Stewart and Douglas Family History

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Naturally, most peoples’ first thought as to where to look for family history information these days is online and, in most cases, that means a google search.

It’s not a bad first choice but if your name is fairly common (like Stewart), then you’ll find that whilst there are untold thousands of results that come back from your google search, you just can’t work out which are relevant to you and which aren’t. At the other extreme, an uncommon name might turn up no results at all.

In practice, google isn’t really all that useful for this. For one thing, say I search for “stewart family history” then this site is currently the nineth entry down. Although one day this site will be a valuable resource for Stewart family history, it’s a long way from that at the moment. Even worse is the very first entry “The history of the Stewart family” which is simply the history of one particular family. So, that particular search wasn’t a whole lot of use.

You can get more specific, for instance if I search for my earliest confirmed ancestor “andrew stewart 1805″. However, that returns 747,000 entries and none of those on the first few pages are in any way relevant to me.

Or, in short, you’re unlikely to find that google searches will be of much use in your family history researches, unless you are very lucky.

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Whilst just about everyone heads for the cemetery at some point in their family history research, one often neglected area is that of educational records.

Now, to be fair, as you go back in time, those records become more limited in that it’s only relatively recently that large numbers of people went to university and, for that matter, secondary education. However, children have been going to primary school or the equivalent of that for a very long time indeed.

Moreover, it’s often quite easy to narrow down which school your ancestors went to. Before the 1900s, you can usually take it for granted that children went to the local school and when I say local, the school usually had to be within walking distance of their home.

From that time, with a lot of luck, you might be able to get the school records of your ancestors and, usually, some information about the family situation at that time too. What’s available will vary a lot in that many of the tiny village schools were amalgamated as public transport became available in the 1900s.

Don’t neglect the equivalent of secondary education either. As you move into the 1900s you’ll find it more and more common for people to go on to post-primary education and, of course, more of those schools are still around.

Likewise, consider the universities too. For the most part these would have been colleges and perhaps have run under a different name in the 1800s as they did in the 1900s. In the UK, there was wholescale renaming as the former polytechnics became universities in the 1980s but there was a considerable amount of renaming earlier too with, for example, Queen’s College becoming Queen’s University in Belfast.

More commonly you’ll find that your ancestors would have went to a technical college. They’re usually still around but were used much more widely in, say, the 1940s than they are now. It’s more difficult to work out which your ancestors would have went to but if you have a reasonable idea of what occupation they had then you can usually work it out.

When you are looking round the cemetery don’t neglect the Sunday School that would have been attached to the church. Records from them can be even more complete and usually go further back in time than the primary school records do. With the entire family going through them you may find that their records complete gaps in your understanding of the family unit over the time that they cover.

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I started off with the family bible of William Stewart born in 1865 as my main source of information.

Now, that’s an interesting source because he starts off with his parents and keeps going right into the early 1900s with pretty much all the births, deaths and marriages recorded over that time. Unfortunately, after he died in 1894 the information recorded becomes more and more patchy or at least it did because I’ve updated it all so now it’s quite complete up to the present day.

What’s a greater problem is that he didn’t record all of the information and in some cases there are gaps. The most important omission is that he didn’t record where the various events took place which makes it somewhat more difficult to fill in those gaps. For instance, since I don’t know where he was married, I can’t get his marriage certificate and therefore can’t confirm the exact date of birth of his parents.

When the Mormon family history site went online about 10 years ago I thought I’d hit a goldmine. Not only did it fill in a number of gaps but they had all the locations recorded! Brilliant, eh? Well, no, actually it was a disaster. For example, it says that William was married in Ballymoney in 1859. The bible records that he was married on September 6th, 1858 which is almost certainly correct as William would have known when he was married; in fact the bible itself was more than likely a wedding present.

So we went to Ballymoney a few years later to get a copy of the marriage certificate. Nope: he wasn’t married there.

In fact, when we started checking on the locations, the majority appear to be wrong so we needed to start from information which we were sure of and work backwards from there which’ll be the topic of our next post.

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