Genealogy Chat

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Best Friend is very lucky, in that many of her London ancestors lived within walking distance of the Family Record Centre. We equipped ourselves with the relevant Godfrey maps (for cities, there are often three editions available, from the 1870s, 1890s and 1910s). The earliest editions give the old street names, tying up with the pre-1881 census. These maps are on so large a scale that you can recognise individual houses and even tell whether they had front gardens etc. We looked at the census, carefully counting households, using pubs and side turnings as markers to establish which particular property the ancestor had actually lived in and marked it up on the old map. Then we set off on a house crawl. This would not work where wartime bombs or the city planners have obliterated the old street patterns, but it amazed us just how much of the street plan was intact. In only one instance was the actual house still standing, but we got a much better idea of how close the various homes were to each other. In one road, we discovered a second-hand bookshop. It was too great a temptation to resist. Chatting to the owner, we learnt all sorts of snippets of local history, leading us to explore and discover even more. You can pick up all sorts of details by talking to residents, but I’d always imagined that Londoners were far too transient a population to know much of the past. How wrong I was. We now have a much more rounded impression of those houses on census night.

I would love to be able to do that with my family, but they all came from small villages. Birthplaces on certificates and censuses were simply the name of the village, with no other address.

Walking in the small Gloucestershire village enabled me to realise why my great grandmother was christened in Herefordshire. It was the nearest church and just down the hill. In a Welsh valley we hunted for 15 Marian Street ,where the family supposedly were in 1891. A local eldely gent assured us that there was no number 15 in that street. Armed with a map we noted that if we counted 15 houses along from the beginning we got to the same house that my grandmother was born in. They probably were there all the time and it was the enumerator who muddled the numbers.

Trickier, I agree, but tithe maps and land tax assessments may name the properties they owned or leased and seating plans can show where they sat in the church. I am remarkably lucky in having ancestors in Puddletown, Dorset. The local vicar made up a visiting book, which is as good as a census for the 1720s! From local history books, I now know that my ancestors' home was the location used by Thomas Hardy for the Quiet Woman Inn in Return of the Native.