Searching for Brettles and Brettells

Searching for Brettles

How do you find out about your Brettle or Brettell ancestors?  There are many free and paid for internet-based resources for anyone searching for their Brettle, or any other, ancestor for that matter.  A simple web search may turn up many leads but after a while you may find it necessary and useful to look at some less obvious websites particularly those relating to the Black Country origins of the Brettles.  Listed below are some sites I have found especially useful, I hope that you find them similarly so, they are all free to use.

Family Search

Perhaps the most useful site is one called Family Search provided by  the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), more colloquially  known as the Mormons.  Because of their particular beliefs in joining with family members in the afterlife (see here) they dedicate a lot of effort to genealogy and have a very large database of information relevant to those researching family history which can be accessed here.  You have to create an account to use the information but it is important to note that you do not have to be a member of the church to access their records.  Their site is large and complex as it serves all types of search worldwide but it is certainly worth time studying and using all the features of the site as it is the most comprehensive free site available.

General UK Genealogy Sites

 Free UK Genealogy  provides free, online access to family history records.  Its team of volunteers create transcriptions of public records from governmental sources, parish churches, and other similar institutions.  As a charity it relies on volunteers and is funded through donations.  It works through three sub sites:

(Just click on the box to follow the link to the relevant subsite for Births Marriages and Deaths, Census returns, or parish registers) 

Free BMD covers births, marriages and death records derived from civic records.  The recording of births, marriages and deaths started in 1837 and Free BMD contains index information for the period 1837-1983.

Free CEN  is an online database of the 19th century UK census returns which provide the name, age, relationship to head of household, sex, occupation, parish and county of birth, medical disabilities and employment status of an individual.  The first full national census was taken in 1841 and 10 yearly thereafter, the earlier censuses may be thin on information and the 1841 version may seem odd in that adults were required to round their ages down to the nearest 5 years.  The 1911 census is particularly valuable in that the original census forms completed by the head of household are available rather than the abstract derived from them which was completed by the census enumerator.  The census information in Free CEN is incomplete but you can get more idea of its coverage here.  Note that the 1901 and 1911 censuses are not covered by Free CEN but may be available from one of the many "paid for" family history sites as is the exceptional 1939 census  (strictly speaking the 1939 register) which was carried out for WWII planning purposes.   Generally there is an embargo on publishing information until 100 years has passed to protect the privacy of the living therefore the 1921 census has only recently become available from Find My Past family history website for a fee.  You will also find that details of  entries in the 1939 register may be omitted depending on the age of the individual.

Free REG covers parish and nonconformist church registers of baptisms, marriages and burials. These non-civic registers go back as far as 1538 and are separate from the civil registrations which began in 1837 and therefore can take you further back in your ancestry than the civil BMD registers.  Again it is incomplete (although having 37 million records)

UKBMD is a site which provides information and many links to websites which have online transcriptions of UK births, marriages, deaths and censuses as well as a wide range of other indexes and transcriptions for most UK counties such as parish records, wills and monumental inscriptions. 

Dustydocs provides links to free sources of UK parish records.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission provides information on tracing Commonwealth war dead and their resting places.

The British Newspaper Archives can provide information if your ancestor appeared in the press; searching is free but you have to pay a fee to look at the details of an entry you have found in a past newspaper.

Family Trees: two valuable sources of information on Brettle families (and many other Black Country families) are Black Country Connections and Halesowen and Leicester Families.  

Information from a number of parish registers in the Halesowen and Cradley Heath areas can be found here.

There is information on the Nottinghamshire branch of of the Brettle family on the Thurgarton History website

When you have exhausted these you might want to wander around the very extensive Cyndi's List, a site which, to quote their words is:

• a categorized & cross-referenced index to genealogical resources on the Internet.

• a list of links that point to genealogical research sites online.

• a jumping-off point to use in your online research.

• a "card catalog" to the genealogical collection in the immense library that is the Internet.

• a genealogical research portal onto the Internet

You can find this site (the one you are currently looking at) listed there.

Family History Software

You may be reticent about making your family tree searches visible online before it is better developed and you have ironed out some of the more obvious mistakes which you make early on but it is certainly worthwhile using some family history software to record all of your findings; a great advance on bits of paper and hand drawn charts.  You can keep all your work private on your home computer until you wish to publicise it more widely on a website as a family tree (see above) using a format called GEDCOM.  If you want to try some family history software I can recommend the free version of Ancestry Quest (see here), it will do most of what you want and if you need all the bells and whistles of the complete program you can buy it online at a reasonable price.   

Directories

Trade directories can provide information on any ancestor who had a trade (sometimes the trade can be found from census entries).  A valuable source is Leicester University’s special collections online  which provides access to digitised trade directories listed by county for England and Wales from 1760 to 1910.

Wills and Probate

You can search for probate records and wills from 1858 to 1996 for England & Wales here.  There are similar systems for Northern Ireland here and Scotland here.

Local Black Country Information

Listed here are sites with more local sources of information for the part of the Black Country from where the Brettles originated.  These sources are relevant to both to tracing your ancestors and to the local history of the area.  The relevance of local history should be clear after looking at the page on “The Black Country”.

A useful source of links to information on the Black Country counties of Staffordshire and Worcestershire (as to all other England counties) can be found at Genuki.org.  Both Worcestershire and Staffordshire County Councils also have lists of their relevant collections.  The Black Country Society is a source of great deal of information on the history of the Black Country, the searchable index of its magazine can be especially valuable.  A more academic approach to the Black Country can be found at the Centre for West Midlands History which is based at the University of Birmingham.

Much more local information on the Cradley and Cradley Heath areas where Bredhill was situated can be found at Cradley Links  , an excellent site which is in its third version.  The web site now contains some new content as well as content from the earlier versions called "Original Links" and the "2007+ Links".

 Similarly information on the broader Rowley Regis area can be found at Rowley Village, Rowley Regis and the relevant Family Search Wiki page and a partial transcription of Brettle and its variants in Halesowen parish registers by Malcolm Platt- Grigg here

Finally when you have exhausted looking at all the web references above take a look at local links and Black Country Connections which have a much fuller list of websites relevant to the Black Country.​

Maps

Maps, particularly old maps, can be useful when trying to make sense of where ancestors originated from and how they subsequently moved.  Some useful sources of old maps online are old-maps which covers the UK and Old Maps Online which covers many parts of the world.  https://www.archiuk.com/ is a database of historical and old maps which again may prove useful.