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!

No Evidence v. Evidence and A Cheeky So-and-So

Last week I was thrilled to find - so I thought - another great aunt. We put her photo on our Facebook group HERE and remarked on how much she looked like Nan. Well, she does indeed look like Nan but she's nothing to do with our family. Why did I think she was? Because an Ancestry member had copied chunks form our tree onto theirs - including photos without asking permission - and added our great grandparents as her parents.

I sent two messages with family info to the tree owner. He ignored me.

Today I found the mysterious Letty. This was Nan's sister who was apparently shunned by the family. Nice. Mum had remembered before that she had two daughters, one named Maud who was older than Mum. Today she remembered that Letty had married a man named Saxby. I put the name Saxby in the tree and did a few searches and found that Mary Victoria Williams (not Letty - I wish they wouldn't mess with people's names) had married Charles Eli Saxby. They had two daughters Maud and Lilian.

The problem is Mary Victoria was born in 1899 and so was Mary Frances. You don't have two daughters six months apart with the same name!

I searched for Mary Frances and couldn't find any documents. On the other hand there are several references to Mary Victoria. You can see them on our Ancestry tree if you log in to www.horswillfamily.comm our private site. So Mary Victoria wins today's prize of being my great aunt. Or grand aunt as Ancestry would have it.

So I clicked on the name of the other tree owner to contact him. He's decided he doesn't want to be contacted by anyone and he's made his tree private. Charming! Let's hope he enjoys borrowing our ancestors and their photos or - here's a suggestion - maybe he'd like to do his own research and not be so rude as to ignore contact from other members. I really think Ancestry should prevent those with private trees copying the information from anyone.

I've written to a couple of members who have Letty in their tree so we'll see what happens next.

Not Just Ancestors

It's four years ago tomorrow that Dad died. I'm writing this today because someone is about to take the back off my computer ...

The other day I had a note from an Nth cousin about the Ash family. My great grandmother was Elizabeth Ann Ash and she married George Horswill (b1851). There's a photo of her below in an earlier post. I'd always thought she must have missed her family when they moved to the north east but that wasn't the case. Her entire family (she was one of 12 children) moved to Durham. No doubt entire villages moved for the work. Dad always thought they would have heard about the coal mining opportunities as the ships passed through Plymouth and indeed that's how they would have travelled. That's another research line there in the ships' passenger records. My great great grandfather Roger Horswill went back to Plymouth to find his second wife. ie after his first wife had died, not a Mormon thing!

It was a revelation to me that the Ash family had moved to Durham. I immediately thought "I must tell Dad". It's amazing how you forget people are gone.

To many the family tree research looks dull and boring and getting people to join in is like pulling teeth. This is a shame because in another 20 years the people who can't be bothered will have their grandhildren asking "Nana, why don't we have a family tree?" Duh ....

A family tree is more than a list of dead people. It connects you to your ancestors. Not just ancestors - these people are your family and you are who you are because of them. My cousins in Co Durham live there because the family made a momentous decision to moved 500 miles 140 years ago. Finding out more and more brings me closer to Dad as if he's still here.

It's not just dead ancestors either. I've found lots of second, third and "we're sill working on it" cousins, many of them in our Facebook group if you'd like to meet them too. I found a fifth cousins three times removed of John's who worked with my second cousin. Small world ... We all pool research and find whole branches of family this way.

Dad would absolutely love all the work we're doing on the family tree. I wish we could have done it years ago so it could have joined in but the online research methods have really only come into play in the last few years.

So let's do it - join us on the My Heritage tree now: www.horswillfamilytree.com and join our Facebook group. All the links are on www.horswillfamilyphotos.com

Here's a nice pic of Dad:

Royal Heritage? No Thanks!

I cannot abide the "Who Do You Think You Are?" programme. It's pap TV designed to appeal to the ignorant masses. Well, no surprise there, that's what all TV is about!

They make it look ridiculously easy to find your ancestors. Of course it's easy when the professional genealogists do it for you and have access to records not available to the general public. All you have to do it turn up and say "That's fascinating!" But then a film of someone spending hours searching through the census records would not make good TV.

The programme seems to think you are only worthy if you have some foreign or royal connection. My family do not have foreign connections other that the fact that a group went to the USA to find work in the mining industry and in recent years people have moved about the globe as they tend to do. We've been in Devon (Horswills) and South East England (Hills) for hundreds of years.

We have no royal connections. We have some interesting connections (Thomas Hardy, Lord Nuffield, Titanic Survivor Alfred Horswill - more about them later) and a famous footballer (Micky Horswill) but nothing Royal. So no idle rich who have contributed nothing to society. Instead we have hundreds of years of tough manual labour. Women in service to those idle rich at the age of 12. Men - well, boys - at the coal face at 13. There was no pension scheme. They spent their whole life down the mines and that life was often a short one. My great grandfather (Charles Ormond Laverick) died in a coal mine in his forties.

The websites, blogs and Facebook pages of the genealogy companies are full of WDYTYA. I can see why they do it. The marketing teams have to be "out there" with whatever is current discussion. Their websites and blogs need to come up in searches constantly and the sad fact is people not only watch the programme but also want to read about it. This week's discussion mostly consists of inane comments about how wonderful Alexander Armstrong is because his family has royal links. Puhleeeeeeze.... who cares? We grovelled to the monarchy hundreds of years ago. Hello!! We don't do that now! He even seems to be a funnier comedian which is great PR...

We should be proud of the hard work done by our ancestors, not proud of the silver spoons.

Look who I found in the 1911 Census ...

You can make quantum leaps in your family tree with the 1911 Census. That's IF you know what to look for. I hadn't managed to find any of the Williams family (maternal great grandparents) in ANY census so it didn't look good for the 1911 Census.

I used Find My Past to look them up. You can buy credits rather than a subscription which suits me as I don't like too much going out of my bank account when not much goes in. Whilst normally it's good to have more information, with their search system sometimes it's worth just putting in names and a year of birth. It doesn't cost anything to view the overall list.

So, starting with what we know ... I put in Nan's and Uncle Arthur's names and date of birth then clicked to see the household. There was Aunt Kate too so I had the right household BUT I could see the reason I couldn't find them before. Their parents were not Francis and Elizabeth Williams but Henry James and Mary Ann Williams. Digging further back found the censuses showing they were both born in Southampton, which we knew so that was more confirmation. It's back to my roots for me then!

Mum knew her grandmother as Bessie, not Mary. Could this be because her mother was Bess? A lot of families called their children by different names, or a variation. John was "named after Bill". Don't go there ... the name changing in the Mangan family gets ridiculous. George Edward Jubilee Mangan was always known as Sam for another daft example.

For further confirmation of the Williams family I got on to Mum again. When I asked her a few months ago she couldn't remember the names of Nan's older siblings and thought the family had lost touch. I read out the names. I don't always do that as you need to get corroboration without giving the relative any clues but there was nothing to lose here. "I remember George, he worked with his Dad in the brewery. What do you call the people who make the barrels?" A cooper!! And there they are on the census under occupation: Cooper.

If you're a member of the family and you'd like to see full details on the Ancestry tree please join the private site at www.horswillfamily.com and you'll see it on there. Ancestry members: the tree is called Horswill and Hills Families.

The 1911 Census also provided some interesting details of John's family on his Mum's side. I found a John Hipson (John's great grandfather) who was in prison. The only John Hipson in London. I thought I'd better keep quiet about it until Maureen said "Did she find the one who was always in and out of prison?" Mind you, in those days you would go to prison for an offence that wouldn't even get you an ASBO today.

As for the Horswills - I found out what happened to Lizzie Jane. Details on the private site later.

For those interested in the 1991 Census we have a new Facebook group HERE.

I found Grandad Hills and Great Great Grandad Ash!

Yesterday was Dad's birthday (he would have been 85). So it was a good day - I'd say propitious but probably can't spell it - to work on the family tree.

Joseph Hills 1888 - 1947

I'd spent months looking for my maternal grandfather Joe Hills. We knew when he died because Mum was 19 at the time. We knew how old he was when he died so we found his date of birth. However, he was nowhere to be seen in the censuses. Then the lightbulb came on. He was Hill in the censuses and various other documents, not Hills. It's the Horswill/Horswell problem all over again!

I dug and dug and came up with two possibilities for his family. Armed with a list of potential sisters I rang Mum to ask if she could remember any of her aunt's names. Previously she'd said she couldn't remember any (although she remembered he had sisters) because the family didn't keep in touch. She said "There was a Louie and an Ada ..." Yes!! Got him!

Here's the list of his siblings from Ancestry:



The good news is I found a new second cousin, Paul Ainsworth, and he's already joined our My Heritage site and our Facebook group. He is Johanna Hills' grandson. There's also a sad tale. Johanna, who was Ada's twin, died when she was about 36 leaving 4 young children. The two older children went to live with relatives and the younger ones went to a Barnardo's home. Life was very tough when a mother died young.

Now, the Horswill family ...

There's a clever print function in Ancestry which gives you a summary tree. More about various ways to print trees later. John has a really good summary with the whole page filled. I had annoying gaps in mine so I need to find more great great grandparents.

Geroge Horswill b1851 is my great grandfather. He married Elizabeth Ann Ash who was born in 1856 in Northill, Cornwall. Here's a photo of her:
How did we know her name? Because she was on the censuses. It stands to reason then that she must have been on the censuses, living with her parents, when she was a child. Fortunately she is shown as "Elizth Ann" on the 1861 census and not just Elizabeth so she was not hard to find. In some early family trees she is shown as Ann so the enumerator probably realised she had both names and entered both. You don't see this very often.

Her father was John Ash and her mother was Susan Hannaford. Luckily for us there are dozens of Ancestry members researching these families so I was able to find ancestors back to the 1600s.

All these new relatives will eventually be put on the My Heritage tree. Some are there already. If you want to see them now, along with all the evidence, go to our private site at www.HorswillFamily.com and you can see the full Ancestry tree (FREE!)

Cool names from this research:

We have a Hezekiah Webb on the Hills side and a Jemima Trengrove on the Horswill side.