Who Exactly are Rachel's Kids? A 1911 Mystery.

Take a look at this pair of census entries lovingly curated for you.

The couple concerned marry in 1908 in Builth, and the 1939 register for Bristol, lately released, reveals a daughter Heddus Rachel born 1919 in Bristol (deceased), who suffered a family tragedy.  We'd prefer not to contact this branch.  Looking at the census we see that two children are listed, but where are they!  They will be gone from the family home by 1939 and we do not have any family wills to help us.  Also - the various obituaries for the Roberts family members in Bristol steadfastedly omit our missing two.

Combing through all the births in Builth Wells from 1908 to 1911 we home in on apparent 'twins' Eira and Melfyn Powell born early in 1911.  Sure enough, neither one appears in the census with alternative parents, and Melfyn goes on to become a baptist minister with a connection to the Bath/Bristol area.  This sounds highly likely as Rachel's brother and nephew were both baptist ministers in Bristol.  Eira is a mystery until we find her marriage under 'Powel' which reveals her date of birth to be different from Melfyn's.  So, not a twin after all.  Coupled with the fact she stayed in Builth, she is eliminated.

So who is the missing (elder) sibling to Melfyn?  We have just two likely years to search, births in 1909 and births in 1910, and this time we home in on BRISTOL.

I count up 27 possible Powell births in Bristol. I can eliminate Maurice Vyvyan Powell (1909) as he is an illegitimate relative on a completely different branch whose son used to live ten doors away from me.  That just leaves 26.  It's time to harness a splash of intuition to speed up the process.

Although many of these Powells in Bristol are likely to be of Welsh origin, mine had so recently left, their hair likely still smelt of Welsh rain. .... My main candidate slid rather than jumped off the page, being Gwenyth Joyce (1910), who it turned out was a full 16 months older than Melfyn despite her birth being registered just a year prior to his.

My weak theory that Gwenyth was the missing Powell gained traction when, like Melfyn, there was no trace of her in 1911.  Finding her marriage in Bristol gave no extra bite as unlike the brother she was already born in Bristol, so the marriage was hardly proof.

Worriting away at Gwenyth and keeping her on the Searchlist eventually paid off.  Whilst Gwenyth's address in 1939 appears to bear no relation to her 'mother''s address at the same time (in Baptist Mills), persistence was about to be rewarded.  By the way, whoever said patience is a virtue was not a family historian - that sounds awfully too much like sitting around on your B-hind, while another's persistence and impatience is about to win through.

I had already gone deep with Gwenyth - finding her marriage, her 1939 entry, her husband's death (not easy given the name of Smith) and now I checked out her husband's probate entry.

Picture my surprise when we get a match.

In both cases, 1939 entry for Gwenyth's mother and 1963 entry for Gwenyth's husband - the same precise address is given: Seymour Road, Bishopston.  Despite the married name of Smith, I have just found family members on Facebook, and there are both Scandinavian and Baptist connections (again) to bolster up the family tree.

All thanks to a couple of squiggles in 1911 indicating Rachel Powell, formerly Roberts, had unknown children born 'somewhere in the world' within a vague timespan.

Now to send a second letter to the Roberts family researcher who lives 5 miles away as I'd like to make contact there, and can only imagine my previous letter got eaten by a hungry hound.

Genealogy Potluck Picnic: Creating Speculative Searches to Find Missing Records Online

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.

Smiths Saga: Let's don't hide let's seek

What a year! I have to look back and think, did I just do all that? I'm referring to my Smiths, George, William, Arthur, Ellen and all the others. They've all been sewn up.

That's right. All the Smiths coming down from Robert Smith, born 1790 in Wymondham, Norfolk are gathered up, spotted on the map and thoroughly accounted for. James Robert, present sir! Mabel Flo, here mister! William. William? Speak up I can't hear you very well across the Atlantic.

There's Tel who works for Virgin Media, George the gardener in Carshalton, George the coachman in Islington, George the labourer in rural Norfolk. Edward who saw the war through, bombs and all, in Bethnal Green.

How is this even possible? Isn't Smith supposed to be *the* most ornery name to research. Folk shudder at the work involved, I'm told. It's not a good name, say others.

Well I think Smith is a fantastic name. Not only were their crisps good in the 80s, square and crunchy, but the genealogical challenge has nearly been maxxed. One wrong turn and you're heading for the wall. A brick wall. Oh.

There is just one of those: Laura. Laura, Laura. Have you not heard us calling? Why are you still playing hide and seek in the woods 140 years later. Dinner is definitely ready. You've totally got the best hiding place, so congrats. Now come out!

I absolutely love when people say, oh that's now become so long ago that you'll never solve that one. Errrr. I'm not going to lie, I enjoy proving that's false. I loved finding William Smith born in England, 1851. Easy! And Charlotte Smith born in 1880, harder! But Laura needs to appear, or we'll just cheat and use DNA to sort her out. Yes your story is obviously *too boring*, I'm turning you over to the science guys.

Charlotte rocks. Ok, turns out she wasn't exactly a nice person, but her family are just so delightful. I met up with them earlier this month for a barbie, after one last effort to find them proved successful.

I have to say that thanks to all these cousins (except one!), I'm proud to be a Smith researcher and I'd consider printing this on a t-shirt for all to see.

Solving a Smith puzzle... using the worst English census!

Let me begin by confirming this was a real puzzle. I had *no* clue where Catherine Smith (born 1785) originated, and judging by her early death, she'd perished long before Victoria had even glanced at her throne.  Her granddaughter another Catherine is given in the above census, but we'll get to that.

I needed to explain the origins of Catherine Smith, as it looked dangerously possible that one of my Welsh fisher-widows could be responsible*, or some other woman in England, Wales or Scotland.

The 1841 census is the worst of the UK censuses, as the image shows, with hardly any detail at all. More often it creates even more questions, that can perhaps never be answered. But I would have been glad for its help today. Sadly, Catherine's early death rules her out from even this most basic of lists.  She lies buried at Cardiff in 1829, far far too early.

Little did I know that there was a nice little trail, a useful path, which if I found it, would take me right to the place and time of her baptism. This Smith had a definite point of origin.

The beginnings of the path lay with her daughter Elizabeth Hogg who seemingly married a Cornishman, Thomas Quick. Thomas and Elizabeth Quick are living together in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in that most terrible of censuses, the 1841.  There it is: above.

I would never have found them there except for a quaint forum concerning Cornish matters, of the name Azazella. My paths first crossed with Azazella some 20 years ago in the dawn of the internet.

Azazella's elves had no clue about the Smiths, but they've sure sewn up poor Thomas Quick. His life was an open book. Although they didn't have the crucial 1841 reference in Newcastle, their notes helped me find it.  They also supplied the news that Elizabeth Hogg had her daughter baptised Catherine Smith Quick...

Listed with the Quicks at Newcastle was plain William Smith with a rough age, useless occupation and no hint of marital status. What it did offer was the initial 'S' standing for Scottish-born.

The path now led me to the very next census where searching for Smith born in Scotland showed only one William still in the town, who had very helpfully just married, a lady who helped him run a pub. The marriage record for the 1840s gives his father's name (Ralph Smith) and so I was arrived at births of all the Smith siblings in Pitlivie, County Angus, including our original Catherine (1785).

Catherine Smith baptised 1785 Pitlivie, daughter of Ralph Smith

Probably the most frustrating Smith enquiry I've dealt with, now solved.  Thanks to compelling circumstantial evidence from several British port towns, linked by a seemingly dull entry from the worst British census. 

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*Catherine Rees born 1753 just outside Neath had a period unaccounted for following the death of a husband, the fisherman W Smith in the 1780s.  Because her son married a Hogg and the above Catherine married a Hogg too (living in the same small parish in Wales!), there was a real danger that my Catherine Rees could have given birth to an illegitimate Catherine in 1785, Wales.  Thankfully her dignity now remains intact.