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The Genealogy Guy interviews the very knowledgable Ted Udall from the Somerset and Dorset Family History Society discussing the history of Parish Records and tips. Without parish records and the stunning work of so many local history groups over the years much of the data that family tree sites now use would not be as vast as it is today.
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Explore genealogy with "The Genealogy Guy" on Armchair Genealogy, one of the latest genealogy podcasts produced in the UK. Tune in as expert genealogists and diverse practitioners share their knowledge, helping you uncover your roots, build your family tree, and learn about your ancestors' fascinating stories. Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned researcher, the podcast aims to help you connect with your family's past and discover long-lost relatives. Subscribe to Armchair Genealogy today and start your journey into your family's history!
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The Genealogy Guy Podcast, demystifying technology, and exploring family tree research. Please remember to subscribe and share the podcast with family and friends.
Mell 0:16
Welcome to another episode of armchair genealogy produced by broadcast media UK and presented by me, the genealogy guy UK, I'd like to say a very big thank you for the emails that have been coming in from listeners giving support, along with ideas for future people to interview and suggestions for questions. It's always so nice to hear from every listener. Joining us now on armchair genealogy is Ted Udall, who knows an awful lot about the social history of the parish register. So to start us off with Ted, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Ted Udall 0:54
Well, I'm, I'm a retired person, I been a member of the Somerset and Dorset Family History Society for quite a number of years now. And I've been the secretary of the Society for the last 12 years, one of the things that I tend to specialize in is teaching family history. In my previous existence, I used to teach people how helicopters worked. But now I've left that behind. And one of the things that I do is teach people how to get started with their family history,
Genealogy Guy 1:23
Your name I came across, because you're giving a talk locally at the Somerset and Dorset Family History Society, mid Somerset group, which is a big mouthful, but on top of that, you're given the talk across to the Somerset side and coming over to Glastonbury. And I saw the poster go up, and I thought I must have a chat with this gentleman, because he obviously knows his stuff, because everyone said, Oh, it's a really good talk, it's worth coming along to. So I thought I'll have a chat to you separately, just because I wanted the listeners to actually have a chance to hear your side and your take on basically parish registers. So what are they if someone's just getting into into genealogy, and they were going, Oh, you need to look at parish records. People go along books, folders, it's really complicated. And it's dated and dusty. How How is it all done? How does it work?
Ted Udall 2:10
Well, basically, the the idea wasn't it was generated really back in the days of Henry the eighth. And it's continued on since then. But some, what you've got is, is a record of every child that is baptized, every couple is married, and every person that is buried, and it's just simply a date, a name of the people involved, possibly with the later ones where they lived. But of course, the very interesting thing about a lot of these is that the older ones in particular, quite often give you some some of the person's thoughts about what happened at the time. So we're not sure of the later ones, because there isn't space to put them in on the record. But the older ones were they were just entered in a book, you quite often get little asides. Note notes about what the what the vicar thought about the people involved, sometimes, you know, quite often written in Latin because he didn't want to be sued for libel, pretty sure that nobody else can read the things.
Genealogy Guy 3:13
So it gives you a chance to get some kind of insight into into the type of people they were and not just necessarily a name and a date.
Ted Udall 3:19
It sometimes does that. That's right. I mean, these things are they do crop up occasionally. And I've had quite a few sent to me by various people say, look, have you seen this one, you know, and get in and have a look at this. And you go in and have a look at the register. And it says something pretty scurrilous about both a couple that are getting married or something, you know.
Genealogy Guy 3:37
When I first started doing this sort of genealogy journey, because you never stop, you're always on a journey on it. So when I first started parish records, were like, you have to get in a car, you have to drive out to the actual area and find a church. It was very complicated and very time consuming. Hpw have things changed nowadays.
Ted Udall 3:37
Well, of course, the vast majority of them are online on the ancestries of this world. You know, some are on Ancestry, some are on Find My Past because a lot of the repositories. Dorchester record office, the Somerset Record Office or whatever we're calling it this week, they got into bed with Ancestry, and they've had all their their records digitised. And a lot of cases you not only can can get access to an index of it, but you can see the original image of the document, which is is something you should do anyway. Because even with the best will in the world, if you only make a 1% mistake in transcribing a document, that's an awful lot of mistakes over the whole country.
Absolutely. Because it can mean the difference between Smith Smyth Smat. There's so many variations on a particular name on one typo. And you're absolutely right. You want to see the actual image of the document so you know that you've seen it and it's not just Well, I think that's what it said on it, but I didn't write it I don't know. Very much so. So how do you how did you get into genealogy and parish records? Or what do you naturally fall into it or something you just found an affinity with.
It's something that well, my grandmother lived to be 95. She died back in 1986. And I inherited some old documents from her, including a few marriage certificates and sort of things that you get, you know, photographs, wedding invitations, that kind of stuff. And that was what really spurred me on to get started. I was working abroad at the time, but when I came back, I joined the Somerset and Dorset Family History Society. And so it's just because my interest was piqued. So I thought, well, yeah, I should just try and find out a little bit more. And of course, the further you get into it, it's the thrill of the chase isn't, it's the detective story, you really want to be, you know, you're gonna find out a little bit more. And of course, the other thing, which a lot of family historians do, I wouldn't say most, but a lot of family historians do is they spend so much time searching, and they find all the information, but then they don't know what to do with it when they've got it. And Oh, where did I put that? You know, the record keeping is not always the best?
It's a huge task. I mean, when you first set out, I mean, I did it right back at the beginning. And you just think I just want the names. I just wanted to be able to trace it back, and job's done, and everything. But the more you do it, you're right, you want more information? You want to know, what was life like, what where did they live? Where, where did they go to school? And what friends did they have and they're all the things that you can find out, but you need to go into things like parish records, and birth certificates and all that to find out who were the witnesses and who were there and who was doing and saying what?
Yeah, that's another mistake that people make is to ignore the witnesses. You know, they might come across a marriage record. But quite often the witnesses, the names of witnesses can point you at the correct family, you know, because they may be relations, they may be friends, but which doesn't help you much. But if there are relations, and of course, that may very well point you at the fact that oh, it's the wrong family. I'm not looking at the right people at all.
Genealogy Guy 7:14
And of course, knowing that and back in ye olden days people didn't travel. So the chances were that they were also either neighbors or just lived in an adjoining street.
Ted Udall 7:24
Oh, yeah, yeah, very much, actually. Although you say that people did move around a little more than we think for, you know, I believe these days, we used to think that, that people didn't move around very much. But in my experience, over recent years, people moved around a wee bit more than we used to give them credit for.
Genealogy Guy 7:45
I think I think a lot of that was usually based down to things like the Industrial Revolution and play and things like that, they were looking for work. So they had to go to where they could earn some money to bring up their family.
Ted Udall 7:57
You know, there are still records related to that. Not directly parish records as such, but you get all the all the things from the settlement laws of the 1660s people would be examined before a JP and they would say, Well, this is you know, they give a potted history of themselves and JP would give them a license to move somewhere, their parish of settlement would be obliged to get them back if they fell on hard times.
Genealogy Guy 8:24
Now with with parish records, or appreciate that a lot of them are now online, but at some places still just you have to go and find the website, maybe the local village website, or they are they all gone across onto Ancestry and My Heritage and places like that?
Ted Udall 8:39
A huge amount of them have there are one or two places where you can get you can get free information. The best place to start searching is a website called Genuki G E N U K I, Genenalogy UK and Ireland. And then you just click on say, for example, England and then you click on the county that you want and it gives you all kinds of information including where to get hold of parish records and things like that, because there's an organisation called the Online Parish Clerk's they started off in Cornwall about 20 odd years ago, and they've gradually spread across certainly the south of England, they're very common, not so much the further north you get, but they are an organisation of volunteers that just choose a parish and go in and find all sorts of information about it.
Genealogy Guy 9:26
You mentioning the parish clerks that it just made me think of the parish councils. It's amazing that each parish council has its own sort of job to do, as it thinks it is now, but they will forget that historically, all their committee members, everybody that's been working that all the jobs that have been done, that should also be going into the archives because he's got names and dates and people associated with it.
Ted Udall 9:49
It does because although we family historians tend to follow the parish registers because that gives you the basic skeleton of you know who is married to whom and who the children are. When they die, and so on, but there are all sorts of other, other documents that which were part of the vestry the parish organisation, including, for example, the accounts of the church wardens. Because they would have to rate and tax the parishioners for the upkeep of the church, they would have to record all incomings of money, they would have to recall who was being paid to upgrade the organ or build a new door or whatever it was. And then of course, you've also got the overseers of the poor, because they had to put a rate and tax on all the parishioners so that they could pay people who've fallen on hard times. So you've got records of money coming in, you've got records of money going out, and they're all names, even simple things like paying the sexton to dig the grave, or the Grave Digger to dig the grave for X, and you can't find a burial record for him. But you found this where they've laid out X amount of money for hmm burying the poor chap, you know,
Genealogy Guy 10:57
You mentioned about the poor and the poor housing that, You've got Alm Houses, do Alm Houses fall under Parish records, or are they a separate entity?
Ted Udall 11:07
They are a separate entity, really, they're normally set up by charities a long, long time ago, many of these I mean, those there are quite a few still in existence. But they were set up a separate charities and so they would tend to keep their own records, the poor houses which are a parish thing in particular. And then of course, later on the workhouses, as, after the 1834, new poor Law Act, they're all in more general within the parish if you like, because the parish was the unit, which knew who the who the poor people were that were worthy of support. And who were the people who were going to pay in. Certainly, when England was still an agricultural nation, or mostly agricultural,
Genealogy Guy 11:52
You mentioned the new poor act
Ted Udall 11:54
To go back one, the old poor law which was, which really stemmed, gradually grew out of the dissolution of the monasteries. Before that, anybody who fell on hard times could go along to the monastery, and they were, it was their Christian duty to to look after them. Once the monasteries had been dissolved, of course, there suddenly there was more destitute people on the streets. And so the government started thinking, well, what are we going to do about this? Slowly over a period of time culminating towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth the First, we get this thing called the Old Poor Law Act, which basically says, if you're able to work, you work, if you're unable to work, you will be supported, you will get relief, but that will be within the parish where you live. Because as I say, they were the people who knew who was, who was worthy of payment and who were going to pay in. So you were supported within the parish, of course, then over a period of time over the next 100 years or so with the civil war going on all the rest of it by the 1660s. Many parishes were preventing people if you'd like, if they were liable to fall on hard times, they would say, right, you got to stay here. Because if you go over in the next parish, they won't want you because you might suddenly become a tax burden on them. And so people get, you know, they had to become settled in inverted commas. De facto, that's what happened. In 1662, a law was passed, making it concrete. So people were then as I mentioned earlier on, you had to stand up in front of a magistrate say, Yeah, this is my potted history, I want to go to work somewhere else, I've got an offer of a job. And then the magistrate would issue you with a license and off you go. But of course, if you were a person who and the numbers were all written down from time to time and changed, but if you were a person who was able to afford rent of more than a certain amount, for example, then you would have been a net payer into the system. So you could go where you liked. If you were unable to afford rent at that kind of rate, then you are liable to be a taker out from the system. And so therefore, your movements were restricted quite often to maybe 20 miles because of course the parish would have to pay for you to get your back if you fell on hard times. So okay, well, we're not paying for you to go more than 20 miles away then.
Genealogy Guy 14:13
So if you were earning a low wage or no wage, you had to apply to be given permission to move to another area and..
Ted Udall 14:23
Yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And quite a lot of these records still exist. The Dorset ones are a bit thin on the ground. I've not got any in Somerset personally, but I believe that the Somerset ones they should all be held at the record office up at Taunton.
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Email the podcast by contacting us info@armchairenealogy.com.
Genealogy Guy 14:46
And now we return to the second half of the chat with Ted Udall sharing his tips and knowledge about using parish records and documents because each area around the country has its own depository basically of where it stores its data. And fortunately, over the years, local history centers have been set up all over the place.
Ted Udall 15:07
I think Somerset was one of the very first I think to have a proper, a purpose built repository for the for their archives. And of course, they've moved it since then to the new one out at Norton Fitz Warren. But yes, they're all all set up for, you know, they're all air conditioned. And you know, all the stuff is kept in a certain humidity range. So all these old documents on parchment and what have you are all hopefully going to last forever and ever.
Genealogy Guy 15:33
Yeah, and the other thing I came across, when your digging back in history and talking about people having to get support to be able to live just a daily life was Friendly Societies, Hey, how did that sort of into interweave into the history?
Ted Udall 15:48
That's something which I'm not really all that familiar with it, but it's the sort of thing that they're the origin really of what we know, more recently as building society. So it would be somewhere where you could pay in a small amount, and then if you fell on hard times, they would take it, they would get a loan.
Genealogy Guy 16:05
So okay, so he basically it was like a, like an insurance policy to help you get through the rest of life.
Ted Udall 16:11
Virtually. Yeah, yeah, they tried all sorts of things. I mean, we talked about the old poor law and I mentioned about settlement and of course, we were gonna come on then to the new poor law which, which was because of the industrial revolution, of course, people are moving off the land and into the into the towns more. And the parish just wasn't up to the business of specially in the towns. The parish just couldn't cope with all the people. And so they set up the new poor law said, Okay, well, you can all bunched together, you can form a union, you have to build a workout. And if people fall on hard times, they have to go into the workouts in order to be supported. If you're going to do that, well, that means you've got to build a warehouse, you've got to put in the plumbing, you've got to put in the heating you've got you've got to pay the staff. And it all becomes a horrendously expensive and actually most parishes and most unions discovered that. In fact, it's cheaper to pay people to stay where they are, rather than force them to come in the workhouse
Genealogy Guy 17:09
That really explains like, why you get poor houses in the cities and the big towns and you didn't get them out in the sort of the rural areas.
Ted Udall 17:18
It's it's odd because there are one or two. I live in Yeovil. So the former workhouse, which is along Preston road is now Summerlands hospital that was built in on a standard sort of plan, but in some and it's only what was then right on the edge of Yoevil halfway between Yoevil and Preston Plucknett, effectively. Another one with which unfamiliar as the Beaminster union workhouse in Dorchester, which is plonked right on the border between the parish of Beaminster and the parish of Stoke Abbott, which is the next one over. So it says as near to the middle between them as possible. So it's right out of the way, really out of the way of the local population, we're going to put all these poor people over there where nobody can see them.
Genealogy Guy 18:03
It sounds a bit like what they do nowadays is put all the people that are a bit in a bit of an inconvenience, stick them onto an estate out the way because nobody wants them around them. It's sort of integrated them into society.
Ted Udall 18:15
Human nature hasn't changed as it you know, it's still now what it was then.
Genealogy Guy 18:19
Your a gentleman of a certain age. So how have you felt the change of technology has has changed the way that you you and and your fellow genealogy friends have actually gone about doing doing their detective work?
Ted Udall 18:36
Well, you mentioned that in the old days used to go along to to an archive somewhere. And you would what you can still do, of course, you can get in touch with them in advance and say, Look, this is what I want to have a look at. You can't these days handle, the old parish registers the same way that you used to, because they've all been microfilmed. And they're all pretty much available online these days, some somewhere or another. But you can go along and look at all sorts of other documents there are quite often you've got deposits of say for example, solicitors, documents, you know, deeds and stuff like that which you can go along and, and look through copies of wills, all kinds of things that you can go along and actually have a look at at your local repository. That hasn't really changed. The difference is that now if you want to build a basic structure of your family history, so you want to look at the you know, the basics of the parish register, births, marriages, baptisms, marriages, burials, then you can do most of that online. There are you know, it's a huge industry now compared with, with what it was 30 or 40 years ago.
Genealogy Guy 19:47
What people don't because I have this conversation with people yet and they think you can just go to to one platform and that's it. That's all you have to do is to join up and they don't realise that ancestry has got a collection of certain things, but not everything. And then My Heritage will have and then The Genealogist will have another one. And each one has its own speciality. And some of them have more information than you can possibly ever want. But then it will suddenly stop, and you you can't find anything else, you'd have to go to another platform. What are your thoughts on the fact that all these different companies are all trying to own the data all the time?
Ted Udall 20:23
Yes they are indeed trying to do that. But of course, the people who actually own the original information are a bit canny as well, because they know that, you know, it's like selling your birthright. And so what tends to happen is that one of the big companies say Ancestry, for example, will have the will have the rights to this information to publish this information online for a certain period of time, after which the others can then have a go at it, you know, and they can start publishing online. The, the end result of that, of course, is that each company is producing an individual transcription of each of these things. And as I mentioned before, even with a 1% typo rate, you will guarantee of course, that if two or three companies are producing the same information, there will be different typos. So if you can't find something on one database, you go and have a look at the other one, because they might have it
Genealogy Guy 21:16
As a tip, then basically, if you find the original image, then you should save that and add it to your data, not just oh, yes, typed version, because three or four years later, you can think, Oh, I found this, I found this, the old the spelling's completely different. And then you look at the original document, and you'll go, No, it's the same documents someone's just misread it.
Ted Udall 21:38
And and the other thing which just suddenly occurs to me, we talked about parish registers earlier on, there is something called Bishops Transcripts, and they are supposed to be a copy of the parish register information, which was sent off to the bishop once a year. They have mostly been transcribed by family history societies usually all of 30 or 40 years ago. But of course, the index with all this information has been interleaved with the original parish register. So we've got effectively one document that isn't necessarily what you'll find online, because if people are going along and transcribing the parish register, sometimes the bishops transcript will give you some extra information, because for some reason, they weren't made. Generally as copies of the register, they were made as copies of the original bits of paper on which the information was written. Because the registers were supposed to be made up on Sunday after the service, everything that happened in the preceding week, which meant that the vicar or whoever had to write it on a bit of paper on Sunday had to get all the bits of paper put in the right order, and then put them in the register. And you can see straight away there's an issue here potentially for for people to lose the bits of paper. And then when they're making up the bishop transcripts, all of a sudden, they find one that's fallen down the back of the Bureau somewhere, and oh, hang Oh, we got an extra one here. And so the bishop transcript sometimes has extra information over and above what the parish register has. So you have to be aware that if you can't find someone in a parish register, that's when you should go along to your local repository and look at their printed index that they have, say, for example, in Norton Fitz Warren or in Dorchetser so you go along, and you look at their printed index for that parish, because that will have the bishops transcripts of BT's will be interleaved with the parish register information. Whereas if you look at the you know, you look at the image of the parish register, you might not find the entry you're looking for.
Genealogy Guy 23:38
it's a sort of a backup information. So you could actually find out the RE spelling of a name, according to how they were baptized, compared to what the bishops notes have actually got down there.
Ted Udall 23:50
Bishops transcripts, when when the Postal Service came in, they were allowed, if they they addressed them in a certain fashion, they were allowed free postage, so they could post these things off in a package. And they would then go off to the to the, to the Bishop of the Diocese and register. But if they failed to put the correct form of address on the thing, the Postal Service would still deliver the thing, but they would say, Well, you know, it's not being correctly addressed. So you've got to pay, and the bishops office would go, No, you're not paying for that. And they get thrown in the bin. And the other thing, of course, is that the clergy, especially young clergy, who were perhaps fairly new to the business, had this really strange idea that their bosses might actually read this stuff. And so quite often, they took great deal of care with the bishops transcripts, which they didn't take so much with the register. And so sometimes, you know, these things are really well written and there's all kinds of little snippets of extra information that are popped in and sometimes completely weird typos like they swapped forenames between two parties at a marriage for example, you know, so you You'd sometimes read these things and think, hmmm, what were they thinking when I wrote this,
Genealogy Guy 25:04
The amazing thing is with with a lot of this information when you go back historically, because a lot of people didn't read or write or couldn't do very well, and everyone has an accent according to where they were in, in the country. And if they moved their accent sounds different to other people, that you get all these weird anomalies where people's names change, and, and it just just becomes like, the typo becomes different, although their name changes from Ron to rob, because they don't quite hear that there was an N on the end, and they, they just changed somebody's name, and it completely throws you off track when he started to go through again, all this is obviously the wrong family, I've got the wrong family, because the names wrong.
Ted Udall 25:44
And of course, you also have to remember that even people that didn't move around, that could still happen, because the incumbent, the vicar would be an outsider, possibly from a different parts of the country. And so he would hear, and the one thing he couldn't do at that stage was when you said when he said, Right, what's your name? And you told him? He couldn't he wouldn't say How do you spell that? Because the answer would have been spell when it means spell. Because people, as you say, didn't read and write. And so now the incumbent changes perhaps on the incoming guy is from a totally different part of the country, and he hears it different again. And so now you've got a name change without anybody moving anywhere.
Genealogy Guy 26:23
It's what happens when you got down, even down to all the census records that have gone through over the years. Every wave that's released, someone has to transcribe them and it takes them hours, I don't think people realize how many times I have to keep double checking to try and go have we got these absolutely right.
Ted Udall 26:41
I personally got involved in in trans re transcribing parts of the 1851 census, but one of the big companies a few years ago, they have got it pretty much down to a fine art they give you an image. And you then type in what you think you see on the image. And then it goes off and somebody else will be given the same image and they will type it in and then the computer will check that what you've typed in is the same. If it isn't, then there will be an arbitrator who will actually come in and look and see what's going on. So it's a lot better now than it was when it was originally and hence the reason for redoing the 1851 census index.
Genealogy Guy 27:19
It's it's one of those things that the phrase AI technology, the it is amazing AI has made a huge difference to genealogical records. Because it's able to look through data and compare stuff in the background while you're working on things. Which is why you get all these sorts of flags coming up going we think we found a distant aunt or a cousin. And they start saying we have definitely she's gonna know you go away and double check in there. But we think there's a correlation here. And that's the bit that I think he's phenomenal with Ai is the way that it can work in the background and help.
Ted Udall 27:58
And of course, it's bound to improve because that's the nature of it, isn't it? You know, it's it was pretty ropey when it started, but then so is everything else when it's new. So yeah, it can only get better, as long as people appreciate that it is not perfect because it's invented by people.
Genealogy Guy 28:15
Well, Ted Udall, thank you very much for giving your time and thought and knowledge, because it's all about learning when you're doing genealogy research.
Ted Udall 28:25
Well, yeah, thanks for letting me talk to you. I must admit that one of the things I do is that whenever I give a talk somewhere on the subject of genealogy, I always end up learning something myself. Always.
Genealogy Guy 28:37
Absolutely. And I think that's a good point to end on. So thank you very much for having a chat to his TED and I wish you every success with further research.
Ted Udall 28:46
Thank you very much pleasure to talk to you.
Genealogy Guy 28:48
Join me next month with another episode of armchair genealogy. Until then, please share and repost the links in the podcast to anyone that you think would be interested. And remember, you might be turning into a true genealogist if you feel the phrase, relatively speaking, holds a truly unique meaning to you.
Jingle 29:11
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