Dan Doyle: The Life and Death of a Wild Rover

My family has a lot of Daniel Doyles in it. It’s a tradition, or an old charter, or something. Each of them is fascinating in his own way but I choose one in particular to talk about here as he was famous in his time and still remembered today by a certain green side of Glasgow.

First, how is he related to me? My brother is Daniel Doyle, our father is Daniel Doyle, his father was Daniel Doyle, his father was Daniel Doyle, his father was Edward Doyle (how did that happen?), his father was Daniel . . . → Read More: Dan Doyle: The Life and Death of a Wild Rover

Ramble…

It’s been a while – two weeks is a long time in genealogy.

Firstly – Psychology 101.

When I first set up my family tree on www.ancestry.co.uk I created it as a “Private Tree”. At some point later, it got accidentally saved as a “Public Tree” and therefore available to the whole world to view. Not a problem in itself, apart from the fact that some annoying “feature” of the tree is that you cannot tell it specifically who is alive and therefore who should be marked as “Living” – the tree displayed all my grandfathers’ details despite the . . . → Read More: Ramble…

William Bird: Tailor

William Bird, my great great great grandfather, was a tailor born in Marylebone, London, in 1829 or thereabouts. In June 1856 he married Priscilla Coucher, in St Pancras’s Old Church. After the birth of four children (that I know of) he died in Q3 1882, aged “54″ according to the death register.

The William Bird who married Priscilla Coucher has around five or six user-submitted entries in the Family Tree section of www.ancestry.co.uk giving his birth year as 1835, and parents sometimes named as George Bird and Elizabeth Mary Cosham. And this is where it doesn’t quite add up. If . . . → Read More: William Bird: Tailor

Contact Us!

My husband and I write this blog because we want to remember what we did, where we went, and who we spoke to, to get our family tree(s) in order.

From trawling such sites as rootsweb, genforum, ancestryaid etc, I know that there are a lot of people out there interested in genealogy and desperate to gather information on ancestors. So far we haven’t put a full tree on the site (come on John!) but we know that this blog is getting hits and being read by people possibly descended from the very people we are writing about. If you . . . → Read More: Contact Us!

Handy Hint #2: A Census is not Primary evidence.

As a History graduate (only a Desmond though: I have no pretensions to rival Starkey) I was taught to differentiate between types or classes of evidence and quality thereof. When dealing with conflicting stories or facts it is helpful to understand the order of reliance or amount of trust you can or should place upon each item.

Primary evidence is, to me, irrefutable proof of an event, its nature, and hopefully timing. Although modern digital cameras and wizardry with graphics can produce “fake” reality by messing with pixels, in general it can be replied upon that “the camera never lies”. . . . → Read More: Handy Hint #2: A Census is not Primary evidence.