Zig-zag

 In First Steps in Family History, Eve McLaughlin explains that this hobby is not quite ‘push a button and out it all comes’. Thirty years later, I am glad that this remains the case. All too often, by following linked records, and somnolescently adding easy-fit jigsaw pieces into the family tree, the challenge is missing. There is no bite. In this piece, I look at examples where irony, clever ancestors, bold peregrinations and past customs dictate that, to complete the puzzle, you must spot the zig-zags.

 

Here follow some cases where life and research are non-linear. It is for you, the reader, to judge whether they fit the bill.

 

Servant girl

Ann Welch started her life as farm servant, skivvy, bridesmaid to her younger sister, fond aunt, shoulder to cry on when the sister died, ring on her finger at 38 marrying the wealthy farmer (both still grieving her sister), exile as the parish rise against the couple, her infant daughter still buried there, and death, for Ann, in distant Kent. Rich, fat, and 50, the only witness on the death certificate? A young 15 year-old servant girl.

 

Hide-and-seek

I could find deaths for neither Dorothy Wood, of Hamilton, Scotland, nor for her sister, Eva James, in Farnham, Surrey. It turns out of course that Eva had died in Hamilton, whilst her sister had passed away in Aldershot, a few miles from Farnham!

 

Driving me crazy

Proving that my Thomas Creed, born 1811, was really the engineer of the same name was a headache. What I really needed was a census specifying his birthplace as ‘West Pennard’, I was not going to accept ‘Somersetshire’, which the 1881 had provided. I drove to Seaton to speak with his great-granddaughter, to Taunton to check the parish registers, and then finally to the local LDS family history library who had the 1891 census (with index) for Woolwich which gave me the proof I needed.

 

Getting the bride

William Haine, farmer from East Pennard, emigrated to eastern Ohio in 1832, taking an elliptical route through the Hudson River (and accompanied by a cousin he detested). He found land, cleared a portion of it, went home, got the bride, and returned, raising a huge family and running a flour mill.

 

Traveller

Isabel Stuart Kroll was half-American and born in 1860 in Stuttgart. She married in France and England, before returning to the U.S. (her husband working in Washington), but later settling in northern Italy. Her family events encompass at least 10 European countries.

 

Eliza’s Return

Eliza Hunter, born 1825 in Redruth, emigrated to Adelaide, where sadly her husband and son both perished. She returned to her brother’s doleful hotel, a squat stone edifice on the Exeter Road. Give the girl a few years, and she’s back, remarrying and heading out to Australia. (Her descendants had no reason to suspect the double emigration until we compared notes.)

 

Embracing the zag

In my research, I can think of examples where the zig-zagging was more virtual than real, or where I, the researcher was the one taking the pass less travelled. The rapid remarriages of Mrs Sarah Atkinson and Mrs Ann Penny took me by surprise, with fairly common names and shifting across county lines, they kept me guessing quite a while.

 

Twice I have found myself taking a research path and landing back on the same internet page where I’d started. John Lynn, an orphan boy of 12 is living in Buffalo, New York, 1880, with apparent strangers. Only by casting my eyes upwards can I see the fairy godmother hiding in the leafy street: his mother’s cousin Anna, the go-to fixer, is a few doors away on the same sheet of the census. Meanwhile, Captain Rees Rees of the Barque the Eliza Ann, was inches down from his sister ‘Eliza’, Mrs Pengilly, in Waggy Wagstaffe’s excellent pages about Neath and the vicinity. Both had left Wills proven at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury in the early 1800s. But in order to ‘find’ Rees, I had to purchase a Will, take the bus to Cardiff, obtain some further Wills, before the truth dawned.

 

Concluding..

And, lastly, I have fond memories of attempting to assist my cousins, in 1997, who were much further along with the Trewhella family tree than I. Kathie in California, Ian in Melbourne and myself in Devon, were sending out a maze of emails to each other, zig-zagging across the night sky, as we traded census, probate and parish register specifics. It’s such a long time ago that when I downloaded the resulting family tree, at 1.4MB it was just a shade too big to fit on my 3½ inch floppy disk.

 

If the road to research was easy, straight and direct, would we bother engaging with family history? I am grateful for the zigs and the zags of the journey, that makes reconstructing the story all the more rewarding.