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.

Certificated: the Weapons of a Family Historian

You know when you just need to press 'play' on a project and get things moving.  Seven certificates rolled their way up the drive last week and the intention was that they would lay to rest a couple of family mysteries.

I'm pretty happy with the results.  There are one or two corners of the family tree where I have literally had to step from one certificate to another to make any progress, and the Jenkinses is one of them.  It all started with Elizabeth Morton born 1814 in Newport, Monmouthshire who came to Abercanaid as a young girl with her dad, who built boats for the canal which ran down to Cardiff and the Bristol Channel.  She quickly disappeared into the folds of the smoky town as Mrs Jenkins and we just catch a wisp of a cloak here and a deathbed scene, there.  A bit of bloody-mindedness and charm helped us find her daughter, who died in childbirth age 28 and whose descendants have reshaped parts of Melbourne's familiar skyline, Australia.  But what of the Jenkins boy?  Four certificates later and I'm not exactly sure.  What I do know is the grandson James Thomas Jenkins was a bit of a phoenix from the ashes.  Losing his parents at an early age, he was adopted by a family in the Rhondda, and he worked his way up the ladder moving to the head of the valleys at Abercrave overlooking a lot of the smoke and organising musical evenings for the village folk.

Confusingly, his mother does actually turn up later on, but essentially J. T. had broken away.  I'd never have found his only son except that a bit of helpful transcribed news gives his son's occupation as 'schoolmaster'.  This has now given me an address for a grandson in London, thanks to the fourth certificate I ordered on this line.

In Manchester, Emma Davies born October 1873 was looking likely to marry in Pennington Methodist Church to a baker, Mr Fearn, but I needed proof that Emma was my relative.  Sure enough, with the help of LancashireBMD to confirm the precise Emma and her location, I found only one lady who fitted.  Her birthday matched the one she gave as Mrs Fearn 66 years later at the eve-of-war, 1939.

Also in Manchester, we lay to rest a cousin whose journeys have required much pondering.  And down in southern England, it looks as if a lady we suspected as being 'very guilty' of some pieces of wartime shenanigans has at last been let off the hook.

I cannot justify any more certificate purchases currently, as the rest of the school of fishes are swimming along nicely and don't need any special coaxing to return to the fold.

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.

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. 

----------
*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.

Great-aunt Mary in Wales: the gift that keeps on giving

Shaking the family grapevine in 1991 caused a whole load of rich fruit to come tumbling down.  I had to run to avoid getting splattered on the head.

One particular branch must not have been ripe, as no amount of shaking the tree was getting me the reward.

It was my Grandpa's Great Aunt Mary.  Such a straight-forward relationship, but born in 1839, she has great-grandchildren who are already great-great-grandparents.  It's my job to keep up with *all* of them, even though they are running three generations deeper than our side.  I needed family history dynamite to get me through the barriers.

Her grandson Tom Jones went to Canada and it took plenty of work for me to find that family. A granddaughter married three counties away from Swansea at the age of 40, and left me several surprises to investigate as well. I knew that another granddaughter lived in North Wales, but it wasn't until 2011 that I met up with this family, even seeing some photos.

One of the branches married a Davies and then an Evans. Only today did I get word I had passed through those choppy waters successfully.  Of the many gurus I met along the way, one was sure she'd had cousins Dolly and Molly, but I can't find trace of them anywhere!

At this point we have had two big reunions on this side of the family - and that's barely scratched the surface!  For sure, Grandpa's Great Aunt Mary and her tricky-to-find brood are truly the gift that keeps on giving!

If you wannabe my cousin

...you've got to know my Grandad.

The baby of the family, with cousins many years older, my Grandpa's infancy was enfolded with lots of skirts.  My Grandpa positioned himself as knowing very little about his family.  He even demonstrated this by writing two and a half sides of A4 of social history, with a couple of snippets about basic relatives, claiming that was all the knowledge he had.  This account mentions grandparents, one aunt, one uncle and his own parents.  Full stop.

However, in conversation there was his dad's cousins, May and Tom.  Then there was aunty Taylor, and there might have been a Rodda, and what about Tom Davies, and Tom Taylor, and Tom's daughter or niece who had the farm at Gorseinon.  All from growing up in 1920s Morriston, south Wales.

That wasn't even the half of it.  Photos clearly showed there was a Great Aunt Maggie, with flashing black eyes, who was grandma of two little girls.  There was Cyril the Methodist minister, a Lily who sent blankets during the war, and 20 years later a recollection about the youngest Taylor boy alongside a vignette from the time of the mid-Victorian goldrush.

Grandpa may have been too young to have everyone on a card index, but for an analytical man he was in fact the perfect vector of that wonderful virus - oral history.  His second cousin Cyril was in touch, it emerged, with their third cousin Ben, who I was able to phone way back in 1994.  Which was two years before Wannabe: that's practically pre-historic.

Davies? Evans? no problem, I'll get an address for you...

I knew my relative Bronwen Davies had married Mr Evans in the 1930s.  Today I managed to get a letter back with full details of their family, but where did I begin?  Cousins weren't telling me much - one of the children ran a hotel, and apparently Bronwen was a great-granny.  Not overly informative I think we can agree.  So I pulled up the list of all Evans children born in the late 1930s with the right mother's maiden name.  A fair few appear in this list, below.

However, I was able to home in on one (arrowed).  This girl had Bronwen's middle name.   It was the only one to jump out, and definitely worth pursuing.  I could match this young Miss Evans up to only one possible marriage in the right part of Glamorgan and soon I was penning her a letter.

Back came a letter this afternoon filling in the gaps.  Well, some of them.  There is still plenty that is unclear about this Pontarddulais branch, who are edging perilously close to the Landsker line.  These are just ONE of several branches from my Grandpa's Great-Aunt Mary Taylor: the gift that just keeps on giving.

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

Riddle of the timeshare: it was the sun wot won it

Prologue: Emigrayshun

One grey June morning as the sun rose over the steelworks, a group of my family left their home in Redhall Avenue, Connah's Quay on a journey aimed at leaving the UK and its new queen behind forever.

Our story: Vokayshun

Grandpa claimed to know nothing about his family.  He did remember meeting many of his second cousins. It would have been too much to expect Tom Jones to be one of these. Tom Jones was listed in his grandpa's will proved 1922 (by Grandpa's father) but with the distance in time, and lack of biographical detail, I didn't think I'd be able to trace him.  Looking back, if I'd bought lots of birth certificates I might eventually arrive at these second-class cabins of 1952, but.... I'd still be left hanging.  It wouldn't be enough. And I didn't take that approach in any event, oh no.

Dedicayshun

I picked up the blower to cousin Joyce eighteen years ago, thinking I was at journey's end. Finally some news on this difficult branch of the family. Mini-me had found her mugshot among old family papers and gone through tonnes of microfiche to locate her. Joyce was off to Italy and was putting info about her mother's family in the post, she said.  She said.  Actually she died before any of that and my main chance submerged again, leaving just one nice clue, the name Rhona.  It took me ten years to remember it though.

Joyce's wedding photo in our family

My one letter from Joyce

Big Break #1.

On the phone, Joyce had told me there was a cousin in North Wales, called Rhona.  I dreamt I was in a cafe in Rhyl, and everyone in tight white curls was called Rhona.  Hello Rhona, have you seen Rhona.  No, Rhona, have you?

Time passes, I grow up.  I realise there aren't that many Rhonas in Rhyl.  In fact, there aren't any!  I get busy.  I trawl all Rhonas born in Flintshire with a mother's name of Taylor and moments later zing up her address thanks to 192.com.

Ten years of inactivity followed by a moment of success.  That describes my entire work on this branch.  But Rhona doesn't 'get' my letter.  This whole line of enquiry is on the verge of evaporating.

I place an ad.  An absolute beauty comes on the market and is duly picked up from Highbury Corner in 2011.  If the letter can't go to the lady, I will, er go to mountainous lengths to...

Big Break #2

If you need to get away from it all may I recommend Gweryd Fishing Lakes high on the hill off Offa's Dyke.  They gave this weary traveller his last night of freedom before September's chastening embrace.  Down the Clwydian Mountains I sped, to the town of Mold, and Rhona's quaint close.

Not expecting much of a particular, I crossed the threshold of number 6, Mold, glad-handing the aged occupier.  Rhona was niece of a farmer from my Grandpa's childhood and a good ten years older than the deceased Joyce.  Even if this venerable lady could barely whisper a 'hullo', I would be extrapolating from this for years to come, so powerful were her genealogical connections.

I tested the waters with the living legend.  I knew I had a lady whose brain was hard-wired to recall facts from the 1930s, her era.  I pressed my first genealogical button.  'Chilton', I said.  'Oh, you mean Hughie.'  Good so far.  'Cousin Margaret?'  'In a bad way, but alive.'  Ok.  Now for the key moment, the testing of the skeleton key, the run past the warder, the ransom-swop, the border-dash, the inhuman leap..... 'Tom Jones?' I lightly enquired?  The 1930s brain whirred and checked its hard-drive and back they came, words of gold.  'Oh, Tom Jones! Well his kids Peggy and Dougie went out to Canada.' And there it was: my cup overraneth.  Not only had this lady skewered her way through a slew of Joneses to find my Tom, she neatly sewed his story up so tight I wasn't going to lose him now.  And all in five seconds.  I drank the proferred tea, thanked the good lady, slumped on a train at Chester, sold the bike - saying 'hello' to September and a new year.

Big Break #3

Veterinary advice: First catch and restrain your animal

Our Tom Jones was born in Morriston, Swansea, about 1894.  Him and his common name moved to North Wales around 1905, ahead of a big steelworkers' strike.  This whole area around John Summers steelworks is massively under threat, April 2016, a century or more of steelmaking in jeopardy.  According to Rhona, Tom's kids left yonks ago for a new life of similar industry, in Canada.  So what bits of feather was I left gripping on to in the UK?

Tom gets a mention age 24 in his grandpa's will, where I first heard of him 70 years later in 1992.  A third of that time again has had to elapse before I could catch him once more.

We're all in the same boat

Big break number 3 was swiftly catching up with Dougie his son on the boat out to Canada (1952) but *not only that*, finding dad Tom on the same boat, and... *not only that*, after my own internal hard-drive warmed up, a thought burst out?  What about the sister Peggy?  Maybe she was on the same boat too?

Margaret on the same boat as her father and brother, 1952

And so it proved to be.  The Empress of Canada gave me emigration notes of imperial quality: my struggling hunt for further records failed to keep pace.  The same address is shown, Redhall Avenue, Connah's Quay.

Tom had married a Cohen in Eccles, which I'd earlier thought impossible, Margaret (Peggy) being born there in 1919.  Figuring out exactly what happened to Margaret Jones was proving a mite tricky 'til I pored over the Empress-ive records and spotted her as Mrs Robson.  There was date-of-birth, names of kids and all with a matching address in Connah's Quay...  It was 2012, sixty years post emigration.  Little did I know that Peggy, even older than Rhona and 20 years ahead of Joyce, was still living, a quiet retiree in Canada.

Big Break #4

I stewed on the Robson info a little while, 4 years to be precise, as it remained on the back-burner.  I had brazenly told the cousins in Wales it was game set and match, an email having plonked through for Dougie's son Col.  That branch weren't playing ball however, and the contact details fizzled away.  I needed another route in.

Sometime in 2014 I tried again, this time focussing on Peggy (by now, deceased).  It was time to get heavy. I dredged the internet, ripped apart the phonebook and pressed search a bunch of times on Facebook, spraying all my clues in neon to get new life out of them, like tired old curtains.

Obvious clue: the name

Several years of obvious clues and several years of missing the obvious: Peggy's boy's name.  According to the NorthWalesBMD project, he was born Thomas Peter Robson in Flint, a really good name to search.  When I pressed the keys for 'T_P_R' Canada, Google warned me to stand back.  Information of an explosive nature was about to be revealed.

Hmmmm.  Margaret J Robson of Calgary?  probated in Maine. I didn't think so. This was too confusing.  I had fished out gold, but put it back in the watery internet for another two years.  Glug glug.

Big Break #5

Pushy salesman: "In the absence of a new lead, go back to your old ones."

It was March 2016 and time to find the Canadian cousins: this was getting embarrassing.  Harder problems had been solved and although this was impossible, with the right alchemy and a splash of oxygen, this can be done.  With my new hard-nosed attitude I brought up the Google search from 2 years before.

The 'J' I now dismissed like a nearly-dead fly. It could clearly be Jones, Peg's maiden name.  No problem.  Exactly how many ladies called Margaret had sons of the right name and age in Canada?  I now suspected not many.  Just the thorny issue of 'Why Maine?' to put right.

So I took a longer look at the Maine Probates, nosing around the pages of York county, Maine.  I spied a typical set-up for legal docs: the attorney's office and their long phone number.  A lemon-eating clerk in a will-free office, and the general message of 'we are closed - to you anyways'.  I idly combed each of those nondescript blue pages, jonesing for a lead.

Ten white pages

Like Hansel stumbling on a witch-free gingerbread trail, there I beheld ten texty scanned-in pages, white in hue, of the estate of Mrs M Robson.  From the bare bones

to considerably more detail at maineprobate.net:

I had gone behind the surface net into the 'deep web' where data lies waiting to be awoken.  Whilst the full addresses were nice to see, they are impossible to capture without the correct file id, so I think are pretty safe.  The cover page was lovely but wasn't clinching it for me.  I continued through.

And there beheld this battery of clinchers:

• Bang - the name of Jones given as likely maiden name
• Bang - the confirmed, matching, date of birth for Margaret

From the Shipping records

From the Probate

• Bang - the confirmed name as plain Margaret

• Bang - an address in Ontario, the region where Margaret first landed

It turns out the connection with Maine was that affordable way for hardworking folk to get a week of sun: timeshares.  A timeshare in Maine, of lobsters and fishing, was what got us done.

Thank you to Ogunquit, Maine for taking me from this

 to this

Footnote:

Never forget your Welsh.  The new cousins in Canada are in fact in touch with their Dad's family, back in Connah's Quay.  Hopefully they'll soon be reaching out to us, too.

Update:
Tom Jones's great-grandchildren responded to my Facebook messages! Tom actually returned to England, to Wallasey, where he married a widow, and lived, not far from his sister. I also discovered that Tom's parents had returned to Morriston from North Wales and that Peggy herself had convalesced in Morriston as a young girl. [Amusing as her father's cousin, from Morriston had improbably been sent to her home town of Queensferry to 'get better' about ten years earlier.]  I'm sure my great-grandfather knew all this, but Timeshare, you helped clear up a big old puzzle.