Doors Open!

Mile End Mill, home to Paisley Heritage Centre

Have you heard of Doors Open Days?  Around the UK, they are held annually, and include many buildings that are not normally open to the public, or which charge entry fees, allow free admission and have special events to mark the day.

This being Renfrewshire’s Doors Open Days weekend, my friend Anne and I visited some of the venues, including Paisley Heritage Centre.  This is housed in a former thread mill, and we were lucky enough to see some of the wonderfully detailed poor law records relating to Paisley residents who fell on hard times in the Victorian era.  Some of these are indexed online, so I had been able to check for ancestors in advance of our visit, which allowed me to identify one individual whose record we viewed - even though the writing posed a bit of a challenge!

1787 Map of Paisley

We were also shown good-sized reproductions of 19th- and early 20th-century maps of Anne’s neighbourhood, and thanks to her local history knowledge she was able to pinpoint familiar landmarks as well as areas which have completely changed since then.  I found some maps of 18^th-century Paisley which illustrated the homes of individual families, including some of my ancestors.

It's worth noting that this particular Heritage Centre’s resources are available Monday-Saturday, and not just on special occasions like today.  Community services like these are priceless, and indispensable to family history research.

Parish Church of
Houston & Killellan

We later travelled to the nearby country village of Houston to visit the parish church, and received a lovely warm welcome.  We admired the gorgeous stained glass windows and handcrafted embroidery inside, then basked in the peace and tranquillity of the church’s rose garden of remembrance.  It was extremely tempting to sit there all day, beneath the trees, listening to the birdsong.

Check out your area’s Doors Open Day and take advantage of this once-a-year opportunity to see inside buildings that have special relevance to your family, their work and lives.  Some areas, like the city of Glasgow, have expanded from one day to a festival lasting an entire week, with lots of tours, talks, and exhibitions as well as access to glorious architecture – and that’s coming up in a couple of weeks' time, so plan your visit soon.

£2 for the biggest family history show in the country (not RootsTech)

Take more than a handful of family history societies, add plenty of groups promoting their military, historical and heritage interests, mix in free advice from genealogy enthusiasts, and top it off with a smattering of expert speakers - et voilà! you have the biggest annual family history event in Scotland, the Lanarkshire Family History Society show, taking place in Motherwell Civic Centre on Saturday 5th October.  

At just £2 for entry, it's an absolute bargain.  It's £3 extra if you want to attend one of the talks, or £10 for all of them.  

My top frugal tip for this event is to leave your plastic and hard-earned savings at home - the specialist family history supplies, books, maps, and yes, gifts, are very hard to resist splurging on.  On the other hand, if your hard-earned savings have been reserved for exactly this kind of spending, go for it.  It's not often some of these companies make a Scottish appearance.  

Check out the website for a full list of the societies, organisations and vendors who will be there, the speakers and their topics, and directions to the venue.

And I'll probably see you there!

50% off RootsTech tickets

Still swithering about attending RootsTech London in October?  Here's something that might help you decide: a 50% discount code.  Register here and use the code 'FAMILYTREE' to get your half-price pass, which includes access to all the exhibitors, stands and over 150 classes covering a tremendous range of family history topics to suit everyone from beginners to experts.  And if you're there on the Saturday morning, do come along and say hi at my class, Beyond ScotlandsPeople: Breaking Down Brick Walls in Scottish Research!

My Top Family History Discoveries

For this week’s blog post I want to share some of my latest online genealogy discoveries.  They’re all free, searchable websites, and hopefully at least one of them will be of interest and/or use to you in your research.  Do bear in mind, though, that while they’re new to me, they may not be new to you!

So here, in no order of preference at all, they are:

Liverpool as a Trading Port  This site has collected the names of residents of the city from 1704-1860, plus ships sailing from the port between 1759 and 1809.  

Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive  Hosted by the University of Virginia Law Library, this covers the late 1750s to late 1830s. People mentioned in these documents include Scottish women, Virginia merchants, aristocratic Highland proprietors, famous authors, enslaved labourers, soldiers, American Loyalists, and many more individuals who sought justice before the Scottish Court of Session.  Many Scots were merchants and slave owners in Britain and the American colonies. 

Berlin Central Library Collections  These include telephone directories which I used recently to help with relative tracing.  The website is accessible in English (although the records are of course in German).

New Jersey Death Index  Get access to a searchable database of 1,275,833 deaths in the Garden State between 2001 and 2017, and more than half a million digitized death index images for 1901-1903, 1920-1929 and 1949-2000.  

This last one isn’t exactly new to me, but I had forgotten it was available online, and was recently reminded about it by a more on-the-ball frugal friend.  The Scottish poor law records are excellent resources for tracing people who moved about both in and out of the country.  It’s always worth putting in a few of your difficult-to-find ancestors to see what pops.

Index to Paisley Poor Law records 1839-1942  The site gives more information about what to expect from the records and how to access those you find in the index.

Free Office software - no strings attached

This is the first in an occasional series of posts about computer software which you can download and use at absolutely no cost to yourself.  I’ll kick off with one of my own personal favourites, Apache OpenOffice.

Family historians use office software, such as spreadsheets for organising ancestral information, or creating lists or research logs to work with.  Word processing packages are infinitely useful for any form of written work, ranging from basic letters to full-scale biographies.  And if you are sharing your know-how with your fellow genealogists, a presentation package can help get your message across to a group.  You may be familiar with Microsoft's Office programs like Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

OpenOffice is a suite of programs much like Microsoft Office.  However, unlike its Microsoft counterpart, OpenOffice is an open source product, which means it has been made freely available for anyone to use as they wish.  There will never be any cost involved in downloading or using any element of the package.  It contains word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and drawing software, plus a maths function creator (you probably didn’t know you needed one!).  It also runs on computers using all the main operating systems, including Macs.

I used it for several years before acquiring Microsoft Office 365 as a student, and may yet go back to it again.  The look and function of OpenOffice is quite similar to Microsoft, although there are differences, for example in the way you go about formatting word processing documents.  But it’s pretty straightforward and like any technology you're new to, it takes a little time to adapt to.  There are occasional glitches, which is true of any software package!  

If all this technical stuff is making you switch off, just take it from me: try OpenOffice before you shell out megabucks for a big-brand product that you might only use half of.  You can check out more information about the package here.

Another very similar open source product, which I haven’t used, is LibreOffice.  What’s the difference between this one and OpenOffice?  Read this journalist’s take on it.

Wishing you happy free downloading 😃

Mad, bad, or dangerous to know?

Edinburgh Castle

I’m always up for a free day out, especially when it involves a trip to the festival capital Edinburgh.  Today my friend Pauline and I had the chance to go there to learn more about an aspect of Scottish social history we were both interested in.

Dome Room, New Register House

The venue was a place we were both very familiar with but which no longer serves as a research office, as it did when we were fledgling family historians.  Today, New Register House’s Dome room (my natural habitat for many years) serves as a meeting and conference centre, and the topic of today’s event* was “Prisoners or Patients? Criminal Insanity in Victorian Scotland”.  Fun, eh?  That’s how we genealogists roll.  First up was a visit to the small exhibition, in next-door General Register House, which introduced us to the sad stories of some “criminal lunatics” and how their lives unfolded.

The curator of this exhibition, Dr Rab Houston of St Andrews University, then addressed the subject in more detail in his presentation in the Dome (his area of expertise is the history of psychiatry; see his podcast page here). I was surprised to learn that before the 19th century, imprisonment itself wasn’t used as a penalty; rather, it was just a short-term holding arrangement before trial or punishment - usually fines or transportation (or worse). 

Dr Houston explained who would have been likely to be committed to the Criminal Lunatic Department of the oldest prison in Scotland, at Perth, and how they would have been dealt with.  He talked about some of the cases from the exhibition and it was sobering to compare how those individuals would have been treated nowadays.  What was considered madness then would be seen as mental illness in our times, and while some of the causes aren't common now, there were some conditions described which were all too familiar.

Were some of your ancestors mad, bad, or just simply dangerous to know?  Honestly, if they were any of the above, you're much more likely to find them in court documents, newspaper reports, and prison records, so don't knock it.  And reading about their struggles will probably give you a greater appreciation for them.

* New Register House regularly hosts talks and exhibitions on a variety of subjects, and they’re free to attend.  I’ve already booked for one of the future talks!

Discount code for RootsTech London

Discount alert! As one of the presenters at RootsTech London, I've been allocated a special discount code for you (yes, you) to use to

save 20% on a 3-day pass
or
save 10% on a 1-day pass

The show takes place on 24-26 October in the ExCeL Centre in London’s 
Docklands, so if you haven’t already bought your ticket, bag a bargain by clicking on this link

https://rootstech2019london.smarteventscloud.com/portal/registration/SPKRPAL

or use the code SPKRPAL at the checkout.

And feel free to share this code with anyone you know who’d be interested.

What’s on offer at RootsTech? More than 150 different presentations; attend as many of them as you can fit in to your time there.  Check out the presentation schedule - every one of these sessions is included in the price of your pass. 

And if your research in Scotland has hit a brick wall, come along to my Saturday morning presentation where I'll be talking about how to overcome some of the barriers commonly encountered in Scottish genealogical research.