Getting old messages from Genes Reunited

It bothered me for years that I had tonnes of valuable information tied up with Genes Reunited and on Ancestry messages.  I haven’t solved what to do with the Ancestry messages.  I hope I shan’t have to copy and paste them all.  Some websites would consider deleting my records if I stopped being a member, for example.  I realised that the Genes Reunited problem was simple – each message or thread of messages had a unique URL (web address).  All I needed to do was capture these 1000 URLs and then load each webpage (ideally automatically) and capture the contents from my web browser’s cache.

I quickly ended up with 1000 copies of webpages and initially thought – let me import these into a Word document (I realise now I can put the HTML into one webpage so they all load as one page then scrape that more easily).  I’m actually happy with these as a series of webpage files.  I will of course need to back these up, as otherwise the process is pointless.

The sixteenth letter of the alphabet

I met Joan and Diana, Muriel Haine’s daughters in 1996 in Devon, then in their 80s or approaching that age.  But Muriel was one of 15 Haine children baptised at Churcham, Gloucestershire (one in the ruins) who scattered across the Empire as they buried their parents.  Sure, I don’t expect a huge amount of detail about the boys in South Africa, but I would like to find their children.  We met Ernest Haine’s grandson at Belgo Centraale in London with his charming wife.  But what about Fred Haine’s daughters? I had to wait for the shipping records (below) to confirm their birth years.

As you can see I was lucky to find Doreen’s birth (in England) in 1914 but I moved on and missed an important clue.  I jigged around with the name of Dyment, looking for more but that was a dead end.

Coming back to this record I realised the clue lay in the middle initial.  I had literally worked all other avenues.  When I zoomed in on the middle initial, I knew exactly what that name would be: PR_ _ _ Y, an old family name.

I punched those first two names, Doreen P_____,  into Ancestry Death Indexes (as firstnames) and up came the result I needed – the lady had died in England in the last few years despite living almost everywhere else in between.  I then googled for more information and traced her last address to Sturminster Newton in Dorset, plus an obituary in the Daily Telegraph.  I was then able to check the address on 192.com, find the property on a local plan, and photograph the property with Google Streetview.  An email from family took a week to come trundling in with all the missing news. I went from knowing absolutely nothing to full information in just a moment.  Guessing the 16th letter.

Finding Thomas Jones born 1895 in Wales

I love Wales for its mountains, and also its impossible naming pattern.  How on earth to sensibly look for my Thomas Jones born 1895 in Morriston, Swansea?  He turns up in Bishops Castle, Shropshire 1901 and Queensferry, Filntshire 1911.  I now know he enlisted in WW1 (where?), married in Manchester, settled in Eccles, before moving back to Queensferry, then to Deeside, and sailing for Canada in 1952.  Phew.  To have seen him safely off these shores is a relief.

The only reason we know any of this is my cycle trip to Mold.  Rhona, his first cousin’s daughter, was 84 and not answering the door-bell.  Luckily I saw a whip of orange silk across the road as a neighbour kept watch.  Oh no, she’s in!  Knock a little louder.  Enjoying tea thirty minutes later, having absorbed my letter in the last few weeks, she was ready to tell me:

Oh yes, Tom Jones!  He had two children and they both went to Canada.

To be sitting in a Welsh town, and be told ‘oh yes, Tom Jones!’ is hilarious.  Rhona was a Jones herself, and cousin Mary married another Jones, but Tom was a completely separate Jones and she knew it.  I first heard about Rhona in 1998 but literally lacked the computer hardware and transcribed data to crack her location.
I sat on my parsed data for ages.  I got the address of Tom’s grandson in Canada within weeks.  But we still lacked his wife’s name and also that of his daughter.  I found an electoral roll entry that completely contradicted Rhona and later turned out to be the wrong family.

Hello Ancestry shipping data!  I found that Tom had emigrated with his son and grandson in 1952 (that was new).  This gave me his wife’s name – but I still couldn’t find a matching marriage.  After getting the certificate, I went back into the same shipping record: thinking if Tom can emigrate with his son, perhaps his daughter Margaret Jones could come along as well?  I had her age (33) but not her married name.  I searched for all Margarets, 33, sailing on the same ship and lo-and-behold, there was Margaret Roberts of the right age and also the same address (!) indexed in another part of the record.  Thank you Empress of Canada for this shipping record!  I then went back one more time into shipping records and found the Robertses returning alone to England in 1956 (as they’d promised in 1952) with dates of birth, occupations and full names given for them, plus an address in Ewloe, near Deeside.

I think that’s as much as I can get without hearing from the Canadian cousin.  There’s one other clue – the family’s religion – given in faint pencil back on Lazarus Cohen’s army records, and no it wasn't Judaism.  I would also like to find Tom Jones’s military record.

God is love but get the certificate

Never has so much been owed by so many to so few certificates.  The aha moments came years ago, but now it’s time to prove it.  Imagining that I could swim a kilometre, and imagining the certificate ensuing, is no fun compared with this A4 documentation.  I’m extracting four from Wales, one from Suffolk, and one from Blackburn.  Wales, Suffolk and Blackburn!  Not places with a good deal (anything?) in common.

Minister of surprise

I’d no sooner transcribed the 1846 certificate, Merthyr, for cousin Ray in Gwent, commenting on its thoroughness, when he sent me a photo of the Baptist minister that had conducted the service, whose photo had been kept by the family in Manhattan.  He was clearly an influential man, this Thomas Davies of High Street Baptist Chapel, Merthyr.  Of the five Francis sister marriages, the rest were in Anglican churches and often lacked basic detail.  Not this one.  We have precise places of residence, detailed occupations (no ‘iron worker’ here) and the father approved as he attended the marriage.  In a world with corrupt, absent politicians; despicable, cruel employers and dead, illiterate fathers, perhaps the ministers alone provided a way through God through the hell-hole that was 19th century Merthyr Tydfil.  (The only question being how Thomas Francis, labourer, or farmer till nearly 40 in the far west of Pembrokeshire, can become a fitter in Merthyr Tydfil bringing his whole family to that town.)  This was certainly not the last we'd hear of Baptist Minister Davies.

A dozen Marys - two dozen husbands

There were 12 Jenkins girls called Mary that married in Merthyr across the five-year period in question, and no word of which bloke they married (choice of two each time), and even if we assumed that Mary Jenkins married, say, William Jones, how to find what happened to them?  Yuk, yuk, yuk.  So I turned the whole thing on its head and just ignored that as a ‘finding aid’.  I decided to conduct the idiotic search of all Marys age 22, in Merthyr Tydfil in 1861.  Puzzlingly, I found her straight away – the most likely candidate was Mary Bromham (formerly Jenkins).  I’m having to wait a little longer for this certificate.  It's now arrived - and fits neatly into our tree.  The bride was 17, the minister Davies (remember him?), the witness a cousin and the father's name correct.

Don't ignore Cohens

There was only one Donald Jones born in Queensferry, Flintshire, and I believe he was the only one married in the district too.  Donald was the name given by cousin Rhona (two years his junior) as son of Tom Jones, but could I find Tom’s marriage!  Or the birth of older sister Margaret?  No.  Actually little did I know I’d found, and rejected Tom’s marriage to Mrs Cohen, 1919, Manchester as the last name just seemed too alien for our Welsh family.  But it was the right one.  I’d also been misled by an electoral roll entry for Sealand which looked right, but was actually another family entirely.  Really, the one piece of evidence I didn’t have, was the name of Cohen.  It turned out the first husband was Lazarus Harris Cohen born two years after his parents’ arrival from Russia.  No less than 5 Lazaruses were born to Cohen families in the Cheetham district of Manchester.  The whole street was Russian (most probably actually from Lithuania).  Lazarus was working I believe in Purfleet hospital as part of the Royal Army Medical Corps, contracting flu ‘which is raging all around here’ and dying in 1918.  He had been working as a tailor in London and was not strong physically.  His widow remarried near her home town of Eccles (to Tom Jones) the following year, moved to his hometown of Queensferry; her younger sister later joining them in Flintshire.

Death of a Smith

Did kind-hearted Harriet Blowers take in an errant deaf uncle as well as her 3 orphan granddaughters?  Despite having a daughter in (then) attractive Yarmouth, another in pretty working Cheshire and another selling frocks in Crouch End, it was with none of them that Henry Smith, aged 78, died, a lowly ‘farm laborer’.  He also had sons somewhere, but probably was appalling at keeping touch.  He was never mentioned by anyone, and at times ran a pub.  The connecting factor in all of this is his deafness (source 1881 census) and the fact everyone hated his wife (who died at some point).  What’s nice though is he must have been close to a sister that he followed to Suffolk, and it was her daughter who witnessed the death.  Harriet is a great character and it’s lovely to have her gate-crashing into our family.  I wonder what Henry’s daughters thought.  Harriet had 3 Australian granddaughters to bring up (plus the last of her 13), was the village’s unofficial midwife and ran the post office despite being illiterate.  She drew the line at 2 grandsons ‘one of whom later ended up in prison’ (true?).  But what a great send-off for Henry, at the Greyhound Inn, Ilketshall St Margaret.  It was while googling ‘Henry Smith’ and Ilketshall that I came across his burial in the village church there.  Once again I knew that Harriet would be on the death certificate (just call me psychic) but it was wonderful to see it printed and worth the tenner/ Harvester meal for the privilege.  I got in touch with Harriet’s granddaughter some years ago.  She knew everything, even more than what I’d already guessed; but she would now be 89.  I’ll have to settled for imagining her knowing all about Henry, as nobody else does, that’s for sure.

Local BMD records lead the way

Continuing the trend of certificates telling you things you already knew, we have Alphonso Jennings.  I had no proof that he was a relative and no clue from the censuses who were his parents.  Yet thanks to this website I was able to extract this information about him.  That’s right, two previous names for the mother.  It took me no time to home in on Margaret Teresa Riley who’d married Simon Burrows (that had died the previous year).  I also guessed that Alphonso Jennings (b 1864) was the father.  He moved around a lot and we can’t find him at all in 1891, perhaps he’d married overseas and that’s why he couldn’t marry Margaret.  More likely they just got together in urban Blackburn, and maybe split up after.  When their son was born, they said they were married, but Margaret doesn’t keep the name Jennings.  This was a repeat performance for Margaret, who’d pretended to be the wife of Thomas Maskell, (Irish?) iron labourer, in 1885.  The certificate bears all this out for the 1897 baby.  It’s not often one spots a person’s birth and thinks ‘oh they must be related let me find out how’.  Alphonso had tough early years but we think did well later in life, moving to Bradford, Yorkshire.  He was a wartime soldier and his great-grandson also fought, in Afghanistan.  He may have had a horse named Foxiburrows.  A great addition to the tree.
Postscript: his mother’s sister Mary Lorn left over £1000 and two houses at her death.  Does any of this money or property go to Alphonso?  No – to his illegitimate brother and his sister Margaret.  It’s maybe possible Mary didn’t know about Alphonso – or more likely, she chose her heirs based on their need: Margaret was unmarried and the brother was renting from her and had a small family.

Jonesing for a lead

More guesswork.  Richard Whitehead born about 1877 in Wales turns up in Bolton at 35 staying with his aunt Sarah.  This got me thinking – who on earth is he!  I suspected the eldest boy Thomas (1853) who is back at home mid-life described as ‘married’.  The only Richard I could see was John Richard born in Abergele on the North Welsh coast.  Sure enough Thomas is there with him in 1881, though never after.  The marriage certificate confirms things nicely – the occupations of father and son, leather dresser given which is exactly as they were in all censuses.  Ages is the main discrepancy – Thomas was 19 but gave his age as 24.  The bride, Miss Jones, was late twenties and possibly pregnant.  Thomas slowly loses his inflated age and by 1911 is only over-stated by a year.  It’s still a bit odd that he’s forty (not 37) when living with his mother, who ought to know her eldest boy’s age.  The nice extra clue is the couple’s only census together with Thomas middle initial of T correctly given.  In a twist, she later forbids her own son from marrying until he's 21.

Howard I know?

The last in this septology is not a certificate at all, but carries the same weight.  I knew that Joan Walker most likely married in Kensington, around 1971.  There weren’t really any other suitable candidates, except possibly in Scotland.  This lady went to live at Kingswood, Surrey, which was exactly the ‘family centrale’.  I hoped that the probate indexes could provide me with the one clue I needed – Joan’s middle name ‘H’.  I was certain it would be Howard.  If so, this would really give me sufficient ground for getting in touch.  Sure enough, in the Royal Courts of Justice court 38, the 1980s computer screen flashed up on the probate indexes with next of kin Joan Howard Walker.  A nice result.

Postscript.  As punishment for citing Wales, Suffolk and Blackburn (Lancashire) as unlikely matches, I now find that Annie Roberts from Lancashire married in Wales and that her step-daughter (Mrs Roberts) died in Suffolk.

Method in their nonconformity

Ancestry have started acquiring datasets that were formerly only on other sites.  The migration index 1890-1960 was for years only on findmypast with its ugly faceless index.  And the non-conformist baptisms were only at an unusual site called The Genealogist, complete with a top hat.  While searching for relatives of mine named Lancelot, this dataset  popped up.  I realised that all the non-conformist baptisms on the old IGI (and now on familysearch) would be available – as images.  I admit several were very dull and/or I’d seen them before.  I hadn’t appreciated that two of my Cornish forebears (but on different sides) appear together at the Copper House Chapel, Hayle, 1827, well six months apart.  One was fantastic giving my Mary Pearce born 1790’s parents.  The other did not name Margaret Trewhella 1784’s parents, even though the husband definitely knew the names and one was allegedly still living.

It was good to iron out Lancelot Gibson’s peregrinations along the Tyne.  The independent chapels gave both date and place of birth, which explains why son Charlton often gave Winlaton, it being near the real place ‘High Spen’, I believe.

Mixed blessings came in the form of the Martin family.  Thomas Martin was a Methodist minister and it was a delight to find pages of his writing – him being the officiating authority.  The puzzling child at Portsea was resolved – one of ours, Thomas Edward.  Another Thomas Edward came along six years later.  In both cases Martin had the boys also baptised in the church at Tywardreath – heaven knows why.  This honour was not given to the girls.  Clearly only the younger survived.  The vicar at the time was a Pearce, Thomas – one of our TM’s wife’s family?  I found a lot of data about this Pearce on the Herald’s Visitation of England volume 5, and in the notes.  They were bankers in Holsworthy and later in Camelford.  They were fairly well connected and there was even a marriage in St Austell.  But were they related to our Pearces (of St Austell) despite the similar names?  I’m not sure.

Not obviously related was William Martin born Tintagel 1781.  He appears to have taken over from my Thomas Martin as minister of Morrice Street Wesleyan Chapel, Devonport in the 1820s and died there, or nearby.

A tragic queen of Denmark was Caroline Matilda of Wales.  (Could this German princess actually point to Wales on the map?)  Yet in 1822 Martin baptised two children Caroline Matilda.  One was his own daughter, at Worcester in March.  The other was his brother Solomon’s daughter, at Devonport in October.  It was nice for me to see that ‘my’ Caroline came in first.  This was not the only time Solomon copied his brother.  He was rubbish at choosing names and possibly yielded to his brother’s suggestions.  Maria Thanetta the first (mine) was born and baptised on the Isle of Thanet.  Her cousin, similarly named, had no connections with Kent.  She also had no descendants despite a fine marriage at Holy Trinity Highbury.  The first Caroline trumped them all with a marriage at Hawksmoor’s Christ Church Spitalfields and a move to posh Hackney.  There is a cousin living at 89 who was named after Caroline – the first, naturally.

Streets of sunshine

It’s amazing.  I can see the view Rita took every morning as she watched the great ships come in, go out, from the hill in Queenstown.  The countryside around north Wales is beautiful but as I cycled through – in the rain – there was no time to stop for pictures.  No problem – I can follow my route along the walled lanes and rousing bends on StreetView.  I’m still looking for a beautiful farm I saw for sale -  in a marvellous location.
Once you start you just can’t stop.  I found where my grandparents lived in Guildford – looks still the same, and tried to follow the walk we talk to the nearby park.  All those questions about places and I no longer need to drive there, or to ‘walk’ the route.  I can do it all on my tiny laptop.  I also checked out our old holiday cottage in Swanage, which I have to say looks a million times better.  It used to have tonnes of buddleia out front, which became one of my favourite plants, but it’s almost impossible to strip out.

I genuinely am amazed they’ve covered all the villages.  I wanted a photo – random I know – of where my prize Haine relative ran to from South Africa, having been the hardest to find ever on that branch.  This was in Marnhull in Dorset.  I ‘drove’ up and down the street looking for Anvil Cottage and found it (with the help of a local authority local plan).  You can zoom in on house numbers – though I don’t think you’re supposed to.

I was mooching around Bargoed which doesn’t look like one of the most deprived communities in the UK (well, that’s Aberbargoed across the way).  A couple of lads in trackie bottoms take pictures of the Googlebot.  Somebody waves at ‘me’ as I scour out our old Airey family grocery in Windermere (now with ugly red windows).  Then they wave into the camera, which is a bit less friendly.

I spent ages on geograph looking for photos of rural Crowan.  It’s a massive parish in Cornwall with several distinct settlements and our relatives lived near-ish to Leedstown.  With StreetView I can take hundreds of photos and follow the route to Pendarves Mill where Mary Rodda courted her husband (or vice versa).  I missed the public footpath that shows where her brother mined ‘Wheal Crowder’.  I wasn’t sure if I could plug in grid references into StreetView.

Moving into Camborne I saw a car reverse down the hill, and then continue reversing for half-a-mile.  I realised I was going the opposite way to the Googlebot and I was observing its rear-view mirror.
I think it’s like the culmination of the Doomsday project of 1986 which some imaginative schools held.  A supreme photographic archive of early 21st century Britain.  The very last thing I did was check out a county I’ve never visited – Norfolk and the two Ilketshalls where my son of Norfolk, Henry, later lived.  The church of St Lawrence rises splendidly above the fens.  What a shock for my Cornishman relative to come here to marry his bride.  Dull they may be, but our neighbours the Dutch gave us them for free.  And did you know smugglers reported worked the area (coming in off the Waveney at Bungay or Beccles).

I also like the way Google gives out both parish boundaries and postal boundaries on its regular maps.  The maps are not a patch on Ordnance Survey – with far too much tundra-like mass unaccounted for.

The Betsys yet to come

An innocent wedding entry - so many questions.  Mary Barton a young widow of 44 was remarrying in pretty St Mary Church in Applethwaite.  It was 1842 and signing the register were a number of people that...
I couldn't be bothered to read.

Fast forward 12 years and the names again caught my eye - Betsy Barton and Betey Airey.  I pushed Miss Barton out of my mind and didn't worry too much about Betey either, as Mary had a sister of that name, so no need to question or investigate.  None.

Betty Airey born 1804 at Bowness, Westmorland was hiding pretty well from investigators like me.  The tramp tramp tramp of the researchers' feet had reached her sister Annabella and they were getting closer to Betty.  Lucky for her, she had a common name and slips through our grasp at any early age.

It was come-clean time for Betsy Barton.  I woke up one day determined to find her.  She was definitely a three-coffee problem.  In favour of my finding her was the fact she signs the register.  Against my finding her was the fact I'd already looked (sort of) and found nowt.

Barely into my first coffee (herbal tea, actually), I spotted Elizabeth Barton marrying 1846 in Kendal (possibly the Catholic chapel) and via some helpful trees on Ancestry, to the 1851 census for Ambleside:

This was embarrassing.  John Barton, the brother, had been on my tree since the mid-nineties.  How on earth had I missed this entry which clearly tells me of sister Elizabeth?  Well I draw comfort that Betsy had been quietly waiting for me to notice her all this time, and as we'll see, she was probably waiting for me to find all the other Betsys at the same moment - because there was more than one to hunt out.

I turned my sights more aggressively on Ancestry and its 1841 census and there was Elizabeth, Betsy, transcribed as Elisabeth living at an address in Kendal age 16, with some Whiteheads.  Ah lovely, and end of story.

Well - no.  Despite nobody in the household having a decent family name at all, something prevailed on me just to find out who these Whiteheads were.  A quick check and I was not at all surprised to find another Betty revealing herself.  Mr Whitehead, the ostler had married a few years earlier in Kendal to, drumroll.....

Betty Airey.  Gosh this coffee is going to my head.  So not only do we have Betsy Barton to add to the tree (born in the gap 1822-1830 between known children of Mary), it looks like we have her aunt Betty Airey (born 1804) who married Mr Whitehead.  This is confirmed by a later birthplace given as Bowness.

Ancestry trees are positively garrulous about both Betsys.  Betsy Barton had four married sons and Betty Airey had at least four married children as well.  Betsy Barton's family lived in the Lakes, on the Piccadilly line, in Wellingborough and in Canada.  Betty Airey's family lived in the Lakes and just for variety - in Blackburn!

I worked with a tiny precise well-groomed lass from Blackburn some years ago whose pursed lips and tiny script bore witness to a certain sort of upbringing, and I always wanted to know more of this town.  Now here's my chance!

My only annoyance is the beautiful tidy tree of all the Aireys old and new has been wholly breached by these two new additions.  They have more descendants than the rest of the family put together and only appeared at the 11th hour like cheeky aunties at a wedding buffet with at least six kids wanting cake.

Betsy Barton ended her days in Wales at the age of 86, and everyone in her house emigrated to Canada later that year.

Betty Airey died in Blackburn.

Postscript

All wrapped up?  That leaves just one mystery - if Betty had married back in 1827, then who was the Betey Airey of 1842.  Believe it or not there are six possibilities.

Betty Airey - no,

but her illegitimate daughter also Betty born 1821 - yes.  Except Betty the mother had a new daughter Elizabeth (later Betsy) born 1841, so this assumes that Betty born 1821 was now dead.

Betsy Airey, niece, also 18 like Betsy Barton and probably not sure how to write her name - this is my best Betsy bet.

Elizabeth Airey mother of Betty and of the bride and grandmother of Betsy and Betsy.  She was now 77, three miles away, and unlikely to be signing any registers to be blunt.

Elizabeth Airey, niece, 4 - I really don't think so.  Though some trees on Ancestry would have her married herself at this age.

Betty Airey, now 74, a cousin of the bride - no!  (And no longer an Airey having married many moons before.)

And final mystery.  Is the migration of 3 Lewis girls from Troutbeck Bridge, great-granddaughters of our initial blushing bride, to Blackburn to work in service in the 1890s entirely connected to our brand-new Whiteheads.  Or had close contacts been retained.  Their great-uncle William Barton lived a matter of yards in Chapel Hill from William Whitehead at Busk, and both men were stonemasons.

Lost memories

I am still cross nearly 20 years later about a missing letter.  My great-grandmother had several cousins and most of them had names that fitted her own social standing - Joyce Summers, Una Hatch, Ellen Glover.  One of these, another Una, wrote to me in 1996 at Burchett's Green College, Berkshire.  I can just see the letter now, perched behind the bar which was where all student correspondence was kept.  Slipping down behind a steamy dishwasher or falling into a pile of bills.  Never to see the light of day again.

After Una's death, her son remembered the letter. Yes she had written one, he said, and it had been full of family information.  At the time he hadn't been interested, but now that he was, could he have a copy of the letter!  I suppose I could fax him an image of a nice clean beer glass, post him a box of big blue cleaning roll, or hand him the keys of the now-closed college for him to search himself.

Hard-to-swallow

It was something of a shock to discover that a large number of Gladys's cousins weren't upper middle-class at all.  Some of them weren't even middle-class.

Much of the blame for this lies on uncle Arthur Smith, who is edited out so fiercely from the family tree, that leaves you wondering if the official records are in error.  Gladys claimed there was only one uncle and he was variously listed as '?' or William. Clearly you weren't expected to ask too much about him, still less enquire if there was yet another uncle.

But there was, and he'd come to London during the gasworkers' strikes of the 1890s, to work as a blacklegger.  He stayed long enough to sire 12 children, before allegedly going off to Australia (this story borne out by two separate branches of the family).  It says a lot for the widow that most of the children survived and several fought in the First World War.  They didn't really leave Bermondsey much, and the thought of them ever meeting their Muswell Hill cousins does leave one pondering.  It would be about as socially awkward as the Edwardians could devise.

A tidal wave of news came pouring in from Bermondsey - I even rang up one of the cousins who lived in the towers near Millwall.  A pint at the Hobgoblin got us going, but I'd need more than a pint to take in 90 years of missing history.  These memories weren't so much lost as scattered to the four corners of south-east London.

I don't feel the 92 boxes of Jim Mortimer's life as trade union leader and Labour Party official fit into my notion of my family at all - yet he had been married to Arthur Smith's granddaughter.

Hard-to-find

With all this talk of Arthur it was easy to forget there was another brother, William Smith.  What had happened to him?  I knew that he was born in England in 1851, and surprisingly, this was pretty much nearly all that was required to find him - in Jamestown.  Hard-to-find?  I don't think so.

This time he brought yet another factor into the equation.  Supposing all my calculations are correct, Gladys now numbers among her cousins the wonderfully-named Victoria Ulander, wife of Axel.

A sense of who she was

It bothered me for ages that more and more data was accumulating about the lives of the Chappell children - who were orphaned in 1867 and who did more and more interesting things.  Several new members emerged as well.  All of these were notionally under the auspices of their mother and grandmother Mrs Jane Chappell who survived until 1925 age 95.  This age may not be so remarkable today, but consider her oldest brother left England in 1832 to practically found the colony of Tasmania.  That she survived the majority of her nephews and nieces (one of whom left her a legacy in her will as if resigned to the fact she would live forever).  And because many of the generations rolled around so quickly, there was barely a year after 1900 when some new significant thing didn't happen.

We got closer to real human memories with a surprise letter from great-granddaughter Eileen.  It shouldn't have been a surprise as it was in reply to mine- but I was innured to non-response.  I'd phoned great-great-granddaughter Eileen who was interested to see there was this other Eileen.  But other Eileen wrote me screeds and I left it too late to meet her, I think.  Not sure of Jane's role here, but her eldest son apparently lost her the farm.

James Chappell's will from 1867 records Thomas Haine as a witness.  And one of the Haine boys later took over his farm, Manor Farm, now the site of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve at Yeovilton.  So if the Chappell boy gambled away the farm, how did one of the Haine's get it?

58 years later, Jane's obituary tells us nothing at all - she is absent from it.  The closest we get is her own son's obituary in Decatur, Illinois.  He'd done well for himself and the paper wrote at his passing (and boy did he look tired) of his venerable mother back in England.  I feel this gave Jane a role and in lieu of photographs, stories, this is at least something.

For other female members in this family, there's nothing.  I have a character-filled photograph for one, a clearly chequered life for another, a decent obituary here, but for one or two women there's nowt.

Turning it around

When cousin Joyce died a few years following first contact, my heart sank.  She'd never after all told me anything of her mother's eight siblings, only that they existed.  I had no names, or if I did that's all there were.  It was tough to get any information.

One Christmas, 19 years after finding out about them, I decided to interrogate freebmd, and emerge with some credible identifications of the Taylor siblings that I knew about, including Mary L.

Incredulously, I found only one Mary L Taylor matched.  The data seemed to tell me she died in Queensferry, Flintshire in 1951, leaving a will.  That was one sibling sorted.  It was all ok, but everyone was dead.  The one thing Joyce had revealed was a cousin Rhona still up in North Wales.  Combing through all the births in Wales showed only one girl who matched.  Lucky or what?  I did write her a letter, but chances like this needed another approach.  By bicycle.  I cycled off the border hills and into Mold, and was able to get an hour with Rhona at her bungalow.  She even guided me back down the hill into Queensferry as a bonus.

The short of it is that 120 years after Grandpa's aunt died, the resulting Taylor offspring have now been pinned through stories and photographs and those nearly lost memories have been properly found.