Welcome!

The Oliver family history site is a work in progress. The internet is a perfect location for this study - accessible to far-flung cousins and easy to update with newly discovered material.  You can contribute by contacting me with stories, photos, documents, or anything that applies to these folks. As well, please let me know of errors or typos on these pages.

 

Who's included?

Primarily descendants of William Oliver & Ann Wilson. I am expanding the site to include all Olivers with Cheriton Fitzpaine heritage. Further research will hopefully join many of them onto the tree with William & Ann. There are no details about living people on this site but their name may appear as a child in the family section of their parents or on a chart. I look forward to being contacted by present-day people who link into this tree so that we can complete more of the picture.

My ancestors are marked with a green tree icon by their names.   A yellow tree indicates Cheriton Fitzpaine Olivers who are not (yet) connected to William & Ann.

People for whom there is a portrait have this icon by their names.

Those who immigrated are denoted with the flag of their new country, e.g. Canada  .

Finding a person on the site

Find someone via the surname index, the charts, or the search tab, all accessible from the top menu.

There is an individual page for each person for whom I have a reasonable amount of information, which is arranged as follows:

  • Name and birth/death dates
  • Parents' names
  • Person's relationship, if any, to William Oliver of Cheriton Fitzpaine
  • An "Extended Family" button which opens up a diagram of the subject's siblings, children, parents, grandparents, and great grandparents
  • Links to charts on which they appear
  • Family section, listing known children
  • The main section - a chronology of life events
  • Source citations
  • A link to contact me with information, photos, corrections, or just to let me know you are interested! 

 

Other areas to Explore

From the top menu you can also connect to

  • Surname Index - which lists everyone who has their own information page. If someone has no information other than while a child at home with their parents (e.g. birth, baptism, census), they won't have their own page.  They will, however, show up on the charts.
  • Charts - which illustrate ancestries and descendancies of key people
  • Calendars - just for fun...birthdays and marriages of everyone on this site
  • Images - thumbnails ... click the lightbox icon to enlarge the image or click the arrow to go to an individual's page
  • Research - background information and records that I have not yet analyzed or attributed to the correct people
  • What's New? - major additions and changes to the site

 

Dates & Places & Names

The most important consideration in constructing family trees is to confirm the links from generation to generation, e.g. is the Edward Oliver who married in this town the same Edward Oliver who was a child over in this other town? By gathering and evaluating a wide variety of evidence, I am reasonably confident that the links in our tree are correct.

A note about spelling - Spelling variations occurred at the whim of the recorder and are inconsequential. For instance, Oliver may be Olliver and Mogridge can appear as Muggeridge or Modridge. Published indexes often introduce strange spellings due to difficulties interpreting handwriting. Notes for a given document will indicate if the name was recorded differently than expected.

A note about birthdates - Pinning down precise birth and death dates is impossible in many cases. Before English civil registration began in 1837, parish records are the principal source for birth information. Often the actual birthdate is not recorded, only the baptism date. Similarly, there are burial dates but not death dates. In Ontario, civil registration began in 1869, but compliance was low in the early years. Exact birthdates were included in the 1901 census and birth month and year in the 1911 census, but I have very often found them to be incorrect, usually off by a year. When a person's precise birthdate is unknown but can be approximated from census or other records, it is given as a circa date, which is plus or minus a year or two.

Census records - images of the pages have been viewed. Spellings, ages, birthplaces and other data in a census are frequently "incorrect". My notes retain the information as it was written by the enumerator, in most cases dispensing with the usual [sic] notation. It is worth noting that the English 1841 census rounded down ages to the nearest 5 years, did not record relationships, and for birthplaces only noted whether or not born in the county of enumeration.

 

Odds & ends

Anything in [square brackets] is an explanatory note that I have added.

The information displayed on these pages will necessarily change as the research continues and this site is updated. Although great care has been taken, I do not guarantee the accuracy of all information on this website.

By checking the citations, you can see where a particular piece of information was found and evaluate how likely it is to be correct. For instance, a date of birth from a birth certificate is more reliable than one from a census or a published book. I have not cited every source that supports a fact...there might be 3 census records that say a person was born in Ontario but I typically don't cite them all.

If you are using any of the information presented on this site for your own genealogical research, please remember to cite accordingly.  Something along the lines of "Oliver Genealogy, online, http://genealogy.kolthammer.org/Oliver/, accessed date" would be suitable.

If you would like to hear about updates to this site, please contact me.

 

Acknowledgements

  • Correspondents as noted in the citations and "What's New" section
  • The developers and supportive user community of The Master Genealogist and Second Site, programs which were used to produce this site.