Belford and surrounding area records?

[JenB]

Mary, I seem to remember from an earlier thread that you live pretty close to Woodhorn?

Have you investigated the availability of records there?

[MaryThorn]

Boo

So sorry, I thought I'd put my 2 x Great Grandfather down, his surname was Straughan.

Jen you're right I'm about 30 minutes from Woodhorn, I'm registered to use the archives but as yet have never managed to go and explore what is available.  I work full time and juggle taxi-ing teenage kids to various activities so have never yet had the time to get up there.

I actually drove past yesterday on a day out with my 13 year old,  I was quite tempted to go in but she reminded of the time previously on a day out when I'd got her hunting through Pegswood Cemetry for family gravestones 😂 So I didn't think it would go down to well if I took her to the archives.  All my research is limited to online.

[Tickettyboo]

Alnwick Mercury 01 August 1861

At Belford St Columba's Church on the 13th ult,by the Rev. David Terras, Mr Robert Straughan, Detchant Buildings, to Miss Ellen Ray, Detchant

So, now you know the church and date, check Woodhorn catalogue to make sure they have this register on microfilm and next time you pass you can stop and see what it says about her father. Shouldn't take too long and its way cheaper than a marriage cert.

Boo

[Tickettyboo]

I'm not having much luck with Family search these days.  I can never get it to load on my IPad.  I don't know if my IPad is too old to support it since its updated.

Are you aware that there is now a requirement to register with the Family Search site and be signed in  to be able to search and see results?
Its simple , all they require is a name and an email address.

That 'may' be the problem?
Boo

[MaryThorn]

I'm already registered with Familysearch.  I've used it for years but since they updated the site recently I can't get anywhere on it, it just keeps coming up as error.  I suspect the problem lies with my IPad.

[MaryThorn]

Wow, Boo thanks for the marriage details.  I hadn't found that with my newspaper subscription.

[Tickettyboo]

You said you have an FindMyPast sub.

I put in Robert Straughan in the name boxes, specified the county as Northumberland, and the date as 1861.

I only got 4 results. The last of those, though its billed as Births, has  subtext in the result (even if I am not signed in and therefore doing a free search) and gives the full text of the marriage announcement.

As the newspaper database is done by OCR rather than transcription, its really worth reading each result in full.

Boo

[MaryThorn]

What is OCR?

Just had another look at the newspaper results through Findmypast subscription and it came up with 89 results for Robert Straughan but none relating to his marriage,

I've always struggled with searching newspaper reports through Findmypast.

[Tickettyboo]

What is OCR?

Optical Character Recognition - read by a machine rather than a human, the more fuzzy the original text, the harder it is for the machine to make out the characters, which is why you often see gobbledegook in the results, though if you look at the image its readable by we humans.

Just had another look at the newspaper results through Findmypast subscription and it came up with 89 results for Robert Straughan but none relating to his marriage,

Did you filter by county and then by year? if you are looking for something in Northumberland and don't filter by County you get every instance of that name from every paper in the database - which sometimes is worth resorting to as a slow news day elsewhere may show that other papers picked up stories as fillers.


Boo