Guild Blog Challenge Post 1: Endings!

A new year often begins with everyone making 'new starts'.  But I've chosen to begin with 'endings' instead, and how helpful it can be to "kill off" your ancestors or all those people in your One-Name Study.

No, of course, I don't mean literally kill off!

But how often do we find that information from a person's death sheds light on their life, whether it is in the details of an obituary, or amongst the items discovered after their passing?  Properly identifying deaths can also protect us from inaccurate family histories, for example, when we've assumed a particular couple lived happily together for several decades, based on censuses, when the reality is, the wife died and the husband remarried someone of the same name, age, and birthplace! (Been there - only discovered the issue when another relative went "gravestone hunting".)

I mentioned in my previous post about the 12 'Newswatch' items from last year.  A new obituary was sent to me on 1st January - it provided an interesting afternoon's interlude, not least because the obituary was in Welsh.  (Thank goodness for 'Google Translate'!) 

As a result of the obituary, I learnt not just about the deceased's family (late husband, children and their spouses, grandchildren and great grandchildren) but also a bit about their previous occupation and contributions to Welsh culture.  All of this detail will make it much easier to reconstruct their family tree than if I was starting with a marriage and trying to work forwards, identifying relevant descendants. 

I thought it might be interesting to look at some of the statistics relating to PARRY deaths in the last year, based on a few UK resources.  I began with one of the newspaper sites (https://funeral-notices.co.uk/national ) and searched for the name "Parry" with date range just 2019. 

It was fairly easy to extract the basic data in the way that I usually do for sites - first as plain text into Word and then using a variety of "find & replace" to make it suitable for a spreadsheet.  I didn't click through to each individual entry to get the full notice text as there was usually sufficient information in the first line, to be able to start identifying entries.  Also because clicking through to each entry would have added a lot of time to what was supposed to be just a quick exercise in order to write this post! 

The search found a total of 338 results, made up of 272 Death Notices, 28 Acknowledgements, 17 In Memoriams, 11 Birthday Memoriams and 10 Funeral Reports.

Once in the spreadsheet, it was easier to see that only 170 were actually surnamed PARRY, or hyphenated PARRY.  There were also multiple entries for the same person, where several members of a family have each placed their own tributes.  And obviously, given the different types of notices, not all entries related to deaths in 2019.

The next database I looked at was the Government's probate site, at https://www.gov.uk/search-will-probate

Year of death is a required field here, so I was able to select just the probate entries relating to PARRY deaths in 2019.  There were 84 results on the site (as at 9 January - this will increase because the last probate date was only 18th December, so I expect more entries to be added for 2019.)

As these results are already in a table format, it was very easy to copy them into a spreadsheet, although there were inconsistencies in the entries regarding capitalization. All of the entries were just PARRYs - there didn't seem to be a way of searching for double barrelled surnames, unless you already know what name you're looking for.  Using the information from the other databases, I was able to find five entries with PARRY hyphenated with another surname.  When I began comparing the data across databases, I also realised that eight of the entries seem to be duplicated in the index, for no obvious reason.   Perhaps there were two executors both granted probate at the same time? 

The third database I looked at was the Gazette (https://www.thegazette.co.uk/wills-and-probate), where Section 27 legal notices are published, in order to trace any potential claims on the estates, prior to the distribution of funds to beneficiaries.

This site just has a text search where the surname can be entered - so, as with the funeral notices, this means results will include entries where the searched for surname is not that of the deceased person, but rather a company of solicitors, or the administrator/executors etc.  However, one can specify either a publication date range, or a death date range (as well as other terms such as location.)

Using the publication date range of 2019 produced 92 notices, of which only 33 were actually deceased PARRYs.

Using the death date range of 2019 produced 48 notices, of which only 20 were deceased PARRYs.

The initial search results only give publication date - so, in this case, it was necessary to extract the full details in order to obtain sufficient information (eg death dates and middle names) to be able to match up these entries to any in the other databases.

When you click through to the full notice, the central details section contains information about the deceased person, which is all I initially looked at.  However, the Notice details, including the publication date, are to the left so, if you want to easily match the full details back to the initial index listing, it's necessary to include all of that information as well.

The full details were easy enough to extract, although there were some inconsistencies to take account of.  For example, different terms seem to be used for the same items (eg "Deceased Surname:" and just "Surname:", or "Deceased First name:" and just "First name:", as well as "Publication date:" and "Earliest publish date:" - the former including what appears to be the time as well, which has consequences for sorting in excel.)  There are items which only appear on some entries, (eg Middle name, Deceased Title:, Maiden name:, Deceased Occupation:, Reference Number: )  Address formats are also inconsistent, some appearing under "Person Address Details", with the whole address as one 'cell', others had the address split into several pieces of information - "Address Line 1:", "Address Line 2:" "Town", "Postcode" etc.  One entry had a previous address listed in a separate section, whereas another just included "formerly of …." within the last address field.  Executor/Administrator information, for the majority of entries (all solicitors, banks, legal companies etc) , ended up in one cell per result, but the addresses for two companies were split into different headings (Company Name, surname, First name, Middle Name, Address Line 1 etc) as were the four entries which appeared to relate to personal representatives, rather than to a company. One of these entries also had an additional executor whose names and address details were again split across cells.

All of which made for a rather 'messy' right hand edge to the spreadsheet!

Although it would be interesting to look at the details for the "non-Parry" deceased entries, at some time, in order to see what the connection to the Parry surname was, I just looked at the 33 deceased PARRYs.

Once the information was 'tidied up', it was possible to see that the difference in results between publication date and death date extractions was accounted for by 13 entries relating to deaths prior to 2019.  Of these, most (9) related to deaths in the latter months of 2018, as might be expected.  Of the remaining four entries, two related to deaths in 2017, one from 2013 and one from 2010.

Next  I compared the data across the databases, concentrating mainly on the Probate and Gazette information. 

Numbers of PARRYs appearing in:

Just Probate                        45 (but 5 are then duplicated so 50 entries)

Just Gazette                         6

Probate & Funeral             22

Gazette & Funeral               1

Probate & Gazette              8

All three sources                 5

I thought that the legal notices in the Gazette were not placed until someone had authority to deal with the estate (ie after probate has been granted ), but looking at the entries that appear in both the Gazette and the Probate sites, in seven cases the probate was dated first, but in six cases, the Notice was placed before the probate date.  Obviously, the six entries that only appear in the Gazette must also have been before probate has been obtained.

Which just goes to demonstrate I shouldn't make assumptions about how a system works!

There are clearly other sources of information related to deaths that I haven't considered so far, such as monumental Inscriptions, cemetery records, and civil registration etc.   I had been going to comment about these sources of information generally not being easily available for such recent times.  This shows how long it is since I have carried out much systematic research, as I had not realised the GRO site does actually have the 2019 deaths entries on it!

So, I now know there were 234 PARRY deaths registered during 2019.  Clearly not all of them are appearing in the three sources I've looked at.  I was going to try identifying which of these appear in the other databases, but even that isn't straightforward as, not only are there death registrations that aren't in the other three sources (as would be expected), but there seem to be some entries in those sources for which there isn't a death registration!  So, even these days, perhaps the civil registration indexes are not 'perfect'.

Just to (almost) finish, it's funny how one notices coincidences when working with records in this way.  'Desmond' isn't a particularly common first name for PARRYs - there's only two deaths during the year - but, based on the Probate index, they both occurred on the 6th Jun 2019! 

Finally, this post was inspired by my uncle, Derek Parry, for the simple reason that he passed away last year. I have several reasons to be grateful to Derek, one of which was his support for my family history, especially regarding the use of DNA.  As my father had died before I appreciated the importance of YDNA testing, my uncle very kindly agreed to test and was the first member of the Parry DNA project.  He continued to support this during his life, taking several additional tests.  

Even though he is no longer present, the benefits of his gift of DNA for the PARRY research will be ongoing.