STEWART, JEAN – August 26, 2010, peacefully, at hospital, dearly-loved mother of Muriel and Jean. Service on Tuesday 31st August 2010 at 2.00 p.m. in Kirkwoods Funeral Home, 150A Kings Road, Knock, Belfast, BT5 7EJ and afterwards to Roselawn Cemetery. Family flowers only please. Donations in lieu may be sent, if desired, for N.I. Chest, Heart and Stroke, c/o Kirkwoods Funeral Directors (address as above). Will be sadly missed by her daughters, sons-in-law Gerald and Colin, grandchildren Simon, Sarah, Jenny and John, great-grandchildren and brother George. The Lord is my Shepherd.

As in all such announcements, a full life is condensed down to just a few words of farewell and, as usual, this means that a great deal about the person is omitted.

For instance, in Jean’s case she was buried with her husband John who she spent decades and Allan, the brother of Muriel and Jean, who died when he was only six months old. Jean’s brother George lives in New Zealand and couldn’t come over to the funeral as he’s getting on a bit himself. Sadly, Jean never made it over to visit him in Auckland as John had a heart attack before he retired so they were never able to manage the months long trip that would have been needed in those days. Still, at least George was able to spend time over here with them several times over the years although perhaps not so much as they both would have liked over their 50 year separation since he emigrated. Jean was the eldest of the two being born on April 14, 1923.

She met John through her employment in a drapers shop on the Crumlin Road and they married in 1951. Between Muriel and Jean she now has four great-grandchildren Josh, Emma, Ben and Sophie as well as the grandchildren mentioned above.

Missing also is mention of the trip taken to Portrush every Easter Monday for decades along with the family above, my Dad and us, Dad’s sister Ena’s family, and their parents (four car loads at the height of it all in the 60s). And, of course, lots of other things besides, many of which I’ve forgotten and some of which were reviewed during the funeral service.

The church itself was a major part of her life and although much of her involvement with the church wasn’t known to me at the time, that she was a person who cared about her religion came across always. She was in the choir and taught in the Sunday school and was one of those relatively rare people who you just know are Christians without being told because of the things that they do and they way that they behave generally.

I can’t say that I’ll miss Jean because with John’s passing 15 years ago we weren’t as involved with her as we had been previously which is sad really. As always, there were so many people at her funeral who I should be seeing now and again but who I rarely see outside of funerals these days which is something that I’m working on changing.

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Thus only a few weeks ago I had a major breakthrough when I found that the 1901 census was finally online.

I hadn’t expected this to add an awful lot of information to my records as the 1911 census did. That one filled in a lot of detail about branches of the family and completed locations for me. I wasn’t expecting much from this one as everyone on the 1911 census would be on the 1901 census and I’d locations nailed down at 1896 so wasn’t expecting any big changes there.

However, there was one key thing on it: the family weren’t in the same house in 1901 as they were in 1896 and 1906. This has quite a big impact as my grandfather was born in 1899 which means that I can now get his birth certificate when previously it wasn’t found on the traces (because of the incorrect address).

Interestingly, it also confirms that my grandmothers name was Jane and not Jean/Jeannie as everyone thought. That difference seems to be down to the Ulster Scots pronunciation: she was always “ginnie” which younger folk in the family took to mean Jeannie when in fact it was the familiar form in Ulster Scots of Jane.

Finally, I’ve confirmation that the family, or at least the Youngs, did come from Scotland with my great-grandfather John Young recorded as being born in Scotland (I think near Ayr but that’s only from hearsay). His wife Catherine was born in Northern Ireland as were all their children so he appears to have come over here sometime in his 20s.

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In between times, it’s often worthwhile looking again at the information already to hand as there are often hidden gems amongst it. For example, the original family bible from William Stewart who was born way back on June 28th 1835 though it probably dates from September 6th 1858 when he married Eliza Dalrymple. He kept that up to date throughout his life as did his children although there are gaps both in later and earlier generations.

Those gaps can largely be filled in though. One very simple thing was realising that there was a very consistent habit of naming the first born boy and girl after the father and mother. Thus, when the “first” born wasn’t that meant that there was either a stillborn child or, more likely (because stillborn children didn’t get named), a child who died quite young. That such children existed has been confirmed in all cases where I’ve had later information about the family so, for example, the 1911 census confirmed several of these children in various branches of the family.

Other bits of information can sometimes need more thought. It was puzzling as to why David J Tannihill of Market Square Lisburn paid for the grave of my great grandfather Andrew. However, later on I found that when he died he was living in 155 Mayo Street, Belfast so if his family had bought the grave they’d have had to pay the non-resident rate for the grave. Who David Tannihill was remains, for the moment, a mystery as indeed does the reason why he wasn’t buried in Belfast instead.

I’ve suspected for a while that some of the location information I have for various people isn’t quite right as we tried to get some birth and marriage certificates where they were recorded as living at the time but found that the information just wasn’t there. So, the plan was to get the certificates from known locations and work backwards from there. That was a problem though as I didn’t know for sure where my grandfather was born. Or, rather, I didn’t realise that I really did know. That information came from his older sister Mary who died when she was 2 in Killymackel, Derriaghy (near Lisburn) of bronchitis. Thus I know that the family lived there in 1896 but in Mayo Street by 1906.

Interestingly, Derriaghy is where my Dad continued to go to the Masonic Lodge so presumably they would have some information about everyone from him back to my great grandfather and perhaps even the generation before that. Also, some years back I went round the nearby Presbyterian churchyard which seemed to have a number of Stewarts buried although at the time I hadn’t linked that with my lot (another visit is called for to recheck that information).

Finally, there’s my latest flash of inspiration. Whilst I’ve known for a while that my grandfather was in the first world war and that there should therefore be a service record for him, what didn’t occur to me is that there would be a corresponding service record from his time in the police so that’s something else to look into.

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As luck would have it, 2009 was the very year that a cousin in America finally got back in contact with me regarding his own researches but unfortunately our own situation just didn’t allow us to get going on what would probably be a very effective collaboration. Ironically, we’d have have made loads of progress had he not been so busy in the couple of previous years. Oh well.

Well, I say that we’ve not done anything but in fact we’ve been to a couple of funerals over that time which have re-established links with some cousins both near and far who we’ve not spoken to in a number of years and did pick up some useful snippets of information along the way which should aid future researches. Perhaps the most significant is that the family definitely did come to Northern Ireland from Scotland in the late 1800s although I haven’t confirmed if that was only the Youngs or if it was the Stewarts too (the Douglas, or rather, Montgomery side came from Kings County [now County Offaly] around the same time).

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However, as we’re moving back to the UK this January we are hoping that we’ll be able to get going again on checking up on primary sources in a couple of months time. We’ve the list of church graveyards to go round from five years ago though we’ll be needing to see the parish registers this time to progress things as we already have the exhausted the information from the various headstones that we came across last time. Also on the cards is some more research in the Public Records Office.

And, of course, it’s time to say Happy New Year!

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In the end, it turned out to be a WordPress issue after all and needed an htaccess file to be installed. Quite why it wasn’t installed automatically, I’ve no idea.

Oh well.

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What’s happened is that the new hosting service uses MySQL 4.1 whilst the old one uses 4.0. That shouldn’t really be a problem but it is because 4.1 partly implements the Unicode character set whilst 4.0 was merrily using the normal Latin character set. In that I’ve only ever typed Latin characters here the Latin set was obviously fine for me and the new one has just created a whole bunch of problems when I type anything that’s not part of the normal alphabet (which, of course, includes all the punctuation marks).

We think we’re nearing a solution to it all, but only time will tell.

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As any of you who have been into genealogy will know, it’s sometimes a long slow process filled with very long waits for documents interspersed with brief periods of frantic activity. Just this morning Wendy received the latest batch of birth certificates and has been busily incorporating the information from them in with what she’s already got. For the first time for instance, a great grandfather is known to have been born in London and that has set her off searching out records in the UK for the first time on that side of the family.

Next up is are the Stewarts and we’ve plans for the Douglas clan too having just registered Douglas Family History a few days ago.

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We also know that having a name such as ‘Stewart’ means having access to untold amounts of information on the web about the origins of the name. But there are ‘Stewarts’ and there are ‘Stewarts’. Not all people with this name can claim royal ascent from Scotland, many contemporary ‘Stewarts’ are such becuase their ancestors altered their original name to this. There were reasons to do such things centuries ago. For example; those French Hugenots who were persecuted and left France altered their names to avoid people knowing their origins. There are some english names today who actually started out as French.

One thing that really takes the burden off the family historian is when they can establish a ‘real’ link with, say, a Royal Stewart. Why?. Because you no longer have to spend long hours in research…your information will already be recorded in the history books. Ok, this may not be as fun as the old detective work but there is a certain satisfaction in finding one of your ancestors written up in Debretts for example. Even if it was 300 years ago.

And I have always thought, even in this age of the worldwide web, it is still more fun to sit in a library with a big fat book for reference than have the ease and simplicity of the home computor. The mystery is still there.

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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.

Incoming search terms:

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