Miscellaneous marriage thoughts - Wales in Yorkshire

From the miscellaneous marriages listed on Ancestry:

I also found my lass from Wales, Kiveton Park, marrying in Jerusalem where she was working as a nurse in World War Two.  Yes the name Wales, Kiveton Park is probably the most confusing ever; even more so as it's often written Wales, nr. Sheffield, or Wales, Nottinghamshire or Waleswood.  Most county boundaries skirt neatly between towns, but Kiveton Park was a colliery that happened to sit on a border I'd never heard of - Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.  So it was able to flout the carefully planned registration districts, poor law unions and electoral constituencies.  It's heart and soul seem to belong with Sheffield, not Worksop (its notional mother town), but I could be wrong about that.

See Kiveton Park and Wales history for more.  I only stumbled on all this by accident, yesterday.  I was about to wrap up a letter for a South African cousin (now in Dorset) when I noticed at the top of the tree the string of SHUGG siblings, from Gwinear, who'd multiplied considerably through to the present day.  I noticed I'd never found marriages for Jane (1821) or Mary (1823).  Could modern research tools help me locate them?

I was embarrassed to find this:

Clearly showing that there were not exactly many of the name anywhere.  This was a great surprise.  I'd a notion there were legions of Jane Shuggs in St Ives all with the father's name of John and thoroughly muddying the picture.  The bad old days had you scrabbling with heavy volumes at St Catherine's House and locating one-off entries such as the one below, and having really no idea who they'd married, who they were (a widow, perhaps) or where they were going next.

The excellent Cornwall Online Parish Clerk database was actually my first port-of-call.  Confirming that Mary Shugg had died age 12, and that Jane was the only one of her generation, I was then launched into her modest-sized Trevaskus family who'd left Hayle, Cornwall for Devonport.

Missing from the censuses was their pint-sized daughter Grace who I eventually surmised had gone with husband Emmerson up to Kiveton Park shortly after her marriage.  The mines there were some ten years old: her sister had had an earlier spell at Harthill, 3 miles away, but the sisters only overlapped for a year as the elder one decided to go back to Devonport after she was widowed.

Their daughter married a mining engineer and it was their girl who worked as a nurse in Jerusalem during World War Two, coming back to England for the birth of her daughter who still lives in the wider area.

Some clarification about the counties from Wikipedia:

Kiveton Park lays claim to being in Rotherham Borough Council, has a Sheffield postcode, a Worksop telephone code, and has [Derbyshire's] Chesterfield Canal running through it, it also lays claim to being the smallest place in Europe with two railway stations.

Ends.

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.

Sure looks like my Ellen in Chowbent

Every so often I have a purge of hard-to-find relatives.  I clapped my hands with joy when I found Ellen and her eight siblings back in the 1990s thanks to the will that never was.  Little did I know that each and every one of them would prove a cow to find, across five counties.  Nathan gave me microfilm finger, Anna became Elizabeth, Sarah had the same name as her step-sister, while Carrie never married her husband.  And Ellen, I eventually found, had married as Sarah Ellen and moved to Lancashire.  When I saw this census entry I knew I'd got her.  Born in Matlock orphaned at 16, her father took the family away from that town's helpful records to Bollington where she disappeared.  Until now.  Thanks to the Atherton records at the online parish clerk, the Davies next generation haven't been too painful to follow up.  Census image: Crown copyright

Omitted from this account is my method. Well, I wasn't really convinced that Ellen might have died between the censuses. I went through all the Ellens born in Starkholmes, before spotting the Starkholmes reference in the above census. The name Esther clinched it as it was her mother, mother of the brood of nine.