17/08/2024
Here is the Family History Report I did for my partner Ian. If you look at the video you will get an idea of the sort of information I include in the Reports I produce for my clients.
It includes family photos which I have enhanced to brng them to life. The oldest photos are from about 1890. They are of 2 sets of his Great Great Grandparents, all born in the 1840s, and whose photos we found in the local pub in the village of Launton in Oxfordshire where they were born, lived and died.
His father’s side of his family, almost without exception, hail from a small area within a 10 mile radius of Edgcott in Buckinghamshire, where his 3 X Butler GreatGrandparents were born, around 1800. Unfortunately, whilst I could find transcriptions of Parish records for many of his ancestors, there were no original copy documents online, which suggests they haven’t survived well. I often can include in my reports copies of original Parish Register entries. Indeed, the oldest in my Family Tree is dated 1759 from the parish of Burgh on Bain in Lincolnshire.
What was fantastic about researching Ian’s Family Tree, was the sheer number of newspaper articles I was able to find relating to his ancestors, and many of these I included in the Family History Report. His 2 X Great Grandad John Butler turns out to have had a wooden leg, and aged 27, in 1864, the Buckingham Gazette reports him brought before the magistrates. The charge: allegedly beating his widowed mother with his wooden leg (!) because of the shame he felt at her being brought home by 2 good citizens of Edgcott, for being “in a beastly state of intoxication”!
Even more astonishing was a newspaper report in 1865, of one of his Launton 2 X Great Grandfathers being sent to prison for 6 months for beating up the local village bobby!! And particularly astonishing because my very law abiding partner is a retired police officer!!!
In Ian’s case, the report I was able to do is slightly truncated because his mother is from Sicily. Very few Italian records relevant for genealogy are online, and any practical research would require, at the very least, attending churches in the region of where his ancestors were baptised and married, and probably, the ability to speak and read Italian, if not Latin. Fortunately, somebody on one of the websites I subscribe to, had done just that for a branch of his Italian Grandmother’s Family Tree. I do not usually take on trust information I find in Family Trees constructed by other people, because of the many occasions when I have discovered mistakes in them. However, in the case of Ian’s Italian Family Tree, this information was the best we could hope for.
If you would like my help in researching your Family Tree, and a Family History Report produced for you detailing all the information I find, then please message me for more information. Also, please take a look at my website https://family-research-projects.co.uk and you will find details of the Family Tree packages I offer for as little as £300. You will also find the blogs I have written. Hopefully you will enjoy reading them and they will give you a flavour of the information to be found in my reports.
