Monday 17 October 2011

15 Days - 15 Collections

In an imaginative mood, Ancestry.com have been giving free access to 15 different sets of records, for for the first 15 days of October only. "15 days - 15 FREE collections" has ended now, but I tried to use the opportunity to go Kisby-hunting.

Unfortunately Ancestry's records have a repuation for being badly transcribed. I've tried on several occasions to search the US Census records for Kisby's but rarely with success. For example, the 1920 Census (part of the "15 days" release) should contain dozens of Kisby's but according to the index search there are none! In their defence, the US was populated by immigrants from all nationalities, many of them with unusual unexpected surnames to confuse the transcribers.

So I chose to extract as many KISBY, KISBEE and KISBEY births from the 1916-2005 England & Wales Birth index. I managed to complete the task for the 30 years from 1963 to 1993 (which included the birth entries for my sister and me). Noticeably, during this period, there are almost NO Kisby's born in the old stomping grounds of the English Fens!