7.  Web trawl

A web trawl of old place names can throw up relevant information.  They sometimes bring up business advertisements with the street/road names you may be looking for.  Also, it may find your search string on web pages posted by individuals as a service to the global community.  A trawl for “Barber Lane” + Brampton found no pages.  The search for “Barber Lane” + Cutthorpe returned a few with a couple of interesting sites. One was a bus time table of TM Travel (see Appendix 3) which had a Barber Lane bus stop, which was very close indeed to a South Terrace in the outskirts of Cutthorpe.  The other reference was to a page within a delightful Virtual Tour of Cutthorpe by Paula Williams, which had a picture of South Terrace!!

Encouraged by this, I tried to locate Clay Lane where Pollie's maternal family had lived (see Appendix 2).  The trawl led to the realisation that Clay Lane was the old name for Clay Cross (see Appendix 4).  So, you can gather a lot of information about place names and even about people through search engines.

8.  Gateways

The genuki gateway provides well-organised links to an extensive collection of online information relating to family and local history.  For example, it contains a link to The Virtual Tour of Cutthorpe mentioned above.  It is huge and is initially overwhelming but the site provides guidance for first time users.  To start with you may just wish to click on United Kingdom and Ireland (top left) and follow links of interest.  The sub-web for Derbyshire is at: http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/DBY/

There are several links to free (community) sites and pages but other links point to sites which require that you register, subscribe or pay to view details.  I decided to skip these sites until I had a clearer idea of what I already had and what I might be missing.

A very useful genuki page contains links to map collections, including modern maps.  Streetmap is quite versatile and you can type in place names as well as other keys, such as postcodes, to retrieve a map centred on that location.  I also worked down the genuki pages to parishes of interest and found surnames of interest on some burial records.

Cindyslist is regarded as the biggest gateway for family history, with links to a vast array of family history sites.   Just select England from the other countries listed and select from the choices offered.  Some of the pages I was interested in (eg on Brampton) had already been moved to the genuki site. 

9.  War memorials

A web trawl for “War memorials” pointed to a page listed in the genuki site.  Unfortunately, it did not include the person I was searching for.  A Google search for “War memorial” + “John Millington” listed a few pages, including John-Mill’s transcription of names on the Grassmoor war memorial, identifying another useful site, familytreemaker.genealogy.com. 

Dan Waddell's book gives the web address of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website and after a tedious search, I found John Millington there at  http://www.cwgc.org/search/certificate.aspx?casualty=854481.  As noted earlier, the microfiche copy of the 2 January 1915 issue of The Derbyshire Times in the Chesterfield Library contained John Millington's obituary, which amongst other details a) corroborated Pollie's recollection of his family in India and career; b) gave the precise address of the family as noted earlier; and c) to our delight, had a photograph of him in his army uniform - the only photo the family now have of Pollie's beloved brother who died for his King and country.