Our resident expert Stephen Rigden, pictured below, answers your queries.
From Barbara Humphry:
‘I have held back from paying a subscription as the one time I had one, I kept finding myself blocked from going any further through my ignorance of how to go about the next move. I was born in 1928 so computers were not part of my education. I cannot go back beyond my mother’s father as there seems to be no record of him. His name was Henry Hobbs and he was a corn and seed chandler at 1 Salisbury Street, Marylebone, London so it should be possible to trace him but I have had to give up the search. I have no birth date but his death was recorded as 6 December 1917 in Marylebone, aged (family memory) 69.
If you can give me any advice as to how to find out more I would subscribe again. Life is short and I have already too many spent far too many hours in fruitless search. Thank you.’
Stephen says:
‘Dear Barbara,
Thanks for your question. Starting your family history can seem daunting at first, especially if you are not very confident with a computer, or if you think you know only limited information about your ancestor. This needn’t be the case, however, and I strongly believe that most people with British ancestors should be able to research most lines of their family trees back to at least 1800 and very probably another 25 to 50 years or so – sometimes surprisingly quickly. I would, therefore, encourage you not to give up, and to keep looking. If you are worried about using a computer, then perhaps you could either contact your local family history society or local library – someone will very probably be only too happy to help you.
Looking at the limited information about your maternal grandfather, the first thing I would do isn’t to look for his death entry in the civil indexes (although it is true that I might want to buy a copy of his death certificate, or search for a will for him). Instead, I think the combination of facts in your possession – name + occupation + place + date of 1917 – is good enough to find him on the 1911 census of England, which is perhaps the single most useful source of information for a family historian starting out.
Sure enough, if I search the 1911 census for a Henry Hobbs living in St Marylebone, I find four candidates. We find that the first of these – a 60-year old – is correct when we look at the transcript. This shows that the corn chandler Henry Hobbs was residing at 1 Salisbury Street with his wife of 23 years, Emily Barbara, aged 42, plus four children – Walter (aged 16), William (13), Winnifred (12) and Lilian (10). The children were all born in Marylebone but the wife was born in Long Ashton in Somerset and Henry himself in Clayhanger in Devon (but right on the border with Somerset). The other thing that the 1911 census uniquely provides, as well as duration of marriage, is the number of children born to it – in this case, Henry Hobbs has declared that he and his wife had 11 children in total, of whom seven were alive in 1911 and four had died.
Now you have found the 1911 census, you have multiple options. You can see that if Henry had married 23 years earlier, this places his marriage circa 1887/88 (1911 minus 23 years, and adding a year because the 1911 census was taken in April, so it’s slightly more likely that he was born in 1887 than 1888). Do treat this with a pinch of salt, however, as human memory isn’t always infallible! This also means that you should be able to find him with his wife and growing family on the 1891 and 1901 censuses. As we know that he was aged 60 in 1911, this means that he would have been born circa 1850/51. We should be able to find him on the 1861, 1871 and 1881 censuses, and, if lucky, on the 1851 census too (if he was born before that census was taken).
Research isn’t always quite so simple, however! Again, we have to be careful with information recorded on the census. When we go to the 1901 census, Henry is aged 45 years – meaning he ‘aged’ 15 years in the 10 years between the 1901 and 1911 census! He is a corn merchant living at 53 Lisson Street in Marylebone. We also learn the identity of two new children, Gertrude and Adry. Next, when we look at the 1891 census, 10 years earlier, Henry is aged 40 – an age which is consistent with the first census we looked at, the 1911. At this date, he is residing at 22 Paul Street and is a butcher with a live-in servant. It is clear that, having made money in butchery, he made a career move and went into buying and selling grain in London. On the 1891 census, we see that daughters Eveling (sic) and Gertrude were both born in Exeter.
Once this stage is researched, there is so much you can do – search birth, marriage and death indexes, search all the available censuses, and then look at other records prompted by the results of your research – and not just for Henry but also for his children and other family. In fact, your family tree could extend both backwards, sideways and forwards quite quickly.
Good luck with your research, and please don’t give up!’
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