Change Log

December 2010

The UK Directories 1900s cover the period to 1930 and follow on from the transcriptions posted last month for the 1700s and 1800s. I have picked out entries relating to people living at Sackett's Hill and posted those on the Sackett's Hill gallery page.

While working on the directories I made a detour and traced the ancestry of Stephen Sackett Chancellor, occasional references to whom had been puzzling me for some time. There were, in fact, four Stephen Sackett Chancellors, all in a line, the first being a grandson of Mary Sackett (c1725– ) who married Matthew Chancellor in 1752. The first Stephen's record is here.

November 2010

The extracts from UK directories help fill in some gaps left by census records. Extracts for the early part of the 20th century will follow next month.

Many thanks to Sheila Phythian, our newly-appointed regional historian for Australia and New Zealand, for the George File Sackett pictures which she took recently in Wallendbeen, New South Wales. Other members, please note that we will be pleased to publish your historic photographs of Sackett people or places.

October 2010

The Rhode Island and Seymour, Connecticut, records, although few in number, will fill in some gaps in our researches.

Many thanks to Karen Gerke for her further contributions to the Adopt-a-newspaper research project. Other contributors: please keep the extracts coming! And if other members would like to help, do please get in touch. Although many of these items are mundane, there is always the chance of turning up something that will add greatly to the Sackett story.

September 2010

This update adds considerably to our knowledge of the genealogy of the Sackett families in India. Thanks to Thurmon King for finding the records. Nearly all the India birth, marriage, and death records have been linked to genealogical sketches, where the various family groupings may be seen.

The genealogical sketches are also now indexed by place name down to county level. This provides lists of individuals having any event in a particular place. An example of the usefulness of this feature would be to look up India in the place index, where a list of the individuals researched above may be found.

Thurmon King has updated his database and this has been uploaded to TSFA website. The online database has records of 28,167 people, up from 27,119. As well as adding more people to the database, Thurmon has added considerable amounts of new data to the records of existing people.

The Sackett Family Association extends a warm welcome to the new members, especially Anna Tabor who has probably created a record not to be broken by joining the Association at the young age of 9 days! I guess many of us would wish that we had started our genealogy studies when we were younger.

Finally, I have indulged an occasional irresistible urge to fiddle around with the look of the website. I hope you like the redesign.

August 2010

This update includes the final batch of transcriptions of Massachusetts vital records in the NEHGS 1841–1910 database. There are 656 Sacket/Sackett records (of which 5 images are missing). Despite taking care in transcribing, there are likely to be some errors, especially with initial capital letters, which the 19th century clerks contrived whenever possible to make look the same. If records appear not to agree with data from other sources, please ask and I will re-check the transcription.

Many thanks to Don and Glenna Hertzler for providing, respectively, a reunion picture gallery and the minutes of the Association meeting held during the reunion.

July 2010

Many thanks to new members Barry & Meryl Axtens for the memoir of Barry's branch of Sacketts in New South Wales. Their joining the Association, together with the recent enrolments of other down-under members Jo Gillausseyn and Peter Sackett, has prompted the inclusion of various Australian databases on the website. The Australia birth, death, and marriage databases were published by Ancestry.com only this month, a timely addition to these researches. This Australian material should be read in conjunction with Sheila Phythian's "Sacketts in Australia" research paper posted on the website in April.

Thanks, too, to Dennis Gottier for the Oliver Perry Davis pictures.

I have made some improvements to the picture galleries so that full-size pictures may be viewed using a "lightbox" feature and, where relevant, have added descendant charts to the galleries so that family members appearing in the pictures can also be seen in the context of their family group. Names on the charts are linked to the individuals' pages and there is a link on the individual's page back to the chart.

Share your stuff!

If you have a collection of historic family photos in your Sackett line, do please consider sharing them on the website. Pictures should be sent to my direct email, not to the Sackett List as that does not allow attachments.

Any family bible records, or other documents, in your line? These often contain information not available in official sources and can add important details to our Sackett story.

I would also be pleased to receive further contributions towards the Adopt-a-newspaper research project, from both existing and new volunteers. It would be good to get to 1,000 records in the coming weeks. Any new volunteers, please take a look at the Research data > Newspapers page to see which states, cities, or newspapers, to adopt, or ask me!

June 2010

Special thanks to Dennis Gottier for the bible records and to Sheila Phythian for the Australia and New Zealand newspaper abstracts.

May 2010

April 2010

Sheila's "Sacketts in Australia" paper includes previously unpublished research in Australia of a number of Sacketts who immigrated there and information on their descendants, a number of whom were not previously known to us.

March 2010

Ancestry.co.uk have recently added images of London marriage registers to their databases and this update includes 97 marriage records not previously researched. I have taken the opportunity to reorganise the marriage records on the website. All English church marriages now appear on pages at both County and Parish level. Much confusion resulted from the formation in 1889 of the county of London which absorbed most of Middlesex and parts of Kent, Surrey, and Essex. Marriages in parishes affected by this change appear on the website in both the original county and in London, regardless of whether the marriage was before or after 1889.

The availability online of English census records (not previously indexed in their hard copy form) has made much easier the finding of Sackett households, although the eccentricities of Ancestry's indexing necessitate alertness to the possible need to include Jackets and Socketts. A further 28 households have been found in the 1891 census, and there should be more to come (the 1891 total is 75 households, compared with 120 in 1881 and 110 in 1901).

Thanks to Thurmon King for supplying transcripts and images of the two bibles. The bibles relate to the same Sackett families, who have not yet been linked to established trees.

Thanks too to the newspaper transcribers who have researched further entries. The total is 612 in just three months. I have singled out Thurmon's "Chicken" story as a "favorite" on the newspapers index page and have it in mind to compile a separate favorites page. Please feel free to suggest articles for inclusion.

February 2010

The images of Merrill Sackett's bible are kindly supplied by John Griffin who bought the bible at a thrift store in Seattle. John hopes to make contact at the reunion in July. Members having a particular interest in this item may wish to contact John in the meantime.

Many thanks to the Adopt-a-Newspaper volunteers who have transcribed another 140 articles this month. There is plenty of work to be done if others would also like to help. Please ask about volunteering on the List.

January 2010

I have added 166 transcriptions from images of the Massachusetts vital records on the NEHGS website. The count so far is 520 Sacket/Sackett records transcribed out of a total of 648. The following years are completed: 1841–47, 1850, 1852–55, 1857–84, 1886–93. Some of the gaps are caused by poor quality images of very faint originals and I am waiting for some of these to be checked by the very helpful NEHGS staff.

The Adopt-a-newspaper research project has got off to a flying start and we have a splendid total of more than 400 transcriptions in the first month. If you have not already volunteered for this project, please do check the newspapers page on the website and consider whether you could help. States on the Library of Congress Chronicling America not yet spoken for include: CA, DC, NE, UT, WA. All these have many references to Sacketts, doubtless including much hitherto undiscovered family information.

Thurmon's database is also updated on the website this month. The database contains an amazing 34,053 people. For privacy reasons not all these are published on the website (there is a cut-off for those born after 1920), but the number published still tops 27,000. Of the total in the database, the number of Sackett descendants is about 19,700; there are 9,500 spouses of Sackett descendants; and the remainder of about 4,800 are ancestors of spouses, mostly their parents.