Have you ever wanted to dig deeper into your family history and uncover hidden stories? Join Dr Michala Hulme and genealogy expert Paul McNeill, as they share their favourite lesser-known websites to help you uncover your ancestors' fascinating tales and the places they called home. The pair discuss gems like British History Online to create a sense of place and the National Library of Scotland maps to chart how an area changed over time, giving insight into our ancestors' mobility and choices.
In this episode, they also reveal the power of local record offices, where you may find records not available online. Hear about Michala's recent visit, where she encountered a new microfilm reader and had to use a pencil to rewind a reel! They explore the wonders of Newspapers.com for tracing ancestors who travelled to places like Australia, North America, and Canada, and how local libraries can offer free access to historic newspapers. Plus, the pair delve into image archives and eBay for postcards of the past, National Archives Discovery for unique records, and burial websites to uncover relatives in your family tree.
Finally, they share a wealth of resources and tips to make the most of your genealogy research. Discover the importance of the London Gazette for understanding government legislation changes, Leicester University's website for trade directories, and local family history societies and war graves to find where your ancestors are buried. Don't miss this episode, packed with invaluable insights and resources to help you explore your family history like never before. And stay tuned for upcoming episodes featuring expert guests from major genealogy companies like Ancestry and Findmypast, ready to answer all your questions!
Have you ever wanted to dig deeper into your family history and uncover hidden stories? Join Dr Michala Hulme and genealogy expert Paul McNeill, as they share their favourite lesser-known websites to help you uncover your ancestors' fascinating tales and the places they called home. The pair discuss gems like British History Online to create a sense of place and the National Library of Scotland maps to chart how an area changed over time, giving insight into our ancestors' mobility and choices.
In this episode, they also reveal the power of local record offices, where you may find records not available online. Hear about Michala's recent visit, where she encountered a new microfilm reader and had to use a pencil to rewind a reel! They explore the wonders of Newspapers.com for tracing ancestors who travelled to places like Australia, North America, and Canada, and how local libraries can offer free access to historic newspapers. Plus, the pair delve into image archives and eBay for postcards of the past, National Archives Discovery for unique records, and burial websites to uncover relatives in your family tree.
Finally, they share a wealth of resources and tips to make the most of your genealogy research. Discover the importance of the London Gazette for understanding government legislation changes, Leicester University's website for trade directories, and local family history societies and war graves to find where your ancestors are buried. Don't miss this episode, packed with invaluable insights and resources to help you explore your family history like never before. And stay tuned for upcoming episodes featuring expert guests from major genealogy companies like Ancestry and Findmypast, ready to answer all your questions!
Hello and welcome back to Unearth the Past, a brand new family history and genealogy podcast brought to you by me, dr Mikaela Hume. In this week's episode, myself and fellow expert on DNA journey, paul McNeill, will be talking you through some of the websites that we use day in, day out for our research. Now we're not going to be talking about the main genealogical websites, and that is because I have experts coming in to talk to us about those websites over the next couple of weeks. Now on with the podcast, paul. Thank you so much for coming back on. How are you doing? Have you had a good week?
Speaker 2:Been a wonderful week. It's just the sun has been shining all week, looking after the grandkids up at the Museum of Winchester because I'm giving a talk there next week. So I was just up there and sussing out all the layout of it and what's there and went underneath it. There's a few secret tunnels under there, so yeah, it's been really good.
Speaker 1:What's she talk about?
Speaker 2:Just me really, what I normally talk about. You know a bit about the DNA show that we've done, dna journey. You know ITV show and a little bit about Winchester, because when we did the Rock Beckett episode with Romesh a lot that was in Winchester. So I'm talking about the history around there. So, yeah, just getting a bit of interest and you know it all goes towards a good cause, towards the museum.
Speaker 1:So yeah, great things really. Fantastic. So if people want to come and listen to you, do they need to get tickets?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so basically on the Winchester Museum Facebook site. If they go onto that then they can see they can book tickets on there. It's at six o'clock on the 22nd, so if they go along there they can book the tickets. Come along. If it's overbooked, i'm sure we'd be able to put another one on. I mean, i'm speaking for the Museum. I don't really know, but I'm sure they could do something. So, yeah, it'd be me doing my dog and pony show that I normally do.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's get back to what we should be talking about, which mean you never do when we are recording together. So we're on this week and then next week. For the next few weeks, we have experts from the big genealogy companies coming on the show. So if you are listening and you have a question for by my past ancestry or any of the others which I'm gonna try and get on, please send me a message, or send Paul a message and he'll make sure it gets to me.
Speaker 1:If you've not checked out his website yet, time Detectives do. It's brilliant. Loads of blogs on there. If you have a read of, send us a message and I'll make sure that it gets asked when we have the experts on from the big genealogy companies. But before we have them on, i thought it was worth me and Paul having a chat about the websites we use, because, believe it or not, we don't just rely on those big genealogical websites. There are many other websites that we use when we are building a family tree and building the family history of a particular person. So, paul, do you want to kick us off then and give us a website that you use in your research?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, because a lot of what I'm doing is around finding the story. You know you need to build a tree, you need to get the dates accurate and everything but one really looking for a stories within that tree. So I'll often go to try and understand a sense of place where the family comes from, and a great website for doing that is British History Online. So if you go in there, they got things lots of information about individual streets in London. They got information about the county histories, so they've got like the official county histories on there and it can give you a bit of background as to why people did things, especially movement. So, for example, i found one family I've done a tree for recently lovely family and you know most of their histories around London.
Speaker 2:But originally they came from near the New Forest and I was trying to work out why they moved. Okay, there are things that let them move, like trains, stations being built and all this kind of thing, but most people moved for work and what I found out was in an area called Pennington in the New Forest, opened up salt marshes and turned them into salt turns when they developed salt and their ancestors moved from inland within Dorset and Hampshire to go to the coast to work in these salt pens, and that was a reason they actually moved. So about something like British History Online? you wouldn't see this kind of thing, because you have background to an area and if you can match up a time and a place to a movement of people, it gives you a wonderful little microcosm of why people did things, as opposed to just what they did okay.
Speaker 1:Well, my suggestion is the National Library of Scotland maps, and that's because I love a map. I use maps in all of my research. I use them to to chart how an area has changed. I use them often if I'm looking for a particular family and I want to prove it's them. I look at a map to see well, is it them? where were they on one census, you know? have they moved to that particular area? is that possible? I also use it to see mobility. So to chart where, if my ancestors you know whether they made a few quid and moved into a bigger house or whether they hit hard times and ended up, you know, in a slum terrace is all minded in parts of Manchester. So I use maps a lot.
Speaker 1:There are many different map sites out there. I think many of us have probably heard of Haboo's poverty maps of London. They're a great resource. I would recommend having a look at those. But, as I say, the National Library of Scotland has quite a few maps on there and they're mostly ordinary survey maps. If you don't like looking at your maps online, alan Godfrey you can get. He's got loads of maps, the Alan Godfrey collection. I think you can get them on the internet. I've got, honestly, about 30 of those maps sat behind me. Also, i am, as many as you know, based up near Manchester. We have something called the Manchester Public Profiler, which is where we have several different maps that overlap each other. So if you find a particular street, you can really chart how that street has changed. Do you like a good map, paul?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'll pick up on what you said, because a lot of the things I end up tracing is to do with London. I mean not exclusively, obviously, but a lot of them. So many people came to London it's unavoidable, you know. But you talked about the Booth archive. The Booth archive is fantastic, and not just for the maps, it's for the police reports. So the Booth inspectors went out with policemen to look around the streets. And I'll give you a little anecdote. I had one recently where I looked it up for a family I was tracing And you know I found the street at the actual time. They were living there And you know the Booth guy had gone along with policemen to make sure he wasn't attacked. He was in South London, you know, and he sort of praised the street because there weren't many prostitutes out during the daytime on the street And they talked about how many drinkers you had there and how many fights there were.
Speaker 2:And you get all this kind of real gory colour that's really interesting about an area And you tie it in to an actual street, as you say on the map, that colour-coded, to tell you what type of people live there. Were they honest working class or were they, you know, criminal working class Or were they, you know, up-and-coming working class? It's fantastic. And if you've got an ancestor that was a copper, i mean, you know we all have black sheep in our families, but if you have got one, then mention by name And they say what their background is and where they came from, because a lot of them were from outside London, like everybody else. They came down to London looking for work and they managed to get into the Met Police Fantastic salt, you know, source of information And those maps are just brilliant. They really bring it home to what areas were like.
Speaker 2:So the other good results with maps are tithe maps, because it tells you where a family worked within a village. You can find out which piece of land they paid tithes on. So the house I live in now it's not an old house but it's actually on a piece of land that was owned by the local church in Hanbal And so theoretically I could be held responsible for paying tithes to the church to get the roof fixed or the fence fixed or whatever. So what you do nowadays is you take out 100 quid insurance and if the vicar ever comes over other than for tea and biscuits and he's asked for some money, basically the insurance pays out on it. But it never happens nowadays.
Speaker 2:But back in the day you go back 200 years, you were paying a percentage of your harvest or whatever to the church, the upkeep of the vicar. So tithe maps are very important and it shows you where a family lived at that time within a village, which is fantastic because this is way before the censuses. So it's quite an interesting thing to do. I would go to, maybe, the Society of Genealogists for that, but you need to be a member. If you're not, you could go to like the the genealogists website. It's literally called The Genealogists. They've got some great maps on there and look for it.
Speaker 1:Go to your local records office, because when I was looking at tithe maps I actually went to my local records office. So we always champion sort of how much you can do on the internet, but quite often just get yourself down to local records office. I went there this morning and they had a new, wait for it Microfilm reader. It was the future. It is the future. I mean, look, i'll be honest with you, i put the reel on upside down first time And then I managed to fix that, because this new computer just turns it, flips it around for you. That was great.
Speaker 1:But then I realized when I wanted to rewind the reel back on to the other reel, that I've not done it properly. So I had to use a pencil, stick it in to the reel And literally it took me about 10 minutes to rewind this reel back on to the other one. So, look, it's all singing, it's all dancing. But yeah, that's where I was this morning. I was at the local records office with a pencil and a pad making notes. Because as much as we champion the big genealogical websites and they are brilliant, they are great, don't get me wrong, you can do so much from your living room. There are still records that are not online and you have to go to your records office to view them, and that was me this morning when I was looking at Roman Catholic parish registers for St Helens Paul. What is the next website that you would recommend to anybody out there researching?
Speaker 2:Well, i think along the same lines for a good generic search, especially if your ancestors have gone abroad to Australia, north America, you know, canada, usa, whatever newspaperscom So you can get newspapers on Ancestry, you can get newspapers on Phyma Pass. That's fine. If you go to newspaperscom they've got so many American newspapers. It's a fairly nice front end. It's quite easy to search. It's a little bit repetitive, but you can. Once you get used to it, it's quite good to use And you can turn up so many stories.
Speaker 1:I mean recently I turned up.
Speaker 2:One a guy from the New Forest went to Bermond's E to be a tanner. So he was working in the tanneries in Bermond's E, fed up with that, managed to get himself across to Canada with his family, ended up on a First Nations reservation teaching farming, and there was an uprising while he was there the real uprising, and he was taken hostage And they had a vote on whether they should cut his head off and cut his heart out or whether they should let him go. And there were items in the newspaper saying which of the chiefs had said we should kill him or we should let him go. And basically because him and his wife had helped the local indigenous peoples when there was a diphtheria outbreak, they decided to let him live. It was fascinating. I found all that out through newspaperscom, mainly because the guy had been held hostage And it was life or death.
Speaker 2:A guy from the New Forest that used to work in Bermond's E in a tannery, and all of a sudden he's on the other side of the world And you know he's in. It's almost like science fiction to him. He's in a world that he's got no knowledge of and he's just trying to help people where he can. So you know whatever the ins and outs of it and the political side of it. It's a fantastic story for a family And you get pictures of people So and it's a biturée. there were pictures of him, so you know what he looks like And there was a big, long list of all the things he'd done, all the things he'd achieved, and you don't get that from normal records, that's from newspapers. So newspaperscom fantastic.
Speaker 1:I will say this as well check out your local library, because I know with my local library, if you have a library card, you can access online newspapers. So you can actually I think it's through ProQuest, i think it's called you just type in your library card number and you can actually access historic newspapers for free, no subscription, as long as you've got your library card. You can do it for free online. So it is worth just checking what resources your local library has. So, speaking of local libraries, i suppose it's ties in quite nicely. I love, i adore pictures. I think pictures are fantastic and I try and find pictures wherever I can, and I would like to, i suppose, put forward several websites, local history websites that contain image archives. Now, the easiest way to find out if your local area has an image archive is probably just to do a Google search. So go onto Google. I live in well, i'm from Stockport, so I just type in Stockport Image Archive or Stockport Local Image Collection, and there is an online image collection of Stockport, where I live, and there are pictures going back into the Victorian period and more recent ones from when members of the Royal Family came to Stockport and whatever. So it's worth checking out your local archives to see if they have any online resources, as, i say, most of them do. I know my two closest ones, which would be Manchester and Stockport. Both have online image archives.
Speaker 1:The other website I use for images believe it or not, is eBay. I am a massive fan of eBay, so whenever I'm researching anywhere, be it a road or a place, i type the road name in eBay, because you often find that that road. Somebody took a picture of it years ago and turned it into a postcard. Our ancestors loved to turn random images into postcards. When I was doing the research into guest houses in Blackpool, then I was writing the history of the guest houses in Blackpool. All the houses that I wrote about on my website are all front covers, the cover pictures of postcards. And then I decided, when I had the postcards, i was going to write about the history of the guest houses. So check eBay. That's what I would say. Check eBay. Don't steal anyone's pictures. If you like an image on there, make sure you buy it, but it's always worth checking out eBay. Paul, what is your next website?
Speaker 2:Well, i'm quite torn, but what I actually quite like is a straightforward one the National Archives Discovery. So people go to local archives to find things out. If you go to the National Archives Discovery, so lots of things are online, lots of things can be downloaded for free. So once you've registered, a lot of things are free. So some of the things you can get on Ancestry, for example, like medal cards and that kind of stuff. But there are other records on there.
Speaker 2:There are very old wills, there are all kinds of disputes within families and the inheritance that you can find on there that you wouldn't know about otherwise. If they haven't got them online, they tell you where you can find them. So a lot of them would be at Q If they're national. You go to Q to look at these things, but some of them they would say it's in the Norfolk archive or some other archive. But it would tell you where to get them And it actually give you all the references. So if you go there and you know what you're after, you can walk in and say right, this is what I'm after, fill out the form, tell the person whatever it is you're doing and actually get straight to it without having to spend time looking through to find it. So National Archives Discovery is particularly good And actually when we did on DNA journey, when we did the red naps although it was too much to go in the show, but the red nap family worked on the river But before that they were basically mercers.
Speaker 2:They were merchants on the Thames, woolen merchants and cloviers, and one part of the family that Harry and Jamie had descended from went from being the actual people that made the clothes and sold them to the ones that transported them along the river And we found wheels on there that were talking about inheritance and this kind of thing And actually lots of legal cases.
Speaker 2:They were very litiginous the red naps in particular And people suing each other for different things, and they were the up and coming class of mercers that were challenging the aristocracy and taking members of the aristocracy to call And sometimes, even if you can't get the whole court case online, you can find who was suing whom And that was very powerful in showing where a family came from. So it's a wealth of information. But you go to National Archives and then go to Discovery and search through it Naval records, all sorts of things. As I say, some are duplicated on other sites, but there's a lot on there that you can't get anywhere else, and even if it's not the full record, it will point you in the right direction and it will tell you where you can get that record from. So I think that's a great sign.
Speaker 1:Okay, up next I would like to propose cemetery, or should I say burial websites. I'm a massive fan of burial websites. I think I tell everyone every week that my PhD was in how the Victorians buried the dead. But for the past couple of weeks I've been researching the history of a gentleman who is going to come in on the show. He's an athlete and he's going to come on the show in a few weeks. That meant that I needed to find out where his ancestors were buried.
Speaker 1:That information is not on at the moment any of the big genealogical websites. However, the local council, in my case St Helens, which is where I've been researching, have put online burials and cremations. That has proved invaluable for me, because there are people in the grave that I didn't know of, that I hadn't come across in my research, and it turns out that they are relatives burial websites, definitely in the UK. So it is worth checking whether your local council has actually put their burials online. You don't get loads of information in terms of look, i don't get an address, but I do get the age that the person died, i get the name. I then get the grave number.
Speaker 1:Once I have that information, i then go along to the cemetery Hope there's a headstone, and often the headstone will tell me how those people are related, even if their surnames don't match and you're not quite sure. If there is a headstone and you are looking off that there is a headstone, it normally says you know mother of, sister of, whatever husband of. So I highly recommend doing a search again, just a simple Google search, to find out if the cemetery that you know you have somebody in, if those records are online. Okay, so, paul, you are up next.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, you've got your eBay, i've got my Facebook. Facebook is brilliant and it's interesting. It kind of. I really got involved in researching on Facebook when I did some work recently well, actually it was over the last three years for a Chinese documentary maker and they've done a documentary about a ship called Elizabeth Maru which was a POW ship that was taking prisons of war from Singapore to Japan for internment, and it was an armed ship and on the way an American submarine called the grouper spotted it, looked it up, saw it was an armed merchant man. They didn't know there's prisons of war on it and they torpedoed it. Ship went down, some of the prisons got out, some were locked up in like the pens under under the under the decks on the ship and they were. All kind of atrocities happens. It's pretty bad. But a number of the prisoners were rescued by Chinese fishermen and this this company has made basically a documentary film about it. But they wanted to talk to some of the descendants of both the prisoners and the crew of the USS grouper submarine.
Speaker 2:So I started doing trees try. They contacted me and asked me if I would, if I would look here, and I said yeah, i'll have a look at it. So I started doing trees for these people. But the way I contacted people was through Facebook.
Speaker 2:Facebook was brilliant for getting in touch with people saying, look, do you know about this? and some people know that ancestors on the ship, some have survived and have spoken about it, and they would put entries up in World War 2 pages and things like that. So I went through Facebook trawling, trying to find people with the right names, and some of the American ones had quite interesting names, sort of Eastern European names that were slightly easy to trace. So I actually traced the descendants of a number of the crew of the USS group and a number of the POWs that either survived or died on the Lisbon maroo and got together and put them in touch with this Chinese documentary company and, funny enough, i just found today I've been invited to the premiere in August at the BFI in the South Bank amazing, that's good, but a lot of that tracing outside of the actual grunt work of building trees was contacting living people, and not even through an ancestry link because I'm not linked to them.
Speaker 2:You know I can build a tree and I can pick people up from there, but you know most people aren't, don't have their DNA on ancestry. So how do you find them? you look for an unusual name, you pick it up on Facebook, you have a look and see if you can build a tree with them in it, and then you contact them and you try and be reasonable about it and say, look, you know, this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm working for, this is what I'm trying to find out is your grandfather so-and-so captain of the you know USS group? or was your grandfather, you know, trooper so and so from from the Singapore garrison who died during the Second World War? and there was an absolute godsend for tracking these people down and once I found them, i pass them over to the you know, to the production company, with the information I've got and it was up to them then to take it further when I did my finding the Peterloo 11 project, where I recreated that photograph from the 1880s, i found all my modern-day descendants.
Speaker 1:So I started, obviously, with the image. All I had was this image from 1880 of people that had been in the Peterloo massacre and were basically grew on the field when the cavalry went in and and charged. So I had this picture, i had their names and their ages and I knew that they lived in a place called Falesworth. That's all I had. So I started at the picture and rather you guys will know if you're listening to this, when you, when you start a family tree, you start with yourself and you work backwards. I start with the picture and worked into the present and when it got to finding those final modern-day descendants of that picture, i used Facebook. They probably thought Paul, i'm just throwing it out there. I was very weird. They just had this random person contacting them saying did you know your ancestor was in the Peterloo massacre? would you like to to recreate this photograph? so I think they thought I was slightly bonkers. Nevertheless, it worked and I think I managed to get nine out of the 11 to pose for the picture that's fantastic.
Speaker 2:But that shows you the power of social media outside. You have to think outside the box and think about what people use rather than what you use as a genealogist. What do people use, what are people interested in? and that's where you get those connections. But that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:I mean, what a great story so the next website I thought I would talk about I couldn't decide whether to talk about the London Gazette, which has been really useful in my research. If you have an ancestor that maybe won a medal, you will find them mentioned in the London Gazette. If you want to know when a particular cemetery got a closure order, you will find it in the London Gazette. It was basically the mouthpiece of what was happening in government legislation changes. Anything to do with the military you will find in the London Gazette. So it's great in terms of social history broader social history, but also if you are looking for a particular person, it's also worth checking out the London Gazette.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna have the London Gazette then. I suppose is my next one. I was talking between that and also, leicester University has got a fantastic website dedicated to trade directories. It is packed full of trade directories. So I think I've just kind of used up my one website and spoke about two there. I'm just hoping listeners that Paul doesn't notice anyway, paul don't worry, nothing gets past me.
Speaker 2:I was brought up in Peckham. You won't get one over on me if you're happy. So my two And I was torn between these two the way you were. It's really hard, but I've tried to go for something that's got a wide appeal, mainly with a UK audience, but there'd be a sense of people that are touched by this living all over the English-speaking world, if you like. So the two sites I had for my one site for my fifth site are the Long Trail, which is a World War One site Great website.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's got regimental histories and all sorts.
Speaker 2:I mean they would tend to ask for a small donation. You can sign up. It's not very expensive. There's a lot of information you can get for free. But if you do sign up you can get more detailed information. And there are war diaries on there and all sorts. And what's interesting is there are additions to it from the descendants of people who fought in the First World War and have put out the reminiscences of some of their ancestors. So there's tons of stuff in there to trace a regiment and to understand roughly what went on. It's very, very useful. And the other one alongside that. So if you're looking at World War One, that's one I'll go for. As you've had two, i'll have two.
Speaker 2:The second one, or number five, 5.1, is Workhousesorg. So that lists all the workhouses in England and it gives you a floor plan and it tells you a bit about them. It tells you about official records And you can kind of use that to then go to, say, newspapers and look up things about that workhouse. But it gives you a great context. When was it first built? Was it the first workhouse or was it the full federation? So if it was a third one built. It was probably quite decent. If it was the first one built and it was built in the 1700s, it was probably bleeding awful. So you can find all kinds of information on there. So there too that I tend to use quite a bit.
Speaker 1:Can I just give a big shout out actually to Paul Higginbottom. I was fortunate enough to work with him on the Great British Dic when we dug a workhouse in Oswestry And they say you know, never meet people that you know, your idols that you look up to. Well in the history world. Higginbottom is one of them because he has done so much work. He has been physically to every single workhouse location in the UK and in Ireland And he has written numerous books. I think I've got most of them behind me on the shelf. And also he has written about Mother and Baby Homes, which was really useful when we were doing the research for Alison Steadman's family.
Speaker 1:If you've not seen it yet, please watch that DNA journey episode. It is brilliant. You can catch it now. I think it's on ITVX. It's a fantastic episode. When I was doing the research for that episode, i reached out because he had mentioned it on his website of Children's Home. So yeah, he's done some fantastic work And if you've not had a look yet, check it out. Workhousesorg, the one we've not mentioned that I feel we should mention is Free BMD, or Where I Am, it's called Lancashire BMD. It's great, it's free. It is what it says. I suppose on the tin It's birth, it's marriages, it's deaths or potentially even baptisms, in some cases marriages and burials, but it's a great resource. I've got the tab open on my screen now because sometimes you just get that extra bit of information that you don't get on any of the other websites.
Speaker 2:I love Free BMD and it's interesting because it lets you look at things quickly. You know, because I do this professionally, i don't want to spend hours mulling over something. I want to get to the facts very quickly and there are various techniques for doing that And one of them is you go on. Free BMD depends on the surname. You get an unusual surname, just plug that surname in, you press all, so you don't answer a birth, marriage or a death, you press all and you put it in, and everything from like 1837 to nearly to today. You get a list of all the births, marriages and deaths, color coded and you can see what areas they came from. So you say, okay, well, this family started off in this area. They moved to that area. Obviously, some stayed there, someone over here, someone over there, and it encapsulates it really quickly. Alright, if you're named Smith or Jones, you can't really use it that way. You've got to be more precise. If you've got a more uncommon name, it can give you so much information at a glance for free. It's absolutely fantastic. So I would.
Speaker 2:And the other thing I do a little trick with this when I talk to people on Facebook and quite often someone will say to me on Facebook oh, i'm really interested in my background, blah, blah, blah. And they might know nothing about it. I mean, a bloke I've been talking to is a cab driver from London and he does tours of London, fantastic tours. Look him up on site. I mean he's on Facebook. He does these tours for Americans generally, but you know nothing about his family. And I just put his surname in And like within 10 minutes, i found out exactly where they were from and I said oh okay, does your family come from here and they do this and where they live? and it's just your grandfather and you look like a magician, you know alright.
Speaker 2:I am clever, but I'm not that clever, you know. I use that and it's just a great thing to really quickly boil down what it is you're looking for, and especially if someone's got an uncommon name, it really gives you an insight into it and it's all free. I love it, absolutely love it.
Speaker 1:I know we've covered five between us and we said we weren't going to do any more, but I think it's worth mentioning local family history societies, and there are family history societies. I think that just cover everything isn't there, you know, dependent upon where you're from, there are quite a few different ones.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. I mean there's kind of a micro and a macro aspect to this. So you've got your local family history societies, which are brilliant. I once researched the Earl of Poultsmouth who was denounced as a vampire in a British coal. So he was actually denounced as a vampire in a British coal and I looked him up. It's quite an interesting story. It's on the blog site The Vampire Lord of Hursball Priers. But I went to the local records office in Winchester and I found a letter written by his ex-wife begging for money from the family, basically, and it's something you would never find anywhere else. But there are family history societies, local ones, that talk about these things, talk about stories that are handed down through the generations. It's all the colour that you don't get from basic archives very, very interesting.
Speaker 1:Another one which we actually haven't mentioned and I know I don't know there's probably about 10, now I've lost count is war graves as well. War grave cemeteries are really useful. I know I mentioned cemeteries in this country, but if you are researching somebody that died, for example, in World War One, it is worth having a look online at the cemetery where they have been buried. Sometimes you may find an image. Sometimes you might want to Google Earth it and sort of go and have a look, you know, from a distance yourself. Don't forget, as I've said, not all cemetery records are online. It is in like on the main genealogical websites. It might be that you have to look at individual websites or even the Commonwealth War Graves website, which will then direct you to where your ancestor is buried, if they died in World War One or World War Two.
Speaker 2:I mean Commonwealth War Graves is a tremendous site. I did a commission with ITV Meridian with Derek Johnson, the reporter from there. Basically he was doing a programme about the Commonwealth War Graves and what was happening in Belgium at the time. It was an anniversary And one of the curators came to him and said well, it's very strange because there are two guys on this commemoration that have never had anybody from their family come back to find out about them. So most people have a family that come back. And there were two called the Bindoff Brothers, b-i-n-d-o-w And we did a programme about it, called The Twins Who Were Killed on the Song, and I researched it.
Speaker 2:You go into the Commonwealth War Graves and it will tell you where they died, where they were buried. It might have a little bio about them and their parents. So there's so much in there And that. Basically let me trace their tree backwards. Funny enough, they were actually German originally. They came over from the Palatinate in the 18th century to London But then became kind of fully English and fought in the First World War nearly over 100 years later, nearly 200 years later, and they were both killed by the same shell The twin brothers killed by the same shell on the Song, obviously at exactly the same time, and they were both killed outright One.
Speaker 2:There was nothing to be identified afterwards. You know, unfortunately with these shells it could vaporise you if you were right in the centre of the explosion. And only one body was buried And I found, using the information from the Commonwealth War Graves, i could find information about their parents. There are no other children that are given, living in Ancestors, i don't think, and we had to go up like side routes to find out. They had no children to find out they live in Ancestors. And we eventually found them in a lady in Brighton And basically she had a load of stuff in her loft from her mother and her aunts about what had happened and the way the family tried to trace the missing brother because there was no grave for him because there was nothing to bury.
Speaker 2:And it was absolutely fascinating And we closed the loop on it And the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, their site. Basically let us close that loop and bring closure to that family as to what happened to these two guys. Absolutely fascinating, we found. You can find letters off the back of that site saying what parents writing in, asking where their son was buried and this kind of thing. So you may have to go to other sites from it, but it gives you so much because it gives you their regiment, it gives you the day they died, it gives you their service number, all these things you need to look in other sites like Ancestry or Fire Might Pass or wherever it might be. It's all in there. It's such a great way to start it.
Speaker 2:The other thing it gives you is when you find civilians who died in World War II. Some of them just died for the same reason as anyone dies anyway. But you find families that were killed in the Blitz And civilian casualties are also registered on the Commonwealth War Graves. So you can start to find a whole household that was hit by a bomb during, you know, 1939 or 1940 or whenever. So you start to be able to piece together a much bigger picture because it leads you into other people and you can search by surname So you can find generations in there. You can find whole families, absolutely brilliant site. And of course, you can then go and visit the actual gravesite And they might be over here, it might be abroad, so that's a great resource.
Speaker 1:Paul, I need to ask you one question. If you could invite anybody from your family tree for dinner tonight, who would it be? What would you cook them And what question would you ask them?
Speaker 2:OK, it might be my uncle Stan who was in the Golden Highlanders, even though he came from Bermondsey, and there's a long story about him going AWOL, i'll go into it. He ends up in a skirt in the Golden Highlanders And he was out in Java just as the war was ending.
Speaker 2:And he was out there when a group of engineers broke into the Bank of Batavia, got into the vaults, stole everything that was in the vaults and buried it in the jungle, i would cook him probably cook him a paella, because I'm good at cooking a paella And I know he used to like going to Spain, for whatever reasons And I would ask him where he buried it and does he think he's still there?
Speaker 1:Paul McNeil. Thank you so much for being the guest on this week's podcast. If people want to contact you, what is the best way to do it?
Speaker 2:If they go to my blog site, so it's wwwtimedetectiveswordpresscom and you can contact me there. You can email me there. I'm Paul McNeil at timedetectivescouk. They're the best place to get me. I'm on Facebook either. As a time detective, it's probably the best one to get me on there. I'm on Twitter, i'm on TikTok and that kind of thing, but I don't really know what I'm doing. I just post pictures and videos. I don't know why I'm in the store.
Speaker 1:So that is it for this week's podcast. I really hope you enjoyed me and Paul chatting about some of our favourite websites. We did miss them off. I forgot to include websites such as findagravecom, which is brilliant, but maybe we will do a part two some point in the future. Don't forget, next week I've got Mary on from Find My Past, so if you have any questions about Find My Past and about the records on there, please let me know and I will make sure that I get your questions asked. Don't forget if you're watching this on YouTube, please remember to like and subscribe, and if you were listening to it via your usual podcast provider, please remember to download. And if you can give us a like if you enjoyed it, that would be fantastic. Have a great week. I hope you're not suffering with a hay fever like me, and I shall see you again next week. Take care.