Armchair Genealogy - Family Tree & History

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The genealogy guide podcast, demystifying technology and exploring family tree research, please remember to subscribe and share the podcast with family and friends.

Genealogy Guy 0:18
Now, anyone that starts to get into genealogy quickly realises the strong connection it has with history. So it makes sense to talk to someone who is not only a historian, but someone who has a passion for genealogy. In this episode, I'm speaking with Dr Nicholas Dixon, a professional genealogist in the UK with many years of relevant research experience and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, this gives him a unique perspective for approaching problems in British genealogy through meticulous documentary research. He has also given many talks about genealogy and written articles and other publications about the related subjects. He studied at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and was awarded a PhD for a thesis concerning the history of the Church of England during the early 19th century. He conducts genealogical and house history research projects for clients, as well as giving talks about aspects of such research. So Nicholas, welcome along to the show.

Dr Nicholas Dixon 1:20
Thank you very much. Mell, it's a pleasure to be here.

Genealogy Guy 1:23
There's so many questions I could start up with, but let's just start with the obvious one. How did you get involved in history and genealogy?

Dr Nicholas Dixon 1:30
It's certainly always been a passion for me. Going back to my childhood, I was researching my family tree from when I was a child, there'd been members of my family who had already been researching it for decades. Before that, I'm still in very much in contact with them and sharing information. There's a relative of mine who, back in the 1960s would go around to different parts of the country and look at the parish registers when they were still in situ in the vestry. So I heard about all of those things from a very early age, and it really inspired me to start doing my own research into my family history. And at the same time, I was becoming really interested in history itself as a subject, and that was very much what I wanted to study at university. But of course, the irony was that even though in some ways the genealogy was at the root of my interest in history, I had to put it to one side while I was actually studying it at university. Because obviously, when you're doing a full time history course as a student, as I was for my first degree, I was at Oxford, when you do that, then it doesn't leave much time for your own hobbies, even if they are very related to history. So I did a lot of research into my family tree, but then it really went to one side, to a large degree, while I was while I was studying, because I did a first degree in history at Oxford, and then I did a master's and a PhD at Cambridge after that in history, the focus of my research was on the Church of England, to a large extent, also the the British monarchy and its relationship with the church. And obviously, the Church of England, in many ways, is very central to to English genealogy, because genealogists use its records so much. Obviously, genealogy and history tend to be considered quite separately, at least in a academic environment, in a university environment. So as I say it, it was very much to one side. And then, having finished my PhD, I found that I had a bit more time on my hands to go back and revisit a lot of the research that I'd done about particular branches of my family a long time before, and I found that there were so many more resources available than when I started some 10 or 15 years before, things that were on websites like ancestry and and find my past were things that I would never have imagined that I could access on the internet before. But I also had the experience of researching a lot in archives from my PhD and from my academic research. So I when I'd done my PhD about the history of the Church of England in the early 19th century, I had traveled to about 30 different archives across England, so I'd used many of the county archives to do my research, also the national libraries and archives in London, and also various University and and cathedral libraries. So I had now this experience of being able to find things in archives and to do that kind of deep historical research. So I thought, well, what if I were to apply some of the same things to my genealogy? Because obviously, at the time that I started it, I didn't have that experience and knowledge of archives. So really interested in one particular branch of my family tree, which goes back to to Norfolk, partially to the town of Kings Lynn, where one of my ancestors was a sea captain in the 18th century, but also various other villages in particularly in west Norfolk, and so I with with the spare time that I had after around the time that I was finishing my PhD, I started to revisit all of that, as I say, to to go to archives in Norfolk, and I made some really fascinating discoveries. I started writing a book about it, which I've been working on for several years on and off. So that brought me back into genealogy, but at that point, I never thought that I'd pursue it professionally. I was very much intending to pursue an academic career in in history, having done a PhD, but for various reasons, I decided not not to pursue an academic career in the university. The pandemic came in in 2020, and that gave me a lot more time to not only pursue genealogy, but also to think about my future direction professionally. And I started to put two and two together and realise that that genealogy was and is starting to have a real commercial viability and potential. And many of the skills that I'd learned as a historian, but also from my own experience of searching my family tree, were things that could be of value to to others, could be something that I might be able to do professionally, even if it wasn't the most conventional career path. So I started doing the family trees of people who are known to me personally, and then I branched out to really offering it as a business. And that's that's what I've been doing for the last few years, giving a lot of talks as well about genealogy and history.

Genealogy Guy 6:40
Picking up on some of those things you like giving talks you mentioned, and I see that you also did Rootstech 24

Dr Nicholas Dixon 6:47
I did. It was the first time that I'd given a talk at Rootstech. Yes, I gave two webinars. One was about ancestors in London in the 18th and 19th centuries. I should mention that I'm from London. A lot of my ancestors lived in London. So there are a lot of insights that I've gained from researching my London ancestors, which I'm able to share with other people. And the other subject was actually about tracing Anglican ancestors, so ancestors who are members of the Church of England. Obviously, this was slightly related in a way to my PhD research, because I'd spent all of that time looking at Anglican records and particularly studying the clergy, but I had never really considered it from a genealogical angle. So that's what I tried to do in that talk. Both of the webinars had a great response. I had a lot of comments and questions coming out of them. The great thing about Rootstech is that it's free, and really anyone, even though they have the in person event in Salt Lake, Salt Lake City, anyone around the world can can listen to those talks. So I was really pleased to be part of that.

Genealogy Guy 7:59
What interests me is your angle is you came in sort of with a bit of interest in genealogy, but was specializing in history. And what genealogists tend to do is they're passionate about genealogy, and then suddenly realise they know nothing about all the history of the periods they're looking at. So you've got a unique take on bringing history to the genealogy in a academic point of view.

Dr Nicholas Dixon 8:23
I think that's right. It is an unusual point of view. They're not as far as I'm aware that they're not many people like me who have done PhDs in history and then go into genealogy. It's just not the way that the whole academic system is set up. The expectation is that you'll stay within your discipline. And also there's an expectation that history is non commercial and that it's really for scholarly purposes primarily. So then going and offering it to clients is not something that really trained to do as academic historians. So that was a bit of a shift that that I had to make in terms of my thinking, although I still hold myself to those standards of scholarship, which which I learned as an academic historian, as I say, in some ways, what thinking back to when I was first interested in genealogy at a very young age. For me, at that time, there wasn't so much of a distinction between genealogy and history, because my passion for history and genealogy, I think those two things really went hand in hand for me, but also that historians can learn a lot from from genealogists. I don't think they necessarily always realise that.

Genealogy Guy 9:34
Absolutely everybody knows that genealogist. You initially just want the names and the dates, and then you suddenly start to realise you want to know about the life of that person, what what was it like? What was going on around them at that time? And that's what makes it magical, and that's what the burning passion becomes, is I want to know about the life, not just the dates,

Dr Nicholas Dixon 9:55
Absolutely, but finding them out about people's lives can be quite difficult. Because obviously not everyone's lives were the same, even if they lived in the same place and had the same occupation. So I think sometimes genealogists can quite understandably make assumptions about their ancestors because they lived in a particular time or place, and they or they might think of some of the Fictional portrayals of those time and places, such as those by Charles Dickens, which I think have such an impact on the way that the people think about their ancestors, particularly in England and particularly in urban environments. That's where the historical research can be really helpful, because if you can find a source that tells you about a particular time and place with great detail and going into very specific details about where, where these people lived, you can really start to To understand their lives. But those sources are not necessarily very easy to find. There are a lot of popular history works out there which will give you a lot of generalisations about what life was like, for instance, in the Victorian period or in the or in the 18th century. But what I found when I researched my family tree, at least, is that families don't really often fit into these neat categories where the trajectory of their lives was basically formed by their environment. So I can be a bit skeptical about some of those generalisations. I have to admit. And so when I'm researching my ancestors, I always want to get at the most reliable source for what life was like in the particular place that they were living. And often those things are buried in rather obscure local history works, many which you might not find on the internet or are not very easy to find on the internet. So I think that's where historical perspective can be. Can be really helpful. When looking at one's ancestors.

Genealogy Guy 12:03
It's something that becomes a popular thing that gets mentioned a lot, a lot when I interview people, is using things like newspapers and finding newspaper stories, because you're more likely to pick up a background of what happened to them, whether they got arrested or whether they were selling a property or getting married was something that gives you an indication of the lifestyle and the people they were mixed with.

Dr Nicholas Dixon 12:27
I think newspapers have revolutionised the study of genealogy, and I think that there must be having the same effect on history, even if we're in the early stages of that, because by the time that you have digitised and searchable newspapers for particular localities over 200 years, so many things will come to light that genealogists and historians simply wouldn't have known about in the past, and in the past they would have had to go to, if they were in London, to the British Library's Newspaper Archive, which was at Colindale, and look at a lot of microfilms of particular newspapers for particular years, and just hope that the thing that they were searching for was there and and visible without any indexing or transcriptions at all. But, but now that you can search those things on the internet, that there's so many things that might have been mysterious to us in the past, or which we might have speculated about, which we can actually be a lot more sure about, and we can really start to piece together all kinds of elements of people's lives. For example, the ancestor who I mentioned, who was a sea captain in King's Lynn in the 18th century, as someone who appears a lot in different local newspapers, because in the 18th century, they had shipping lists, and these gave the name of the captain of the ship and of the cargo that they were transporting a lot of the time. So from that, I've been able to trace the voyages of this particular ancestor over a period of 30 years, alongside some other sources. And obviously that can take a really long time, but it's very worthwhile, because at that point you can actually start to pinpoint where your ancestor was a particular moment in time, the places that were visiting. And I think that that does start to bring things to life a little.

Genealogy Guy 14:21
Let's take a short break from historian and genealogist Dr Nicholas Dixon, giving me the chance to speak to the listeners and say, if you're enjoying the podcast, please remember to subscribe whatever platform you're listening on, so you'll be notified every time there is a new episode. And could I also ask you share the link to Armchair Genealogy via email or your own social media accounts, and if you have any suggestions of people I should interview for future episodes, please drop me an email at info@armchairgenealogy.com and now back to our conversation with historian. And genealogist, Dr Nicholas Dixon, I know that another one of your interests is house history, which seems to be the growth there's there's a lot more people now interested where they live. And obviously, if you live in England, there's a lot of history in the villages and the towns and the houses that were built over the centuries. Does that differ to normal people genealogy.

Dr Nicholas Dixon 15:23
House history is very strongly related to genealogy, but it has a number of characteristics which I think make it rather different. The first thing is that it's very difficult, if not impossible, to do house history online to any great extent, the sources that you need to trace the history of a house have often not yet been digitised, because you will hopefully have the deeds of the property, either the person who owns it still has them, or they've been deposited in an archive, and those can be the most vital sources for tracing the ownership and indeed the the inhabitants of the house over many years or generations, although you might find people in directories which which have been digitised to a certain degree, and you'll find the people who lived in the house in the in the standard genealogical sources like censuses. In my experience, it's very difficult to make a lot of headway with House history without actually going to the local archive, particularly the county archive, and some cases, the National Archives as well, because they have a lot of legal records, which, if the house was the subject of some kind of legal case will be very useful to to the house historian. I can't necessarily see house history becoming such a popular hobby as as genealogy, because it requires that kind of specialist and rather time consuming research. But nevertheless, it's a fascinating area, and as you say, it's one that people are becoming a lot more interested in, because traditionally, house histories have been written more by people in the of architecture conservation world, and those people are very expert when it comes to building materials and different styles of architecture and all of that. But they don't haven't necessarily looked so much at the kind of historical and genealogical records that that I'm more used to. So when I've been tracing the history of the house, I've been trying to combine both things, but obviously my perspective is much more historical and focused on the people who actually owned the house and and lived in it.

Genealogy Guy 17:43
I know you live very close to the National Archives in London, which I find. It's a fascinating building. I could spend hours in it, but there is so much there. Could you think of any tips, if someone was ever thinking of going for the day they went, Oh, I'm going to go to the archives. What could I look up? What sort of things I think I should start with?

Dr Nicholas Dixon 18:02
Certainly I would recommend doing some preparation in terms of looking at the catalog of the National Archives before you go, because, especially if you're making a visit from a long distance, and you and you really want to make it worthwhile, I think it makes sense to have searched the discovery catalog, which is available on the National Archives website. This contains an extraordinary amount of detail. If you search for someone's name or for a particular place, then you may well find what you're looking for even before you've visited the archive to a certain extent. So I think that if you, if you turn up on on the day, without having done that, and without having ordered documents in advance, then the visit could be a bit more disappointing, because you realise that you have to go back essentially after you've done that preparatory work. There are wonderful resources in the National Archives outside the reading rooms. Many people think of the National Archives as just the reading rooms where you look at the original documents, but because it's also an affiliate library of Family Search, there are a lot of genealogical and historical sources which are available on the computers at the National Archives, which are not available when people look at Family Search at home. So that's something that I think genealogists use it a lot where something is not on Ancestry or Find My Past, you may well find it in a Family Search, digitised microfilm a lot of the time, and as I say, those can only be be viewed on site at places like the National Archives. And it also has an excellent reference library all kinds of volumes, journals, things like that, the army list and the Navy list. If you're researching military history, which, again, you might not have easy access to at home or close to in your locality. So you can use the National Archives for a number of different kinds of research. It's not just about looking at particular documents, although that is obviously the heart of it, it's also about the online resources they have and the physical library resources that they have. And when you consider all of those things, then I think there can be very few people who are researching genealogy who won't find something useful or won't discover a new piece of information if they go there.

Genealogy Guy 20:41
I've spent a lot of time in the map section because, yes, such a collection of all the different counties and the different subsections of the counties, and they've got quite detailed maps showing you all the little tiny villages and and I never realised that there was so so much more detail in maps, because you just think of the national map or your your local borough, but they've got records of like small villages and all the little outline hamlets and things like that.

Dr Nicholas Dixon 21:07
Well the tithe maps which are held at the National Archives, of course, really helpful. You'll find copies of tithe maps as well in in County archives. If you if the National Archives is easier to go to then, then it's really good for those tithe maps, which are useful not only to house historians, if they're searching for a particular house, particularly a more rural house, where, if it had already been built in about 1840 there's a high likelihood that you'll find it there, and you'll find the who the owners and the occupants are. But it's also really useful for genealogy, because if you had an ancestor who was a farmer, even a tenant farmer, you can actually then hopefully see the land which they farmed and what type of fields they were farming, and what type of agriculture they were involved in, if you then tie them to a specific Farm, that could lead to all kinds of other records which are of use, such as property deeds for that farm or places where it's mentioned in in local history work. Obviously there are others besides the tithe maps, but I found that the the tithe maps can be really useful for all kinds of research. Obviously, they are digitised. I think on The Genealogist website (www.thegenealogist.co.uk/), many of the originals are held at the National Archives.

Genealogy Guy 22:25
Yes, I spoke with the people at a The Genealogist and what's good is they've now got a map section where they've digitised the tithes, so you can actually start looking up your family, and, as you say, find out who were their immediate neighbors, and maybe even, yes, where their wife came from, because it was the adjoining farm or the next village.

Dr Nicholas Dixon 22:46
I've certainly found ancestors listed there. There's more than is digitised, I think, because also you have the tithe files at the National Archives. And there was one particular case where I was researching a house that was inexplicably not on the tithe map, even though it was in a village where a tithe map had been compiled, and it was very difficult to work out why. This was because it seemed that none of the village was actually exempt from the tithes, which would be the obvious explanation that most people would would go to when I looked into the tithe file for this particular village in Surrey, it transpired that the rector that the incumbent of the village who received the tithes had actually quite generously chosen not to collect tithes from the laborers cottage gardens. This then meant that for some properties, particularly the smaller properties, were not on the tithe map. And of course, without that particular source available in the National Archives, that's something that I simply wouldn't have known, and would have would have just been guessing about for a long time afterwards.

Genealogy Guy 24:01
As always, the people I speak to, I always go. I could spend the next next few hours just chatting more and more if people want to find out more about what you do, both your research and your presentations and that, have you got social social networks that people can track you down and find and follow?

Dr Nicholas Dixon 24:19
Yes I have a website, Dr Nicholas Dixon.com, (drnicholasdixon.com) and I also have a Facebook page, and I have a an account on X (Twitter). So that's that's where you can reach me.

Genealogy Guy 24:33
You have a unique way of looking at history and genealogy, so it's just nice to get the other side of the coin and you bring a different skill set, and that's what makes all my interviews interesting, because everyone's got their own little specialty. That's that they know a lot about.

Dr Nicholas Dixon 24:51
Yes, there's so many different ways of of looking at genealogy. I think I know there are some people, of course, who focus a lot more on things like DNA where, although I've studied it to us to a certain degree, it's not so much a specialism for me. Obviously, the different localities in the different countries where where you've researched mean that you have different types of knowledge. And I think the wonderful thing about the the genealogy community, and about the about professional genealogists as well is, is that a lot of the time we're we're able to help each other out with with our different expertise. And I think that there's, there's something really great about the the collaboration that takes place among genealogists, and that's something that I've certainly benefited a lot from.

Genealogy Guy 25:41
People who are not into genealogy. When they start to get into suddenly find out there's all these people that are quite happy to give them tips and advice (yes) put on the right track,

Dr Nicholas Dixon 25:52
Yes, people volunteer for their local family history societies as well. I've spoken to a number of family history societies for particular counties, and the fact that people are not just there to do their own research, but also to help other people out and to share the knowledge and some of the findings that they've made is a really great thing, and long may it continue.

Genealogy Guy 25:52
I always encourage people to join local history groups, even if, if you're not living in the area that you want to find out about, because a local person will probably say, I know someone from that area. I'll put you in touch with them, because everyone, every one of them, wants to help other people, and that's what's good about those organisations.

Dr Nicholas Dixon 26:39
And the Society Of Genealogists (www.sog.org.uk), I think, is another one that I would recommend people looking at if they're into genealogy as well. Obviously, it's a bit different from the local family history societies. The subscription is a bit higher, it has a library in London, but they've done some really great things recently, the resources that they can offer and also the talks that they put on. So, yes, there's so many organisations out there in Britain and elsewhere now that can help people, and that's that's a really great thing.

Genealogy Guy 27:15
As you highlighted from your own experience, that the technology has moved on in leaps and bounds, and it's so much yes easier, but it doesn't mean the answer is always on the internet. So all I can thank you very much. Nicholas, for for your time, because, as always, I go away with my head full of like new great ways of experimenting and tracking down bits of information.

Dr Nicholas Dixon 27:39
You're very welcome.

Genealogy Guy 27:40
It's been a great pleasure to talk with you.

Jingle 27:42
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