The best things in life are free

It was great to resolve a long standing puzzle concerning my Scotts.  The whole family unit had disappeared and the fairly distinctive names of Edith Maria and Martha Gertrude were yielding absolutely nothing.  I knew that various in the family had gone out to Australia, and decided to test the Australian Death Index 1787-1985 to see who would appear.  Although it's initially off-putting that you get a 'deny' screen and lots of blank details, it's amazing what you can get.
I reconsidered my information and realised Edith Maria born in Kensington was actually Edith Mary Ann born in Kennington.  I looked for Edith Mary Ann's death in Australia with parents' details as given (yellow-underlined).  The maiden name of Scott isn't shown on-screen but is hidden information in the database.

Fresh from this success, I then thought - well, why not take it to the next level?  What about Edith's own children?

I then was able to get a tiny bit more information from the Trove newspapers, from the companion Australian Births Index 1788-1922 but this was certainly a Great Leap Forward.  For some data (such as the marriage of Edith Mary Ann's youngest daughter, 1924) I had to use the Electoral Roll to make an educated guess, and then check the details for sure on the very tight-lipped Victorian BMD index.

I then solved a year-long mystery about the identify of 'Casie B'.  She had been driving me crazy- was she Charlotte, Catherine, Caroline, Cassie, Cassandra.  Step up, the extremely useful Victoria Passenger Lists 1852-1923.

As you may be able to see from this, the two records broadly match.  The shipping records has Jessie B (alleluia), while the 1881 census entry written 18 months earlier has 'Casie B', where I think the C is intended to be pronounced 'Ch' (though I can't think of a single English word that uses this form but the Italian cinto).

It's then an easy matter to find the girl as Jessie Beatrice in freebmd, and then to go in whichever direction (Trove, the deaths index), to find her death at 43 as Mrs Dunlop widowed mother of two deceased children.

The father of all these children is possibly in Kings Cross England age '35' in 1891, though this smacks of coincidence.  He and Mary Ann had another child together after arriving in Australia (who died).  He lived to see all three daughters marry before dying at 53 in Melbourne.

Conversely, his father, Thomas Scott senior was still very much alive back in England and about to move house.  Senior's will makes no mention of these Australian shenanigans; instead earmarking all the £600 estate for his relative in England, S T Bennell - child of a deceased daughter.  In fact all of senior's 3 children predeceased him.

So, if anyone is researching Walter Addison Block or Herbert Graves Harrison, Alexander Leonard Turner, Stanley Watson Wray, Hugh Fred Williams Coulter, their wives and families, thank you to those large websites for the free data, and do get in touch.

It's on the net, it must be wrong!

I often hear variations of the following warning: 'Do not add this to your tree until it has been verified by YOU.'

I am an impatient transcriber and thoroughly resenting going through centuries-old parchment for a location which ought to have been included in the catalogue.  I mournfully wound my way through the Ditcheat PRs in Taunton and it became obvious a much larger Scott family existed. It was frustrating not knowing if they were close relatives, and being boggled by the out-of-sequence names.

Now, thanks to the net, I've found my Scotts. With the glorious overview on findmypast and familysearch, I can see all the burials, marriages and baptisms that have been recorded.  I can make judgements and compare across the whole county, being cogniscent of gaps.  I found that several of the marriages of Scotts in Ditcheat had a corresponding baptism in another parish, at Chewton Mendip.  Wasn’t that something?

I did get waylaid by some bad cataloguing: Curry Rivel, the lead item on the microfilm, being listed in error for Ditcheat as the place of baptism.  But that was infinitely preferable to slogging down to the record office and failing to spot key entries in the register.   A computer is much better than my eyes at combing through large amounts of data.  Without this global knowledge one can comfortably assume the girl baptised in the parish must be the one married there: often wrong.  Again with comprehensive census and good burial records we can be disabused of this parochial guesswork.

The biggest skill of a family historian is not to check every wretched source, and presumably extract an oath from their custodians that they are valid; but to take data of varying quality from a range of sources and to sort them: what is likely to be correct, what is suspicious and what is possible but not proven.  If jurors on a strict diet of daytime soaps can do this, I'm sure I can.

One needs some understanding of the background to a source or place: that includes London street names, the rounding of ages in 1841, the fact names are correct in probate records but not often elsewhere, the fact that women in England change their names when they marry and previous married names should appear on their children’s civil birth records; that birth dates before 1837 are rarely recorded officially; that it was easier to get into the main town than it was to cross the hill into the next valley.

I would prefer to carry on seeing YOUR transcriptions, and for me to concentrate on the analysis, which will include considering whether your hardwork belongs on my tree or not.