RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: Jill Eaton on Tuesday 12 September 17 13:10 BST (UK)
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Does everyone have a criteria or cut-off point where they accept they are never going to find that definitive bit of information? Or do you all keep the ancestor on the back-burner on the off chance that new records will become available and identification will finally become possible?
I've got a couple of ancestors who, unless DNA matches throw up some results, will almost certainly be unable to locate.
An illegitimate great grandmother. Father unknown. Mother's name on the birth certificate and no biographical details to identify her age or family background. And the location of birth, the workhouse. Any documentation that might have helped - eg. Creed registers and workhouse admission and discharge books are no longer extant for her date of birth and she doesn't appear to be on any census before her marriage in 1891
John Williams. great grandfather. I've got a thread on Rootshcat regarding him. I've been looking for 10 years and in that time only learned his year of birth, his year of marriage, the year of his death and his probable religion. I've looked on the various web sites over and over again but have finally accepted that the above is as much as I'm ever likely to know with any certainty.
Frustratingly I can't go back any further with these two ancestors.
So what do you all do? Stop looking and concentrate on another ancestor? Or just keep looking until you have a eureka moment ;D
Amended to add:
This is a general query. More about general genealogical principles and techniques than locating actual specific ancestors.
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Think we have all been in this situation with finding lost ancestor's I still have several yet to find I would say just concentrate on another in the mean time ... I have found information on several ancestor's years later so don't give up ;) ;)
Rosie
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I've been trying to find Eliza Matthews origins for over 10 years. Fathers name missing from marriage cert (vicar made a habit of doing this), place of birth in census varies from Purton, Wiltshire to Wapley and Codrington, Glos. I think I have found her son living with a different couple and described as grandson, but not entirely sure. I've had a few threads on RC about her.
Now joined by Elizabeth Bishop, have details of her baptism, but there's not a trace of her afterwards. I'm more likely to give up with this one than with Eliza Matthews.
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I've been trying to find Eliza Matthews origins for over 10 years. Fathers name missing from marriage cert (vicar made a habit of doing this)
Don't you feel like giving the vicar a piece of you mind and telling him to be more thorough? ;D ;D
I always feel this way about census enumerators...."Ireland!! What do you mean by just "Ireland" ask them whereabouts!!" ;D ;D
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I don't think we ever admit defeat or give up entirely. More and more records are becoming available, and you never know if one day something new will appear.
It's a little bit like looking for something at home, you know it must be somewhere but just cant find it. Then when you stop looking and do something else, you open a drawer and there it is staring at you!
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I put them on the back burner and work on another branch. I am currently going back over my tree updating my early research and adding sources which Mary be new or I missed documenting when I first started out. I have managed to get back a generation further than before due to records added over last year.
In regards to unhelpful vicars and parish clerks I had one who wrote John Smith and wife on all the baptism so you know the fathers name but will never know the mother name helpful **** not ;D
Regards panda
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I've been trying to find Eliza Matthews origins for over 10 years. Fathers name missing from marriage cert (vicar made a habit of doing this)
Don't you feel like giving the vicar a piece of you mind and telling him to be more thorough? ;D ;D
I always feel this way about census enumerators...."Ireland!! What do you mean by just "Ireland" ask them whereabouts!!" ;D ;D
Definitely! I'm sure a few other people would too - once he'd finished his tenure in Old Sodbury, he moved to a parish in London where he continued in much the same fashion
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I don't think any serious researcher ever 'gives up' on someone they are looking for. I work on the basis of getting a copy of every record they potentially generated in their lifetime and do that for all I research as it gives me a better picture of their life.
On personal experience I was looking for a great aunt who I loved to bits, knew where she was born, lived, who she married, where they lived and where he is buried, she told me 'family stories' and the rest of the family would laugh when I told them, said she was crazy...... I didn't think so, but could never find where they married and where she was for a great part of her life and it stayed that way for 30 years. As I knew her and so like many of us when researching OUR family we are emotionally involved and discount what we think doesn't 'fit'.
I eventually asked on the forum fully expecting no one would find anything and went onto research many dead ends but one which didn't seem to have any connection in my eyes to her at all answered all the questions and more. I simply was looking in the wrong place, I now know she was married twice,where she lived, that she worked as a professional photographer ( which I never knew) but that answered why she carried a camera around with her family just said it was her age/dementia and I would never have found it myself as there were no 'connection records' to that part of the world or her life.
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I think we've all got at least a few pots simmering on that very crowded back-burner! Most of mine seem to contain Irish Stew!
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Never give up. I certainly will not. Like you Jill I have a London ancestor who seems untraceable prior to her and her husband's first child's birth in 1812. The said ancestor died in February 1851, just a few weeks before the 1851 census and she was living in Marylebone in 1841 and said she was not born in county of residence, Middlesex. Her age at death and workhouse admission gives a 1790-1791 year of birth. The only likely marriage is in 1810 but the fly in the ointment is the bride was not a spinster, and if she is the same woman, she'd have to be a very young widow if she was just 19/20. She had her last child (my 3xgreat grandad) in 1828. Yet actually I managed to trace her husband's baptism quite easily and he was from Dorset so it could be a clue as to where she was from. She was in London by 1812.
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Hi Coombs,
I have to agree with everyone else, never give up, just put it to one side and come back to it every now and then. I can identify with ThrelfallYorky's "Irish stew" comment ;D I have quite a few Irish ancestors on the back burner!
In the last year, an old letter came to light that got us all talking about one ancestor again and some of the details confirmed that addresses and occupations we were unsure about were correct.
There are also a great many different types of records becoming available online.
Lastly, there are those eureka moments. A set of ancestors whose details you have been looking at for years and getting nowhere. Suddenly, you either think of a different approach or you recognise a pattern in addresses, names, occupations, etc.
No, I don't think you should ever give up.
Pet50ite
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Irish Stew! strangely comforting (though not for those suffering from too much of it) to know I'm not alone :D
My biggest problem at the moment is an acute case of stubbornness....I know it would be healthier to move on for a while and research other ancestors in what may be a far more rewarding exercise...but I keep just having that one last look just in case I've missed something, forgotten something, not explored every available bit of information, missed the bloomin obvious....and getting frustrated in the process.
The irritating and trite Ancestry advert that implies you just put in a name in the search engine and your family tree will just miraculously grow itself should actually advise potential genealogists that if they aren't very determined they will almost certainly fall at the first hurdle ;D ;)
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I have one ancestor that I have really given up on. My 4 X Great Grandmother born circa 1757. Her marriage is a Dade type record which usually gives the names of the parents of the groom and bride.
However not in her case as she is described as a foundling.
I have no record of a baptism for her so I don't even know where she was found. The available foundling records have been searched. She is a true brick wall.
Venelow
Canada
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I agree with Jill about the misleading advert
Never give up ...extra information can turn up in all sort of places ...
dNa did help me discover my great grandmother.s marriage and legitimate son
And once I knew that name
Rootschatter s found
My great grandmother was given probate of her husband's uncles estate so I knew she was a widow in 1938 and her address
I wouldn't have thought of persuing those non blood relatives !
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I think we've all got at least a few pots simmering on that very crowded back-burner! Most of mine seem to contain Irish Stew!
Got a few of them ;D
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Hi Coombs,
I have to agree with everyone else, never give up, just put it to one side and come back to it every now and then. I can identify with ThrelfallYorky's "Irish stew" comment ;D I have quite a few Irish ancestors on the back burner!
In the last year, an old letter came to light that got us all talking about one ancestor again and some of the details confirmed that addresses and occupations we were unsure about were correct.
There are also a great many different types of records becoming available online.
Lastly, there are those eureka moments. A set of ancestors whose details you have been looking at for years and getting nowhere. Suddenly, you either think of a different approach or you recognise a pattern in addresses, names, occupations, etc.
No, I don't think you should ever give up.
Pet50ite
Yes, and sometimes you want to put it on a backburner and move on but you feel that you just want to concentrate on that line and put all others on a backburner. Spend days looking through records on Anc, FindMyPast, FamilySearch etc to see if any more info comes up that you missed. You may exhaust the records online but you keep thinking there must be loads more records that are not online, more than you think. Newspaper records, land/window tax records, rate books, poor law records, wills that are waiting to be digitised, local censuses.
Sadly in some cases when FindMyPast release new records for a county of interest the parishes you want are "coming soon". it is easy to think that you have to go to the RO in that case but sometimes you could live hundreds or thousands of miles from where your ancestors lived. Asking a researcher costs money. More online records the better.
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I find the strange inconsistencies within the search parameters on various websites frustrating too.
FindMyPast has English Catholic baptisms with the facility to add the father's and mother's names. This obviously narrows the search enormously.
By contrast, their Irish Catholic baptisms don't have a facility for the father's name and won't give any hits from just the mother's first name. This makes the possible hits very wide. For most of us, the census (if there is one) has the father's name and the mother's first name until you can find a marriage for them and learn her surname.
Some of the useful parameters that used to be available from these sites have gone too.
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Hi Coombs,
I have to agree with everyone else, never give up, just put it to one side and come back to it every now and then. I can identify with ThrelfallYorky's "Irish stew" comment ;D I have quite a few Irish ancestors on the back burner!
All mine are in the Irish stew pot, I give it a stir every now and again with any new set of records that come along to make sure it doesn't burn but I never consider it defeat, if I've found all there is to find that is success.
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Hi Coombs,
I have to agree with everyone else, never give up, just put it to one side and come back to it every now and then. I can identify with ThrelfallYorky's "Irish stew" comment ;D I have quite a few Irish ancestors on the back burner!
All mine are in the Irish stew pot, I give it a stir every now and again with any new set of records that come along to make sure it doesn't burn but I never consider it defeat, if I've found all there is to find that is success.
;D ;D
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The only likely marriage is in 1810 but the fly in the ointment is the bride was not a spinster, and if she is the same woman, she'd have to be a very young widow if she was just 19/20.
I can see how that might be uncomfortable, although I will say that one of mine married at 19 and was widowed at 21. I also have an ancestor who married at 15/16 years old- although her husband outlived her, she could potentially have been a widow that young if he hadn't.
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The only likely marriage is in 1810 but the fly in the ointment is the bride was not a spinster, and if she is the same woman, she'd have to be a very young widow if she was just 19/20.
I can see how that might be uncomfortable, although I will say that one of mine married at 19 and was widowed at 21. I also have an ancestor who married at 15/16 years old- although her husband outlived her, she could potentially have been a widow that young if he hadn't.
And she may have been born about 1787-1788 instead of 1790/1791. Sarah may have been approximately 60 in 1851 when she died. She and her husband had her first child in July 1812. I tend to question ages at deaths at the best of times but even more when they are an exact round figure, often that is a educated guess. She was admitted to the workhouse in 1848 and her age was given as 57. The marriage was April 1810 in Axminster, Devon, and Sarah's hubby was a coachman. I even have a copy of the original 1810 marriage record and George Coombs was a bachelor. No occupations given but both signed the register, they did not just give their mark. Sarah witnessed her eldest sons marriages in 1835 and 1845 so I compared signatures but could not draw any conclusions.
After 1810 the George and Sarah seem untraceable in Devon and my George and Sarah seem the only candidates who could be the same couple.
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The only likely marriage is in 1810 but the fly in the ointment is the bride was not a spinster, and if she is the same woman, she'd have to be a very young widow if she was just 19/20.
I can see how that might be uncomfortable, although I will say that one of mine married at 19 and was widowed at 21. I also have an ancestor who married at 15/16 years old- although her husband outlived her, she could potentially have been a widow that young if he hadn't.
Just to add a quote from another thread...
Reply #33
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=778436.msg6328161
"on my nan's first husband they were only very young and married for about 6 months when he was killed."
Annie
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I agree with Jill about the misleading advert
Never give up ...extra information can turn up in all sort of places ...
dNa did help me discover my great grandmother.s marriage and legitimate son
And once I knew that name
Rootschatter s found
My great grandmother was given probate of her husband's uncles estate so I knew she was a widow in 1938 and her address
I wouldn't have thought of persuing those non blood relatives !
bridgidmac - I think your great- grandmother is a really good example that you should never give up. Lots of us looked for her without success and yet she was hiding in plain sight ( hidden by a really bad Ancestry mistranscription of her place of birth on the 1911 Census). Once you had the DNA evidence, she was really easy to find - even if that inevitably led to even more secrets and questions. That is the joy of genealogy!
Isobel
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We all have brickwalls.
Never give up.
Some strategies that i find help -
Take a break away from your research line - holiday or look at another family line.
Go over old hard copies - review old material. Usually after a couple of years. Amazing what you pick up after a fresh look.
Haunt any and every genealogy forum you can. Put your info out there and keep looking occasionally you find a relative with the missing pieces or someone to help.
Perserverence is the key.
Cheers
Jack Gee
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Mine are two Irish 4x great grandparents.
No mothers are named on the 1845 Dublin marriage record of 3rd g grandparents., although the 2 fathers are.
Grr... But I haven't given up them..... One day maybe.......hopefully
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"At which point do you admit defeat?"
It may be useful to know that 'defeat' is not a word in the Genealogy dictionary ;D
Hampered maybe :P
A wee bit o' my poetry....
'Never give up' or admit 'defeat'
Always look forward do not retreat
Whether or not they're in an 'Irish Stew'?
There will always be records to us anew
So bide your time and think ahead
They're not missing they're only dead!
Annie
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Never...
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Does everyone have a criteria or cut-off point where they accept they are never going to find that definitive bit of information? Or do you all keep the ancestor on the back-burner on the off chance that new records will become available and identification will finally become possible?
I've got a couple of ancestors who, unless DNA matches throw up some results, will almost certainly be unable to locate.
An illegitimate great grandmother. Father unknown. Mother's name on the birth certificate and no biographical details to identify her age or family background. And the location of birth, the workhouse. Any documentation that might have helped - eg. Creed registers and workhouse admission and discharge books are no longer extant for her date of birth and she doesn't appear to be on any census before her marriage in 1891
John Williams. great grandfather. I've got a thread on Rootshcat regarding him. I've been looking for 10 years and in that time only learned his year of birth, his year of marriage, the year of his death and his probable religion. I've looked on the various web sites over and over again but have finally accepted that the above is as much as I'm ever likely to know with any certainty.
Frustratingly I can't go back any further with these two ancestors.
So what do you all do? Stop looking and concentrate on another ancestor? Or just keep looking until you have a eureka moment ;D
Amended to add:
This is a general query. More about general genealogical principles and techniques than locating actual specific ancestors.
I admit defeat at the same time I admit dehead, debody, dearms and delegs!
Not being a religious person but one who has a belief in life after death I know I will find out eventually and I would not like to have to admit to any of my ancestors I gave up on them.
However reading your post it seems your method of research differs from mine. Having been researching practically all my life I never really concentrate on one ancestor. Despite what the experts say on every trip I make to an archive library, graveyard or on the internet I am on the lookout for any person connected to my family not just a specific person. I also look for any and all snippets of information that may be gleaned from all sources.
The advent of the computer was a welcome step for me as it made collating & subsequent finding hundreds/thousands of bits of information far easier than previously searching for a snippet I knew I had found years earlier.
As others have said records previously unavailable are constantly becoming accessible in my 60 odd years of research millions of records have been released and many records thought to have been lost forever have been found or in a few cases re-examined and by careful conservation have been made available to the public in digital form.
Even today most libraries and archives still contain many records that have not been indexed and catalogued or at least have not been fully indexed and catalogued and the record I/you need could be hiding there just waiting to be opened.
One final point :
The internet does not hold all the records available and probably never will, millions of records sleep unmolested on shelves and in cupboards in libraries and archives.
Cheers
Guy
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Yes well when I go to record offices I find lots of things that may never be online. I recently looked through some Norwich land/window tax records which go back to 1708. They list owners and tenants and can be good substitute for census records. Found several rellies on there. Also Norwich lists of overseers of the poor and vagrant/pauper lists from 1754 onwards.
Knowing me the archivists will read this and think "Lets put them online then" ;D
I just checked the 1810 marriage of George Coombs to Sarah Davey in Axminster, Devon and they married by license so that looks promising. Witnesses Charles Cornish and Tho Taylor.
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Think it far better to be realistic and admit defeat rather than go on a wild goose chase on the ground that someone is a 'strong possibility'
Have some one on the 1881 census - very unusual name - gives age and precise place of birth - but can find no trace of him before 1881.
Did he change his name I wonder?
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I have a bulldog attitude. I will never admit defeat on an elusive ancestor. Once I have my claws into an ancestor I will never let go. I will keep exhausting all the available records out there. When I get onto an ancestor I think "I am not going to let this go".
I have a James Smith who was in Oxford in 1841. He was a brazier. He died in March 1849 and in 1841 he said he was not born in county of residence. I have an approximate DOB. I have his children's names and it seems his wife named children after her parents. I may never find James' baptism and parentage but I sure as hell will keep having a go. Oxford was a honeypot for people from surrounding counties and further afield. He could have come from anywhere, he could have been born in Norfolk for all I know or Cornwall. But that will not stop me having a look.
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Think it far better to be realistic and admit defeat rather than go on a wild goose chase on the ground that someone is a 'strong possibility'
Have some one on the 1881 census - very unusual name - gives age and precise place of birth - but can find no trace of him before 1881.
Did he change his name I wonder?
Very likely. With the internet this has been made a lot easier to find. I was researching prior to the internet and knew where my ancestor lived from the age of 30ish, where he died and thought I knew where he was buried ( thanks to his headstone with inscribed name in the church yrd ( next door to his farmhouse) however despite knowing from census where he was born and despite spending months looking through parish records I could never find his baptism, then with pure luck found his marriage record ( because of his wifes name) and also his fathers name ( who was not his father but his grandfather).
Then after looking at an earlier census finding him as 'grandson' and two other children who were visitors in the house however one having the same given name as my daughter I remembered something my grandmother said years before in a passing comment when asking what I had called my new baby....... and an added throw away comment of "apparently your grandfather had an aunt called that", so I searched this visitor ( with a different surname) and found her parents and more children, did some more research and found my ancestor was their first child, born/baptised in one completely different name, lived with them no longer than 11 months and was sent to live with her parents, by the next census he was using their surname and his middle name. So he was born with one full name and changed it and lived most of his life and died under another completely different name....... and he is not even buried where his headstone is, but 3 miles away in the next village in an unmarked grave.
Never give up!
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I've been stuck with my paternal Grandfather since I first started looking... (About 40yrs ago now:-(
Every now and again I give up... (I'm embarassed to ask on here anymore, as I've been asking since I joined RC in 2005).
The really annoying thing is that I have his Marriage Cert, (1893) he's on the 1901 and 1911 Censuses, and I have his Death Cert, (1937). But try as I may, (& many others on here have tried too) I cannot find a Birth or Baptismal entry for him:-(
All I can say is, - think laterally, - & try from different angles and approaches. (For example, I've found Newspaper Articles concerning my Grandfather). Changing one's name was very simple in the Victorian era, - no paperwork necessary, - you could call yourself what you wished! And I'm convinced that some folk just didn't want to be found...
Romilly.
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I've got two good examples of name changes...
My 2xgt grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of Elizabeth HAMLEY and a Mr UGLOW.
She starts as Elizabeth Jane Uglow HAMLEY
Her mother marries and she is on census as Elizabeth Jane ROBBINS
She had an illegitimate child of her own and pretended to be married to the father, putting on the cert that she was married name WALKER
She marries as HAMLEY
Her husband put on her son's birth cert that she was maiden name UGLOW
and then she eventually dies under her married name of JONES ::)
Another is my 2xgt grandfather who spawns out of nowhere in 1881 as William BRADY. He continues with this name for the rest of his life. My cousin, especially since he was boarding in 1881 with the MILBURN family, believed that he must have come from Ireland, despite having a Northumberland place of birth on the censuses.
I later pieced it together that his grandmother, Jane nee MILBURN, had died young and with the father absent the two children, Ann and William, had gone to live with Jane's childless brother Thomas and his wife. Ann married early to Gilbert HENDERSON and was widowed at the age of 21. She then had William illegitimately and he was registered and christened as William Brady HENDERSON. She then remarries and he appears on the next census as William THOMPSON before reverting permanently back to his mother's maiden name.
Makes you realise how they were only found from the wealth of records at the time, if one of my ancestors in the 1700s did this I'd be stuffed ::)
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After 1891 my 3xgreat grandad just vanished. I checked all first and surname variants in the whole of England after 1891 and even scoured any deaths under same first name and age group in the county. He was last on the 1891 census in Co Durham. I later found him on the next census - in America. The 1900 census. The best ever US census as it gave his details more. He snuck off in 1892 to live with a daughter who emigrated there in 1881.
Never give up. If an ancestor vanishes after a census or a death of a spouse, try emigration. He may have had kids abroad and went to join them while some other children were married and stayed in the UK.
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Never completely, I always live in hope. I will often get exasperated and start working on another branch and put the elusive person on the back burner for a while.
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Such a lot of encouraging advice from contributors, and the lighthearted 'defeat, delegs, dearms, debody' (thank you Guy) reminds us that this should be enjoyable, even if frustrating at times. I have little to add other than to mention the British Newspaper Archives ad a useful resource, although they may not go back early enough for some
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While I will never admit defeat when it comes to brick walls beyond 1700 (a very rough threshold), when it comes to brick walls in the 1600s I have to concede that the records might simply not have survived - if they ever existed in the first place.
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One website said that only a minority of people left wills but I disagree as it was more common than people think. If it was not for a lot of my yeomen, local businessmen, farmer and tradesmen, and sometimes ag lab ancestors it would be much harder to establish links prior to 1800.
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One of my ggg grandmothers never named the father when my gg grandmother was born. To compound matters, she forgot to register the birth. The baptism only mentions her Single Woman status.
No hint from a later marriage either. She died of consumption a couple of years later, and Mary Ellen was raised by the grandparents.
So that is one I have admitted defeat on.