After 40 years I finally solved one of my big brick walls!
Got 8 generations of yeoman farmers in and around Macclesfield in Cheshire only halted by my grandfather.
But I had never been able to find the births (or marriages) of my 7 and 8 x great grandfathers. William & Richard Lane. Burials, yes, wills, yes. Baptisms no.
Tried all sorts. Got lots of images of them having ‘leases for 3 lives’ from the Earls of Derby; images of them being ‘overseer for the poor’, ‘constable’; paying for their seats in the local chapel, etc - good, hardworking men, doing their best for their families and community.
1672 is the first dated piece of evidence where I can place Richard Lane in Macclesfield Forest - he takes a lease on 46 acres there.
But where did they come from? Admittedly the records back in the early 1600s are pretty sketchy for around there, so I thought that that was the end of the line for them.
A couple of weekends ago I went the Family History Expo in Auckland. In the Familysearch seminar, the very nice lady sped through the different ways to search on the fs site. I have used it extensively for searching not only people under ‘records’, but using their ‘catalogue’ to view all sorts of films not found on the usual search websites. I’ve looked at ‘family tree’ on there briefly, but not found anything relevant, (and in fact seen erroneous information).
BUT I thought I’d give it another go, and a hit came up for Richard Lane, with the name of a wife, AND the names of her parents! Wow! No sources quoted, No actual record of marriage, No person to contact - just ‘added by Familysearch’. How frustrating. Never ever taking anything at face value, I started to do some digging using the name suggested there. Took me quite a while, but eventually I found a will for the father of the wife which said in the middle ‘Richard Lane my son in law’! Got ya!!
(The very nice lady in the LDS Family History centre sang 'Hallelujah from Handel's Messiah for me I was so excitied!)
This turned out to be not in Cheshire, but in Staffordshire, about 18 miles away.
I’d looked at Staffordshire before of course, but Richard Lane is not an uncommon name there around the right time. Impossible to know which one would be the right one. Without the clue of the name of his wife, and getting to it that way, I would never been able to make the connection.
Now I have my Lane family rooted back another 3 generations, (not quite in the same village, but near by). Hooray!
So the moral of this story is:
a) Never give up, and b)use every avenue you can to try and find that missing clue - even if you didn’t really want to drive that 30 kms through the city to go and listen to somebody talking about something you thought you knew all about!
