Funny Friday genealogy story

[iverglas]

Now, everybody feel free to try to top this one if you can!

I've been hanging out at a board run by a family history society in England, poking away at other people's family trees, since I'm really an absolute whiz with a search engine, and a big softie, and will do almost anything to avoid work. (I'm in Canada, so all my English genealogy endeavours involve on-line resources.)

A woman posted the other day looking for help in finding out the name of the man her great-aunt married during WWI. He was killed at the front not long after, and all she had was a photograph. So far, the transcriptions of the General Registry Office index for the UK, which the FreeBMD project is doing, are still spotty for that period, so the marriage didn't show up on a search of the on-line index for the great-aunt's name.

But I had the name, so I thought what the heck -- I decided to find the image of the index page where that surname appeared, for each quarter, beginning in 1914, and look for her. Not a monumental undertaking; she was on about the 10th one I looked at. Fortunately, by that time, the GRO index includes the spouse's surname, so I was able to switch to the page for that surname and find the one who married in the same place that quarter. Voilà -- the person who made the inquiry now knew who her great-aunt's husband was, and she found his grave listed at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, and I was able to find the record of their child's birth, which was registered even though he was stillborn or died shortly after birth.

So then I went to http://www.genesreunited.co.uk to see whether anyone had posted a family tree that included the great-aunt's husband. I'm a member, but the person who made the inquiry isn't. And sure enough, there were four people who had him. So I sent them PMs asking that they contact the person for whom I'd done the search.

They're all pretty old, it seems. One contacted that person directly -- he's a nephew of her great-aunt's husband, in his 80s. And one contacted me. She's a granddaughter of the great-aunt's husband. Tricky? Her grandparents weren't married, and her father was born before his father married the great-aunt and went off to war.

So now the person who made the original inquiry, who wanted to keep the memory of the dead soldier and share the wedding photo she has with his family, if there were any, is going to hear from the soldier's own granddaughter.

Meanwhile ... the granddaughter (who is also quite old) and I got chatting, and I told her about how my mum and I had visited her town in England back in the 90s, and managed to find the pub that my grandmother's uncle owned, and had drinks on the house.

She wrote back:

I cant believe what you have just said about C______ family
My friend A____ C____ P____ I think has been in touch with you she has told me about you

I mean. Talk about your bloody small worlds!

ACP is the granddaughter of my great-grandmother's brother. She found me when a volunteer at the local library accessed Ancestry for her and saw the notes I had made about some of our mutual ancestors in the censuses.

Since the woman who made the original inquiry has the same surname as one of my grx2-grmothers, which belongs to a deep-rooted family in that area, I'd wondered whether we might be related. Turned out not.

But her great-aunt's husband's granddaughter, whom I met while doing my genealogical good deed for the day, is good friends with my great-grandmother's brother's granddaughter in a completely different part of England, and knew who I was before we met.

I figure you can't make this stuff up. ;)



aargh ... husband, uncle, son, daughter ... hard time keeping it all straight myself!

[NOLALady]

1. Yup! The ole six degree formula at work !

[iverglas]

2. of course, that's what it is ;)

Not really a genealogy story at all! It all started with the question we Canadians are used to -- Where are you in Canada? I have a cousin in Victoria ...

Well of course I live about as far from Victoria as I am from England, and I've been to England but never been to British Columbia. It just happened that the person asking lives in the small town in England where my grandmother's uncle happened to have owned a pub and his granddaughter still lives ...



Anyhow, I'll just take this opportunity to reiterate my offer of lookups in records for England / Scotland / Wales / Channel Islands and Canadian databases (censuses back to 1841, BMDs back to 1837; Cdn records mainly slightly more recent) for anyone who might want them. My particular forte is finding names that have been horrifically mistranscribed, sometimes even by FreeBMD itself, so if anybody needs anything or can't find somebody you know is there, just holler!

[Cybergata]

3. I've run into close relatives on line I never knew I had . . .

because of my genealogy web site. That has been the best part of working with genealogy online.

[catchnrelease]

6. Are you up for a challenge?

I have a gr-gr-gr-grandfather that was born in Canada, somewhere around 1820. (Some records show him born in 1817, others 1822...) A few years back, I used a professional researcher in Green Bay, WI trying to find where this man was born, but even she couldn't find him. We have many records of him once he came into the US, including his Declaration of Intent, but it seems as if he was dropped by an alien ship at the US border, lol!!! The closest possibility we have is a baptism record for what appears to be an illegitimate child with the same/similar first name, at about the right time, from St Francois du Lac records. (Yamaska County, Quebec) But this is just a guess really.

If you are interested, or have any ideas, I can give you more details, or what few there are anyway. You can pm me also.

[iverglas]

7. but of course; always!

Only problem is, I'm not really much use with Canadian stuff that far back. All my own four grandparents were immigrants to Canada, two as children around 1907, two as a married couple in the early 1920s. So Canadian records don't hold much for me at all, and I haven't delved into anything that isn't on line. The 1911 census, for two families, and a few marriages after that up to when privacy laws prevent disclosure at this point, that's it for me.

Quebec records, in particular, I'm clueless about. I only learned here a few weeks ago the extent to which all those parish records have been compiled and indexed and made searchable on line. And Pierre Trudeau forgive me, but I've never heard of Yamaska! Ah, I see St Francois du Lac on a map ... I obviously by-passed it the times I hitchhiked between Montreal and the little town way east of Quebec City I lived in one summer, and points east. ;)

Are you sure he was born in Canada -- or might he have just said he was? If the name is French, most likely so. If it's English, he might have immigrated here from England first.

Anyhow, sure, PM me details! (Back that far, nothing you say should likely identify you, and I wouldn't want you do.) In particular, whether he would have been in Canada for the 1851 census, which it sounds like not.

Busy week coming up, so gimme a few days!

[iverglas]

4. allowing myself to hijack my own thread ...

I keep wondering -- how come we're in the "lifestyle, peer support and self-help" category?

I mean, I know I'm addicted to / obsessed with genealogy, but I still like to think of it as a hobby ...

;)

[Cybergata]

5. I've often wondered that myself. . .

but my husband thinks I'm crazy to be so obsessed with genealogy. It is sort of an addiction. Maybe it fits under the lifestyle part of the title. The lifestyle of people who are surrounded by open books full of birth dates and marriage dates, of people who spend hours in libraries searching for hours through books. People who live for HeritageQuest, and are delighted to find a digital book that includes one their ancestors mentioned. Hum, maybe we do need peer support.

[CBHagman]

8. Well, maybe we're not that far from the 12 steps.

Given the family scandals genealogy research can reveal, there are days when I think I'm making a "searching and fearless moral inventory" of them and not myself. If I ever write the family history, it should be called Codependents Galore.