Reconstituting the Allsops of Tissington–progress

I’ve been making slow but steady progress on my project to reconstitute the Allsop family/ies of Tissington, Derbyshire, England. I’ve described the general method I used previously. It makes use of the wonderful charting and querying abilities of Family Historian software. I didn’t start out with the aim of putting them all together, I was only interested in my own tree. But as it turns out, my own tree accounts for the majority of them and having gone this far there’s no turning back!

Updated method

I made one slight modification to the method described. Instead of drawing shapes to link individuals who I think may be the same person, I started colour coding the boxes instead. It worked much better as I could still see who belonged where even if the charts moved about as I merged people.

Progress

I’ve now identified two main family groups of Allsops. One group descends from a John Allsop from Kniveton who married a Tissington bride in 1833 and had some children in Tissington. This smaller tree is below. Note the use of blue and red box outlines, along with placement of trees, so that I can easily see the people who I think are the same person, but don’t yet have sufficient evidence to merge.

The other much larger group, from which I descend, had been in Tissington from at least the 1600s.

There are also quite a few coloured boxes where want to be sure they really are the same person in here.

Work to be done

I still have a number of extra individuals to sort out. I’ve shifted them so they all sit on one part of the chart sheet. I’ve also added bars with years written on them, so that I can arrange them down the page placed roughly at their estimated birth years.

I’ve been doing more targeted searches for information about these people and have slowly been linking them in to the two main trees where I can. The source that is helping me the most for those born after 1837 is the GRO birth indexes, which now include mother’s maiden names.

I’m also planning to request some documents from the Derbyshire Record Office. There is one document in particular from their catalogue which looks like it will confirm the link I have pencilled in from the earlier to the later generations.

Can you do this grade five history homework?

Recently my grade 5 son was given this homework task:

History - migration

During history, you have been examining migration and some of the reasons people migrate to different countries. Your task is to write a migration story about a member of your family, alternatively research a migration story.

Some things to include:

• Name of person that migrated
• Date of migration
• Why they migrated
• How they migrated (e.g. by boat)
• Their thoughts and feelings about adapting to a new country
• Any other relevant information

I'm not sure how a ten year old would manage this homework if their family were not relatively recent immigrants. In my son's case, he had a huge advantage since I've been researching the family for the past 25 years. At last, a reason for him to look at some of the research that I have been most excited about! I think he was quite perplexed to see how excited Mummy was about his homework.

I drip fed him source documents over a few days and talked with him about what they meant. Passenger lists, newspaper articles and of course the wonderful letter from John himself that I found at the National Library.

My son’s answer, below (included with his permission), was entirely his own words.

History migration John Allsop

John Allsop migrated to Australia with his wife and children. The boat left England on the 12^th of March 1852. On the Chowringhee there were 319 passengers. Throwout the journey 95 people got cholera 98 people had fevers and 39 other cases even the doctor got sick and they were worried he was going to die. The ship had a total of 17 deaths. On the ship there were 9 babies been born including a new son for Jonh and Ellen. They arrived on 5^th July 1852.

Johns family came as Assisted Immigrants because in England they were poor and the government needed more workers for Victoria. When he got there it was the gold rush but he did not run away to get gold. In Australia he was much happyer because he got more money and he had his own house he now had enough money he could save it and sent it to his mother.

Rearranging a genealogy jigsaw

I’ve been having a lot of fun fitting together the puzzle pieces of the Allsop family of Tissington, Derbyshire, England. In doing so, I’ve learnt more about the capabilities of my genealogy software package, Family Historian.

Partial transcripts and images of the parish records for Tissington are on FamilySearch. I’ve gone through these, starting with the transcriptions and looked at every relevant image (plus a few) to make any corrections (not many) and add in the information not included in the transcripts (quite a lot) in a spreadsheet. I’ve also found census entries for anyone called Allsop who lived in or was born in Tissington and done the same thing plus added in a few bits and pieces from other sources.

Now the fun begins!

I used a plugin to load the spreadsheets into my Family Historian software giving me a file with lots of mini trees - and lots of duplicated people.

I started out by setting up the columns in the individual record view to be sorted by given name then estimated birth date (Family Historian has functions to calculate that) – and a columns relating to birth, baptism, marriage, census, death and burial. For the census I set the display up to show the place, if I had a census entry for the person, or a strike through if the census was before their earliest possible birth date, or after their last possible death date.

Clicking the image below should take you to a full size view.



Some duplicates were easy to spot, such as following a family group through the census. I merged any that appeared clear cut. I was left with a few more substantial trees, and quite a lot of stray small family groups and individuals. It was a good start, but time for a new approach if I wanted to get any further.

This is when I tried something with my software that I haven’t done before. I knew that there was an option to insert an additional tree into a chart, but I hadn’t ever made use of it as I had thought of it as mostly a presentation feature. It occured to me that I could use it as an analysis feature.

To get started I ran the standard “All Facts” query and sorted it by date. Starting with the earliest fact – the baptism of Richard Alsop, son of John and Jane Alsop on 15 May 1673 – I created an all-relatives chart. I then went down the list of facts and inserted an extra ‘tree’ for each fact not yet represented on the main chart.

Many of the ‘trees’ consisted of one or two names only. I could drag and drop the trees around, so I placed each ‘tree’ near to where I thought it might belong. I could also insert or draw shapes and text on the chart all from within Family Historian. Below is a marked up portion of the multiple tree chart. The coloured loops show the people from different ‘trees’ who I think may be the same person.



You can see that I had five separate records in the late 1660s and early 1700s containing a Robert Allsop.

• Baptism of Robert son of John and Jane in 1677
• Marriage to Mary Wragg 1703
• Birth of a son Thomas to Robert and Mary in 1704
• Burial of Mary, wife of Robert, in 1728 (no age given), and
• Burial of Robert in 1729 (no age or relationships given).

It didn’t seem so obvious when I was looking at a long list of names and dates as it does, to me, on the chart.

I also think that the Thomas who married Elizabeth Goodwin in the chart above may be the same person who married Martha, a few years later. The Thomas who married Martha is most likely my 6x great-grandfather, so I’m quite interested to know who his parents were.

Blowe is a zoomed out view of the multiple tree chart. I counted 27 separate trees within the full version (which was very wide!), most of which I will be able to combine together now that I’ve seen how the pieces fit. A few individuals who I am not (yet?) able to fit in to the main family tree are sitting to the side.



For now I consider this little exercise to be an experiment and a learning experience. I’m very happy with how it’s working and I’m having a lot of fun. Sliding the different ‘trees’ into place really does feel like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

The genealogy fairy delivers

I have started this post a number of times only to get stuck because I was trying to say everything at once. Two and a half months later, I think I have calmed down enough to get words on a page!

I was excited about my visit to the National Library of Australia (NLA) with a researcher cousin who was visiting Canberra. We went there to view photocopies of some manuscripts from Derbyshire, England. They were described in the NLA catalogue as:

“Correspondence between Sir Fitzherbert and John Allsop
(b. 1820) and documents relating to the emigration of the Allsop family to Australia.”

This description sounded so specific to my family, and the timing of finding the item in the catalogue was so fortuitous, it must have been a gift from the genealogy fairy!

The fairy didn’t let us down.

Neither my cousin nor I had visited the manuscripts room at the library before. We found and entered the small room and approached the counter. The staff member on duty was very friendly and helpful. We signed the form promising to do the right things, and checked if we were allowed to take photos of the papers (yes we were). The papers were waiting for us in a box on the shelves at the back of the room. We found them, chose a table, and opened the box.

The correspondence was 17 pages long starting with a four page letter in the hand of my great-great-great grandfather. It was a lot to take in all at once! We decided to photograph the pages before continuing.

Having photographed the papers we started making out way through the documents, page by page. I enjoyed having someone else with me who was just as excited by our find as I was. We read the pages in soft voices – there was only one other person using the room and he didn’t appear to be bothered by us. It was useful to do this with another person. As one of us would tail off over a difficult word, the other would step in and continue reading. Some words puzzled us both for a while, but in context we could work them out and suddenly they seemed obvious. “Omnibus” for example! We managed to work out most of what was written.

Now once again I find myself writing, deleting, rewriting and arranging paragraphs describing the documents and what we learned from them… then deleting them again. Time for a break I think!

This post will have to be marked “To be continued”…

A visit from a genealogy fairy

Last night I had the great fortune of a visit from a genealogy fairy. You might think you’ve never heard of a genealogy fairy – but you have heard of Serendipity in genealogy, right? Well, that’s the name of one particular genealogy fairy.

The fairy who visited me last night wasn’t Serendipity (although she may have provided a helping hand). It was a far more powerful fairy. A fairy who grants genealogy wishes!

This is what happened…

I was catching up in correspondence with cousins/researchers about various family history matters. One cousin is planning on visiting Canberra this coming weekend. We were planning on having lunch at a venue yet to be decided next week.

My cousin told me about some research she had requested relating to our shared Allsop family in Derbyshire. This reminded me to show her a document I had promised her, relating to the emigration our ancestor John Allsop (b.1820). I checked up on the details before I sent it. The document had been part of a collection of FitzHerbert family papers in Derbyshire Record Office.

All this collaborating and citing sources and seeking archival materials must have pleased the genealogy fairies. They were paying attention when I said:

“I would love to know the role the FitzHerbert family played in getting them to Australia. I’m sure there must be all sorts of relevant material in those archives!!”

All well and good. We might be able to get someone to do the research, and that would be exciting, but it’s not quite the same as finding the material yourself. I clicked send on the email.

Next I replied to another cousin/researcher from a different branch of my tree. She had written to me about some extensive family history books she had tracked down. I found a copy of one of the books on eBay, but the price was a bit steep so I went looking at the National Library of Australia. I didn’t find that publication but I did find some other family histories that looked like they might be connected.

With the Allsop family and family history books jostling for attention in my mind I entered “Allsop family” in the NLA catalogue search box. Just because.

Eight results came up. Result number seven was “Papers of Henry Fitzherbert 1850-1860”. That sounded more than interesting, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I clicked the link. The manuscript was described as a copy of 17 leafs of material, the original held by Derbyshire Record Office.

The item summary read:

“Correspondence between Sir Fitzherbert and John Allsop
(b. 1820) and documents relating to the emigration of the Allsop family to Australia.”

I’m sure the genealogy fairy got a kick out of my reaction!

My wish appears to have been granted, and our lunch venue next week is settled. Thank you, genealogy fairy.

Don’t say that you don’t believe in genealogy fairies. Every time someone says that, a researcher gets stuck on a brick wall.