“What’s in a name?” How to trace your Tudor family history (part 3)

Sir Thomas More and his family, painted in 1592.

Having looked at how to begin researching your family history in part 1 and introducing parish registers in part 2, in this final post in our series on tracing your Tudor ancestors we will focus on the problems you may encounter along the way and how to overcome them. We will also briefly touch on some other sources for Tudor family history which will take you beyond parish registers.

 

Potential problems and troubleshooting

There are a number of reasons why you may struggle to trace your Tudor ancestors using parish registers, for example:

• The registers in which they were recorded may not have been digitised or indexed yet, or they may not have survived at all
• They may have been poorly indexed or transcribed
• Details may have been recorded in unexpected ways (e.g. Latinised spellings like ‘Johannes’ instead of ‘John’)
• The information they contain could be too sparse, making ancestors with common names (e.g. ‘Smith) hard to identify with certainty
• Your ancestors may have practised a non-Anglican faith and gone unrecorded in parish registers, or they could have been living in another country at that time

 

Fortunately there are a number of tricks which can help increase your chances of success, many of which are discussed in Tracing your ancestors' parish records : a guide for family and local historians (2014) by Stuart A. Raymond. Some common techniques include:

 

• Using alternate spellings (e.g. Samuel, Sam, Saml) and wildcards (e.g. ‘sam*’, ‘sam*l’) to make sure your results include all possible name variants and misspellings
• Removing their surname from your search altogether, as this is the part of their entry most likely to have been misread by the transcriber
• Broadening your search by avoiding precise ages, places and addresses (e.g. ‘Kent’ rather than ‘Lewisham’) and checking maps for neighbouring parishes where your ancestors may have moved (see The Phillimore atlas and index of parish registers (1984) by Cecil R. Humphery-Smith)
• Searching another website like FamilySearch and FreeReg, as not every site will have transcribed the registers in exactly the same way
• Considering where else your ancestors could have been, for example if they were Jewish or Roman Catholics they would probably not have attended Anglican churches, and if they came from overseas they might not have been in England at all (the website England’s Immigrants contains a useful database of 64,000 people known to have emigrated to England between 1350 and 1600)

 Further research

If you are fortunate enough to succeed in tracing a branch of your family back to Tudor times there are a wide range of other sources you can use to flesh out their stories, such as manorial records, wills, and taxation records. The National Archives’ website has a helpful guide to Medieval and early modern family history which provides a good introduction to these, many of which can be browsed via their Discovery catalogue.

If you would like to learn more about researching Tudor family history most of the books in this guide are available through Lewisham Libraries and can be reserved through our online catalogue. Reference copies of the rest are held by Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre. If you have any difficulty finding what you are looking for please ask a member of staff and we will glad to help.

Happy hunting!

 

A sixteenth century hawking party with water spaniels.