Why October is such a Great Month for Family History

So with Michaelmas over, the first day of Autumn is upon us along with its familiar chill, the beauty of the changing leaves on the trees to a golden rich warm glow, the darker nights, and the excitement of Halloween being on its way. Why else would October be such a great month?

For genealogists, there’s another reason: October is also National Family History Month. Now, this may only be official in the United States and not in the UK, I'm not sure, but I'm joining in because I think it's a great idea, and therefore giving it a mention in my blog because I can!

With National Family History Month, there is no better time than now to ignite an interest in finding out about your own ancestors and to discover who they were. This event encourages you to delve into your past and to find the ancestors whose paths met to make you who you are today.

With lots of new records being added to the online databases regularly, it really is an interest that you can engross yourself in from your own armchair, especially over the long winter nights when it’s nice to just curl up with a hot drink in front of the fire. But beware, this comes with a warning, you could get stuck there all night, every night, as once you get sucked in, you can’t leave it alone!

Family History research no longer stops at simply finding how far back you can go with a surname, there is so much more to it and so many records to help you to uncover and understand how each of your ancestors lived, bringing their stories to life and understanding what qualities and traits you may have passed on to you from them.

Mum always told me how her Grandfather Thomas B Greatrex of Barry was a Champion Quoits Player for the National Wales team.

I researched this and found that his name is mentioned in many of the articles detailing records of games, in particular where Wales played England in the early 1900s.

However, what a further treat to uncover this photograph of him, complete with a trophy, and in his Quoits attire which I would never have realised before nor probably have been interested in had I not begun my research.

Perhaps you have stories and myths passed down through family generations that haven’t been proven. Wouldn't it be fabulous to explore those further and uncover what they were really about, or as the case may be, weren't.... were they merely a fantasy of one of our older generation's minds that had been invented solely due to wishful thinking?

My Grandma who was born in Barry in Wales always claimed her father's family were not from Wales but from Derbyshire, and the mention of Matlock was often referred to. When I began my research, I followed her paternal line for several years, and after going back as far as the 1770s to my Great x 5 Grandparents, I found them all still firmly located in Wales.

Burial records helped me to locate their graves in a South Glamorgan churchyard where amazingly most are still standing to this day and are still legible, including the grave of my above-mentioned 5 x Great Grandparents. We were surprised we had never been taken here by my Grandma, but maybe she didn't even know of its existence, and neither would we if I hadn't found these valuable records.

By this time my Grandma had passed away and was no longer here to ask, but I often joked with Mum about how family myths aren’t always true, and how I wondered who made that Derby one up to trick us all….

Eventually, I hit a brick wall and couldn’t find any trace of my Gx5 Grandparents' births, nor some of the births of their eldest children beyond 1770. This was back in the day when nothing was online and I had to trawl through archives and make endless records office visits to Wales, which was challenging when working in a full-time job. After several years, I parked that family line and moved on to my maternal line for a break, completely dismissing the Derby link.

This brick wall remained firmly in place until Autumn 1998, when the LDS British Vital Records Index, which was a 5 CD set, was launched containing nearly five million names from parish registers, civil registration, and other record collections from the UK (a genealogist’s dream).

How wrong I was to assume that my Grandma's facts were incorrect when of course she was right all along...she was a wise old soul and how could I have ever doubted her!

I put in my Gx5 grandparents’ names, this time searching the whole of the UK and not just restricting it to Wales, and guess where they popped up - you guessed it, in Derby, together with the births of all their children missing prior to 1770.

They had moved from Derby to Wales - why or exactly when I don’t know, that’s still a puzzle yet to solve. My Gx5 Grandfather was a farmer in Derby, and then most of his children ended up farming in Wales, but to travel from Derby to Llangenni in Brecon in the late 1700s, with eight young children must have been quite a task.

But what a find - my brick wall had finally crumbled!

That then allowed me to go back as far as 1600, still in Derby, where I and a few of my relatives who also research our family, have been stuck on another brick wall ever since, which one day I will break down if it kills me! We also haven’t found the Matlock link, but I’m sure it’s there somewhere, waiting to be discovered!

Another thing Grandma had shared was that we were also of French descent (so not just Derby!), that we came over with William the Conqueror, and that the name De Mortimer is in our ancestry somewhere. I’m not having as much luck proving these ones but I am hopeful that one day, my searching will pay off and again my wise old Grandma will be proved right.

So even if you have tried in the past and failed to find anything, don’t give up. There are new records being found and added to online databases, and something that wasn’t there before maybe there now.

If you are interested in finding out more about your family history and you’d like to kickstart your research during National Family History Month but don’t know where to start, why not contact me for a free consultation to see if I can help, either by giving you guidance, or carrying out research on your behalf.

Thank you for reading my article!

Alison Stephens, 1st October 2021