A quicker way to search ?

[greyingrey]

I've got a couple, married in Ruddington, Notts, in 1825 & living there on the 1841 & 1851 census. The first child I can find born to them was born in Ruddington in 1832 (from the 1841 & 1851 census) Obviously, children born earlier may have already have left home.

Someone has trawled through the Ruddington births for me without success & Laura The Explorer here has very kindly looked through Castle Donnington, a nearby village where they had relatives, but could find nothing.

It MAY have been the case that they didn't have children who lived to be baptised before 1832, but it strikes me as unlikely. Either they weren't baptised, or we've missed them, or they lived elsewhere between 1825 & 1831....probably in a neighbouring village.

So I've got the surname & the parents' first names & I want to know if any children were born to them betweeen 1825 & 1831 in the Notts/Leics border area. If I try to search on Ancestry, I'll get all the entries from Land's End to the far north with different parents' names for every year.

Is there any way I can narrow the results of the search, please ?

[Sherbertrose]

I know this is an obvious question but have you tried igi? If you have the fathers first and second name and the mothers first name you can establish all children born to the combination within a specified time scale and counties.

Sandra

[Elaine ..Spain]

I think the first thing to do is establish whether Ancestry has a likely database for what you are trying to find, then locate the database and search that, rather than doing a blanket search over the whole site.

Go to the Ancestry Card Catalogue and enter one or two keywords to describe the sort of database you are looking for, e.g. Nottinghamshire parish
Using these keywords you get 10 database sets that you can search in.

I have to say that I don't think the parish record collections on Ancestry are particularly good, unless you are looking at London or Liverpool!

[Christine in Herts]

Might be worth keeping an eye on the new FamilySearch site, where you can browse images for some UK parish registers. They put up new material from time to time so, even tho' there's nothing there now for Notts, there could be in the future.

Chrisitne

[margaretmarch]

Have you tired asking the Notts Family History Society what they might have that you could look at?
Margaret

[JuneR]

I always do the parent search on IGI as Sandra described in her post (No2).

June

[greyingrey]

Oh, thanks....this is where I'm going to show my ignorance again....what is IGI ?

I fear you're right that Ancestry might not cover most of these parishes.

No offence meant to anyone here who may be connected with Notts FHS, but I've found (& other people have told me the same) them to be a bit of a washou) I dd contact them a few months ago & asked them that, if I joined &, if I paid on top of that, could any of their members do a lookup for me when they called in at the archives ? (ie I wouldn't ask them to do more than one at a time & I'd pay them extra each time). I've got a friend who belongs to another FHS & she says they look on it as a very useful source of extra funds for very little work. But all Notts advised me to do was to pay a professional researcher

[margaretmarch]

Oh dear! that doesn't sound very helpful. from Notts FHS.

The IGI is familysearch.org here's the link http://www.familysearch.org/eng/Sear...set_search.asp

Margaret

[greyingrey]

Thanks very much, Margaret

[Mary from Italy]

Any chance they could be non-conformists?

You'll find some East Midlands General Baptist records here, including Castle Donington:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~blanchec/casdonbirth.htm

and this pay site has a lot of Non-conformist records:

http://www.bmdregisters.co.uk/

Bear in mind that not all records are online, though; they may have been baptised in a parish that hasn't been transcribed yet.

[Sherbertrose]

If you want to offer up some names there might be a possibility that some one might find the baptisms that you are looking for.

Sandra