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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t know who the others in the photo are so my guess is that they are from her side of the family. Neither do I know her maiden name which seems pretty ridiculous as I write this as I’ve known her all my life and seen her many times.

But family history is a bit like that. There’s loads of things that you figure “of course I know that” and never quite get around to writing it down and thereby realising that you really don’t know it at all. Writing it all down is, of course, the key as you’ll have untold numbers of gaps in the information if you don’t write it all down as you come across it.

Whilst it’s pretty unlikely that I would end up following her family line it is much better to have a complete record to play with. For example, it looks from my records as though the Stewart and Hamilton families intermarried a number of times over the generations. Were they distant cousins getting married? Perhaps, perhaps not: I just don’t know at the moment.

The more complete the record is, the more likely you are to find matches when searching in the likes of the Mormon family history site.

After a lot of wandering round, I found lots of Stewarts but none seemed to be my great grandparents. However, when it’s a country area like that, it’s usually best to work on the assumption that the older graves with the names you’re looking for are related to you. There may not be an immediately traceable connection but when there are only a handful of Stewarts who’ve died around the appropriate time, chances are that eventually I’ll find the relationship.

Anyway, there weren’t that many of the right vintage. Quite a lot around the latter part of the 1900s but they’d be distant cousins at best as the family moved to Belfast around the turn of the century. However, there was one grave which I was pulled towards, that of William Stewart. It was in the older part of the cemetery with some very old style graves surrounding it and one of very few Commonwealth War Graves headstones in that section.

There was no definite connection at that time as the headstone just didn’t have enough information to let me link him in. However, I did know that there was a brother of my grandfather who’d died in WW1 and William was certainly around the right vintage. Snag was, that I was pretty sure that the family had already moved to Belfast by 1915 so he’d not be buried there, would he? Well, not too long after that I came across the excellent site of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and looked up the Stewart deaths. What did I find, but William and the address where he lived at that time in Belfast.

In fact, Mayo Street where he was living is quite an important area for the Stewarts for a large chunk of the 1900s and knowing that address let me look up even more information in the Public Records Office about various members of the family as they all lived there in various houses from 1906 through to the second world war. Just knowing that address kept me busy for quite a while afterwards.

How come William is buried in Lisburn and not in one of the Somme graveyards? Well, he didn’t make it to the Somme because he died through getting a foot infection during the training in Ballykinler. That actually saved my grandfather as he was able to point to William’s death as evidence that the infection that he’d gotten in his own foot was quite serious and he did make it to the Somme and back home again. What I still have to do sometime is to ask for William’s and my grandfathers service records.

So, if you are exploring graveyards it’s definitely worthwhile noting details of everyone with the family name that you’re looking for if they’re anywhere close to the right vintage.

The Killinchy area remains significant for the family right up to the present day with descendants of the children Agnes, Bobbie and Catherine still living there.

Robert produced the first complication in the family tree in that he remarried after his wife Catherine died in 1921 so there’s a whole new branch of the family (still based in Killinchy) to complicate the drawing of the tree somewhat.

But who’s in the photo?

Well, starting from the left as you are looking at it those standing are Catherine, Samuel, Robert, Robert (Bobbie), and Nannie (Agnes Elizabeth). Sitting are Annie Burton, Catherine and Jeannie.

Annie married Bill Maggs and they both went to Canada a few years after this photo was taken and founded a branch of the family in Alberta and British Colombia. I met her in 1978 whilst on holiday there and found her very like my own grandmother despite all those years of separation (they never got together again after she left). Pretty well all of the descendants of the others still live in Northern Ireland.