searchmyancestry – Ruth A. Symes
Innovative approaches to understanding more about your family history
On censuses, many young Victorian girls pretended that they had already reached the age of 15 in order to have a better chance of obtaining work as domestic servants and to command better wages when they did so. Sidney Paget, the Boscombe Valley Mystery, Illustration of 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery', in The Adventures of Sherlock... Continue Reading →
Women of all classes fabricated their age on the nineteenth century censuses. The government report into the census of 1881 stated that many women ‘desirous of being thought younger than they really are, return themselves as under 25 or under 30 when their true age is considerably beyond these limits.’ Interestingly, there was also a... Continue Reading →
Can house names tell us anything about our family histories? When researching one of my ancestors, Charlie Terrell, on an online newspaper site, I was thrilled to find a brief reference to him from the 1930s when he was a witness to a car accident outside his house in Pontefract. To my delight, the report... Continue Reading →
searchmyancestry - Ruth A. Symes 