Africa United was a great movie. I seem to remember getting pressurised to watch it while somewhere really unexpected like the University of London students' union or a socialist demonstration, or possibly strolling through Mayfair. We need to be united in our search for records in Africa.
Britons in Africa is now online. It is a showcase database, enabling people to be surprised at finding one of their folks on the great unexplored continent. The Stirling Castle, Dublin Castle, Walmer Castle and a dozen other Union-Castle ships could get you to a new life in as little as 23 days.
However, until recently, those 23 days could see your descendants in England closing the door completely on your life, as no genealogical information was obtainable from South Africa, which became a Republic (after Afrikaaner-dominated voting) in 1961.
Now, on FamilySearch, Natal marriage records are online (to 1955) and Zimbabwe deaths, in a somewhat crude index up to the last days of Ian Smith. It looks like the card indexes were hurled out on the table and rapidly photographed before possible destruction by the incoming government. Who knows. It's great to have them.
These new databases that allow us to follow our relatives around the world, should be applauded.
26 Dec 2013
Clues from the cousins #2
It's very nice to get one's own detailed family tree back with a few amendments. In the case of 87 year-old distant cousin Ted W, the additions were limited to a couple of pen strokes.
Next to Robert Boocock I'd optimistically put a ? in case there were any other siblings. Ted just put a red line through that. Nice and clear.
I nearly missed it but under his uncle William Young, he'd put something. It was definitely his writing and not his young nephew's. It was the three letters ADA in capitals. Well that was something, didn't know about her. Also the digits 23.6. I guessed this was Ada's birthdate - the 23rd of June. Not much to go on - but a whole new unexpected family group to add to the tree.
Sure enough I checked the birth records and censuses and found William - with a completely different age and a very different wife from the one I expected. I put Ada on the backburner, happy to have at least found a record of her birth on the banks of the Tyne (Northumberland).
Then I thought - I can't just abandon this information. Surely a record of Ada's later life can be found? I teased out information concerning all the Ada Youngs who married on the Tyne and one fitted the best. The next challenge came for her daughter, listed as Dollie J (name slightly changed). I might have used Findmypast's excellent marriage finder, but in this case I employed an alternative tack. Looking for all the children with the right mother's maiden name born near the Tyne, I found only candidate that fitted and this led me to the missing marriage. Now I have Ada's two children to write to, living not far at all from where there grandfather William Young was in the 1911 census.
Sadly Ada has now long been deceased, but she was remembered I'm guessing affectionately by her elderly cousin Ted, and it's time now to see if her children would like to know something of her family background after such a long gap.
Postscript: No Tynesider will be surprised to hear that Dollie knows Ted W, and is in touch as I am with Ted's nephew Dave.
Next to Robert Boocock I'd optimistically put a ? in case there were any other siblings. Ted just put a red line through that. Nice and clear.
I nearly missed it but under his uncle William Young, he'd put something. It was definitely his writing and not his young nephew's. It was the three letters ADA in capitals. Well that was something, didn't know about her. Also the digits 23.6. I guessed this was Ada's birthdate - the 23rd of June. Not much to go on - but a whole new unexpected family group to add to the tree.
Sure enough I checked the birth records and censuses and found William - with a completely different age and a very different wife from the one I expected. I put Ada on the backburner, happy to have at least found a record of her birth on the banks of the Tyne (Northumberland).
Then I thought - I can't just abandon this information. Surely a record of Ada's later life can be found? I teased out information concerning all the Ada Youngs who married on the Tyne and one fitted the best. The next challenge came for her daughter, listed as Dollie J (name slightly changed). I might have used Findmypast's excellent marriage finder, but in this case I employed an alternative tack. Looking for all the children with the right mother's maiden name born near the Tyne, I found only candidate that fitted and this led me to the missing marriage. Now I have Ada's two children to write to, living not far at all from where there grandfather William Young was in the 1911 census.
Sadly Ada has now long been deceased, but she was remembered I'm guessing affectionately by her elderly cousin Ted, and it's time now to see if her children would like to know something of her family background after such a long gap.
Postscript: No Tynesider will be surprised to hear that Dollie knows Ted W, and is in touch as I am with Ted's nephew Dave.
Clues from the cousins #1
I write the letters, I enclose the trees, I post them off. This takes at least a week.
I enjoy contacting new cousins, as they can tell me anything that I really ought to have known but which has slipped between the cracks of the records.
And so it was with Annie Whitehead. She was well known to her nieces but completely missing from my clever-clever tree. Turns out she was born before her parents' marriage as Catherine Ann Nevitt, and had two children herself around the same time her Dad was just finishing up his (2nd) family. Dad was a railway platelayer in Abergele, on the Welsh coast.
How on earth was I supposed to find out what happened to her child, Catherine A Roberts, born 1920? There are 18 of this name who marry in the 1940s.
Well, as luck would have it, a clue - the only clue, came in the form of the North Wales birth index. This gave me Catherine's middle name of Amy. Sadly, I concluded she was likely to have passed away so I checked the death indexes for the period 1969-2006 and just searched on the firstnames 'Catherine Amy' and the birth year of 1920.
Believe it or not, there is only one entry across the whole of England and Wales, in Suffolk. Unusual, but an explanation came along. It seems Catherine had married in Suffolk, 1945, and indeed that her mother, my original 'Annie', had died in Suffolk visiting her daughter when aged 60. (This is very different from the, also true tale, that Annie had lived in rural North Wales.)
It was then fairly easy to locate Catherine's family in Suffolk and hopefully there is a grand story to be told.
Incidentally, this family at a stroke, knocks ten years off the previous record for oldest relative on my generation. Five generations of producing children at 23 puts them nearly 60 years ahead of me - easily my oldest fifth cousins; sadly deceased even before my own birth.
I enjoy contacting new cousins, as they can tell me anything that I really ought to have known but which has slipped between the cracks of the records.
And so it was with Annie Whitehead. She was well known to her nieces but completely missing from my clever-clever tree. Turns out she was born before her parents' marriage as Catherine Ann Nevitt, and had two children herself around the same time her Dad was just finishing up his (2nd) family. Dad was a railway platelayer in Abergele, on the Welsh coast.
How on earth was I supposed to find out what happened to her child, Catherine A Roberts, born 1920? There are 18 of this name who marry in the 1940s.
Well, as luck would have it, a clue - the only clue, came in the form of the North Wales birth index. This gave me Catherine's middle name of Amy. Sadly, I concluded she was likely to have passed away so I checked the death indexes for the period 1969-2006 and just searched on the firstnames 'Catherine Amy' and the birth year of 1920.
Believe it or not, there is only one entry across the whole of England and Wales, in Suffolk. Unusual, but an explanation came along. It seems Catherine had married in Suffolk, 1945, and indeed that her mother, my original 'Annie', had died in Suffolk visiting her daughter when aged 60. (This is very different from the, also true tale, that Annie had lived in rural North Wales.)
It was then fairly easy to locate Catherine's family in Suffolk and hopefully there is a grand story to be told.
Incidentally, this family at a stroke, knocks ten years off the previous record for oldest relative on my generation. Five generations of producing children at 23 puts them nearly 60 years ahead of me - easily my oldest fifth cousins; sadly deceased even before my own birth.
23 Dec 2013
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:
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!
Richard Feltham 1889 and bride Maggie Van Deren returned from bridal tourWe can add to this with the 344 words rescued from Google’s snippeting tool:
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
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?
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.
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:
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.
‘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.; orIn the US, he’d usually be ‘Richard W. Feltham’. Yes, you’ll spot that older UK records included punctuated initials.
R. W. Feltham
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.
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:
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.)
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.)
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