There’s a wealth of family history societies, genealogy companies, and DNA-testing businesses hoping to catch your eye, and there lots of talks and workshops and goodness knows what else for you to sample.
If you’re planning to seek out some help with the trickier corners of your family tree, make sure you bring print-outs or even original documents.
I’ll be there on two days.
Friday 7th April
2.20pm – 3pm: I will be giving two “Ask an Expert” sessions. My areas are old handwriting, wills and (no surprises here) Essex!
(And when not doing that I’ll be buying archival storage materials and checking out the CDs that the family history societies have to offer)
Saturday 8th April
11.15am-12pm: my workshop session Turn your family tree surprises into a book will be taking place in Theatre 2. I’ll be talking about resources you can use to enrich your research, and the many way there are to share your writing.
12pm-2.30pm: I’ll be at the Pen & Sword stall (number 290), where you can ask questions about my talk, and… well… let’s just say there’s books available to buy. Lots of them.
3pm-4pm: I’ll be giving three “Ask an Expert” sessions.
The BBC has reported this as “‘Mischievous’ Jane Austen faked Steventon marriage records” which makes her sound like Sir Percival Glyde in The Woman in White. And there’s more: “Novelist Jane Austen created fake entries in a marriage register linking herself with two separate men, it has emerged.” Blimey! The strumpet! She’s committed both bigamy and fraud!
Well… no. Had she filled out a form in the parish register like so:
Layer-de-la-Haye marriage register 1754-1812. ERO ref: D/P 255/1/2. Image reproduced by courtesy of the Essex Record Office.
She would have been in rather a lot of trouble. From 1754 and the Hardwicke Act, marriages were far more regulated than they had been. At least one of the couple had to be resident in the parish they were marrying in, and the marriage had to be by banns or by licence. Banns were called on three consecutive Sundays in church, or a licence had to be paid for and would involve a fine if it turned out the marriage was illegal. If you were so rich that you owned half the British Isles, you could of course get a special licence and marry wherever the heck you liked. You’d also need two witnesses and a clergyman to perform the marriage, and then the spouses either signed or marked the register. The example above (the marriage of my 6 x gt-grandparents) shows that they got married by licence (Elizabeth was pregnant at the time, so the licence sped things up without having to wait for banns to be called), and they both marked – although note that Elizabeth signed with an E, which suggests she wasn’t quite as illiterate as it might at first appear.[1]Not long after writing this blog I found out, ironically enough, that Elizabeth Cardinall is in fact a distant relative of Jane Austen’s – by marriage, via the Burr family and the 1st … Continue reading
If you look at the BBC article, you can see one of Jane’s works.
Hampshire Archives, from the BBC website.
She’s written the groom’s name as “Henry Frederic Howard Fitzwilliam” where it says “AB” and added “London” as his abode, and then her own name where it says “CD”, and her home parish as her abode. Would Mr Fitzwilliam, bearer of such a grand name, want to marry by banns, though, one wonders?
Look at that example from 1767, and you’ll notice they’re different forms. On the page that Jane Austen graffitied, you can see the other side of the leaf – the title page of the register – showing through. What she “edited” was the example which was printed at the front of every marriage register, so that clergymen would understand how to follow the new layout. And it’s showing how to lay out the publication of the banns – it’s not a marriage entry.
Perhaps she didn’t expect her father to see it, or perhaps he spotted it and laughed.
It’s certainly a fun thing to find – but it was found, in fact, some time ago (“it has emerged” is rather misleading. This “emerged” years back). It is quite the hyperbolic headline – she falsified a marriage record! Well… she did, but not in quite the way you’d assume from the breaking-news tone.
It does go to show though, what you’ll find in parish registers. Poisonings, death by a bell falling out of a steeple, children born in barns, locals trashing a pulpit, extreme weather, and maybe the graffiti of a vicar’s imaginative teenager daughter.
You’ll be able to see this on display in Winchester from May.
Not long after writing this blog I found out, ironically enough, that Elizabeth Cardinall is in fact a distant relative of Jane Austen’s – by marriage, via the Burr family and the 1st Duke of Chandos.
Saturday 3rd December 2016, 10am-2pm What: Book-signing at St Mary’s Christmas St Nicholas Fayre Where: St Mary’s Church, Bearwood, B66 4BX
Entry fee: None! Just turn up. You can buy a copy of Poison Panic from me on the day for £12. And I’ll sign it for you.
Sunday 12th March 2017, 3pm-4.30pm What:Essex Book Festival 2017. Criminally Good Afternoon Tea. In the county where the poison panic took hold, we’ll eat scones and I’ll tell you about the lives of Sarah Chesham, Mary May, and Hannah Southgate. Where: Park Inn Palace Hotel, Church Road, Southend-on- Sea, SS1 2AL Entry fee: TBC. Booking details to follow.
In “Turn your family tree surprises into a book”, I’ll explain how I pieced together alarming discoveries from my own research and turned it into a book. I’ll talk about the sorts of historical resources that you might find helpful for your research, and then I’ll take you through different ways to share your writing.
It’s on Saturday 8th April from 11.15am to 12pm. There’s a full list of all the workshops running over the three days, and remember that there’s loads of stalls from all sorts of family history societies, and vendors selling archival storage materials (I can’t be the only person who finds that exciting), and lots of knowledgeable and interesting people to speak to – photograph daters, heirloom detectives, etc etc etc.
The skeleton from the 1857 Waterloo Bridge Mystery
Have you heard “The Reclusive Skeleton of Fingringhoe” episode of Punt PI? In this Radio 4 series, comedian Steve Punt puzzles his way around cases of high strangeness, such as the Mull Air Mystery and The Crying Boy Paintings. It’s like Fortean Times on the radio. You’ll hear my dulcet tones chiming in, to talk about some of the research I did into the mystery of the skeleton. When a skeleton turns up, as they sometimes do – the image at the top of the page is from the 1857 Waterloo Bridge Mystery[1]It wasn’t strictly a skeleton as there was some flesh accompanying the bones – although not very much. – they exert fascination. How can we identify a person just from bones? Without the flesh, can we find out how they died?
The skeleton in the Fingringhoe case was found in 1949, in the apparently abandoned cottage of an actress called Ada Constance Kent, who hadn’t been seen since March 1939. She was reclusive and rather eccentric, so was the skeleton hers? But what about the children who had got inside her house and played there? I’ll leave you to listen to the programme, and if you’re interested in reading about what happened in the 1940s, then see the chapter in Patrick Denney’s Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in Colchester (Patrick pops up on the radio programme too!).
I looked into Ada’s family background, tracing her in the censuses. I went off-piste a little and traced her mother, aunt and grandmother. These bits weren’t used on the programme, but it helped me to see Ada in context, as an ordinary girl from a riverside village in north-east Essex, who apparently came to an extraordinary end.
A guest blog for Findmypast. A letter written by my great-great-grandmother on Armistice Day in 1918 was full of clues for identifying my family. Would it unlock the mystery of my grandma’s Aunt Emily, and who was “poor Tom”?
A guest blog for Findmypast. What happened to my grandma’s uncle, Ernest Baden Powell Field? And why did his marriages not quite match up with what I found on the 1939 Register?
With the First World War 100th anniversary commemorations ongoing, I’m welcoming John Broom, author of Fight the Good Fight: Voice of Faith from the First World War to Essex & Suffolk Surnames. His book examines the way that faith and war combine – how one person’s faith might prompt them to seek after peace, whilst another’s inspires gung-ho nationalism. John looks at the experiences of people from many countries involved with the First World War, and uncovers previously untold stories of belief and bravery in the face of unparalleled destruction and despair.
His second book, about faith and the Second World War, will be out in April 2016.
A while ago I compiled all the unfortunate causes of death to be found in the parish registers for Beaumont-cum-Moze – perhaps the most unfortunate was William Taylor, who was killed by the bell falling out of the belfry. Burial registers aren’t really supposed to include cause of death, so they appear infrequently. But when they do, they give us a view into the lives lived (and the deaths died) in the past. Drowning and burning seems to have been more common than it is now, with people relying on well-water (and with all those rivers and creeks along the coast) and open fires. Of course, these are the deaths which have been described in the register – so they might be unusual, hence why they warrant a mention. And many causes of death not recorded may have been stranger still – it entirely depends on the whim of the minister or clerk entering the burials in the register. “Shall I mention that this poor chap was struck by lightning while harvesting turnips? Hmmm… nope.” It’s worth searching for your ancestors in newspaper databases in case they did have an unfortunate death which required an inquest.
Here’s some more, this time from Brightlingsea and Elmstead. The date is the burial date.
