Genealogy Chat

I am missing a John Atkins age 31, children John 9, George 8, Alice Louisa Adelaide 5, Sarah Ann 3, Thomas Gordon 2 and James Herbert 1. All were born in Portsmouth, and I am sure still living there at the time of the 1901 census. I have found the wife, Alice Amelia Atkins, she was a patient at one of the local hospitals (The Royal). I have tried and looked everywhere all to no avail, perhaps a new pair of fresh eyes might be able to help me? With many thanks in advance, Julie

Hi Julie I had the same request this morning for my missing family, and receved a lot of help. My family Bannell were found under Rannell in the 1901 census, the B had been transcribed as an R. I was going through the first letter change when a lass beat me to it. Try doing the same it might bring up the family your looking for. Valerie

I'll give it a try, thanks Valerie. Julie

I also lost my family, so in 1901 decoder I entered their christian name only , age and place of birth - sorted them by ID number and there they were - all christian names in a row with a change of surname. We knew it was them as there had been a whisper that someone in the family had changed their name for some reason or other!!! If you don't know how to use decoder to do this - I'll be only too pleased to help Chrissie

I wasted £5 this morning looking for relatives which I know must be somewhere, I have one of the birth certificates! What's a decoder and how do I use it? Thanks Paul

Hello Chrissie, Many thanks for that info, I would be very grateful for your help using the decoder, I shall wait to hear from you. I'll email you too in case you miss this on the board. Thanks again. Julie

You may find this useful re 1901 decoder. I post it now and then and it seems to help. If you go to my website http://worldzone.net/family/reddesktop/ there is a link to downloading it. It is a useful tool for 1901 and saves money. John 1901 decoder Its main use is to see if 2 people you look at are in fact living in the same house. It basically saves you money downloading loads of names in the hope you get the right ones early on. 1 Press ……. SHOW BROWSER 2. Use advanced search for the names you want. (Fred Smith) 3. When you have all the ‘Fred Smiths’ you suspect then press PROCESS RESEARCH. 4. Now advance search for ‘Freda Smith’ 5. Now press process research, again for all the pages that appear 6. Do this for all the names you suspect may be your ancestors, children etc 7. When done press SHOW RESULTS 8. Now press GROUP BY 9. Then press PAGE ID 10. This will group people who live in the same house together with a ‘grey’ colouring automatically. You could try this to start with using 1 of my relatives as an example. I wanted to know whether Richard Fletcher was the Richard I was searching for, approx age 30 to 35, in fact he was 33. I knew he had a daughter called Maud, age not known. So put in Richard Fletcher with his approx age. This will produce quite a few, process each page. Then put in Maud Fletcher age 5 with a range of 5. This will produce some, press process research for each page. ( I suggest you ask for 30 names for each page) Now follow the above steps and see what you get. When I found the result, then I paid for the download and discovered his wife’s name and 4 other children. Hope that helps.

John, Many thanks for all that information. I shall certainly give it a go. Your advice is much appreciated. Julie

Hi Just a long shot. Did any of the children get called by their middle names? For example there is a Herbert born Portsmouth at Farnham .. well it says Rural on the census but it's probably Royal. A

Hello Ann, It's entirely possible that they could have been called by their middle names, to complicate matters, this family also tended to call children by the same christian names, therefore there would have been many contempary cousins with the same christian and surnames making misidentification highly likely! Thanks, Julie