RootsChat.Com

Hi Everyone,

I am the coordinator for the county of Staffordshire in the FreeREG
project, whose goal is to transcribe the church and chapel registers
of the UK and put them online for free.  This is a volunteer project,
and I would like to invite you to become a transcriber.  We have many
images of original documents to choose from, so if you have
Staffordshire roots, we may have images of registers that contain
records of your own ancestors.  If you think you have exhausted what
is online at Find My Past or Ancestry or Family Search, this is a good
way to gain access to new material, some of it never transcribed
before.

Let me address some of the most common concerns people have about
transcribing, and offer a few inducements.

* You do not need any prior experience.  All volunteers receive
  training, and it is very easy.  If you are interested in a
  particular parish, you will quickly become familiar with the names
  of people and places and occupations, and this will make
  transcription easier and easier over time.

* You do not need to live in the UK.  We currently have transcribers
  from all over the world.

* There are no deadlines, and everyone transcribes at a pace that fits
  their schedule.  All we ask for is a commitment to some degree of
  regularity in your contributions so that it is clear that you are
  active.

* No special computer software is required.  Most of use use a program
  called WinREG that was created especially for us, and it is free.
  It runs natively on Windows, but Mac users run it in the Parallels
  emulator.  But you don't have to use WinREG.  You can use any
  spreadsheet program, such as LibreOffice or Excel.

* You can give yourself explicit credit for your transcriptions if you
  wish, such that your name is displayed in your records when FreeREG
  users bring them up in a search.  Or if you prefer to remain
  anonymous, that's fine, too.  You can use your full name, your
  initials, or a pseudonym.

* FreeREG does not take ownership of your work.  What you upload to
  the server is a copy, and you give FreeREG the right to incorporate
  that copy into its database.  But you can keep your own copy and can
  do whatever you want with it.  The account that you create when you
  sign up gives you access to your files on the FreeREG server, so
  that you can add to them, make corrections, download them, etc.

* We transcribe more than just the baptism, marriage and burial
  registers of the Church of England.  We also transcribe
  nonconformist registers, and the burial registers of public
  cemeteries.

* There is a very active email forum especially for FreeREG
  transcribers that you can join if you wish.  Transcribers can post
  questions and ask for second opinions on difficult readings.  Some
  of the people in the forum have been transcribing for years and are
  exceptionally skilled.

* For Staffordshire FreeREG there is a monthly newsletter to keep you
  informed of news about Staffordshire records, and research articles
  to help you understand how the records were created.  All team
  members are welcome to submit items for inclusion in the
  newsletters.

* Everyone can view the online spreadsheet which tracks our progress
  and shows all that we know about what registers exist for the
  county, what we have transcribed, and what remains to be
  transcribed. The Staffordshire database currently contains nearly
  3.7 million records, which represents an estimated 70% of the known
  pre-1900 registers.  There is also a website for the Black Country
  part of Staffordshire (and including parts of Worcestershire,
  Shropshire, and Warwickshire) which shows where the original
  documents are kept, important details about the churches, and any
  anomalies or gaps in the registers.

If you, or anyone you know, are interested in volunteering, go to
https://www.freereg.org.uk and click the Volunteer link in the main menu.
Being the Staffordshire Coordinator, I am of course keen to have
volunteers for Staffordshire, but if you are more interested in
another county, just choose another one when you sign up. Each county
has its own coordinator, although some coordinators manage more than
one county.

If you have questions, you can either reply to this message or contact
me via the RootsChat Personal Messaging system.

best wishes,
Dale Braden
Staffordshire Coordinator
FreeREG

Thank you for your swift replies.

Hannah died less than a year after the 1851 census, at the age of about 89, so she probably didn't remarry or move into a workhouse, though the latter is a possibility since she was poor.  Although the census doesn't indicate which parish church Hall St residents would have attended, I can guess that it was St Martin.  St Paul didn't have burial ground, St Mark was further away in Ocker Hill (I checked their records, too), and St Johns didn't start keeping burial registers until 1855 or so.  I did check the original register images of the churches I mentioned, so no worries about transcriber errors or omissions.

I did some checking and found that Oldbury Cemetery and the Heath Lane West Bromwich cemeteries didn't open until 1858, and Tipton Cemetery on Alexandra Rd didn't open until 1873.  I checked the holdings of the Staffordshire Record Office and learned that the majority of the Methodist chapels didn't have burial grounds.  The registers for those that did have burial grounds usually stop at 1837.  Only a few continued beyond 1837 and Hannah isn't in them anyway.

I had overlooked the implication that Hannah was Anglican if she was on parish relief.  That is helpful to know, and perhaps I can rule out her being in a Methodist burial ground.  But she isn't in any Tipton burial ground or neighboring parish, so perhaps she is further away somewhere whose registers have not been transcribed yet.  I guess I should check Bilston, Wednesbury, and Darlaston at least.

Thank you both for responding.  "Great Bridge" was my guess, too, though I agree that the first word looks a lot like "greit" and I just can't see the "g" in the second word.  I just confirmed that this address did exist in 1911 census and it was in fact a private dwelling.  Unfortunately the occupants had the surname Lavender, not Barton.  Oh well, I guess she wasn't at that address until 1914.

The attached image is from a 1914 passenger ship manifest, showing that an ancestor of mine was returning to New York City from a visit to the UK.  The extract is from a column in which the passenger was supposed to indicate the relationship, name, and address of the nearest relative in the UK.  I am interested in the reading of lines 3 and 4, which appear in slightly darker ink and appear to be in a different hand from the other entries.  I think the lines read:

mother, K. Barton, 161 ? ?
Westbromwich

The reading of West Bromwich is a bit uncertain, but my ancestor and her mother were in fact born there, so I would expect the street address to be in West Bromwich.  But I cannot make out the street address, even after trying to match it to a list of (modern) street names in W. B.  I have not been able to find my ancestor in the 1911 census, so no help from that source.  Can anybody decipher the address?

cheers,
Dale

I have William Mallin's bible, and in it he names only the one wife, Elizabeth, so I don't think he was married before.  As he was born in 1772, children born in the 1780s to anyone with the same name are probably not his.  But it could complicate matters to know that there was another couple in the same parish with the same name.

I noticed that freereg.org says that they have transcribed the marriage registers for All Saints, West Bromwich starting in 1795, but I could not find any marriage for William and Elizabeth using their search engine.  Freereg says that the register is in bad shape and hard to read, so I suppose that one of the illegible entries could be for William and Elizabeth.  It's too bad to hear this about the register, because so much of my family was from that parish!

I have searched Tipton St Martin using freereg, the IGI, and the newer databases at familysearch.org and not found anything.  In fact I searched those databases for someone named William Mallin marrying a woman named Elizabeth anywhere in England during the 1790s, and didn't find anything that looked reasonable.

I recently discovered that the All Saints WB register was never microfilmed by the Mormon church.  They only copied the bishop's transcripts, which I've already checked.  I still suspect that William and Elizabeth got married in All Saints, but if the register is illegible, I won't be able to prove it using that source.  Do you happen to know whether the banns registers survive?

I do think the Christ Church burial record that you found is that for my ancestor, and I think you probably have the right burial records for his parents, too.

happy new year,
Dale