or Inspiration in Family History
In this day and age we live with a multitude of resources at
our finger-tips, some would say too many.
There are 55 million records for William Jones on Ancestry, and 100 million entries for Elizabeth
Smith, for example.
With all this content, I never want to leave holes in the middle of my family tree. I'm always on the look-out for something to
move the story forward and today I'm making the case for good old-fashioned guesswork - supposition, if you will. I'll show how using your intuition, and
posing 'what if?' questions is a valuable dish to
bring to your internet meal.
Our first two cases come
from Wales. Nowhere is 'just supposing' more needed, with a distinct shortage of names, few middles and a lack of other identifying criteria make progress a big challenge - until now!
What if.... family
rumour was right after all?
When my mother's third cousin Sue let me see the family
bible in Wales, 1997, I was pretty happy.
At last we'd get some clues about older members of the family, who were lost in the midst of time.
She married a Hubbard
in Swansea.
She was born in Marloes, and her daughter Mary will be missing from the family home age 22..
These rumours from the family
were just not helping. There was no
trace of Mary or Ann with the information provided from the bible, in the census and in death records. Was it plain wrong?
Frustrated at the poor quality
information about Mrs Hubbard I parked these notes. One day,
after coming back from my Aunt's house and seeing a copy of the rumours, I gave
in and clicked on the nine possible marriages in Wales, and there in front of
my eyes, was the groom, Mr Hebbard! (Mary had lopped five years off her age and faked her spinsterhood to make sure the marriage to this teenager went ahead. Facts that were missing from the family bible!)
Ann Francis (born 1815) was still a puzzle. In desperation, I looked at a map of Merthyr
Tydfil, where she must have gotten married, hoping it would somehow help. I noticed a community called Morlais. What if Ann's birthplace had been
misrecorded as Morlais, not Marloes?
Sure enough in 1871, the enumerator makes that exact error, and she is
solved:
Mrs Ann Jenkins, age
55, born Morlais Pembrokeshire
But now there was the problem of Ann's missing daughter Mary
Jenkins, who was not at home in the census aged 22. What a common name! How on earth was I going to find her? I used my knowledge of the community to help
me. Nobody was going to afford servants
or have an unmarried woman laying around the house. If she wasn't at home, there were two
options: dead or married. So, let's
see if she was married. There were 40
married Marys in Merthyr of the right age in 1861 on FindMyPast - step away from the census,
that's too many! Yet, a simple click
showed the first Mary had a baby boy Thomas Francis Bromham, bearing the family
name of Francis. Logic had paid off, but
with the downside that I needed to fork out £9.25 in the form of a certified
marriage document as proof.
Family rumour had been correct, and with some intuition
about a tired census-taker muddling the place names, and the unlikelihood of a
young unmarried woman floating around a town of ironworkers, our three
mysteries had been solved.
Just suppose...
there was a way in?
Still thinking about Wales, I was visiting a cloudy Black Sea
coast town in the summer of 2012. Hillary
Clinton, who herself has ancestry from Merthyr Tydfil, had recently honoured an
American study area in the town. Around
its black formica tables were gathered a number of Brits and Americans, soaking
up the free WiFi and congenial company. But
my attention was elsewhere.
I was deep in nineteenth-century Wales. I had fought tooth and nail to establish some
kin of my ancestress Ann Morgan, born 1761, and I wasn't about to let them slip
away. I needed answers about Ann's five
nieces, the Rees girls. The way I saw it
there was just one way forward. Just
suppose a Rees girl had decided to honour their father, Morgan Rees, and give his names to one of her sons? I
thought it was definitely worth a speculative try, on FamilySearch.
As if by magic, an entry appeared, Morgan Rees Price born in
the Vale of Neath, 1810, son of Jenkin Price and his wife Jennet, formerly Rees. This couple have quite a story to tell,
running away to Bristol to marry and then becoming proprietors of Rutland Arms
in the heart of Swansea. I would never
have found them without this imaginative work-around. They will at some point get their own article.
I later repeated this strategy (2016) to find what became of her cousin, another Jennet - this time I thought she might have a son called Anthony. She did. So after eight years, I had a workable line taking me from Gwenllian Rees born 1751 to the Mid Wales Hotel in Knighton, Radnorshire 1930s and from this to relatives in the town this very day.
What if... I've been
looking in the wrong country
Francis Harris, born Cornwall 1818, had been on my tree for
years, but I wasn't convinced I had his story straight. Living an ordinary life in a Cornish
town? I felt that my Harrises
would work up a bit more wanderlust than that.
When I spotted another Francis born in the same year, I was even more
suspicious I had mistaken identity. I
got my first wind of a missing uncle, and I was determined to hunt him down!
He flourished in the 1840s and at this time, America was definitely
calling. Not to mention Oz, Mexico and
anywhere with ground worth mining. So what
if Francis had come to the States and had a family out there – after all I
realised, his sister wouldn't be far away.
How come he had slipped through the records! And here was the little entry I needed, the
1850 census from FamilySearch for Grant county, Wisconsin, a well known Cornish hang-out:
Even though there's nothing to trace this man to Cornwall,
his wife Phillippi Rowe can be directly linked to Crowan, Cornwall, about 2
miles from where Francis was born.
Hmm! I think this speculative
search was successful. But that wasn't
all, dunking his name back into Google's watery index and there is plenty more
on our uncle...
His 3x great-grandson Jonah Harris and myself exchanged
emails over Christmas last year with snaps of our respective family gatherings
and the food we were having (Brits on the left).
"What if?" had worked out for us.
What if... a
puzzling initial could lead me to a missing cousin
Percy Creed Bell was born in 1874 at Abersychan, South Wales
and disappears from every record available aged 16.
It is very odd to realise that his closest living relative is now my
grandmother (and a chap called Alec in Glastonbury). I found a trace of a plausible fellow out in
the western States, name of Percy H. Bell, real estate agent, who sometimes
gave Wales as his birthplace. Could this
be him? I could find nothing at all to
link the two men, except that no other record matched either one of them.
I got to thinking about the 'H'. No offence, but Creed is a terrible middle
name and maybe Percy had thrown it overboard along with his British identity.
Percibly.
So, what if, he was really the Percy H. Bell all
along? And what then, might the H
be? By the way, this story hasn't even begun. With Google's search bar waiting, I realised
his grandma's maiden name, Hammond, would fit the gap. And so I entered his name into Google...
Poor Percy Hammond Bell existed alright. As a dapper young Brit, with soft pale skin
(if he was anything like my Great-grandpa), he was learning Cantonese in rough
parts of Los Angeles when he witnessed the slaying of Chinese gangland boss
Wong Wee Chee, 1896. The name of the
murderer was whispered in his young ear, which sealed his fate. LA was not going to be a nice place for
Percy. No sir.
SENSATION: KING-PIN WITNESS TESTIFIES IN GANGLAND MURDER
TRIAL
The trial papers gave his parents' location as Ipswich,
England, which fitted the facts. Percy
never again lived in LA. His elder son
was swept away in the Columbia river, 1920, and he himself was convicted of
fraud ten years later in Oregon. The
whole family died out, leaving as mentioned, my grandmother as theoretical next-of-kin.
Just suppose....
the shipping list had a sister on it?
When Doug Jones sailed to Toronto in 1952, his parents came
too. I noted down all the details and
very quickly had an email address for his son in Ontario, but nothing more came
of that, and the email address no longer works.
Back to the drawing-board, then.
I got to thinking, as Doug's parents had come out with him,
what about sister Peggy, just suppose she had come out as well. She had definitely gone to Canada, according
to the nosey-parker relatives back in Wales.
I had no easy way of finding Margaret Jones born 1919 and
known as Peggy, but what if she was on that same boat, the Empress of
Canada, the same day, with her parents and brother? That could reveal plenty. It was worth a search, on Ancestry, surely?
From this:
To this:
So, we were correct. Margaret
Jones became Margaret Roberts. From the
most common name in Wales to the sixth most common – progress! This slender thread was enough to find her
grandchildren in the Rocky Mountains, see Riddle of the Timeshare for more. Without the helpful search of
migration records, I'd still be scratching my head at Liverpool Docks.
For more successful speculation (after all, searching is
free!) look out for the next article: What if the impossible is possible?
For more blog entries on this theme see: Genealogy Blog Potluck Picnic hosted by Elizabeth O'Neal.
And why not tarry awhile here on my blog: there are some great articles here and some terrible ones too. Try the Popular Posts as a starting point.
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