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.

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.

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.

Illegitimate sister, garbled details? Part Two

I was wrong, again
A confident, cocky tone in a blog post is never good.  I am returning to this blog cap in hand, admitting I was wrong.  The illegitimate sister 'born about 1922' was indeed born in about 1922.  Was she called Jane or Calista: er, no.  Did she go to Australia, ummmm.  No, to that as well.

From memory to fact
Here were the facts as presented.

'My sister Jane was born in about 1922 and was sent abroad, to America maybe.  My Mum kept a set of her clothes that she had worn as a girl.'

Maybe the clothes were something like this:

 
One step back
Galling is the word I would use to describe receiving that birth certificate of Calista from 1919 - the girl who went out to Australia from the Clee Hills.  I was so convinced, but actually secretly glad that I was wrong.  It felt too hasty a victory.  The battle was lost but not the war.

It's how you say it
Jane, Jane, Jane.  There were no Janes in the 1920s.  It just wasn't in fashion, like Margaret or Gwendoline aren't today.  But there was a May.  In fact May was the only option at this time.

If you say, May, it sounds like Jane.

 
 Where to now...
And May it seems didn't go out to Australia, but she did have connections with Ghana.  Now they should be interesting.  We are just waiting for for the birth certificate as proof.  Tick tock.

1939 Register - wife swap

Mr Richard and Mrs Louisa May Bowman raised four kids together but were never married.

Twenty years earlier, Richard Bowman had married the real Louisa May, and the pair had gone their separate ways.  Richard took up with another Louisa May (not her real name), while the real deal found love in a different part of the country.

The 1939 Register for Kent shows Richard with the fake Louisa May.  When he has a heart attack at the wheel of his lorry, both ladies choose to remarry under the name Louisa May.  This was the first indication of an inaccuracy in the official record - one the registrars would have missed.

I tried to understand how a lady could marry two different men in different areas at the same time, with two separate death records, with ages at least a decade apart.  Before deciding it was impossible!  There had to be two individuals.  Kent Louisa was royally faking it, putting the pretend maiden name on her kids' birth certificates.

She even stuck to names that the real Louisa had given to her kids.  As the real Louisa was using Bowman for her kids by the new man, and the fake Louisa (calling herself Bowman) was recording the real Louisa's maiden name on her kids' birth certificates, and they were BOTH using the same Christian names for their kids - it was a right royal mix-up.

Richard and Louisa May are in Kent in 1939.  The real Louisa was miles away with her new partner.  Richard's migration path is in orange.

It's only, as ever, on the fake Louisa May's deathbed, that honesty prevails.  Well, mostly.  She is still listed as Louisa May Bowman.  She still tells a small porky about where she actually dies.  But the probate entry reveals......

ALSO KNOWN AS Millie!  Then the obituary says she's Millie, and the burial clerk calls her Millie as well.  There's no hiding place, girl....

The 1939 Register gave me July 1901 as the birth date for Millie. Searching all the women born July 1901 with the forenames Millie H E yielded only one birth.  I've found you, Millie.  But, she disappears utterly from the records, not even showing up in 1911, until she 'becomes' Mrs Louisa May Bowman circa 1930.

While the real Louisa has evolved into someone entirely different, quietly playing the piano and nurturing musical talent at another southern location.  Her grandson had no idea of the family in Kent.

Thanks to 1939 Register for quietly resolving these potentially awkward family mysteries.
(Note, as this 90 year-old wife-swap is still pretty recent, Bowman is a pseudonym.)

Finding 4 New Jersey husbands: no marriage index

... or "Wrestling, Swimming Pools and Silk".

One bright morning in half-term I couldn't stay in bed any longer. By six I was on Ancestry.com wondering if cousin Claire had made anything of my leads, concerning our Hunt cousins in New Jersey. I'd discovered Beatrice Hunt born 1907 in Salford had married an Italian man and died in Rancho Cucamonga after deciding to search Passaic county for all the English Beatrices. Of course she was alonely possible. Claire had done something similar for the second daughter, noting the existence of a child, Verna. By 0804 I had confirmed this and stood possessed of Verna's birth name and married name. By 0806 I had learnt she starred in two recent YouTube videos, including one with her grandson, six foot four pop journalist Giancarlo. Before I jogged off for my doctors appointment at half nine I resolved to find the other two, trickier, Hunt sisters, and that's what happened. Here are Betty and Lily in the 1930 census for Paterson with their incorrect birthplaces. Unfortunately the next census won't give the parents' birthplace of England, so it's time to use FamilySearch, for free, to comb the whole town in 1940 for clues.

The fact that they must have been born across the Hudson, in Manhattan, would turn the impossibility of finding them into a distinct possibility. Searching all the girls in Paterson New Jersey yielded plenty of possibles...
but an unexpected link pulled both girls out snap and pronto!

This is the 1940 census of Paterson with possibles for Betty and Lily grown up.

And so is this.  Hmmm, Quicks appearing twice? Suspicious!

Writing to Giancarlo, he indeed confirmed Betty had married Victor. And the Quicks and Cobianchis are living just a block from each other and/or the 1930 home on Straight Street. It's all a world away from scary old Salford. Victor worked in the silk mills as an examiner. Wrestling is a big local sport. The pools closed in the 1930s for regular cleans. A Hunt nephew drowned in the fast-flowing Passaic river. I am going to the States in August and northern Jersey is gonna talk to me more than its swankier neighbour just across the water. Go garden state.

Cousins laid to rest

My aunt was sure cousin Eva married the bus driver and settled in San Francisco. I combed through all the 1940 census and found a husband who was a railway carriage cleaner. Everything matched up, and to my delight the San Francisco marriage indexes, now in image form on FamilySearch, confirmed this.

Rumoured to be illegitimate, it was certainly a surprise to note she survived her father 93 years, and was nearly the last of her generation. Thank goodness my great-aunt was around to forestall this awkward eventuality.  Her father passed away of tuberculosis in Wood Green not that far from me some time before the first world war.

It really is odd she survived so long. We had a phone call in the 1940s to tell us her older sister had died, exhausted by finding money at all hours of the day - and still another sister was confined to Colney Hatch lunatic asylum in the thirties. So hats off to Eva for clawing her way to the end of the century.

Another of the cousins disappears off the face of the earth in 1964 having proved her mother's will. She was then living in Surbiton. It now turns out she used the money from the estate to buy her own cottage just outside Henley.  But she only enjoyed the cottage for two years before passing away herself. The person with whom she occupied the cottage survived another 29 years however.

Long journey: Birds and Family Members Always Come Home

Some searches have you going through the wringer on your way to adding a twig properly onto the tree.  This parish magazine from Shropshire is charmingly online, and answers at a swoop who 'Major Roberts' was - listed in a family obituary, turns out he was Miss Jones's second husband - no wonder I couldn't make the connection.  Although born in Wolverhampton her parents brought her back to Shropshire to be baptised. I eventually caught up with the baby girl featured, now a director of a rather iconic part of Glastonbury Festival, lor' luv 'er!

Barbara G Walker is not an obvious addition to the tree, at first.  By and large we are churchgoers and hardline feminism hasn't won many supporters on this side of the pond.  However, peeking back into Barbara's (ironically, male) forebears - we see signs of plenty of strong women, who would give Barbara their strongest backing as she ploughs a very difficult furrow.  Maybe her extremism 'grabs male territory' so that most women can live their lives with a bit more freedom than the generation before.

Cordelia Fuller was one of those mysteries of a dozen years or more.  (And explanation has still not come in of who exactly Cordia lived with in the mid-west back then. Update: it has.)  Eventually I did not find her marriage by checking under her maiden name, but by waiting for her descendants, the Smiths, to post a tree on Ancestry.  Which they did.  Here is the original will, photostatted in 2000.

And here the photo of Cordelia as an older lady in the Smiths' heartwarming book, Ocean Depths.  The family still live and are based in Kansas and the mid-west.

Facebook's useful experiment for family historians is closed

In 2012 Facebook offered you the chance to message its users for 65 pence, if they were not already your Facebook-friend.  I found this pretty useful and sent messages off to my future housemate (who didn't know me), plus a new cousin in Sydney and one in rural Massachusetts.

The pennies spent guaranteed my Hello would reach their Facebook inbox and not go to a hidden folder.

I had great responses from Sydney and rural MA, and consider it money better-spent than had I dusted down the stamps and posted a big long letter.  In the event, the cousin in Sydney never replied to the Facebook message, but tracked me down on my website and sent me an email.

So a good experiment. Update, 2015, it's back and boy have I made use of it.

A day of industry

An extraordinary 24 hours in the world of family history...  I found out a whole bunch of stuff.

* I had a reply from JM in Barrow whose wife was the family historian.  I was pretty sure she was the daughter of John Thompson and Mary Taylor - Mary being the one of a handful of Isabella Barton (1830)'s family to have had issue.  And so this proved to be.

* I had a reply from JD in Sherborne whose mother Ivie was born in Durban, South Africa, the child of Cornish parents.  It turns out Ivie had 5 children in the 1930s, all of whom are still living, and that she passed away in Zimbabwe.  I first heard of Ivie in the will of her grandfather, 1923, Bellevue Terrace, Tuckingmill about 15 years ago.  Only now is there this opportunity to find the family.

* I had a reply from AL in Dronfield, Derbyshire with very good information about my Kiveton Park relatives.  It turns out my Grandpa's grandma Shugg had a first cousin Grace Emmerson who lived at Kiveton Park.  This was not a country house but a mining village in the parish of Wales.  Her husband was not only a miner and preacher but builder too, and a son-in-law I understand became the colliery manager.  A granddaughter moved to the Dales immediately north of Harrogate where there are some large farms.  One of the family married in Jerusalem in 1942 when it was under the British Mandate.  The relative was working in the hospital there - it was wartime.

On the bus yesterday to a dear old cousin in the Mendips, the First Great Western bus wiggled its way past THREE of my relatives in the housing estates of south-west Keynsham.   Broad streets and plenty of bungalows with retired people actually sitting outside ('in their front gardens!').  I think K. Pearce is somewhere on Lytes Cary Road, but he didn't get my letter or so it seems.  Then there was Hutton Close which was home to my Mendip cousin's cousin Barbara, and then the very same bungalow became the property of a Mrs G. Alkins from Halesworth in Suffolk.

The thing is, GA is quite a bit more closely related, being descended from my 3xgreat-grandfather Smith's older sister, of whom he was quite fond.  To make it all worse, Smith died it turns out at the childhood home of GA's mother - who lived to 92 and who would certainly have remembered him.  I decided long ago I would no longer pursue contact with Mrs Alkins (now herself 90) because of advancing age.  It was nonetheless galling for the bus to gaily trip past Hutton Close and know that the only human memory of ggggfather Smith was there for the asking inside that bungalow.

In Bristol the same day, I twice jogged past CreedBet, which information online confirms is run by the son and grandson of my Granny's first cousin L G Creed, described at his father's death as 'turf accountant'.  Who would have thought that the betting gene would run through 2 more generations.

Two other short bits of story resolved themselves in the morning: the father and son both named Peter Hill, of Penzance were found, the father having passed away last year at Praze-an-Beeble.  I find it interesting that it was only the Rodda children who moved away from Crowan that had family there - Mary left in 1841 and Thomas the same year, yet the brother who remained has no family in Cornwall whatsoever (one, in Reading, only, and the rest in Australia).

The other puzzle being the deaths of William and Catherine Bell, Methodist minister and his wife, both of which took place in 1925 as per the Methodist records at John Rylands Library, Manchester.  Catherine's took place first a matter of weeks before her ancient aunt Jane; while William (who'd been ill for at least 15 years) struggled on till the end of the year looked after by their daughter Florence Sloss.  Catherine's early death dispels my fancy that she lived on until the war.  It renders impossible that any of the Sloss family in Bangor, Co. Down, would remember the Bells at all.  Florence's next of kin are none other than the Butler-Slosses of judicial fame.  It seems then that both Catherine and her eldest sister Arundel had, despite producing many children and some grandchildren, no heirs to continue - and that both lines are now extinct.  A most unusual situation.  The only grandson in America said he had no family and was buried by the Veterans' Bureau.  I spoke to 2 of Arundel's granddaughters on the telephone, before the line was extinguished.  But it is Catherine's line I'd really like to have known.

I messaged Yvonne F. in Florence, Massachusetts the granddaughter of Judith Marshall from Bodmin.  Judith was brought up by great-uncles and aunts as her parents had gone up to Ashton-under-Lyne with all the other children.  Judith alone remained down in Cornwall and died aged 97 in or near Newton Abbot.  Yvonne would certainly remember her.  On her Facebook page she had Exeter College listed as a previous place of study.  As I ran past this earlier in the week, I thought Yvonne would like to know.

The biggest mystery of the day to crack was the 3 Rose sisters of Decatur, Illinois.  I've been over the data, that I now have, and don't see how I'd have gotten anywhere without the October 2003 Decatur Herald and Review obituary that I located today.  I was at the British Library, renewing my pass (for another 3 years - hurrah!) and had had some success with the British papers.  I had definitely tracked down US papers from the available databases (ProQuest, Gale &c) and was determined to get something out of them again.

I followed the links to British newspapers from Newsgroup and then backtracked out of UK records to the US and was very surprised to find Decatur's Herald and Review on the list of available papers.  It claimed only to cover the last 10 years, but I found records back to 1992 or more.

My first search (under the Rose girls' father's name) yielded a result straightaway and I quickly went to the page (the above obituary in 2003) so I could capture the information before it could disappear.  The obituary (which was for the eldest Rose girl) gave me sufficient information which coupled with Intelius.com, Facebook.com and the Washington State marriage indexes up to 2004, meant I could construct trees down several generations.  The Rose girls were in a strong position to take forward the mitochondrial DNA of their ancestors the Murrows, though only the middle one is known to have granddaughters, but as these are married, the line may well continue.

Looking back over the resources, I definitely could have found this from GenealogyBank's collection (1990-) but would have had to pay a monthly recurring fee, so am kind of pleased I didn't know they had this article.

That just leaves the British newspapers, which gave my some surprising results, see next entry.

Making work for the postman

Of the 14 letters I finally sealed up today, 10 were to new cousins.

They were scattered around the edges of England with a disproportionate number (33%) in what was once Lancashire.

Few of the addresses were in the phone book - but luckily 192.com was on-hand to help me locate them.  After learning the postcode area (for example DH7), I've taken to using a house price website called Proviser (example pages are from Bradford), to capture the full list of streets within that postcode area.

I also consult Google maps to see if there are other clues - relatives living nearby, or a geographical feature that would make one part or other of the area more likely.  Within Proviser I note down the names of village settlements, for example within Blackburn there is Mellor.  I double-check that the address I need doesn't include a village name.

Now I can whip through the list of streets in Proviser - including or excluding the villages as found by my earlier checking - and quickly narrow the field to the correct street.  Possibly the longest search was for a relative in Walks Avenue (Manchester).  It's a big old postcode area, couldn't easily be split up and W is right at the end of the alphabet.

Sometimes it makes sense to do a visual.  When looking for an address by the Lakes, there just seemed to be a tonne of possible addresses - so I picked out some likely streets from looking at the map, and was proven correct.

If you are unlikely and your relative lives on a densely populated Old London Road (which tend to be rather long) there could be a lot of houses to the one postcode.  Or worse, finding a relative lived in a tower block in Plymouth - there were at least 10 floors and in the order of 90 different properties all occupying the same thousand square foot.

It's useful if somebody on the property is in the phone book (not necessarily the person you expect) and if somebody's ever held a directorship.  One trick I used in Liverpool at a down-at-heel neighbourhood, once very grand, was looking in the 1984 phone book to see if the address was given there.  It was.

On the whole, it needn't take that long to search a postcode.  The bulkiest areas can be divided into villages - and postcodes for central urban districts might only cover a few dozen streets.  The worst area I searched was BB2 - 10 pages of addresses mostly all in Blackburn itself, so few could be eliminated (or focussed on) by determining if the address was/ was not in a surrounding village.

It can be embarrassing when you've spent ages pinning down your postcode and got the address only to find that the person was in the phone book all along.  I was looking for a Richards family member in Romford and missing a possible entry in the phone book was understandable as it was just such a common name.

Another trick is to know the combination of names of a couple.  I mentioned here how knowing that John B Jones had a wife Ann E enabled me to focus-in on the only couple in the country who shared this name-combo.  (Name slightly changed to keep them anonymous.)  For this highly mobile couple who'd lost contact with relatives 30 years ago, and had left their Midlands address 20 years ago, I needed a miracle to pin them down.

The site to use for comparing addresses with postcodes and vice versa is the Royal Mail's Postcode Finder.  It used to offer only a measly 10 searches a day - which got you nowhere, particularly if you're still struggling to understand its search boxes.  It's considerably more relaxed now, particularly since it's been sold out of our hands to the lowest bidder!

Once you've found your address, you still need to write the letter, prepare and include copies of documents, keep a photographic record of what you've sent and muster up sufficient envelopes, pens, stamps, paper, printer ink, and power cables to get the show on the road.  In fact I recommend writing the address on the envelope as the very first thing you do - then at least the myriad documents can be filed in the correct place as you prepare for dispatch.  I would certainly recommend sending a stamped-addressed envelope, unless you strongly suspect you'll be getting an email response.

As for writing the letter itself, some tips on this business can be found a few pages up.

It's now slightly more work than it used to be when I got all my addresses from wills, and later in the brief periods when electoral roll full results were easy to come-by.  But I'd rather have all the information relatively easily than just a portion of the information ridiculously easily, which is how I'd describe family history 20 years ago...  (Plus you never used to know until too late, just who was hiding behind those terse phone book entries.)

For today - some folk I've been hunting nearly 20 years, others turned up yesterday when I took a detour down a branch I'd not known existed.  We will have to see what comes back.

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.