Why stop at three hundred years?
A Note on Sources
The tale goes back a little over three hundred years, to the later years of the eighteenth century; to, in some cases, the parents of the generation born before the first national census, carried out in 1841 and the introduction of mandatory civil registration. And I firmly intend to stop there. No tracing my ancestry back to King Arthur, Boudicca or Guinevere. There are people I can point to in the 1700s with considerable certainty, but I am dubious of many of the earlier names I have found. There are some exceptions to this rule of mine, especially for landed gentry whose lineages were regularly recorded. But the unreliability of British records before 1700, for the vast majority of the islands’ inhabitants, is self-evident.
Almost all of the information I have gathered has come from on-line sources. The online information is ample, often both too much and too little at the same time. Every year more information is available online, not only through the ever proliferating geneaology sites, but also through local historical societies, google books and more. I have relied primarily on two sources: census records and birth/marriage/death records. In a few cases I have found a will or other document which has added information, and I have a very little information from local archives.
If I weren’t so chary of spending money I might have ordered more copies of birth, death and marriage certificates from the General Records Office. With these in hand some of the facts of which I have been wary might have been more quickly resolved. Some day, I keep thinking, I will get there and look at the records for myself.
Civil registration of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales started 1 July 1837 (1855 in Scotland), but registration was not compulsory until 1874. Earlier parish records exist, but many people did not register; online the parish records are skewed with many from some small areas of the country (fortunately some of these are Birmingham, Shropshire and Dorset) and none from others. Thus the data is incomplete and much of it is lost to history. It is very tempting to go back into earlier records, and I have spent many hours doing so. Since many family names are found in related families throughout generations, it is easy to be lulled into adopting people into the family tree simply because their records exist.
Census records, however, while suffering from inconsistent spellings and transcription errors, nevertheless provide a wonderful snapshot of whole families, such as date and place of birth of each member present, their relationships and residence. This allows a single family’s records to be correlated over several decades. This can then be supplemented by birth, marriage and death information, and other historical sources.
The census records however are publicly available only from 1911. This limit is determined by privacy requirements, protecting the living and their near relatives, but has the effect of making it difficult to start from scratch if you don’t have first-hand information from family members. Fortunately Ian Macnee had laid the groundwork before me. And there are plenty enough discoveries of interest as to our forebears within these two centuries that I am content (Hmm – I keep trying to push the boundary back!).
I couldn’t have got this much information without earlier work on the Harley lines by my brother Ian, with input from our uncle, John Harley. They provided a skeleton to which I have been able to add flesh through online data. Using their research as a basis I have located several lines of the Harley family back to the late eighteenth century – to John Harley (1807-1884), son of Edward Harley and Martha Ellis of Hopton Castle, Shropshire.
The family tree lists the sources from which the information has been drawn. Feel free to check any or all of it to your heart’s content.