Fleshing out the tree

[coombs]

One tip is, maybe a bit time consuming for rural villages, is to look up an ancestor in the census and research the neighbours as well, and/or see how far away your ancestor's cottage or house/farm is away from a nearby establishment such as the local pub or shop. Often houses in villages were not numbered but some may have been named, ie "Oak Cottage", and it can be harder to try to find out where in the village the house was. It is easier in towns and cities due to houses being numbered more often, and the street name.

If you see an ancestor working in service for a shopkeeper as opposed to a huge manor house, have a gander for info on the shopkeeper employer. I have virtually researched my ggggrandmothers 1861 employer.

[Top-of-the-hill]

  How right you are about the difficulty of researching villages! I am currently writing up a talk on this village in the 1930s - a small place which I know very well, and I still can't work out where some of the people lived. Right up to the 1921 census, some of them still gave their address as " The Street" or even just the village name. (And the schedule numbers are pretty random as well.)

[Erato]

Doing a Google book search is also worthwhile.  Surprisingly, even very inconsequential people can turn up in books.  I found a letter to the editor of a children's magazine written in 1917 by a boy who would have been my uncle except that he died just two years later, aged eleven.  That letter, about native fishing methods, gives at least a little insight into what interested him and it's really all I know about his short life.

[coombs]

  How right you are about the difficulty of researching villages! I am currently writing up a talk on this village in the 1930s - a small place which I know very well, and I still can't work out where some of the people lived. Right up to the 1921 census, some of them still gave their address as " The Street" or even just the village name. (And the schedule numbers are pretty random as well.)

I have deduced where the house my ancestors lived at in Bletchingdon, Oxfordshire, as it was enumerated as being about 2 doors down from the local pub in 1851. I have been to the village myself and it is very quaint and my ancestral cottage seems to be in a row of still extant ones.

Also researching travel routes is good, and how long a journey from say, Norwich in Norfolk to Chelmsford in Essex took in 1800, my estimate is a couple of days as many horse and carts could not travel overnight and horses had to rest and horses had to change at the inns. A journey by sea from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk to Custom House in London in 1800 perhaps took 3 or 4 days, at a guess, with the ship/boat having to moor up overnight at various spots on the way, for example, Southwold, Felixstowe or Maldon.