So this was one of the trees I was shown at least 10 years before I started my research. I don't think I ever looked up the first baptism as mentioned above, but now I can do that very thing through the miracle of the internet & the Lincstothepast website. Mark Doughty would have sat in St Nicholas Church trying to read the scratchy hand writing of the parish records that we can do ourselves now in the comfort of our homes.
This is the record I have started to look at:
http://www.lincstothepast.com/Records/RecordDisplayTranscript.aspx?oid=531572&iid=203851
The first thing you notice is that you can't really read it can you? When you do start to study it closely you will find it's in Latin, and the record starts at Michaelmas in one year and goes to Michaelmas the next year as opposed for 1st January to 31st December as it is now. Michaelmas Day was celebrated on 29th September. In 1584 they were following the Julian Calendar, whereas we now use the Gregorian Calendar. the switchover came in 1752, introduced by Pope Gregory. The day after Michaelmas day farm labourers would go to the nearest market town with their tools and seek work for the next 12 months. That's why many of our relatives seem to move around so much, as many of them were agricultural labourers and had to go where they were hired to do so. I have had to give up looking at that record above-I couldn't see John Doughty, I could see a William Doughty in the previous year. I suppose Mark would have started with several generations forward from this record, otherwise how would he have known where to go back to?
I think he would have started with generation 7, Richard Doughty & Elizabeth Holt, Richard baptised in Ulceby, 1781. This is that record:-
http://www.lincstothepast.com/Records/RecordDisplayTranscript.aspx?oid=783247&iid=203598
Ulceby (Grimsby) Parish Records - Baptisms & Burials
(1781-1783)
Baptisms 1781: 2nd Decem: Richard, son of Wm and Elizabeth Duty.
Now if you were starting you research here, would you ignore that record? Well I would have done, I was looking for Doughty records, not Duty ones. Now though after 20 years after starting my research, and having transcribed hundreds of documents from the originals to excel spreadsheets for the Lincolnshire Family History Society, I know what records to look for. Back in 1781, not many people knew how to spell their names, they spelt them phonetically I suppose, with a Lincolnshire Accent and the poor old clerk or curate, speaking Oxford English had to somehow make head and tail of it, so they wrote Duty, just wonder how they pronounced it. When I first started looking at the records prior to 1837 at the Archives in Lincoln, I was appalled by what I saw-I just couldn't read the writing at all and those old microfilm readers were hard work. Nowadays with transcriptions all over the place it's so much easier, but are those transcriptions correct? How do you know if you just accept them. If you were to look up on family Search for Richard Doughty baptised 1781 in Ulceby would you find the above record? No! Put in Duty instead, now what do you get? Yes there's the result you want, but okay fine if you know it already.
So now I am looking for a marriage between a William & Elizabeth Duty, prior to 1781, and if base on the information above, then it must be around 3 years earlier. Well I looked at Lincstothepast and the record isn't there, so it must be at the Archives, or available at one of the Mormon study places, or maybe the Lincolnshire Family History Society has a useful publication, transcribed by volunteers like me, who are sent microfiche copies from the Archives, which I read on a Microfiche reader and then put the result on an excel spreadsheet, which is checked by others. Well I didn't find it in 1779 like it says above, I found it in 1777, William Duty to Elizabeth Summercoates, at South Ferriby, on 15 January 1777.
So enough for now I think, but more to go on now.At least I had something to work on, imagine if I hadn't?
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