Well, I can only apologise for neglecting to answer your post, G Mix. Pandemic ... my partner and I have still not left the house since Feb 28 of last year, except for essential medical and veterinary reasons (and of course our double doses), so you'd think that would have left lots of time for family historying. It didn't happen.
In Feb of this year, right when this post was added to my old thread, I suddenly got very busy with work. I've always worked at a home office, so COVID actually had far less effect on us than on most others. The worst effect for us was on my mum, living 200 miles from me, 90 years old and isolated in her apartment in a senior cits' building. She had been in cancer treatment for over two years, one of the first to get a wonderful new immunotherapy and one of the lucky ones on whom it worked miracles, making her a poster child for others to have access to it -- so she had gone from being bedridden in agony and needing one of us kids there 24/7 (I did it in 10-day shifts; my sister living nearby tended to all her shopping and hospital apointments, from then through the pandemic) to doing laps around the block with her walker. Ten weeks after the date of the post I'm replying to, 8 weeks after eagerly having her first shot, she died suddenly and alone late at night, not of cancer or COVID but apparently of heart failure. I will forever hate every single person everywhere who selfishly defied pandemic rules (and now stupidly and evilly refuses vaccination) and contributed to my mother not seeing two of her four children for over a year, and to the depression she didn't survive. Rant ends.
Thank you G Mix. I know I did read your post and take it on board -- because I was recently closing a slew of old open tabs and ran across the ones where I'd hunted for Emma Buie.
The thing is that the missing daughter in that family of mine -- the eldest child, born in the 1840s, according to the two censuses she appears in (51 and 61) -- was named Emma. So imagine my ears perking up.
Emma Buie, age 16 (b. c1856 Clerkenwell), seems to have been a servant in a Monro household in London in 1871 (so place of birth may or may not have been correct). That seems likely to be the one, but I see no other records of her. The surname Buie seems to be Scottish. My Emma would have been nearly twice as old in 1871.
I can also add, all these years later, that some DNA work was done and that the family in question -- whose "real" surname is not the surname my mum inherited -- matches closely with the YDNA of a family that lived for generations 10 miles from where my family was in the 1850s with a totally different surname. But not closely enough to find a paper crossroad, probably, even if I had any clue who my most recent Mr. "real surname" -- who married c1820, grandfather of the children batch baptised in the 1850s, who is evident in any other records only from the fact that his widow remarried in the 1830s -- was and where he came from... although I do know that his wife (whose DNA doesn't count in the male surname line) had the same surname as the YDNA match name with my family -- !! So many webs, so tangled.
I stay on the trails, but I'm kind of stuck where I was a few years ago, except for ever-narrowing bits and pieces. Like discovering the grave of my great-grandfather's sister (one of the batch baptisms in Cornwall in the 1850s) in Canada, of all places, where her husband abandoned it when he departed back to England later that year with their kids (one of whom settled in S. Africa, whose granddaughters, whom I had already found online, had never heard of their great-grandmother buried in Canada and knew only more genealogical tall tales) and his new wife, and then left the kids behind and left for parts even more exotic. One half of a couple dissembling is enough; when both of them
and their kids
and their siblings just lie about everything, in different ways, this is what you get.
It was interesting to read this thread again. We are in the midst of a paroxysm of statue toppling and name-changing here in Ontario (Messrs. Ryerson and Dundas, for example, having been associated with the "Indian" residential schools where crimes against humanity were committed), but I haven't seen anything yet calling for Col. Simcoe's deposing. He was a mixed bag, of course, as aren't we all.
I think I'll go hunting for my Emma again. Or make lunch.
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