Names, names, names

Another in the series contributed to the blog by novelist Lois Elsden

Lois circa 1873, aged 20

I suppose it is with having an unusual name myself that I have always been interested in names. Certainly having an unusual surname has been an asset in searching for my family tree.

I recently fictionalised a search for family history in my genealogical mystery, my novel, ‘Radwinter.’

Thomas Radwinter is in search of his ancestry and has little difficulty at first because there was only one person in the earliest records he could find, the 1841 census, with his surname.

These days it is so much easier to undertake genealogical research because of the internet sites available, some of which are free, and also the on-line community who are so willing to help and support research, and share their own results.

I have had great help from others researching the same surnames as I have been looking for, and I have even found a distant cousin who now lives in the USA.

Even if your surname is not that unusual, as Thomas Radwinter’s was, there are many ways to trace your ancestors, if you have a date of birth, if you have a place of birth, or if you have an ancestor with an unusual first name.

It is sometimes helpful to remember that people in the past were not always as literate as they are now, and names might be spelled in a variety of ways; my own great-grandmother was Lois, Lowis, Lowes, and Loise on different documents.

Some census enumerators found regional accents challenging, and if the person they were recording did not know how to spell their own name, then you might find a name can be written in different ways; I found Susannah spelt Susanner, Sousan, Sussanna in a series of census returns!

Thomas Radwinter discovered that his own ancestor had been Taras Radwinski when he arrived in England in the 1830’s and anglicised it to Thomas Radwinter… My character Thomas was delighted to find out that his distant ancestor had the same name as himself.

Name changes can happen for more reasons than the one Thomas discovered, and not only as a woman marrying might take her husband’s name.

Sometimes a child would take a step-father’s name, sometimes a family for some unknown reason will change its name, or sometimes there is a very good reason for a name-change.

My family were Jewish and in the 1840’s they changed their name from Moses to Walford, much more English, and maybe, in those days, more acceptable.

Lois, 1969 aged 18

When tracing ancestors, the same first name can crop up again and again, and that can help pin down an elusive family member.

I was stumped in searching for a someone called John… However, I knew he had an aunt and a grandmother named Drusilla, so when I found a man named John with the right surname for my ancestor, and he had a daughter called Drusilla, it seemed to fit.

I did further research and was able to confirm that I had the right John!

One of the delights of genealogical research is the unusual names you come across, and the waves of name change are fascinating.

Names I think of as very old-fashioned, and associated with elderly relatives of my grandparents generation, are now fashionable again, Ethel, Maud, Sidney, Wilfred… you will find children with these names in many nursery-schools!

Names that Thomas Radwinter comes across in his researches include Wulfwin, Guthroth and Frodo!

I’m sure not many people have hobbits in their family, but paying attention to names can help solve many genealogical puzzles!

© Lois Elsden

Pictures, from the collection of Lois Elsden

* Lois, loiselsden.com


"If you are interested in reading my story of Thomas Radwinter's search for his family and want to unravel the mystery of where his ancestors came from, you can find 'Radwinter' by Lois Elsden on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/RADWINTER-Lois-Elsden-ebook/dp/B00IFG1SNO, "

Vanishing Act ....... searching shipping lists and manifestos, and records of passengers travelling from British ports

Another in the series where novelist Lois Elsden reflects on using history to write a novel about the past.*

It’s happened to me, and I guess it happens to most people who are looking into their family history, that the ancestor they are seeking seems to vanish.

I was following my family, census by census until suddenly in 1871, there they weren’t… I checked death records, I tried spelling their names in alternative ways, I tried ignoring the father and looking for the mother and then the children. None of them appear in the 1871 census. What a mystery… but there they were, back again in 1881.

There may be reasons why people are not on the census; maybe they were travelling, maybe some of the records are not complete for some reason.

I haven’t yet found where my family went, but in my novel about a family in search of their roots, ‘Radwinter’, they do find an answer to the mystery.

My fictional character Thomas Radwinter is searching for a relative who had been living in the seaport of Portsmouth in the 1840’s and then disappears. It occurs to Thomas that maybe his ancestor boarded a ship and went somewhere, and an obvious destination at that time was half-way round the world to Australia.

Most people know that thousands and thousands of people, men women and children were transported to Australia as convicts.

The prisons had become full and containment of criminals was becoming a major problem in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain.

Running out of space for all those sentenced to imprisonment, many were housed in chains, in hulks, old rotting ships moored along the banks of the Thames.

Previously, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries North America received those transported from the British Isles, sent to work on the plantations. The American War of Independence, 1775-1782, put a stop to that.

At the same time, Australia and the antipodes offered vast, seemingly limitless opportunities for farming, forestry, whaling and mining, and sending ne’er do wells far away not only got rid of them, but also ensured there was a labour force which needed minimal if any payment. It was a primitive and brutal life for all concerned. More than 165,000 convicts were transported to Australia

However, not all the travellers to these far off lands went because they were forced to; my family went to Tasmania in 1839 as merchants and traders, importing fine wines from Europe, porcelain and silk from China, and tea from India to their warehouses in Hobart.

They exported wool, whale products, timber and minerals in their ship, the Lady Denison, until it sunk… or maybe the convicts on board overwhelmed the captain and crew, threw them overboard and sailed for San Francisco!

My character Thomas discovers that his family also went on the long voyage, round the Cape of Good Hope across the Southern Ocean to a new life.

Thomas investigated his history as I did. He, and I, had a successful outcome to our research, thanks to the internet! The many very good genealogical web-sites make it possible to do in-depth research from home!

So, if your family seems to have disappeared, try looking up shipping lists and manifestos, and records of passengers travelling from British ports… There are a lot of lists with a lot of ports, a lot of ships and lots of passengers – in fact in 1852 alone nearly half a million people emigrated to Australia!

However, playing the genealogical detective and with a little determination you might very well find your missing ancestor!

© Lois Elsden

Pictures, from the collection of Lois Elsden

* Lois, loiselsden.com


"If you are interested in reading my story of Thomas Radwinter's search for his family and want to unravel the mystery of where his ancestors came from, you can find 'Radwinter' by Lois Elsden on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/RADWINTER-Lois-Elsden-ebook/dp/B00IFG1SNO, "

When reality becomes fiction, the continuing story of Radwinter

Now this is the second in the series of posts from Lois Elsden the novelist reflecting on how the lives of real people were woven into her novel Radwinter.

Looking back at old records to find out about past lives is so exciting!

Some people researching their family history, just seem to want dates, they want to know how far back they can trace their family… I’m not so much interested in the how-far-back, I’m more interested in trying to get a little glimpse into the lives of my ancestors.

In my novel ‘Radwinter’, a genealogical mystery, I have based the detail for what my character found out about his family tree on what you can actually find in a search of the censuses records. Census were conducted every ten years since 1841, but they are accessible on line only up until the census of  1911.

These are now quite easily available through a variety of family history web-sites. You can travel into your family’s lives without even leaving home!

In my novel, Thomas Radwinter finds that from 1851 until the end of the century, several of his fore-fathers were employed in the brick industry; making bricks, laying bricks, building with bricks, and eventually managing a brick factory. My character is a fiction but the boom in brick making really happened.

Bricks have been made for thousands of years, and made roughly in the same way, clay shaped or moulded into bricks and left to dry then baked in a kiln. From medieval times, wherever there was clay, there were brick works. These were small-scale and local, and the bricks were usually made only as and when they were needed.

My character Thomas Radwinter looks at the 1851 census returns for Bletchingley in Surrey where his ancestor was living and is amazed at the number of people who were involved in one way or another with bricks… He wonders why, and soon discovers that a new industrialised process has been discovered to make better, harder, cheaper bricks.

The middle of the nineteenth century was boom time for industrialisation, and boom time for brick making.

Improved transport systems including the network of canals, enabled clay to be moved about the country away from the clay pits to wherever the factory was and with the new more scientific process millions and millions of bricks were made.

I found out so much about bricks, just because of my interest in looking into family history, but that wasn’t all.

Another person in Thomas’s family tree worked for an umbrella maker. I found some umbrella makers when I was researching in the census returns and I went on to look at umbrella making in the nineteenth century; the revolution for making them came when steel was used instead of whalebone, and when a way of folding an umbrella was devised by a French purse-maker…

Researching family history for me is more than just names and dates; it’s fascinating to imagine people’s lives before ours, whether they were in the brick industry or worked in an umbrella factory. This for me is where a family tree really bears fruit!

Text © Lois Elsden

Pictures; from the collection of Lois Elsden

*Lois, loiselsden.com

"If you are interested in reading my story of Thomas Radwinter's search for his family and want to unravel the mystery of where his ancestors came from, you can find 'Radwinter' by Lois Elsden on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/RADWINTER-Lois-Elsden-ebook/dp/B00IFG1SNO, "

Creating a novel from real lives lived out a century and more ago

Now here is a story from the novelist Lois Elsden * whose new novel focused on the search for family.

Like many people I am fascinated by my family history, and like many people I live a long way from where my ancestors lived.

Even if I did live near my ancestral roots, people in the past moved around far more than we sometimes think; the history we are taught often seems to suggest that most people lived in small communities and only went further afield on market days, or on family occasions such as weddings. People have always travelled, to find work, to marry, to see what lies over the hill.

Luckily for us we live in an age when we can access records through the internet, and conduct our researches on line. We no longer have to travel to the family church and look at the parish register then trail around the graveyard trying to find where our family has been laid to rest. With the way people moved around in the past, such visits might be to many parish registers and different county archives.

There are many genealogical sites on the internet, and there are even free sites, although they do not have the access to as many records and archives as those you pay for.

It is possible however, from your own home, to roam the world in search of your family… I have ‘travelled’ to Tasmania in search of mine!

I am a writer, and my latest novel is a genealogical mystery, of a family in search of their roots who are able to go back through looking at census returns and other documents on-line to find their history.

My story is about an imaginary family called the Radwinters. I chose the name because I passed by a sign to the village of Radwinter in Essex and the name caught my eye.

Many people would begin their quest by travelling back from the known, from their parents, and grandparents; they can use the information given on birth records, for example the mother’s maiden name.

Marriages records give the actual names of the couple, this is important! I have friends who are always known as Jane and Jim, their actual names are Sheila and Gerard – it’s vital if you want to find when someone was born to have their correct given name! Death certificates will give a date of birth as well as the date of death.

Thomas Radwinter, the character in my novel has a different approach; he goes back to the census of 1841 in order to work his way forward to the present.

To his surprise he finds there is only one person in all the census information called Radwinter… and in 1841 he lives in the village of that name!  1841 was the first census in England, Scotland and Wales; some of the enumerators in those days made mistakes; sometimes the people giving the information were illiterate or spoke with an accent and names were written down incorrectly and dates of birth were guess-work!

If you are looking for someone, you might need to try a variety of spellings for names in order to find the one you seek.

My character Thomas tries to find a birth date for his ancestor, but it was only on July 1st 1837 that the General Civil Registration of Births, Marriage and Deaths was introduced in England and Wales.

However, there are now many parish baptismal records available on-line; my character Thomas, however, has no luck finding his ancestor in either births or baptisms. In my novel, I trace how Thomas eventually succeeds in finding his ancestry, using resources as if I were searching for one of my own real family members

I have created a fiction, using my own experiences tracing my genealogical history; anyone else can do the same and find their own family too, and find their own exciting trues stories of the generations who came before them!

Text © Lois Elsden

Pictures; from the collection of Lois Elsden

*Lois, loiselsden.com