www.Geni.com

This site focuses on genealogy community building and making it possible to network with other Family Historians. There is a Free sign-on and they claim to have 50 million profiles, so I would think you are going to find some connections somewhere in that lot.

I set up a part family tree on this site today just to see how easy it was to navigate. At first it seemed OK, putting the first few relatives in, but there did not seem to be a straightforward way to add more than one sibling to a person. It is quite possible that I haven’t completely understood the system, so I shall try that again and see where that leads me.

You get blue boxes for men and pink boxes for women. Each box contains the words edit/tree/more. Arrows from the top lead you to enter parents, arrows from the bottom for children and to the side for siblings. Once you enter a sibling and their partner you seem to be virtually cut off from adding more siblings.

In the top line of boxes there is one marked Relatives, and this gives a list of all the people on your tree and their relationships to you, such as Gt. Grandparents, like 2 x Gt. or 8x Gt. etc.

The next box is statistics and you get a pie chart showing how many males and how many females you have entered. You can at any point upgrade from the FREE Geni.com information to paid versions. Once you have entered all the birth and death dates that you can, the programme will work out for you an estimated life expectancy.

The next section is for Timeline, and I have to be perfectly honest here, I couldn’t comment because I don’t have enough statistics entered yet, only just having started the tree for the benefit of this review.

Then comes a section for Photos, one for Videos and then the Profiles, in default your own comes up. You would have to request a specific person to get their profile. You can set up links to share your details with family and friends, then if they have viewed they can leave you a message in the guestbook.

For the profiles to be complete you really need to enter date details, however many details of this nature you have, to make the profiles more complete.

On the home page there is a small area on the left hand side which divides the number of people you have entered into family members, blood relatives and ancestors. You will be given notice of hot matches between your tree and some other person’s tree. I expect this will be similar to Genes Reunited. It will enumerate the most common surnames, married versus single people, countries of birth and much more.

There are many more options on this site, and I would need a lot more time to explore every section. For some you need quite a bit of information entered to give the programme something to work with, for instance statistics, they can’t work with just a couple of people. I only entered 26 people and I don’t think that was enough really, but I will enter more and see what happens then to the statistics.

All in all, I think this would be quite a useful site. I do have my family tree in various places at various stages. I have my most complete family tree on my own computer and contribute to the World Family Tree via my Family Tree Maker programme now and then.

Surnames were not used in Britain before the Norman Conquest. People were either known as ’son of’ or ‘daughter of’ or they had a nickname. The nickname could have something to do with a personal attribute, say they had a lame leg, or a big nose, or stooped, or had red hair – the list will be endless.

It was the Norman barons who, when they came to Britain, introduced the use of surnames. British people caught on to the idea, but they didn’t always stick to the first surname they chose. Gradually though, surnames were used more and they stuck.

It was a lot easier in the olden days because communities were much smaller and everyone knew everyone else so your personal name was enough, because everyone would know your parents as well, therefore ’son of’ would be sufficient for identification.

Perhaps a person would be known by their trade, Roger the fletcher, William the smith, and so on. You would eventually end up with Roger Fletcher, William Smith, Richard Redhead and so on.

Around the year 1400, most English families and even those from lowland Scotland had taken on hereditary surnames. People were still coming up with new surnames as immigrants came to Britain bringing in new names.

A lot of Scottish, Welsh and Irish names come from gaelic personal names so you need to keep this in mind when doing Scottish or Irish genealogy. The Welsh people took longer to adopt surnames, this followed Wales and England becoming united in 1536.

Family History and family tracing has been made more of a minefield by people and families changing their names in the past. There didn’t always need to be a legitimate reason, they would often do this purely on a whim. Although surnames are your main area of research when looking into your own family history, you need to be aware that the name could have been changed.

The spelling of your family names could have differed widely, mostly because way back not many people were educated enough to recognise if their name had been spelt differently. Standardisation of spelling names wasn’t thought of until the 19th century, and even now spelling mistakes can happen. Names cannot always be spelled phonetically, they might sound like one thing but be spelled quite differently. For instance, the personal name St.John is pronounced Sinjun, if you were not educated, how would you spell it?

Surnames which evolved from place names are probably the oldest to survive, and obviously they are more common, due to many people living in the same place. Even countries have provided surnames, take French, Fleming, Britten for instance.

You can have names from rivers – Surtees [on the Tees], Pickersgill [a stream containing pike], Fleet [an estuary or a stream]. Trees also provide many names, Leaf, Root, plus Elmes, Maples, Oakley, you get the picture.

Many old occupations also provided names, for instance Frobisher meant a refurbisher or cleaner of armour. Arkwrights were makers of arks or chests. Mason, Fisher, Thatcher and so on, all self-explanatory.

The study of names is absolutely endless, but if you are a committed family historian this is a very important facet of your study. Always keep an open mind though and be prepared for all sorts of weird and wonderful spellings of the name you are researching. Always take down any details you come across, even though you may think you have the wrong person because the spelling isn’t as you expected to find it.

Better to take down the information there and then, than to wish you had later on.

I wonder what we would do today if suddenly we were asked to pay a tax on windows in our homes? I don’t think we would take kindly to that at all.

This Window Tax was introduced in 1696 in the reign of King William III of England. The country needed money and people resented the idea of personal income tax, our ancestors felt that divulging their private income was a gross intrusion into their privacy. So the Window Tax seemed like a fairer way, the richest people usually having the largest houses and the most windows would pay the most tax. Seems fair to me.

Cottages were exempt anyway, but poorer people were also able to avoid paying this tax. The tax had to be paid by whoever occupied the house, not necessarily the owner.

A lot of other people avoided paying the tax by simply blocking up any windows which took their total over 6, the maximum allowed untaxed.
Even today you can see houses in England and Scotland with these blocked up windows, they are usually painted black with white lines making the area look like a window at first sight.

There were quite a few where I used to live in rural Lincolnshire, England,
and in most areas where there were old buildings.

Of course there was the other side of this, the super-rich people built houses with, or added to those they had already, many more windows, they put them here, there and everywhere so they could be seen to be paying more tax than the merely ‘rich’ people. Talk about one-upmanship!!

Unfortunately it seems that none of the lists of people paying the Window Tax have survived, if they had they would have been another great source for anyone tracing family trees to find family names of ancestors who had paid [or not paid] the tax.

I am sure you have heard the phrase ‘daylight robbery’ – it is thought that this stemmed from the Window Tax where people did believe they were being taxed on daylight.

If I ever chance upon any details of people paying this Window Tax I will certainly show the details here. Or, if anyone else knows is any have survived, I really would appreciate knowing about them.