I predict a baptism

Sometimes you can guess a record's existence before ever you get proof.  George Scott of Butleigh had a daughter Miriam born 1818.  Odd, as this was the name of his uncle's wife, who had died before he was even born.  Unless perhaps there had been a 'middle Miriam' - for example, a sister of George.  And so it proved.  There were two, in fact: Miriam Scott 1791 and then Miriam Scott 1794-1818 were born shortly after their uncle's wife had died. This last Miriam passed away shortly before the birth of the girl in 1818.

The female line of the Scott sisters

Betty and Sarah Scott between them had 14 daughters, but none have a line to continue.  Susanna's great-grandson died in 2001, the last of her female line.  While her sister Martha's female line died out ten years before, despite going a generation deeper into modern times.

Martha was the bearer of the line through her eldest daughter Mary, herself having four daughters, but only her youngest, who sailed for Adelaide aged 17, another Martha, can have family.

We wish that line luck.  To find the line in any numbers in England, we have to go back to the 1690s.  Miriam Bond had a niece, though, Anna Feltham who wandered up the aisle to marry three days shy of childbirth.  The line continues through her in NSW, Kimberley South Africa and the States.

The last grandchild

I rarely get to do much on my Scotts, the family of James Scott and of Miriam Bond.  We know so little James, though his name was given to several grandchildren and beyond.  A descendant in South Africa, Rev'd L S Creed, baptising his daughter with middle name Scott, 1918, the same one he had.

Then came his will in 1995.  The pitiful estate duty extract on poor-contrast microfilm gives us a wealth of genealogical data.  He names three daughters Betty Haine, Sarah Boyce and Martha Crud.  In addition he names a grandson, and also Francis Scott.  Francis was nominated executor, and revealed as a brother on this tiny scrap of film.

I'd never heard of the Boyces, but the name Crud.  I looked again, could that be.... it was CREED, in fact the name of the main family I was researching!  Betty's granddaughter married Martha's grandson sixty years later, and I am their descendant, so this document explains the connection very nicely.

I tracked the Boyces to London, their most prominent son having left an administration.  A trip to Guildhall Library gave me his address, and then, oh joy the 1871 census which led me to descendant Celia with whom I had many years of happy correspondence.

1. Betty had: James, Frances, Miriam (dy); William, Sarah, Mary Ann, Ann, Elizabeth (dsp); Martha, Susanna, Jane (issue). All discovered 1992 and traced, except Elizabeth whose fate, in Port Antonio, Jamaica, I did not learn till 2002.  The clue here being an old newspaper article about William:  ‘As brother-in-law of a West Indian missionary, he fittingly occupied the chair.’  I leapt to the, correct, conclusion that Elizabeth had married a Methodist minister, and found that his movements matched an 1881 census entry for his third wife and issue.  Solved.

2. Martha had Elizabeth (dy); James (?), Ann (dsp); Mary, Thomas, William, Sarah, John (all with issue).  Three were identified prior to 1992 by cousins.  Thomas raised his head later, and was not inked in till 1998, when a census finds him a very old man in Kent.  The final three of Mary, John and Ann were the result of searching for 'born West Pennard' on the Ancestry database.  Ann resisted capture until 1901, when she is found living with Sarah's children as their housekeeper.  Because the original 1901 census production was so dreadful, I missed a lot of clues, it being too expensive to look at the actual records.  Solved bar James.

3. Sarah had Martha, Hannah, Miriam (d in their 20s/30s); Sarah, Elizabeth, Stephen (dsp); James, Francis (issue). All discovered 1995 bar two.  We found Sarah's marriage in the Ancestry/LMA index, but Elizabeth’s marriage has so far only been indexed at the GRO.  I solved her only in 2012.  So it Sarah and her surviving children went to London in about 1830.  We do not have records for her husband in the capital but I think he was there.  Two nephews plus a niece, later came to London.  Now solved.

Tracing Wilcie Urch across husbands and seas

Wilhelmina Margarina Urch was born in Ireland 1875, and these notes follow my tracing her, from the 1901 census, through to her birth record, a choppy crossing of the Atlantic, and switching husbands on arrival.  It was nice to find the distant 1910 census entry of steely Ohio obliquely referencing her father's birth in England (at pretty Cossington) and mother's apparently in Ireland - which was significant information, if true.  There are plenty of Urch cousins who knew about auntie Wilcie, if not her actual antics.  The only real puzzle is an older one, if the boy born at Cossington in 1832 was the grandson of James Lucas of Baltonsborough.

finding that marriage before 1837

Clues lurked like chirpy birds around my family tree, but I still hadn't worked out who Mary Creed, born 1811 West Pennard had married.  I plugged the names into the Somerset Marriage Index, now online at findmypast, and only the marriage at Pylle 1835 seemed to fit.  I looked at children baptised at Pylle 1835-1841 as shown on familysearch, and the name Rhymes came up.  When I searched for Mr Rhymes marrying in 1835, here comes the man, with the reference exactly matching Mary's, telling me he was the groom.  The census confirmed Mary's birthplace.  That just leaves one of the nine Creed siblings yet to find, and I believe he died in America as a young man.

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.

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!

Celtic connections

I have the following connections with Scotland:
1. Stephen and Ann Read, a soldier who worked at Stirling Castle and retired to Glasgow.  Their son-in-law was Postmaster General of Straits Settlements about 1910 and then at Glasgow.
2. John Wood of Hamilton, who married in Surrey to Theodora and whose children were born in Hamilton.  Only one decided to come back and live there.
3. Dr William Lyall of Edinburgh who married in Bromyard Worcs to Marion and had several children.
4. Robert Park of Edinburgh who married in Dorset to Augusta and whose children all married in Scotland though two moved on, one to Cheltenham, one to Nyborg Denmark having married a corn merchant.

I have the following connections with Ireland:

1. Rev'd William Lea, born in England, married Burton-on-Trent to Elizabeth and who came to Ireland to be the clergyman of Foxhall, Co Longford. Source: googlesearch, Irish census
2. My grandfather, born in Stockwell, descends from Walsh, Dawson, Cleary, Carroll of Co Limerick, Co Cork, Co Tipperary in no real known order.
3. Edwin Brown of Poole, engineer for the Belfast tramway, married in Bath - still there in 1926, but hard to get more information as Northern Ireland has own records from 1922. Source: familysearch
4. Thomas Richards, jeweller, Wexford Town, married in Dublin to Annie, from Somerset, his second wife.  They had an only child Sylvia. Source: 1890 Wells Journal
5. Sarah Urch, printer's daughter from Wells, who married in Galway 1857 to Michael Harding.  Her younger brother must have followed her to Ireland.  He had arrived in Dublin and found a wife, by 1870.  Robert Urch became supervisor of the Inland Revenue in Dublin and is buried at Mount Jerome. Source: will of Lucas Urch, familysearch
6. Moira Kelly, daughter of an Irishman, returns to Ireland in the 1950s living happily in County Meath.  Her father was a clerk in Crouch End in 1911, and from his birthplace I found him living in 1901 in Meath.  His grandchildren are still living at the same place today, their stint in England being over. Source: cousin

Two-thirds of these connections are from my Somerset line: they had names sufficiently rare for me to track them around very easily.

you go and save the Hester last

Alright so Amy Dunkerton had already amazed me. She died in 1831 in Pilton, Somerset aged 40 but that hadn't stopped her fiesty daughters from carving their own futures:
* Caroline Amelia, married 1847 St James Piccadilly to a waiter
* Charlotte, married 1838 Sussex Gardens to a jeweller
* Sarah, married 1842 St Pancras Euston Road to a police constable

Excuse me weren't these ladies supposed to be home by five o'clock and what pray were they doing in London. Shouldn't they have been making sheep's eyes at the local farmer's sons back in Summerzet?

I have spent several dozen man-hours following up on the London descendants, and now for something unexpected.

The girls' father William Dunkerton left a will in 1855 and had then six daughters living, so in particular what had happened to the youngest, Hester? Died? Married young THEN died? Where was the marriage.

She'd married at St John's Chester (of course?!) in 1856 aged 31, to a young innkeeper and gone to bring up another slew of daughters at the Rossett Bridge Inn between Wrexham and Chester before dying ten years later (neatly avoiding most censuses). Thank you http://pilot.familysearch.org for this useful marriage entry.

These girls were every bit as interesting as their mother and aunts, here they are:
* Esther married 1886 Chester St John, a plumber of BANGOR
* Mary Ann married 1882 Wrexham, a tailor of WREXHAM
* Eleanor married 1884 Manchester, a labourer of NANTWICH
* Caroline married 1892 Islington, a restaurant cook of LUTON

Thanks to this lost and missing marriage entry I now have relatives in eastern Cheshire and in North Wales which is new and exciting territory.

One of the granddaughters was called Nellie Evans, but she proved absurdly easy to trace in Wrexham, to a sad death aged 29 in childbirth. I think I have had a very blessed couple of hours researching and should probably quit while I'm ahead.