Find Your Lineage
Researching Your Family Tree
Be prepared when thinking about researching your family tree, it is hard work and time consuming and can be costly if you want to do it properly. Even with the internet to help you it requires time and tenacity. BBC Programmes like ‘Who do you think you are’ are great viewing and have made many people interested in tracing their roots which is fantastic but they also make it look so easy, don’t be fooled. I am pretty sure there were numerous genealogists and researchers working their socks off in the background. I would not be surprised if they were not running around like headless chickens trying to meet the production schedule and also the budget was probably quite large too. It does make great entertainment though and I love it, then I would wouldn’t I.
I thought whilst I was thinking about writing this that I would provide a few tips for those of you interested and brave enough to take the plunge.
When researching a family tree it is always possible that you will find a few surprises some enlightening but some finds can come as a bit of a shock and some can make you sad. Be prepared to find out things, you may rather, not have found out about. Of course this may never happen but it is especially relevant if it affects still living members of the family. Always tell your family that you are going to start researching your family history. Your family can be a great source of information and anecdotes and they may even reveal a few secrets you did not know about if they are aware that you are going to start researching the family tree anyway.
Most Common finds: Criminal in the family, illegitimate child, bigamous marriages, army deserters.
Whilst the Internet has been an extraordinary aid to genealogical research and has come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years, this however is one of its joys and dangers for the researcher. It has the potential to be a source of huge errors and because of its worldwide reach, even just a little bit of incorrect information posted on an accessible website can quickly infect a number of research projects. While plenty of quality Internet sources exist for the genealogical researcher, it is always best to approach any source especially other people’s family trees with a big dose of scepticism. Remember, just because the information is found on the Internet does not make it accurate. There is no proof like source documentation.
This happened to my Father and me when we decided to publish over 30 years worth of hard manual research on our family history on the internet. To our surprise there were loads of family trees posted, on many internet sites relating to a Samuel Oxford born in Hadleigh, Suffolk, England in 1707 to Thomas Oxford and Sarah Lulpeck some claiming a relationship with the de Vere family, a titled English family and having many descendents alive and well living in the USA. Some of these sites even displaying the de Vere family crest.
It appeared that nearly all the best practice research advice offered on nearly all good internet sites had been completely ignored on this one. This would also turn out to be somewhat of a political hot potato and however sensitively you handle it, how do you tell people that they had been researching the wrong family line without shattering more than a few dreams? Samuel Oxford son of Thomas Oxford and Sarah Lulpeck died in 1708 so could not have possibly had any descendents a live and well today and living in the USA.
I spoke to one advertised researcher in the USA who shall remain nameless and I hasten to add did not belong to any Genealogical Association to ask for some information about the Virginia records only to be told ‘I cannot help you as I do all my research on the internet’. I was flabbergasted!
Worse was still to come when I found out that In fact some descendents had even made special trips to Hadleigh all the way from the USA to see the place of what they thought was their roots, only to find out that this is now not the case. I am still assisting some of these people with the hunt for Samuel Oxfords real roots. It was a shattering blow for some of them. Some however are so romantically attached to the Myth, the de Vere fable and family crest that they are still in denial.
The fact that the misinformation on Samuel Oxford 1707 son of Thomas Oxford and Sarah Lulpeck has caught on has actually turned out to be a real shame and disappointment for people who are serious about tracing their roots as a lot of people have copied this and the myth and fable that goes with it, without checking its original source. I think it was a case of the majority rules so it must be right.
If you had looked and still can look at many trees on the internet containing Samuel Oxford Hadleigh 1707 son of Thomas Oxford and Sarah Lulpeck they have only been sourced from other peoples trees and not from actual records and unfortunately this appears to have snowballed out of control, as I mentioned earlier one of the Joys and dangers of relying solely on the internet.
My Grandmother was Anne Louise Oxford daughter of Samuel Oxford 1874 Polstead, Suffolk UK son of Harry Oxford 1841 Stoke by Nayland, Suffolk UK son of William Oxford 1815 Layham, Suffolk UK Son of John Oxford 1770 Stratford St Mary Suffolk son of John Oxford 1742 Kersey Suffolk UK son of John Oxford 1698 Hadleigh, Suffolk UK son of Thomas Oxford 1668 and Sarah Lulpeck and brother of Samuel Oxford 1707 – 1708 Hadleigh, Suffolk UK.
Any link from the UK to a Samuel Oxford in Virginia USA has yet to be proved and with the aid of some keen researchers in the USA we are still researching this.
This seems to be the common myth which has circulated on the internet and taken hold.
The Myth
Samuel Oxford and Mary Ann Browne were childhood sweethearts, she being from a Lower class and he of a Higher, their parents did not approve of this relationship and did everything to break them up.
Family lore from Oxford descendants still in England has it that Samuel and Mary ran away to Wales where they married and where their first child, Edward, was born about 1724. After Edward's birth, the little family moved to the colonies, settling in Stafford County, Virginia. It was here that the births of the other children, John, Ann, Elizabeth, and Samuel, Jr. were recorded in the St. Paul parish register.
Unfortunately the Oxfords appear to have been poor farm workers in earlier times. ‘The Higher Class’ comment did make me chuckle somewhat.
There is no doubt that a Samuel Oxford did exist in Virginia but is my opinion that he is related to an Oxford family who went out to America earlier and records seem to suggest that the Samuel Oxford linked to the USA descendents was in fact born in the USA. So we hunt for his birth record and father.
The Fable
That Thomas Oxford was related to the de Veres being a descendent of Stephen Oxford son of Robert de Vere the 19th Earl of Oxford.
The de Veres are well documented, and Robert married Beatrix de Hemmend c1625. Robert had a son Aubrey born 1627, who succeeded to the title on his father’s death in 1632. Beatrix outlived Robert by many years. The linking of the Oxfords to the de Vere family looks to be an attempt to show an ascent to the aristocracy where none exists. This fable however is embarrassingly, easy to disprove. http://groups.google.com/group/soc.genealogy.medieval/topics?gvc=2
My Grandmother Ann Louise Oxford was a great story teller especially about the Oxford family and I never heard her relate the Samuel and Mary Brown story and its many variations which appear to be so popular on the internet. I never heard her refer to a de Vere link either. She talked about many other things though including the famous story of the Red Barn murder in Polstead. They knew the Murdered Girls family descendents ‘the Martins’ quite well.
Both Thomas’s and Sarah’s family is reasonably well documented in the Parish records for the time. I have Samuel’s Birth and Death Citation taken from the parish records.
Be warned do not rely on the internet as your only source of information.
This is also related to the story above. Here, the researcher just accepts without documentation the incorrect assumption of a relationship between two people and continues to research from there. We have seen examples where as many as eight or nine generations of research have been done and done very well however it was all done on the wrong family line. What a shame that a considerable amount of time and energy was spent researching someone else’s family tree. We do not advise anybody to proceed to the next generation of research unless proof of a link between generations has been found.
Regardless of the nature of the information you discover, always enter it onto a standard genealogical log this can either be a research diary or an application like family tree maker. The purpose of this is to keep you organized. Many beginners write down information on napkins, scraps of paper, or the backs of envelopes, and then fail to transfer the information to its proper place. Good records also provide something for others to work with after you have passed your research on to them.
Do not become too reliant on the direct line and overlook the collateral lines. Researching siblings can provide valuable clues. For example when researching a census, you might find the parents of an ancestor living with one of their other children. Not only will this provide you with the names of the parents, it also places the parents in a location that can then lead to additional information.
Researching sibling lines may also lead to a previously unknown relative who is also doing research on the family. These distant cousins can sometimes provide the big break you've been hoping for.
Always record a female’s maiden or birth name in your research not their married names. Even if you are not including female lines (maternal) in your project, you should still record the maiden names. This might provide a valuable clue for future research since some families use the mother’s maiden name as a middle name or even hyphen the surname for the oldest male child. This information could help identify the correct male ancestor when there are two or more possible people found in the records in the same place and time.
This is also very relevant to my story. It is very tempting for some people with a family name like Churchill or Wellington to assume they must be related to this famous person after all they have the same name. Then, based upon this assumption they start researching from that person, trying to work from the famous person to themselves. This is a very bad approach to researching your family tree. Remember to start with yourself, work backward in time, prove the connection between each generation, and record where the information was found and get the documentation. Then, if you prove the connection to that famous person, you'll really have something to brag about. Even stranger is an e-mail I received from one researcher saying they had spotted the de Vere link and were intending to start their family research at this point and go forward even though their name was not de Vere!
It is very common in many families for three or more generations of male ancestors to have the same name. A situation like this can lead the inexperienced researcher to list a male as the father when he is really the grandfather. In such cases it is very easy to skip a generation. To avoid making this mistake, be careful to record as many dates as accurately as possible and research carefully the facts that are uncovered, such as dates, place names and occupations.
We all often have the notion that our names have always been spelled a particular way through the generations. In our own research we have seen the Manly name spelled several different ways: Manley, Mainly or Manlye and even Manlie. If we are searching alphabetically through an index seeking this family name, we have learned to check each of these variations since information can be listed where we least expect it. One of the best exercises for anybody doing family research is to spell the name being researched as many different ways as possible (phonetically). While searching all the variations of a family name will add extra time to research, the results will often pays dividends.
And this! Genealogy is all about proof. Some researchers just assume a link and produce an ancestry tree and hey presto the obligatory family shield! Research must be approached correctly start with you and work backward, one generation at a time. The key to success is to prove absolutely the link between each generation. Like any good investigator, you must gather all the evidence, scrutinise the evidence in context, and reach a conclusion based upon the corroborating evidence. Reaching a result based upon incomplete evidence will put at risk the correct outcome.
Never forget that we owe it to ourselves and future generations to do the research on our family as accurately as possible. What an achievement when you do even if you turn out like me not to be rich and famous.
Thanks to Lynn Huber and David for supplying me with the information on the American side and giving me their comments.
If you are interested in researching your family tree and do not want to do it yourself please feel fee to contact me either on www.Findyourlineage.co.uk or by e-mail info@findyourlineage.co.uk
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