Building a Family Tree: An Example on FamilySearch.org -- Project Thirteen

England & Wales, Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial Registers, 1567-1970 for William Tarbutt

I have been working on this family for a while and I found an interesting record in the England & Wales, Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial Registers, 1567-1970 on Ancestry.com. Here is the record.

You might have to click on the image to see the detail, but essentially, the record lists the first seven children with their birth dates and shows that they were all christened on the same day. Finding this record cleared up the fact that the same christening date kept coming up for different members of the family. Once I got documents explaining that I had the right family and that the children were correct, I decided to take a look at each of the children.

I am not going to go back through all of the steps I took in researching the family, but I did find enough to start working on documenting the individual family members. One of the criteria I use to determine if further research is indicated is the lack of a death date and no information about a marriage.

For example, here is the first child listed.

There is also no record of a marriage in addition to the lack of a death date. How do we know if this person lived long enough to get married or not? We don't. So, there is a need for more research. Currently, she has only one source in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree.

An interesting thing about doing searches in the Family Tree is that there are connections for three of the other Partner programs. However, although the program will search using some of the information in the Detail section of the individual it will not automatically add additional information such as a spouse or parents. You have to add in a place also. So even though you get results from a search, you will get more accurate results by adding in additional information and yes, you have to add in the additional information every time you do a search. After adding in the christening place and the names of her parents, I got a long list of Mary/Maria Tarbut (with alternative spellings) with different marriage dates and places.

Now, it is time to do a search on the Findmypast.com website. I need to know how many Mary Tarbuts there were in Cranbrook, Kent, England. There is only one result: the same England & Wales Non-Conformist Birth and Baptisms with the 1814 christening date. By looking at some variations, I find a Mary Tarbut who dies in 1848. The problem with these records is that without the names of a spouse or parents, you cannot tell if the female person who dies has her maiden name or a married name.

For the time being, I decide to move on to Harriott Tarbut. Notice the variation in the spelling of Harriott.

I got a technical difficulties error message from FamilySearch, so I switched to Ancestry.com.  I struck out there also. Findmypast.com finds only the same christening record. I decide to move on. The reason is that I am making my initial review of the children. I am not spending time with the harder cases, I am trying to find more information about the family. The additional information could unlock the lack of records for the rest of the family members.

Next in line is John Tarbut. There are several John Tarbutts already in the Family Tree including his father, so I need to be specific about the dates and places.

FamilySearch is still on the fritz, so I rely on the other websites. Now, I am into the maze of people with the same or very similar names. I don't find anything useful in Ancestry, but I do find a marriage record in Findmypast.com that looks helpful.

A quick check on the location shows that Maidstone is about 13 miles from Cranbrook.

Here is a breakthrough. I can now do searches using John Tarbut married to Elizabeth Tilby and see if I can find a Census record that tells me this John Tarbut was born in Cranbrook. That information is in the English Census records. I can temporarily add a spouse into the Family Tree and do some searches. Hmmm. I do find the family, finally. How do I know that this is the family? Well, I did forget to write about some of the information I already know about this family. They are Basket Makers. Here is his brother William and his family with John, his brother living with them at age 61 in the 1861 England and Wales Census. The birthplaces match, the names match, the ages, and dates match. There is only one problem, I already have William Tarbutt married to Sarah Monk Smith in three different census records with no children. I find another marriage record showing that this William Tarbutt married Eliza Griffiths in 1850 and his father's name is John Tarbutt. Both of these men are Basket Makers and both were born in Cranbrook. One of them is not the William born in 1810.

So far, we haven't been able to resolve the records. So more research is necessary. What I did find is that William Tarbutt as a basketmaker is very likely a Romi (Romany).

Further note: After some consultation with one of my daughters who has been working on these families in England, we concluded that there are two William Tarbutts (Tarbut). One born in 1810 and one born in about 1815. Both are from Cranbrook and both are basketmakers. In fact, all of them are basketmakers. They are also non-conformists and that is a stronger indication that they were Romi or Gypseys. I started to find them on Romany or Romi websites.

Explanation of how this project began and why I am pursuing it (updated).

In this project, I started out by picking a somewhat random person from my ancestors or my ancestors' descendants who may have lived into the 20th Century from the FamilySearch.org Family Tree and to hopefully show, step-by-step, the research needed to extend that person's family tree back several generations. Finding a person who has no apparent ancestors in the Family Tree is relatively easy for those who lived in or into the 19th Century by much harder the further you go back in the past. As I continued to examine individuals in the Family Tree my objectives have changed. I decided to include anyone who, from the lack of information in the Family Tree, needed research.

To clarify this project, I will not be reserving any of the people I discover for my own Temple List unless I am related to those I find. For those I find to whom I am not related, I will simply leave the "green icons" on the Family Tree for that person's descendants to find and use for themselves. Please refrain from doing the temple work for people to whom you are not related.

Now, after I got going doing the research, I got a couple of requests to research some people further back in time. These turned out to be old, established "end-of-line" situations. Since my original idea was to demonstrate finding people, I started with easier challenges. But in any event,  I may or may not find new people to add to the FamilyTree. Since some of the families I choose are in an "end-of-line" sort of situation independent of the time frame, there is no guarantee that I will be any more successful than the average user of the Family Tree in finding additional family members. In any event, I hope that my efforts as recorded will help either the family members or others to find more information about their ancestral families and relatives.

Why am I doing this? For the past 15 years or so, I have been helping hundreds (thousands?) of people find their ancestors. I simply intend to document the process in detail with real examples so that you can see exactly how I find family lines. I simply want to show where those "green icons" come from. Since the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is entirely cooperative, I will simply assume that when I find a family that needs some research that I am helping that family. By the way, this is Project Eleven of the series because I intend to do this over and over with different examples.

There is another reason why I am doing this. Because I constantly offer to help people find their ancestors and I get relatively few that take advantage of that offer. I need to spend some of my excess energy.