen and workers. It is estimated that in 1780, there were 80,000 Catholics in the country.

-Sons were often brought up in COE to preserve their rights of inheritance, while daughters were schooled at home in the Catholic way. A husband might attend COE services without his wife and children.

-Catholic families of means sent their sons abroad to train as priests, although that was illegal. They returned to England and ministered to congregations in small, but illegal family or estate based chapels. There were few legal public chapels until after the Catholic Relief Act of 1791. See below.

-In London, each embassy of a Catholic country was allowed to have its own chapel, but their registers indicate they served a greater population.

-There were pockets of Catholicism where laws were not enforced vigorously – Lancashire and rural Yorkshire – areas about as far away from London as you can get. Certain large cities also gave some relief from oppression.

The Catholic Relief Act was passed in 1791, allowed Catholics to enter the legal profession and granted toleration for their schools and churches.  In 1829, full equality was given by the Catholic Emancipation Act.  In 1850, the Catholic Church organized into dioceses again, but it was after World War I before geographical parishes were set up.  In the intervening time, people could choose their own place of worship. This may account for your finding your family records in a variety of registers.

At the beginning of civil registration of births, deaths and marriages, the government asked for the clergy to turn in their old registers. Only a few Catholic ones were included. See next week’s blog post to find out how to get UK Catholic information.

Source: Christensen, Dr. Penelope. Researching English Non-Anglican Records. Toronto, Canada: Heritage Productions 2003.