1881 census to Facebook: Smiths are easy you know

Prologue
On the run from demon headmistress, I slunk onto the 2pm coach to Wales, July 2011.

A few days later I was in Merthyr Tydfil and this time I was the hunter.  Margaret Jenkins last seen alive with grandma, 1861.  Jennie Newman’s wonderful BMD index for Merthyr sitting pretty in the library.  I snatched the data and ran off to the record office, hoping to learn her fate and still stalk the halls of the iron (Crawshay) kings before sunset.

I hopped from one leg to the other playing a verbal dance with the registrar’s clerk, elsewhere reported.  Suffice to say I walked away with the name of her husband, Job Smith, and still had time to admire Merthyr’s old buildings, pass Trevithick’s statue and see Cyfarthfa’s mountainous halls.  After a burger in the Wetherspoons of course.

Like the dead swan in the Taff’s salmon-run, poor Margaret only flapped her wings once before death beckoned.  And she produced just this:

1881 census to Facebook
My initial vigour waned, as I noted not a single British trace of James Smith after 1881.
His half-brother is on an Ancestry tree as having died in Queensland, and I decided (in 2016) to investigate the siblings by the simple measure of clicking on their names in the census.  It showed at least two of them died in Melbourne.  Time to see if the whole family emigrated.

Yes – they arrived 2 April 1883, in, surprising place alert – Townsville, Queensland.  The older boys are listed separately on the same page.  All except James, that is. But he didn’t die in Wales 1881-3, so where did he go?

 

 Turns out he did come out to Oz as well.  The death record of James Jenkin Smith (1931) with father Job and mother Margaret Jenkin leads inexorably to this, and other, electoral rolls, revealing two findings:
 
1) the house name, Hirwain, after his place of birth, and
2) he had a wife Margaret (which research shows was from the marriage of James Smith in 1893)
3) he worked on the railways, befitting his training working with iron

Later electoral rolls show his son (source BMD indexes) living in the area, as a manufacturing chemist and a granddaughter, who is shown as dying in 2000, according to The Age newspaper.

Great nephews and nieces are listed in the newspaper, but with no surnames how was I to find them on Facebook?  I had a street address but was keen to get an electronic connection – quicker and easier.  By re-googling the names of the great-nevry, ‘Sonia, Michaela and Alister’ I spy a further reference yielding their paternal grandfather’s last name which they, naturally, share.

By plying this new information into Facebook up comes the whole family network, revealing the Smiths had become Hackett-Smiths, no wonder I’d found them hard to find.

Gratifyingly, the upward trajectory had continued.  The chemist had given way to the architect, whose sons are in design, and plastic surgery.

So Margaret, Swan of Aberdare, who flapped so briefly, and whose story we nearly lost, has helped build the City of Lights 10.6 thousand miles away. 

Creative Commons – flickr.com

Riddle of the timeshare: it was the sun wot won it

Prologue: Emigrayshun

One grey June morning as the sun rose over the steelworks, a group of my family left their home in Redhall Avenue, Connah’s Quay on a journey aimed at leaving the UK and its new queen behind forever.

Our story: Vokayshun

 

Grandpa claimed to know nothing about his family.  That was true, but he did remember some cousins.  Tom Jones wasn’t one of them.  When I found Tom Jones listed in his grandpa’s will, I didn’t think I’d be able to trace him.  By splashing cash on birth certificates I’d maybe get his date of birth, getting me as far as the second-class cabins of 1952, but…. I’d still be left hanging.  It wouldn’t be enough.

Dedicayshun

I picked up the blower to cousin Joyce eighteen years ago, thinking I was at journey’s end.  I’d found her mugshot in old family papers and mini-me had gone through tonnes of microfiche to get this far.  She was off to Italy and was putting info about her mother’s family in the post, she said.  She said.  Actually she died before any of that and my main chance submerged again, leaving just one nice clue.  It took me ten years to remember it though.

Joyce’s wedding photo in our family

My one letter from Joyce

 

Big Break #1.

On the phone, Joyce had told me there was a cousin in North Wales, called Rhona.  I dreamt I was in a cafe in Rhyl, and everyone in tight white curls was called Rhona.  Hello Rhona, have you seen Rhona.  No, Rhona, have you?

Time passes, I grow up.  I realise there aren’t that many Rhonas in Rhyl.  In fact, there aren’t any!  I get busy.  I trawl all Rhonas born in Flintshire with a mother’s name of Taylor and moments later zing up her address thanks to 192.com.

Ten years of inactivity followed by a moment of success.  That describes my entire work on this branch.  But Rhona doesn’t ‘get’ my letter.  This whole line of enquiry is on the verge of evaporating.

I place an ad.  An absolute beauty comes on the market and is duly picked up from Highbury Corner in 2011.  If the letter can’t go to the lady, I will, er go to mountainous lengths to…

Big Break #2

If you need to get away from it all may I recommend Gweryd Fishing Lakes high on the hill off Offa’s Dyke.  They gave this weary traveller his last night of freedom before September’s chastening embrace.  Down the Clwydian Mountains I sped, to the town of Mold, and Rhona’s quaint close.

Not expecting much of a particular, I crossed the threshold of number 6, Mold, glad-handing the aged occupier.  Rhona was niece of a farmer from my Grandpa’s childhood and a good ten years older than the deceased Joyce.  Even if this venerable lady could barely whisper a ‘hullo’, I would be extrapolating from this for years to come, so powerful were her genealogical connections.

I tested the waters with the living legend.  I knew I had a lady whose brain was hard-wired to recall facts from the 1930s, her era.  I pressed my first genealogical button.  ‘Chilton’, I said.  ‘Oh, you mean Hughie.’  Good so far.  ‘Cousin Margaret?’  ‘In a bad way, but alive.’  Ok.  Now for the key moment, the testing of the skeleton key, the run past the warder, the ransom-swop, the border-dash, the inhuman leap….. ‘Tom Jones?’ I lightly enquired?  The 1930s brain whirred and checked its hard-drive and back they came, words of gold.  ‘Oh, Tom Jones! Well his kids Peggy and Dougie went out to Canada.’ And there it was: my cup overraneth.  Not only had this lady skewered her way through a slew of Joneses to find my Tom, she neatly sewed his story up so tight I wasn’t going to lose him now.  And all in five seconds.  I drank the proferred tea, thanked the good lady, slumped on a train at Chester, sold the bike – saying ‘hello’ to September and a new year.

Big Break #3

Veterinary advice: First catch and restrain your animal

Our Tom Jones was born in Morriston, Swansea, about 1894.  Him and his common name moved to North Wales around 1905, ahead of a big steelworkers’ strike.  This whole area around John Summers steelworks is massively under threat, April 2016, a century or more of steelmaking in jeopardy.  According to Rhona, Tom’s kids left yonks ago for a new life of similar industry, in Canada.  So what bits of feather was I left gripping on to in the UK?

Tom gets a mention age 24 in his grandpa’s will, where I first heard of him 70 years later in 1992.  A third of that time again has had to elapse before I could catch him once more.

We’re all in the same boat

Big break number 3 was swiftly catching up with Dougie his son on the boat out to Canada (1952) but *not only that*, finding dad Tom on the same boat, and… *not only that*, after my own internal hard-drive warmed up, a thought burst out?  What about the sister Peggy?  Maybe she was on the same boat too?

Margaret on the same boat as her father and brother, 1952

 

And so it proved to be.  The Empress of Canada gave me emigration notes of imperial quality: my struggling hunt for further records failed to keep pace.  The same address is shown, Redhall Avenue, Connah’s Quay.

Tom had married a Cohen in Eccles, which I’d earlier thought impossible, Margaret (Peggy) being born there in 1919.  Figuring out exactly what happened to Margaret Jones was proving a mite tricky ’til I pored over the Empress-ive records and spotted her as Mrs Robson.  There was date-of-birth, names of kids and all with a matching address in Connah’s Quay…  It was 2012, sixty years post emigration.  Little did I know that Peggy, even older than Rhona and 20 years ahead of Joyce, was still living, a quiet retiree in Canada.

Big Break #4

I stewed on the Robson info a little while, 4 years to be precise, as it remained on the back-burner.  I had brazenly told the cousins in Wales it was game set and match, an email having plonked through for Dougie’s son Col.  That branch weren’t playing ball however, and the contact details fizzled away.  I needed another route in.

Sometime in 2014 I tried again, this time focussing on Peggy (by now, deceased).  It was time to get heavy. I dredged the internet, ripped apart the phonebook and pressed search a bunch of times on Facebook, spraying all my clues in neon to get new life out of them, like tired old curtains.

 

Obvious clue: the name

Several years of obvious clues and several years of missing the obvious: Peggy’s boy’s name.  According to the NorthWalesBMD project, he was born Thomas Peter Robson in Flint, a really good name to search.  When I pressed the keys for ‘T_P_R’ Canada, Google warned me to stand back.  Information of an explosive nature was about to be revealed.

Hmmmm.  Margaret J Robson of Calgary?  probated in Maine. I didn’t think so. This was too confusing.  I had fished out gold, but put it back in the watery internet for another two years.  Glug glug.

Big Break #5

Pushy salesman: “In the absence of a new lead, go back to your old ones.”

It was March 2016 and time to find the Canadian cousins: this was getting embarrassing.  Harder problems had been solved and although this was impossible, with the right alchemy and a splash of oxygen, this can be done.  With my new hard-nosed attitude I brought up the Google search from 2 years before.

The ‘J’ I now dismissed like a nearly-dead fly. It could clearly be Jones, Peg’s maiden name.  No problem.  Exactly how many ladies called Margaret had sons of the right name and age in Canada?  I now suspected not many.  Just the thorny issue of ‘Why Maine?’ to put right.

So I took a longer look at the Maine Probates, nosing around the pages of York county, Maine.  I spied a typical set-up for legal docs: the attorney’s office and their long phone number.  A lemon-eating clerk in a will-free office, and the general message of ‘we are closed – to you anyways’.  I idly combed each of those nondescript blue pages, jonesing for a lead.

Ten white pages

Like Hansel stumbling on a witch-free gingerbread trail, there I beheld ten texty scanned-in pages, white in hue, of the estate of Mrs M Robson.  From the bare bones

to considerably more detail at maineprobate.net:

I had gone behind the surface net into the ‘deep web’ where data lies waiting to be awoken.  Whilst the full addresses were nice to see, they are impossible to capture without the correct file id, so I think are pretty safe.  The cover page was lovely but wasn’t clinching it for me.  I continued through.

And there beheld this battery of clinchers:

• Bang – the name of Jones given as likely maiden name
• Bang – the confirmed, matching, date of birth for Margaret

From the Shipping records

From the Probate

• Bang – the confirmed name as plain Margaret

• Bang – an address in Ontario, the region where Margaret first landed

It turns out the connection with Maine was that affordable way for hardworking folk to get a week of sun: timeshares.  A timeshare in Maine, of lobsters and fishing, was what got us done.

Thank you to Ogunquit, Maine for taking me from this

to this

Footnote:

Never forget your Welsh.  The new cousins in Canada are in fact in touch with their Dad’s family, back in Connah’s Quay.  Hopefully they’ll soon be reaching out to us, too.

Signed, sealed, er, where is it?

Like a Bond denouement with minutes on the clock to total annihilation, we are 12 hours away from the ‘destruct’ button on a link to the Harvey family.

In just 12 hours, a certificate will drop through the door.  I’ve not been as excited since my Grade 2 piano aurals hit the mat, some time ago.

Hit the Mat, Mr Paper
Whilst it’s possible for a lady (age 20) to produce two babies in the same year by two different partners during the war…. I am not sure that’s what actually happened.  I think this thought will be ‘slaughtered off’ when the killer certificate hits my mat, 12 hours from now.  Tock tock.

Illegitimate sister, garbled details? Part Two

I was wrong, again
A confident, cocky tone in a blog post is never good.  I am returning to this blog cap in hand, admitting I was wrong.  The illegitimate sister ‘born about 1922’ was indeed born in about 1922.  Was she called Jane or Calista: er, no.  Did she go to Australia, ummmm.  No, to that as well.

From memory to fact
Here were the facts as presented.

‘My sister Jane was born in about 1922 and was sent abroad, to America maybe.  My Mum kept a set of her clothes that she had worn as a girl.’

Maybe the clothes were something like this:

 
One step back
Galling is the word I would use to describe receiving that birth certificate of Calista from 1919 – the girl who went out to Australia from the Clee Hills.  I was so convinced, but actually secretly glad that I was wrong.  It felt too hasty a victory.  The battle was lost but not the war.

It’s how you say it
Jane, Jane, Jane.  There were no Janes in the 1920s.  It just wasn’t in fashion, like Margaret or Gwendoline aren’t today.  But there was a May.  In fact May was the only option at this time.

If you say, May, it sounds like Jane.

 
 Where to now…
And May it seems didn’t go out to Australia, but she did have connections with Ghana.  Now they should be interesting.  We are just waiting for for the birth certificate as proof.  Tick tock.

European Genealogy across 13 countries – a story starting in the Lakes

  I idly wondered whether Arthur Taylor, living in London age 18, might come back to marry in his native Keswick.  He did!

And on clicking behind the link I spy his wife looked like Isabel Kroll.  This didn’t sound like a lasting marriage.  What was he up to?  But I couldn’t find anything more, so gave up on him.

But then I found a reference to a lady living in Italy, who just had to be Arthur’s daughter, and the game was on.  Arthur turns out to be the International YMCA’s ‘man in Italy‘ while Mussolini is at the helm.

It takes me a good year to recover from these Italian revelations before I finally get the will of Arthur Taylor’s daughter, Signora Barone.  I certainly expected that the dalliance with Isabel Kroll would long have past, but concluding Alice’s long and passionate will comes the note from the clerk…

And then, buried in the text, Isabella’s mother is listed with a very English-looking name, Rosalie Stuart-Cowen!  I already knew about Scots in Poland, but Scots and Germans (?) seemed to hold an interesting tale to explore.  Considering I lacked both Isabella’s birth, death and previous marriage, it was remarkable what I eventually crowbarred out of the internet.

Here is Isabella’s first marriage, which I did not find by idle Googling, but only by the specific search indicated.

Here is Isabella’s tree now.

The following countries are covered on the map below
England – where Isabel married in 1907
Denmark – where Isabel’s first husband was born (place given as father’s birthplace in 1920 census for her elder children)
Sweden – where her daughter Anna’s son Hans was a citizen in 1954, likely as an adopted child, and believed to be his final home
Poland – where Isabel’s second husband worked in the 1920s after WW1
Netherlands – where Isabel’s sister Georgina was living until about 1900 (at The Hague)
France – where Isabel’s two elder children (and grandson Hans) were born (Paris, Vaux-sur-Mer)
Italy – where Isabel’s second husband worked in the 1930s and where her younger daughter (Alice) settled (in Sicily)
Switzerland – where Isabel’s mother died in 1890 (unsubstantiated) and where her sister Rosalie died in 1927 and where her sister Georgina married (in Lausanne)
Germany – where Isabel’s sister Rosalie married in 1883 (at Stuttgart), and where she herself was born (source 1920 census), and where her father was born (ibid)
Greece – where her first husband went to live, presumably after separating from Isabel
Canada – where Isabel’s youngest child was born in 1908
USA – where Isabel was living in the 1920 census (Washington DC), while her second husband performed his YMCA duties, and where her two elder children settled, and where her mother was actually born
Brazil – where her grandson Hans (John) came to reside or work in the 1950s

What a surprise to tumble out of a marriage in the Lakes.  Lastly a picture of gorgeous Giarrattana in Sicily:

 This was the second Sicilian connection to emerge.  As well as Il Dottore Barone from Noto, I have Signor Leone from Naro a century before.  Agreeably close to Montalbano’s fictional Vigata, which I watched sorrowfully in the denouement to this Sicilian episode.  But as Sicily recedes, step forward Malta – even further south, as new home for a descendant of Annabella Airey.

1939 Register – wife swap

Mr Richard and Mrs Louisa May Bowman raised four kids together but were never married.

Twenty years earlier, Richard Bowman had married the real Louisa May, and the pair had gone their separate ways.  Richard took up with another Louisa May (not her real name), while the real deal found love in a different part of the country.

The 1939 Register for Kent shows Richard with the fake Louisa May.  When he has a heart attack at the wheel of his lorry, both ladies choose to remarry under the name Louisa May.  This was the first indication of an inaccuracy in the official record – one the registrars would have missed.

I tried to understand how a lady could marry two different men in different areas at the same time, with two separate death records, with ages at least a decade apart.  Before deciding it was impossible!  There had to be two individuals.  Kent Louisa was royally faking it, putting the pretend maiden name on her kids’ birth certificates.

She even stuck to names that the real Louisa had given to her kids.  As the real Louisa was using Bowman for her kids by the new man, and the fake Louisa (calling herself Bowman) was recording the real Louisa’s maiden name on her kids’ birth certificates, and they were BOTH using the same Christian names for their kids – it was a right royal mix-up.

Richard and Louisa May are in Kent in 1939.  The real Louisa was miles away with her new partner.  Richard’s migration path is in orange.

It’s only, as ever, on the fake Louisa May’s deathbed, that honesty prevails.  Well, mostly.  She is still listed as Louisa May Bowman.  She still tells a small porky about where she actually dies.  But the probate entry reveals……

ALSO KNOWN AS Millie!  Then the obituary says she’s Millie, and the burial clerk calls her Millie as well.  There’s no hiding place, girl….

The 1939 Register gave me July 1901 as the birth date for Millie. Searching all the women born July 1901 with the forenames Millie H E yielded only one birth.  I’ve found you, Millie.  But, she disappears utterly from the records, not even showing up in 1911, until she ‘becomes’ Mrs Louisa May Bowman circa 1930.

While the real Louisa has evolved into someone entirely different, quietly playing the piano and nurturing musical talent at another southern location.  Her grandson had no idea of the family in Kent.

Thanks to 1939 Register for quietly resolving these potentially awkward family mysteries.
(Note, as this 90 year-old wife-swap is still pretty recent, Bowman is a pseudonym.)

Getting past missing marriages or incorrect marriages in family history

I have been bedevilled by missing marriages that slow the whole research programme down.  I proved Marjorie Joan Sargeant from Croydon married as Margery J (in distant Plymouth).  I found Stephen N Waller marrying as Stephen N Wallis, Jonathan Gibson as Jonathon Gilson, Marian Thomson as Marianne Thomson; Harriet Hichens as Harriette Hickens; Conrad Spencer as Conrad Spenser.  I observed Ella H marrying as plain Ella, Elizabeth as Lizzie, Samuel as Sam.  Not to mention Miriam C becoming Caroline M and Gladys P becoming Peggy G.  These reversals of forenames can be tricky to spot.  Most times findmypast’s excellent marriage index can help you find these as it automatically looks for initials as well as full names.

The Sargeant marriage was particularly gratifying as I used the birthdate from Ancestry as the key reference, as shown.  Unfortunately it’s not possible to use this approach on findmypast as you need to know the married name of the party – with over a million British surnames to choose from, this could take you a lot of guessing.

The sixteenth letter of the alphabet

I met Joan and Diana, Muriel Haine’s daughters in 1996 in Devon, then in their 80s or approaching that age.  But Muriel was one of 15 Haine children baptised at Churcham, Gloucestershire (one in the ruins) who scattered across the Empire as they buried their parents.  Sure, I don’t expect a huge amount of detail about the boys in South Africa, but I would like to find their children.  We met Ernest Haine’s grandson at Belgo Centraale in London with his charming wife.  But what about Fred Haine’s daughters? I had to wait for the shipping records (link) to confirm their birth years.  I was lucky to find Doreen’s birth (in England) in 1914 but I moved on and missed an important clue.  I tried to work sideways through her now-known mother’s maiden name, Lilian Josephine Dyment of Bridgwater, but that proved a dead end.  Coming back to this record I realised the clue lay in the middle initial.  I had literally worked all other avenues.  When I zoomed in on the middle initial, I knew exactly what that name would be.

I punched those first two names into Ancestry and up came the result I needed – the lady had died in England in the last few years.  I then googled for more information and traced her last address to Sturminster Newton in Dorset, plus an obituary in the Daily Telegraph.  I was then able to check the address on 192.com, find the property on a local plan, and photograph the property with Google Streetview.  I went from knowing absolutely nothing to full information in just a moment.  That letter ‘P’.

Lost memories

I am still cross nearly 20 years later about a missing letter.  My great-grandmother had several cousins and most of them had names that fitted her own social standing – Joyce Summers, Una Hatch, Ellen Glover.  One of these, another Una, wrote to me in 1996 at Burchett’s Green College, Berkshire.  I can just see the letter now, perched behind the bar which was where all student correspondence was kept.  Slipping down behind a steamy dishwasher or falling into a pile of bills.  Never to see the light of day again.

After Una’s death, her son remembered the letter. Yes she had written one, he said, and it had been full of family information.  At the time he hadn’t been interested, but now that he was, could he have a copy of the letter!  I suppose I could fax him an image of a nice clean beer glass, post him a box of big blue cleaning roll, or hand him the keys of the now-closed college for him to search himself.

Hard-to-swallow

It was something of a shock to discover that a large number of Gladys’s cousins weren’t upper middle-class at all.  Some of them weren’t even middle-class.

Much of the blame for this lies on uncle Arthur Smith, who is edited out so fiercely from the family tree, that leaves you wondering if the official records are in error.  Gladys claimed there was only one uncle and he was variously listed as ‘?’ or William. Clearly you weren’t expected to ask too much about him, still less enquire if there was yet another uncle.

But there was, and he’d come to London during the gasworkers’ strikes of the 1890s, to work as a blacklegger.  He stayed long enough to sire 12 children, before allegedly going off to Australia (this story borne out by two separate branches of the family).  It says a lot for the widow that most of the children survived and several fought in the First World War.  They didn’t really leave Bermondsey much, and the thought of them ever meeting their Muswell Hill cousins does leave one pondering.  It would be about as socially awkward as the Edwardians could devise.

A tidal wave of news came pouring in from Bermondsey – I even rang up one of the cousins who lived in the towers near Millwall.  A pint at the Hobgoblin got us going, but I’d need more than a pint to take in 90 years of missing history.  These memories weren’t so much lost as scattered to the four corners of south-east London.

I don’t feel the 92 boxes of Jim Mortimer’s life as trade union leader and Labour Party official fit into my notion of my family at all – yet he had been married to Arthur Smith’s granddaughter.

Hard-to-find

With all this talk of Arthur it was easy to forget there was another brother, William Smith.  What had happened to him?  I knew that he was born in England in 1851, and surprisingly, this was pretty much nearly all that was required to find him – in Jamestown.  Hard-to-find?  I don’t think so.

This time he brought yet another factor into the equation.  Supposing all my calculations are correct, Gladys now numbers among her cousins the wonderfully-named Victoria Ulander, wife of Axel.

A sense of who she was

It bothered me for ages that more and more data was accumulating about the lives of the Chappell children – who were orphaned in 1867 and who did more and more interesting things.  Several new members emerged as well.  All of these were notionally under the auspices of their mother and grandmother Mrs Jane Chappell who survived until 1925 age 95.  This age may not be so remarkable today, but consider her oldest brother left England in 1832 to practically found the colony of Tasmania.  That she survived the majority of her nephews and nieces (one of whom left her a legacy in her will as if resigned to the fact she would live forever).  And because many of the generations rolled around so quickly, there was barely a year after 1900 when some new significant thing didn’t happen.

We got closer to real human memories with a surprise letter from great-granddaughter Eileen.  It shouldn’t have been a surprise as it was in reply to mine- but I was innured to non-response.  I’d phoned great-great-granddaughter Eileen who was interested to see there was this other Eileen.  But other Eileen wrote me screeds and I left it too late to meet her, I think.  Not sure of Jane’s role here, but her eldest son apparently lost her the farm.

James Chappell’s will from 1867 records Thomas Haine as a witness.  And one of the Haine boys later took over his farm, Manor Farm, now the site of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve at Yeovilton.  So if the Chappell boy gambled away the farm, how did one of the Haine’s get it?

58 years later, Jane’s obituary tells us nothing at all – she is absent from it.  The closest we get is her own son’s obituary in Decatur, Illinois.  He’d done well for himself and the paper wrote at his passing (and boy did he look tired) of his venerable mother back in England.  I feel this gave Jane a role and in lieu of photographs, stories, this is at least something.

For other female members in this family, there’s nothing.  I have a character-filled photograph for one, a clearly chequered life for another, a decent obituary here, but for one or two women there’s nowt.

Turning it around

When cousin Joyce died a few years following first contact, my heart sank.  She’d never after all told me anything of her mother’s eight siblings, only that they existed.  I had no names, or if I did that’s all there were.  It was tough to get any information.

One Christmas, 19 years after finding out about them, I decided to interrogate freebmd, and emerge with some credible identifications of the Taylor siblings that I knew about, including Mary L.

Incredulously, I found only one Mary L Taylor matched.  The data seemed to tell me she died in Queensferry, Flintshire in 1951, leaving a will.  That was one sibling sorted.  It was all ok, but everyone was dead.  The one thing Joyce had revealed was a cousin Rhona still up in North Wales.  Combing through all the births in Wales showed only one girl who matched.  Lucky or what?  I did write her a letter, but chances like this needed another approach.  By bicycle.  I cycled off the border hills and into Mold, and was able to get an hour with Rhona at her bungalow.  She even guided me back down the hill into Queensferry as a bonus.

The short of it is that 120 years after Grandpa’s aunt died, the resulting Taylor offspring have now been pinned through stories and photographs and those nearly lost memories have been properly found.

The best things in life are free

It was great to resolve a long standing puzzle concerning my Scotts.  The whole family unit had disappeared and the fairly distinctive names of Edith Maria and Martha Gertrude were yielding absolutely nothing.  I knew that various in the family had gone out to Australia, and decided to test the Australian Death Index 1787-1985 to see who would appear.  Although it’s initially off-putting that you get a ‘deny’ screen and lots of blank details, it’s amazing what you can get.
I reconsidered my information and realised Edith Maria born in Kensington was actually Edith Mary Ann born in Kennington.  I looked for Edith Mary Ann’s death in Australia with parents’ details as given (yellow-underlined).  The maiden name of Scott isn’t shown on-screen but is hidden information in the database.

Fresh from this success, I then thought – well, why not take it to the next level?  What about Edith’s own children?

I then was able to get a tiny bit more information from the Trove newspapers, from the companion Australian Births Index 1788-1922 but this was certainly a Great Leap Forward.  For some data (such as the marriage of Edith Mary Ann’s youngest daughter, 1924) I had to use the Electoral Roll to make an educated guess, and then check the details for sure on the very tight-lipped Victorian BMD index.

I then solved a year-long mystery about the identify of ‘Casie B’.  She had been driving me crazy- was she Charlotte, Catherine, Caroline, Cassie, Cassandra.  Step up, the extremely useful Victoria Passenger Lists 1852-1923.

As you may be able to see from this, the two records broadly match.  The shipping records has Jessie B (alleluia), while the 1881 census entry written 18 months earlier has ‘Casie B’, where I think the C is intended to be pronounced ‘Ch’ (though I can’t think of a single English word that uses this form but the Italian cinto).

It’s then an easy matter to find the girl as Jessie Beatrice in freebmd, and then to go in whichever direction (Trove, the deaths index), to find her death at 43 as Mrs Dunlop widowed mother of two deceased children.

The father of all these children is possibly in Kings Cross England age ’35’ in 1891, though this smacks of coincidence.  He and Mary Ann had another child together after arriving in Australia (who died).  He lived to see all three daughters marry before dying at 53 in Melbourne.

Conversely, his father, Thomas Scott senior was still very much alive back in England and about to move house.  Senior’s will makes no mention of these Australian shenanigans; instead earmarking all the £600 estate for his relative in England, S T Bennell – child of a deceased daughter.  In fact all of senior’s 3 children predeceased him.

So, if anyone is researching Walter Addison Block or Herbert Graves Harrison, Alexander Leonard Turner, Stanley Watson Wray, Hugh Fred Williams Coulter, their wives and families, thank you to those large websites for the free data, and do get in touch.

The last grandchild

I rarely get to do much on my Scotts, the family of James Scott and of Miriam Bond.  We know so little James, though his name was given to several grandchildren and beyond.  A descendant in South Africa, Rev’d L S Creed, baptising his daughter with middle name Scott, 1918, the same one he had.

Then came his will in 1995.  The pitiful estate duty extract on poor-contrast microfilm gives us a wealth of genealogical data.  He names three daughters Betty Haine, Sarah Boyce and Martha Crud.  In addition he names a grandson, and also Francis Scott.  Francis was nominated executor, and revealed as a brother on this tiny scrap of film.

I’d never heard of the Boyces, but the name Crud.  I looked again, could that be…. it was CREED, in fact the name of the main family I was researching!  Betty’s granddaughter married Martha’s grandson sixty years later, and I am their descendant, so this document explains the connection very nicely.

I tracked the Boyces to London, their most prominent son having left an administration.  A trip to Guildhall Library gave me his address, and then, oh joy the 1871 census which led me to descendant Celia with whom I had many years of happy correspondence.

1. Betty had: James, Frances, Miriam (dy); William, Sarah, Mary Ann, Ann, Elizabeth (dsp); Martha, Susanna, Jane (issue). All discovered 1992 and traced, except Elizabeth whose fate, in Port Antonio, Jamaica, I did not learn till 2002.  The clue here being an old newspaper article about William:  ‘As brother-in-law of a West Indian missionary, he fittingly occupied the chair.’  I leapt to the, correct, conclusion that Elizabeth had married a Methodist minister, and found that his movements matched an 1881 census entry for his third wife and issue.  Solved.

2. Martha had Elizabeth (dy); James (?), Ann (dsp); Mary, Thomas, William, Sarah, John (all with issue).  Three were identified prior to 1992 by cousins.  Thomas raised his head later, and was not inked in till 1998, when a census finds him a very old man in Kent.  The final three of Mary, John and Ann were the result of searching for ‘born West Pennard’ on the Ancestry database.  Ann resisted capture until 1901, when she is found living with Sarah’s children as their housekeeper.  Because the original 1901 census production was so dreadful, I missed a lot of clues, it being too expensive to look at the actual records.  Solved bar James.

3. Sarah had Martha, Hannah, Miriam (d in their 20s/30s); Sarah, Elizabeth, Stephen (dsp); James, Francis (issue). All discovered 1995 bar two.  We found Sarah’s marriage in the Ancestry/LMA index, but Elizabeth’s marriage has so far only been indexed at the GRO.  I solved her only in 2012.  So it Sarah and her surviving children went to London in about 1830.  We do not have records for her husband in the capital but I think he was there.  Two nephews plus a niece, later came to London.  Now solved.

found in Bradford

Sarah Ann Shields is living happily in Westmorland in 1871, but then pulls off a very good disappearing act.  Her father’s will does fill in the gaps, as he names John Barnie as an executor, and I believe son-in-law.  There is no mention of John Barnie marrying a Shields, except on familysearch (image1), and then we can piece together that Sarah must have married the schoolmaster in Bradford of all places before going up to Edinburgh.  The Scottish census gives her birthplace as England.  Although she dies in her mid thirties, she does have family in the Rutherglen area of Glasgow.

Update 2014: I arrive at the home of their great granddaughter clutching a pack of frozen peas, having been nearly sliced in two by a crazed woman from Luton. The Barnie family had tried to find Sarah’s origins but were hampered by not knowing her birthplace. They might have located the Atkinson first marriage, but as Sarah’s birth record apparently occurs in London (actually she was registered correctly in Westmorland but as Shield), they had no idea of the Northcountry origins.

double-proof for the Attenboroughs of Brigstock

This census entry confirmed the Attenborough of Brigstock connections to my Huttons.

gotcha- marriage of Eleanor from Windermere

I shouldn’t have panicked ‘losing’ Eleanor Lewis.  Although her name is relatively common, I had her birthplace of Windermere up my sleeve.  But you can’t rely on that, as what if she’d died soon after marriage, or a variant of the birthplace been given in a census?  I already had spotted her sister Isabella in the 1911 Blackburn census, and found a marriage there, so I knew straight away the circled entry was for my relative.  Her daughter died nearly a hundred years later nearby, unmarried.

John Fry in Canada

thanks to Automated Genealogy for helping me find John in 1911.  His name was Maidment and the name of his wife matches his marriage to Lucy Maud Perrett 1910 (freebmd), and that of his daughter matches family records.  She is supposed to have become Joan Pender or Pinder but we can’t find her family after this.