English Ancestors

16/05/2026

My latest blogpost has just published. It's a review of John Wintrip's excellent latest book: A History of Parish Registers in England and Wales.

I first met John Wintrip when I applied to become an Associate of the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (AGRA). John was at that time Chair of the Board of Assessors. We met a…

30/04/2026

My latest blogpost has just published. It's about using historic maps and old photos to 'recreate' and virtually walk around a place of special interest to your family history or your One Place Study.

This is the second video post in my Shackleton’s Fold One Place Study series. A One Place Study brings together aspects of family history, local history and even house history. They are often…

17/04/2026

For any of you who have fairly recent Irish ancestry.

The wait is almost over!

At midnight tonight, a definitive chapter of our history opens. The 1926 Census, the first of the Irish Free State, will be available for public search online.

For historians, genealogists, and the Irish diaspora, these records will reveal the fabric of Irish households and communities at a foundational moment for the nation. Whether you are tracing your lineage or studying a decade of transformation, the stories of a young nation will soon be at your fingertips.

The countdown to midnight begins.

Are you as excited as we are?



https://nationalarchives.ie/collections/search-the-census/about-the-census-collections/census-1926-2/

26/03/2026

My latest blogpost/ YouTube video have just published. They are aimed at genealogists and people doing One Place Studies and are about using historic maps/ census documentation/ other docs to locate houses and streets that no longer exist. At 25 minutes, a bit long, but I hope worth it. In the video, I work through two examples (in Birmingham and Leeds) of working out the location of former properties.

The video comes with a plea for anyone with family history in Shackleton's Fold (New Wortley, Leeds) and who has an interesting story about it, or a photograph along the Fold, to get in touch, which you can do privately via my blog.

Ordnance Survey: Leeds Sheet 13: Surveyed: 1847. Published: 1850.Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland The last post I published in my ‘Ancestral Tourism’ s…

10/03/2026

I’ll be giving a talk about voting before 1832, and how it all played out in the three Rotten and Pocket Boroughs of the Isle of Wight on 19th March. If you’re on the Isle of Wight, entry is £3 to non members of St Helens Historical Society.

This is going to be a fascinating talk about the murky history of elections on the Island prior to the Reform Act of 1832! Don't miss it!

09/03/2026

How beautiful is this?!
I too have a ‘Family Tree’ and it goes up each year when the Christmas tree comes down, but it has photos in little frames and a few small antique-looking baubles, rather than actual felt people. 🙂

06/03/2026

If you have Manchester/ Lancashire ancestry, or have an interest in letters from servicemen during WW1, you might be interested in this. The letters have been made freely available to the public.

Manchester & Lancashire FHS were contacted by a lady who asked if we would be interested in a number of letters written by servicemen during the Great War. This proved to be a substantial collection of around 350 letters written by some 70 servicemen. MLFHS agreed to take the letters under the condition that they were made freely available to the public; a condition to which the Society readily agreed.

The Letters cover the whole period of the war but most were written 1914-1915. Some correspondence is limited to a single letter while other men wrote as many as twenty. It is believed that the letters are only a selection of the correspondence.

All of the letters were addressed to Harold Hill.

When project work is complete, the letters will be deposited in Manchester Archives as part of the Zion Archive. to read the letters click the link https://mlfhs.uk/zion

19/02/2026

My latest blogpost has just published. It's about working with DNA results, working out where 'Half' relationships start, and why.
I wrote this post in response to a few comments about how difficult the concept of 'half cousins' can be.

Getting your head around ‘Half’ relationships can be tricky. In regular life we probably wouldn’t make a distinction between a half cousin and a full cousin. Yet when we’re …

12/02/2026

I’m sure a lot of you will understand!

24/01/2026

My latest blogpost has just published. It's about digitising old family photos and using them as the basis of mini family histories to share with family. I'm writing about it more as a ToDo List item rather than a success story, since I've been drowning under the weight of this self-imposed project...

The military band (marching band) of the 1st Battalion of the Green Howards. Location and precise year not known. ‘X’ marks my Granddad. About three years ago I set myself the challenge…

31/12/2025

Happy New Year!
If you need an accredited professional genealogist to help with your family history research, here’s where to look.
PS. I’m on there too. 😉

Wishing you and yours a very happy New Year. May it be filled with exciting research and discovery! https://www.agra.org.uk/