Family Tree

FREE covermount CD includes: West London area ancestors in the 1851 Census, the Post Office Directory of London for 1931 (extract), baptism records for Bishopsgate St Nicholas Acons 1539-1653, plus software, charts, back issues & how-to guide.
Trace your living relatives We explain the how, where and why of tracing living family members to grow your tree
Your virtual family We look at the pros and cons of social networking sites for genealogical researchers
Law of the land Understand the enclosure movement & look for ancestors in the surviving records
Goodbye & thank Kew Before he retires as FT’s military expert, Iain Swinnerton shares his secrets for those researching British soldiers at Kew
The Special Constable We unlock the story of the Special Constabulary in England & Wales
Ethics in the archives The ethical considerations for archives bequeathed controversial records

PLUS
A day at the SOG – we have top research tips following FT’s prize winner’s day in the archives at the Society of Genealogists
Reader story – once a draper, always a draper
Reader story – a nurse in the family
Spain in turmoil – explore digitised records of British volunteers who fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War
Plotting the dead – a project to rescue and record a neglected Manchester cemetery
Older mums – we investigate the incidence of women having children later in life
A toast to temperance – discover temperance history & raise a glass to the last teetotal bar in England
Twiglets – diary of a family tree first-timer
Thoughts on… Diane Lindsay embroiders colourful tales about the lives of her ancestors

Regulars: Genealogy News; Genealogical miscellany; Your Q&A & photo-dating; Reviews of the latest books & CDs; Mailbox – your letters; Diary dates

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Every year on 27 January, the world marks Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD).

The Holocaust Educational Trust runs talks by Holocaust survivors, to tell their story, to commemorate the past and educate the future. Eva Clarke is one such survivor, who recently gave a talk to Huntingdon Regional College students, and I was fortunate enough to attend and hear her haunting account.

Eva Clarke’s story is, as she explained, ‘a family’s story’, which begins before she was born in the late 1930s when her parents, aunt, uncle and cousin, packed up their homes in Germany, and fled to Australia, England and Czechoslovakia, to what they hoped was safety.

In May 1940, in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, Eva’s German-Jewish father, Bernd, married her mother, Czech-Jew Anka, and they started their married life dealing with the daily drudgery of the wartime rules for the Jews (such as the curfew, the prohibition from attending the cinema or travelling inside trams, and, of course, the compulsory wearing of the infamous yellow star) that little by little took away their rights. But at each turn, the Jewish response – as Eva Clarke related in her talk on her family’s Holocaust experiences – was, ‘Well, we can cope with this’.

Then, in 1941, the cards arrived in the post with details to report to a warehouse, near the railway station in Prague. First Bernd was summoned, and a few days later Anka was sent for too. And so began their transportation and imprisonment in Theresienstadt concentration camp for the next three years.

These were three years of starvation (and the relentless daily struggle to find enough food just to survive), separation (men and women were largely isolated, families were split up), oppression and fear – and also, seemingly strangely, hope. With hindsight, we wonder how it was that no-one knew what would happen next. But the horrors of mass executions and gas chambers, a history with which we are so familiar today (though nevertheless appalled by) was simply, literally, unimaginable to our ancestors just a generation or so back.

And so it was, in September 1944, when Bernd was summoned to move camps to Auschwitz, that Anka volunteered to follow him – she’d already suffered three years of imprisonment (‘Why and how could it get any worse?’ Eva recalls her mother explaining her optimistic decision to go with him), and of course Anka would prefer to be with her husband.

When Anka arrived at Auschwitz she was already pregnant. This was a perilous position as only those prisoners fit for work were allowed to live, but over the coming months her baggy prison clothes disguised her condition, and in October 1944, Anka was sent to work in a bomb factory. Then in the spring of 1945, with the Allies advancing, the Germans began emptying some of the camps and for three weeks Anka, by now heavily pregnant, was forced to travel on an open coal truck. As the train neared Mauthausen camp, Anka went into labour.

Weighing 3lbs, Eva was born on 29 April to her emaciated 5 stone mother. The gas chamber at Mauthausen had been blown up the day before, so mother and baby lived to survive the war.

After he had left Theresienstadt in September 1944, Anka never saw her husband again, and later she discovered that he had been shot dead on 18 January 1945 in Auschwitz. Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians nine days later.

Eva told her story, to a hall full of students at Huntingdon Regional College, as part of an educational program by the History and English Department to help teach the lessons we can all learn from the Holocaust, about prejudice, ourselves and our values. But in addition to telling one family’s story, Eva says she tells her story to preserve the memory of those that perished but who have no one left to honour their lives. ‘We only live on by being remembered by other people,’ Eva explained, encouraging the students: ‘Go home and talk to your families – every family has a story to tell.’

Eva Clarke’s mother, Anka, is alive today, and you can see an interview with her on YouTube – search on ‘The baby born in a concentration camp’.

At Huntingdon Regional College, Eva Clarke’s Holocaust testimony was preceded by a workshop with Mary Mihovilovic on the Holocaust and issues of prejudice. To find further details of other talks run by the Holocaust Educational Trust visit www.het.org.uk.

For more information about Holocaust Memorial Day and other organisations who work with Holocaust and genocide survivors, or focus on remembrance and education, visit www.hmd.org.uk and also click on its ‘Links’ page.

Family Tree will be at Who Do You Think You Are? Live, 24-26 February, on stand 628. Visit us for some fantastic exclusive show offers – we really do have something for everyone!

Joining us on our stand for the whole weekend is Family Tree‘s very own photo-dating expert Jayne Shrimpton. Bring along your voucher from the magazine (published in the December-March issues) to have a personal and free photo-dating consultation* with Jayne.

If you’re looking for top family history books and resources, make sure you also visit our Family History Bookshop at the show on stand 632. There will be a large collection of family history books and related items for sale and some special discounted offers to take advantage of.

We can’t wait to meet you at the show!

*1 voucher per consultation (maximum 10 minutes). Photocopied vouchers not accepted. You may bring your magazine if you don’t want to cut out the voucher.

A course for members of the public to learn how to read and interpret historic documents has proved an instant hit.

The course, organised by Newport University and Gwent Archives, is being held over 12 weeks from 10 January. All 15 places on the Level 4-accredited course were booked quickly. By mid-January there was a waiting list of nine people, who hope the course will be repeated.

Course participants are attending weekly sessions at the new Gwent record office in Ebbw Vale, where deputy archivist Tony Hopkins provides an insight into handwriting and methods of transcription for documents dating from 1550 to 1900. The course also examines different types of documents, why they were produced and what they tell us today.

Bursaries were offered to course participants from the deprived Heads of the Valleys area, which includes Ebbw Vale. The course also attracted people from outside that area. Claire Syder, Newport University’s officer for community-based learning development, said: ‘We would like to repeat the course but we would have to staff it.’ She said the initial course had been possible because Mr Hopkins gave a morning each week to the venture.

Florence Green died in her sleep at Briar House care home in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, last Saturday 4 February, just two weeks before her 111th birthday on 19 February. She was believed to be the last person alive who served in the war.

Florence Green, a great-grandmother, joined the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) as a 17-year-old in September 1918, two months before the end of the war, and served as an officer’s mess steward at Narborough Airfield and RAF Marham, both in Norfolk, until July 1919.

Born Florence Beatrice Patterson, her service was only officially recognised in 2010, after a researcher unearthed her records at The National Archives. Find out more here.

The world’s last known combat veteran of the First World War, Claude Choules, died in Australia aged 110 in May 2011.

The brightsolid stand

Collaboration is the key to the future

With well over 4,200 genealogists and technology developers in attendance at the RootsTech 2012 conference, the word of the 3-day gathering seemed to be ‘collaboration’. Held 2-4 February attendees from different backgrounds converged in Salt Lake City, Utah at this unique event with the express purpose of forging new technological paths to further the genealogy industry.

FamilySearch, a major sponsor of RootsTech, shared its vision for genealogy as making access to one’s family history a seamless process. From the daily keynote addresses to the user and developer sessions, it was made apparent this goal could be achieved by researcher collaboration aided by technology.

With this theme came many new developments, such as brightsolid’s announcement of its intention to enter the US market with its newly launched Censusrecords.com followed by its findmypast.com brand introduction planned for later in the year (read more about this here).

Likewise, of note was FamilySearch’s unveling of its new app, FamilySearch Indexing, which is available for both Apple devices and Android devices.

Jimmy Zimmerman was the winner of the Developer Challenge with his Chrome browser extension, NoteFuser, which is an extension that links genealogical notes kept in Evernote with the new FamilySearch site as well as Geni.com.

Next year RootsTech will be held 21-23 March in Salt Lake City, Utah.

An estimated 270,000 images containing more than a million entries will be published on the website, covering parish churches from a wide expanse of East Kent, including the city of Canterbury; the towns of Faversham, Wye and Elham; Thanet; and towns along the east Kent coast stretching from Whitstable in the north round to Hythe in the south.

The launch has been timed to coincide with the temporary closure of Canterbury Cathedral Archives for refurbishment, which will reopen in autumn 2012.

In the second phase, findmypast.co.uk will start to transcribe the records, with a view to creating an index and making them fully searchable on the website later this year.

Findmypast.co.uk has also added 16,696 new London Docklands baptism records, and occupational records of 99,140 Thames watermen and lightermen are now on findmypast.co.uk, covering 1688-2010. Further details of the records contained in this collection can be found at www.findmypast.co.uk/search/other-records/thames-watermen.

The documents, kept in storage by the Law Society until now, originate from solicitors’ firms that no longer operate or exist. It is not always possible to repatriate these documents and they cannot be destroyed for legal reasons.

Contents range from property deeds and wills, which are hand written on vellum and stamped with the wax seal of Charles II, to personal diaries of society ladies from the early 19th century. These were originally stored in the solicitor’s offices but were never claimed by the clients.

As well as finding historical gems, the archivists also hope to repatriate some of the contents with any remaining legal owners – such as descendents of the original owners. This is a joint project with the Law Society and the SRA (Solicitors Regulation Authority). The two organisations are working with the Records Preservation Section of the British Records Association in order to sort out the documents of interest and loan them to public archives, on the basis that the documents could be retrieved should an owner come forward and ask for them.

With the Historical Record Storage and Sharing Platform, genealogists will have for the first time a platform to self-publish high-resolution documents that are automatically digitised using OCR and made searchable – all for free. Mocavo users will be able to upload historical records such as photos, books and documents to their accounts. Records can be uploaded in several different ways: via a web browser, Mocavo’s new smartphone apps, by email, or through the Dropbox service. Mocavo users retain full ownership of their records, can delete them at any time, and can control whether or not their records are shared with the public. Mocavo personnel are going to be religiously policing for copyrighted content and have dedicated support people for this purpose. Mocavo’s new iPhone and Android smartphone applications will enable users to take pictures of historical records, photographs – even entire books – and have them automatically uploaded to Mocavo’s historical record storage and sharing service. Users can also perform Mocavo searches and access their Mocavo accounts through the smartphone apps. Mocavo’s apps are in the process of being approved and will soon be available for download.

In addition to creating a powerful search engine for family history, Mocavo wants to connect and empower the social discoveries made by genealogists every day and aims to do this with Discovery Stream. The stream will deliver a constant source of new user-generated content in a fashion similar to the Facebook newsfeed or Pinterest. Whether users are uploading family trees and documents, or finding positive matches on the search engine, Mocavo wants to bring these interactions to light. ‘Our mission is to find the world’s family history records and make them easily accessible to the growing legions of genealogists and family historians,’ said Cliff Shaw, CEO of Mocavo. ‘… we want to work with every genealogy content creator, be they big or small, to help them bring their content online and make it searchable for free.’

Visit www.mocavo.com or www.mocavo.co.uk.

DocumentsOnline is also to be replaced, by a digital document delivery service feature in Discovery that will be available from 31 March. This should make it easier for users to search for records and order digitised copies, if available, all in one place.

TNA plans to continue to develop new features and functionality for Discovery in the future, in order to better integrate its online services and collections.

Research guidance
TNA has also made some changes to its Records website (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records) to help users find the guidance they need more easily. You can now find all TNA’s online research guidance through its new research guidance A-Z (nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/atoz) and its research tools pages on looking for a person, place and subject.

Media player
Also new is TNA’s Archives Media Player – the new multimedia hub bringing together all of its audio and video content in one place.

TNA’s podcasts are very popular, and as its back catalogue continues to grow, the existing Podcasts page has become increasingly unwieldy and difficult to search.

The Archives Media Player provides a quick and effective search function by media type, title, key word or author. Categories are easily navigable from the media player’s home page and there are options to rate individual podcasts for other users and to post comments.