Tag: Findmypast

Pursuing the Parkfield

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Findmypast announces new additions to their record collections every Friday. This past Friday (January 13th) brought an unexpected surprise – a newspaper titled Lloyd’s List.

Lloyd’s List is one of the world’s oldest continuously running journals, having provided weekly shipping news in London as early as 1734. Known simply as The List, it was begun by the proprietor of Lloyd’s Coffee House in the City of London, England as a reliable and concise source of information for the merchants’ agents and insurance underwriters who met regularly in his establishment in Lombard Street to negotiate insurance coverage for trading vessels.[1]

I decided this would be a good opportunity to see if I could find the ship Parkfield that carried my third great grandfather Thomas and his family from England to America in 1846.

I mentioned the Parkfield in “From England to Indiana, Part 3.” I knew the ship’s name from this biography of Sylvester Casbon, published in 1912. [2]

Detail Sylvester bio H of Porter Co 1912
(Click on image to enlarge)

The information in this account gives the year incorrectly as 1847. This is not surprising considering that the biography was published 66 years after the fact.

I have previously searched the internet for information about the Parkfield, without success. Now, with the new Lloyd’s List archive on Findmypast, I had success right away – a modest one, I’ll admit. This is it.[3]

Parkfield Lloyds list 20 Apr 1846
Detail of Lloyd’s List, April 20, 1846, showing sailing dates, and ports of arrival and departure.
(Click on image to enlarge) Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk). 

This small notice shows that the Parkfield departed Southampton, bound for Quebec, on April 18, 1846.

Emboldened by my success, I did some more searching in the Findmypast British Newspaper Archive and located this advertisement in the Hampshire Advertiser of March 28, 1846.

Parkfield ad 28Mar1846 Hampshire Advertiser
“Shipping. Emigration to Canada,” The (Southampton) Hampshire (U.K.) Advertiser, vol. 23, no. 1181, p. 1, col. 1, 28 Mar 1846; online images, British Newspaper Archive—Findmypast (http://search.findmypast.com/search/british-newspapers : accessed 13 January 2017)
(Click on image to enlarge) Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk). 

EMIGRATION TO CANADA.—fine ship PARKFIELD, of 700 Tons burden, Captain Smith, will embark Passengers in the Southampton Docks, on Thursday, the 16th of April.
This Ship has been employed regularly in the East India Passenger trade, and has a roomy poop and other very superior accommodations for all classes of passengers, and will carry an experienced Surgeon.

These two newspaper items did not add a lot to what I already knew, but they validate my other sources and tell us a little more about the ship. I think the description of the ship as a “Canadian Lumber Boat” in Sylvester Casbon’s biography is probably inaccurate, given the fact that it was “employed regularly in the East India Passenger trade.”

The one item I would most like to have concerning Thomas Casbon’s voyage is a copy of the Parkfield’s passenger manifest. Unfortunately, it still eludes me!

As a postscript, I decided to check Lloyd’s List for the ship taken by Thomas’ brother James in 1870. As I reported in “James Casbon of Meldreth, England and Porter County, Indiana,” James arrived in New York from Liverpool, England, on December 27, 1870, on the ship Great Western. Armed with this information, it was easy to find the record of the Great Western’s departure from Liverpool on November 11, 1870.[4]

Ship Great Western depart LPool 11 Nov 1870
(Click on image to enlarge) Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk). 

I was able to learn a little more about the Great Western. There were several ships of that name in the 1800s. The most famous was the Great Western of 1837, the first steamship designed for transatlantic travel. This ship carried passengers to New York for many years, and was taken out of service in 1856.[5] Another Great Western was built in 1872, and was wrecked on Long Island in 1876.[6] Based on their dates of operation, neither one of these could have been the ship taken by James Casbon in 1870. That ship was almost certainly The Great Western of the Black Ball Line, built 1851 in New York. The Black Ball line was a well-known passenger company of the 19th century. It continued to operate into the 1880s. Unlike its namesakes, this Great Western was a sailing ship, not a steamship.[7]

[1] Cox, Alex (12 Jan 2017), “Findmypast Friday”. Findmypast Blog (https://blog.findmypast.com/findmypast-friday-2190497688.html : accessed January 15 2017).
[2] History of Porter County, Indiana: A Narrative Account of its Historical Progress, its People and its Principal Interests (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1912), v.2, pp. 482-3; digital images, Hathi Trust Digital Library (https://catalog.hathitrust.org : accessed 20 August 2016).
[3] Lloyd’s List (London), No. 10,014, p. 1, col. 3, 20 April 1846, Parkfield sailing, 18 Apr 1846; online images, Findmypast (http://search.findmypast.com/search/british-newspapers : accessed 13 January 2017), British Newspapers 1710-1953.
[4] “Home Ports,” Lloyd’s List (London), No. 17,651, p. 4, col. 7, 12 Nov 1870, Great Western sailing, 11 Nov 1870; Findmypast (http://search.findmypast.com/search/british-newspapers : accessed 13 January 2017), British Newspapers 1710-1953.
[5] “Ship Descriptions–G…Great Western 1837,” The Ships List (http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/descriptions/ShipsG.shtml : accessed 14 January 2017)
[6] “Ship Descriptions–G…Great Western 1872,” The Ships List.
[7] “Black Ball Line (trans-Atlantic packet),” Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org : accessed 15 January 2017), rev 13:42, 3 Nov 16.

Without a Hitch

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What would you say is this first name?

Hitch

Don’t feel bad if you don’t know. One of the major online genealogy organizations didn’t know either. Here’s a screen shot of how the record was transcribed in FamilySearch.

Jitel screen capture
https://familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&query=%2Bgivenname%3Ajitel~%20%2Bsurname%3Acasbon~ : accessed 11 January 2017.
(Click on image to enlarge)

Did you think the name was “Jitel”?

So, what is FamilySearch? Here’s what the entry in Wikipedia says:

FamilySearch is a genealogy organization operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was previously known as the Genealogical Society of Utah (or “GSU”) and is the largest genealogy organization in the world. FamilySearch maintains a collection of records, resources, and services designed to help people learn more about their family history. FamilySearch gathers, preserves, and shares genealogical records worldwide. It offers free access to its resources and service online at FamilySearch.org.[1]

FamilySearch is the website I used the most for genealogy research. It’s easy to use, has millions of records, and it’s free. I also have a paid subscription to Findmypast, and I use a version of Ancestry at my local library. According to one source, as of January 1, 2017, FamilySearch had 2,180 historical record collections online containing 1.2 billion searchable documents and 5.57 billion searchable names; Ancestry had 32,795 databases with over 19 billion records; and Findmypast had 2,049 databases with over 2.0 billion records.[2] In addition, there are many other companies and organizations that provide online genealogy data, either for free or by paid subscription.

Where and how do these genealogy websites get their data? They purchase or borrow it from archives and repositories. These data sources exist at the national, state, and local levels. Some belong to governments, some belong to private organizations. In the case of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they have copied and microfilmed vast quantities of records and stored them in a massive vault dug into the side of a mountain.

Most if not all of these archives consist of paper records. In order to make them available online the information in them has to be converted to searchable digital information. The process for doing this is referred to as indexing. At a minimum, indexing requires someone to transcribe the data from individual records and enter them into a database. Most often the records are scanned or photographed so that a digital image is created. Then someone transcribes the information into a database.

Records that are typed or printed might be scanned with optical character recognition (OCR) software. But OCR is not able to read handwritten records, so they must be transcribed by hand. FamilySearch relies on volunteers to do their indexing. I’ve done some indexing for FamilySearch. It can be challenging trying to read older styles of handwriting. Often the records are badly damaged from water, fire, sunlight, age, insects, etc.

Ancestry sends much of their data to other non-English speaking countries for transcription. Although they have good quality control mechanisms in place, you can see where errors might arise when non-native speakers try to interpret handwriting.

I’ve gone into this rather detailed explanation to try to make a couple points: 1) online genealogy databases are only as good as the quality of the indexing. This is not a criticism of the online providers – they provide a wonderful service and have made research much easier than the days when you had to visit the actual data repositories for research. 2) There is no substitute for being able to view the actual record, or at least a digital image of the record.

Which brings me back to the entry for “Jitel” Casbon. I originally found this entry when I was using FamilySearch to find descendants of James Casbon (1806-1871), son of James (“James Casbon of Meldreth (~1772-1833)”). This particular transcription is contained in a database called “England and Wales Non-Conformist Record Indexes (RG4-8), 1588-1977.” The index was “created by The National Archives in London as an online access to digital images created from the original records.”[3] Whoever transcribed the records for The National Archives came up with the name “Jitel.”

What is a nonconformist? In England, these are considered to be “people who did not belong to the established church,” i.e., the Church of England.[4] More specifically, in these records, nonconformists are members of other non-Anglican protestant denominations. “Jitel’s” parents (James and Ann) were nonconformists.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the FamilySearch entry did not have access to an image of the actual record. At the time, this was the only information I had, so I entered “Jitel” into my genealogy software program, hoping to get access to the actual record someday.

That day came this week, when I repeated my search in Findmypast, looking for anyone with the surname Casbon born between 1826 and 1830. It turns out that Findmypast has a collection named “England & Wales Non-Conformist Births and Baptisms.” Unlike FamilySearch, this collection includes digital images of the actual records from the National Archives. Here’s the record that turned up in my search.[5]

Hitch Casbon birth baptism detail
(Click on image to enlarge)

Also unlike FamilySearch, whoever indexed the record for Findmypast correctly transcribed the first name as “Hitch.” Can you see it?

Because of the handwriting, I can also see how the indexer for FamilySearch would have interpreted the first part of the “H” as a “J,” and the “ch” as “el.” The second part of the “H” looks like a small “l” to me. I might have transcribed it as “Jlitel.”

What kind of a name is “Hitch”? Well, it turns out that the child’s full name was Alfred Hitch Casbon. Hitch was his middle name. His mother’s maiden name was Ann Hitch. It was common at the time to use a family surname as a middle name. It was also common to use middle names or nicknames when registering births.

Of course, once I had access to the original record, and knowing the mother’s maiden name, it was easy to recognize the word “Hitch.” But without that information, it’s easy to see how a transcriber could make a mistake.

Another mystery solved. I’ll have more information about Alfred Hitch Casbon in a future post.

[1] Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org : accessed 10 January 2017), “FamilySearch,” rev.14:26, 29 December 2016.
[2] Randall J. Seaver, “Genealogy Industry Benchmark Numbers for 1 January 2017,” Genea-Musings, 1 January 2017 (http://www.geneamusings.com/2017/01/genealogy-industry-benchmark-numbers.html : accessed 10 January 2017, items 1, 2, and 9.
[3] FamilySearch Wiki, (https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/England_and_Wales_Nonconformist_Record_Indexes_(RGA_4-8)_,1588-1977_(FamilySearch_Historical_Records) : accessed January 12 2017); “England And Wales Nonconformist Record Indexes (RGA 4-8) ,1588-1977,” rev. 13:00, 26 Oct 2016.
[4] “Nonconformists” (2017), The National Archives (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/nonconformists : accessed 12 January 2017).
[5] “England & Wales Non-Conformist Births and Baptisms”, transcriptions and images, find my past (http://findmypast.com : accessed 10 January 2017), entry for Hitch Casbon; citing The National Archives (U.K.) reference RG4/155.