Hi, my name is Jayne and I'm from North Yorkshire and my parents (now deceased) were from the Barnsley area in Yorkshire. I’ve been researching my family history for the last nine month and discovered that my grandfather was born in the Black Country - so I’m not as Yorkshire as I thought I was! My Ancestry DNA test confirms that I’m part West Yorkshire and part West Midlands. During this time I’ve been learning about the history of the Black Country: I’d recommend both the book ‘Tracing your Black Country Ancestors’ by Michael Pearson and a visit to Black Country Living Museum in Dudley to anyone else who knows little about the history of the area and wishes to know more.
I’ve been building my family tree on Ancestry and buying certificates from GRO along the way to try to provide evidence to link up families, especially when I suspected recording or transcript errors or use of different first names. Recently I’ve tracked my ancestors on old detailed maps of the area bought from Midland Ancestors online shop; using sticky notes I could see they hadn’t move far for a few generations at least. I’ve also found the website Black Country Connections useful and I believe my ancestors link to some of the people listed on there. I can provide information on how I believe I’m linked to them and information from the documents to back it up, though I’ll start a new thread on the Black Country section for that. Hopefully I might get some help from other members of the site on some of my objectives too.