Latest Additions - Tidder, Hipson and Wise Families

I finally got round to scanning mother-in-law Maureen's huge box of old photos - and in includes some really old ones. Below is Florence Elizabeth Faunch, Maureen's grandmother. She married twice and Maureen is descended from her second husband. Florence has several photos on our My Heritage site now. You can go to Family Tree and search for her and all her photos will come up. The excellent restoration job was done by Mac from the Family History and Photography group on Facebook:



The box included a lot of the Hipson family (Maureen's Mum's side) and you can see several albums of them too. Go to Photos then look down the album list on the left for Tidder Family and Hipson-Clack Family. The photos are tagged, where possible, with the relevant names so they show up on the tree.

Speaking of photos on trees, you can download any photos for your own use BUT you must not put them on any online tree on Ancestry, My Heritage or elsewhere. If you do then impolite people will indiscriminately copy them all over the internet. We paid a LOT of money for the premium and private My Heritage site so that this doesn't happen. You'll see that I've now made this a condition of your membership of the site. You need to be careful if you are confirming Smart Matches into another tree that you then REMOVE our photos from yours.

On to more interesting stuff. My second cousin, David Williams, has done a huge amount of work on the Williams side and we've now worked out that the enigmatic Bess, she of the 1875 photo who looks so much like Mum, was in fact Mary Ann Wise, who married a Bradley then married Stephen Joyce. You can now find her in the correct place in the tree (My Heritage and Ancestry). If you know the Hills family you can go to Nan and follow the tree upwards. Just click on anyone's name to show their branch of the tree.

Using the marriage banns records I found Mary Ann (Bess)'s parents too. She lied about her age for the first marriage! Mary Ann's children took the Joyce surname when she married Stephen Joyce (well, before that ...) so I'd thought they were his children from his first marriage.

Here's the lookalike photo of Mum and Bess, her great grandmother.

An early £10 Pom

John's great aunt Florence Tidder emigrated to Australia after the war. I think she actually pre-dated the "£10 Poms". On the boat she met Mary, from Edinburgh. They became and remained best friends for the rest of their lives and lived near each other in Perth. They made a trip back to the UK about twenty years ago and we took them round the New Forest area.

Amongst Maureen's (John's Mum) huge collection of old photos was this one with the Koala. It was obviously taken by a professional photographer and was very high resolution for its day. I thought Flo deserved a page of her own in the family history album marking her move to Austalia.

The digital kit I used was Raspberry Road's Travelogue. You can see another page of their trip to Ayres Rock HERE

In pictures...

I couldn't resist making a scrapbook page of the Chosen text. Click on it to go to a larger version in our gallery. I'm thinking of printing it mural size as the answer to "Why do you bother with all these dead people?" The word art column (made with elements from WM Squared's My History kit) also features on the front cover of the report many of the family will receive soon and to the right of this blog. It took me forever to do so it's now used all over the place!

The Chosen

Why do some of us work on the family tree and gather photos while some think it's a sad hobby or just ignore it? This was posted on the Family History and Photogrpahy Facebook page (which you can find HERE) by Peter Monaghan. It says it all for me and I know many other genealogists feel the same.

"We are the chosen. In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors.

To put flesh on their bones and make them live again.
...To tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve.

Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before. We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story. So, we do. In finding them, we somehow find ourselves.

How many graves have I stood before now and cried? I have lost count. How many times have I told the ancestors, "You have a wonderful family; you would be proud of us". How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love there for me? I cannot say. It goes beyond just documenting facts. It goes to who I am, and why I do the things I do. It goes to seeing a cemetery about to be lost forever to weeds and indifference and saying - I can't let this happen. The bones here are bones of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It goes to doing something about it.

It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish. How they contributed to what we are today. It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family. It goes to deep pride that the fathers fought and some died to make and keep us a nation. It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us.

It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give us birth, without them we could not exist, and so we love each one, as far back as we can reach. That we might be born who we are. That we might remember them. So we do. With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are they and they are the sum of who we are.

So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers. That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those who we had never known before."

by Della M. Cummings Wright.Rewritten by her granddaughter Dell Jo Ann McGinnis Johnson. Edited and Reworded by Tom Dunn, 1943.

CLICK HERE to see this in a scrapbook layout.

Horswill ancestors worked in the mines, going back to gold mining in Cornwall in the early 1800s, from the age of twelve. We mocked Dad when he told us mining stories but I feel immensely proud of that heritage and I know he would have been very proud of the way we're working on the family history now.

December and January are not genealogy months for me as I'm still failing to retire each year and have loads of tax returns to do but in a few short weeks (Eeek, that's how long I have to do the tax returns ...) I'll be working on it again.

Have you joined the MyHeritage site? You can find it on www.horswillfamilytree.com. If you can type out your name and email address you can join it! You can then invite others and add what you like to the family tree and photo albums. We have lots of distant cousins joining us from around the globe and I'll tell you about them later.

Have a very Happy Christmas and prosperous New Year!

Look what can be done!

The main photo of the Horswill family which we use a lot in websites was actually a larged framed photo hanging on our wall. Dad took a photo of it (pre-digital). Tony now has the framed photo in the US but since it was impossible to get it out of the frame we still needed to work with Dad's photo of it, which had a flash burn. I've covered this in various scrapbooks layouts - see photo and the end of the post belowe this one - but now we have a restored photo WITHOUT the flash burn.

The restoration was done by Michael Harvey. You can see his site HERE. He'll be doing a lot more work for us!

Here's the before and after:

Important Changes To Our Family Websites

First of all, sorry it's taken me so long to update this blog. We don't even have a tribute to Uncle Bill yet (coming soon ... )I had the whooping cough thing for three months and I'm only just catching up on the life that passed me by during that time.

The news is basically - we've gone private!

We no longer have the My Family websites which were completely private. Which website is that, you ask? Exactly. The ones no-one looked at or asked to join. They were $60 a year and it was a waste with no-one using them so they went.

The main Horswill Family Photos site is a public website anyone can see. We need people to be able to find us! So is this blog, of course, and our Facebook groups.

The big changes are to the family tree sites. The My Heritage site is now completely private. The photos were already private but it was a pain having updates on the home page showing who added what, birthdays, tagged photos etc. If you are logged in you can see all of this. In fact you won't notice any difference.

Anyone who is not a member will not see any updates or photos and WILL NOT be able to see the tree. The page they get to when they type in www.horswillfamilytree.com will invite them to look at Horswill Family Photos to see who we are and they can then ask to be members of the My Heritage site. You can also invite members to the site yourself through the invitation system.

If you haven't logged in for a while take a look - there are hundreds of photos and digital scrapbooks on there and the tree is growing.

I paid the price-of-a-small-country fee to upgrade the My Heritage site so you can upload as many full resolution photos as you like and you can also download full resolution photos. They will download as a zipped file. Just ask if you don't know what to do with that! I'll put full instructions on the main site but basically to ADD photos:

1) Go into the photos/videos section.
2) Click on Add Photos
3) BEFORE you find your photos REFRESH the page and make sure you can see a line at the bottom asking you which album you want to put them in (it also gives you the choice of starting a new album).
4) Find your photos on your computer and upload them.

Please do NOT add photos from Facebook. You should never let sites talk to each other anyway but Facebook photos are completely useless for our project as they're very low resolution. I suggest you don't upload them from Flickr either. I hit that button and stopped it just in time as it was about to put the 20,000 photos I have on Flick onto the MH site!

Need to know more about resolution? Click HERE.

You can always send me a disc or actual photos!

Now to Ancestry ...

Scroll down a couple of posts and you'll see we've been the victim of Ancestor Rustling. This is what the genealogy geeks call it when someone adds your ancestor to their tree even though they're not related - and then keeps taking more and more ancestors and all the photos. In this case the ancestors were Nanny Hills' family and the photos inlcuded on I have copyright on as I restored it. I have a legal battle going on with Ancestry US office. Long and stupid story .... Basically genealogy has its share of morons, as does any hobby.

So the Ancestry tree is now private. If you've had an invitation to look at it you can, of course, still look at it. Nothing has changed. If you want to see it just let me have your email address (or Ancestry name if you are a member) and I'll invite you. There are no photos or copies of documents on Ancestry, they are all on My Heritage. NOTE you don't get to add to the tree on Ancestry unless you're an experienced genealogist. Please go to the My Heritage site to add people to the tree.

Now for some good news! I managed to find a way to hide the flash burn on the photo of George Horswill's family. The photo we have is a photo of the framed one when it was hanging on the wall. George was born in Bigbury in 1851 and is my great grandfather. My Grandad, Tom Horswill, is in the front row on the left.

Click on the small image in the right hand column of this blog and it will take you to a (random) gallery of scrapbook layouts)

Christmas 2010 Newsletter

Here's the newsletter (mostly) that's gone in the Christmas Cards:

THE FAMILY TREE AND PHOTO ARCHIVE PROJECT

Horswill, Hills, Laverick, Wake, Mangan, Tidder, Clack and many more!

Christmas 2010 News

[See last page for list of our websites]

How it started

Dad and I started looking at the family tree back in the 1980s. We even had our honeymoon (all six of us, it was one of the competition wins) a few miles from Bigbury in South Devon where the Horswills come from. We had a lot of information and, of course, Dad remembered some of his great aunts and uncles and stories passed down but we soon came up against the Genealogy Police, “That woman from Shropshire” as Dad and Auntie Mildred referred to her. I still have their letters! She kept telling us we had it all wrong so we gave up.

I was pleased when I found out we didn’t have it all wrong but sad too because Dad would have enjoyed the progress we’ve made now.

Much of that is down to the internet and millions of public records transcribed onto computers which we didn’t have back then. Now we have Ancestry and other sites and can create the tree online. It’s also easy to meet other people working on a connected tree and join them up. It’s a good way to meet new cousins. We’ve gone back to the 1600s with most branches of the family. Uncle Chick’s (Charles Docwra) tree does back to about 1200!

Horswill Family

We’ve traced the families of Dad’s great aunts Lizzie Jane and Edith and his great uncles Harry and Fred. The cousins are on Facebook if you’d like to meet them.

[omitted for privacy]

Ash/ Hannaford

George Horswill (b1851 in Bigbury) married Elizabeth Ann Ash from Cornwall. I’ve found hundreds of Ash relatives and we have two photos of her. The family moved to Durham in about 1870 and I always felt sorry for her being taken away from her family but in fact it was her family who moved. All twelve of them. Several connected families moved for the coal mining. The Geatches family, with whom we have a few marriages, moved to the US.

I’ve recently hooked up with some Ash cousins researching the tree and the Hannafords have dozens of people working on it.

Horswill II and Elsdon Family

My great great grandfather, Roger Horswill b.1829 married twice. I’m from his first marriage and there’s another branch of Horswills from his second. I met Wilson Horswill in London many years ago, It turns out he was at school with Grandad! Thanks to Lynne Horswill for unearthing old school records. So Dad did remember correctly that there was another branch of the family.

Here’s what it says in the school records:

Thomas Horswill [Grandad] born 31/3/1893 parent George,lived at 13 Neal Street Annfield Plain, left school on 1906

Henry [Harry] Horswill born 9/6/1895 parent George,lived at 13 Neal Street Annfield Plain left school 1908 to work in pit

Frederick Horswill born 4/3/1897 parent George, lived at 10 St Aidens Crescent, Annfield Plain left school 1911 to work in pit

Moses Wilson Horswill born 21/8/1923 parent William, lived at 21 Headly terr Annfield Plain left school 1912 (returned to Southmoor)

William Horswill born 13/11/1904 parent William,lived at 21 Headly Terr Annfield Plain left school 1912 (returned to Southmoor)

Robert Horswill born 12/5/1921 parent Robert, lived at 15 Lanley Terr Annfield Plain left school 1921 (moved to Doncaster)

John Horswill born .......... parent Thomas,lived at 37 Durham Road Annfield Plain left school 1936

That side of the family has a foundling in it. Cuthbert Elsdon was left at St Cuthbert’s Church in Elsdon, hence his name. And his tree stops there since we can’t go any further back. You can search for him in the online trees. He was born in 1650.

Hills/Williams Family

Due to Mum’s memory for names, as in “I remember an Aunt Louisa and an Ada”, we managed to find Grandad’s (Joe Hills) family and another second cousin also researching the tree. This branch is where you can find a Hezekiah!

Progress was slow on the Hills side. We had a photo of Nanny and Grandad Hills on their wedding day. Mum said Nan was 19 when she got married and they got married in 1914, as many people did. So we based Nan’s date of birth accordingly. And we couldn’t find her. We couldn’t find her because she got married aged 19 in 1916, not 1914.

We also couldn’t find her mother Bessie and grandmother Bess. It turns out they were both called Mary Ann. Officially that is, they could well have been called Bess by people who knew them. The 1911 census helps because you see children living in the house who were alive in living memory. This is how we found Mary Ann, living in the same house as Aunt Kate, Uncle Bob, Nan etc

We also went wrong with Nan’s father because we thought he was a Francis (and Uncle Frank was named after him). He was actually Henry James Williams, although he might have been called Frank. People were often called something quite different from their original name which can really throw you. He was from Southampton so I’ve gone back to my roots. I’ve even walked down the street where they lived in 1860. I’ve gone back to the 1800s with that branch. I’m going to find a few graves when I have time and the weather is better.

I spent a long time looking for Nan’s sister, the missing Letty. Some months into the search Mum remembered that she married a Saxby. I put this into the Ancestry records and there was Charles Saxby married to Mary Victoria, daughter of Henry James Williams. The corroboration was their daughter Maud. All in Mum’s memory. Fortunately the Saxby family are very keen on genealogy so we have more people to put in there later. I’ve only just joined up with their tree.

The story was that Letty went off with a married man and later married him. There is no earlier marriage for Charles Saxby. I checked with his family. She was estranged from the family and yet her father was at the reading of the banns and probably therefore at the wedding. Very strange!

It’s fascinating stuff. There are some loud “Yes!” moments at 3am when the dots join up.

John’s Family: Mangan, Tidder, Hipson, Clack

I used Bill Blamire’s tree to start us off and soon joined up with some keen researchers in the Mangan and Clack families so it’s a big tree with nearly 600 people. There’s the same confusion with names and “she was Jewish, you know” (No, she wasn’t, I have the baptism records …. where do people get these ideas?) but Maureen’s memory is invaluable.

The more facts you find, the more people remember. It really is essential to talk to the older members of your family while they’re still here and not make any assumptions. I found one of Maureen’s relatives in prison on a census and dismissed it as the wrong one then the next day she asked me if I’d found the one in prison!

Photo Archive Project

This is making slow progress as no-one gives me any photos! Photos put onto Facebook are amusing but useless as far as the archive project goes because the resolution is too low. You can read long essays about this on the Horswill Family Photos site. That site needs tidying up but please take a look as it gives full instructions about what to do with photos.

I think I’ll go mad if anyone else tells me they have a box of old photos. The box needs to be in my house or my computer!

Our Websites:

Main site: www.horswillfamilyphotos.com This is where we attempt to pull the project together and the links page takes you to the other sites, including the blog.

Private photo upload site: www.horswillfamily.com You will need to ask for membership of this site (which I’ll appove of course). If you are a member of Ancestry use your Ancestry log in. You can also see the Ancestry trees from this site without paying Ancestry membership fees.

You can load high resolution photos onto this site and it’s private. Only people I know to be family are allowed in. Please see the instructions on the main site. It’s essential that you put photos into an album when you upload them otherwise it takes me hours to move them. You can also download any photos you want to keep.


My Heritage: www.horswillfamilytree.com Anyone can join in on this site. You can add people, information, photos etc. and create charts and celebrity lookalikes and send messages to each other. Please join in!

Ancestry Trees: If you’re a member of Ancestry you can see our trees. Username is horswillfamily and the trees are:

Horswill and Hills Families
Mangan Family Tree

We have a blog and two Facebook groups all linked from www.horswillfamilyphotos.com. Come along and meet some cousins!

You can help this project along by:

1) Writing down any family stories you remember. Who married who, where did they live etc

2) Sending photos!

There is lots to do in 2011!