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 There is no way of flagging that an active post should not be included in the "popular list" and I have temporally withdrawn several "top posts" so that other posts have a chance to work their way to the top of the list. As the withdrawn information is also on the main site users can still find it if they want it.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

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego at Tring 200 years ago

Help Desk

Family Events

Two hundred years ago Tring was a hot-bed of non-conformity, which has the unfortunate effect that there are no birth or baptism records for many children. However most people still got married at the parish church before 1837 and were buried in the churchyard - as most chapels did not have their own burial grounds. I was looking for a suitable test problem to try out the Hertfordshire registers that are now available on FindMyPast and a comment by Melvyn Barber gave me just what I was looking for.

Tring

There is no doubt that his great great great grandfather, Thomas Barber, was born in Tring around 1828, but  he was born before civil registration (1837) and there is no surviving evidence of his parents. Looking at the marriage records for Tring - and the early census returns revealed an interesting family. It is not clear who the couple were but they named their sons Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, after the three people that God is said to have saved from the fiery furnace. The matter is complicated by the fact that Thomas's father, Meshach died before the 1841 census and his wife remarried, but information from post-1837 marriages name the father, and a single "emergency" baptism of a new-born child who died within days, provided further evidence.  For the full story see BARBER, Tring, early 19th century.