About Doing Family History

The Falkirk Archives, located in the oak-paneled Victorian library of Callendar House, where with the assistance of wonderful archivists I was able to break through two genealogy brick walls.

Some of the Who, When and How of this Ancestry

This is about the  Macnee ancestry of Ian, Sheila and Hazel Macnee, and the Harley ancestry of Ian, Sheila and Hazel, and of Michael, Margaret, Philip, and David Harley.

As a reader of mysteries, I have found the search for people and places, tracing down clues and evidence, establishing footprints and connections a personal detective story which has entertained me for hours.  There is even a little useful information about family health issues, culled from the few obituaries I have examined.

But I have to state at the outset that I have reservations about the nature of family history. It can be profoundly conservative, encouraging the idea that blood must always be thicker than the more fluid bonds of a civil society in which strangers work out how to live together. The former idea is something I find abhorrent, the second I have built my life around. Nevertheless, I offer the outcome of this search for other members of my family, to peruse as they will or ignore totally. 

I knew almost nothing about our parents’ and grandparents’ families. As a reader of mysteries I have found the search for people and places, pursuing clues and evidence, establishing footprints and connections a personal detective story which has entertained me for hours.  For the family tree I have used a genealogy software, ReUnion, which allows me lots of flexibility in providing narrative and other detail, but which I cannot edit online. So I will continue to update it on my home computer and replace it online periodically.

I have traced the family ancestry so far along a number of lines to the late eighteenth century. That is about as far as I think we can reliably go, given the nature of British records, especially those available to me online.

The timeframe – three hundred years

The tale goes back a little over two 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.

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[1]and none from others.  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. 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.  There are some exceptions to this rule of mine; there are people I can point to in the 1700s with considerable certainty, but I am dubious of many of the names I have found until they can be confirmed by on the ground research.

Census records, however, while suffering from inconsistent spellings and transcription errors, nevertheless provide a 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.

Census information

Since 1801 the Census in the United Kingdom has been taken every ten years, the only exception being during World War II. Only a few pre-1841 census returns have been found. Censuses in general prove very useful in tracing an individual’s life, though there are sometimes gaps and omissions and the information therein cannot always be relied upon; for example it might have been provided by a person other than the person concerned. The first census in 1841 contains less information than than subsequent censuses and the ages of adults in that census are generally rounded to the nearest five years. Where extracts are provided from the 1881 census the name of each member of the household is followed by their marital status, age, sex, place of birth and occupation. The Census was taken on the following dates: 1841: 7 June; 1851: 30 March; 1861: 7 April; 1871: 2 April; 1881: 3 April; 1891: 5 April; 1901: 31 March; 1911: 2 April. The most recent census available (online) to the public is that of 1911, except for a 1939 register which has been released also.  

The 1921 census, conducted on Sunday 19th June, will not be available until 1922. 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 had laid the groundwork before me.

And there are plenty enough discoveries of interest as to our forebears within these three centuries that I am content (well maybe – I keep trying to push the boundary back!).

The names

While tracing any line of ancestors presents its problems, the female ancestors present the most difficulty, given the absence of maiden names in most of the records (Scotland retains women’s maiden names).  But in many cases the census records provide clues that allow one, given some luck, to identify the women’s birth families.  On the Harley side, these include Ellis, Blissett, Round, Lilley, Ward and Gilvray, while Gilvrays contributed Beat, Forrester, Kent and Joy amongst others.

On the Macnee side we have other issues. The spelling of our family name was established by Robert Hamilton Macnee.  His name at birth was McNie or MacNie; over the years it was spelt in various combinations, but finally he adopted both the small ‘n’ and the ‘ee’ ending which we inherited. MacNie is the version I have used for earlier generations. There is much more to be written of the Scottish names, but for now here are the other names brought in by the women on the Macnee side: Hamilton, McCulloch, McLauchlan, and Monteith; and Carr, Robinson, Vise, Smith, and Wisdom.

The data sources

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.  If I weren’t so chary of spending money (stingy!) 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 uncertain might have been more quickly resolved.  I kept thinking I would get to Kew some day and look at the records for myself.

I couldn’t have got this much information on the Harleys without earlier work 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. For the MacNee/MacNie line there was little to go on except Ian’s full name (Robert Ian Hamilton Macnee) and the fact that Dad’s mother was cremated in 1935.

The family tree available on ancestry.com includes all the records from which the information has been drawn.  Feel free to check any or all of it to your heart’s content.

AND FINALLY

The more I have learned of my ancestors and their families, the more I have come to enjoy them.  History may not have recorded their stories but it is amazing how much can be gleaned and how much more real and alive they have become to me.  There is no-one famous, or even perhaps worthy of fame, but they have nevertheless provided me with endless hours of fascination as I have searched to unearth them from the bogs of the past.