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General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: myluck! on Wednesday 11 January 17 11:09 GMT (UK)
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Just reading a topic where there was a reference to clutter which made me think and want to share...
A while ago I was talking to a relative of my OH; she was born, raised and living in the U.K.
She was older than my OH and had information from conversations with an even older uncle, now deceased.
She talked of how he wasn't necessarily "all there" all of the time and that most of what he said made no sense. She was dismissing the information as having no real use when she researched. She told me "he even tried to tell me one day that his grandmother was from the moon"!
As I was researching the same line for my OH I took down everything she could remember including the reference to the moon! Which in fact became very useful as after much searching it turned out that the grandmother in question was actually born in Moone, Co. Kildare, Ireland :o
She was not a martian and the old uncle was not telling tales!
It proved to me that no matter how trivial a piece of information seems, no matter how outlandish or insignificant, it can often be the tie you need to help source out facts.
Just an comment for all searching - don't knock any idea without solid proof!
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hahaha i love this - fantastic story!
I have started doing this now everytime i go anywhere!
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As soon as I read "from the moon" I thought, bet that's a Kildare women.
My grandmother often told a story which included the line "I had the baby with me". The story was dismissed as nonsense as the baby in question wouldn't have been born at the time, until I proved one day she had been there, pregnant.
Keep it all and let it drop into place or not as the case may be, you just never know.
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Not one of my lines, but I knew someone who used to tell folk she 'was born in Eden'.....and of course, yes, it turned out she was. It was a small settlement on the edge of a larger town. The place even has a street named 'Garden of Eden'.
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I hadn't been able to trace my maternal grandfather back at all. Didn't know his birthdate, didn't know where he'd been born, although apparently my maternal grandmother would disparagingly refer to him as a Geordie when she was mad at him. No marriage certificate, since grandfather and grandmother had met in Birmingham and run off to Manchester when grandmother got pregnant. All I had was a death certificate, which might or might not have had his correct age. My mother was born in 1930, so no census data was available.
My mother had told me years ago that when she was just a lass, a woman had come to their house and wanted to talk to her father. The woman, accompanied by a young woman who was announced as 'this is your sister', called herself Mrs. X.
Finally the 1939 Register came out, and I was able to get my grandfather's birth date. But I still couldn't find anything that seemed to match up with him for a birth certificate. So I started thinking about the woman who had called herself Mrs. X. Was 'X' his real name, instead of 'Y'?
And following that, everything fell into place. He'd been born in Birmingham, but his parents were from Newcastle on Tyne. He couldn't marry my grandmother, because he was already married (and had several children!).
The kicker and tie-in? The name he used as his alias, 'Y'? I wondered how he had decided on that. Turned out to be his mother's maiden name!
Not the most sterling character, but at least I know who he was, all due to a half-remembered memory of my then 9 year old mother.
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Yes that's so worth bearing in mind...In conversation with my 98 year old Uncle before he died aged 103 years, who had a wonderful memory, whilst enquiring about our Irish Ancestry.. he said "I don't know where the Carrolls came from in Ireland...all I remember is that Mother always said that's where the glass came from?" but he couldn't explain what this referred to.
I dismissed this apparently meaningless snippet of information until much later when I was doing further research that it dawned on me that the Carrolls must have come from "Waterford" famous for it's crystal ;D
Another baffling story was that some of the Carrolls went to America and opened " Bucket Shops" ??? I later learn that one ancestor, a book binder, was a member of the "Bookbinders' Guild" in Missouri, but no evidence of any bucket shops..but she could have been employed in a bookshop?
Carol
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Recently I was researching after being given a reference about someone on the Bridge. Presumed it was the name of a ship. Turned out to be Sydney Harbour Bridge! ;D
Blue
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That reminds me of the standing joke we had at Inverclyde Royal. Dunoon mothers used to have to come over on the ferry to the maternity unit. The ferries were called MV Saturn and MV Jupiter. We thought it was great that a birth certificate could legally say born on Saturn or Jupiter.
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That reminds me of the standing joke we had at Inverclyde Royal. Dunoon mothers used to have to come over on the ferry to the maternity unit. The ferries were called MV Saturn and MV Jupiter. We thought it was great that a birth certificate could legally say born on Saturn or Jupiter.
I like that...ET go home ;D ;D ;D
Carol
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That reminds me of the standing joke we had at Inverclyde Royal. Dunoon mothers used to have to come over on the ferry to the maternity unit. The ferries were called MV Saturn and MV Jupiter. We thought it was great that a birth certificate could legally say born on Saturn or Jupiter.
and I thought coming from the Moon was mad!
Also proves local knowledge is useful
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Yes that's so worth bearing in mind...In conversation with my 98 year old Uncle before he died aged 103 years, who had a wonderful memory, whilst enquiring about our Irish Ancestry.. he said "I don't know where the Carrolls came from in Ireland...all I remember is that Mother always said that's where the glass came from?" but he couldn't explain what this referred to.
I dismissed this apparently meaningless snippet of information until much later when I was doing further research that it dawned on me that the Carrolls must have come from "Waterford" famous for it's crystal ;D
Another baffling story was that some of the Carrolls went to America and opened " Bucket Shops" ??? I later learn that one ancestor, a book binder, was a member of the "Bookbinders' Guild" in Missouri, but no evidence of any bucket shops..but she could have been employed in a bookshop?
Carol
I always thought a Bucket Shop was a Bookmakers/Bookies for taking bets; legal or illegal
There is a burger place in St. Joseph Missouri called the Bucket Shop!!
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There is a district called Eden in Cumbria. A Jericho in Lancashire. A town called Moscow in Scotland.
Some of my ancestors had the surname Moon. A possible origin was Norman-French de Mohun. So they could have claimed to be of the moon, although not from the moon.
Other ancestors were born in Church. That's Church, the place, in Lancashire. Another died in church, during Sunday service. When I'm in my dotage I shall confuse a younger generation with those snippets.
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Well I never knew what Bucket Shops were in the mid/late 1800s so I may have got it wrong but found no proof...there is hope for me yet ::) ;D ;D
Carol
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Anyone got rellies born in Bethlehem ;D ;D ;D
http://www.walesdirectory.co.uk/Towns/Bethlehem.htm
Carol
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I had some pieces I couldn't string together. I got the local Assizes records and in there there was the father's name. Trouble was, looking at the Census etc one'd assume it to be the chap who lived closer (1 mile away/same village, instead of 2 miles away/in town).... I realised that I had the right one by pinning the information I had against just one of them. Without the "pieces" I'd have just assumed the other chap "must be right as he's just up the road and has the right name".
Further pieces and tying him into the specific family I'd got for him then came out in a court case published in the newspapers that made me triply sure I absolutely had the right man/family ... trouble was, "the dead end trail" also ended at the same point. "Went to Canada..." and that's where I'm still stuck, except I DO now know he is the right chap, so could at least draw the tree back a further 4-6 generations even if I have no idea what happened to him.