Whitehouse Family History Centre

1st January 2024

 

A warm welcome to the premier website for Whitehouse family history and Whitehouse genealogy records.  Access to the records on this website is entirely free of charge.

 

CONDITIONS OF ACCESS TO THIS WEBSITE

It is almost inevitable that mistakes or omissions will be found in the materials made available.  Please report them to me.  I do not accept any liability for any act or omission that might result from the use of material on this website.  Despite my best efforts, I cannot guarantee that material downloaded from this website is virus-free and therefore disclaim any responsibility for transmission of any virus or other contaminant or any effect thereof.  You may access these materials, but in the knowledge of these disclaimers and subject to these conditions of access.  If you do not agree, do not proceed any further and do not use or download anything from this website.

 

Documents available here are amended from time to time. Updates can be distinguished from previous versions by the yymmdd date in the file name. Please do not pass on documents to others, but suggest that they come here to download the latest version. I ask this to prevent the circulation of out-of-date material that might contain errors or suffer from omissions that have since been noticed and corrected.

 

ENQUIRIES

In a change of policy, I will now accept enquiries from the general public and am seeking to re-register Whitehouse with the Guild of One-name Studies.  My time remains limited, as I am still trying to get my website in good condition for archiving.

 

CHANGES OF PRACTICE

Because many of my less recent correspondents are dead or are uncontactable, I am not attempting to e-mail updates of trees.  Some are on the website in the Tree Archive and can be downloaded.  The date of this version of the tree (in yymmdd format) can be seen from the file name.  This practice applies to all the correspondents associated with these trees, whether contactable or not.  Please use the correspondent key (link below) to find your Tree number from your reference number.  If you do not have any record of your correspondent reference number, e-mail me.  See below under "EXISTING REGISTERED CORRESPONDENTS" for how to do this if you cannot find my e-address.

 

Effective 17th March 2018, all names, e-mail and postal addresses of registered correspondents remain private and will not be communicated to others (not even to those of the same group, that is to say who share the same tree) without explicit permission by e-mail or letter to do so.  Telephone numbers have always been private and will continue to be so, unless, again, explicit permission is given.   It has been my practice before then to thank by name in the newsletter anyone who has helped me to improve the records.  That practice will continue so long as I have permission to do it, which I shall seek. 

 

TREES

I have drawn up 277 Whitehouse trees attached to 579 existing registered correspondents; 125 trees are shared and 152 are those of a single correspondent.  Nearly all my registered correspondents (or their wives or husbands) are descendants, but a few are collaterals of descendants or connected through a marriage.  My practice is to draw or re-draw a tree in MS Excel, using a portrait mode and “tall tree” format, in which the oldest ancestor appears at the left side and descendants in subsequent columns, moving left to right.  To keep this exercise within achievable limits, two rules are normally followed:  (1) The tree will not usually descend along female lines.  That is to say, if Mary Whitehouse marries John Smith and they have children, the tree will normally merely say “Issue” (whether or not they survived infancy);  (2) The tree will not include any Whitehouse with a date of birth of 1902 or later, unless he or she has a brother or sister born before then, in which case the whole generation of siblings is included along with their spouses (regardless of when the spouse was born).  Of course, the children of these siblings do not qualify, because they were born after 1902, but, again, “Issue” of the siblings will be mentioned by the word “Issue”, if it is known that they had any.  Exceptions are made to these rules from time to time to include an additional generation, but no “modern” generations will be included.

 

EXISTING REGISTERED CORRESPONDENTS

An existing registered correspondent is one who is listed on my private register and has been given a WFHC reference number.  E-mails from existing registered correspondents will always be answered.  Please use your reference number in the subject line of e-mails and, above all, please tell me of any change to your e-mail or postal address.  If you send an e-mail with no subject line or a subject line that I cannot recognise, it might be deleted as spam, without being opened.   If you have lost my e-mail address, you can contact me through the Guild of One-Name Studies website ("Google" it to get the current web address) by entering the registered name Goodwork in the search box.  That will give an e-address which forwards mail to me.  I use this system because the Guild encrypts the e-mail address, so it is less likely to be spammed.  Family history is all about working backwards, so feel free to contact me by post at dnalgne, XJ5 2MS, yerrus, nottus, yawgdir eht, eerht ytxis.

 

RECORDS ON THIS WEBSITE

Access to records is free and is through the appropriate EXPLANATIONS file listed below, where the links are shown.  The brief descriptions given after the links do not do justice to the wealth of material available here, much of which is of better quality than records found elsewhere.  If a file is shown as unavailable, the usual reason is an error in the link.  Please tell me about it right away. 

 Newsletters & FAQs

CURRENT NEWSLETTER (The newsletter having the same date as this index page)

PREVIOUS NEWSLETTERS (Back numbers to December 2005)

FAQs 240101.doc (Frequently asked questions, prints out at 5 pages of A4)

 

Searching tools

BMD EXPLANATIONS 240201 (Births, marriages and deaths, including General Register Office indexes, the Marriage Details index and parish records)

(Indexed transcripts of censuses)

CEN EXPLANATIONS 240120 (Indexed transcripts of censuses)

PROB EXPLANATIONS 210322 (Wills and administrations indexes)

MISC EXPLANATIONS 220805 (Other records: Apprentices; Birmingham directories & rate books; Catholics; Children’s hospital records; Famous Whitehouses; Fire policies; GWR shareholders; Lloyds Bank memo. books; London Gazette; Lunatic asylums;  Medics; Patentees; Prisoners of War 1795 and 1812-15; Sedgley Manor Rolls; Staffs Boatmen, Staffs Police, Staffs Quarter Sessions Prisoners and Seamen who fought at the battle of Trafalgar)

CHURCH KEY 160402 (Key to abbreviations of churches used in trees and databases)

CORRESPONDENT KEY 231109 (This key enables registered correspondents to find the number allotted to their tree; where there is more than one correspondent attached to a tree, the tree number is that of the lowest correspondent number)

TREE LINKS

(Links to WFHC trees written in MS Excel)

Articles

1939 REGISTER 160402 An updated and expanded version of my paper published in The Midland Ancestor, Vol. 18, No. 5, March 2016, explaining the Register)

BIOLOGICAL CLOCK 180310 (Article by Ruth Symes about childbirth and related women's subjects in the Victorian era)

FREQUENCY 060331 (Paper about the frequency of occurrence of the Whitehouse name)

LLOYDS BANK 170519 (Article about the origins of the bank and the managers' memo. books)

MARRIAGE MINING W MIDS 220528 (Paper about how to find marriages in church registers, especially in the West Midlands, including links to the Loach tables)

MARRIAGE MINING NOTTINGHAM 210322 (Paper about finding marriages in Basford and Nottingham Registration Districts)

MARRIAGE MINING S YORKS 150417 (Paper about how to find marriages in church registers, especially in the Sheffield area)

ORIGINS OF NAME 140105 (Short paper about the origins and early occurrences of the Whitehouse name)

TEN YEAR REVIEW 111010 (Article published in Journal of One-name Studies, Jan-Mar 2012, providing a review of the progress of the WFHC since October 2001)

WM TOWN CODE 240127 (Paper about a 2-letter code for the names of towns and the larger villages in the West Midlands)

 

Many files are in MS Excel.  If you do not have Excel installed, try downloading the Open Office suite, which is free software and contains a spreadsheet which is compatible with MS Excel. 

Keith