Help Needed!

This website was born of a moment several years ago when I discovered that a Piggin relative had spent a day or more at the Family Records Centre copying out civil registration index entries that had already been extracted by me some years earlier. There is so much to do that we can neither afford to duplicate work nor deny anyone the pleasure of exploring virgin territory. So it was decided to set up a public master file of what had been extracted and what had not been. Despite a certain amount of Internet joshing, this one-name study falls well short of completeness. There have been some massive efforts to help so far, but there is a huge amount still to be done. If you are interested in contributing research, here are some of the areas in which the study is still weakest.

1. Gaps in the Study

• 1841 census of England: very patchy coverage at present.
• 1851 census of England: we have made considerable progress finding Piggin(s) entries in this (see below) but there are gaps.
• 1861 census of England: very patchy coverage at present.
• 1871 census of England: very patchy coverage at present.
• 1881 census of England: only the main spellings have been checked. Anyone with a copy of the FFHS CD-ROM index published by the LDS church could greatly help by extracting the data.
• 1891 census of England: very patchy coverage at present
• 1901 census of England: the high cost of the images from the PRO index website means I am grateful for any copies of these that you can share with me.
• Pre-1858 wills in English diocesan jurisdictions (consistory courts): see the wills page for coverage so far. Most county records offices, particularly Norfolk, still contain huge numbers of unresearched wills with key family information in them. There are a great many wills indexes, particularly those published by Phillimore. These should be systematically searched, either at the Society of Genealogists Library in London or using those files put in subscription online services by Ancestry.com.
• Pre-1858 wills in English prerogative courts (York and Canterbury): the Canterbury collection is being gradually indexed by the Public Records Office and images are being placed online. So far, very little has been seen of the York collection, which appears to be mainly at the Borthwick Institute.
• Lexis (English legal citations): could some kind soul with access to this very expensive British online resource do a search for all cases where the names Piggin and Piggins are mentioned?
• LegalTrac, ABI/Inform: these are two U.S. law-report sites which I cannot afford to search.
• Military records: some have been checked, others are only known of from index references. Some kind soul is needed to actually visit the PRO at Kew and see what is in these documents.
• All the U.S. censuses: very patchy coverage at present. Only the LDS index to the 1880 census has been examined in any detail.

2. Further research needed

In all genealogical research, it is vital to see the original parish registers (or images of them) rather than rely on published indexes. The reason is that all indexers make transcription errors, skip data that does not fit in the prescribed data fields and miss illegible entries. In addition, very few of the burial entries from the English parish registers have ever been indexed. For this reason, major work is still required to check the accuracy of the vital data on this website, most of which is drawn from indexes rather than sources. Full transcriptions (rather than mere indexes) are listed on the Transcribers page.

3. Thoroughly checked

• The English General Registry Office indexes at the Family Records Centre, London: births, marriages and deaths from 1837 to 1989: most of these extracts have been donated to the FreeBMD project, and can be searched there. The Australian Vital Records Index 1788-1905 (selective index published by LDS on CD). New South Wales Birth, Death and Marriage online indexes up to 1945. New Zealand civil registration indexes of births (1920-1990), marriages (1970-1990) and deaths (1848-1939, plus war deaths, 1949-1954, 1958, 1971).
• British Censuses 1841-1901: Nottinghamshire entries almost complete for most years, broad coverage of Devon, Norfolk and Warwickshire in 1851 thanks to LDS CD; broad coverage of 1881 nationally thanks to the FFHS-LDS CD-ROM (but see gaps listed on 1881 page); broad coverage of Norfolk in 1891 thanks to the Public Records Office's pilot online project in 2001; extensive coverage of 1901 as noted above.
• English national will indexes (formerly at Somerset House, now in First Avenue House, Holborn) from 1858 to 1980. Pre-1858 wills at Lichfield (intensively searched by Tina Negus), at Lincoln (scanned by Tina), at Southwell (lightly searched by my self at Nottingham Record Office in 1986) and at Norwich (some initial checking by Neil Adams, but much remains to be done).
• International Genealogical Index published by LDS Church and currently available online at http://www.familysearch.org as well as British Vital Data (indexes published in 1999 by LDS on CD-ROM; the second edition appeared in 2002)
• The Commonwealth War Graves Commission online database and the Australian War Memorial website, both of which provide good information on 20th century soldiers.
• Historic newspapers are only gradually becoming available online. Plenty of Piggin references were found in the searchable London Gazette but pickings were slimmer at the British Library Online Newspaper Archive, while the Newspaper Archive produced only one hit in late 2002.
• Family Tree Maker index series: CD001 to CD450 (includes many U.S. census indexes) and World Family Tree CD 01 to CD 22.
• Ancestry.com searchable website as of January 1999.
• Telephone directories: Britain 1986, online British, Australian, New Zealand, U.S. and Canadian directories as of 1998, E-Mail directories as of 1998, also some pre-20th-century printed address books.
• U.S. Social Security Deaths index (various online versions obtained via Freedom of Information Act) to 1998
• Alta Vista search engine as of mid 1998. Google as of mid 2001.
• English Public Records Office online catalogue.
• U.S. Library of Congress online catalogue.
• British Library OPAC 97 online catalogue.
• Names of legal cases in WestLaw