Search This Blog

Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts

17 Feb 2015

Will: 'You still need me'

Some wills are great.  And some don't tell you anything at all.
I had been waiting for the Norris will for a while - safe in the knowledge it'd fix a few mysteries for me.  Nope.  We still have no idea what happened to the nephew that had the papermill in Australia.

This week at exactly midnight - eleven wills dropped into my inbox.  I was already asleep (brownie points there), but at 7am you bet I woke up fast.  A whole bunch of them were frustrating or just plain brief, but the Edith Taylor will was surely the best of the bunch.

The last known of three siblings - my question was 'who is going to get your money?'  Not only does she start me on a hunt for her globe-trotting twin brother, but she throws me a nice chewy bone naming some of her cousins' kids as well.

Of course the price has changed.  What I spent in those precious dawn seconds, was what it cost me to get 2 years' worth of wills at one a week, back in the old days.  Well, my old copies aren't going anywhere, and aren't telling me much of anything new either.

When it comes to solving tricky family puzzles: 'Will', I definitely still need you.

Disclaimer: I didn't actually go to Italy.

1 Jun 2011

Crimes and Rimes

Mary Creed was born in a village near Glastonbury in 1810. She was the last of her siblings to fall to the power of a findmypast search. I found a possible marriage at Pylle, Street on the Fosse, a parish which does not hand across data readily. I ran some possible names through findmypast, and Rimes came up with a matching entry. Mary had married Daniel Rimes, likely while in service in the village. They'd had a large family and bounced around the villages seemingly getting poorer with each passing census. I realised that Julia Amelia one of their several girls was known to me, being housekeeper for many years to Rufus Maidment in fact we now know they were cousins. In the fuss of the 1901 census release I never looked at the original document scans and so missed Julia here, where she's clearly listed as cousin. In fact her middle name was Creed which would have been a big giveaway, had she used it. Grandson Ernest Rhymes was on the board of a Seventh Day Adventist sanitorium in Napa Valley California living in the idyllic surrounds of St Helena later running a small business I think selling smoothies. The grandsons in Australia did the name proud played cricket entered themselves clearly on Trove the newspaper archive, and have lately held reunions between the Sydney and Adelaide branches of the family. In short it is a series of research crimes which kept me from knowing this family sooner!