Better Pictures of Napsbury Military Hospital

Military

Peter has kindly provided larger images of a number of the pictures by Ricardo of patients and wards in Napsbury Military Hospital. This could help anyone trying to identify an ancestor who was in the hospital between 1916 and 1919.

Month End Report (May 2014)

A busier month than I had planned - in part because of a lot of extra email-driven activity especially early in the month - and while my current plan is to post about 15 times a month I somehow managed 26!

I am tweeting @HertsGenealogy to notify people when I post something new and  currently have 49 followers - and quite a few of my tweets have been retweeted - definitely bringing in some extra traffic to the Newsletter and main web site. However, as the visitor from the Ukraine has highlighted, quite a lot of traffic is generated by criminals and I have taken a close look and estimate that perhaps a third of the traffic shown in the graph does not involve a real human viewing the blog. I suspect that some of the most "popular posts" on the Newsletter have only been there for week after week because of this unwanted computer generated activity. There is no way of flagging that an active post should not be included in the "popular list" and I have temporally withdrawn several "top posts" so that other posts have a chance to work their way to the top of the list. As the withdrawn information is also on the main site users can still find it if they want it.

Background Activities Include

Sally's family tree included Shadrach, Meshack and Abendigo and she wondered how common these names were or if her Day relatives from Harpenden and Hitchin were related to the similarly named Barber brothers from Tring. I replied: The names Shadrach, Meshack and Abendigo were unusual in the general population - but Old Testament names were used by some groups of non-conformists. It is very likely that you Day ancestors from Harpenden and Hitchin belonged to the same religious sect as the Barber family of Tring, and there may be a common link via a minister or a particular chapel.  In such families non-conformists (before 1837) would have had to marry in a parish church, and might sometimes be buried in the parish churchyard (possibly in an area separate from Church of England burials). However their children are very unlikely to have been recorded in the parish registers and many non-conformist baptism records are lost. This can make tracing their families very difficult!

Robert has brought the information on the Pubs in London Colney up to date.

Jon has provided additional information of Henry Jeffries of St Albans.

A check showed that a number of links were missing and broken. These have been corrected and information relating to the following pages should now be easier to find:

 Thomas Meadow's Mausoleum, Watford

Starkey Railway Family of Watford

St Albans Union

Photographs of Patients at Napsbury Military Hospital 1916-1918

Military

Post Cards

For a period of about two years Ricardo Studios of St Albans regularly visited the wartime Military Hospital at Napsbury Asylum at London Colney and took posed photographs of groups of patients in the wards, or in the grounds. These would have been purchased by patients to send off to family and friends. Virtually all the pictures were numbered and I have now collected together a large number of images, many of which can be enlarged to allow easy identification of the faces. Sufficient of the cards are dated and this allows approximate dates to be given to the other cards. If you can identify any of the many hundreds of faces - or have other examples of Ricardo cards (especially if they are dated) let me know and help make the dating more accurate.

Click Here to see the collection of photographs. 

The Old Public Houses in London Colney

London Colney

Beer & Brewing

Arlene has provided an excellent picture of Thomas Wright sitting outside his pub, the Swan at London Colney, in 1904/5 to add to the already detailed history of The Swan. At the same time as adding this picture I have updated the London Colney page with a picture of the main road and a list of the many pubic houses identified in Craven's 1854 directory.  Interestingly the Bell, the Bull, the Golden Lion, the Green Dragon, the Kings Head, the White Horse (later called the Pear and Partridge) and the White Lion were still open in 1995. (Can someone bring the list up-to-date, possibly with name changes and closures, in a comment?)

Hit a Brick Wall? Looking for a way round

Help Desk

Shenley

Coreen has been researching her ancestor Walter Hewitt - who was born in about 1774 and had a number of children baptised at Shenley between 1804 and 1809. She can't find any record of his birth and has checked the obvious sources at HALS and he may have been the Walter mentioned in a removal in 1782. 

Unfortunately there are no surviving birth/baptism records for many people born before civil registration, especially when there are no census returns to suggest a place of birth. My analysis in HEWITT, Shenley Area, 1780-1851 does not come up with an immediate answer - but illustrates the kinds of questions one should be asking when you are trying to work your way round this kind of problem. 

Was the Lucy Hewitt who married in Hatfield in 1802 his sister and did she survive until the 1851 census?

Could the Mary Marston who witnessed his wedding at Abbots Langley in 1798 be his mother - now married?

And was the other witness, James Smith, a relative?

Was the 6 year old Sarah Yeoman at South Mimms in the 1841 census his granddaughter?

And if so did he have a daughter, Elizabeth, born in London Colney in about 1803?