Newspapers part 2 - man bored in Springfield

Take these snippets from GenealogyBank concerning my Richard Feltham ostensibly of Springfield, Ill., Dakota and Seattle, but really of Alaska:

Richard Feltham 1889 and bride Maggie Van Deren returned from bridal tour
letter from husband 1898... Klondike... frozen
daughter dies of typhoid 1907
wife sues for divorce 1909 remarries 1911
both move to Seattle to start a business there
husband dies in Alaska

We can add to this with the 344 words rescued from Google’s snippeting tool:
on a/c of ill-health had to go to the Klondike.. and chase buffalo across Dakota (for more)

I haven’t made up my mind if this is some kind of homosexual cover story or just a set of extremely unfortunate events followed by another set of unfortunate events that don’t really undo the first; or a typical story of a climber always away from home; or the male/female/Springfield divide.  Woman happy with husband doing well in Springfield.  Man bored of Springfield.

His great-nephew Homer White was not expected to have family as none appear in the censuses, yet his father’s obituary tells of Miss Josephine White prompting me to look a little deeper.  Sure enough he has a girl somewhere in Tennessee with his first wife – see the Tennessee Delayed Birth Records 1869-1909 and let me know where!

Newspapers part 1 - a burning tale

Farewell this week to free snippets from GenealogyBank.  They’d cottoned on to the fact that free snippets was maybe not the cleverest way of displaying newsprint.  Some of the articles are barely half-an-inch deep, so why pay to get more, when there wasn’t any more to be had?

Back in 2005 I learnt of the death most likely of Esther Symes (born 1817 Hornblotton) at a fire in her home in Ohio, some time in the 1840s.  This was reported fifty years later – come on, journalists! – at her husband’s own death, 1896.  (This in itself odd, as the widower had sired and lost a whole other family in the intervening decades.)  Genealogybank kindly filled in the gaps for me.  The Canton Repository writes: On the 2d inst. [2 Nov 1846] the house of Thomas Cook of Lordstown, Trumbull co. Ohio, was destroyed by fire, in the absence of Mr. Cook. His wife and family had got out, but the wife returned to the building to secure a pocket book &c. when it fell in and she perished.

That’s it.  No more to be had, but pretty useful.  Superfluous information such as the lady’s actual name can be had elsewhere.  A natty finger points to the entry just in case you miss a genuine news item amongst the accounts of turnip growing or whatever else occupies regional newspapers.  We can tease out that 2 Nov was a Monday, likely wash-day, so Esther would have a lot on her plate with the infant and 2 other children under 4 to keep busy.  Tragedy would strike as the boy was killed in the Civil War, while the infant was to herself die in childbirth.  Minnesota was exceptionally mild in that month with persistent south-easterly winds and no frosts – with the warmest weather overall for 85 years.  Might these facts explain our story in Ohio?

Excuse me there's a dot there - punctuation of initials

We seem to have a difference of opinion over our use of initials in the UK.  In the US, they like to put dots after everything.  With ordinary speech, we know Americans like to use ‘air commas’ but why do we never see kung-fu punctuation in the same way.  They must be itching to punctuate.

‘Mr. Jas. M. O.’Dowd.,:’ 

might be a typical greeting on a letter.

One poor boy was given the middle name of J – that’s it.  His whole life Americans wanted to punctuate it, and he yelled out them, it doesn’t take a period, it’s just ‘J’.  To which the other Americans nodded, and mentally added a full-stop.  (His name was Clinton J Parkhouse.)

This stuff matters if you’re searching Google Books.  If you have a Richard Welch Feltham, in England he’d be either:

Feltham, Richard W.; or
R. W. Feltham

In the US, he’d usually be ‘Richard W. Feltham’.  Yes, you’ll spot that older UK records included punctuated initials.

So if you read of a W H Morgan or W J Roberts, what are their names?  Well for sure that’s William Henry and William John.  And F W Jones – well that’d be Frederick William Jones, or just possibly Francis William.  Interpreting initials is a fairly easy business.

I needed to prove that a BGH Jones living in Lancaster was married to a woman called Elizabeth A.  (This was to prove Elizabeth wasn’t my Elizabeth A Jones born 1949 in Wolverhampton.)  If you need to work with initials, the findmypast marriage finder (link) is the place to go.  Sure enough Bonar Glyn H Jones turns up as marrying a lady called Elizabeth.

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.