Wow thank you for your help, what an amazing response and website, a distant relative I 'met' through Ancestry recommended it and told me how good it is!
So my great grandmother was born about 1869. I haven't seen a birth certificate, only census records from when she pops up in Chatham, Kent with William Thomas Butterworth, the father of her 2 children Margaret and Annie (my grandmother). I don't know exactly what's on the marriage cert of Sarah Ellen and her later husband George Thomas Waghorn (I suspect she never married William Thomas but took his name initially) because it hasn't arrived in the post yet, I only know that her father was Samuel Yates. But there was certainly a connection with Bolton so that fits. However, according to Margaret's daughter Margaret Davies who is still alive, the children of Samuel (she thought he was called Joshua) were Sarah Ellen, Joshua, Harold and Emily, which are quite different. But she may not have been quite sure about the names like Joshua.
I don't know when Samuel emigrated, only that the twins came back to visit in the late 1930s when they were grown up. Margaret, who was born in 1930, remembers and has a photograph somewhere which I'm hoping will be unearthed soon! I did look in NZ records for the twins but at the time I was looking via Joshua not Samuel and didn't come up with anything.
All your help is so, so appreciated. I have been looking on and off for about a year now, and got quite stuck. But up until a year ago, I was only aware of the existence of my grandmother, but knew absolutely nothing about her, not even that she was born in Chatham and her parents were from Lancashire. So this is all amazing!
Thank you and for any further ideas you have
Emma
