Last of the line - goodbye to some overseas cousins

With the passing of Nelson Mandela, all links to the old South Africa are going.  I do have cousins over there, and what’s strange for me is that many of the addresses I had came from old address books back here in England.  I wrote to Beth Ahrends twenty years ago, and she wrote that the government was changing and ‘the old awful policy of apartheid is going’.  She worked with others in the township of Khayelitsha teaching African women to sew and so to make money and improve their living standards.
It’s not been easy to locate her granddaughter Thomasin, and I thought I caught a glimpse of her in Australia at a bomb-scare at a school in Melbourne.  If it’s truly her, then Beth’s great-granddaughter told me a lot – she ‘didn’t want to be named’ in the story.  That certainly sounds like she’s tough enough to be Beth’s family.

I have finally found that my grandmother, 92, is indeed the last of her cousins, and there were 25.  It took the internet to establish this as the last three died in – Bermuda, Cape Town and Vancouver.  My grandmother, brought up in less than exotic, but still with a seaboard, Lancashire, lives in none of these places.  Her stillborn brother died in 1912, something of a stark fact – the year of the Titanic and all.  We definitely didn’t get to know him at all – such is the roll of the dice.

Bogralin - clue to Scots ancestry lies in a strange place-name

This is another thread of my hard-to-pin down Scots ancestry.  Fresh from the delights of finding ‘Scotland’ emblazoned across the census entry for Colby, Westmorland – being the birthplace of the heart-still-beating Margaret Moses (81).  It was fifth-time lucky as she’d presumably been counted in all the other censuses since the dawn of time (1801) and this really was the last time to catch her.

Clues came in thin and slow after this.  Today the word ‘Bogralin’ jumped into my head.  It’s almost certainly gobble-dy-gook but I searched my laptop for it – no dice.  Then I searched my sent items in email (known not to have been downloaded) and hey presto, an email that ought to be carefully filed, but isn’t:
Carlisle Record Office writing to my cousin Roger in 2009:

There is an entry in the marriage bonds.  It reads:
16 August 1783
Moses, Joseph, Netherton, p. Hayton, wdr, yeoman
Rae, Margaret, p Hayton
Rae, John, Bogralin, yeoman [Bondsman]
[Hayton]

Cryptic!  A few thoughts emerge from this.  The square brackets are not translations – so Bogralin is not just another word for Bondsman.  Traditionally the third person listed was not a marrying party, but was the bondsman – clear enough.  The last square bracket is the place where the marriage was expected to take place.  Sometimes, as in Return of the Native, the marriage does not occur as expected at all.
It’s extremely unusual for the parish for ‘Bogralin’ not to be stated – was it meant to be within Hayton?
The couple were married the following day at Hayton and John Rae witnesses  (as does Joseph’s married sister).

Assuming, dare I?, that Bogralin is a mis-transcribed place in Scotland or Ireland, this might indicate that John Rae was expected to be in town only for a few days.  So, can’t wait to view films 90694 and 412603 at the research centre in Kew to resolve the matter.  With luck the latter is a film of the original, and I can be left to interpret the word, and my only true proven (0.8%) Scots origins, for myself in a tranquil setting by the Thames.

(The third piece of Scots heritage comes from the Mellrays of Kentmere, who were almost certainly earlier the Millreas of Kirkinner, Wigtownshire.  Fanciful – we hear them crossing the Solway Firth some time before 1735 – but utterly unprovable, or nearly. ~DNA for the Mellrays if still living, might prove it.  Though this is 0.4% of my ancestry and no guarantee I got any genes either from it.)

Digging up the past - an unusual hunt for DNA

My Scots ancestry has proved hard to pin down.  My grandfather shared a bedroom with his Grandpa Hunter in the 1930s – he neglected to steal any DNA, but instead garnered that the Hunters were from Scotland.  More reliable information from a line of females still in Cornwall, says that they were from Ireland.  Since the last male Hunter died in Bendigo, 1970, we’re not likely to know the answer any time soon.  As to the man who arrived in Cornwall about 1770, he might have been a Scotsman born in Ireland – that would make both stories correct.

The other relative I’d like to dig up lies in Mount Jerome, Dublin.  By comparing his DNA with my cousin in Mount Avenue, Ealing, we’d know for sure if the massive Urch and Harding families were related to us.  I believe the vicar of Baltonsborough was probably drunk on communion wine and that’s why my Sarah Lucas appears to have been baptised as Mary, Christmas Day 1804.  Though I admit that checking the microfiche at cousin Hala’s house in Walthamstow is probably easier than telephoning the Irish gardae for a reburial.

Ironically one of the Lucas family *was* actually dug up, by accident, in Adelaide a few years ago, see our earlier tale.

Working with very little information in family history

This is useful as I’m largely researching families which would have been impossible 15 years ago.  I started with my Somerset farmers who were all in the area, all left wills, all had distinctive farm names, left lovely useful obituaries and were well remembered by almost everybody still living in the area.  Very handy with only the 1881 census (available by postal search), a letterbox, the phone (if parents out) and the probate office (for 15 minutes after school 2 days a week).  If I wanted more – I could drive to Barnstaple (not close) to pin down the odd rogue marriage.  I could order the marriage odd certificate as well – but they rarely gave me hot leads.  I could go to the record office and library at Taunton fairly easily and indeed did so.  I must add in that 1990s oddity, the International Genealogical Index – on microfiche at the local library (now morphed into the hugely larger familysearch).

Now I may well be looking for a Jenkins in the middle of Merthyr Tydfil.  No wills – no addresses, nobody remembering them, no obituaries, no indexed chapel entries, nothing useful locally and only a very generic story, though useful, available in the local library.  Your prime lead is the census – which you use with extreme caution.

I don’t really blame a lot of modern hobby genealogists for getting things all in a twist.  Anyone who’s ever tried to write a crime story and have all the characters lined up doing the right things at the right time knows the impossibility.  Your murderer is on the phone to somebody she doesn’t meet for another two hours.  With lots of online trees, people’s murderers are indeed on the phone to somebody they won’t meet for two hours.

If somebody is unmarried in the 1871 census, they absolutely can’t have married in 1870 – sorry.  Well, actually they can.  I can think of three people who are at home when they had kind of secretly got married – Ann Pearce (1841 Cornwall), Elizabeth Edwards (1891 Northumberland), Alma Barrett (1881 Somerset).  But usually, it’s a case of people picking the wrong family to be their ‘ancestors’.

Ann married Pearse and so blends in rather easily into those at her parents’ house.  Elizabeth is listed as ‘M’ (married) but no married name given – I missed that valuable ‘M’.  Alma is not only at home apparently unmarried but her child (born legitimate) is edited out of the census completely.  Where is she!
There’s also plenty of cases of people being given their step-father’s name in the census – just to keep you on your toes.

It took me absolutely ages to figure out who Leah and Annie Nicolas were, listed in the 1911 census for their grandmother’s hotel in Bodmin.  Both their ages were overstated by a year, the last name was Nicholls (though they later used McGuigan) and Leah was the elder girl’s middle name.

Getting past missing marriages or incorrect marriages in family history

I have been bedevilled by missing marriages that slow the whole research programme down.  I proved Marjorie Joan Sargeant from Croydon married as Margery J (in distant Plymouth).  I found Stephen N Waller marrying as Stephen N Wallis, Jonathan Gibson as Jonathon Gilson, Marian Thomson as Marianne Thomson; Harriet Hichens as Harriette Hickens; Conrad Spencer as Conrad Spenser.  I observed Ella H marrying as plain Ella, Elizabeth as Lizzie, Samuel as Sam.  Not to mention Miriam C becoming Caroline M and Gladys P becoming Peggy G.  These reversals of forenames can be tricky to spot.  Most times findmypast’s excellent marriage index can help you find these as it automatically looks for initials as well as full names.

The Sargeant marriage was particularly gratifying as I used the birthdate from Ancestry as the key reference, as shown.  Unfortunately it’s not possible to use this approach on findmypast as you need to know the married name of the party – with over a million British surnames to choose from, this could take you a lot of guessing.

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.