RootsChat.Com

Hi Terry,
Nice to hear from you.  I've replied to your email address.  Let me know if you don't receive it.
Cheers
Steve

Hi all,

Is there a genealogical method to approach the problem of working “forward” into the total unknown?

My problem is that I can follow one of my great grandfather’s brothers up to a certain point and then lose him and am not sure of a good method to work forward from there.
 
He was born in Belfast 1880……1901 census bombardier in Royal Garrison Artillery in Belfast…… 1911 census married with two children at the fort in Sheerness, Kent……one more child in 1916…..retires from the army as a Second Lieutenant after WW1……first wife dies in 1921….then marries his second wife in 1923, where he lists himself as a ”retired army officer”.

 Up until he married his second wife he was living in Scarborough, Yorkshire but after he married his second wife they seem to have moved away somewhere.  I can’t find any children from the second marriage.  They both, and the children from his first marriage, have fairly common names so I don’t have any trouble finding potential candidates for death certificates or marriage certificates for the children from his first marriage.  I just want to avoid the time and expense of sending off for certificates until I get “lucky” and pick the correct one.  And, for all I know they may have left the UK.

With all this data online, is there a way of searching for two people in the same place at the same time?  E.g. show me the death records where a person named A and a person named B died anywhere in the same vicinity, say county.  A census would be perfect but I’ll need the 1933 census and probably don’t have enough time to wait for that one!

Or, does it just have to be hit and miss sending off for death or marriage certificates that may fit. 

Very frustrating.

Cheers

Hi, just an update.  Jane from Old Mersey Times has been helping me with this for the last few days.  She discovered a younger brother (William John) to Matilda who was also not living with their father and stepmother in Liverpool in the 1871 census.  Jane thinks that Matilda and William John may have been sent to a relative in Toronto, Canada....perhaps they couldn't get on with their stepmother.  This is based on census records for Toronto that she found.  Certainly William John emigrated to Toronto in 1905.....perhaps because of a childhood experience there?  I'm not totally convinced yet that they were sent to Canada but they were definitely sent somewhere.  And Heywood,  am a bit embarrassed to admit this but you are correct with your suggested marriage records!  I was certain I had checked all the possibilities for her in Ireland.  In fact she married a Henry Moore in 1883 in Belfast.  So, she was obviously found, after being missing for at least a few days!  I wonder where she went when she went missing in Liverpool.

They seem to all be there heywood.

I just tried searching the Liverpool Post on the British Newspaper Archive for a few months after she vanished using the keyword "missing".  Curiously I had one result talking about a young boy being kidnapped to be sent begging door to door by the person who kidnapped him (in Ireland).  That sounds like the sort of thing the 30th April article on Matilda is implying as a possibility.  I wonder if that was something that happened in those days.

Woops, my maths on fly just then were fairly abysmal...yes 41  :-)  ....even less reason to be living at home in Belfast.  There was one death registration in Ireland that fitted her perfectly but it turned out to be someone else.