Genealogy Chat

Try this handy tip,for finding possible family name connections on FreeBMD:............... Useful when maiden names are used as second christian names for offspring .......... Leave 'Surname' window blank,& enter full maiden names in 'First name' window.........

It is a good way of finding people, but it often takes ages on FreeBMD - it is worth trying on ancestry first, because the search is usually much quicker, then if you find nothing there, try FreeBMD because it is more up-to-date than ancestry. Kate.

My great-grandfather was called John Gray and there are a lot of them! His wife was called Ruth, but without her maiden name I couldn't find her baptism. On the 1881 census she was transcribed as born in Langley. This is a village not far from where William and Ruth raised all their children, so it made sense. I couldn't find any Ruth baptised there that could be mine. I looked for children's births on freebmd, and found a child called Frederick Barnes Gray. I knew they had a child on 1881 census Fredrick [sic] B. So then I looked for a Ruth Barnes - and found a marriage between her and John Gray in LangHAM in North Norfolk. Sure enough, Ruth was born in Langham in 1846. A very kind GR member has found Ruth, unmarried, as a schoolmistress on the 1861 census in the village where she and John lived most of their married life, so that's how she met him. Nell

Have a look at the near neighbours on the census list. I have found two separate sets of in-laws either next door or nearby and its helped me go back a generation. I looked further back on another census and again they were neighbours, perhaps childhood sweethearts!

hi hope you don't mind, thought i would add another. if you go to origins.network. do a free search on your chosen name. when the results come up, click on close variants. this will give you all spellings that they check for and you can use them on other searches. this gave me another 5 variants that i had not thought of. shirley