PARRY One-Name Study Blog

Blanche Parry and Queen Elizabeth I

2012-01-08T13:39:00.002Z

I don't normal specifically advertise Parry related products, but I hope you'll forgive me for this one, since it is in aid of a good cause.

Ruth Richardson, who wrote the book "Mistress Blanche: Queen Elizabeth I’s Confidante" has been involved in the production of a limited edition, souvenir calendar, the proceeds of which are all to go to Bacton Church, in Herefordshire. She writes,

These lovelypictures+detailed descriptions (making a short book) are in a calendar-formatto commemorate the Diamond Jubilee of H.M. Queen Elizabeth II, 2012. Through thegenerosity of the Queen (who waived charges) it includes the gorgeous portraitof Princess Elizabeth, c.1546, in her red and gold dress. The Marquess ofSalisbury has generously allowed the Rainbow portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, the portraitof Lord Burghley (Blanche's cousin) and a photograph of Hatfield Old Palace tobe used without charges. The other pictures show: Blanche Parry's St.Margaret's Church (Westminster) tomb, Blanche's Bacton monument, QueenElizabeth I's Presence Chamber, the frontispiece of the 1588 Welsh Bible,Llangorse Lake + 1584 map, the site of Newcourt + drawing of the house, BactonChurch and Dore Abbey. We are most grateful to all the picture owners. Detailscan be seen on www.blancheparry.com

All proceeds fromthis calendar will benefit Bacton Church where Blanche worshipped as a girl andwhere her family are buried. Apart from printing, all work on this project hasbeen voluntary. It is a strictly limited edition, with superb pictures, andcannot be repeated. This calendar really is recommended to keep as a collectable.Recently described as 'magnificent', 'gorgeous' and 'unique', it has alreadysold throughout the UK and Europe, and from Alaska to Australia....

Further copies can beobtained from amazon.uk or directly from Ruth E. Richardson. Thank you.

So, if you're still in need of a calendar for 2012, or just want to gain a collectable, please see Ruth’swebsite, at http://www.blancheparry.com/calendar_release.shtml, for more information.

Focussing

2012-01-08T12:02:00.000Z

I saw on the news recentlythat an avalanche in the Swiss ski resort of Zermatt has left many Britishholidaymakers stranded. This reminded me of some correspondence last year regardingEdward Parry, Suffragan Bishop of Dover, whose tombstone is shown on my page athttp://homepage.ntlworld.com/im.griffiths/parryfamilyhistory/parrytrnscrptns/fess.htm#can . It turned out that, in 1871, Edward travelledto Switzerland in order to consecrate several Anglican Churches, one of whichwas The English Church (St Peter’s) in Zermatt. The Times Online for Aug 05, 1871 reported that "The Right Rev.Edward Parry, D.D. Suffragan Bishop of Dover, will consecrate the Zermatt Churchon Sunday next." Diane, mycorrespondent, very kindly arranged for a copy of the Church’s history, “AChurch in the Alps”, which contains some details of Bishop Parry’s involvementin the dedication of the Church, to be sent to me.

It is interestinghow, even with a large study, one family can come to dominate so many of thereferences collected. I happened to be consideringwriting a blog posting about a sequence of Parrys – Joshua Parry, Caleb HillierParry and Charles Henry Parry, three generations from one family, when I heardthe news item. The post was prompted becauseof my purchase of a book entitled "The Spirit of Enquiry, Caleb Hillier Parry,MD, FRS" by Sholem Glaser, just before Christmas. This is one of several books I’ve comeacross in the past and thought “I really must get a copy”. Written by a retired surgeon, the book covers Caleb’s contributions tomedicine but it also contains information about his ancestry and familyrelationships, so my hope is that it will both confirm the information Ialready have, and also give me some new leads on the family.

Charles Henry’sbrother, and the youngest son of Caleb Hillier Parry, was Sir William EdwardParry, the arctic explorer - and his son was the Edward, Suffragan Bishop ofDover, subject of the Swiss churches query. Later descendants of the family include another Bishop, another Admiraland a couple of knights – so that’s why this one family seems to dominate the recordcollection.

And since this familymade use of the same coat of arms as the Herefordshire “Golden Valley” family, itis one that I am particularly interested in putting together the pedigree for. I usually try to avoid collecting too much generalbiographical information on individuals – anyone interested in that much detailon these individuals can easily find it elsewhere anyway (although there aresome errors – as on the Wiki page for the Suffragan Bishop, which has hisfather incorrectly listed as his grandfather). But another book relating to this family, “A Memoir of the Rev. JoshuaParry, Nonconformist Minister of Cirencester; With Some Original Essays andCorrespondence”, has also been on my “wants” list for a while. This is the biography of Joshua written byhis grandson, Charles Henry and published in 1872 so, again, it’s a book likelyto contain information about family connections.   I discovered that it has joined the many oldbooks being digitised and republished – unfortunately, only as a “snippet view”online, but at least printed versions are now easily available so that’s wheresome of my “Christmas money” will be going!

I wrote in my lastpost about identifying the probable author of the pedigree sheets in Herefordlibrary. As I was looking up the bookabout Joshua a few days ago, I noticed that the front cover for the original versionshown on the Google books page (at http://books.google.co.uk/books?q=editions:ISBN0217432417&id=LwzYQQAACAAJ&as_brr=0&as_pt=ALLTYPES ) is the drawing of the coat of arms from the tomb of Joan Parry, formerlyMorgan, the wife of James Parry of Poston, which I show on my “quartered coatsof arms” page at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/im.griffiths/parryfamilyhistory/parrytrnscrptns/gvarms.htm . I obtained this drawing at the sametime as the pedigree sheets so, since I don’t think Charles Henry was theauthor of them, it appears he was probably in touch with the author (or myidentification is wrong!) It will be aninteresting task to try to identify who was communicating with who, out of the various, separate, Parry families, during the1800s.

I haven’t made agreat deal of effort to contact living Parrys – I am quite happy just to be intouch with the steady stream of researchers who contact me, since the ParryONSis a fairly large study. It will be extremelytime consuming collecting the records up to date, yet alone do all the communicationthat would be necessary. But it occurredto me that perhaps, for queries about certain families, I should be seeking outliving descendants. I knew that the great,great granddaughter of Sir William Edward Parry published several books –indeed, I have her biography of Sir William Edward Parry on my bookshelf. Unfortunately, having found an address forher through some online research papers, I then found what I suspect will be anotice for her death at http://announcements.telegraph.co.uk/deaths/74153/parry .

So, now I am pondering- should I proceed to look for other descendants of this family? In fact, should I change my own intentions regardingthe study as a whole, and make more effort to contact living Parrys? (Certainly, if the DNA project is ever tosucceed, that will probably be necessary.) At times like this, I am reminded of how different One-Name Studies canbe. Back in 2008, Andrew Millard made apost to the Forum comparing the way in which the Pomeroy Family Association(PFA) and my Parry Study were tackling research (http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/goons/2008-07/1214948300 ).   I rememberthinking at the time that perhaps the way in which the PFA had a very specificaim (“The aim of the project is to reconstruct the family trees of everyone whocalls themselves by any of the surnames we associate, either historically or inthe present-day, as a variant of, or related to, Pomeroy.”) was something Ishould consider for the Parry ONS, rather than just “carrying out” a one-namestudy. It is slightly depressing to lookat the post on my blog that Andrew refers to and to read how many things Ilisted then, which are still “ongoing projects” – would a more specific goalwould have helped these get finished?

Actually, probably not – the restof life would still have got in the way and, to be honest, part of the fun andexcitement of the study, for me, are the unexpected avenues I end up going down. But what the reminder has done is helped to providesome focus for getting things back on track, after so many months of other activitiestaking priority. I think this is going tobe a good year for the study!

How has your study grown this year?

2012-01-02T17:54:00.000Z

That was the question posed on the Forum at the end of last year. I don’t currently keep statistics on the Parry study (mental note to do so in the future!). However, I do keep a list of all communication, so I can tell from that, that I had 20 new Parry related contacts over the course of 2011. That’s down on previous years (26 in 2010, 31 in 2009 and over 50 in each the two years before that). Although that might be a sign of less people researching, I suspect much of the reason for the reduction is my own lack of activity.

It is good to take stock occasionally of how the study has progressed – even when it serves as a reminder of things that haven’t yet been achieved (after all, I’m even less likely to do something if I don't remember it!) And, although I may not have managed to write about these events at the time, during 2011 the probable author of the pedigree sheets from Hereford library was identified, I learnt that there is evidence the Allington Parry family used the “fess and three lozenges” coat of arms and therefore linked themselves to the Herefordshire “Golden Valley” family, and Parry entries were collected from numerous sources (sometimes unexpectedly, as when the archaeology group visited a local museum to look at the roman collection, but browsed the social history exhibits as well, turning up three Parrys for me).

2012 has made a promising start, with both a new Herefordshire Parry contacting me and someone joining the Parry DNA project (not actually a Parry but, with the low numbers involved in the project so far, I welcome any interest.) So, instead of just causing me to look back, the main result of asking the question has been a positive thought – the opportunities are there for 2012, so how am I going to make the best use of them, in order to progress the study?

Happy Christmas

2011-12-24T17:47:00.004Z

The above shows a recent ebay purchase - a sample Christmas card produced by E. W. Parry of 100 Regent St, probably dating from 1885 (based on the handwritten note on the back.)

This year much of my time has been taken up with family matters, but the ONS still continues, albeit slowly, and I'd like to wish all my readers a Happy Christmas and all the best for 2012.

A plethora of places

2011-07-18T08:28:00.005Z

I'm always interested in places named Parry - wondering what their history is and how they got the name. Today I found quite a collection, all in the same area.

It started from a comment on one of the blogs I follow, which referred to "Parry Primary". The blog, Good Morning Yesterday, is about life in Singapore in the 1950s & 60s, so I promptly searched Google for "Parry Primary, Singapore".

The map image says it all really:

It must be a headache for postal deliveries - especially if people fail to address letters correctly!

I'd love to know how this naming came about.

Remembering Geoff Riggs

2011-06-12T21:58:00.006Z

I heard today that Geoff Riggs has passed away. I first met Geoff at a family history fair at Stoneleigh in 2002. At the time he was one of two people manning the Gwent FHS stand but we somehow got talking about One-Name Studies – I was thinking of joining the Guild, having seen all the good advice being provided on the forum about searching the 1901 census, which had recently been re-released. As I continued chatting to the other Gwent member, I became aware that Geoff had left – only to re-appear shortly later with the Guild treasurer, who was ready to take my membership fee!

It’s always stuck in my mind as an example of how Geoff made the most of opportunities to promote the Guild and, whilst I didn’t know him as well as many others did, his enthusiasm for genealogy was always apparent.

The photograph shows the roller banner produced for the Welsh area, which Geoff brought along to the Guild Conference in 2009 – I was thrilled to see the Parry surname being advertised so prominently.

Geoff’s own web site at http://www.riggs.org.uk/Study/Riggsologist.htm shows the impressive work he’s done and an obituary by Roy Stockdill can be found at http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/GENBRIT/2011-06/1307901493 .

No doubt there will be many more tributes in the coming days.

Pondering some issues from the Guild Conference

2011-04-25T18:01:00.002Z

Before I left the Conference, I was given some other Parry information – six certificates from St George’s, in Birmingham, transcribed by Guild members as part of a Marriage Challenge. Certificates are always a welcome addition to my collection, since they help to confirm the links between people. However, over this last year, I stopped submitting entries to the Challenges, since I didn’t have the time to check for mis-transcriptions in the index details, or look for the marriages on the IGI etc., before submission. I almost re-started this week, when there was a message on the forum about the forthcoming Lymington challenge – until I realised that it was actually a repeat and I already have the two marriages from there. Good job I am not quite as disorganised as I sometimes think, and my BMD files were marked up to show those entries as already found.

It’s over a week now since the Guild Conference and organisation and technology are probably the two main issues that have been on my mind since then. John Hanson’s talk, Researching and Recording a large ONS, was based on his work with the Halsted Trust (The Halsted ONS, I have just discovered, has two Parry entries in it :) ) Despite having heard Jeanne Bunting some years ago describe the difficulties caused by the multiple copies of pedigrees and research papers found when the Halsted study was taken over, I still don’t add a date to all my own printed information so that it is clear which is the latest version. This can easily be done by adding a footer to documents, with automatic text fields for either last saved, or last printed etc., so it is one of my goals to do this from now on and also to gradually work through my past files adding them.

Keeping a research log is another suggestion I have often heard but have never yet managed to maintain for long (a book on my desk only works if I am at my desk, a log on the computer only works when the computer is on etc.) I do have a spreadsheet for keeping track of correspondence but what alternative methods do people find successful as a research log? Is there a good piece of software (or a way of better managing the software I already have), I wonder?

Regarding useful websites – such sites often get mentioned on the Forum at a time when I am too busy to extract all the Parry details and, although I have tried to keep a spreadsheet of such sites, so that I can return to them later, I often find myself printing the web page as a reminder instead. But John mentioned taking screenshots or printing to pdf - since I invariable visit the website initially just to check if there are actually any Parrys, that’s a much more efficient system than having to remember the spreadsheet, then find/open it and copy the url across. (It might help avoid the mounting paper piles, as well!)

Another tip, having all the ONS data on an external hard-drive (and backing it up to a pc/laptop), seems a reversal of the normal way of doing things but actually could be more sensible. Having been developing the Parry study over a period of time, which has involved several computers (and other things stored on the computers), I’ve run into problems with filing systems and synchronisation between a pc and a laptop. So having the study data as a totally separate entity on an external drive could be a better solution for the future. I was planning to re-organise the data anyway, with a view to it being more understandable if someone needed to take it over, so this could be a good opportunity to pull things together into a totally new format.

Dick Eastman gave me more things to consider, in his talk on the Family History World in 10 years time:
What about archiving emails? Few of us write letters in the way that people did in the past, so how else will our descendants experience that thrill of reading something personal from us?
That issue is relatively easy to solve (both my online and computer based mail systems seem to have the facility to archive messages) but this next topic is more of a challenge:
As society moves towards being “online, everywhere, all the time”, working practices are changing and shared data is being transferred so that it is no longer stored on our computers, but is held on servers “out there”, in the “cloud”.

How will this impact on my methods for carrying out the study?

Many of us who began our family history during the last ten years or so would probably struggle to deal with a totally paper based ONS – and I won’t finish the Parry study in my lifetime, so the methods used need to remain relevant to the upcoming styles of newer researchers. At the moment, my website is static and not updated often enough. Shared information, available to all, has the potential to allow for much more collaborative working – something I’d obviously like to see happening with the Parry ONS, so that could be a very exciting development (if I can learn the technology!)

But…

Whilst working practices might change, how much will character and attitudes – if people pick the easy options now, isn’t that still likely to happen? We already see people happily linking into information and pedigrees, on sites such as Ancestry, with scant regard for accuracy. And contacts often pass on to me “facts” which I find to be incorrect. Sometimes it may only be a minor issue, such as reversed names etc - but that still takes time to investigate and clarify.

So how can any form of quality control be maintained when many people are all contributing to the same work in progress?

Dick did mention one possible solution, in the form of an “unalterable Wiki” – where information cannot be deleted so, rather than “correcting” what someone else has written, people would be able to add information and justify it, whilst still leaving the original in place so that future readers could judge all the evidence for themselves. This option does sound interesting - earlier this year someone on the Forum raised the question about using a Wiki for a one-name study site and there are Guild members already doing so. So perhaps some combination of a Wiki, linked to pedigrees built using a program such as The Next Generation or Second Site, which are designed for web sharing, is worth considering. I imagine it would be easier to update than my current web site, and more effective in engaging others to contribute.

But then, as well as the quality control issue, am I back to pedigrees spreading out over large areas so as to become unclear, or one person per page views that make it difficult to follow the various cousin level relationships, - the very reasons I deliberately decided to draw out my pedigrees in the first place!

As you can see, the conference has certainly left me pondering how to rise to the challenge of making the most of the technological advances, whilst still retaining the accuracy and clarity which (hopefully) are hallmarks of the Parry ONS.

(And that was just from two of the talks!)

Anzac Day

2011-04-25T11:50:00.002Z

Recently, on one of the mailing lists, the War Grave Photographic project (at http://www.twgpp.org) was mentioned. This database contains 788 Parrys, including 23 Australians and 9 from New Zealand. A search on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site returns a total of 821 Parrys, with 34 from Australia, and 10 New Zealanders.

The photographic project includes graves up to the present day, and both sites include other surnames, such as Parryman, in the results, so more work is needed to clarify the overall totals, but the following is the list of those from Australia and New Zealand included on either or both sites:

Name, Rank, Date of Death, Age
A Parry, Sergeant, 20/02/1950, 30
Allan John Parry, Corporal, 23/12/1943, 27
Athol Wynne Parry, Gunner, 11/05/1915, 19
Benjamin David Parry, Private, 22/07/1942, 35
Bert Allison Parry, Lance Corporal, 02/03/1917, Age n/k
Charles David Parry-Okeden , Flight Lieutenant, 23/03/1945, 32
Charles Edward Parry, Corporal, 05/10/1943, 26
Charles Francis Parry, Private, 21/11/1942, 22
Claude Herbert Parry, Lance Corporal, 04/10/1917, 20
Cyril Strahan Parry, Lieutenant Colonel, 21/11/1947, 55
Edgar George Jarvis Parry, Staff Sergeant, 18/06/1941, 36
Ernest Parry, Private, 25/04/1918, Age n/k
Ernest Arthur Parry, Flight Sergeant, 29/11/1944, 19
Ernest Charles Parry, Captain, 06/10/1917, 31
Errol Vernon Parry, Private, 25/07/1942, 32
Francis Parry, Private, 04/04/1918, Age n/k
Frank Parry, Sapper, 11/08/1942, 38
Frederick Parry, Private, 19/07/1916, 20
Frederick Quiney Parry, Private, 19/11/1917, Age n/k
George Edwin Parry, Private, 30/05/1918, 28
George Edwin Parry, Private, 20/01/1945, 36
Griffith Martial Parry, Corporal, 15/04/1917, 24
Harold Leslie Parry, Leading Aircraftman, 11/01/1941, 25
Harry Leslie Parry, Second Lieutenant, 28/06/1915, Age n/k
Henry Parry, Private, 25/07/1916, 23
Henry Parry, Private, 17/06/1943, 38
Herbert Henry Parry, Private, 18/07/1915, Age n/k
Hubert Parry, Private, 23/08/1917, 19
Jack Alan Parry, Sergeant, 31/10/1942, 28
James Stephen Parry, Private, 09/06/1917, 21
John Parry, Private, 12/10/1916, 25
John Henry Parry, Private, 17/05/1941, 40
John Henry Parry, Private, 21/06/1941, 37
Joseph Stewart Parry, Sergeant, 29/09/1941, 26
Leslie Parry, Private, 01/09/1942, 33
Leslie Albert Parry, Private, 27/08/1943, 23
Morgan James Parry, Flight Sergeant, 16/03/1945, 22
Peleg Lloyd Parry, Lance Corporal, 15/11/1916, 28
Richard Walter Parry, Corporal, 26/04/1919, 34
Robert Duncan Parry, Private, 19/07/1916, 19
Robert Groves Parry, Private, 05/10/1943, 26
Ronald Wilfred Parry, Flight Sergeant, 13/01/1945, 20
W Parry, Chief Stoker, 22/04/1918, Age n/k
Walter Richard Parry, Able Seaman, 01/03/1942, 20
William Norman Glyn Parry, Trooper, 09/08/1916, 36

The generosity of Guild members

2011-04-15T22:41:00.002Z

Back in June 2009, I wrote about discovering references to the burial, in Winchester Cathedral in 1634, of Roger Parry, rector of Hinton Ampner. After arriving at the conference today, I was given a photocopy of the register showing the burial entry, which had been obtained for me by a guild member. This was soon followed by a transcribed marriage certificate, produced as part of the St Albans marriage challenge, confirming that an entry indexed as both Parry and Tarry was actually a Tarry. Then another guild member stopped me in the corridor and handed me a piece from the Surrey Advertiser in January, featuring an Elizabeth Parry, whose memoir, “Thirty Men and a Girl: A Singer's Memoirs of War, Mountains, Travel, and Always Music” had recently been published.

It never ceases to amaze me how generous Guild members are, in giving their time to help each other. Each year I seem to come home from the conference not just with lessons learnt from the talks, but with additional information on the Parrys specifically.

Getting active again

2011-04-15T08:31:00.002Z

Things have been picking up again recently. Several new Parry researchers have contacted me and a couple of others, who hadn’t been in touch for a while, have also written to send me information. Whilst life is still busy in other areas, it has reminded me just how much I enjoy working on the One-Name Study.

It's the Guild’s AGM and Conference this weekend. The first talk is by John Hanson and entitled, “Researching and Recording a Large One-Name Study”. Yes, I know that’s what I am already doing – but it sounds like a good opportunity to review where things are at and to get a kick-start back into activity.

Things don’t always go to plan….

2010-12-31T17:53:00.003Z

I wrote in my journal, at the start of 2010, that I was feeling quite positive about the year ahead – I was obviously anticipating achieving quite a lot. However, things don’t always go to plan and, instead, I have spent much of it dealing with some “relative health issues”. Things are looking more positive now though so, hopefully, 2011 will be more successful.

To finish the year on a seasonal note, one of my favourite photographs taken during the recent snow (in the garden of a Parry family, just in case you wonder at the connection!)

Happy New Year everyone.

Barcheston

2010-05-31T22:54:00.002Z

It was the Shipston Wool Fair today – a good opportunity for a day out, which also included a trip to nearby Barcheston, where several Parrys who are mentioned in the probate abstracts lived. There, in the main aisle of Barcheston church, was a memorial stone to Walter of Fell Mill, which would match to abstract number 609. It read:

In hopes of A Joyful Resurrection in Jesus Christ
Here Lyeth the Body of Walter perrey
Of Felmil A Dyer who departed this life
The first day of October ANNO DOM
1705 Ætatis Suæ 66

Though wee have lost our faithfull friend
In Christ wee hope he made his end
His Body in the Grave doth rest
To rise wee hope forever blest
All you that do this day pass by
As you are now so once was I
As I am now so shalt you be
Therefore prepare to follow me

The surname spelt Perrey is not necessarily a problem, stonemasons did make mistakes and surname spellings often varied in those days anyway.

But there was no coat of arms on the stone either. Which is interesting, given that Walter’s family being entitled to the arms of the Parrys of the Golden Vale is one of the reasons put forward by Boden for considering them as possible ancestors for Sir CHH Parry.

Clearly more research needed to find any evidence for that.

But a booklet about the Barcheston tapestries did at least tell me that a David Parry was paid for catching two otters in the River Stour. Pity none of the abstracts mention a David though!

Parry’s fit for a Prince!

2010-05-21T21:00:00.002Z

Ignoring several half written blog entries, I could hardly let today pass by without mentioning an item being reported in newspapers and online – Prince Charles is to present a documentary for BBC Four, exploring the life and legacy of the composer, Hubert Parry.

I can imagine that provoking a surge of interest in the Parry family.

In some ways, that’s obviously a good thing. But I’m hoping the documentary confines itself to the man, his music, and those he influenced – more publicity for his "ancient pedigree", featuring various, seemingly non-existent, ancestors would not be helpful!

It’s probably too much to hope for though – even if the documentary is accurate, the reporting and follow-up articles may not be – I notice the Mirror’s site already reporting that Hubert Parry died in 1848 (No, that was his birth date).

Surely it’s not that difficult to check a few facts!

Mistranscriptions

2010-04-08T22:16:00.002Z

I finally finished matching the Parrys in HEF 1871 back to 1861 recently – or, at least, I thought I had. Then I remembered that I’d only searched for Parry entries from FindMyPast, before comparing the details to those from Ancestry. I hadn’t done any of the variant spellings, such as Parrey. On the whole, that shouldn’t have been a problem – since I’d done those spellings when searching on Ancestry, & would pick up the entries when I compared the two. But since I’m trying to ensure my file is as complete as possible, I went back to FMP to collect the most obvious of the spelling variations.

It was a good job that I did since, whilst some had been on Ancestry, one couple turned out to be on Ancestry as Porrey, and another as Farrey, so I had actually missed those two. One of the Marriage Challenge results I received recently also led me to find a Parry mistranscribed in a census as Farry so clearly the P/F confusion is something I’ll have to look out for.

Once an entry has been found, it is often obvious why the names have been mistranscribed and it’s relatively easy to be sure what the correct name should be. But I have found two instances recently where people seem to have used Caroline and Catherine interchangeably, appearing in the Civil Registration indexes as one but in a census as the other. It’s almost impossible to tell from just the two entries whether there’s been a recording error or the person actually used both names.

Name variations have been an issue with several marriage challenges recently. I received two results from another challenge, where one turned out to be a Pavey, not Parry. Then I set out to prepare a submission for the Beaminster MC. I only had one entry, from 1903, so it should have been easy. But first I discovered that the entry was on FreeBMD as both Parcy & Parry. On checking the original indexes it turned out that FreeBMD was right, since the original indexes have it as both as well. That much is understandable – I’ve seen many words where "r" and "c" have been difficult to distinguish and the GRO would have indexed it as both if they were unsure.

But I then checked censuses and, from the 1911, managed to identify who is marrying who out of the 7 names shown on FreeBMD (Mary on twice and the other bride on with different spellings). Using the birthplace from 1911, I found Mary with her parents in 1891 and as a servant in 1901. But in 1881 the family are recorded as Pavey – and that’s the surname Richard, the father, appears to use when married in 1866 (and probably his birth in 1842 as well). Having since found the parents in 1901 and 1911, it seems likely that what started as a decision between Parcy or Parry has ended up as really being Pavey!

It will be interesting to see what the marriage register itself actually says.

I guess I shouldn’t complain – I can usually find the Parrys, even when they're hidden under Porrey, Purry, Pansy (and even "Lang"!). But I’ve just dealt with a query regarding a Parry who married a Margaret Oudenrode. Now that’s a surname with potential, when it comes to mistranscriptions!

Patience is a virtue that pays off!

2010-04-02T16:37:00.003Z

I picked up a second-hand book recently, “A calendar of letters relating to North Wales, 1533-circa 1700,” published in 1967 from various collections in the NLW. North Wales has a high concentration of Parrys, including some families that can be traced back to the 1600s, so it’s likely the book will help with general background to the times, as well as the specifics regarding the Parrys listed in the index.

Several of the entries relate to Jeffrey Parry of Rhydolion, who happens to be the earliest ancestor in the pedigree of the Jones-Parry family shown on my web pages at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/im.griffiths/parryfamilyhistory/parrytrees/jonesparry.htm. He was described on the Llanbedrog church site as “a zealous puritan from Shropshire who was an officer in the Commonwealth army”, something I’ve not yet found proof of. However, the book of letters quotes a NLW manuscript describing him as “a great Heaven-driver of Llyn & a zealous maintayner of Coventicles”. so that’s a new lead to follow up regarding his religious activities.

Some years ago, whilst browsing bookshops in Hay-on-Wye, I spotted a book entitled “Royal Visits & Progresses to Wales” by Edward Parry. The price meant I didn’t buy it – but now I have just discovered that the book is available for download from Googlebooks. (A much cheaper option!)

Was it worth the wait? Apart from acquiring an item by a Parry, does it tell me anything useful? Yes, perhaps it does. Whilst it was published in 1851, so repeats the errors of some other antiquarian works of that time, it does include transcriptions from manuscripts. One of these refers to “Cornet Jeffrey Parry”, who lived near Pwllheli, and who was to be given money to distribute in a way that furthered the work of the Gospel. Wikipedia indicates that a Cornet is a new and junior officer. Could this be the confirmation that Jeffrey was indeed an officer in the Commonwealth Army?

According to the pedigree, Jeffrey Parry died in 1658 and the letter was written in 1657, so he either died fairly young or this refers to someone else. But, despite the general popularity of the surname, he is the only Jeffrey Parry I know of in that area so, yet again, this could be a possible lead into the origins of the Jones Parry family.

Let’s hope I don’t have to wait too long to find out more.

Finding a goldmine!

2010-03-14T17:39:00.003Z

As I mentioned earlier this year, I have set up a ParryONS account on Twitter to see if that is a more effective method than this blog, for keeping people informed about the study. Initially I’ve just been posting about activities and not tried following other people but, since the Guild has now set up its own account, I thought I’d try following that.

Quite soon I found myself being followed – and struck gold when I checked out the follower’s website at http://welshfamilyhistory.ning.com/ , which referenced the British Library theses database. I already knew about this system through another interest, but had never registered since the thesis I wanted then wasn’t available. However, thanks to Darris, I've now learnt about a doctorate written in 1994 regarding sources for family history, with particular reference to Wales – and it uses the Parrys of Llidiardau as a case study.

This thesis is available to download for free and looks to be a real gold mine – not just with regard to the Parrys but also the whole process of researching in Wales. Additionally, it will be interesting to see what has changed over the last 16 years.

(And, having registered with the site, I now find I can obtain the other thesis I wanted for free as well – it will just take 30 days for it to be digitised. What a brilliant resource).

I came across the following logo on an ebay item recently, a postcard printed in 1910 by J.Richard Parry Jr, of Denver, Colorado.

So far, I haven’t been able to find any other information on the publisher but perhaps he is connected to the J. Richard Parry who illustrated a book in 1910 called “The Mystery of Bonanza Trail”.

On another subject, it was mentioned earlier this year on the ISOGG mailing list about work to combine documentary resources with DNA approaches to tracing immigrant ancestors, especially with regard to indentured servants who travelled to Virginia and Maryland. Since one of the Parry abstracts is for a John Parry, who died in Virginia in 1637/8, this could be specifically relevant to the Parry ONS. Having checked one of the recommended sites, which has a database of immigrant servants, I also found five more Parrys (all later than John). So this is clearly a topic I shall be watching for progress on.

I haven’t commented since the DNA seminar but both that, and then WDYTYA Live, which was on the following weekend, were useful (and enjoyable) days out. I even got to meet some of the names I see so often on the mailing lists.

It’s nice to be able to put some faces to names now.

PARRY DNA

2010-02-19T23:10:00.001Z

Tomorrow is the Guild’s bi-annual DNA Developments seminar. After the previous one, in May 2007, I wrote that a lot more "paper research" was needed before DNA testing could be used effectively in Parry research. I think that is still true but at least there is now a Parry DNA project with one person tested, as well as a group on Ancestry containing another set of results.

So, some progress, but still a long way to go!

New Year, New Start!

2010-02-05T16:28:00.002Z

Well, not quite, since we’re already into February and this is my first post. I don’t generally write New Year resolutions but last year’s blogging wasn’t exactly successful, with only three posts all year. So this year I am aiming to do a better job of keeping people informed about the study.

There’s little point trying to catch up with everything that happened over the past few months but one of the "highlights" included finding out from a Tudors site (at http://tudors.crispen.org/chronology/index.html) that a "William Parry of the Persian expedition" introduced coffee into England in 1601.

Really?

It turns out that William Parry produced the first printed reference to "coffee" in its english modern form, when he wrote about the travels of the adventurer Anthony Sherley. Parry had been part of Sherley’s expedition to Persia, in which Sherley was attempting to persuade the Shah to form an alliance against the Turks and also promote English trade interests.

So not quite introduced coffee itself, but played a part in making it known, at least. I wonder which William Parry that was?

A reference on the Forum to the History of Parliament reminded me that I have some early Parrys to look up. But it also set me searching for information about a Sir George Parry. I’ve come across references to this name on several occasions – one referred to him as a commissioner for Dorset who met Prince Rupert prior to the battle of Naseby, there’s also a poem about Sir George by Robert Herrick. Unfortunately, the relevant volume of parliamentary history is not due to be published until 2016. But one of the family tree references I found suggests George died in Ireland in 1660 – I’d never noticed that before. Could he be a link between the Parry family from Herefordshire (known to have moved down into the Wiltshire and Dorset areas during the 1600s) and one of the Parry families from North Wales claiming the same coat of arms?

Definitely a possibility to follow up.

Many more records have become easily available recently, as Ancestry now have all of the BMD civil registration indexes transcribed. However, not all the information is available from the main index pages so there’s a lot of work to be done extracting the rest of the details. With so much now available online, this year will have to see a shift to finding more effective ways of dealing with some aspects of the study.

New websites and technology may come in useful for this. GenealogyWise, a genealogical social networking site, began last year – I did set up a Parry group but so far haven’t found this very helpful. Something that looks like it will be much more relevant is Google Wave, a new collaborative tool. By setting up waves for specific families, it should be possible for researchers to work together, adding information as it’s found or confirmed. That will be much more effective than my current system where people are emailing me and I then try to add the information to a web page (as with the Colston Parrys (http://freepages.family.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~parryresearch/colston.htm). That is too reliant on me having the time to draw up the web page. By using the waves, information can be collected and arranged by other people as well, and then perhaps a web page created at a future date if appropriate. Seeing the instant results on the waves is also perhaps more likely to encourage people to share what they know.

One final thing to add is that I am also trying out using Twitter to let people know what’s happening with the study. Since this blog isn’t getting updated frequently, because many things take time to accomplish with there being so many Parrys, this will allow me to let people know about any ongoing activities.

You can find me at http://twitter.com/ParryONS if anyone’s interested.

The Blog Returns

2009-08-02T22:45:00.002Z

My apologies to anyone who looked for the blog recently and found that it had been removed. Somehow I fell foul of the Google robots which look out for "spam blogs". Thanks to Jay for pointing it out to me, and to the Google reviewer who restored it over the weekend.

Clearly, I need to improve the quality of my writing!

I’ve been working on a couple of pedigrees over the last few weeks, in response to emails from other researchers. One had sent me the details of several certificates – since it’s a Monmouthshire/Breconshire family, I already have them in some of my files, so I have been adding the information from the certificates and checking where there are still gaps to be researched. I’ve also identified a possible earlier generation – but since it’s in that period just before the censuses, it’s going to be difficult to confirm the link.

The other pedigree relates to the family of a James Patrick Parry – the researcher had sent me an article he’d written about James. Unfortunately it is mainly in german, but there was sufficient information for me to recognise the family as being that of Gilbert Sidney Parry (author of the probate abstracts book), and of the Sidney Parry who drowned in the Serpentine. One of the references from the article relates to the "Topographical and Historical Account of the Parish of St Mary-le-Bone", which I then found on Google Books. This shows a burial of a William Parry in 1826, who is described as "of Montagu Square, and of Walton Hall, in the County of Suffolk". I knew about the Montagu Square address from his probate entry, but it’s the first time I have come across the Walton Hall reference. I am hoping that, that might help in researching the earlier generations – since there’s reputed to be a link to the family of Sir William Edward Parry, the arctic explorer, as well, and that’s another family whose pedigree becomes unclear in the 1700s.

Ancestry have now fully transcribed the civil registration marriage index for England and Wales from 1916 to 1983, so that will help me to meet the Guild’s requirements for collecting the BMDs. It will still be a long process to gather the full details though, and to match up the full names of spouses properly, especially given the number of marriages between Parrys and either other Parrys or other frequently occurring Welsh names.

I took a trip to North Wales last week and spent a couple of days walking around graveyards, so I now have a collection of Parry memorials to transcribe. It was a good learning experience – I must remember next time to take a tape recorder, just in case the inscriptions on the images are not sufficiently readable. It takes too long to transcribe them by hand whilst there, when time is limited to day trips.

Finally, having travelled all that way in search of memorials, today I discovered one closer to home, when we noticed that one of the plaques in the local park is for a Parry. An effective end to the weekend!

1911 census completed (sort of!)

2009-06-27T22:56:00.002Z

The final areas of the England and Wales 1911 census were released earlier this month and there is now a total of 28,375 Parrys on the site. I have been collecting the entries for each area as they have become available but my file only has 28,055 in it, since the areas released earlier have now been amended. This is an issue with all of the census sites – initial transcriptions are rarely perfect so there is an ongoing process of error correction, making it difficult to keep an extracted file up to date. Some of the totals for the Welsh counties in 1911 have changed by hundreds so it will probably be quicker to re-extract them this time, rather than trying to identify the changes. I am hoping that such a large number of changes is due to errors with the uploading process, perhaps some areas missed out etc, and that future amendments will relate to fewer entries. Re-extracting the data will become increasingly difficult once I start adding further information to individuals or match up entries across years. Transcription corrections also have a knock-on effect for any derived information, such as statistical analysis or distribution mapping. Fortunately, given the number of Parrys there are, gaining or losing just a few of them should not make too much difference to the conclusions drawn from any analysis, so it may not need redoing. But it will be frustrating to know that is isn’t totally accurate.

If keeping extracted files up to date is one of the challenges of carrying out an ONS, then identifying the surname when it is mispelt is certainly another, especially with early records, when spelling wasn’t standardised. I have sometimes wondered whether I should be looking at spellings such as "Paris", for very early appearances of the Parrys in London, bearing in mind how the place would be pronounced in french. So I was amused to see the following, in the recent release of the Cecil papers on British History Online:
[1611–12, January 5]."A bill of charges from Brussells to London."
For rydyng from Brussell to Parys by coache eyght dayes and a halfe.25s
For dyet eyght dayes and a halfe.22s
For my Lord Imbassettors gardner to goe withe me two and from in Parrys to by my things—given him in Crowns.6s
From Parrys to Roane, coache hire.7s6d
For expences in Parrys for dyet and loging.li80
For porters hire in Parrys to carye trees abord the boat.30
For portters hyre in Roane and carrag by watter.43
Given to the boye in the house to laye my trees in the grond.10
Spent in Roan for aleven dayes and a halfe for dyetli86
For horse hire from Roan to Deepe46
Also given in earnest to the boatemaster from Parrys to Roane.30

I guess anyone looking for the city of Paris should be considering spelling variations as well!

There’s been some useful information sent to me by other researchers over the past few months, such as extractions from a number of Breconshire parish registers, and details of individual 1911 census entries. One of these was for a man known to be a performing pianist, yet he appeared in the census as the manager of a shoe shop in an area of what is now Birmingham. In the course of identifying where the parish was, I came across the Historical Streets Project, which could be useful for finding particular addresses in the early censuses.

There’s also been some links to follow up. One was a news report about the excavation of a WW1 mass grave at Fromelles, France, and the CWGC’s attempts to identify the bodies. The casualty lists of possible soldiers includes one Parry, from the Australian forces:
320 Private Parry Frederick 29th Battalion

Frederick is mentioned on the main CWGC site.
Name: PARRY, FREDERICK
Initials: F
Nationality: Australian
Rank: Private
Regiment/Service: Australian Infantry, A.I.F.
Unit Text: 29th Bn.
Date of Death: 19/07/1916
Service No: 320
Casualty Type: Commonwealth War Dead
Grave/Memorial Reference: 1.
Memorial: V.C. CORNER AUSTRALIAN CEMETERY MEMORIAL, FROMELLES

Any relatives are being encouraged to come forward to assist with the task of identification.

Other sites include one for Australian Honours, which has 80 Parrys, and the UK Surnames Genealogy Contact site which has 29 entries for people researching Parrys. A few of them I recognise but the others I should probably contact at some stage. There’s always a trade-off with doing that – time spent (which could be considerable, if I happen to have information on their family) against the information to be gained from the contact. That’s something I have been considering with regard to another method some Guild members use for contacting people – the social networking sites, such as Facebook. Facebook recently allowed the registration of usernames, which prompted discussion on the Forum. "Parry" as a username had already been taken but I decided to register ParryONS - the only benefit seems to be that it makes it easier for people to find me by using that in the URL, rather than a string of numbers, but I thought it was worth doing something. I don’t currently have a One-Name Study group on the site, since there is already a Parry Family Group and a couple of "fun" groups for the surname, but I sometimes wonder if it would be worth creating a closed group for the study, as a possible way of contacting some of the "younger generation" that frequent Facebook. But it’s that trade-off issue again.

I was surprised recently to realise that it was 2007 when I last worked on a particular census page for the internet. Everything takes a long time with a study of a high frequency surname. I did let my Ancestry sub lapse some months ago, in order to spend more time working systematically on the vital records, but the lack of complete census transcriptions elsewhere (and a half price sale) tempted me back. I have been concentrating on collecting some BMDs from FindMyPast’s parish records but, now that Ancestry’s records are accessible again, I shall also return to comparing their parish records to the BVRI2. I had always thought that Ancestry’s "England and Wales Christening records" (and the similar database of marriages) was the same as the BVRI2 but closer inspection earlier in the year indicated that there were differences between them. I therefore started to extract the BVRI2 entries as well, for comparison. There is the option to save files from the BVRI2 cdroms as either rtf or gedcom so, not being sure which would be best, I extracted a small number of entries using both. On conversion of the two files into spreadsheets using LDS Companion, I was surprised to find that, not only did I occasionally get differences in the results (eg the rtf method didn’t cope with accented words, so Thoós and Joós became Tho and Jo), but also some strange errors crept in on the gedcom version (loss of a couple of ages, a couple of grooms names appearing as if they were the bride’s father’s name). Also, neither of the converted files included comments such as "Husband previously married".

So it now appears that I may need to extract all entries using both methods and compare the results of that process first, as well as add back in any "previously married" comments, in order to make sure I have an accurate BVRI2 extraction, before I can then do a comparison of the BVRI2 to the information on Ancestry. It will probably still be quicker to do it that way, rather than checking all entries individually, since there are 3749 entries, but it shows how a "simple" task can end up being much more complicated than originally expected.

Fortunately the correspondence level has dropped recently (although I still have some long outstanding items for which I need to either put together, or check through, information). But there have only been four new contacts since the end of April, three via email and one by post. The postal one did involve putting together information on a couple of people, but it turned out to be a useful exercise. One of them was Roger Parry, a member of the Golden valley family from Herefordshire, but who was rector of Hinton Ampner, in Wiltshire. Searching for more information online, I was able to find a reference to his burial at Winchester Cathedral 18 May 1634, ae. 88. (on http://www.wargs.com/family/stratton.html). Another site indicates there is a note in the Hinton Ampner registers which states that, in 1576, "Roger Parry Parson of Hinton took Possession of his Parsonage the sixth Day of May, and did reade his Articles in the presence of Mr. Richard Beckensall, Robert Streeter & others." The site also mentions a note from the 1634 register of Hinton-Ampner. The original is in Latin, but the site author has translated it as "Roger Parry the Rector of this church who resided here 58 years died at Winchester where he was buried; he lies in the Temple of the Holy Trinity in the Bordal [?] Chapel, May 24th, in the eighty-eighth year of his life."

Obviously the original parish records need checking to confirm the entries but, when I eventually get around to writing some web pages about Parry occupations, it will be quite interesting to produce one about those in the ministry, considering the number of cathedrals with a Parry connection.

Continuing on the subject of occupations, a message on the Forum yesterday led to a site with details of EU farm subsidies – so I now have a list of around 400 payments made to Parry farmers. Comparing that to directory information will go on the "to do" list.

I also noticed yesterday that what is described on the BMD pages of Ancestry as "Marriages 1984 - 2005 (transcribed)" actually goes to a page entitled "England & Wales, Marriage Index: 1916-2005" – so they must be about to release the fullly transcribed records, as they did with the births. That will be a help (although I imagine I will still need to work through each quarter to add the spouses surnames, as I am doing with the mothers maiden names for the births).

And finally, I should have guessed I might be tempting fate to say how little correspondence there had been recently, since I promptly received an email relating to a new contact and also a second email from a new contact I’d answered two weeks ago.

Quarterly Newsletter!

2009-04-28T12:11:00.004Z

A Guild member mentioned earlier this year that he had changed from producing a quarterly newsletter to writing a blog – given the length of time since my last post, perhaps I should be doing the opposite!

There has been activity on the study throughout the year so far. January saw the official release of the 1911 census. I’d already had a preview of this with a beta trial just before Christmas (not the most convenient of times, but it was an opportunity for a few surprise presents.) During the trial, I had collected all of the Parrys in the available counties. However, some of these needed re-doing after the official release, since the totals had changed. This will continue to happen, as corrections are made to the transcriptions – already some of the counties released in January are showing differences to the previous numbers of Parrys, so those need investigating. The census is also being released in stages – with all of England now completed but with Wales, the Channel Islands, and the overseas military, still to come. The current total for Parrys is 13,772 but I expect that will double by the time the whole census is released.

Another database released earlier this year was Ancestry’s transcription of the GRO Birth Indexes from 1915-1983, something previously available from them only as images. This makes it easier to collect the information and helps me move closer to the recommended ONS goal of collecting all BMD details. I am now systematically working through the images to check the transcriptions and add the mothers’ maiden names. One benefit of the searchable database is that it is now possible to easily identify other surnamed entries where the mother’s maiden name was Parry, although following such lines is certainly not a priority for me.

There have been several marriage challenges during the year, one of which unfortunately I was too busy to submit anything for, since there were about 80 entries to be checked. I am now involved in helping with the Birmingham challenge and it is interesting to see how the challenge principle is changing, as some people "adopt a church" rather than searching across a whole registration district, and others choose to either limit submissions or not carry out certain look-ups. As usual though, the results received have set me searching the censuses for more information, which has resulted in some interesting trails. Even with a common surname like Parry, some people stand out as individuals and "Pluvius Cambria Parry" is certainly one of them. With a father from Flintshire and a mother from Hertfordshire, I wonder whose idea it was to name him "Rainy Wales Parry."

Sometimes Guild members offer other look-ups and a recent "newspaper challenge" by Richard Heaton produced several references to a Mr Parry’s vocal performances, as well as a report of the theft of a cash box from a Thomas Parry in Ross. The box contained gold and silver worth £6, but also "a beer-house Licence, and two Receipts for insurance", so I hope there were no accidents in the pub while he got that sorted out. The relevant entry can be found on Richard’s web page.

On other occasions, information arrives unexpectedly, as a photograph of a Parry war grave recently did, thanks to Anni. Although only the initial is shown on the stone, his number allowed me to identify him as a Thomas Parry, who was born in Anglesea, the son of a Henry and Jane Parry. I was also able to find the family in the 1891 and 1901 censuses.

Correspondence so far this year has included 17 new Parry contacts, as well as ongoing discussions with several others. I’ve also had the opportunity to visit both the National Library of Wales and the National Archives for the first time (not that I actually found what I was looking for in either place, but I still collected a few Parrys.)

But there is one thing that has dominated my thinking since the 1911 census came out – the reason why my great grandfather should have found himself in Hereford County Prison. I’ve often wondered whether I have any "black sheep" in the family – but I hadn’t expected to find one quite so close to home.

Hopefully, it should make an interesting story - when I finally track down all the paperwork!

One-Name Study Blogs

2008-12-08T19:14:00.005Z

There was some talk on the Forum recently about ways of publishing research on one’s ONS and blogs have featured as an attractive alternative to producing newsletters, or other printed material. There are now 33 blogs listed as being written by Guild members. It will be interesting to read through them to pick up tips – I’m always on the look-out for new ideas, especially on how to write interesting entries.

One of the difficulties with this blog is getting the balance right between meeting the purpose of the blog (which is to keep people informed about what is happening with the study) and making it something that people will actually want to read. I try to log down in Word what I am doing as I do it but, with having a largish study, many tasks take time to complete. This means the blog can turn into a list of half completed activities, forever repeating the same things as ongoing - but the alternative is large gaps between entries, especially when other (non-genealogical) activities also get in the way and delay the finishing of things.

Several other Guild members mentioned being too busy to keep their blogs going. But with December now here, and the end of the year looming, I don’t intend to see "updating the blog" on my resolutions list so it’s back to the listing of ongoing activities.

Keeping up with correspondence has been a major issue, with two records in the last few months. On the 18th August, I received emails from three new contacts - that’s the most on any one day. Then, starting from the 23rd October, there were ten new contacts in a fortnight (looking back, it was actually nine in 9 days to start with – I’m certainly glad that pace doesn’t continue throughout the year!)

It is always exciting to hear from other researchers. As with the marriage challenges, receiving new information is an opportunity to look into a particular family and often I can trace them through at least a few censuses. So that is a form of progress on the study, even if it isn’t particularly systematic.

One researcher sent me a certificate for a marriage in Nottingham in 1922. Because of the names used, and the family’s lack of movement from the village of Llanrwst, DEN, during the census years, it was possible to follow the family line back to the 1841 census, through three generations prior to the person marrying. Obviously the details do need further confirmation but it’s a good framework to work from (and an illustration of the usefulness of middle names).

Of the three new contacts in one day, one related to Monmouthshire, and two to Herefordshire, so all three connected to my area of particular interest. One descended from a family I already knew a little of – James Pritchard was left the property of Arkstone in Kingstone, HEF, by Mrs Mary Morgan (an heiress of the Parry family), on the condition that he took the name Parry. There is a reference in the London Gazette to the name change (Gazette Issue 12920 published on the 11 September 1787. Page 2 of 8 ) and several Parrys appear with Pritchard as a middle name around that time. There had not been much cause to investigate them before, although I had collected a copy of one of their Wills, that of Elizabeth Pritchard Parry who died in 1841. Now I had a reason to transcribe it, which confirmed the initial conclusions being drawn from the IGI, census, and the researcher’s own family stories, about what happened to the family in the early 1800s. The next stage is to produce a web page of the tree (but there’s at least three other family trees that I’ve promised to write first!)

Whilst searching for information about that family, I came across a reference to a book about Kingstone, by Delphine Coleman. As an informative account of the history of the parish, it also contains details about the Parry family, including an image of the Will of a John Parry who died in 1689. Further investigation is still needed to follow up the information in the book but it is a good example of how useful local histories can be. It reminded me of another book I came across a few years ago, at one of the Family History Fairs. "Past People in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire", by June Badeni, has an account of the Parry family from Easton Grey, yet another family to be followed up when time permits. I already have photographs of many of their memorials, having visited the parish church some years ago, and there is a pedigree relating to them in the sheets I obtained from Hereford library, although its accuracy does need confirming.

Another fairly new correspondent has copies of an indenture and two property deeds relating to their family, which should help in tracing them back further. And following up what happened to the other descendant lines had one of those "you’re never going to believe this…" moments. The researcher’s discussions with more recent owners of the property indicated that there had been descendants of the family in Canada and a search through an old address book turned up a couple of possible names. I found an obituary online in which those names appeared along with some others. Could this be the family? Then onto the researcher’s doormat fell a copy of a letter and newspaper cutting that another relative had just found amongst some family papers. Yes, it confirmed that the obituary was indeed the right family – and the researcher is now in contact with their cousins in Canada, a possibility not even suspected just three months ago.

Seeing people connect up with each other is exciting. Amongst the batch of ten new correspondents were two descendants of the "Colston Parry" family (view their pedigree here). With another one of those making contact during October, that means there are now at least eight researchers of that family, and the pedigree needs amending to include all of the new information. Hopefully, being in touch with each other will encourage them to further research to become the experts on their own family, a depth of knowledge that I cannot develop for the many individual Parry families.

Of course, things aren’t always that easy – one correspondent has so little information that they are totally stuck in the 1900s and will probably remain so until the 1911 census is released early next year.

Whilst trying to keep up with the new contacts, there is also continued correspondence with others. One of these concerns much earlier records – those relating to Griffith Appenrith of Calais, who died in 1553 and whose coat of arms some claim to be a more elaborate version of the "fess between three lozenges" Parry arms. He is referred to in the Middlesex pedigrees as "Apenreth or ap Henry" so a link to the Parrys is feasible. An important article with regard to Griffith is "The Welsh at Calais" by P.T.A. Morgan. Several of the references for this article relate to records held at Longleat and, when I first read it years ago, I probably dismissed the possibility of ever viewing these, since a research student had told me about the "exhorbitant fees" often required for access to private records. However, a recent discovery has made me think again – whilst searching for information on a book about Herefordshire speech that had been mentioned on a mailing list, I came across a book cataloguing papers from Longleat, which mentioned families such as the Talbots and the Devereux. Tempted initially by the book, since these are "Parry related" families, I then thought to check A2A and found Longleat listed. It appears that at least some of the records have now been copied so maybe viewing them will not be so impossible after all. Interestingly, as well as the Calais records, there are three sets of papers with references to Parrys - one of which is an Anthony Parry in the 1500s. Could this be the Anthony from Wiltshire who appears in the probate indexes? It would be funny if, as well as finding information that establishes Griffith’s origins, the papers also contain details that help to identify exactly how the Wiltshire Parrys connect to those of Herefordshire – something long claimed by researchers but not proven. That really would be an achievement.

For a family genealogist, such stretches of the imagination would be a "no-go", since it is important to work backwards step by step to firmly establish connections. But, for a one-namer, following up all such references to the name is important. In this case, they could shed light not just on the particular individuals but also on the origins of surnames, since there are Griffith families who claim to descend from Griffith Apenreth.

Which reminds me, I still haven’t finished the web page concerning the surname’s origins, a subject that another researcher enquired about just recently.

Talking of the web pages, following on from the difficulties with the web site in August, I registered two domain names, parryfamilyhistory.org.uk and parryone-namestudy.org.uk. Since the posting problems resolved themselves, the domains are currently pointed to the existing site but they should make it easier if I do need to move it in the future.

I did actually upload the full details of the probate abstracts, although the page is not linked in to the rest of the site, since I want to rewrite the whole probate section. They can be found here. I had made a start on converting the information into a spreadsheet for submission to the Guild Probate index but that still needs finishing. The probate index is another Guild initiative which will be very beneficial as more people submit information, since it will enable members to find their surnames where they appear within the content of Wills relating to people of other surnames.

The marriage challenges continue. Since I last posted I have received results from the following:
Lincoln MC - 2 found out of the 3 submitted.
Blythswood – 1 submitted and found. This is a challenge in stages so I have also just sent 3 entries for the stage 2.
Marylebone – there have been several batches of these and it has fascinated me to see how many marriages relate to people who have moved from Wales.
Eton – 5 found out of 5 submitted. This one also led to a helpful discussion about the use of "mail merge" in the production of certificates from excel files, so I now have some linked files to play around with.
Shoreditch stage 1 – another 100% result, with 27 submitted and all found. I’ve just submitted 13 for the stage 2 as well.
Tiverton – 1 submitted and found. Now this is an interesting one from 1902 – the family of the groom appear as PARRY in the 1901 census, but are PERRY in every census prior to that, a family originating in Devon, but with the groom’s father moving to Wales by 1871. Since the marriage took place in Devon, where the bride was also from, yet the groom remained as PARRY, could this indicate a permanent name change for the family?
Cirencester – 3 submitted. Two full certificates found and the 3rd, a Register Office marriage, had the spouse identified from a local index. The two full certificates are from 1841 and 1870 and, as I looked for related census entries, I realised that the Mary Elizabeth Parry marrying in 1870 was actually the daughter of the John Parry and Mary Coole, formerly Radcliffe, who married in 1841. So that’s a neat tie up between the results.

Although I have only had a small number of marriages to submit for those challenges, there are others ongoing that I won’t be submitting to because of the number of entries involved – for the two stages of West Derby, I have a total of 1153 marriages, and Toxteth has 180. However, for a challenge at Birmingham, there are several challengers working together who are tackling it a church at a time. Even though I have over 230 entries, they have said to submit them, so I have. I might actually be able to help with some batches of that one though, since Birmingham isn’t that far away, so I don’t feel too guilty. I was across there this last week, helping to identify some of the churches in Aston, by finding a few of my Parrys. But, in the long run, it may be more practical if I carried out a more local challenge myself.

It’s not just receiving Challenge results that can lead to furthering the study. In order to obtain details of entries for the Scottish challenge at Blythswood, it was necessary to purchase units from Scotland’s People. While I had those, I extracted the rest of the Parry details from the indexes there. Perhaps not surprisingly, there seemed to be a higher proportion of variant spellings of Parry in Scotland. However, searching for variants also produces more irrelevant results, since the variants of Parrie and Parrey pick up a place, Parrie in Edinburghshire, and an occupation of a "Parrey Cox Maker".

I already had the Scottish census details from Ancestry, which was a great help. If it wasn’t for Ancestry having transcribed so much regarding parents and spouses, it would have been very difficult to sort out some of the families from the SP indexes alone, where several occur together on a page. As one might expect with transcriptions, there are differences between the information on the two sites, with people appearing on one site but not the other. It is fairly easy to resolve the situation of those found on SP but not on Ancestry, by searching using place references and just a first name, or even no name. But it is not so easy the other way round. Funnily enough, one of the latest Marylebone certificates involved someone who I then traced to the Scottish censuses, which made it worth going back and purchasing a couple of the images. This revealed that a person listed on Ancestry definitely does appear in the census, so I don’t know what Scotland’s People have them indexed under. One good point about Scotland’s People though is that, if credits have run out, buying more re-instates them, so that is good to know.

I happened to be looking at the Warwickshire County RO’s site recently, which has Parrys in their databases for Victuallers (4 as victuallers, 6 as bondsmen), Tithe apportionments (21), and Prisoners (15).

I still haven’t followed up many of the databases that have been mentioned on the forum, but there have been a few:
Manchester’s unfilmed 1851 census had 179 Parry entries.
A preliminary look at an Australian newspapers beta site gave me thousands of results so that needs closer investigation.
An Irish Mariners site turned up two Parrys.
And a Guild member let me know there are two Parrys listed amongst the yacht owners in "Lloyds Register of Yachts 1969."

I also noticed that the Slave Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies, 1812-1834 were on Ancestry. I’m not sure how long they’ve been there. There’s 1704 Parry surname results and, using keyword, gives 2837 results because of owners with Parry as a middle name.
Another database it is worth using keyword for is the BVRI on A, which appears under "England & Wales Christening Records, 1530-1906" and "England & Wales Marriages, 1538-1940". This is not just because using keyword picks up Parry as a first name, but because it also picks it up in other contexts, such as maiden names of widows. (An example to explain - Hercules Richard Burleigh married Florence Peace in 1876. However, Florence’s father is shown as Samuel Billington Parry. It appears, from FreeBMD and CheshireBMD, that Florence Parry may have married Henry Peace in 1874.) These are entries that would be difficult to find on the cdrom version. The only problem is that it is necessary to visit each individual page to collect parental information, whereas that can be easily saved to a spreadsheet from the cd version, with the help of the LDS companion program.

Extracting BMD information is one of the main priorities of an ONS. I was recently sent a list of BMD details by a researcher and adding notes from those to my files indicated that I didn’t yet have all the relevant entries transcribed from the GRO. FreeBMD is becoming more up to date so that helped for some of the entries from the early 20th century. I also decided to have a look at the entries for 2005, which I hadn’t yet done. Using keyword, there are 707 marriage entries (about 350 actual marriages, since all entries are extracted at least twice when using keyword), 443 deaths, and 982 births. Not all the births are surnamed Parry, of course, since using keyword picks up those whose mother’s maiden name was Parry. However, with 558 actual Parry surnamed births, the population of Parrys does appear to be increasing – although I hardly think it’s doing so at a sufficient rate for Parrys to "take over the world", as a group on Facebook jokes.

Mind you, if they did, they could at least make it a legal requirement to record their own genealogy!

Another lost inscription and website issues

2008-08-15T23:26:00.002Z

There’s been mixed results with regard to the Salisbury Cathedral records. Unfortunately, there is no record of Henry Parry’s burial. But although the burial register appears to go back that far, it is a later copy, so the fact that it shows no entry for him doesn’t mean there wasn’t one originally. After all, why copy a register unless it is in a state of disrepair? Perhaps some other contemporary evidence will turn up from elsewhere, otherwise it looks as if that query will never be resolved.

However, I did learn of an inscription that I didn’t know about before – it’s also “lost”, since the stone can no longer be identified, but at least I have the text for it. This was for Francis Parry, of the Close, Salisbury, who died in 1662, “a man universally esteemed, who in the maturity of life yielded to nature…aged 77.”

An abstract of his Will is in the probate abstracts book and he’ll be appearing in a sub-branch of the Golden Valley pedigree, once I put that on the web site.

I was going to say, “It’s been over two weeks now, with no progress on the web site problem” – but today’s check on whether I could upload anything succeeded! I was so surprised, I almost forgot what I wanted to upload. The DNA information is now on there, as well as a separate page for details of site updates. I haven’t added the rest of the probate abstracts yet – the whole probate area of the site could really do with some rewriting, so it’s a matter of deciding how much of that to do first. In some ways, the fact that I can now upload to the site again seems bad timing – I’d almost decided to take out a domain name and develop a new site because of the problems. Now I have to decide – shall I just “tweak” it or shall I go for a major change?

One of my contacts recently sent an article about Blanche Parry from the Birmingham Post – it’s a shame that, although the reporter had obviously seen Ruth’s book about Blanche, he’d still got her father’s name wrong (Miles was Blanche’s grandfather, not her father. Her father was Harry.) I wonder how many people were interested enough in the details to have now been misled.

I noticed the National Archives have the RN Officer's Service Records available. There’s 30 Parrys amongst them, including a few familiar names. It’s often interesting to look at how occupations run in families – I wonder how many of the Admirals and Commanders will turn out to be related to each other!

Thinking of “new”information, there have been several sites mentioned on the Forum recently, but I haven’t had time to follow those up yet. Perhaps there will be some good results to share in my next post.

Lost monuments and other activities

2008-07-31T20:35:00.002Z

There have been several things I’ve set out to write about over the last few weeks but time has been flying by again.

We had a holiday and, although I hadn’t planned to do any research, I try not to miss any opportunities. So it was that I found myself in Owermoigne church, looking for a memorial to Leonard Parry, who was rector there when he died in 1614. In his Will, he asks that he be buried in the chancel, specifying the words he wanted to be carved upon a plain stone. However, there was a notice in the church porch with some of the church’s history and the only stone mentioned as having been in the chancel was for the rector who followed Leonard. The loss of some artifacts as well as a number of memorials to the lords of the manor and “former rectors and their relations,” was noted though, so it appears that events over time, especially the rebuilding of the church in 1882, have taken their toll.

At least I did find his name on the list of vicars.

Leonard was rector from 1567 – 1614 and it must have been an interesting time. According to the noticeboard, although the rectory is thought to have existed since the thirteenth century, most of the present building dates from the time of Elizabeth (who reigned 1558 – 1603). The villagers were well known for their smuggling activities in the past – with the squire and parson also being involved. Beams in the rectory dining room are reputedly from a wreck of the Spanish Armada (1588) and the rectory cellar contains a bricked-up window through which the parson used to receive his share. Oh Leonard, if only you could come back and tell tales!

Later we visited Salisbury Cathedral. Here, I hoped to find a memorial to Henry Parry, who was Chancellor & Canon resident when he died about 1570 and in his Will requested to be buried under the pulpit. But a search of the recorded tombs shows no record of him. Perhaps there will be other records, such as the registers, which will confirm his burial at least. That’s something still to be investigated.

But back in June, I wrote about the lost gravestones of a mayor of Coventry and his wife, Mary Luckman, formerly Parry. I also knew that a memorial plaque in Church Knowle to another Leonard Parry, who was rector in that parish until 1623, had been lost when that church was renovated. Considering these two "new" losses, it shows the importance of recording things as they are today, as well as researching the past - perhaps I should be doing more on the current Parrys, after all.

I’m still catching up with emails from when I was away. One of them was from a researcher whose ancestor, Abigail Griffiths, was a servant of John Parry of Ewias Harold. In 1724, he left her all his houses & lands in Longtown, Clodock, with remainder to her brother David. Mindful of a talk on “hidden kin” at the Guild AGM, I am keeping an eye out for anything which might indicate she was related to him – especially since there were several David Griffiths in Longtown by 1800, owning land near to my Parrys. In fact, the son of one of them married a sister of my 3xgt grandfather so who knows, perhaps the Griffiths and Parry families intermarried in the same way the Vaughans and Parrys in that area seem to have done, keeping property "in the family".

But as usual, I couldn’t resist doing a search for any new information which might have appeared recently, and I spent some time on the site of the Ewyas Lacy Study Group. They are in the process of adding manorial surveys to the site, which will be a great help in identifying the lands held by Parry families. The area is a “hot spot” for Parrys, so I could quite happily spend hours on this site, and the similar site of the Longtown Historical Society Archive.

I saw a second hand book recently that looked interesting – “Thirty Thousand Yesterdays,” by Ann Parry. Ann was David Lloyd George's last Welsh Secretary, and the book was described as being “full of political and social events of the era before WW2”. But it is a much more “personal” book than I expected, starting with her early years in Anglesey, and listing the entries from the family bible. Those have enabled me to identify the family in three censuses – 1881 at RG11/ 5593/30/5, 1891 at RG12/4679/96/10 and 1901 at RG13/5296/95/6. I’m looking forward to reading the book through properly.

At the moment, still being fairly disorganised with the study, it’s sometimes easy to lose track of what information is referenced to where. I happened to look at the help pages for the Parry mailing list & message board just before my holiday and was dismayed to realised they were directing people to the Perry DNA project - since they had been written before the Parry DNA project commenced and, at that time, Parry was included as a variant under the Perry project. Changing those was a priority once I returned home.

I would like to say that I have also now updated my own site to include the details of both the project at Family Tree DNA and also the DNA group at Ancestry. However, having got all the pages written, I now find that my ISP has problems with the upload server, which is preventing any changes. “It should be fixed in 4-6 days,” they say. So how come people on the cable forums have been complaining of the same issue for the past two months? I might not have been updating the Parry pages frequently over that time, so hadn’t discovered the issue earlier, but I may have to consider an alternative web site if it can’t be resolved fairly promptly.

Other news – I realised that I had missed the deadline for one of the marriage challenges. Fortunately I only have two entries for that district but it was a bit frustrating. I have now submitted details to three others with deadlines looming, with just one more to do. The Parry probate abstracts would now be on my site if I could upload anything. To go with them, I decided to put up the pedigree of G S Parry, who originally produced them. His pedigree appears on one of the LDS films – I didn’t find it myself, I just happened to be sitting next to an acquaintance in the local FHC some years ago as she was flicking through the film to find the item she had ordered it for, when she suddenly exclaimed “I’ve found a Parry pedigree”! I got a copy and filed it, only later discovering the connection to the abstracts. But I am glad I decided to produce his tree because it meant I got out my file of assorted notes and pedigrees that I have been sent over the years. The very next day, I received an email from a new contact who wrote to say that a 4 year old Doris Parry shown on my 1901 census listings was his grandmother. As I followed the family back through the other censuses, I realised something was familiar, so I picked up another set of sheets from the pedigrees file, relating to research carried out between about 1930-1950 by a Roy Edgardo Parry, regarding Parrys in Gloucestershire. Again, this had been sent to me some years ago by another researcher and I had filed it until the time I got around to working on pedigrees. Roy Edgardo Parry only turns out to be the brother of this researcher’s grandmother. Instant tree back to 1700! In trying to check who it was who sent me those sheets originally, I found an email from 2004 when a non-Parry came across my site and decided to let me know about the developing site for Longhope village, a place with a graveyard full of Parrys – guess where the family is from!

With another of the recent new contacts turning out to be a descendant of the Jones-Parry family that I have a pedigree on my site for, it seems like a lot of separate pieces of information might suddenly start fitting together.

Ongoing Projects

2008-06-30T12:30:00.002Z

Why are some activities easier to do than others? At the start of the year, I wrote about trying to get some extractions or transcriptions done most days before dealing with any incoming mail. That tactic certainly worked with the probate abstract book, which was transcribed by March. The second stage of work on the details from the book, inserting tabs so that the information could be pasted into a table, was almost compulsive – the sort of task that is so easy to do in preference to anything else, that it’s probably a good job that, that is also now finished. The results have been pasted into excel and just need some rearranging and categorising to make them useable.

The process set me thinking about the different requirements of tasks on the study and how to achieve the most progress. There are many activities to be carried out for a one-name study. The primary task may appear to be the amassing of a large collection of data on the name. But that data then needs analysing, and conclusions developing from it, which should be published in order to advance research on the name. There will always be some overlap of these tasks, especially since one rarely finishes data collecting, as new sources become available. But for a small study, the bulk of the data collection can be carried out before the other stages and, in some cases, the study can effectively be “completed” – having traced everyone by the name back to an original source. There may be new developments to explore, such as the use of DNA for genealogy but, if you only have a few hundred names in any census, the basic work doesn’t take long.

For a large study it’s different. If you waited until all the basic data was collected, it would probably be your descendants carrying out the other stages! So it seems important to work on several stages at the same time.

Thinking about the nature of the activities, there are some which I describe as “mindless” - even if they take a long time to complete, it doesn’t matter since they can be picked up easily and paused at any time, and don’t take much effort to carry out. Other tasks require a bit of planning – perhaps they are still easy to carry out, but must be tackled in one go (eg where the data is only available for a limited time, or where any break in the extraction process would result in a different set of reference numbers and make it difficult to match up the data), or else they just require more thought in order to get them right (as when designing a web page to best explain a particular point). For most of these tasks, the final goal is known – it’s just how to get there that’s the issue. But then there are those tasks which require a great deal of thought and application, often without knowing quite what the final result will look like (as when I tried to find a way of mapping a modern Parry distribution with a program designed for 19c information).

So, for the different types of activities, it’s not just the time available that influences whether they get done or not – it’s also attitude. Do I feel like putting in that level of work, at that time? Am I up for a challenge, or do I just want something simple that will give quick results? I once read that it’s more effective to start a new project before finishing the previous one – the reasoning being that starting and finishing are the hardest parts and, if you finish a task without something else on the go, it gets harder to start something new. (Of course, it is important to ensure the original task does actually get finished!)

But, again, it's the principle of overlapping tasks, rather than tackling them consecutively.

So why this ramble about tasks? Basically, it’s the reasoning behind the structure of the ongoing projects list which follows. I’ve not really thought about the nature of the activities of the ONS in this way before – it’s just been a list of things to do, one after another. But structuring the activities, with priorities taking account of the nature of the tasks, could be a more effective way of making progress.

So, the ongoing projects:
The probate abstracts book is the main task but it has moved into a “thought required” activity, since the structure of the eventual database needs some consideration. And, although there are some simple corrections to be made to the original transcription before posting that onto the web site, page layout and linkage of related abstracts needs thought.
There are actually two new transcription tasks - census entries and BMDs. Since both of these will take a long time overall, having two provides a bit of variety. They are also both subdivided into smaller activities:
BMDs – the starting point is typing up the certificates received from the marriage challenges. As that moves into combining those with results already received in a variety of electronic forms, and submitting them to the Guild marriage index, the basic transcription task will become the civil registration indexes not yet transcribed.
Census – all of the index information is already extracted so this is the continued transcription of the additional details, starting with “my” three counties. Again, as this task moves into a “thought required” activity once a county is completed and the process of matching individuals across census years begins, the transcription will move on to adjoining counties.
The other current activities that require some thought are updating the web site with information on the DNA research, and with the “Fess families” details derived from the display in April.
And, while I’m doing that, the “serious thought” subject – how to connect up information on the web site so that people can easily find out what is available for any individual.

And now the projects are "in print", look out for their progress.

Three weeks ago, I said that, by the end of the week, I intended to have caught up with all the outstanding tasks. Clearly I didn’t achieve the goal, since I have only just posted the current projects list, but I also “failed” with regard to correspondence – probably the major difficulty of every large ONS and the reason that some people choose not to register their studies. Producing an initial response to people isn’t (usually) too difficult but, having had 25 new contacts since the start of the year, it is the later exchanging of information that can take up the time. And I still have several queries that had to be put aside about six months ago.

But setting the goal helped so my next one has to be catching up with that outstanding correspondence, whilst still keeping up with any day-to-day occurrences. And, while on the subject of those, here’s the news from the last couple of weeks:

I spotted a couple of Sir Edward Abbott Parry’s books on ebay. In looking for more information about those, I found an interesting article by Susan Watkin, detailing his work.
I received details of three more marriages from the Marylebone marriage challenge during June. There are 5 challenges to sort out items for, but none of them are places Parrys are common in so it shouldn’t take long.
I had a nice surprise when a Guild member took the trouble to send me a death notice from a newspaper – and then followed that with 13 17c marriages she’d found on a visit to the Westminster archives.
The Queensland Convict Transportation Registers were mentioned on the Forum – 58 Parrys and 1 Parrey transported. Details from the assizes will be a good subject to research at some time but that will have to go on a “future projects” list.

Finally, a couple of comments from correspondence:
Octavious is a fairly uncommon name – but I’ve had two queries recently involving it. The searches I’d carried out for the first query helped me identify information on the second promptly, despite the spelling varying between “ious” and “ius”. It’s helpful when things coincide like that.
I’ve also received emails from both new and renewed contacts regarding the Golden Valley family, which have resulted in me browsing the Patent Rolls for early information, as well as rechecking some of the coat of arms details. There are some contradictions in the reference works with regard to which families certain Parry quarterings have been ascribed to, so sorting that out will be part of the “fess families” research.

Probate Abstracts update

2008-06-13T23:25:00.002Z

One of the (free!) books I picked up at the WDYTYA event was a catalogue from “Personalia”, who are dealers in all sorts of historical artifacts. It is fascinating to browse through something like this, since it gives an insight into the past, as well as containing many names (no Parrys though). One of the sections I found particularly interesting was about Momentos – predominently mourning brooches and rings. I have come across many references to mourning rings whilst transcribing the probate abstracts book but had never realised what forms they could take. You can see examples on their web site - Mourning Jewellery and Momentos

With regard to the probate abstracts, the basic transcription of the book was finished in March and I am in the process of converting the information into a suitable form to paste it into a spreadsheet or database. Having it in an electronic form will make it easier to search, but a spreadsheet format will also mean information can be rearranged easily which should make it more convenient for spotting connections between the various abstracts. At the moment, the conversion is what I call a “mindless task” – adding in tabs between information such as names and the key terms of “executor,” ”witness,” etc., so that the information will paste easily into a table. It doesn’t take a lot of thought but, every so often, something catches my attention. One such moment was when I spotted “Thomas Luckman, of Coventry, printer” in the abstract for a Mary Parry, spinster of Warwick, whose Will was written in 1783 and proved 1791. It wasn’t just the place name, but also the surname which caught my attention – and an article that appeared in the local newspaper a few years ago came to mind. It concerned the loss of some gravestones, amongst which was one belonging to a former Lord Mayor of Coventry, Thomas Luckman, and his wife Mary, who were buried in St Mary’s in 1784 and 1813 respectively. The gravestones had been moved during excavations at Coventry’s first Cathedral and had later disappeared. You can read the newspaper report here.

According to the newspaper, Thomas Luckman’s wife, Mary, had formerly been a Parry and, when I first saw it, I just noted it as “a Parry, to be followed up ‘as and when’,” since I had no further information on her. But now I have the abstract information, which links her in to a family, since it describes Mary Luckman as the niece of the testator (although it doesn’t actually mention that she was a Parry).

And it’s possibly not just any family – but one of those families who may eventually be shown to belong amongst the “fess families”. One of the other beneficiaries is a cousin, Martha Parry of Barcheston Mill, and there has been a suggestion by other researchers that the Barcheston Mill family connect to those of Aston Somerville, who did use that coat of arms. So there is a picture building up of interconnecting families – I just need to prove that there were definite relationships between them, rather than just associations. But it does seem like it’s time to stop bemoaning the fact that I have no family locally to research – they may not be my own family, but, as Parrys, they’re close enough.

As a final note along those lines, as I rechecked the Segar Parry information today, I discovered that some of the records for that family are held at Warwick record office – yet more relevant information just about on my doorstep!

It’s a good job that I have finally caught up with recording the last few months activities and can now start to look forward to the ongoing projects.

Web site update

2008-06-13T23:15:00.002Z

I used the “fess families” as the basis for my display at the Guild’s AGM in April. The display for the Solihull seminar in February went well (so I thought!) and I gained a few ideas from talking to others there, as well as just from the actual process of producing the display. But that display had been a more general introduction to several aspects of the study so I narrowed it down to concentrate on just the fess families for the AGM display. Having done that, the information I produced should act as the foundation for pages on each of the fess families to go onto the web site. Back in February I also received a copy of the Will of Bishop Edward Archibald Parry, formerly Bishop of Guiana, which I will transcribe. He was the son of Edward Parry, Suffragan Bishop pf Dover, whose tomb at Canterbury can be seen on the “fess families” page on my web site.

Getting the web pages updated is important – they have suffered from the busy-ness of the last few months and don’t even have details of the DNA study or DNA group on them at the moment. The only page I have added recently concerned my grandfather’s “emigration” to Canada. There is more to be added even to that page but the incentive for producing it was hearing about the Ontario Genealogical Society’s annual conference which was being held in London, Ontario. I notified a Canadian researcher about the page, in case there were any opportunities for making it known to people. Nothing came of that but at least it meant I produced the page (sometimes deadlines do work!)

Going back to the Guild’s AGM in April – since it was held down in Devon, I was able to obtain information on Parry events in that county, which I typed up once home. This was an incentive to systematically extract the IGI entries for the county. Tackling the IGI properly is on my “to do” list, but I know from doing Devon that it will be a long job. One of the difficulties with English counties is going to be the number of Perry entries, since they are treated as a variation of Parry on the IGI. Some of the early variants could be even more problematic, since searching for “ap Harry” produces all the “Harry” results. I will perhaps have to work on an exact search for Parry and hope that I can cover all the variants separately. There’s certainly plenty of scope for confusion, especially where there are instances of different surnames that have the same origin and which may be interchangeable in particular time periods - one of the probate Abstracts is that of an Ursula Harry, who then remarried to a Harrison and who also had a son in law, David Parry.

So that's three different surnames which all have an origin derived from “Harry’s son.”

Past research

2008-06-13T23:10:00.002Z

Another recent addition to the British Origins site was the “Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries 1890-1980”. After looking at them, I almost wrote an entry entitled “sometimes I could scream!” because amongst the entries was one saying “I have now definite proof …”(of a particular Parry’s parentage) but it didn’t indicate what the proof was. It’s like researchers who write saying “I know….” but when you ask how, it turns out that they don’t actually know at all. Such comments serve to remind me of the importance of documenting sources, and also of attempting to ensure that what I research is distributed and available for others to build on. But it is frustrating to think that much of what I am working on has already been researched by others in the past. Yes, past research does need re-examining, especially as new records become available, but how much better it would be if we could keep building on it, instead of having to rediscover it.

Sometimes we do need to correct past research though. I wonder to what extent that will be the case when I have followed up what I call the “fess families” – those Parrys families laying claim to the coat of arms “a fess between three lozenges”. Back in March, a researcher sent me a link to an article on the Gazettes Online web site, concerning an insolvent debtor, Segar Parry . This is a site that I plan to go through systematically when I get time but I can never resist following up such items. There were two lines of enquiry that resulted. Firstly, I discovered another entry which stated “Cornet Robert Burdett, from half-pay of the 25th Light Dragoons, vice Segar Parry, who exchanges, receiving the difference. Dated 29th March 1819”. Now, I don’t understand the military arrangement that is going on here and so still need to find out about that. But, back in December 2006, I received an email asking about a James Burdett Parry, baptised 1828 in St Marylebone to a James and Amelia, so finding the names Burdett and Parry linked together in some way could be important. An additional point of interest on this line is that there is also a John Burdett Parry. Unfortunately, he was born about 1808 in Herefordshire, and is in that county in the censuses so, although his wife comes from Middlesex, there doesn’t seem to be anything to connect him to the James Burdett Parry. It could all just be coincidence but it is something to be looking out for.

The second line of enquiry that resulted from following up the Gazette article came from the reminder that I have already come across references to the combination of Segar and Parry with regard to heraldry. According to a story that I have yet to prove, one of the daughters of William Segar, Garter King of Arms, married a Parry. The Parry wasn’t keen to apply for a coat of arms but his later descendants did. Looking at my own listing of Parrys from Burke’s General Armory I found “Parry (Segar-Parry, Little Haddam, co. Hertford). Ar. a fesse betw. three lozenges az.” – so that makes this family one of those I should be including amongst my “fess families” investigation.

And it certainly looks like it will require investigating – I am fairly sure that the Segar Parry was the son of a Nicholas Segar Parry and, using a combination of the IGI and the probate abstracts, it appears that the family may have traced back to Flintshire.

So how come the Herefordshire Arms?

Working together

2008-06-13T23:09:00.001Z

One of my friends from the States asked recently whether a DNA sample would help with his branch. It is such a shame that he isn’t a Parry, since I don’t doubt he’d have become the second member of the DNA study. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he looks out for Parrys who may provide samples for me. Collaboration has been a recurrent theme as I’ve considered the events of the last few months. I had a pleasant surprise after thanking a Guild member for their work on one of the marriage challenges. It turned out that they’d noticed some Parrys in records they were working on, so I soon received a file of Parry marriages from Sussex. It sometimes happens that people send me files in versions that are more up to date than my programs will open so I have to request the details in an older version. But in this case, not being particularly technically minded, I didn’t even recognise the file type (an odt file) and none of my programs would open it. However, a search on the internet indicated that Google docs would do so. I’d not used that system before although I had viewed the spreadsheet a Guild member set up, in order to let other members view the entries for the challenge he was carrying out. It occurs to me that sharing files through the system could be a potential method for encouraging collaboration amongst Parry researchers, especially on things such as the census records, or civil registration and certificates. Since there are so many Parrys in those records, working together is possibly the only way even the basic information will be collected in less than my lifetime.

Generous genealogists

2008-06-13T23:05:00.003Z

I received 23 copy marriage certificates at the end of May, the results of Stage 2 of the Bristol Marriage Challenge. That’s 40, out of the 48 Bristol district entries up to 1871, that have now been accounted for. (The 51 marriages shown on FreeBMD is an exaggeration due to transcription errors). The details from several of these latest ones will be of interest to other researchers but I need to get them typed up first – not all of the challengers send out results electronically since some prefer to transcribe directly from the registers onto blank “certificates”. But, having received well over 300 certificates since I started submitting entries to the challenges, I’m certainly not going to complain about a bit of typing up.

I went to the WDYTYA? LIVE event at the beginning of May and spotted a few Parrys in some second hand books. There weren’t enough references to justify buying the books, but staff on the stall were kind enough to let me transcribe the entries. It reminded me of the first time I asked a bookseller if I could do that – it was soon after joining the Guild, so the concept of one-name studies was still new to me, and I’d found one or two entries in each of several separate booklets of apprenticeship records. Again, there wasn’t enough to justify buying them, but I wasn’t sure what kind of response I might get from the bookseller, a gentleman easily identified by his hat. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that, in return for just putting the series of books into order in their box, I was free to transcribe anything relevant. It was only in April, when the bookseller died, that I learnt of his past contributions to genealogy. Howard Benbrook’s recollections of Don Steel probably encapsulate what many of us visitors to the fairs experienced, and Stuart Raymond’s his wider contribution.

No wonder he had understood the one-namer’s goal.

Medieval soldiers

2008-06-09T11:40:00.003Z

A new database was mentioned on the Forum at the end of May - The Soldier in later Medieval England, which covers the period between 1369 and 1453. I didn’t expect to find any Parrys in it (and I didn’t), since these dates are before the name developed as a surname.

However, it does have 5 ap Harr(y/i) and 9 ap Henry entries, as well as other names which are possibly early variations (such as ap Herry) or that researchers have contacted me about (like Appenreth). Most Parry families will have started through an “ap Harry” and amongst the progenitors of the Golden Valley Herefordshire family are John ap Harry, and his brother Thomas, who are reputed to have fought at Agincourt. I already knew that a Thomas ap Henry and a John ap Henry are listed in Anne Curry’s book about Agincourt, as having taken out indentures to serve on the 1415 campaign. But here I find that, in 1415, a Thomas ap Harri and a John ap Harry both appear on a list as “sick”. There is then both a Thomas and a Henry ap Harry fighting under Edmund, Earl of March, in 1417, and a Thomas ap Harry under Richard, Duke of York, in 1441.

Of the ap Henrys, a David, two Jeuans, a Gwilym and a Ricard, were all under the command of John ap Rys et al, in 1415. A David and a Jeuan were also listed as sick. Then, in 1441, a Davy fought under Sir Lewis John, and a Philip under Henry Bourchier, Count of Eu. In the 1415 campaign, there was also an archer, John ap Herry, listed under the command of Griffith ap Jeuan Iscoid. This is notable because the John from the Golden Valley family was occasionally listed as “ap Herry”, but, since he was sheriff of Herefordshire around 1400, I imagine he is unlikely to be fighting as an archer in 1415.

I noticed a (probably irrelevant) fact, that all of the ap Harrys were men-at-arms whereas the ap Henry entries are all just archers (or “archer foot”). That some individuals do appear as men-at-arms is itself a promising sign, given that the Parrys from the Golden Valley were armigerous. But it is clear that more information will be needed to make sense of the various entries. Thomas ap Harry was supposedly killed at Agincourt (according to various Golden Valley pedigrees) so there are probably many people of the same names. The project details do mention that the research team will be linking records and building up career profiles, although such details does not appear to be accessible through the web site. This is something I will need to enquire about – I certainly don’t have the experience and knowledge to work on these records, even if I did access the originals.

The results generally are very interesting to browse through – one gets some idea of why names such as Powell are more common than Parry nowadays, of how many Welsh soldiers were involved in the armies, and also some idea of the differences in frequencies of particular names in England and Wales (eg there are 30 Harrys to only 4 ap Harrys, whereas there are 37 Howells, but 88 ap, or “appe”, Howells.)

I just hope that further information will be obtainable on the ap Harry/Henrys and also others who appear in the pedigree books as relevant in some way, such as “David Gam”, who died at Agincourt, supposedly saving Henry V’s life.

I may regret writing this…

2008-06-08T15:40:00.002Z

But since, if I don’t aim at something, I won’t achieve it, I have now made this the "catching up" week. By the end of it, I aim to be able to write about the ongoing current projects, having cleared all the outstanding tasks from the past few months. Such tasks include not just general study activities (the ever-increasing filing, as well as writing some extended emails) but also blog entries about things that have happened recently on the study.

So, today’s catch up entry – DNA groups on Ancestry.

Early in May, Ancestry enabled DNA groups to be set up for surnames. Although there is already a Parry DNA project at Family Tree DNA, it seemed a good idea to set up a group on Ancestry as well. Some subscribers to the DNA lists seemed concerned at the thought of several projects existing for one surname but I think, as a one-namer, I’m more concerned about reaching Parrys wherever they are – we can sort out the practicalities of how to compare all the results later!

And the decision seems to be paying off since another Parry has requested to join the group already. One advantage of the Ancestry groups is that people who have tested elsewhere can submit their own data. I started the group by inputting my Parry results from a male relative and it is great to finally see a comparison of two sets of Parry results. Not that they match, but it’s a start.

The Ancestry groups also allow for the sharing of files and for carrying out discussions, so they do fill a gap in the existing provision, since FTDNA only show results of tests by them, and the only other discussion areas are the normal surname message board and mailing list, neither of which do I want to become dominated by dna issues.

So, another small step along the path to making sense of the Parrys.

“Later” – the Surrey Will Abstracts

2008-05-28T11:45:00.002Z

Have you ever noticed how flexible the word “later” can be?

The Surrey Will abstracts contained 66 Parry entries, plus a few variant spellings, although some of these were duplicate indexing of the same items. I ended up noting 71 individual names, derived from 45 Wills, only 5 of which related to Parry testators. Out of the others, 26 had Parrys as a witness, or just as a name with no further details, so there was insufficient information to do more with those for now. I was hopeful that the other 19 would be “connectable” in some way, since there were relationships given, but searching for connections produced mixed results. The Will of Andrew Tremills (or Tremetts) was the best – this links in with 5 entries from the Parry Abstracts book and, although I had worked out the likely relationships between those people, Andrew’s confirms the details and gives me his daughter’s maiden name - not that I can find the marriage of a Whitney Parry to a Tremills/Tremetts, but that’s another issue.

Of the other abstracts:
Edward Jones of Bermondsey mentions deeds which are with John Parry, exec. of (Mr) Samuel Loyd – and an abstract of a Samuel Lloyd’s Will appears in the Parry Abstracts book. Unfortunately, the executor of Samuel’s Will was a Charles Parry, but he does have a brother John, so it still looks promising.
In 1696, Mary Nobes of St Saviour Southwark left money to her son-in-law Roger Ingram, and her granddaughter, Hannah Parry, wife of Samuel Parry, and I can find a marriage between a Samuel Parry and Hanna Ingram on the IGI in 1693.
Elizabeth Collins of St Olave Southwark 1682 left her best holland apron and cambric handkerchief to Penelope Parry, wife of Thomas Parry of St Olave Southwark, gentleman. She also left the rest of her estate to Richard Parry, Thomas Parry and William Parry at 21. No relationships were given. However, a Thomas Parry of St Olave, with a wife Penelope, does appear in the Parry Abstracts. They only have a son Thomas, but he mentions children of his siblings (without naming the children). So just hints at connections there, with a lot more to investigate. One key point for me is that the siblings are late of Breconshire, so here we are dealing with the gradual spread of the Parry families away from my main area of interest to elsewhere in the country.

Finally, I was interested to see that both the Surrey Abstracts and the Parry Abstracts book contain an abstract for Knevet Parry of St Olave, which was proved in 1603 – and that there are differences between the two abstracts even on the witnesses’ names. So often with a one-name study, it is easier to deal with secondary sources, since they are more accessible, but this is a reminder of the importance of checking the original records wherever possible.

So that’s the Surrey Abstracts - and the “update on where things are at with the study” will have to wait until “later.”

Parry in the FA Cup Final

2008-05-17T14:45:00.002Z

I was just watching the start of the FA Cup final and spotted a Parry in the line-up – Paul Parry, who plays for Cardiff City. You can read more about him on Wikipedia.

However, not particularly being a fan of football, I have decided to spend the afternoon exploring the Parry entries from the recent addition to the Origins site - Surrey Wills Abstracts 1470-1856. Because these are fully transcribed abstracts, it is possible to find entries where Parrys appear within the content of the Will, or as a witness, rather than just those Wills made by Parrys. This should be a great help in putting together family relationships – I have already spotted one for an Andrew Tremills (or Tremetts), who seems to be the father-in-law of a Whitney Parry who appears in the Parry Abstracts book.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to post some results later - along with an update on where things are at with the study, since it has been rather a long time since my last posting!

The year so far

2008-02-15T12:54:00.002Z

It’s the Guild’s Midland Seminar tomorrow, which should be an interesting day. There’s the opportunity to put on a display about our studies so I thought I’d have a go, as a "trial run" before doing one for the AGM Conference in April. I was planning it as a general introduction to the Parry ONS but now I am wondering whether I ought to link it more to the seminar’s topics.

I received a renewal reminder from Ancestry recently. Last year I made use of a special offer in order to get a good rate on the World subscription but, with it going up to the full rate this year, it’s a good opportunity to take stock of what information is on there and how valuable it really is. Whilst I do collect all references to the name, many of the thousands of entries available on Ancestry relate to records such as newspapers and published histories – items which are time consuming to extract from and largely add just biographical detail. But my priority must be the building up of the framework of who was alive when – something more effectively achieved through the vital records of births, deaths and marriages, combined with the censuses to identify where they all were.

Things are progressing with regard to transcribing the Parry Abstracts – I’m now on page 87 out of 104 pages, (abstract 572, out of 689). There are a few I have missed out and will need to return to – I didn’t think I’d tackle some of the Welsh Wills using voice recognition software!

With the concentration on that transcribing, I do still have some correspondence to catch up with, although I have managed to reply fairly promptly to the nine new correspondents who have contacted me so far this year. I have also checked and submitted almost 70 entries to the various marriage challenges.

Findmypast has added the next decade of passenger lists, which included 466 Parrys. Having extracted them using exact spelling, I tried to find variants and those with additions (eg "jnr") after the name – at which point I realised I’d missed the double barrelled surnames. It doesn’t seem possible to search just for those, without knowing who you’re looking for, so I shall have to remember to search on Parry* in future. I also realised that I will need to go back and search for such combined surnames where Parry is the second name, although that is more difficult to know what to search for – the ONS list can be useful for this since searching there for *parry* gives some ideas of possible combinations.

There’s been some interesting items on ebay – Mrs Parry’s livery button; an item relating to Parry’s Hotel, in Ambala (Haryana / India) (probably some connection to the company now known as EID Parry); postcards of Parry Sound which led me to discover the difference between Parry Sound and Parry Harbour (aka "Parry Hoot", as lumbermen gathered there to avoid the "dry" town of Parry Sound, where the sale of alcohol was banned by the "Beatty Covenant"); and a business card for "Irvin & Parry Gunsmiths" of Philadelphia, Pa, who made "the Parry Antomatic Single Trigger for Double Guns" (don’t think I’ll be adding one of those to my collection!)

As usual, the Forum has been a good source of websites to explore. Recently there have been some Boer War sites posted – perhaps I should let some of the sites know about my Dad’s research into one of our relatives, since he does appear on them. Richard Heaton has also updated his newspaper site, which currently has 69 Parry items on it. He’s talking about researching local newspapers at the seminar tomorrow.

Now that’s possibly given me an idea for a more appropriate display.

Starting as I mean to go on

2008-01-01T23:49:00.000Z

An empty house today was a good opportunity for clearing emails and work on the study.

Whilst checking ebay notifications, I came across a reference to a “Lorris and Roger Parry”. Further investigation revealed Roger Parry (1905-1977) was a French artist. The “Lorris” turned out to be a Fabian Loris rather than “Lorris Parry”. But given that registered one-name studies carry out worldwide research, it is great to find someone in a country where the surname rarely occurs.

There are also references to work by 20 other Parry related artists on the artnet site so I shall have a look through those later.

Ebay can be an interesting source of information – I didn’t know a Parry wrote a “Cyclopaedia of Perfumery”. There’s also another French connection, as a Parry-Vielle limoges box is listed. I don’t know the reason for the Parry in this company’s name and it looks as if the company’s website is unavailable so no source for their history there. But searching for more information on them did net me 4 Parrys from a list of voters in Placer County, CA, in 1890. Although I did decide not to sidetrack to explore all the other companies that are found by searching www.parry- on google. That's an activity for another day.

I didn’t actually submit any entries to the Liverpool Marriage challenge, given how many there were for Parrys. However, I did send the challenger a list of them, in case it was useful in helping to narrow down the possible churches for other people’s entries (since I had been able to identify a reasonable number of the churches by using the Liverpool BMD site). Today I received a file back, with over 200 of the exact dates added in, as well as a few of the churches I had not been able to identify. That will certainly be a great help and was a lovely surprise.

In order to ensure the study progresses, I am planning to try doing some work on extractions or transcriptions most days, before replying to correspondence. Today I managed to transcribe the entries for Anglesea and Berkshire from GS Parry’s book of PCC Abstracts. However, I didn’t then manage to finish emails to the three new correspondents (the third new one arrived today) so the plan may not always work.

But at least I’ve tried!

Rounding off the year

2007-12-31T12:44:00.000Z

As this will be my last posting of the year, a year end round up seems a more appropriate subject than just a "catch up" of December's activities, although I need to do that first.

At the beginning of December, a couple of new databases were mentioned on the mailing lists:
The Dublin 1911 census became available from the National Archives of Ireland – 38 references to Parrys, although five are a family of "Kaye-Parry" and one has Parry as a middle name. Some of the entries were in boats and it took a bit of searching to find the Parrys in these, since there were several images in each set, but I managed it in the end.
Some Seaman's Wills were launched by the National Archives (DocumentsOnline) - 10 Parry records there. Interestingly, two appear to have been made on the same day, for two Parrys who are on the same ship. I wonder whether they are related or whether it is just coincidence.
Another researcher sent me details of the Bendigo Goldfields Petition of 1853, which has three Parry entries.

A certificate arrived on the 24th from the Billericay marriage challenge. I also received one on the 28th from the Aylesbury challenge. These were both 100% successes, since there was only one Parry entry in each of the districts. The variation in the number of Parry marriages in the different registration districts around the country will be an interesting subject to investigate when I finally get all of the information collected and can start plotting the distributions of events over time. As with the census distributions, I imagine the analysis will demonstrate how Parrys have spread across the UK from Wales over the years.

So that's a quick summary of the main events since I last posted here, but how has the overall year gone?

My resolution for 2007 was "to be more organised". In some ways, it's quite depressing to look back at the tasks I was considering at the start of the year – transcribing the census entries for my three main counties and getting them online, transcribing some Wills for Llanvallteg in Carmarthenshire in order to investigate the use of a coat of arms, collecting and checking the GRO entries, etc. – and to realise that none of them have been completed.

So I'll concentrate on the positives for the year instead!

I have managed to submit entries for almost 40 marriage challenges.
I have written some web pages to support the mailing list and message board.
There have been frequent extractions from new databases, many of them discovered as a result of the suggestions made on the Guild forum, which remains one of the best resources I know.
I have received and replied to over 300 specifically Parry related queries, of which 56 have been from new contacts (two in the last few days).
And I have started a Parry DNA study.

With regard to the last point, I missed out one event that occurred in December – the arrival of the results for the first participant in the DNA study. These were originally due to arrive during January but I received a notification on 20th December that the initial markers were posted and, by the 24th, all 67 Y-DNA markers as well as the mtDNA results were available. The mtDNA haplogroup of J* seems to indicate a maternal ancestor associated with the spread of agriculture into Europe during the neolithic period - interesting, but not directly relevant to the Parry surname study.

Of more relevance are the Y-DNA results – haplogroup R1b1c, which I understand is part of the most common haplogroup in Western Europe. No exact matches above 12 markers so far in the database, and no Parrys amongst the limited marker matches. But, since the Y-DNA is also that of my own family line, receiving the results has made the end of the year feel like a new beginning.

I have already mentioned that doing more work on my own family will be a goal for next year. Publicising the DNA study further on the appropriate mailing lists and message boards has now been added to that. There's still a lot that I need to learn and understand with regard to the use of DNA for genealogy but hopefully that will come with time – time to read my new resources, "DNA & Genealogy" by Fitzpatrick and Yeiser, and Chris Pomery's new book "Family History in the Genes". I thought Pomeroy was an uncommon name (1523 in the 2002 Office of National Statistics database database, as opposed to 35614 Parrys) but Chris mentions 1400 Pomeroy researchers who have helped him build up the Pomeroy study over 7 years. Thinking of ratios, the equivalent number of possible Parry correspondents could be interesting - perhaps I won't work too hard on the publicity to start with!

Other goals for the year – improving the organisation of the study will continue to be a priority, especially with regard to correspondence. There was talk on the forum recently about managing communication and better use of technology such as google mail. I should also develop some standard letters for administrative issues, such as on the mailing list or for those people who contact me not knowing where to start with research, as well as find a more efficient way of producing responses whilst investigating queries. That might help me to avoid the situation I currently have, of about 15 researchers awaiting replies where I know what needs saying but still have to write it all in a sensible order.

The work on transcribing the censuses for my three main counties will continue – that fits in with doing more on my own family as well as helping several contacts that I have specifically said I will produce pedigrees for. Systematic data collection, especially for the vital records to ensure I make full use of opportunities such as the marriage challenges, will be ongoing. I also hope to publish more on the web site and ensure that it is updated regularly. The Heraldry pages, in particular, will be an early target. And, finally, I intend to investigate using resources such as facebook for contacting people interested in the Parry surname.

That lot should certainly keep me busy in 2008. Happy New Year everyone!

Parry’s Reptilian Wonders

2007-12-04T12:28:00.000Z

It can be quite frustrating to discover a Parry reference and then not be able to follow it up further. A few weeks ago, on the One Show, Neil Oliver did a feature about the Royal Menagerie. In the discussion afterwards, they happened to show a photograph of a travelling zoo, which I noticed was called “Parry’s Reptilian Wonders”. I have written to the programme to ask for details about the source of the photograph but have not received a response. Searching the 1901 census site for Parrys who were travellers or had an occupation concerning zoos, circuses, animals, or reptiles, did unearth one possible family when I used “travel*” as the search term. There’s a couple from Lancashire, visiting a house in Worcestershire - William aged 25, with his wife Margaret, aged 21, along with a 7 month old son who was born in Staffordshire. William and Margaret both have the occupation “Travelling Showman”, which could be a promising lead – although I might have expected them to spend the nights in their own wagon, rather than sleeping locally.

But, so far, there are no other clues. So, if anyone comes across “Parrys Reptilian Wonders”, I’d really love to hear about it.

Another interesting book

2007-12-03T23:36:00.000Z

I received another "new" book today – the fourth volume of Michael Powell Siddons’ work, "The Development of Welsh Heraldry". It has a photograph of the monument to Blanch Parry at Bacton in it, as well as a photograph of one of the two Parry windows at Atcham (which were removed from Bacton in 1811). I already have photographs of some of the arms at Atcham on my page concerning the Parry families who used the "fess and three lozenges" (here) but I am aware of differences both in the arms shown on the various memorials to Blanch and also in the interpretations of those arms so perhaps it is time I gathered the information from the various sources together.

Interestingly, Siddons also quotes from notes made in 1569, concerning some arms seen "in Mr Parri’s howsse" in Herefordshire - but they do not include the standard Parry "fess and three lozenges" and they do include the arms of Moreiddig Warwyn. Later documents seem at pains to point out that the Parrys do not descend from that Moreiddig but from "Moreiddig of the Golden Valley".

So there’s a puzzle to investigate next year.

To do more work on the Parry heraldry will go with my other New Year’s resolution – to do more on my own family. And no doubt I shall be continuing with the ongoing challenge of "organisation"!

There have been several new databases recently:
US passports applications on Ancestry – I actually remembered to use Parry as a keyword, so picked up 221 entries, as opposed to just the 145 surnamed Parry. Some of the additional references relate to addresses (born in Parry Sound, live in South Parry, Ohio or Parry City, New York, etc) but most of them are people with Parry as a first or middle name, so they’ll be interesting to follow through.

Ancestry also added the Australian electoral rolls (1901-1935) - 4965 entries there. And I noticed the Radnorshire marriages for 1813-1835 which I don’t think I have seen before, so that’s another 56 entries.

I do have quite a list of sites to check that have been mentioned on the Forum. I have also sent off requests for three marriage challenges this week, as well as recently received results from others, so there is still a lot going on (despite the absence of blog activity).

And, with the DNA study starting up, it looks like 2008 could be an even busier year.

Ruth’s book launch

2007-11-24T20:15:00.000Z

I took a day trip to Bacton, in Herefordshire, today, for the launch of Ruth’s book, "Mistress Blanche, Queen Elizabeth I’s Confidante".

I’m really looking forward to reading it, since Ruth has been able to examine, and have transcribed, some documents which have never been available before. So it will be a great addition to the information that's known about this Parry family from Herefordshire, as well as of relevance to anyone interested in Elizabeth's court.

The Parry DNA Project

2007-10-20T22:44:00.000Z

Back in May, I briefly wrote about attending the Guild DNA seminar and about how there probably needs to be a lot more "paper research" before DNA can be used effectively with regard to the Parrys. But following recent discussions on the forum, I decided it was time to act. So, despite the fact that the paper research still needs doing and that I haven’t even caught up with all my emails, I have taken the opportunity to set up a Parry DNA project. Well, actually, Susan from the Guild made all the arrangements, so it is a big thanks to her for doing that. But I am the administrator for the project so now it’s down to me. I still need to update the project profile page, so that it describes the project in more detail. I’ll also need to update my own Parry web pages and the Parry profile at the Guild, as well as let people know about it via the mailing lists etc. But at least the actual testing system is up and running. Information can be found at http://www.familytreedna.com/public/Parry/.

Thinking of the mailing lists, in my last entry I wrote about the lack of activity there – October has now had more messages posted to the list than any month ever, and more than the last five months added together! It is encouraging to see people helping each other. Unfortunately for me, the majority of the postings have been message board postings, and the topic has wandered from its original subject, which means I shall have to work out how to tidy up the threads – something I haven’t particularly had to do before. (But I’m not complaining!)

Some other new information arrived today, in the form of two marriage certificates from the Poplar marriage challenge. One of them, Annie Eliza Parry who married William Edward Orchard in 1866, I have been able to identify in the earlier censuses. These challenge results always provide an opportunity to search for specific people in a way that I probably don’t do when just collecting census information. It often results in me being able to match people up across the censuses. Unfortunately the other marriage result, William Parry who married Emma Croxton in 1869, is a bit more elusive. Interestingly, his father was a James Wellington Parry, who I don’t think I have come across before (a middle name like that would tend to stick in my mind). There are a couple of Parrys with Wellington as a middle name nearer to 1900, but I can’t see any obvious connection at the moment.

Talking of marriage challenges, I did finally get the Bromsgrove entries submitted, as well as a few relating to challenges with only a small number of Parry entries, although I still have another large area, Marylebone, to check through. Sometimes jobs take longer than expected – but other times I just get sidetracked. A few days ago, I considered posting an entry entitled "Good intentions". It was going to describe how I had started the day full of plans to catch up with various emails and get several sets of challenge submissions organised but how I had soon found myself doing other things. This was because, when I started to answer an email from a new contact in Australia, it reminded me that I had not extracted all the Parry entries from the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages.

2251 entries later… (and no emails, challenge submissions or blog entry achieved)

And, as people start their Christmas countdowns, I realise I have less than three months to achieve last year’s resolution!

Picking up the pace.

2007-09-21T17:12:00.000Z

I was going to call this entry "What happened to August?" but then it might have turned out to be one of those backward looking, "too many things to do, not enough time to do them" posts, which would not do justice to the recent activity on the study. As it happened, from the point of view of new databases and active research, it was a fairly quiet month and, yes, that was fortunate, since I was busy doing other things.

But over the last few weeks there has been a veritable flurry of activity on the study.

I have sorted and sent off details for all but one of the seven marriage challenges recently announced. Most of them only had one or two Parry entries but the seventh, which I am still working on, is for Bromsgrove. With its proximity to the counties bordering Wales, it was no surprise to discover there are 71 entries to check.

Some members of the Guild have now started to carry out "birth and burial" challenges, as well. So I have my name submitted for three of those.

There have been updates to a few databases, as well as a new site launched. The City of London burials on findmypast now contains 190 Parrys, instead of the 167 that were there when I checked in April. Another decade has also been added to the Passenger lists – there are now 5395 Parrys listed for between 1890-1939. The new site is http://www.bmdregisters.co.uk/, subtitled the Official Non-Parochial BMDs Service. It is a pay-per-view site, at the moment covering items contained in RG4 and RG5 at the National Archives. As some of the Guild members have pointed out, there are some anomalies in the transcriptions, and some of the information is available on the IGI, so it isn’t necessarily worth paying to obtain more details at the moment. But it is certainly a site worth keeping an eye on, as the intention is to add more records and an index pointing to available information is always a help.

Correspondence, as usual, is an issue, with some long-standing items that I need to go through to check the information on, still to be answered. On the other hand, it is an exciting aspect of the study, with 8 new contacts since the beginning of August, several of which are researching Parrys in "my" area. Another pleasing aspect is their own locations – whilst most of my contacts are in the UK, with some American and Australian researchers, two of the newer contacts have been from France and Germany, which may provide some insight into the mobility of certain families. Being able to put the French researcher in touch with a UK member of the same family is an added bonus.

Of course, it is never possible to "clear" the correspondence. I managed to answer five queries one day – and by the end of the day every one had written back to me. Perhaps it’s an indication of the vibrant state of Parry research, although one wouldn’t think that's the situation looking at the Rootsweb mailing list and message board. I must start to regularly encourage more postings on there.

It’s certainly time to pick up the pace.

A day out

2007-07-28T22:28:00.000Z

I went on a day trip today to Trellech, Monmouthshire, with CADAS, the local archaeological society. It was mainly to visit the dig (see the Lost City of Trellech) but we called at several other places in the village, including the church – where I found a Parry:

The text says, “Underneath lie the remains of Hannah Parry Wife of Willm. Parry of this town who died April the 19th 1814 in the 50th year of her age. Long nights and days I bore great pain To cry for cure was all in vain Till God who knew what time was best Did eat my pain and gave me rest”

A list of churchwardens indicated that a William Parry was a warden from 1799-1804, so perhaps that was her husband.

I didn’t spot any Parrys in the graveyard itself, but only had time to check a few of the stones so there may have been some. But I did see the name again – on several estate agent's signs belonging to Parrys property.co.uk.

Well, one-namers are supposed to collect every reference!

Compulsory civil registration, and new databases.

2007-07-27T11:11:00.000Z

There was an interesting discussion on the Forum recently concerning civil registration and whether or not registration was compulsory for births prior to 1874 – it turns out that it was, but the onus was on the registrar to collect the information, rather than the parents to report it. This perhaps helps to explain the details on one of the certificates I bought some years ago – Albert Edward Parry, son of David and Jane Parry, was born on the 2nd July 1865, at 18 Neville St. Abergavenny, and christened on the 21st July 1865 in the Abergavenny Methodist Church (according to a transcript of the church records that I obtained after buying the birth certificate). However, his birth was registered on the 23rd December 1865 by Mary Yarnold, of Neville St, Abergavenny, who was present at the birth and who gave the date of birth as the 16th July. She also reported the mother to be Jane Parry (i.e. no maiden name) and gave no father’s name.

A search of the 1881 census, the only census easily available at the time, revealed Mary Yarnold to be a lodging house keeper.

I initially had difficulty in obtaining the certificate from the local registrar – because I had given the father’s name as David Parry and the mother as being either an Esther or a Jane. This was because, at that time, all I knew was that Esther, David’s first wife, had still been alive in 1861 but that, by 1871, he was married to a Jane. I was therefore trying to narrow down the likely timescale for the death and remarriage by identifying Albert’s mother. Since the certificate gave every appearance of Jane having been an unmarried mother, the staff at the Registry Office thought the details were too different for it to be the right certificate but, with a bit of persuasion, they did send it to me. Although I was convinced it was the correct one, I often wondered why the certificate was worded as it was. Finding the baptism seemed to put paid to my theory that David and Jane had been unmarried at the time and that Jane had perhaps taken herself off to a lodging house to have the baby “quietly”. Perhaps the explanation is actually just that the parents didn’t register the birth. Then, months later, either through general conversation or specifically checking likely places, the registrar found out about it and registered Albert with Mary supplying the details as she remembered them, just to ensure that a registration took place.

Later research traced the death of Esther on the 14 June 1861. The marriage of David and Jane still needs to be confirmed, since they don’t appear to have married until 1873, by which time they were probably expecting their third child.

I occasionally buy Parry related things from ebay – the most recent item was an auction catalogue for “The Parry collection”, a collecton of largely 18th century furniture made from either Welsh oak or of English walnut, which was sold at Christie’s in London in 1997. Little genealogical value to the catalogue, of course, but it’s interesting to have something which not only relates to a Parry family but also gives an insight into the items some Parrys may have been involved in making and others may have had in their homes.

There have been two databases mentioned on the Forum recently that are on the City of London site (although not that easy to find from their home page!) - the Diocese of London Consistory Court Wills Index, which has 19 Parry entries, as well as one Perry who is “otherwise Parry”, and the London Signatures Index of both Wills from the Archdeaconry Court of Middlesex and marriage bonds from the Commissary for the Archdeaconry of Surrey, which contains 12 Parry entries and 2 for the spelling Parrey. I still need to explore the information more thoroughly but there are a few familiar names so I know some of it will match to other information already held.

There’s also been a new index added to Ancestry - the Australian Convict Transportation Registers, which includes 55 Parry entries, and one with a middle name of Parry. Several of them were convicted in one of “my” three counties, so I shall have to try to find the records of their convictions as soon as possible. At least that should be fairly easy now I have conviction dates.

The marriage challenge at Blything has been completed with a 100% success record for Parrys, all 7 having been found. As if that wasn’t good enough, six of the marriages possibly relate to three generations of the same family, and their earliest ancestor found in the 1841 census, a John born abt 1780 outside of the county, was still alive in 1851 – from which it appears he was born in Hereford (one of my three main counties). And when I tracked down the couple from the 7th marriage in one of the censuses for London, it turns out that the groom was born in Breconshire, yet another of my main counties.

I’ve a bit of a backlog of emails at the moment - two new contacts on consecutive days at the beginning of July, and another two in the past four days, combined with the continuing correspondence with several others, means I currently have about 13 outstanding queries as well as the trees I said I’d check through for people. So, apologies if you’re waiting for a reply, I will get there eventually.

But I have just discovered that Ancestry now have the full British Army WWI Pension Records 1914-1920 online (rather than just the A and B surnames) so I think I just caught the “collecting bug” again!

Yet another summary of activities.

2007-07-04T15:25:00.000Z

I try to keep an ongoing log of activities concerning the study, which I then attempt to pull into shape as a (hopefully) interesting and informative blog entry. But sometimes (ie now!) the list of unfinished comments is too extensive to do that with so I’ll just highlight a few of the most important recent happenings.

I’ve checked out and submitted the details for the six marriage challenges which had been announced by Guild members. It was interesting that, out of the 14 marriages, only one was in the June qtr, the January and September quarters had three each, and the remaining seven were all in the December qtr. Obviously only a small sample but it will be interesting to see what the distribution is for all of the marriages (once I have finally extracted them all.)

I also received three certificates for marriages found during the Halifax and Huddersfield challenges. Together with those mentioned previously from Whitechapel and Poplar, they’ll keep me busy for a while, looking for matching information in the censuses. It can be very frustrating to find the relevant couple on just one census and then have them disappear (as Samuel Parry who married Martha Kitchinman in 1850 currently do, after their appearance at RG9/2910/53/3.) But sometimes the information found can lead to more than I expected – as in the case of a widow, Rachel Parry, who married a missionary, Zechariah Wilmshurst, in Poplar in 1872. Checking on the 1871 census, I found a possible entry for the widowed Rachel and then, in 1861, Rachel as the wife of a Thomas E Parry. Despite living in London, the Thomas Parry was born in Monmouth, so that raises the interest level, since it’s one of my three main counties. A quick search on FreeBMD using her maiden name, Rawlinson, (obtained from her father’s name on the marriage certificate) and I have the first marriage as well – Rachel Rawlinson married Thomas Edward Parry in London December 1846, so that ties up with the 1861 census family.

A contact in Australia reminded me about the First Families site, especially this page which relates to a Thomas Edwin Parry, born Kingstone in Herefordshire, and his Scottish wife Elizabeth. I’d had a look for them in the 1851 census before, finding a Thomas and Elizabeth in "Kington" in Herefordshire but she wasn't born in Scotland and they just seemed too old to be the right couple. This time I checked on Family Search, found Thomas Edwin’s christening in 1830 to a Thomas and Elizabeth, and then found two possible Thomas's in the 1841 census. One of them had a mother called Ann so, although a second marriage for the father Thomas was a possibility, I decided to investigate the other one first. This Thomas was with a family surnamed Brimfield, and there was also a 13 year old Eliza Parry present. So I looked for her christening and found a possibility, also to a Thomas and an Elizabeth, in Kingstone in 1828. I then looked for marriages and found the marriage of an Elizabeth Parry, with her father as William Wathen (so probably a widowed Parry), marrying a Brimfield in 1839. I then checked the Herefordshire Family History Society's monumental inscription index which indicated that a 35 year old Thomas Parry was buried in Kingstone in 1836. So this time it does look like I might have identified Thomas Edwin’s family.

Thanks to the same contact, I realised I hadn’t extracted occurences of Parry as a first name from the Queensland bmd indexes – this is necessary not just because of those cases where Parry is a genuine first name, but also to find those where it might be the first part of a double barrelled surname, such as in "Parry Okeden" and "Parry Winton". Looking through the list, I notice a few other familiar names – Parry Woodcock (perhaps connects to the family of Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, the composer, since I know one of the early generations there had a Parry-Woodcock marriage) and Colston Parry (the family I recently constructed a pedigree for, although I don’t know where this particular person fits. Perhaps it’s a lead to another branch, although it’s possible the name is just a coincidence).

Talking of the Colston Parrys, I’ve been contacted by yet another descendant of that family, so am about to start comparing information with them.

And whilst on the subject of contacts (‘tho’ not actually directly Parrys) I received one of the Genes Reunited "Hot matches" emails recently. These often contain people who match those on my tree purely in name and birth year, (which probably has something to do with me only putting such limited information on the site!) But this time I realised one of the three entries for the name of my grandmother, "Elsie Thomas", was actually a likely match. And when I searched for other Thomas’s in that area, it confirmed that there were actually two researchers who have put my grandmother’s family on the site. So I have rejoined GR in order to contact them and finally get around to working on my own family again. Perhaps I’ll get time to follow up some of the Parrys as well while I’m a member.

And, lastly, a couple of new/updated databases – Findmypast now has the passenger lists for 1920-1929. There’s 28 pages of Parrys, 1367 records. Strangely enough, no sign of my grandfather. It’s a good job I already knew he should be there and what ship he was on. A search for the ship (Cedric) by date (1924), using Donald as a first name and Par* for the surname soon found him – transcribed as Parey. Well, I guess I should have known I’d have to look for some variants as well! (15 Parey, 12 Parrey, 6 Parrie, 18 Pary, and 15 Parie). The current total number of passengers using Parry and my own choice of variants gives me 4597 results. I won’t risk using their variants – "Parry" with variants produces 14900 records.

And secondly, Ancestry have added the Breconshire marriages 1813-1837 to their site. This database was compiled by two of the local researchers, Alan Powell and Brian Hemmings. One does need to remember to search by keyword, not just surname, in order to pick up both brides and grooms. But it’s great to have this data available online. It really does seem time to get back to working on "my" main area for a while.

Limited Time

2007-06-23T22:43:00.000Z

Time on the study has been a bit limited recently, because of other commitments. This situation always leads to a backlog of correspondence so, over the last couple of days, I have been trying to catch up. As usual, there has been a variety of queries.

One was a new contact whose ancestror, a Hannah Parry, was born in 1811 and married before the 1841 census, so normally not someone I would be able to find much information for. However, the researcher had found later relatives, an Andrew Dorricott and his family, listed on my site, because their nephew, a Henry Parry, was with them. That seemed like a good start but, despite being able to trace the Dorricotts through the censuses, the Parry side remains at a standstill until some certificates or parish records are examined, since the Henry was born about 1872 and does not appear with his own family in any census.

Three of the contacts were people who had been in touch some years ago but had recently come across something which prompted them to get in touch again. There was also an enquiry from someone writing a book about the bishops of Barbadoes, three of whom were Parrys. That correspondence will certainly be ongoing since there is a lot of information available but it’s a matter of gradually putting it all together. Perhaps they’ll be candidates for another page on the web site, although I shall obviously have to ensure I’m not duplicating anything the author wishes to write. There was a similar query on the Parry message board, about a Baptist minister – I must remember to reply to that, there’s no dates given so a request for more information is probably necessary before anyone can help there. I did reply to another message board query, from someone who was “completely stuck” - that’s not even been acknowledged yet. I hope they were notified of my response.

A researcher who’d been in touch last year wrote to say that she’s found some relatives, which was great news (even though they are no longer Parrys, since they’re descendants of a daughter). I realised, thanks to the Guild marriage challenges and the recording of “cardinal points”, that her earliest Parry marriage, of Thomas Bancroft Parry to Priscilla Boucher in the March qtr of 1877 probably took place in Stepney St Dunstan. If she can view that record, it should enable her to confirm a possible census entry for Thomas as a 5 year old and therefore move back another generation. Talking of marriage challenges, I received results from two of them this week – 100% success rate for Whitechapel Stage 2, with 8 out of 8 found, plus two more results received from Poplar district. Several other challenges have been announced recently so I need to organise the data to submit to those – fortunately not too many to look up since none of the areas are Parry “hot-spots”.

Going back to the correspondence, I finally managed to reply to the researcher looking for the William Parry, father of a William born in 1864. I hate to admit defeat but, at the moment, I just can’t identify him amongst all the other William Parrys. I do hope that, as I gradually complete all the census details and matching up of entries, he becomes apparent, but it’s not looking hopeful at the moment. So many of the people change their ages and birthplaces from one census to the next that anyone who doesn’t have other family with them to help confirm who they are is always going to be difficult to identify (and that’s to say nothing of those who “disappear” for a census or two. Did they go on holiday, emigrate, or just get mistranscribed?)

But at least now the only outstanding correspondence is four people whose information I have said I’ll check through to see if there is anything I can add, so they all know that will take me some time to do.

Oh, and the replies starting to be received for the messages I’ve just sent!

Too many Williams

2007-06-03T16:40:00.000Z

As often the case, the lack of posts does not mean there has been nothing going on with the study – rather the opposite, having received emails from six new contacts since I last posted, as well as continuing correspondence with several other researchers.

Sometimes it seems that most of my time is taken up by communicating with people, rather than collecting information but, since many of the enquiries do involve looking up details in censuses and following families through the years, perhaps it’s really just a different aspect of "collecting". The important point is making sure I end up transferring all the details collected into the master files for the study – back to organisation again (which, based on the mounting piles of paper, is something I still need to work at!)

But the general collecting does continue. I noticed one of the Guild members had a tagline for the Geograph British Isles project so thought I’d try a search for Parry related places, with some success:
- Parrys Field Barn, near to Fisherton de la Mere, Wiltshire (SU0039)
- Parry's Castle, Carmarthenshire (SN4114)
- The New Parry aqueduct on the Montgomery Canal (SJ3529)
- Parry's Lane, near to Westbury Park, Bristol (ST5775)
-The Llyn Harri Parry section of Afon Seiont, near to Bethel, Gwynedd (SH5264)

I know, from searching on map sites, that there are a lot more Parry related places in the UK so it has acted as a reminder that I still need to write a web page to collect the information together. (One of the new contacts has also told me of a road in Gosford, New South Wales, which was named after a Henry Parry – it makes a change to find a place in Australia not named after Sir William Edward Parry. Some information on Henry’s family can be found in the Australian Dictionary of Biography)

It is also possible to search within the descriptions of the photographs on the Geograph site. Doing so finds several references to individual Parrys - Llywelyn England Sydney Parry, who built Craflwyn Hall, near to Beddgelert, Lady Love Jones Parry for whom a property called Glyn y Weddw was built, R. Williams Parry, a poet, Tim Parry, one of two children killed by a bomb in Warrington in 1993, Sergeant R. O. Parry, one of the crew killed when a Lancaster bomber crashed in 1945, and finally Arthur Croose Parry who, along with Walter James Probert, is remembered on the war memorial in Birley, Herefordshire. That’s another reminder for me - the Croose Parrys are one of my "priority" families, that I intend to write a web page for. There’s currently some pictures relating to a heraldic query for them on my site at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/im.griffiths/parryfamilyhistory/queries2.htm, but there’s a lot more to be written.

I had some credits to use up on Findmypast.com so collected the Parrys in the London Burials database (167 entries). There was a message from the Origins network to say that they had also added the London City Burials to their site – I must have visited them too soon after receiving the message, since it was showing no results for Parrys. However, I have just rechecked and it now includes 192 Parry entries. I still need to investigate how this differs from the burials on Findmypast.

There was a message on one of the mailing lists concerning Ancestry giving free access to their US military records until June 6. Since I currently have a subscription, I can view them at any time but such messages always prompt me to have a look and start extracting! (only 132 databases with Parrys in – ranging from just one entry in many of them, up to the 1,153 in the WW1 Draft Registration cards. Tho’ strangely enough, searching from the main search page only finds 88 military databases with Parrys in – it looks like some of the databases normally included in categories such as "Family and Local Histories" might also have been made available amongst the military records offer.)

A probate entry I suggested might be relevant to the researcher of the coal business family has proved to be so – Thomas Parry of Saint Mary Islington , Middlesex, whose Will was proved in the PCC 10 November 1857 mentions his sons Thomas Sparke Parry and William Valentine Parry, as well as three other sons. So that’s a success in identifying that link.

A marriage challenge for Newport Pagnell has been announced – from a quick search on FreeBMD, there are four Parry entries in the district so I shall have to get those references checked and see if it is possible to find them on the IGI, before submitting the details to the challenger.

And finally, why the title? It’s a comment on two of the queries received from the new contacts, which have both involved trying to identify people named William Parry. So how does one identify someone with a fairly common name, born in the late 1820s, who may or may not be with family in the 1861 census (and I don't know who the family were, except the father was another William Parry), who may or who may not be married (he was recorded as a widower on a marriage certificate in 1864 but there’s time for the first marriage to also have taken place after the 1861 census), who died before the 1871 census, and who is likely to have an occupation along the lines of labourer, farm labourer or Ag. Lab.? Especially when people seem to appear and disappear across the censuses, because they vary their birthplaces and ages, as well as move around, which makes it difficult to know whether a particular entry in one census really does match to a particular entry in another census (and that's not even considering the mistranscriptions which disguise people).

I guess that’s why I collect them all – but currently, there are just too many Williams!

A quick summary

2007-05-22T11:58:00.000Z

I’ve finally caught up with most of the backlog, which built up whilst I wrote the Colston Parry page. There’s been a few emails exchanged as a result of the page, but no-one has specifically started discussing the evidence needed yet.

Another thread started on the message board, concerning a family who ran a coal business. Once again, middle names have been helpful since two of the siblings were called Thomas Sparke Parry and William Valentine Parry, which are fairly unusual names. The researcher has created a tree on Ancestry for them (although for some reason it isn’t found by searching and currently needs the direct link - http://trees.ancestry.co.uk/pt/person.aspx?tid=1958178&pid=-1876262920 )

There are times when something brings home to me the enormity of carrying out a One-Name Study on a name like Parry – like looking at how many trees exist on Ancestry for the name. And one of the things pointed out at the Family History Show at Olympia was just how easy it is to connect someone else’s tree to your own now, if you think it fits. That might sound like a good idea but I imagine it could lead to a further proliferation of unproven pedigrees. Which is one reason for me not to worry about the number of trees available – since it’s better to stick with the established sources.

I’ve added the mailing list resources page to the Rootsweb List Pages WebRing which should help to improve its visibility (announcing the pages on the mailing list itself would probably also be useful!).

Results from some of the marriage challenges have arrived – 17 in total from Bristol, and 6 so far between Marylebone and Poplar. I need to make time to add all the details to my certificate list and to see if the information matches up to anything else I have.

Finally, last Saturday I attended the Guild DNA seminar. I still haven’t found any males amongst my own Parry family to take a test, but there are a few Parrys showing in the searchable databases. However, there’s probably a lot more "paper research" needed before it can be used effectively in Parry research.

Finally posted the Colston pedigree

2007-05-12T18:34:00.000Z

After several weeks of working on it, I have finally posted the page containing information about the Colston Parry family, at http://freepages.family.rootsweb.com/~parryresearch/colston.htm . Lets hope it prompts some collaboration between the five researchers who connect to the line.

As a side effect of doing that, I have also written some resource pages for the Parry mailing list and message board. No doubt they’ll develop further as time goes by, but I hope they prove to be beneficial to researchers.

Now to catch up with all the other things I’ve been ignoring for these past few weeks!

More sites and a Marriage Challenge sidetrack

2007-04-23T21:26:00.000Z

A few interesting sites have been mentioned on mailing lists recently:
Buckinghamshire Wills, which has no Parrys (the nearest is "Parryt", but there are many Parrots or similar so it’s probably a variant spelling of that). But it reminded me that I ought to make a list of all the county related sites, such as this one, to ensure that I cover them all when I work on the probate items.
Queensland Historical BDM Indices for the period 1829-1914. I had some difficulties with this site initially (reverting to just 20 results and not going beyond page 1) but I was able overcome these by using "next" rather than the page numbers.
Online Genealogical Resources of the Westchester County, New York, Archives – found 9 entries in the marriages records and 11 under naturalization so that’s useful (although as just index entries, I don’t know how easy it would be to identify the same people in any other records, without obtaining copies of the entries to find out more information first).
Mention was made, on the Monmouthshire list, of a web site for Govilon, which led me to another site concerning the village history. We visited this parish in 2002, mainly for my own family history, since my 2xgt grandparents are buried here, along with one of their children. I discovered the existence of the local history group’s work then, but it is good to see that they now have a "web presence" and that there is also some Parry information noted under the censuses. More incentive for me to get these various families identified – this is one of those "too many people with the same name" areas!

FFHS Ezine arrived yesterday, which reminded me about the catalogue for the Lambeth Palace Archives now being available online. This had been mentioned on the Forum earlier in the month but I didn’t have time to follow it up then – and I didn’t get far today either. It’s possible to carry out several different searches so it really needs exploring properly rather than a quick search. Just using the Keyword search in the printed books catalogue find 186 references to Parry and, although there are only five Parrys in the Names Database, one of them, Edward Parry the Suffragan Bishop of Dover, does have 346 entries to his name.

The ezine also mentioned the Manchester petition concerning the abolition of slavery – I’m glad to see the only Parrys were in support of the bill, a Richard Parry, a Jacob Parry, and a James Parry. No other information on them though.

I forgot to mention in my last posting that a marriage challenge had been announced for the Reading district. I was sorting out the entries for that today (6 entries), checking on the IGI (2 found) and censuses (2 possibles found) and ended up thinking about how the availability of records these days makes it easy to research some things. One of the marriage entries was for a Richard Parry, March qtr of 1896. There’s only one other name on FreeBMD, an Ada Emily Rivers. No guarantee that they married each other, since transcription of the index is incomplete, but it seemed plausible so I looked for a "Richard and Ada" in the 1901 census (unsuccessful). There’s a lot of Richard Parrys, but the only one in Berkshire was an actor and appeared to be married to a Sybil. So then I looked for an Ada Parry – none in Reading and the only wife of a Richard elsewhere was an Ada Ellen in Wales. There were several possibilities to investigate in England without husbands – the most likely seemed an Ada E born in Oxford, living in Kent. She was the Head ("wife" crossed out) but was recorded as married. With her was a one year old daughter and a 40 year old "sister" Edith Parry. Now that’s obviously an anomaly – could it be that this Ada was a Parry who married a Parry, a Parry who wasn’t really married but said she was because she had a child, or was Edith in reality a sister-in-law? Could this be the right Ada?

Searching for Ada Rivers, with a keyword of Oxford, found one entry in 1881 – daughter of a Wm Geo. and Sarah Rivers, born about 1872 - and living in Reading. Using "Oxfordshire" found them in the 1891, still in Reading. No sign of a sister Edith, and the parents would have been too young to have a daughter of the right age anyway, but certainly the Ada looks a possible for the marriage.
So, back to the hunt for Richard Parry. Assuming he’s a year or so older than Alice, I searched for a Richard with birthdate of 1870+/-5 to allow for "census variations" (those few years that people sometimes lose at census times). Fifty entries in Wales, another one in Scotland, but it’s more sensible to start with the thirty nearer to home, in England. Some were easily discounted, because they’re Heads with wives listed. But there’s a promising looking entry in London – a married man, a civil engineer staying in a hotel in London. But he’s born in Yorkshire, so was he just down temporarily from there?

Using as a keyword the birthplace for Richard from 1901 – "Idle" – I found one 1871 census entry, 5 year old Richard, to an Albert W and Alice A Parry. Richard is actually born in Bradford, and the family are living in Eccleshill. This is the advantage of using "Idle" as a keyword not as a birthplace – Idle is actually only mentioned in the entry as the Sub-registration district, so I’d have missed him on a birthplace search.

And there’s a daughter Edith, aged 10, in the family.

Putting Bradford as the keyword to re-search found Richard in the 1891 (but not 1881). He is a surveyors clerk, in Streatham, London and has his sisters, Edith and Rosa, with him so that entry ties in with both the earlier census entry and the 1901 sister Edith.

And then trying a keyword of Yorkshire found the family in 1881 – in St Giles, Reading, Berkshire. Clearly the family had been in the South for some years.

So everything looks good, but is it? Without the marriage certificate to confirm details such as the fathers' names, it could all just be supposition based on coincidence. I just hope the challenger can find the marriage entry!

And finally, I now have a Freepages account on Rootsweb to use as support for the mailing list and board, so will be able to put there any particular trees that I can’t put on my own web pages, but which really need to be displayed somewhere for people to collaborate on. So I need to get on and write the initial pages and the Colston tree page to put up there.

One thing leads to another..and another….

2007-04-18T14:10:00.000Z

Recently a “renewed contact” sent me her tree to look over so I have been working on that, whilst also putting together some information on the Colston Parrys. Both families have people who emigrated to the States - which led to me deciding I really ought to do something about systematically collecting the information for there, even if only in index format. So I then extracted the 1920 and 1930 census details, as well as made a list of the items available on Ancestry for the US. I know I collected a few bits and pieces from the site when they allowed three days free searching a while ago, so it’s important I get myself organised to do that properly. But it’s definitely a job that needs doing this year.

I was a bit surprised that there had not been a reply to one of my message board postings but, when I checked the board, I discovered there were actually several messages posted which had not come through to the Parry list – so then I had to email the Rootsweb helpdesk to let them know the gateway appears to have broken. Unfortunately it looks like an intermittent fault, since some messages do get through and others don’t. An ongoing problem there.

Continuing to investigate the Colston Parrys, I had a look at the Bristol Wills Index, which had been mentioned on the Forum back in December – there I found an entry for an Edward Colston Parry who died in 1857. I’d seen that death in the BMD indexes but couldn’t account for it amongst the people I had so far found in the censuses. But now, since it clearly was an adult, not on infant death, I checked out the BVRI and found a possible christening of an Edward Colston Parry to another Edward Colston Parry, in 1803. I suspect, although it will need confirming, that the father is a sibling to the earliest entry I had previously found (a William Colston Parry who had children between 1787-1798).

The possible census entries leading from that christening matched up to some of the “stray” Colston Parrys I had found, so that accounts for several of them – and then I made contact with a researcher connected to the line through a correction they’d submitted to one of the census entries.

There’s been new contacts from several sources after the last few days – not only that one from the census correction, and two who have emailed me directly (make that three, since another email was received today & still needs answering) but also another one via this blog. I’d been thrilled to get my first comment on the blog, which had been from a Guild member who kindly looked for the death of the Lieutenant Parry – but to get the second, from a Parry researcher, is just as exciting.

I do hope they all respond to my replies – the number of new contacts who then don’t acknowledge my response is increasing. I shall obviously have to start either asking for a receipt to such emails, or sending a follow up message to confirm that they did receive my reply. That’s a shame because it all adds to my work, but perhaps it is something I can plan for, or set up to happen automatically – in which case at least it will lead to improvements in my computing skill!

Another coincidence occurred whilst looking for the Colston Parrys in the censuses. I had noticed some (unrelated) Parrys in Bristol, who were born in Buenos Ayres – and then the very next day Howard posted a link on the forum for a site with information from there. That led to me finding the details for the marriage of the parents (which gave me the father’s name) and baptisms for some of the family and, since I was now intrigued enough to look for them elsewhere, also to finding the family in another census.

Notice of an offer for some free credits on the Scotlands People site was posted on a mailing list, so I took advantage of that. Initially I extracted the census index information from Ancestry, thinking that would enable me to identify any entries which were particular priorities, so that I could then obtain copies of them. It did, in that there are several people from “my” three counties. However, it also became apparent that there are differences between the indexes on the two sites, so I then used the credits extracting the index entries from Scotlands People as well and will now need to purchase more in order to obtain the full details for those census entries, as well as to look at the other indexes. There’s definitely a need to prioritise, because of the cost, but at least I now have some idea of the totals involved, which I wouldn’t have done if it hadn’t been for the free credits.

And, finally, the standard “New Names” message arrived from Genes Reunited to let me know that 719 Parrys have been added to the site since 4 April 07.

Phew, somehow I am glad to know that the message doesn’t need to lead to any action on my part (only because I’ve already collected the entries in the regular trawl that I now carry out twice a week!)

Correcting mistakes

2007-04-08T15:52:00.000Z

A recent attempt by an inventor to cross the Serpentine in an inflatable balloon prompted a letter to the Daily Telegraph by a Jenny Jones, of Hampshire. It appears that her 3xgt uncle, a Sidney Parry who was a soldier in the Life Guards, once attempted to swim the Serpentine dressed in his full uniform. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it to the other side. He is pictured on the British Empire site.

Of course, nothing is ever straightforward – the site indicates the event was in 1833 but the date given by Jenny is 1834. And, since that was prior to civil registration, there’s no easy way to confirm which is correct. To do so will probably entail finding his burial, (although perhaps a memorial or newspaper report may provide the answer).

I seem to have come across quite a few errors of one sort or another recently. I decided to taking a break from writing emails and do some census transcription instead. Almost immediately I found two entries mistranscribed as Crouch when they should be Parrys. Then a housekeeper as Higgins, the Head of Household’s name, instead of Parry. And then a married daughter of a Parry, whose surname was dittoed to her husband’s surname of Jones, and yet she was transcribed as Parry. So I gained some and lost others!

I also discovered that, where I had previously submitted a correction to Ancestry (again, a case of a married daughter who had been given her maiden name of Goode, instead of her married name, Parry) Ancestry have highlighted her mother and sister and added a note that they also have the alternate name of Parry. Now that’s just silly!

I imagine they use software which “thinks” that if one member of a family has had their name corrected, then all those related to them should as well, rather than having a person actually checking the submission. But the moral of the story for researchers is to beware of the little yellow triangles which highlight an alternate name, because they could be very dubious “alternatives” (and there does not seem to be a way of checking how the triangle came about – whereas actual corrections indicate the submitter – so, unless you can make sense of the other corrections in the household, you could easily get caught out on the names).

Talking of errors, hopefully I have prevented one, by suggesting to a researcher that his family probably did not come from North Wales, given that all the evidence places them in Bristol. It’s a family I call the “Colston Parrys”, since they often use the name Colston as a forename, which makes them fairly easy to spot. Only “fairly” easy - there are a few censuses that I am unable to find them in and there are also a few entries I can’t account for, so it will be interesting to see how they eventually all fit together. Pity most of the marriages are outside of the range for the current Bristol Marriage Challenge.

But I have managed to check and submit entries for the four other challenges soon to begin, so that will be a help towards identifying all the GRO marriage entries. Again though, errors can be an issue – at least two of the entries I have received details for, from earlier challenges, have then turned out to relate to Perry families when matched up against census information (despite everything in the GRO system recording the name as Parry).

I have occasionally commented to Guild members with “old” English names about how their names appear to have a lot more spelling variations than Parry does (which also then leads to more possibilities of mistranscription for them). And I’ve assumed that the difference is due to the longer time that their names have had to mutate, since Welsh surnames settled later than English ones did. But sometimes I get that nagging feeling that, perhaps, when I finally start matching up all the Parrys, I shall find just as many of them “missing”, because they are listed under some unexpected spelling variations.

And perhaps, in the end, the distinction between Parry and Perry will not be as clear as expected based on the theories concerning their origins.

Rambling!

2007-03-30T20:52:00.000Z

I thought it had been a quiet spell recently, but now that I have looked at some of my activities…..
- a link to an index of Methodist ministers and probationers who have died in the work was posted on the Forum – that contained 9 Parry entries and one Parys. All but one of them should appear in some of the censuses so identifying them in those is on the 'to do' list.
- a link was posted on the Powys list for the gravestones section on the Llanspyddid Community Website. There are three Parrys listed, so I spent some time looking for relevant census entries – found some intriguing links but establishing all of the connections is not easy so that will require some further work.
- another message reminded me of the Longtown Historical Society’s site. When I first searched for Parrys here, I found four pages of references, now there are 16. Clearly a site that needs returning to – especially since it is the parish where my own family were living in the mid 1800s. Aren’t I fortunate that my Parry ancestors lived in an area which now has some keen local historians in it!
- a couple of addresses were posted relating to the Gloucester Record Office and an online index to the Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeology Society. There are over 100 Parry references in each, but I know I have looked at these sites before so need to check back first before extracting any more details.
- amongst various ongoing communications with Parry researchers, I also received emails from two who had not been in touch for several years. They’re both researching Parrys in Monmouthshire, largely in 'my' area, so that’s a promising sign for making more progress on the Parrys there during this year.
- had a look for some information on 'Parryville' after a link was sent to me by another researcher. I wonder if I’ll ever find out exactly how many places in the world are named after Sir William Edward Parry, the arctic explorer?
- Results from the first stage of the marriage challenge in Whitechapel district received (Thanks, Howard) – 11 out of 12 marriages found. To put that into perspective – if I was researching those particular families to the extent that I needed to know what was on the certificates, this challenge has saved me a minimum of £77 (or a lot of time searching through otherwise unidentified registers).
- four other marriage challenges have been announced so there’s a few other entries for me to sort out (fortunately none of the recent challenges are hot spots for Parrys)
- I went on an interesting 'sidetrack', when I was checking my one and only entry for the Epsom MC, a Robert Gee Parry. Since it is a fairly distinctive name, I decided to search through the censuses to put together the family. That was reasonably successful but, in the course of it, I began to wonder whether a lot of the 1851 for Manchester is missing. Why does something which starts off relatively easy, then become so much more complicated?
- Booked to go to the 'Who do you think you are?' show at Olympia in May which should be good. Any other Parry researchers planning to attend?
- yesterday there were problems with the search on Ancestry, which seemed a major issue for a while, since neither the .co.uk nor .com seemed to allow any searching. But it was possible to browse the new databases so I did that instead and found they now have Canadian Border Crossings, 1895-1956. I thought that might be a useful source and, once the search facility returned, I found I was right - 566 Parry surnamed border crossings, and 32 with Parry as a first name. But there’s 1,235 with Parry as a keyword, so there must be many entries where a Parry is a contact, or next of kin, etc.
- Received an email from NAOMI, the 'National Archive of Memorial Inscriptions.' Although it does have 11 Parrys on the site, I don’t think I shall be purchasing the details, not at £4 per inscription!

So not a quiet few weeks after all – perhaps better described as a ramble, than an amble.

And perhaps I should try posting more often!

Errors and Discoveries

2007-03-14T21:02:00.000Z

Recently, I was checking the references for marriages to send to the upcoming challenges, confirming the FreeBMD transcriptions using the images on Ancestry, and also searching for the items on the IGI. Whilst doing this, I was surprised to notice a quarter which seemed to have no Parry references (March 1846). The image on Ancestry is a typed one and the surnames ran from Parrott to Parsison.

Since there were references on FreeBMD for that quarter, I had a look at their image, which turned out to be handwritten. Initially I had thought that perhaps a whole page had been missed out when the typed indexes were produced but it soon became obvious that it was just the Parry entries which were "missing" from the typed version and that they ran over several pages in the handwritten version.

The solution? The typed version shows no heading for the Parrys – so there are only five entries which should be Parrott, from an Ann to a Susannah, then the first names start again with Ann but, because the “Parry” is missing, it looks like they are all Parrotts as well

I wonder how often such a thing might happen with a less common name, where it is unlikely to be spotted? At least with Parry, I know there will always be some of them in every quarter so would be suspicious enough to investigate if I found none.

A couple more sites mentioned recently on mailing lists – the Museum of Freemasonry (which also has information on other similar societies) has a searchable catalogue which produced 16 results. Many of them related to the fact that there was a company by the name of Parry who produced some of the medals and regalia. But there were also a few books written by Parrys, which reminded me that I have still not decided on the best way of recording such things.

The London Gazette site was also mentioned. I have come across that one before but again, it should be on my “to do” list because it needs proper organisation and a systematic approach to tackle it, since a search over the whole current date range produces 14803 Gazette Editions that contain the name!

Finally, the discovery – yet another “fess and three lozenge” reference. Found in a Surtees Society publication of the Visitations of the North (Yorkshire and Northumberland) for the family of Baguley, “gold a fess between three lozenges azure” (p120, which is p136 if you use the page box in adobe). Somehow I think this one could be an error, since their normal coat of arms is just three lozenges, and the note does state that the shield is not recorded elsewhere. But it just shows how easy it might be for a single reference to mislead people.

Browsers!

2007-03-06T23:06:00.000Z

Not directly concerning research but related to the web site and therefore relevant. I received an email last week letting me know that two of the links on the site didn’t appear to work. “Strange,” I thought, “they work for me.” But it was apparent, from the copied text in the email, that something wasn’t right. It turns out that IE automatically corrects little errors in coding – and clearly confusion on my part when I was teaching myself how to write web pages, such that I put \ instead of / on certain links, has probably resulted in some people never being able to view particular pages properly!

Which is a bit of a disappointment, given the number of years since the first pages went online.

I have now (I hope) corrected all of the links. I also realised that a couple of the pedigrees were likely to be displaying incorrectly in certain browsers (images which should align horizontally being displayed vertically instead). Fortunately, I found a solution to that elsewhere on the web so that has been corrected as well.

Ancestry are beginning to add British Army WW1 pension records to their databases. There’s only the A and B surnames at present, but a keyword search turns up three results with Parry either in the contact address or as one of the first names (although I suspect one of those might be mistranscribed as George Parry Blackwell, when it should be George Percy Blackwell).

There have been two new contacts since the end of February, so correspondence with them and some of the other more recent contacts has taken up a reasonable amount of my time. Another marriage challenge has also been announced, so sorting out the entries for those four challenges must be my priority over the next couple of days, although I have also been working on the web page for the Parrys of Penderi – one of the families using the “fess and three lozenge” arms. That’s something I would like to place online fairly soon, since I have received help from two researchers local to that area and it would be nice to show that I have actually done something with all the information they have sent me!

Contacts, more contacts, and Marriages challenges

2007-02-28T15:12:00.000Z

Isn’t it strange how, sometimes, the things that should be easy to find, turn out to be very elusive. Since the last posting, I’ve received messages from four new contacts, plus a renewal of contact with someone I was last in touch with in 2004. Two of the messages were easy to deal with – one was someone just starting out on research and wondering what to do. He’d already made a good beginning by contacting living relatives, and so it was easy to pass on details of my own page with sources for new genealogists, and a few of the other useful sites, such as the BBC, which has a "getting started" section. The second was a current Parry who’d come across my site and thought they’d write. Again, an easy one to respond to.

Two of the other contacts, strangely enough, were both looking for Parrys called Robert – unfortunately, not the same Robert! What with possibilities of name changes and second marriages for both of them, I knew they would not be very easy to identify. But we have made some progress.

But in the final case, the researcher very kindly sent me a tree going back to the 1800s. And can I find them in all the censuses? No!

Both of us have come up with the same possibilities for some of the entries but second marriages, possible mistranscriptions, and children being born just after census dates have "conspired" to turn what looked like being an easy task, into quite a search. Such is life. Good job I like a challenge.

Talking of challenges, I’ve finally submitted my (19) marriages for the Bristol challenge and suddenly there are three more challenges being announced on the forum. The kindness of Guild members in undertaking these challenges is really appreciated (even if I do have to get a move on to check the details for my entries before submitted them. That’s minor work compared to what they are taking on.)

Other news – I have updated some of the pages on my web site, to tidy up my Sources and Resources page, and to include the link to Ruth’s site. Ruth and I have also been "chatting" about coats of arms. The details of a Surname information site were posted on the forum, but subsequent comments by the experts (i.e. the one-namers who know their own surnames better than a general researcher would) indicate that much of the information is suspect (so I won’t even repeat the link!). Genes Reunited continues to grow – between the 9th – 23rd Feb there have been 1101 new entries for Parry (according to the "Genes New Names Alert"). I wonder how many of the submitters are actually researching or whether it is just people submitting their recent families?

And, finally, I discovered that the University of Wales, Aberystwyth has been granted the funding to put Bartrum’s Welsh Genealogies on-line. (BBC article) Brilliant news for those of us interested in the old pedigrees but who don’t live on the doorstep of the NLW. Mind you, with all the Welsh naming that is in there, I wonder how long it will be before "researchers" are publishing all sorts of pedigrees showing how their family connects to those in Bartrum’s work?

Perhaps it's a good job the project will take three years - that might give me sufficient time to identify some of the Parry families who genuinely trace back to them.

Matching marriage entries, and other news

2007-02-13T11:53:00.000Z

I have almost finished sorting out the Liverpool district Parry marriages, to help Susan with her challenge. The process is not really complicated, just time consuming, as I have mentioned before. Basically it involves:
- already having a listing of civil registration items (perhaps extracted from something like Freebmd, or transcribed personally from the GRO indexes)
- collecting the items on the Lancsbmd site (relatively easy because it is possible to download a csv file of the results).
- checking each item from Lancsbmd to find its GRO reference (using Freebmd as far as possible but looking up on the original images where necessary). [For a low frequency name, it might be possible to skip this step and to match to a listing of the civil registration items just on the basis of the names alone but this is not possible for the Parrys – they’re just too common.]
- matching the Lancsbmd listing with its added references to the listing of civil registration items.

In some ways, it would be easiest to run the match process using a program like Access but there are some difficulties with doing this. Firstly, if running the match on the basis of just the GRO references, then there are additional entries created in any situation where two Parrys have the same references (which can happen because of Parry-Parry marriages but there is also at least one case of two Parrys marrying non-Parrys yet having the same references. Was it a brother and sister marrying on the same day or was it just coincidence that they followed each other in the register?) Although it is possible to automatically delete any duplicates, this won’t solve the problem of "false matches".

But, if the original matching process takes names into account as well as references, then it won’t match items where there are slight differences in spellings, such as the Susannah who appears on Lancsbmd as Sussanah, or the James who probably should be a Jane. And it certainly won’t match the "Christina" who probably should be a "David John"!

Although the Freebmd name transcription can be checked back to the original indexes, there’s no way of checking the Lancsbmd entries. And what if the transcription is correct but the spelling is just different in each source? Such situations lead to the question of whether I really need to be adding a standardised name column to every file as well (which I will obviously need eventually, when I finally want to put all of the names into a master index. But do I want to sidetrack onto consideration of "standard forms" at the moment?)

And, of course, any automatic matching process using the GRO references, presupposes that the references on the civil registration listing have all been corrected (which they haven’t!)

In the end I just find it easier to match using Excel, keeping all the columns of each file but then also having one column with all the GRO references in to sort on, which brings the matching items next to each other enabling them to be combined manually. It might take longer but I keep control and at least I know there are no false duplications. Then it is just a matter of putting the information into a form that is usable by Susan since I have sent both a full column file (in case she wants to double check anything) but also a reduced file based just on the references and including spouses and church, which should be easier for her to work with for the challenge.

Hopefully, having now listed all the process, it will remind me of what to do if much time lapses before I tackle any more UKbmd sites.

Other news - more years have been added to the passenger lists on findmypast – it now covers from 1890 – 1909 and includes 2038 Parrys.

Another researcher mentioned a strange entry on FamilySearch, where what is possibly her Williams family have all been entered as if a Caleb Parry is their father (easy to find – use "All resources, look for a Martha JASPER, with Caleb in the father’s name. First entry, on the IGI, for Martha Williams Jasper, born 14 FEB 1821 Llanbedr, Brecon, Wales, is the relevant one. Click on her and then the "Family" link alongside Caleb.). Having done some further searching, I found an entry in the 1871 census for Abergavenny showing a Caleb Parry visiting the Jaspers. Caleb was originally recorded as a Minister, to which someone has added "Latter Day Saints". Now I wonder when that was added!

Caleb is recorded as being born in America but, based on various census and IGI entries, I suspect he might actually have been born in Flintshire, and that he then moved out to Utah, marrying a Catherine from Wales either before or after he arrived there (or on the boat, as some IGI entries have it). He then returned to the UK around 1870/71, and died in Birmingham in 1871. There’s also an interesting collection of other marriages, along with some children born to one of the other wives, children who do appear with Caleb and Catherine in the US census. I wouldn’t have been able to tell from just the census entries but it seems possible that this is my first case of the "multiple marriages" one is reputed to find amongst the LDS.

Funnily enough, one of the names which appears in the family is Bernard, and I have just dealt with a query from another researcher who has family using that name, in the same area of Flintshire. I wonder if there might be a connection there? It’s a pity there are so many of these North Wales families – it will be a fascinating job to sort them all out eventually but, at the moment, I just don’t have the time or resources.

Next priority is to update my website, and add that link to Ruth's site.

The last few days

2007-02-07T10:41:00.000Z

Two sites have been posted on the Forum regarding indentured servants to the US. One has 7 results from just a Parry search (3xPARRY, 1xPERREY, 3xPERRY). However, a soundex search produced 32 results, including 2x PERREY and 9xPERRY. The reason for the difference is that the other results found on the Parry search all have Parry as a spelling variant within the entry. It’s always useful to explore what results different search methods produce on a particular website, especially when dealing with early records. It helps in determining the best strategy for searching, in order to get the right balance between picking up everything which is relevant, without being inundated with irrelevant entries. The second site did not appear to have a specific search facility, so needed to be searched using Google’s site search. That indicated there were 36 pages with references to Parry, but the site is familiar - have I searched it before?

I have been thinking about organisation and how little things can make a difference. Sometimes it happens that I come across a site whilst searching for something else, or a useful site is mentioned on the Forum but I either don’t have time to look at it, or else I just carry out an initial extraction and don’t finish tidying up the information. I often leave the Forum messages highlighted to remind me to go back “at some stage” – but then I don’t always check back through those emails when a “new” site is mentioned. How much simpler it would be if I just had one spreadsheet into which I entered all the web sites when they were first mentioned, including details such as whether there are any Parrys, if so, at what stage my extraction is in, and for sites where information is still being added, the date I last extracted the details. Doing that would mean I only have one place to check to see if I have already done work on the site. It would also enable me to clear out a lot of my old emails. Just a simple piece of organisation.

The trick is to make sure I stick to the system!

Two burial sites mentioned on the Forum, following on from one concerning Missouri death records (which is still sitting highlighted in my “GOONS” messages folder) – St Lukes, in Upper Norwood, Surrey with 1 Parry, and Jewishgen, which has 1925 results using a “sounds like” search but only 3 for exact spelling Parry. Since one needs to register to view the details, I have left it for the moment. But that’s now four entries in my new spreadsheet.

Some good news – Ruth’s book on Blanche Parry is with the publishers, although it sounds like it could be near the end of the year before it is published. I will set up a link to her site, which should help her to get noticed on the search engines. It will be interesting to read what she has discovered, especially with regard to the family as they appear in the bardic poems – one of the few more contemporary records relating to them.

A marriage challenge for Bristol 1837-1851 has been announced. I thought I might have quite a few entries but there appears to only be 19. I’ll need to go through and see if I can find any of them on the IGI, or other such sources, first before I can submit them. But that project is such a help to Guild members. I have also received copies of some certificates from another researcher so that adds to the collection. I must set out my timetable for tackling the marriage indexes – but I still have the Liverpool entries from 1881-1911 to sort out first to help Susan with her challenge.

Todays emails included the Rootsweb review. I often only skim through that, but of course it also includes a list of new databases. I should really try checking them when they are announced – or at least add them to my new spreadsheet. I hope it proves as effective as I am finding my “activity log” for emails. There is something quite satisfying to see 3 emails received (just this morning – one renewed contact from 2002, one about the marriage certificate, and one about an unsuccessful deeds search) and all of them marked off as acknowledged already. It helps to keep a sense of order to the study.

Now all I need to do is clear the longer outstanding ones which I have marked in red!

So much for being organised!

2007-02-02T22:55:00.000Z

The blog is certainly failing miserably at its task of letting people know what’s going on with the study. But, never mind, I have decided that the success of a New Year’s resolution should be measured by whether the planned action is consistently in practice by the end of the year. So I still have plenty of time to get organised and into a better routine of writing it.

There has been a lot happening though. Firstly I’ve made up my mind with regard to the civil registration indexes – largely as a result of emailing Susan, the Liverpool marriage challenger. Although I’m not submitting any of the Parry marriages for the district, she said that the listing iteself would be of help to her and that perhaps I would find the Lancsbmd site of use myself. I certainly did – it turned out that there are 964 entries on there which related to the period covered by the current challenge. Although some of them were duplications (because separate entries appear to be made for both maiden name and the 1st married name when someone has been married before) I have been able to match almost 600 entries so far from the Lancsbmd to the GRO listing. Which means those GRO entries now have the spouse and church details added to them, making it much easier to identify a particular marriage amongst the many Parrys with the same name.

At the same time, I was also trying to match those Liverpool items which are on the IGI to the GRO, since that also helps to identify the relevant churches and spouses. The two matching processes have been time-consuming, since every Lancsbmd entry initially needed looking up in the GRO just to be able to match the items properly, and the second marriage issue did cause me a few problems (Parry entries in Lancsbmd aren’t necessarily Parrys in the GRO). There were also anomalies with the IGI because some items are on there with the surname as, for example "Jones or Parry" or "Parry or Jones". And there is a difference between these because one is found when using Parry as a search term and one isn’t. This means that the entries found on the IGI are not actually the ones which will be found on the GRO as having married under the surname Parry. Confusing until you realise what’s going on.

But the final result of all this work has been the realisation that it could be possible to identify quite a number of the GRO marriage references – not just who is marrying who, but also which church it took place in – through the UKbmd sites, and that is definitely worth doing, so work on the GRO marriage index has become a priority for this year. (And I’m wishing there were a lot more districts covered by UKbmd sites!).

Whether the GRO birth and death indexes will follow remains to be seen, since I do still want to get the census entries for my main counties transcribed fully and online, as well as some particular family trees derived from them.

In line with the decision to work on the marriages, I have made a start on contacting the 35 other Guild members who might already have the full details for some of the marriages, since they have submitted entries to the GMI indicating a Parry married into their registered name. This of course adds to my correspondence, which has also included five new contacts since I last wrote, as well as renewed contact with a researcher I last wrote to in 2002, and over twenty other Parry related emails received – most of which I have answered but there are still a few long outstanding ones.

There’s a few specific items to mention from the correspondence – one of the new contacts was having difficulty with her Parrys in Herefordshire, because there appeared to be some duplicate entries, but with slightly differing details. This illustrated how a One-Name Study can help in sorting out such situations, since I had sufficient information to be able to demonstrate that there were actually two different couples called Henry and Emma Parry within the same area, both of about the same age, rather than there being some error in the way the census was enumerated. I’ve received a very interesting enquiry with regard to Parrys who were prisoners of Napoleon – I’ll write more on this in a later blog entry since I’m only just beginning to look into it. The issue of surnames possibly being used as first names was touched on by another query – in this case the researcher was trying to find out about a James Burdett Parry in London who, unfortunately, died before any of the censuses and civil registration began so I am struggling to find much about him. The interesting point though, is that in Herefordshire there is a John Burdett Parry, whose wife came from London – could there be a connection or is the use of Burdett just a coincidence?

As I was answering this query, Daniel posted to the Forum a method for searching middle names on Freebmd – which obviously I checked out for Parry. Only just over 4900 on there at the moment. The question arises as to whether such entries are considered part of an ONS. Some researchers say no, because they regard an ONS as just instances of the *surname*. Others say yes, because it is still use of the name – and, since the situation often arises through use of a maiden name as a middle name, one would expect such entries to be of help in identifying marriages. But, with a common surname, there can be as many (if not more) "first name" instances as some other One Name Studies have in their entire study!

Other interesting points from the past month (most courtesy of Guild members as usual) – a site about Family History in India which has 39 pages with Parrys on (still need to sort out those), the Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office have put their Wills index online and some of the items have the images freely associated with them. (32 Parry entries – still to follow up properly). The passenger lists on Findmypast (used to be 1837 online) have 774 Parry entries so far (just for 1890 to 1899). A database of cases heard in the Court of Chivalry between 1634 – 1640 produced 131 references. Many of them appear to relate to cases where a Parry was the solicitor but again, this site still needs investigating properly. A project involving the digitising of documents from the US National Archives (NARA) – it’s currently a pay to view site, but it appears the documents will be available for free after five years (which gives me plenty of time to index the 1185 documents mentioning Parrys that are already there, before I even consider viewing the actual records) (Note - the total has now gone up to 1241 since I first searched.)

Finally, during the last month I’ve also received upgrades to two very useful programs – Genmap and LDS companion (both available from Archer Software). Now I’ve just got to find the time to use them!

Holiday’s end

2007-01-07T21:08:00.000Z

Well, the decorations came down yesterday and are boxed up, ready to go back in the loft, so I guess that means the holiday season really is over. Time to get back to "work".

Not that I actually stopped working, of course! Even with visitors around, it was still possible to carry out a few of those "mindless cut and paste" jobs. As I mentioned earlier, I have been thinking that I should perhaps re-adjust my priorities and do something with the civil registration entries. So, over the holidays, I had a look at Parrys on the FreeBMD site - only 45,515 births, 27,054 marriages and 32,523 deaths.

And there’s already almost 2000 new entries added to those, since they updated the site on 5th Jan.

That just goes to show what a major task transcribing the details of the civil registration indexes would be – yet alone then attempting to identify who each entry relates to. It’s a good job some of the Parrys used distinctive names. There were quite a few I recognised from queries or my own research. But in a few years time, the DoVE project will probably be on-line, which might render the current indexes obsolete.

One advantage of collecting some of the entries would be that I could submit requests to the Guild Marriage Challenges, where members are looking up church records for particular registration districts. This enables members to discover the full details of the event, making it much more likely they can identify the people concerned. However, I doubt it would be appreciated if I submitted a request to the current challenge for Liverpool – with 1141 Parry marriages in that district within the relevant timespan, it could be a good way of destroying the enthusiasm that’s been shown for the project.

So, still some thought needed as to what I do with regard to the civil registration indexes.

During the holidays, I have also been working on extracting the rest of the details for the Parry entries in the NLW probate indexes on A2A. This should enable me to identify their relevant parishes, which will be useful at the moment for sorting out those Parrys from Carmarthenshire, in particular, and for deciding whether any other probate items could be relevant to them. I haven’t yet transcribed the four items I received just before Christmas, but I have had further parish information sent to me by the local researchers. Amongst that, I noticed an entry for a Griffith TWYNING. I don’t think that’s a very common surname and I wonder whether it could relate to the Twining’s Tea company – there are a couple of references to Twinings in the book The Parrys of the Golden Vale, about the family of CHH Parry. This could be a lead with regard to how that family really connects to others who use the "fess and three lozenges" coats of arms. Something to bear in mind, at least.

There have been a couple of useful web sites mentioned on the Forum – a Directory for Cuba from 1960 netted one Parry, there was another Parry in a cemetery index from Sleaford and today I found three Parrys in the New Bedford (Massachusetts) Whaling Archives.

But I mustn’t get too sidetracked on such "new" things – I still have seven people to email with regard to Parry messages received over Christmas, two of whom are new contacts, so that is a good start to the year. Let’s hope it continues (now all I need to do is pursuade all these contacts that they really want to contribute to the study – I wonder how long it would take to collect all the BMD indexes if every Parry researcher helped?)

A quick summary

2006-12-17T16:02:00.000Z

Just a quick summary of the last few days, so that I don’t get too far behind over Christmas.

There have been several sites posted on the Guild forum concerning patents, following an initial message mentioning Google’s new beta Patent Search. These all still need following up, since there are 916 Parry references on the Google site alone.

I received a query from Adam, another Guild member, concerning marriages between people of his registered name (Hargest) and people of mine. Since one of the marriages was in 1914, I didn’t have any information on that couple but, by taking a guess as to the likely birth date for a first child, I did manage to find a birth registration in the right area for a child with the mother’s maiden name as Hargest, so that was a start. His other query related to a marriage in the 1700s in Llandyfalle, Breconshire – again, apart from having the entry from the marriage bond index, I couldn’t identify the Harry Parry further. But he was from the parish of Gwenddwr, Breconshire, where there is quite a sizeable Parry family being researched by others so I shall look into that further in the New Year, as well as try to do more on the births from the 1900s.

The subject of "cross marriages" between Guild Members has been on my mind after an email from Mary, who organises the Guild Marriage Index. There are currently 79 entries in the Index for Parry marriages, all of which have been submitted by other members. I could possibly find out the full details for each of those entries by contacting the other members – so that’s another thing to add to my "to do" list. (Fortunately several members have submitted more than one Parry marriage so at least that’s only 35 emails to write, not 79).

After posting a message about the NLW probate indexes onto the Powys list, I received a request for information abut a marriage between a Mary Parry to a William Thomas, around 1852/3. I have found one possibility in the GRO indexes for 1854 but also realised that the enquirer had already bought at least one certificate which appeared relevant to them – just one of the problems associated with such high frequency names.

But these recent queries have made me think about adjusting my priorities – although I really do want to get the details for the census entries for my three main counties transcribed and online asap, I am beginning to think that finishing the listing of the GRO will be of more use – it would save me having to spend time looking for possible entries when I receive such queries. It would also mean I would have the items listed so that, as I go through the censuses, I should be able to identify the relevant BMDs for the people I am transcribing.

Following on from my last entry, I received another Genes Reunited "New Names Alert" and decided to look at the entries for the last 14 days – supposedly there were 635 entries, but this total became 636 when I went to the page and, once I tried extracting the details, the final total shown was only 607. Definitely strange!

I have received the photocopies of the four probate entries that I had ordered from the NLW. Two of them are actually just administrations, but they have inventories and bonds with them so that still gives me the next of kin details. It is interesting to see how the earliest (1680) has a value of almost £490 pounds (probably a lot of money in those days) whereas two of the others were £19 (1694) and £92 (1746). I don’t know yet whether these do all relate to the same family but, if they do (as I suspect, since it is not a common surname in that particular area), one wonders at the changing fortunes. It will probably be after Christmas before I can transcribe them all properly, and I know there are some others to obtain for these Parrys in Llanvalteg but, hopefully, they should enable me to put together at least some form of a pedigree for the family. Then it will be a matter of trying to find other records, eg parish register entries, to confirm the details.

But I haven’t seen anything yet to indicate the use of a coat of arms, which was where this line of investigation started.

And, finally, another Guild member has written to me to see if I have any hints on where to start with carrying out a large study. (I shall resist the temptation to say “don’t” – I enjoy what I am doing too much myself – but sometimes I do think we’re a strange bunch!)

New Year’s resolution!

2006-12-11T11:16:00.000Z

I mentioned recently to a friend that I’ve already made my New Year’s resolution – and that it is "To be more organised." The fact that, yet again, it is over two weeks since I posted anything probably demonstrates why – there’s certainly been things happening on the study, they just haven’t made it into the blog.

It’s amazing how much time gets wasted through not being organised – papers not filed when printed, resulting in it taking longer to find them when they’re needed, emails not written when first thought of, so it effectively takes twice as long to write them because they need "re-thinking". And I have lost count of the number of half-finished web pages in the "working" folder. How much more convenient it would be if those were finished – then I could just give people a link to them instead of having to virtually rewrite the same information in an email to answer a query, as I did yesterday. Another researcher had asked whether Ap Harry (which led to the surname Parry) was also the same surname as Harry. Now that page on the origins and derivation of the surname would have been so useful – if only it was online!

The question arose because I’d posted on a couple of mailing lists about a new discovery – the pre-1858 probate indexes for Wales have finally been made available online, but through the A2A site, rather than the NLW. That will be a great help to researchers – there are well over 2000 entries just for Parry and, since the records go back to the 1500s, it’s important for me to include the "ap Harrys" as well as other variations on those two names. I have collected all of the references that show up just from the initial search, but I still need to go through each catalogue individually in order to pick up the parish information. With 68 separate catalogues and all those individual entries, I think I could be busy for some time. But what a great resource for anyone researching family in Wales. And it could also be useful for the wider study of surnames – looking at the frequencies of particular names in particular areas and at how the Welsh surnames developed over time.

That I discovered the indexes were on A2A was thanks to one of the two researchers who have been helping me with regard to the Parrys in Carmarthenshire – he’d sent me a second listing of Wills for the parish of Llanfallteg and I’d recognised the format as that of A2A so checked out the site. Such contact with people who are local to the area of research is a great help and often a good reason for joining and supporting the local family history societies. Of course, I had already written to the NLW with regard to the four Wills for the Parrys of Llanfallteg that had previously been mentioned to me, and it now looks as if there will be a few more that are relevant, but such is life. I shall probably wait until I have been through all of the early Will entries, adding parishes and any other details, before I decide which others are important enough to obtain copies of. I now know, from the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, that one of the family was born in Llangan, an adjoining parish to Llanfallteg, so I shall obviously have to widen the net from just that parish.

I have been working hard over the last week to try to get all my emails up to date, after some non-genealogy activities had taken up my time. I think I have done reasonably well – even managing to answer some emails on the day I received them, since more come in while I’m clearing the backlog. But there are still a few long outstanding ones (that I need to find the paperwork for!).

An interesting point arose with regard to one of the new correspondants – the use of Parry as a first name. I am now in touch with three people whose first name is Parry – but two are male, and one is female. It’s interesting how "non-gender specific" the use of a surname as a first name can be.

There have been some interesting discussions on the Guild Forum recently. One, about the differences between Access and Excel and how people use them for recording their genealogical research, has set me thinking about organisation (again!). Another was about the Genes Reunited site, and about how to follow up the "Genes New Names Alert" messages. When I was a member (I joined for a year to solve a family mystery) I rarely received these notifications but now, having let my membership lapse, they are arriving every two weeks.

From the 3rd Nov – 15th Nov, there were 812 new Parrys added and from the 17th Nov – 1st Dec there were 787. In total, there are currently 34982 Parrys listed on the site – that’s more than there were in the UK in any one census. You’d think, with that number of entries, there must be a lot of researchers who should connect to each other – I wonder if people actually look for, and follow up, possible matches?

Perhaps I should just be glad they aren’t all writing to me - not even my New Year's resolution would help in dealing with that number of queries!

Forgotten Blog?

2006-11-23T20:56:00.000Z

Anyone who reads this blog frequently (is there such a person?) could be forgiven for thinking that I had forgotten it.

Back on the 6th November, I started to plan an entry which was going to be entitled “A Justified sidetrack”. It was to follow on from my previous one, where I had mentioned getting sidetracked such that I wasn’t working on the things I should have been doing. I really did intend to get on with writing the web page about the coats of arms – but then Ancestry made their databases available for free for three days. Since I only have a UK subscription, I could hardly resist such an opportunity to explore the entries relating to the other countries, could I?

So that was the “justified” sidetrack.

But I had just finished investigating those entries when Ancestry added a further batch of immigration records – and then made them available for free until the end of November.

Of course, I have only extracted the index information for most of these records – with the number of Parry entries on the site, it would be impossible to follow them all up in the time available (even with another “three days free” offer, which they have just sent me.). But at least the details I have collected should enable me to look at the sorts of records which are available and to get them into some form of basic organisation. Then, when I do get the time and resources to follow up further, I should have some idea of what I am looking at.

I did check a couple of the John Parrys, who appeared in the passenger lists around 1890, in case one of them might have been my great grandfather. He is reputed to have gone abroad at about that time, but there is insufficient information on the lists to identify most of them. I wonder whether there are any other records which might be of use? [If anyone does come across a John Parry, born in 1865 in Glynfach, Breconshire, (but just as likely to state his birthplace as Monmouthshire or Herefordshire since the family moved around when he was young) possibly working as a cattleman somewhere in Canada or America around 1890, but who has then “disappeared” by 1901, I’d love to hear from them. He was back in the UK by 1901.]

I had a nice surprise last week, when one of the Guild members sent me the details for four Parry related marriages – the results of the Guild Marriage Challenge that he had been carrying out. Two of them I’d asked for and they will help another researcher. The other two were previously unknown to me and, since one of them relates to someone with Parry as his middle name - which he never used in full on any census – I now have the added puzzle of working out where the usage came from.

I still have the backlog of sites which had been mentioned on the Guild forum to check out for Parry entries, so no news of any great discoveries amongst them. There have been three new contacts so far this month and I still have some census details to look at for two of the researchers who made contact during October. I’ve also been taking a look at the National Archives, where I discovered that some of their special collections are available online for free – so, at long last, I have a copy of the records relating to the “grievances and horrible extortions and destructions done to Jordan, abbot of Dore and his abbey“ as a result of the attacks by Griffith and John ap Henry [SC 8/213/10624 if anyone else want to look at it].

And, finally (only six days after starting to plan the above), I have discovered that Llanfallteg, the parish in Carmarthenshire where the Pendery farm mentioned in the previous entry is, has a Village History Society. I have been exchanging emails with two researchers from there who have been very helpful in supplying me with maps and information on the area. I have downloaded a Will from the PRO for a Richard Parry who died in London in 1641, and who I suspect could be the Richard from Llanfallteg, mentioned on the Genuki page at http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/wal/CMN/Llanfallteg/Lloyd.html. That should be interesting to transcribe. And I’ve also put in a request to the NLW with a view to obtaining copies of four other Parry Wills from Llanfallteg so it’s a case of “watch this space” – I shall track down these “fess and three lozenge” families eventually!

Coincidences and sidetracks

2006-10-29T17:24:00.000Z

This week, I have been working on a web page relating to the “fess and three lozenges” heraldry puzzle – where several, apparently unconnected, families all use the same (or very similar) coats of arms. One of the families has been described as being descended from the “Parrys of Pendery”, a farm reported to be in the parish of Llanfallteg, near the border of Carmarthenshire with Pembrokeshire. I had looked for Pendery in various sources but had found no other reference to it.

Last night I noticed an email which had been dumped in the bulk mail (ie spam) folder by msn, which just had the subject “lloyd”. Lloyd’s not a family name I recognise, so I almost deleted it but something made me stop and check the properties. At which point, I recognised the sender as someone I’d previously helped with regard to her Parry family. She was wondering if I could get her started on her Lloyd line. Now, I don’t normally get too involved with research into other surnames – there just aren’t enough hours in the day – but this time I did, because of where they were living.

Only the exact farm I had wanted to identify with regard to the Parry family!

It looks as if the Parrys had long since left, by the time her family were at the farm but, what a coincidence. At least I now know where the farm was.

On one of the days earlier this week, I started out with the intention of writing the heraldry page, but got sidetracked immediately when I checked my mail beforehand. There was a message from ebay with regard to an item I was watching – a book about a railway tunnel, which had been written by a Keith Parry. In trying to find out more about it, I ended up extracting the details of all of the books which had been written by Parrys and which were held at a particular library. It was a fairly manageable number, only thirty two such authors there. But I wonder how many there would be if I tried the British Library catalogue? It’s things like this which make me stop and think about the goals of a one-name study, and how feasible it is to collect *everything* on the name.

The two new contacts I mentioned on the 23th have both responded with further information, which is great. Sometimes people don’t even acknowledge my response to their first enquiry, which can be a bit disheartening. One of the families is from North Wales so, as usual, there is probably not a great deal that I can add to his research but sometimes just sharing the information enables people to spot gaps and further opportunities for research. The other family originates from the area around West Dean in Gloucestershire but they are living in Monmouthshire for some of the later censuses, so that makes them one which I will be including on my web site.

If only I didn’t keep sidetracking and actually got on with writing the pages!

Quieter weeks

2006-10-23T20:32:00.000Z

The past couple of weeks have been fairly quiet from the correspondence point of view, which has been useful since I have had other things to do. But that doesn’t mean work on the Parry collection took a break.

I recently helped on the Guild stall at a local history fair and discovered that the Herefordshire Family History Society, (who were conveniently on the adjoining table), have now produced their marriage index on cdrom. Given the concentration of Parrys in Herefordshire, as well as my own family links there, this was one cd I just had to buy! Some of the entries will be on the IGI, of course, but there are others that aren’t. (Even for those that are, having such a second transcription will be useful for confirming the details of the entries, since it will be some time before I could check all of the parish registers myself). Another advantage of such indexes on cdrom, as opposed to searching an index such as the IGI online, is that the whole index can be viewed. This makes it easier to spot entries with variant spellings such as Pary, Parey, Parrie, Parrye, (and “ap Harry” with the “ap” as part of the first name). There are 891 marriages with just the “Parry” spelling so plenty to keep me busy there (and three of them are Parry-Parry marriages, which will add to the fun of identifying their family links!).

A weekend away in Kent gave me the opportunity to visit Banstead parish churchyard, which I had read contained a Parry tomb. Email correspondence with a member of the local History group, who kindly went and checked the churchyard for me, confirmed beforehand that the monument did exist and was accessible. Although there are no personal names on the actual tomb, it does have coats of arms on it, photographs of which I will put up on my web site soon. And I know who is likely to be buried in it from the details in the book, which are confirmed by the entries in the National Burial Index.

Coats of arms can be very useful for identifying links between families – as long as one can be sure that they are genuine and have not been assumed. Whilst in Kent, we visited Canterbury Cathedral and I had a bit a a surprise when I found a Parry tomb there – that of Edward Parry, Suffragan Bishop of Dover, who was also an Archdeacon of Canterbury. The tomb shows the same coat of arms as that on the tomb at Banstead – which also matches to the arms found in several other places around the country. But most of these families have no known connection between them - so I think it is definitely time for a ”puzzle page” on the web site.

The Guild Forum has again been the source of several possible sites for collecting information but, since I haven’t yet had time to follow any of them up, comments will have to wait for another blog entry.

And the lull in correspondence has obviously passed, since I received emails from two new contacts yesterday.

Assortments

2006-10-09T10:13:00.000Z

It seems to have been a week of “bits and bobs”, with nothing actually getting completed sufficiently to justify writing about it. However, in keeping with the blog’s “reason to be”, here’s a few notes:

I finally got time to look up a web site of obituaries, relating to Saginaw, Michigan, which had been mentioned on the Forum. Although searching for Parry as a surname produced just four results, using the “full record” option resulted in twelve. Three of these additional entries were for people born in Parry Sound, another three related to a Campbell family, where the husband’s first name was Parry but, of the other two, one was the married daughter of a Parry couple and the other was an entry where the spouse’s maiden name was Parry. Certainly a good example of how a wider text search can be more fruitful than just a surname search.

Another site mentioned was for the Jamaican phone book – netted fourteen Parry entries (although, being current, these go in the “file for later” category).

As well as updating the Parry profile on the Guild site, so that the census figures are more up-to-date and there is now a link to this blog, I have been working on my web page for the Parrys in Herefordshire in 1901. I have finished the extraction of the full details and am adding a map of the distribution within the county – but there are always some issues to sort out when trying to plot maps, so that still needs further work.

It’s funny how one thing can lead to another - the correspondence with regard to the Aston Somerville Parrys reminded me of a reference I came across a few years ago, for a Parry family in Lillington, Dorset, who appear to bear the same arms. There is a Will for a George Parry of Lillington mentioned in the Parry Abstracts book and he appears on some pedigree sheets I have from Hereford library. But, whilst searching for further information on the Parrys from Lillington, I happened to come across a list of marriages at Winfrith Newburgh (no. I’d never heard of it, either!) which included the marriage of an Alexander Parry of Owermoigne to Joane Mildeton on 20 Jun 1603. I suspect this is Alexander, son of Leonard Parry, the Rector of Owermoigne – who just happens to appear on the same pedigree as George, only without any details for his marriage, so that’s a useful find.

Another item found through the Lillington/Parry search was an “index to Dorsetshire” which, on further investigation, turned out to be an ongoing series of publications concerning monumental brasses. A google site search produced several references to Parrys there, so that’s clearly something to explore further.

Whilst I was thinking about the discrepancies in some of the Parry pedigrees, I had another look at the online Calendars of Patent Rolls, since I know several people on the pedigrees appear in them. This site seems to have improved its layout so it's easier to follow up the references (mainly to Ap Harrys/Ap Henrys in those days, not Parrys) But I need to understand more about these sorts of records, and the history of the time, before I can make sense of some of the entries.

There’s been a sudden flurry of activity on the mailing list – mainly due to one researcher who has “found” the message board. At least it has enabled me to see that the gateway between the board and the list is finally working properly, as are the mailing list digests.

I received copies of two certificates from another researcher, which will be a help when I come to deal with the civil registration entries. There have also been two further new contacts this week – one already back to 1780, and the other in America, so perhaps not a great deal I can help them with, but I shall try.

And finally, a notification from the Powys mailing list that the Genuki pages now contain a list of photographers in Wales – not surprisingly, a few of them are Parrys!

Historical Records

2006-09-30T15:12:00.000Z

Two new contacts over the last few days, as well as continued correspondence with three others. One of the new contacts has family in Monmouthshire which is already traced back to an Edward Parry born around 1806, so I am not sure how much help I will be able to be at the moment, although I have been able to find some relevant census details.

But it is always good to account for a few more Parrys from one of my three main counties.

The other new contact is even further back in their research, having traced the family back to the mid 1600s. This is a family I recognise – the Aston Somerville Parrys – who, from the coat of arms on the monument in the church there, could possibly connect to the Henry Parry who was Bishop of Worcester in the early 1600s, and also to the Parrys of the Golden Valley, Herefordshire.

Which reminds me that I still have some photographs relating to Henry, and to the Aston Somerville memorials, which I haven’t yet sorted out to put on the web site.

I’d love to be able to find the links between all of the families who used this coat of arms – but will I ever know enough to do so?

It’s not just the simple “data processing” task, of gathering more information in order to connect up all of the, currently unconnected, individuals or partial pedigrees (and to correct the discrepancies in some of the accounts already published). It’s also about having the skill to understand what some of the information gathered actually means - I needed a lesson on the background and language of marriage settlements recently, having misunderstood which of the parties actually had the “use” of the property.

Sometimes the thought of amateurs such as myself tackling historical records is quite frightening!

Perhaps that’s just one of the difficulties of carrying out a One-Name Study – we collect everything, from any place and any time. So, whereas a “normal” genealogist would be tackling things gradually, working back a step at a time, we might suddenly find ourselves delving into medieval records (or even earlier) without having had the opportunity to build up the background knowledge necessary for their correct interpretation.

A cue for a reminder to myself – to constantly ask, “Am I understanding this correctly?” and to be prepared for alternative explanations, rather than assuming things really are as they first appear.

Matching references

2006-09-23T22:58:00.000Z

Thanks to a comment by another Guild member, John Dods, I spent some time yesterday extracting references to Parrys from the National Archives of South Africa. There were 828 occurrences of the name so I have a lot of work to do in identifying exactly what is there but, whilst looking through them, I just happened to notice some references to “Leon Parry and Hayhoe Ltd”. It stuck out to me because Leon is not a name I have come across for a Parry.

Later, I happened to be looking at the new British Phone Books database on Ancestry – and what should I find but entries for “Parry Leon & Hayhoe, Travel Agnts (South Africa) Ltd, 219 Regent st W.1”

I then checked that address in a 1934 Trade Directory, but they weren’t there. However, they were listed under the Commercial section - “PARRY, LEON & HAYHOE (SOUTH AFRICA) LIMITED (Representing Parry, Leon & Hayhoe Ltd. The South African steamship, shipping, forwarding & insurance agents, bonded warehousemen &c.; marine surveyors & adjustors; agents for brokers at Lloyds), 19 & 20 Northumberland avenue WC2- Telegrams, “Parlehay, London”; Phone, Whitehall 3387 & 3388.

I wasn’t sure where to find them within the Trade section but a look under Shipping revealed that “Agents-Shipping” was the most likely grouping and, yes, there they were, as well as under the Northumberland Avenue address in the street directory.

Repeating the process with a 1938 directory, I found from the Commercial listing that the company was now at 2 Conduit St. And again, they appeared under that address in the Street Index and also under the Agents-Shipping group in the trade directory.

Of course, “Leon” wasn’t the first name of a Parry, it was the surname of someone else in the company, as indicated by a message now found on one of the mailing lists.

But, if I had realised that at the time, I might not have remembered the name later so would not have spotting the matching references!

An afternoon's search

2006-09-22T11:27:00.000Z

Well, I was right – another two weeks before I posted an entry. But I can’t blame the mailing list transfer. Everything went smoothly with that and the Parry list has now migrated to the new mailing list software being used by Rootsweb.

No, it has just turned out to be a busy couple of weeks. Again, correspondance has taken up a fair amount of my time – fourteen Parry related emails received, leading to eleven replies being sent. A couple of the responses involved following families through all of the censuses, which can be quite time consuming but is also fascinating – seeing how fortunes change and a child in the workhouse can become someone famous, or how some families "die out", because branches all end with daughters, so there are no sons to carry on the family name.

Amongst the information sent to me recently was another obituary. As I’ve mentioned before, these can be very useful sources of information, as they often list the relatives attending the funeral. But one thing I noticed about this one was the separation of men and women – the men attending the funeral and the women being at the house. Was this a particular social practice of the time (or the area), I wonder?

There’s more to family history than just the story of a family – it prompts enquiry into many areas of social history that I, for one, might never have considered.

Other interesting reading I received were two articles relating to a Parry family from Machynlleth, where a researcher has traced the family, largely through property deeds and probate entries, back into the 1600s. At this time, the patronymic system was still in operation and the family is a good illustration of how the "Harry/Parry" name can re-occur through several generations, whilst not actually being their "surname".

It is an interesting thought that, for many Parry families, by the time the line has been traced back about six generations from someone alive in 1901, they might no longer have the surname. Unfortunately many of the surviving parish registers in Wales don’t start until the 1700s but, where they do begin earlier, or where the surname settled slightly later, there would seem to be great potential for researchers to be able to establish exactly when their family became Parrys.

If only there weren’t so many of them that it is often impossible to get back beyond 1800!

The Guild forum has again been a useful source of information. Amongst the sites posted have been some relating to modern references, such as UK company directors, or US "people look up" sites, such as the My Family people finder which found 26,466 Parrys! Clearly such sites produce a large number of results for the surname, sometimes with too many occurrences of even just one first name, to allow the data to be fully searched. Not that I’m in a position to do a great deal with such current data even if I could collect it all, since I still have the 20th century BMDs for UK to extract.

A recent addition to the Ancestry databases shows more promise, although again will tend to produce a large number of results. Their "British Phone Books 1880-1984 Release 1" contains 5120 Parry entries – somehow I think it will be a long time before I can do much with those but certainly the ones for the early 20th century will be useful.

Another "Guild" reference was a site for the town of Burton Latimer, in Northamptonshire. I wasn’t expecting much, since it’s not really a "Parry" area but I did find one family in the 1901 transcriptions. The household was headed by an unmarried Catherine M Parry, with "Head" crossed out and "sister" entered instead. With her were six children described as daughters and sons, but I guessed they were probably not her’s. In the course of trying to identify them in the earlier censuses, I found a couple of errors on Ancestry - someone transcribed as aged 2 when they should be 23, and as Parry when they were actually a married daughter and should have been Webb. Then there was another person transcribed as a son called Catherine Parry but who was actually a servant called Catherine Griffith.

I was going to say, after all that, that I never did find the original family that I was looking for – but I did (eventually). The 1891 searches were proving unsuccessful so I tried earlier and found a possible entry for the Catherine Parry in 1881, in Llanasa, Flintshire, with parents, Alexander and Margaret, and siblings Joseph aged 18, and Emma aged 12. At 15, the Catherine was recorded as a pupil teacher, so she seemed a good candidate for someone who is later a described as Governess.

Next I found the oldest children, in the 1891 census, with Frances as Francis, Margaret as Margaretc and the birthplace of Canonbury as Cannonbury. Obvious really. Good job Mary F was just Mary F!

This time the children were with their mother Louisa Flora Parry, visiting their grandmother, Emma M Draper. A quick look on Ancestry’s listing from FreeBMD, and there’s Louisa Flora Draper getting married in Kensington, June qtr of 1886 to a John Parry. Quick look forward to 1901, Louisa Flora (transcribed as "Floy") Parry is with her husband at the Vicarage in Bromley. John, her husband, is a Church of England clergyman. Staying with them is his brother Joshua Powell Parry, an undergraduate from Jesus College Cambridge. No children there – they’re obviously all with their aunt, Catherine, in Burton Latimer.

Back to 1891, where’s John? No sign of him at the moment so let’s look for Joshua. He also seems to have absented himself, so I’ll try the 1881. There’s Joshua P Parry, aged 9, staying with his brother William 22, another brother Edward G, also 22, and a sister Josephine aged 20. They’re in Liverpool and it looks as if John is also nearby - a 24 year old lodger, Clerk in Holy orders, Curate of St Chrysostom, with a B.A from Cambridge.

Looking further back, in 1871, there’s Alexander Parry again, with his wife, Margaret, this time with children John 14, William and Edward G., both 12 and described as twins, Josephine 10, Joseph 8, Catherine M 5, and Emma 2. Joshua would not yet have been born.

So I was right with my identification of Catherine in 1881.

Nice when things match up like that. And of course, that isn’t the end of the story. With a name such as Alexander, which is not a common Parry first name, and his birth place in both 1871 and 1881 consistently being Ysceifiog, it isn’t that difficult to find the family in the 1861 census, with the four oldest children, and then to find him in both the 1851 and 1841 censuses. In those, he was living with his mother, another Margaret, and his brothers, William, Thomas, Edward, and Joseph. The boys all seem to be in the building trade so Alexander must have changed direction, becoming (according to the census entries) a farmer and then later, a brewer, and earned sufficient to give his children the opportunity to gain an education and, for three of them, the chance to go to Cambridge University.

Those three sons, John, Joseph and Joshua, all appear in the Cambridge University Alumni. Interestingly, the entry for Joshua describes his father as the Rev. A. But I’ll leave that for a descendant to investigate!

So, from a site reference where I wasn’t expecting much, I have had a pleasant afternoon putting together a four generation family tree, matching up several disparate census entries in the process and been able to identify some of the Cambridge Alumni!

Not bad for an afternoon's search.

Update to the web pages – Probate index

2006-09-06T16:33:00.000Z

I seem to have been composing this entry for a week. One day I shall learn how to write the blog so that it actually achieves what I intended – to keep people informed of all the ”daily” happenings, which rarely get attention on the web site. But I’m sure there must be one of those “laws” in operation for genealogical research – you know the sort, about how the time taken to carry out a particular task is inversely related to the time you expect it to take, combined with some obscure relationship to the complexity of the task!

Anyway, a brief summary of the events since I last posted:
Received nine Parry related emails (including two from new contacts), and an updated tree by post. Sent twelve Parry related emails, plus posted some census information in response to the tree.

Several useful sites have been mentioned on the Guild forum. Some haven’t actually contained any Parry entries (but I’m sure they were useful for someone). However, I did find a Henry Parry listed as a Navy coastguard on the Isle of Wight in 1841 through Ann's page. He was 50 and was not born in the county whereas his wife, Jane aged 45, was. No sign of them in 1851 at the moment though.

Exploring the rather gruesome subject of judicial executions, I discovered that two Parry ladies had been the victims of murders. No Parrys listed amongst those executed for murder (on that site - found one later) but the subsequent postings of related web sites did show up the case of Albert Parry, a private in the West Yorks Regiment, who was amongst those soldiers executed by their own side during WW1. (One of indexes at http://www.lightage.demon.co.uk/index.htm)

Some of the sites have many individual pages, which can make them time-consuming to search. So sometimes one has to decide whether the likelihood of results justifies the time taken to search. One useful feature of Google is their “site search” facility, which does speed things up. It also helps in finding people or information which might not otherwise be found, e.g. a Dr Edward Parry who attended one of the victims on the Judicial Executions site, or the fact that another victim’s maiden name would have been Parry, since her father was named in the article.

Unfortunately the "site search" doesn’t seem to work on some sites, such as lycos/tripod. It also doesn’t help when a site exceeds its data limit (too many of the Guild accessing one of the execution sites, no doubt!)

Another site mentioned was the 1901 Canadian census, which currently contains 242 Parry entries. But I shall leave extracting those until I’m ready to tackle Canada more systematically.

Carole, a new subscriber on the Parry list, wrote a good message to the list to introduce herself. I thought I’d look up her family on the censuses but, in common with the way things seem to be going at the moment, the task extended. First, I came across a family who were mistranscribred as Parry when they should have been Evans (that lost me 6 Parrys). Then, after finding a possible partial family for Carole in the 1851 census, when I looked for them in the 1841, the only likely family all appear to have been mistranscribed as Perry (so that gains me 10 Parrys). I guess I gained overall, but notifying Ancestry of all the errors will take time.

(And whether it is the “right” family still remains to be seen, since some of the children differ from the list Carole gave.)

The problem when things all take longer than expected is that they end up only getting half done before something else crops up. [Mental note to self – still need to tell Ancestry about the Perrys. And still need to remove/add all the mistranscribed entries in my own census files].

And other things that crop up don’t always get dealt with. Anne posted a message on the Forum asking for views concerning the issue I'd commented on in my very first posting here – mentioning living people in blogs. Almost two weeks later and my views are still sitting in my drafts folder!

Found a “classic” on Family search – “2d. Gt. Gd. Father Perry”, born about 1727 in Stafford, England, who died about 1780. I wonder if that was really his name!

And, finally, I managed to upload some of my transcriptions of the National Probate Index entries onto my web site. They aren’t fully transcribed but the list has been “hanging around” for so long (one of those “half done” jobs) that I thought I ought to put them where they might help other researchers.

Not that anyone on the Parry list commented when I told them. With five of the 3877 entries relating to my own direct line (most of whom didn’t have much to leave anyone) I would have hoped that others might also find a few. Perhaps there just isn’t sufficient detail there yet for people to recognise their own family.

Or perhaps the list is keeping quiet prior to its migration onto the new Rootsweb mail system tomorrow. Will it be another two weeks before I post anything?

Filling in the details

2006-08-24T10:20:00.000Z

When I first started genealogy, I thought of it in terms of working back from generation to generation – that, almost circular, process of finding a birth record, in order to obtain the parents’ names, from which one could find their marriage, and from there, their births, in order to then repeat the activity for the earlier generation. Perhaps this was a consequence of my interest starting after listening to my Dad talking about his research over the previous 15 years, since his main concern was in tracing his direct lines back.

But it wasn’t long after I started researching Parrys, and was working through Clodock parish registers and censuses, that I realised some of the advantages of checking original records and of taking a wider view, collecting the details of others with the same name. The discovery that my widowed 3x great grandmother, Hannah Parry, had a widowed brother-in-law, Henry Jones, staying with her in the 1861 census enabled me to make the link between her late husband, Thomas Parry, and the brother-in-law’s late wife, a Phoebe Parry, who I had listed from the PRs, thus establishing the parentage of my 3x great grandfather.

Similarly, it was following up the burial of an “unrecognised” baby, Lewis Parry, who I’d found listed in the Llanwenarth registers with an address of Pwll-du, which enabled me to discover that my 2xgreat grandparents had a fourth child. Born just four days before his 26-year-old mother died of meningitis, he died of bronchitis eight months later, a brief life that barely left a mark (except, I imagine, in the hearts of his family).

In his case he didn’t even appear in a census. But the censuses often reveal such additional information about a family. I was recently contacted afresh by a researcher who had sent me his pedigree four years ago, which traced his line back into the 1700s. Since I now have access to all of the censuses I thought I’d quickly check the details of his family from that source – and almost immediately found three further children who were not on his pedigree. A new tree is now in the post to me – clearly the researcher has been able to add much more detail to his original tree, as the census information has become available.

There are always new things to learn about our ancestors’ lives and filling in such details can often help with the more important aspects of research. I have received the railway record that I had requested from Cheshire Record Office for an Alfred Parry who had worked at Brecon Station. As well as including the date he started working for the company, all the different posts he held, at which stations, the salary that he was being paid, and when he received a bonus, it also gave the man's date of birth and death. If he was actually my ancestor, I would immediately be able to find those vital records for him, which would help to further the research back another generation.

I once heard a talk about “burying your dead”. Although UK death certificates are not as informative as those from some other countries, it’s still important to investigate deaths, searching out other sources of information as well. There might be more relatives buried in the same grave, or a newspaper report of the burial might give important clues (when I first started research, on a Minett family, it was a newspaper’s listing of a son of Henry Minett as “Mr Sorel-Cameron”, which first alerted me to a name change). Another Parry researcher recently investigated the reference to a dying ancestor having just given birth, something which has led to the possible marriage of the lady’s sister - a useful piece of information given the wife’s maiden name was Jones. And, if I hadn’t already known about Lewis from investigating the parish registers, I would have discovered him when I checked the memorial inscriptions, where he is the only one of the children mentioned on the gravestone of my 2xgreat grandparents. As it was, already knowing about him from the parish register information made it easier for me to recognise the memorial inscription as “mine”.

Of course, sometimes it is hard to find these additional details. When I finally find the death of my 3xgreat grandmother, I shall be very glad to “bury” her!

Holidays, Places and Names

2006-08-23T22:18:00.000Z

Well, my holiday has come and gone, so now I am getting back into the study. Fortunately not too much happened while I was away – only seven new contacts to reply to (okay, two of them are people I have been in touch with before, but it was some years ago and they either don’t remember or didn’t recognise my contact details). Also received some information and useful links from a couple of my other contacts.

Some time ago, one of my family was looking for accommodation and found the chosen place was situated on “Parry’s Lane”. That set me thinking about places being named after Parrys, so I did a quick search on the Streetmap site and found that they list 51 assorted Avenues, Closes, Drives, Roads and Streets, involving the Parry name, as well as two actual places (a Castle and a Barn). For some reason, the Multimap site only finds fifteen results and some of those are duplications, where they have two versions of what appears to be the same address. Further investigation and comparisons obviously required!

But where else do Parry places occur?

One of the links sent to me was for the Geoscience Australia site, which indicates there are 36 places in Australia referring to Parry (although four of them are actually for Parryvale/Parryville so perhaps don’t count!). The site lists different types of features so again, further investigation is necessary to check on entries which may turn out to relate to the same place.

Another Australian site I’ve found is the Street Directory. You have to search by State but I found 82 street references, with some in every state except the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory.

So now I am on the hunt – looking for places to do with the Parry surname.

Another question soon follows though - who are they all named after?

I know from one of my Australian contacts that several of the places there are named after Sir William Edward Parry, the arctic explorer, and I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few others also commemorate him. But some, such as the streets in Bristol, are more likely to be named after his father, Dr Caleb Hillier Parry, Physician to Bath General Hospital, whose library forms the “Parry Collection” in Bristol University’s Medical Library.

So, once I have set up some web pages to collect and list all of these places, perhaps there should be an ongoing competition amongst the more “famous” Parrys – to see which of them has the most places named after them.

Another week's news

2006-07-29T13:21:00.000Z

Another week passed without posting – was it a quiet week for the study?

Actually, no. I received 18 Parry related e-mails, sent 13 such e-mails (a couple were combined responses since several of those received were from the same person, passing on useful snippets)(And I still have three to reply to).

On Tuesday I noticed Ancestry had added the ability to search by parents or spouse name to the 1871 England census. By the end of the day it was on most of the UK census databases, as well as showing in the search results. This will certainly make identifying people from the index much easier, but is it enough to justify re-extracting? No, although sooner or later I am going to want to code such relationships into my files. (And, having continued to add the full details to the Herefordshire censuses yesterday, and been reminded of what a slow process it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ancestry have the full details transcribed before I do!)

I e-mailed Cheshire Record Office on Thursday to ask about a marriage bond. They do have the relevant bond but also have a minimum charge for copying, so I had a look at what else they hold, in case it was worth obtaining copies of other documents at the same time. That led to me extracting the Parrys from:
Railway staff records (243 Parrys)
Overleigh Cemetery (304 Parrys)
Freemen of Chester (82 Parrys)

A website for "Unassisted passengers to Victoria, Australia" was also posted on the Guild forum. I think I have looked at this before, but did not appear to have extracted the details so I did that. Currently there are 500 Parry entries but, according to other Guild members, they found more results this time than when they previously visited the site, so it is probably a site to return to.

In dealing with one of the e-mail queries, I came across the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which contains 40 references to Parrys, although only nine are actual biographies. The rest are references to Parrys mentioned in other people’s biographies. Still useful though.

Another query received was an interesting one relating to a Parry-Parry marriage in 1903 – which demonstrated how useful the Ancestry indexes are these days, since I was able to trace one of the branches all the way back to 1841. Of course, having names such as Violet Faith Parry and Victor Townley Parry did make it easier. Having the brother of the father staying with the family in 1871 also helped – although his name was just William, the fact that he was a partially sighted engine driver and retained both the disability and his occupation throughout the two earlier censuses made identifying the father, a plain John, much easier.

Oh, and I still haven’t mentioned what I found in 1837online! It was a Kelly’s Handbook for 1901. One of the entries in it related to Thomas Croose Parry, who is from a “known” family in Herefordshire. The entry mentioned that his wife was the daughter of Charles Lane from Liverpool. Since all we had previously known about her was that she was born in Brazil, this reference has now enabled me to identify her, with her family, in the 1861 and 1871 censuses, as well as prompting me to look for their marriage, which I found on FreeBMD.

I guess the reason this was so significant (apart from helping a fellow researcher) was that it came just after the suggestion that the two Parry families, from Redmarley and from Eastnor, might be connected. Both of these families have connections with South America - one with Argentina, the other with Brazil.

So it just set me thinking, not so much about Parrys emigrating, but about Parry involvement elsewhere in the world, perhaps through occupation or trade, which might not leave such clear evidence as them actually appearing in the other countries. A whole new area to think about!

Random jottings

2006-07-21T11:53:00.000Z

When I first started collecting Parry details, I intended to set a “cut off date” of 1901, partly because of the “100 years rule” operated by some genealogical organisations and partly because of the difficulty, at that time, of collecting the more recent information. But such an attitude goes against the concept of a one-name study – which is to collect everything on the name, from any time or place. Fortunately, the growth of the internet and changes in policies have now made it easier to gather these details, with the availability of the civil registration indexes through organisations such as 1837online and Ancestry, of nationwide telephone directories and electoral rolls through companies like 192.com, and other items such as trade directories being made available on CD-ROM through companies such as Archive CD Books. Even films obtained through the family history centres will sometimes contain parish registers right up to the 1970s or 1980s.

I read a comment recently that, “the history of the Victorian age will never be written......we know too much about it”. Perhaps the same could be said about some one-name studies – a definitive history of all the people with the name will never be written. But that shouldn’t stop us studying it.

At the family history Centre on Wednesday I decided to look at some of the USA and Canadian records – there were 1,153 entries for Parrys in the WW1 Draft Registration Cards 1917-1918, but only 185 in the US WW2 Draft Registration Cards 1942, along with 352 in the US WW2 Army Enlistment Records 1938-1946. Are they non-comparable databases or did less people sign up?

There’s over 5,000 immigration records listed – they should help track down some of the Parrys who just “disappear” from the UK. I wonder if my 3xgreat grandmother was amongst them? Somehow, I doubt it – at 87 in the 1891 census, I wouldn’t have thought she was going far. But I certainly haven’t managed bury her.

Having written much of the above earlier in the week, it is strange that the requirements of one-name studies are yet again being discussed on the Guild forum. Sometimes I wonder whether people read the same registration form that I did!

Mind you, I had a chuckle after one comment by Chris – he is researching the name Gray/Grey, which is more common than Parry. He said he’d registered in order to obtain publicity (in the hope of finding helpers). For me, publicity was exactly why I did not register the name when I first joined the Guild. Too much publicity = too many queries!

But one of the benefits of the Guild now is the profile (see my Parry profile) and that at least gives me the opportunity to explain that I haven’t collected everything yet, especially in areas such as North Wales where the name is very common. It doesn’t stop me getting queries though.

I’ve received messages from two new contacts in as many days. One does relate to North Wales and I’ll need to ask for more information – the family I can find in the earlier censuses, which appears to match to the details sent, does not then seem to lead to the family which matches the information in the latest censuses. Have I picked up the wrong census entries or has the researcher made the wrong connection?

The second contact has traced her family back to Gloucestershire through Monmouthshire but, having seen on my website how many Parry entries there are in that area, wondered whether she had the wrong family. In this case, I don't think so, but it is a possibility which us Parry researchers always have to keep in mind, because it is easy to get things wrong.

And it isn’t helped by errors in the resources. While looking for this second family on Ancestry I found:
- an incorrect page link where the name index leads to page 12 instead of page 9 (and with three Parry families on that page, I’m glad I eventually found it!)
- a missing page (following an entry where Henry Parry, a 25 year-old railway clerk from Brecon, was recorded as head of a household but was the last name on the page so I was missing his wife, Kuhumah, aged 25, and daughter, Rosanna, aged eight months, who appeared on the next sheet. Thanks to 1837online for getting it right.)
- and, possibly as a result of the previous error, the Lewis family at the start of the page containing Henry Parry are all incorrectly listed in the index as Parry.

I’ve only found a few name errors on Ancestry in the past - to find three major problems in one day must be a record!

Spotted a snippet in my local paper on Wednesday – the Joneses want to break the world record for the biggest get-together of people with the same name. It appears that the record is currently held by the Norbergs, after 583 of them gathered in Sweden.

I wonder if there’ll ever be a Parry gathering?

Other events in the past few days - messages from two existing contacts passing on further information that they had found. I also bought two Parry items - a pair of upholsterer’s pliers produced by Parry & Son of 329 Old Street (I think that’s in London - still need to investigate the company), and a book by J. H. Parry, entitled “The Discovery of the Sea, an illustrated history of men, ships and the sea in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”. Nice when several interests coincide!

And I’ve realised that I still haven’t posted what I discovered with my additional credits on 1837online. Oh well, maybe next time!

Web Site contrasts

2006-07-17T21:59:00.000Z

Some more useful sources from the Guild over the last few days. One was a site listing sources relating to New Zealand (http://nzgenealogy.rootschat.net/Nzlinks.html). Well worth exploring for anyone with NZ ancestors, since there is such a variety of information there. However, because there are so many individual listings, it is the sort of site which is very time consuming to search through. Using Google’s site search can help but only where the pages are on the same site.

So, with Parry not being a frequently occurring name in NZ, this is one to return to once I have some specific people to track down. Otherwise the time it takes to search isn’t worth the return gained in terms of general names.

In contrast to that, was an index of burials in Manchester City Council cemeteries (http://www.burialrecords.manchester.gov.uk/) - 523 Parry entries, all available as a result of one search. There’s only the basic details given, (name, year, and cemetery) with more information available for a (rather prohibitive) fee but, in many cases, I imagine the basic information will be sufficient to identify the person in the Civil Registration indexes.

Now all I need is a listing from the civil registration indexes to match them to!

That's another task still to be tackled.

The "missing" Will

2006-07-13T21:34:00.000Z

I received the “missing” Will yesterday, that of James Parry of Walterstone Common, who died in 1883. No surprises in it – everything to his wife, Phebe, and their two daughters, Mary and Jane. Nothing about the wider network of relatives, such as nieces, nephews, etc. I guess it was hoping for too much, that he might also mention other Parrys in the same area, who may or may not be more distantly related.

But at least his family are fairly easy to identify in the censuses, since they tended to remain in the same parish. Work on filling in the census details for Herefordshire Parrys, and matching them up from one census to the next is continuing on an (almost) daily basis at the moment.

No promises as to when they'll appear on the web site though!

Time contrasts

2006-07-10T19:20:00.000Z

I had some spare time in town today so went browsing in the Local Studies section of the library.

Found the details for 12 Parrys who were on the Courtaulds "Register of Hands", between 1911-1919, as well as 5 Parry burials in a local cemetery, another one in a parish church, and then eight marriage entries in that same church where Parrys appeared either as a partner or as witnesses.

Once home, briefly checked out two sites mentioned on the Guild forum (Duncan & Mandy Ball's Wiltshire site and Brooklyn Genealogy). The first is one I recognise – a replacement for an earlier site, which contains information on Parrys from Easton Grey and Malmesbury. The Easton Grey Parrys will eventually appear on a page of my own site, since I have further details on them.

Doing a Google site search on the Brooklyn site indicates there are about 44 pages with Parrys in – no time to extract them at the moment, since I have 4 or 5 Parry related emails to catch up with from the weekend. So, for now, I shall just add it to my "to be followed up later" list.

Start the day with spare time, finish it without enough time!

Occupations

2006-07-08T21:32:00.000Z

I posted a message on the mailing list yesterday, asking for help with a family in Liverpool for an Australian researcher. Today, one of the Liverpool researchers very kindly looked up the details for me.

It appears that John Parry, described as a "cabinet maker" by his son on the son’s marriage in Australia in 1862, was described as a "portrait painter" when he himself married in 1828. So, is it the wrong marriage, or did he change his occupation?

Or were some occupations, which we might nowadays think to be totally unrelated, more closely linked in the past?

Browsing on the web, I found this site about a Welsh Mormon Parry. From his journal, it appears that three of that family, two masons and a "painter, plumber, and glazer" were also portrait painters.

As my Dad used to say, "beware of viewing the past through twentieth century eyes".

Probate records

2006-07-06T15:53:00.000Z

I received copies of the paperwork for eight probate entries today (it should have been nine but the HMCS haven’t found one of them yet).

The family information available in such documents can vary – for example there’s the eight page Will of Joseph Henry Parry, an unmarried gentleman of Harewood Park, Herefordshire, which names his cousin and several nieces, or the four page Will with two codicils of Philip Parry, which names his five children, a son-in-law, and four grandchildren, two of whom are stated to be by his daughter’s former husband. Very useful.

In contrast to those, three of today’s were just grants of Letters of administration, which contain a standard wording to the effect that such letters have been granted to a particular person and that some other person or people are the sureties.

These often result in more questions than answers.

And, of course, it is two of this latter group which relate to my own family - the administrations of the estates of Mary Parry, my 4xgreat grandmother, who died in 1874, and of Thomas Parry, my 3xgreat grandfather, who died in 1854.

So now I am wondering – was the William Parry of Clodock, one of the sureties for Mary’s administration, her son? And, if so, why was it his sister, Elizabeth Griffiths wife of John Griffiths, of Penyworlod, Clodock, who received the Grant and dealt with the estate? Was the Henry Jones of the Cwm Farm, Clodock, one of the sureties for Thomas’ administration, his brother in law? Were the other two sureties, John Price of Cwmyoy Lower, for Mary’s and Richard Watkins of the Veddw, Clodock, for Thomas', relatives or just friends?

And why did Hannah Parry, Thomas’ widow, only obtain the letters of administration in 1876 – more than twenty years after Thomas had died? It implies there was something to administer, perhaps something which passed to Thomas as a result of his mother’s estate being distributed.

I wonder if I will ever find out what.

July 1916

2006-07-03T20:22:00.000Z

(Learnt one thing yesterday – you can’t play around with the template, and still make postings without the template changes showing!)

Isn’t it nice when people are helpful – I’ve received three emails today from other researchers, passing on websites to look at.

That’s also one of the advantages of being in the Guild - other members will often bring to your attention sources which you might not have come across through your own research. Recently we were informed about the US Veterans Affairs Gravesite Locator, which I found contains 233 Parry entries. From that site I also learnt of the American Battle Monuments Commission, on which are the details for 11 other American Parrys who are commemorated elsewhere (in Europe or in Asia).

Which reminded me that I still needed to extract the names of the Parrys who appear on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site. There are 820 of them. I watched a program about the Somme yesterday, and about the battle for Thiepval in particular. Now I know that seven Parrys died there that first day of July 1916, two more on the 3rd, – by the end of the month, the total was at seventeen and, by the end of that year, at thirty five. The Thiepval Memorial has the highest number of Parrys listed on it, out of all the memorials on the CWGC site.

Sobering thoughts, and not what I had originally intended to write about today.

Time flies when…

2006-07-02T22:16:00.000Z

….. I’m working on a couple of queries. I can hardly believe it’s over two weeks since I commented on writing about queries before actually answering them.

I did finally manage to reply to those two enquiries – in the process producing about ten pedigrees of families who could be followed through all the censuses, plus many other groupings that can be identified in one or two censuses but who don’t yet appear to connect to the rest. And all that from just one parish in North Wales!

Over the same period I have sent 24 Parry related emails, made 5 Parry Board postings, and (hopefully) helped three more new contacts, as well as received a couple of gedcoms, a printed tree and some details of Parry related places. Ancestry were celebrating their completion of the US census records, which set me off on a slight sidetrack, extracting the totals of Parry families in each of the states over the 140 years. That should make an interesting page for the web site eventually.

And the offer of some extra credits tempted me to fit in some research on 1837online – more of that in another posting!

Happy Days!

2006-06-16T09:02:00.000Z

Some days something happens which makes the whole day brighter (even when it was going well to start with).

Just received an email from a new contact – who turns out to be a descendant of one of the “famous” Parry families whose pedigrees I have on my web site. There is so much I hope we can discuss!

Shapes & Sizes

2006-06-13T09:50:00.000Z

One-Name Studies come in many different shapes and sizes: shapes, because of the variety of ways in which researchers choose to carry out what is effectively the same task; sizes, well, that one's more obvious - because of the different frequencies of the surnames.

Parry is a fairly frequently occurring surname in the UK (I must stop calling it "common"!). It is not up in the XXL category - only Smith & Jones make that. Nor does it join the XL group, the likes of Hill, Morgan, Fisher, and Gray. But, with almost 23,000 of them in the 1881 census, it is near the top of the L category.

Not for me that process of checking every quarter in the Civil Registration indexes, in the hope of a glimpse of just one entry - mine tumble out, filling rows and rows in spreadsheets.

With more people carrying the name, it follows that there are more people interested in researching it (although probably not proportionately - I imagine a rarer name has more "interest" factor). Yesterday I received one email from a new contact, and three from "pre-existing" contacts (although two of those were "new" just weeks ago). Getting the balance right with regard to communication (speed, frequency, level of detail provided, additional research undertaken as a result etc) is a debated subject amongst One-namers.

And having a blog raises other questions - what am I doing writing this when I haven't yet replied to the people I am writing about!

Hi

2006-06-10T21:15:00.000Z

First post [Scary! What will happen when I click on that "publish" button?], so it’s a brief introduction to the purpose of this blog. You can check out the links at the side to find out about the Study itself. There is a lot more information to be made available on the main web site. However, it takes time to put together those details and, in the meantime, there are all sorts of other "happenings" – contacts being made, new resources found, links discovered, and general ongoing development, etc.

So this blog is intended to provide a record of those things. Hopefully, it will also give a flavour of what is involved in carrying out a One-Name Study.

Some One-Namers have described their blogs as an "experiment". And, indeed, there does seem to be something almost contradictory about using a blog (by its nature, a "real time", "now" medium) to write about a genealogical study (where most of the subjects are dead). Especially since one of the major caveats concerning genealogical writing is not to publish anything concerning the living, without their permission. As far as possible, genealogy also concerns facts, pieces of information for which some evidence can be found, rather than opinions, the mainstay of many blogs.

So, yes, this is a bit of an experiment. It will be interesting to see how it develops.