Riddle of the timeshare: it was the sun wot won it

Prologue: Emigrayshun

One grey June morning as the sun rose over the steelworks, a group of my family left their home in Redhall Avenue, Connah's Quay on a journey aimed at leaving the UK and its new queen behind forever.

Our story: Vokayshun

Grandpa claimed to know nothing about his family.  He did remember meeting many of his second cousins. It would have been too much to expect Tom Jones to be one of these. Tom Jones was listed in his grandpa's will proved 1922 (by Grandpa's father) but with the distance in time, and lack of biographical detail, I didn't think I'd be able to trace him.  Looking back, if I'd bought lots of birth certificates I might eventually arrive at these second-class cabins of 1952, but.... I'd still be left hanging.  It wouldn't be enough. And I didn't take that approach in any event, oh no.

Dedicayshun

I picked up the blower to cousin Joyce eighteen years ago, thinking I was at journey's end. Finally some news on this difficult branch of the family. Mini-me had found her mugshot among old family papers and gone through tonnes of microfiche to locate her. Joyce was off to Italy and was putting info about her mother's family in the post, she said.  She said.  Actually she died before any of that and my main chance submerged again, leaving just one nice clue, the name Rhona.  It took me ten years to remember it though.

Joyce's wedding photo in our family

My one letter from Joyce

Big Break #1.

On the phone, Joyce had told me there was a cousin in North Wales, called Rhona.  I dreamt I was in a cafe in Rhyl, and everyone in tight white curls was called Rhona.  Hello Rhona, have you seen Rhona.  No, Rhona, have you?

Time passes, I grow up.  I realise there aren't that many Rhonas in Rhyl.  In fact, there aren't any!  I get busy.  I trawl all Rhonas born in Flintshire with a mother's name of Taylor and moments later zing up her address thanks to 192.com.

Ten years of inactivity followed by a moment of success.  That describes my entire work on this branch.  But Rhona doesn't 'get' my letter.  This whole line of enquiry is on the verge of evaporating.

I place an ad.  An absolute beauty comes on the market and is duly picked up from Highbury Corner in 2011.  If the letter can't go to the lady, I will, er go to mountainous lengths to...

Big Break #2

If you need to get away from it all may I recommend Gweryd Fishing Lakes high on the hill off Offa's Dyke.  They gave this weary traveller his last night of freedom before September's chastening embrace.  Down the Clwydian Mountains I sped, to the town of Mold, and Rhona's quaint close.

Not expecting much of a particular, I crossed the threshold of number 6, Mold, glad-handing the aged occupier.  Rhona was niece of a farmer from my Grandpa's childhood and a good ten years older than the deceased Joyce.  Even if this venerable lady could barely whisper a 'hullo', I would be extrapolating from this for years to come, so powerful were her genealogical connections.

I tested the waters with the living legend.  I knew I had a lady whose brain was hard-wired to recall facts from the 1930s, her era.  I pressed my first genealogical button.  'Chilton', I said.  'Oh, you mean Hughie.'  Good so far.  'Cousin Margaret?'  'In a bad way, but alive.'  Ok.  Now for the key moment, the testing of the skeleton key, the run past the warder, the ransom-swop, the border-dash, the inhuman leap..... 'Tom Jones?' I lightly enquired?  The 1930s brain whirred and checked its hard-drive and back they came, words of gold.  'Oh, Tom Jones! Well his kids Peggy and Dougie went out to Canada.' And there it was: my cup overraneth.  Not only had this lady skewered her way through a slew of Joneses to find my Tom, she neatly sewed his story up so tight I wasn't going to lose him now.  And all in five seconds.  I drank the proferred tea, thanked the good lady, slumped on a train at Chester, sold the bike - saying 'hello' to September and a new year.

Big Break #3

Veterinary advice: First catch and restrain your animal

Our Tom Jones was born in Morriston, Swansea, about 1894.  Him and his common name moved to North Wales around 1905, ahead of a big steelworkers' strike.  This whole area around John Summers steelworks is massively under threat, April 2016, a century or more of steelmaking in jeopardy.  According to Rhona, Tom's kids left yonks ago for a new life of similar industry, in Canada.  So what bits of feather was I left gripping on to in the UK?

Tom gets a mention age 24 in his grandpa's will, where I first heard of him 70 years later in 1992.  A third of that time again has had to elapse before I could catch him once more.

We're all in the same boat

Big break number 3 was swiftly catching up with Dougie his son on the boat out to Canada (1952) but *not only that*, finding dad Tom on the same boat, and... *not only that*, after my own internal hard-drive warmed up, a thought burst out?  What about the sister Peggy?  Maybe she was on the same boat too?

Margaret on the same boat as her father and brother, 1952

And so it proved to be.  The Empress of Canada gave me emigration notes of imperial quality: my struggling hunt for further records failed to keep pace.  The same address is shown, Redhall Avenue, Connah's Quay.

Tom had married a Cohen in Eccles, which I'd earlier thought impossible, Margaret (Peggy) being born there in 1919.  Figuring out exactly what happened to Margaret Jones was proving a mite tricky 'til I pored over the Empress-ive records and spotted her as Mrs Robson.  There was date-of-birth, names of kids and all with a matching address in Connah's Quay...  It was 2012, sixty years post emigration.  Little did I know that Peggy, even older than Rhona and 20 years ahead of Joyce, was still living, a quiet retiree in Canada.

Big Break #4

I stewed on the Robson info a little while, 4 years to be precise, as it remained on the back-burner.  I had brazenly told the cousins in Wales it was game set and match, an email having plonked through for Dougie's son Col.  That branch weren't playing ball however, and the contact details fizzled away.  I needed another route in.

Sometime in 2014 I tried again, this time focussing on Peggy (by now, deceased).  It was time to get heavy. I dredged the internet, ripped apart the phonebook and pressed search a bunch of times on Facebook, spraying all my clues in neon to get new life out of them, like tired old curtains.

Obvious clue: the name

Several years of obvious clues and several years of missing the obvious: Peggy's boy's name.  According to the NorthWalesBMD project, he was born Thomas Peter Robson in Flint, a really good name to search.  When I pressed the keys for 'T_P_R' Canada, Google warned me to stand back.  Information of an explosive nature was about to be revealed.

Hmmmm.  Margaret J Robson of Calgary?  probated in Maine. I didn't think so. This was too confusing.  I had fished out gold, but put it back in the watery internet for another two years.  Glug glug.

Big Break #5

Pushy salesman: "In the absence of a new lead, go back to your old ones."

It was March 2016 and time to find the Canadian cousins: this was getting embarrassing.  Harder problems had been solved and although this was impossible, with the right alchemy and a splash of oxygen, this can be done.  With my new hard-nosed attitude I brought up the Google search from 2 years before.

The 'J' I now dismissed like a nearly-dead fly. It could clearly be Jones, Peg's maiden name.  No problem.  Exactly how many ladies called Margaret had sons of the right name and age in Canada?  I now suspected not many.  Just the thorny issue of 'Why Maine?' to put right.

So I took a longer look at the Maine Probates, nosing around the pages of York county, Maine.  I spied a typical set-up for legal docs: the attorney's office and their long phone number.  A lemon-eating clerk in a will-free office, and the general message of 'we are closed - to you anyways'.  I idly combed each of those nondescript blue pages, jonesing for a lead.

Ten white pages

Like Hansel stumbling on a witch-free gingerbread trail, there I beheld ten texty scanned-in pages, white in hue, of the estate of Mrs M Robson.  From the bare bones

to considerably more detail at maineprobate.net:

I had gone behind the surface net into the 'deep web' where data lies waiting to be awoken.  Whilst the full addresses were nice to see, they are impossible to capture without the correct file id, so I think are pretty safe.  The cover page was lovely but wasn't clinching it for me.  I continued through.

And there beheld this battery of clinchers:

• Bang - the name of Jones given as likely maiden name
• Bang - the confirmed, matching, date of birth for Margaret

From the Shipping records

From the Probate

• Bang - the confirmed name as plain Margaret

• Bang - an address in Ontario, the region where Margaret first landed

It turns out the connection with Maine was that affordable way for hardworking folk to get a week of sun: timeshares.  A timeshare in Maine, of lobsters and fishing, was what got us done.

Thank you to Ogunquit, Maine for taking me from this

 to this

Footnote:

Never forget your Welsh.  The new cousins in Canada are in fact in touch with their Dad's family, back in Connah's Quay.  Hopefully they'll soon be reaching out to us, too.

Update:
Tom Jones's great-grandchildren responded to my Facebook messages! Tom actually returned to England, to Wallasey, where he married a widow, and lived, not far from his sister. I also discovered that Tom's parents had returned to Morriston from North Wales and that Peggy herself had convalesced in Morriston as a young girl. [Amusing as her father's cousin, from Morriston had improbably been sent to her home town of Queensferry to 'get better' about ten years earlier.]  I'm sure my great-grandfather knew all this, but Timeshare, you helped clear up a big old puzzle.

Signed, sealed, er, where is it?

Like a Bond denouement with minutes on the clock to total annihilation, we are 12 hours away from the 'destruct' button on a link to the Harvey family.

In just 12 hours, a certificate will drop through the door.  I've not been as excited since my Grade 2 piano aurals hit the mat, some time ago.

Hit the Mat, Mr Paper
Whilst it's possible for a lady (age 20) to produce two babies in the same year by two different partners during the war.... I am not sure that's what actually happened.  I think this thought will be 'slaughtered off' when the killer certificate hits my mat, 12 hours from now.  Tock tock.

Six generation birthplace chart

This is #MyColorfulAncestry chart credit to J. Paul Hawthorne.  

A couple of the 32 places on the right-hand-side lead somewhere else entirely.  The Monmouthshire lady brings two more counties to the yard, while Cumberland's mother was said in the 1841 census to be born in Scotland.  And one of the Cornwalls has an Irish grandfather.

Many places appear just once. The Kent box is misleading as this was a Cornishwoman born while her parents were travelling around Britain.

If you think this is diverse, check out the Dibben lasses, or their kin the Huttons, who occupied up to 20 counties within a generation by sheer force of stagecoach.  That's all massively trumped by my cousin Arthur Taylor's bride who takes in 13 COUNTRIES in her life across the globe.

Missing you: The world of decade-long searches for kin and kith

Last weekend I stumbled on missing-you.net and ukpeoplefinders.com, sites where people post messages for individuals missing from their lives.

Each message is a forlorn thing, penned with logical hope gone and only illogical wonder remaining.

In 1915 my great grandpa's uncle James Taylor wrote his first codicil in Swansea. A canny man, he had become moderately well-off from a lifetime at the tinplate works, shearing the sheets that came off the rolling mill. He despatches a dead daughter in one line, declaring... her family need no support.

I begged to differ. Eva his granddaughter who was actually born in his house, was then 18 and motherless. Her father had just remarried. Eva took on a ghastly job at the tinplate works dipping iron sheet into sulphuric acid, and presumably, as she was just an assistant, would be occupied in disposing of the 'pickle liquor sludge' as well.

Well-provided-for my backside, and a house point if you can see where this will link with our first paragraph.

Age 22, Eva added to the woes by falling pregnant, which hadn't happened in the family since fifty years when great aunt Lavinia was 18 and somehow spent time alone with Cornish carpenter Martin.

Actually getting pregnant prior to marriage had been common in the Welsh towns: though absolutely not in the Cornish villages where the family had come from. Did the town provide a place for nookie, or a more relaxed attitude to meeting, or more enjoyable social interactions, I don't know?

Testimony from testy older relatives was very much of a place dominated by strict moral code, highly regarded education and a Protestant (Methodist) work ethic. This explains why great aunt Lavinia (and others!) got married.

But, Eva's sweetheart did not bring that option to the table. Was he just visiting, an ex-soldier on to Cardiff at the first sign of trouble?

All hell broke loose at home. Once again, there had never been an illegitimacy and the timing was awful with grandfather Taylor dying and her father still pumping out fresh siblings.

Eva cut her losses and left rigid stuffy Morriston and its acidic overtones forever behind, opting to go back to her childhood home, the peculiar medieval town of Bishops Castle under the delightful, pagan, Shropshire hills.

~~~~~~
Leaving my own family aside for the minute, I yesterday went on to Missing You, the website joining people together. I had a good browse for people who I thought I could quickly help.  I focused on people looking for a birth mother, as that can be quite straightforward.  The searcher knew that his mother Paula Heeley had a baby in North Manchester 1969 but couldn't find her birth. There in FreeBMD was Paula's marriage five years later.  Looking at the birth and marriage records together I could see she'd taken the name Heeley from a stepfather and had actually been born a Tomson. These events were all happening yards from the searcher's home suburb in North Manchester.

Little did I know my Eva's journey would end up on these same pages.   Despite doing the family history for so many years I knew little of Eva, and certainly nothing of the 1921 situation.  My mind was blank when I contacted her granddaughter, Allie, in February of this year.  Allie quickly told me of Eva's first child, an older sister to her Dad that none of them had ever known, born in 1921, and I quietly got to work. At this stage I didn't even know if they cared, I just felt I had to look.

When I started looking for Eva's baby girl, who we'll call May, I knew her life story would surprise. A few moments in and I was on those very pages of Missing You.

"I am looking for my brother born to May Jones in Liverpool in 1940."
Signed off by a lady in Canada.

I was staggered! It seemed May had taken a different surname (Jones) and had a son plus this lady in Canada, neither of whom showed up in the birth indexes.  This raised many new questions.  It looked like May had several relationships and had probably been adopted by a couple named Jones. It was definitely the same May however as the site gave her second married name.

Whew! And here comes the problem with these sites. There is just no visibility concerning messages posted and replies given. They just disappear into a blank hole with a bald 'thank you for your contact'.

I believe I will never get a response to the two hints I gave yesterday to the location of the two birth mothers. I shall continue to hunt out such cases. It took barely five minutes on FreeBMD.

Ordinary people have no clue how to drive a site like FreeBMD, just as I would struggle to operate kit in an opencast mine. (Although I do have a 1994 JCB licence!)

It annoys me when people tell the world they have been 'searching' for 40 years for their family member. Posting repeated confusing messages after midnight is not searching just as playing with a Tom-Tom without batteries in bed is not driving.

I steered clear of those folk and did my best yesterday to do brief efficient research with intuition thrown in, to spare these people any more time-wasting online.

Back with my own Missing lady, May. Barely three weeks after contacting Eva's granddaughter Allie, a reunion is now happening in spring 2016. Not with me, but with the family of missing May, conceived in the land of Welsh tinplate 1920. With in fact the very lady who posted on Missing You in Canada over ten years ago. Though I'm grateful to the site for the posting, it was no help whatsoever in facilitating present-day contact. For that, my friends, we added a splash, not of sulphuric acid this time, but of that modern innovation, Facebook, born 2005.

Illegitimate sister, garbled details? Part Two

I was wrong, again
A confident, cocky tone in a blog post is never good.  I am returning to this blog cap in hand, admitting I was wrong.  The illegitimate sister 'born about 1922' was indeed born in about 1922.  Was she called Jane or Calista: er, no.  Did she go to Australia, ummmm.  No, to that as well.

From memory to fact
Here were the facts as presented.

'My sister Jane was born in about 1922 and was sent abroad, to America maybe.  My Mum kept a set of her clothes that she had worn as a girl.'

Maybe the clothes were something like this:

 
One step back
Galling is the word I would use to describe receiving that birth certificate of Calista from 1919 - the girl who went out to Australia from the Clee Hills.  I was so convinced, but actually secretly glad that I was wrong.  It felt too hasty a victory.  The battle was lost but not the war.

It's how you say it
Jane, Jane, Jane.  There were no Janes in the 1920s.  It just wasn't in fashion, like Margaret or Gwendoline aren't today.  But there was a May.  In fact May was the only option at this time.

If you say, May, it sounds like Jane.

 
 Where to now...
And May it seems didn't go out to Australia, but she did have connections with Ghana.  Now they should be interesting.  We are just waiting for for the birth certificate as proof.  Tick tock.

Illegitimate sister born 1920, garbled details? Give me 2 minutes...

Oh my goodness. Just got off the phone to a new cousin in the Midlands, born 1939. He remembers he had a sister born 1922 called Jane, born illegitimately, who went out to America as a young girl, presumably with another family.

Bless him, it turns out that everything he recalled was incorrect, although in many ways it was still true. I found the birth for Calista (not Jane), 1919 not 1922 and traveling out to Australia, not the US!

Luckily I had an open mind. The story doesn't end there. As the sister was happily falling nursing her new baby in Australia, 1938, her mother back in England unexpectedly fell pregnant with my cousin (above).

I hope to corroborate this story shortly and put the families in touch. Not bad for an hour's work!

European Genealogy across 13 countries - a story starting in the Lakes

  I idly wondered whether Arthur Taylor, living in London age 18, might come back to marry in his native Keswick.  He did!

And on clicking behind the link I spy his wife looked like Isabel Kroll.  This didn't sound like a lasting marriage.  What was he up to?  But I couldn't find anything more, so gave up on him.

But then I found a reference to a lady living in Italy, who just had to be Arthur's daughter, and the game was on.  Arthur turns out to be the International YMCA's 'man in Italy' while Mussolini is at the helm.

It takes me a good year to recover from these Italian revelations before I finally get the will of Arthur Taylor's daughter, Signora Barone.  I certainly expected that the dalliance with Isabel Kroll would long have past, but concluding Alice's long and passionate will comes the note from the clerk...

And then, buried in the text, Isabella's mother is listed with a very English-looking name, Rosalie Stuart-Cowen!  I already knew about Scots in Poland, but Scots and Germans (?) seemed to hold an interesting tale to explore.  Considering I lacked both Isabella's birth, death and previous marriage, it was remarkable what I eventually crowbarred out of the internet.

Here is Isabella's first marriage, which I did not find by idle Googling, but only by the specific search indicated.

Here is Isabella's tree now.

The following countries are covered on the map below
England - where Isabel married in 1907
Denmark - where Isabel's first husband was born (place given as father's birthplace in 1920 census for her elder children)
Sweden - where her daughter Anna's son Hans was a citizen in 1954, likely as an adopted child, and believed to be his final home
Poland - where Isabel's second husband worked in the 1920s after WW1
Netherlands - where Isabel's sister Georgina was living until about 1900 (at The Hague)
France - where Isabel's two elder children (and grandson Hans) were born (Paris, Vaux-sur-Mer)
Italy - where Isabel's second husband worked in the 1930s and where her younger daughter (Alice) settled (in Sicily)
Switzerland - where Isabel's mother died in 1890 (unsubstantiated) and where her sister Rosalie died in 1927 and where her sister Georgina married (in Lausanne)
Germany - where Isabel's sister Rosalie married in 1883 (at Stuttgart), and where she herself was born (source 1920 census), and where her father was born (ibid)
Greece - where her first husband went to live, presumably after separating from Isabel
Canada - where Isabel's youngest child was born in 1908
USA - where Isabel was living in the 1920 census (Washington DC), while her second husband performed his YMCA duties, and where her two elder children settled, and where her mother was actually born
Brazil - where her grandson Hans (John) came to reside or work in the 1950s

What a surprise to tumble out of a marriage in the Lakes.  Lastly a picture of gorgeous Giarrattana in Sicily:

 This was the second Sicilian connection to emerge.  As well as Il Dottore Barone from Noto, I have Signor Leone from Naro a century before.  Agreeably close to Montalbano's fictional Vigata, which I watched sorrowfully in the denouement to this Sicilian episode.  But as Sicily recedes, step forward Malta - even further south, as new home for a descendant of Annabella Airey.

Two little bits of paper

So I got back on Sunday after a few days' away, and the Office for National Statistics had pushed a brown paper mountain through my door, for £37.

What really mattered were the two little bits of paper.

It is not often that news from the 1870s has me carpeting Facebook friends with panicked news. But that's what happened here.

These dear certificates resolved a decade-long battle to find the whereabouts of Charlotte Smith, born 1880 in Norfolk, and Eva Walker, born 1897 in Swansea.

Like the very best of horoscope readers, all that was required to sort things out was a date of birth. Two dates of birth on the two bits of paper.

Charlotte is then searched for on the 1939 Register, and appears as Mrs Campbell living in a mansion flat on Battersea Park.

Eva is then also searched for on the 1939 Register, and appears as Mrs Purcell a widow living of all places in Kidderminster, a part of the Midlands nearest to the Welsh Marches.

Both ladies had married age forty, three counties away from their birthplace, which made them hard to spot.  Both actually had families.

Charlotte's London family are an absolute joy and we're seeking to reunite them with their first cousins elsewhere in the capital.

Charlotte in particular was my most missing relative, in an army of people "who we don't really talk about" which included her father, grandfather, and most of her grandfather's (overly sexed, illiterate) relatives.

Eva has also kept me guessing; but, no longer. I shall have to scout around for new missing relatives, as so much of the post- Victorian era has been resolved.

Thanks to birthdates, the 1939 Register and those, now screwed up, bits of paper.