The Essex Wills Beneficiaries Index – what it is and how to use it
I first heard about the Essex Wills Beneficiaries Index (EWBI) in a newsletter from the Essex Society for Family History. It’s a remarkable index compiled...
Category: Sources
Suckling’s Essex
I’ve found something rather fun on Google Books – Suckling’s Memorials etc of Essex, published in 1845. He went round many of the parish churc...
Guest blog: The Mystery of the Sailor in the River
A guest blog for Wivenhoe’s History about a sailor who drowned in the River Colne in 1850. But all was not as it seemed. (A shorter version of this text w...
The Bridges family of Lawford and John Constable’s portrait
If you’re from north-east Essex, and perhaps if you’re from south-east Suffolk, you cannot avoid John Constable. My grandma had a print of The Haywa...
Updates – Lawford
I’ve finished transcribing the earlier parish register (1558-1764) for Lawford in north-east Essex. It’s right by the Suffolk border, so you might f...
Did Jane Austen fake a marriage?
Ahhh, see, I told you that notes left in parish registers are endlessly fascinating! Not only is it possible (at least I think so) that Charlotte Brontë got the...
Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2017
News! I’m doing a talk at Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2017 at the NEC in Birmingham. In “Turn your family tree surprises into a book”, I...
Knock down family tree brick walls with the 1939 Register
Check out Find My Past for my guest blog about family tree brick walls I demolished with The 1939 Register. Without it, I would’ve struggled to trace Uncl...
Review: Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2015
I’d never been to WDYTYA? Live before, and wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Everyone speaks about it in excitable tones, and now that it’s...
FreeREG’s new look
After a great deal of work, the new interface for FreeREG is now online: FreeREG2. It sits over a database that contains 20,000,000 parish register transcriptio...