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

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 (below) to confirm their birth years.

As you can see I was lucky to find Doreen’s birth (in England) in 1914 but I moved on and missed an important clue.  I jigged around with the name of Dyment, looking for more but that was 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: PR_ _ _ Y, an old family name.

I punched those first two names, Doreen P_____,  into Ancestry Death Indexes (as firstnames) and up came the result I needed – the lady had died in England in the last few years despite living almost everywhere else in between.  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.  An email from family took a week to come trundling in with all the missing news. I went from knowing absolutely nothing to full information in just a moment.  Guessing the 16th letter.

Jumping the gap

To me, one of the excitements about family history is finding a person in one record and then spotting that person in another record.  This may seem pretty prosaic!  For a long time I believed I needed to find that person in another country, but actually, that proved to be excitement mixed with disappointment.  I can never do as much justice to a family tree overseas as when the family ends up in England: should the line go off to America or Australia it gets a little dull after a couple of generations, being further removed from 'the jump-off'.

Probably the exceptions to 'boring Aust-america' are when we are following the female line, following a story, where there is a strong family connection or where they lived in an evocative place, such as early 1870s Utah or the Wisconsin big woods.  Should the family come BACK to England that can make for a good tale, particularly as British records may be even better than corresponding ones overseas.  (For example Mullins Symes and siblings were born in Ohio according to the British censuses, but there isn't a single American record confirming this.)

In contrast, if someone migrates to Lincolnshire or Brecknockshire I'm transported with delight: a whole new county and area to explore; new settlements to see through the eyes of my relatives.

I particularly find it wonderful where an ancestor has you weaving through a sea of records like a Turkish bazaar chase , only to have them quietly sipping tea at home by the time you do finally catch up with them.  A case in point is Ann Hooper who marries twice in quick succession, on one occasion in Bristol, and then is away abroad in the next census, before finally, in 1881 letting us in to her Wiltshire farmhouse, twenty years after we'd last seen her with her parents.  Unfortunately she leaves no family now, but it was still important to resolve her, and to have the enjoyable hunt.

findagrave helps find the female line in Graceland

I had a blockage investigating the female line, with its new lease of life in Illinois.  There was Agnes White, but who had she married: Graceland Cemetery records had the following entry, for Mrs Rose, formerly White which took me a step close in extending the female line.  Agnes had three daughters - but where are they now?

Update: eldest girl Maxine has her obituary on genealogybank, which leads me to the other sisters. The middle girl is indeed continuing the Murrow line.

Faith, Hope and Ancestry

I'm just so glad to have solved this puzzle, and found a title for the post which really does fit the facts, as you'll see.

I don't care if it seems I'm singing the praises of Ancestry.com. Because perhaps I am! Much as I'm annoyed with the cynical moneymakers at an extraordinary url in itself,
The proprietors of mf.com (that's Ancestry) have run a pretty effective dragnet over the 19th century. Your ancestor was living in a cave with no roads nearby to escape any entry in their database.

My three Welch sisters ran the water mill at Alhampton maybe 15miles south-west of Bath after their widowed father's death (1880), then they drop right off the radar in 1884. It was all change. Eldest girl gets married and kind of retires, dying with no clues. One girl marries (age 31) and my guess is emigrates somewhere although with the other sister.

I was beginning to wonder which uninhabited island they'd colonised when the answer came from searching All Names on Ancestry . . . New Zealand!

Middle girl Jane (thank goodness) pops up on the newly released electoral rolls down there, as, on closer inspection does her married sister Louisa Ann Smith. Yeh - I'd not have spotted her so easy.

But Louisa was my real target. Just 31 when she married there was a real hope that she might have family. Considering her backstory, I really needed her to have family.

(Her own mother, a lifelong family servant was never supposed to get married but at pushing 40 'stepped in' to help her sister's widowed husband out and ended up married, but also ostracised. Louisa the youngest was taught her letters and helped run a school in Stroud before taking on the watermill.  Atta girl.  But where were they?  Was this the end of the road)

Meanwhile in New Zealand,...
Hope arrived. What an apposite name for the Smiths's eldest child. We now see that Jane, Louisa and Mr Smith sailed almost immediately the minister closed the wedding service. Paperspast tells us they arrived in Christchurch 1884 only to jump on board another vessel going along the coast to Lyttleton. Mr Smith was I believe a grocer.

The NZ birth indexes to my joy listed Hope and Faith as the names of the first two Smith babies. Then followed Ruby and a fourth daughter - with a somewhat less exciting name, sadly.

The trail limped on (I'm not sure how) to Sydney, where I finally arrived at the door (via Facebook) of a descendant.... Huzzah.

Update: I'm meeting one in England in six weeks [August 2015], who was held as a baby by her great grandfather, the very Mr Smith who emigrated with Louisa in 1884.

Note: Ann Feltham (1810-1862) is a Cinderella story. Whilst her daughter Louisa must have had it tough losing mother age 8, going on to school in distant Stroud, and then running a watermill with her sisters, now orphans, in her 20s, she was a true Victorian - setting out for New Zealand in 1884. The story nearly never began. Ann Feltham (her mother) witnessed almost every single marriage going - cousins, aunt, younger sister. She's shown in old letters as caring for her aged uncle. But when her sister dies, suddenly in 1844 marriage comes a-knocking. She settles at Broadfield Down as a farmer's wife, where Louisa arrives in 1853. But Ann was almost certainly banned from returning to Ditcheat, where she had buried a child, and where her own mother had wobbled up the aisle just 8 days before her own birth. Visiting another big farmhouse, this time in Kent, as a guest, not as a servant, she likely had too much cream and died. Ironically it was a 15 year-old domestic servant girl who found her, the rest of the family being out.