Adding to the Family Story: London Criminal Records

A Trial in the Old Bailey in the 1890s

Searching for ancestors in greater London comes with its challenges. There are so many different jurisdictions and different records to search. If you are lucky the records with your ancestors have been digitized but things are still dicey if you have a common name. My ancestral name of Arment is not that common but which variations are most likely?

Different spellings were not the only challenge when I was searching back in the early 2000s. There was a group of us interested in parts of the same family line who were swapping information. Fortunately, one of our group lived in England so could go to records offices to check parish registers for birth, marriage and death records. Progress was slow.

There was hope. Some records were coming online. Free BMD, for one, was very helpful. Then about 2003 the Old Bailey Online began putting records on their website. They started with the earliest records available at first. Of course, I plugged in the Arment name just on the off chance. I hit pay direct in the 1820s records. A 14 year old named George Arment was robbed and he looked to be one of mine!

As the later years rolled out bit by bit, I kept plugging in the Arment name into the Old Bailey website. When the records for the 1840s were available I found the record of another trial involving my Arments and this time they were on the wrong side of the law. This find jump started my research and I now have a better idea about this family's life and times. This trial and its aftermath had implications that lasted for more than one generation. 

Story to be continued next week.

Image:

By Various authors for Cassell & Co. - The Queen's Empire. Volume 3. Cassell & Co. London, Public Domain,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27561068    

Among the Teeming Masses - Family History in London

Houses of Parliament through fog, Claude Monet, 1904

Many cities have been known as the Big Smoke but, to my mind, the biggest of them all was London. This bustling metropolis was home to many, over 6 million by the 19th century. The well-to-do saw a more civilized side of London in their well-appointed homes than did the masses crammed into the East End. Although the fires that warmed the houses of the rich contributed to the smog, the air in their areas of the city was not so dense as that in the working parts of town. Industry and commerce added to the mix which made East End air more hazy. The same type of haze seems to gather over the records of the poorer members of society. Not for them the ownership of houses or listing in directories, more likely the midnight flit and sparse records. 

It wasn't until the 20th century that some of my London family research dealt with better off city dwellers. Before then, my family members were firmly entrenched in the East End. I am hoping to use some of the research techniques taught in the webinars that I have been watching to prove my Cavanagh line back from Henry Cavanagh to the first of the line that came to London from Ireland. I hope there are sufficient records to fill out this family line that far.

I have had success in finding information about one of my other family lines in the East End. Many of them figure in records which contain details about their lives which were kept because they are records deemed important to the state. That was because some of them fell afoul of the law. Criminal records add depth to the usual birth, marriage, death and census information, providing a fuller picture of the life of the Arment family, a story with many chapters. 

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th-century_London 

Images:

By Claude Monet - Musée d'OrsayFormer version: The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain,  

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=155843  

Some of My Latest Genealogy Distractions

As any genealogist knows, researching family history can take up a lot of your time. It used to take hours of cranking microfilm readers to come up with a few relevant family facts. When the internet came along and evolved so that there were searchable databases it seemed like research took very little time at all, relatively speaking. As more and more information came online it added more dimensions to the information we could find out about our ancestors and, yes, the time spent ramped up again.

There was so much new information that genealogists had to find ways to keep abreast of new developments. You could attend seminars and genealogy conferences to find out new information but the internet also spawned new ways of learning online.

I began the year by taking the free genealogy course put on by the University of Strathclyde at Future Learn. The course was wonderful, a great introduction for newbies and a good refresher for those who have been around the block a few times. You got to chat with some of your fellow students and I reconnected with a cousin I had corresponded with years ago. Future Learn also offers lots of other interesting courses on subjects besides genealogy. The University of Strathclyde also has more in-depth paid family history courses and I am sorely tempted to sign up for one or two.

Canada also has its own home-grown online genealogy courses offered at the National Institute for Genealogical Studies (NIGS). Each course is six weeks long and there is an extensive catalogue. I have taken some of their courses in the past without any plan behind my studies but I am currently signed up for a full methodology program focusing on Irish research. I am determined to get my ancestors back to that country by hook or by crook!

Then there are the courses and other information available at DNA Central. It will take me a long time to explore the courses and other learning opportunities on that website. I hope that I will have a much better understanding of using genetic DNA once I access more of the information there.

A more recent type of learning that has started to take up my time is the genealogy webinar. They are fun and informative. I am sure that I could just fill up my time taking in the knowledge rather than putting it into practice. I only follow a few of the sites that offer webinars: Legacy Family Tree Webinars, Virtual Genealogy Association and Genealogy with a Canadian Twist. No doubt there are many more available out there but there are only so many hours in the day and I still have to check out the podcasts on the Irish Family History Centre website at https://www.irishfamilyhistorycentre.com/podcasts?page=1.

DNA: Making Progress Slowly

Well, I am not as far ahead in learning about DNA as I thought I would be by now. For one thing, it is hard to assimilate and retain knowledge about the subject and, for another, I seem to find so many other things that are taking up my time. How does that happen?

I have made some progress. While the sales were on, I sprang for a test with Ancestry DNA to add to the ones I had already done. Ancestry is supposed to have the largest database of DNA test results to match with. Maybe I would find some UK matches.

When I got my Ancestry results back I eagerly looked for new matches. My main American colonial line of Tripps was well represented and many of the matches had family trees. That was good - up to a point. Some of the trees went back further than the Charles Tripp born in 1761 who was proven by documentation. Unfortunately, I think the trees showing Charles' parentage are planted on shaky ground but I don't have anything to refute them at this point. Probably best that I stay silent on that score.

On Ancestry as well as on FTDNA a really close cousin match showed up for my Gilchrists, a line which has been in North America since at least 1853. I sent emails and messages to the DNA owners for these matches but never got any replies. Lack of response, I think, is one of the most frustrating things about working with genetic DNA.

There is always hope that I will end up with more cooperative DNA matches when LivingDNA opens up their matching function this year. In the meantime, I have been learning more about the various DNA tests through the courses at DNA Central.

I live in hope that using genetic DNA will provide me with more clues to my family history.