I've just been playing with Lost Cousins, another website/service dedicated to helping genealogical research. What is unique about Lost Cousins is that they match up names entered by subscribers based on more than the name, they use the detailed page reference from the 1881 census to disambiguate the surnames. This is really great, much increasing the chances of real matches, assuming that people correctly identify their ancestors in the 1881 census in the first place.
Recently in Genealogy Category
I have been using 1837online to search the BMD indexes for ancestors. However, there are some aspects of the service that are irritating, so I recently tried the new FamilyRelatives service. How do they compare ?
My great-grand father was George Alexander Williams-Hubbard, a glover who lived in Worcester, England. For some time I have been trying to understand the origin of the Williams-Hubbard name, especially since it is quite unique.
Family legend is that George's mother introduced it to reduce the complications involved in having children with two surnames, it is this that I been trying to verify.
This has proved somewhat confusing, since some records appear to support the marriage and family of Walter Henry Hadley Hubbard and Louisa Stone, but do not explain the Williams surname, and other records indicate an apparent match between Walter Henry Hadley Williams and Louise Friend. Of course, officals could have been variously recording Williams-Hubbard as Williams and as Hubbard, but this doesn't explain the two families theory.
Here's the details ...