Gloucestershire and Bristol Team

Happy New Year to all Wikitreers and especially Team Gloucestershire. I feel we had a good year, we were mentioned in reports on the England County Statistics page quite a few times and in the newsletter were in the top performers for sourcing and connecting for both Gloucestershire and Bristol.

The monthly challenges have been fun and also shown us how much work there is left to do. The locations challenge and 2010 gedcom (November challenge) challenge were extremely useful for our area.

My own biggest wins are sourcing and improving a family and then finding a number of them who have no locations - so we can bring them into the fold!

Please feel free to share your wikitree highlights with the team and let's continue the good work through 2025.

Thank you for being on Team Gloucestershire.

All the best

Alison

Hello Gloucestershire and Bristol Team

I've updated the tables for our area, thank you to everyone who is helping to improve our area - we got a mention for connections this week.

All the best

Alison

Hi to the Gloucestershire and Bristol Team

I've updated the table for our area on our Gloucestershire/Bristol Team page. We got a mention this week for being one of the top Sourcing areas for Gloucestershire.

Are you joining the Source-a-thon? We have about 80 unsourced profiles dated 1800 or later we could work on. There may be a few more by then, I'll have a look around.

All the best

Alison

Gloucestershire Update

Thank you to everyone who helped improve our locations during June. This was a hugely successful challenge and we had so many locations to improve. Let's move onto the connectathon next and link some families together. Please add a source if you add a profile during the connectathon though.

I'd like to welcome new member Carol Collins to our Gloucestershire team, I hope you enjoy researching in the area and do shout if you need any local expertise from the team.

I've been trying to source some of the unsourced records unearthed during the locations challenge. I've found that if locations are uploaded incorrectly with a Gedcom then often they have completely empty location fields for other close family members. Finding locations on profiles with no locations or only England is quite a big win. If you are updating a profile (and have the time!) do have a look around the rest of the family.

All the best

Alison

Hi Gloucestershire team

This month the England Connectors challenge is to improve County locations. This really helps with connecting and avoiding duplicate profiles. I find that frequently where a census has been written as 'Gloucester, Gloucestershire' the transcription turns out to be just Gloucestershire (which is a big place). Spellings of Gloucestershire vary and Bristol as well throws a few challenges.

So if you can spend any time, no matter how little, joining in and helping us improve Gloucestershire this month it would really help. I'm absolutely getting behind this challenge. The list will be broken into chunks and hopefully many will be fast to amend.

Here is the link: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Connect_England%21

Gloucestershire and Bristol thank you in advance.

Have a lovely June

Alison

PS: Bristol has no County, it's just England.

Hello Gloucestershire Team

We're welcoming new member Sue Hewitt to our team and thank you Sue for choosing us. If any team members have questions or need help with brick walls, do share them with us and we can see if we can help.

I've updated the statistics for Gloucestershire and Bristol. Thank you to everyone who has made a contribution to improving our profiles.

Happy Wikitreeing

Alison

Happy New Year Gloucestershire Team

Let's make Gloucestershire and Bristol as good as possible this year.

Are you connectathoning this weekend? I shall be adding some Bristol and Gloucestershire profiles to help us connect more families to our Tree.

All the best

Alison

Merry Christmas All

Firstly a warm welcome to the Gloucestershire Team to David Hartley, a recent OT1 graduate.

Secondly a big Thank You to all our team members, for all your work on our Gloucestershire county profiles this year. We've achieved such a lot, especially as we now have Bristol as a separate area.

I wish you all a wonderful festive season and happy 2024.

All the best

Alison

Hello Team

I've added in the tables for the past couple of weeks, we're holding steady really with unsourced and unconnected profiles.

Along with Team Member Steve Davies we have an interest in the Forest of Dean, so when I look at connecting profiles there I'm always quite confident of finding a connecting branch. I also know the local surnames which helps.

With this in mind I thought I'd sort out an area, rather than a list, so (having recently visited the town) I used Wikitree+ and input birthlocation='Tewkesbury' into the text. There were just over 1,400 records. Running 'Biocheck' created a list of those where something was wrong - perhaps an unsourced record or uncleaned gedcom or just a sticker in the wrong section. I went through the list and fixed them, and some other immediate family members, Now, when I'm connecting Tewkesbury profiles I feel better about who lived there and what they did (they were Waterman or Stocking Weavers)

If your family spent time in a location, then improving it's profiles - finding the landowners, workers, criminals, influential families gives a good insight into their lives.

I'm not sure I'll do this in Bristol yet though, I'd be here for years sorting it out. Villages are better!

Thank you for participating in our Gloucestershire and Bristol Team.

Alison

Good Afternoon

I've updated the stats for the last couple of weeks. The suggestions challenge was running until the end of October and over 100 suggestions were sorted out for each of Gloucestershire and Bristol. Having said that we cleared 51 Gloucestershire suggestions and we still had an extra 18 on our list so something is creating extra suggestions.

The more good quality, sourced profiles we add to Gloucestershire and Bristol, the easier it is to connect branches up. If you hit a Gloucestershire brick wall, do shout to see if your team can help.

All the best

Alison

Hi all

I've updated our stats for the last couple of weeks.

Currently the england connectors challenge is all about suggestions (Find it here: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Connect_England%21) and so thousands of UK suggestions are being fixed, including some from Gloucestershire and Bristol.

I have to admit that while I was correcting some suggestions I found the most awful gedcom, no-one was the child of their parent or married to their spouse so I've disconnected a few branches of family and might have contributed to the increase in unconnected people. I'll rectify that shortly.

If you enjoy the challenge of sourcing older profiles, those make up the main bulk of our unsourced profiles now and any help is very welcome.

Happy Wikitreeing

Alison

Hi All

(hashtag) proud

Well done team and anyone who worked on Gloucestershire profiles over the Sourceathon weekend. As you can see we sourced 133 Gloucestershire profiles and 26 Bristol profiles. We also connected 47 Gloucestershire people to the main Wikitree.

Thank You. 😄

Alison

Hello Gloucestershire Team

I have to confess to adding a few to our unsourced stats this week. I'm hoping they'll all be neatly sourced by next week thanks to the Sourceathon and Gloucestershire/Bristol will be all the cleaner.

We've been slowly reducing the suggestions over the past few months.

Thanks to everyone who helps with Bristol and Gloucestershire and have fun in the sourceathon.

All the best

Alison

Hi All

I would like to extend a very warm welcome to Stephanie Hill who is joining our Gloucestershire Team. Thank you for choosing us and we hope you enjoy being on our team.

I'm aware the Sourceathon is coming up and we only have (about) 25 Gloucestershire unsourced profiles from 1800 or later. Pre-1800 profiles are slower to source and it's not that we don't have later profiles, it's just that they're not marked. If anyone wants to source the earlier profiles that would be fab.

To help improve our Gloucestershire area in the Sourceathon I'll find and mark some post 1800 profiles. They're easy to find, on wikitree + choose an area or name and run the Bio check or choose an unlinked section, they're often unsourced. I think it needs to be done in advance of the weekend though.

There was (at a recent count) 58 Bristol profiles from 1800 or later.

Thank you all for your help with our region.

Alison

Hi all

We've stagnated a bit on the stats over the last week. I have to admit to having a short break in Lydford, Devon so while I was there I thought I'd improve and source a few Lydford profiles and find out a bit about previous Lydford people. It creates a nice connection to a place!

Anyone who wants to work through a few Bristol unsourced profiles there is a good number in the 1900's section. Alternatively location suggestions often throw up the double whammy of correcting the locations and usually sourcing the biography as well.

Hello Team

I've updated the statistics so we can bask in the glory of reducing Bristol unsourced records by 208 over the last few weeks. However, the rest of Gloucestershire is not faring so well with 108 sourced over the same time frame but only a few in the last couple of weeks.

The England team have an unknowns project going on. If you need help with any Gloucestershire or Bristol unknowns then do shout, maybe your team can help.

All the best

Alison

Hi all

I've updated our statistics and we were mentioned in dispatches this week as Bristol's unsourced profiles have reduced by 36.

I have to confess to have done some sourcing this week and just to let you know if I find records I cannot source I make sure they are in the Gloucestershire Unsourced category rather than just flagged 'unsourced'. This is just so I have them all in one place when I go through the various unsourced sections. If you find the Gloucestershire Unsourced category particularly challenging, that is why.

I'd like to welcome a new member to our Gloucestershire and Bristol team, Michael Christmas. Michael is working on Medieval Bristol profiles, and here is one he competed earlier.. Maurice (Gaunt) de Gaunt (abt.1186-aft.1230). I think we're very lucky to have Michael on the team.

Thank you for your continued efforts and do shout if you have any questions or suggestions.

All the best

Alison

Hi Everyone

I've updated our County Statistics, thank you if you helped with unsourced, unconnected profiles or suggestions. We had quite a few profiles added last week.

Bristol needs some TLC if anyone wants to help that area.

All the best

Alison

Hello everyone,

I recently helped a German Wikitreer out with some English research on Anton Hensler (1777-1848), who moved from Germany to the Bristol area when he was a young man.

If you look at Anton's profile you will see that his letter of denization was signed by 36 business men and local dignitaries. I managed to decipher most of the names and found information about some of them which I cited where possible.

Anton also married twice, firstly to Ann Ball (abt.1794-1833) and secondly to an Ann Butler, some of whose family appear to have lived with them in the 1841 census.

I am not familiar with the people or the area and was wondering if anyone would be interested in picking up research on Anton's two wives, the 36 signatories to his letter of denization plus Charles Ludlow Walker, the mayor who signed his affidavit?

Some of these people may have been notables, or someone might like this as a bit of a local history project.

Cheers,

Catriona

Morning everyone

We did well with suggestions last week, so thanks to everyone who helped.

I celebration of this weekends coronation I've seached Wikitree+ for King's Stanley and run a bio check. This has given me a list (actually quite a long list) of profiles that have potential issues - some are unsourced, some don't have a <references /> tag etc so they make improving a bit more interesting.

If you want to have another go then Charlton Kings or Kingswood would be Royally relevant. We've got quite a well connected County! If you find more please let us know.

Have a lovely weekend.

Alison

Hi Team

We've got some Gloucestershire and Bristol Statistics so we can monitor our progress. The good news is that lots of organising has been completed - teasing Bristol out of Gloucestershire and creating 2 separate tables (thanks to everyone who helped with the Gloucestershire and Bristol section of the locations challenge). The bad news is that our tables now need to 'start again' so we don't have the old stats to compare our progress with.

If anyone has 5 minutes to look at some suggestions the location suggestions are often pretty quick and we have 100+ in suggestion 612 - location too early in birth location. This usually means that United Kingdom is in the location field for someone around earlier than 1801 and it's just a case of deleting that. As a bonus United Kingdom is often added to death or marriage incorrectly as well, which means you'd clear 2 (or 3) suggestions with 1 edit.

Thank you for any help with Bristol and Gloucestershire.

Alison

Hello all,

As you will see from the latest stats update there have been generally big increases in all areas. It's important you know that this is actually due to a change in the way that the data is gathered and we are actually "finding" many more profiles than we had in the past. Our total number of profiles considered Gloucestershire, increased by a whopping 12 800!!! Now some of these will actually drop off the list because as a project we have been looking at some of the trickier locations such as Bristol, which has for most of its history been an historic county in its own right, but has sometimes been part of Gloucestershire, with some parts taking a turn in Somerset. The Project profile standards have been updated to reflect how Bristol will be treated and I have also added the information to this page as well.

Thanks everyone for all your contributions, Cheers, Elizabeth

Fantastic work team Glos! Our stats are looking very GREEN and only a small increase in the number of unknowns. Well done all.

Is there a Died in Gloucestershire sticker? I also might found a painting of guy I just sharing. He pretty famious. He’s Sir. Humphrey Hooke

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hooke-8

https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/humphrey-hooke-15801659-and-grandson-223969

Billie

Stats updated - unsourced and suggestions down, increases in other totals is only minimal. Well done team Glos!

I noticed that the bot has been busy changing the category Bristol, Somerset to Bristol, Gloucestershire. I was a little curious about this so did some research. It seems that in fact Bristol has never been in either Somerset or Gloucestershire. Avon is about the closest but in fact since 1373 Bristol has been a county in tis own right.

https://www.associatedwindows.co.uk/news/bristols-county-what-is-it-and-why

https://www.uwe.ac.uk/life/discover-bristol/bristol-history

It transpires that Bristol therefore should not be included in Gloucestershire (or Somerset) and all the address lookups here and in other genealogy sites are in fact incorrect.

Hi All, I've been very slack and had forgotten about updating the stats, but I'm back on track and will be aiming to do it at least once a fortnight- hopefully every week. Well done on the connections, that's gone down since December which is super.

Connection Issues: Hi team can you help? I thought I'd try and reduce our Gloucester Unconnecteds and found the Hendy's in Bristol. They were all added for a One Name Study from the 1911 census. I thought I could connect them to each other and then I'd just need 1 connection to the Main Tree for a big reduction in our numbers.

Well it kind of worked! I connected a lot to each other, (which was very satisfying) and a few to the main tree but I still have 20 family strands left, about 160 profiles. I've written a biography for all the profiles I found in Bristol, so lots of potential spouses and maiden names etc Connecting isn't really my skill, I do it to challenge myself.

Elizabeth can we have an update on our Gloucester Stats? The Hendy's could help us go green for our unconnected profiles.

All the best, Alison

Hi, I'm looking at some Browning family members associated with the village of Brookthorpe in Gloucestershire and noticed there was no category for the place -- so I created one and copied in a CIB from a nearby place. Could someone please check it and make sure I did it properly? There's a St. Swithin's Church there with the tomb of a Thomas Browning, so there's a lot of puzzle pieces around waiting to be assembled...

Added note -- the CIB I copied was from Cirencester, and some of the information still refers to Cirencester. I'm not sure how to get the correct information for Brookthorpe.

It's only about 45 minutes until the start of the Connect a thon. I have updated the stats to show the pre "thon" figures. Can't wait to see how many Gloucestershire profiles we can connect to the big tree.

Gloucestershire stats updated on this page. Well done on reducing suggestions everyone. Cheers!

Finally finished reviewing the post-1500 date and relationship suggestions for Gloucestershire :) Inspired by the spring clean.

Hope everyone is well! David

Well done Team Gloucestershire. We cleared 658 suggestions from Gloucestershire profiles during the recent Clean a Thon. Thank you all so much for your contributions :-)

Hi Elizabeth. Would you please add me to the Gloucestershire Team? I have had a DNA match and discovered many relatives in Gloucestershire, which I am now adding to WikiTree, so it makes sense to join the team.

Thanks, Cherryl

Hi Elizabeth, Please can you add my interest in Forest of Dean to the list as well. Also I've really enjoyed using the 'bio check' over the last few weeks. I can select an area using Wiki+ (eg Littledean) and then biocheck looks to see if any of those profiles need improving. Some have style issues, most need sources, a couple need merging, some 'unknowns' - a real variety of suggestions and dates and I've seen some interesting families on the way past. At the end of the list I feel as if that small area is as good as it can be which is quite satisfying! I might post that in GtoG but we have a good team on the small area of the Forest of Dean we could really have a squeaky clean area on Wikitree!

Hello

For member interests, please can my following interests be added to me: Vale of Berkeley 1500-1800 and Forest of Dean. Thanks!

Hi Steve or pre-1500 sourcerers. I have another pre 1500 for you to mark unsourced. The source stated is a familysearch tree and I checked but there are no sources on that either.

Avery Traherne (1423-)

I can't find sources but perhaps I'd have to go down the line and work backwards.

Thank you.

Hi all

I've been trawling through suggestions and have 3 gedcoms in St Briavels that I can't edit as unsourced or sort out the style issues as they are too old (pre-1500). I know Elizabeth loves this sort of thing so I thought I'd mention it. ;)

De Dene-20 John Dene

De Lasseberge-1 Agatha Lasseberge

DeDene-8 Rose Dene

Another big jump in the stats this week as profiles with "England" in the marriage location field (but not in the birth or death location) are included for the first time. Thanks for all your work :-)

Hello lovelies! Huge increase in active suggestions this week because of the new reporting of dead web links. If we could fix a few that would be super :-) Cheers!

Please can you add the Family names of Davies/Hough/Kibble/ward/Priday/Hurcombe to my interests

Thankyou

Great work Gloucestershire! Huge improvement in the stats for this last update - especially unsourced and unconnected. Thank you for all your work and I hope you are enjoying a restful and safe Christmas Day. Cheers!

Gloucestershire is a super interesting county! Most of my research up to date has focused on Gloucestershire and the West Country. I look forward to learning more about the England project and Gloucestershire in particular.

Well done Gloucestershire! We're back in the green in all areas. Thanks everyone for your contributions.

Hello Gloucestershire!

After the Connect a Thon our figures are looking very RED this week, but it's all in a good cause! Since the last stats 406 profiles have been added to the tree that show a connection to Gloucestershire one way or another. Thanks everyone for all your hard work.

Just complete 55 unsourced for team this past week and still going

Hello everyone,

I've updated the Gloucestershire stats. I've rejigged the format to include unknowns as I know that some folk enjoy giving our profiles their proper names. Thank you all for your contributions and stay safe in this tricky time! x

A huge drop in Gloucestershire suggestions after the weekend Source-A-Thon. Thanks to anyone who contributed. And of course a corresponding rise in unsourced and unconnected as we find more profiles that "belong" in Gloucestershire.

Hi, I’ve been updating Forest of Dean profiles and came across a Freeminer. I asked if we could have a new category of Freeminer so it’s been set up. Freeminers are very specific to the Forest of Dean but if you come across any, they now have a category of their very own!

Well done Gloucestershire folk. As of 1 Mar we have GONE GREEN! Thank you all for your efforts. Another few days to go until this challenge is over.