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I'm looking at some burial records in a municipal cemetery, not church land. Under the Place of Burial section it has a subcolumn of "Situation". The plot numbers are usually seen in here, but other times I'm seeing a small letter "a" after the section letter, e.g. "C.a.". Does anyone know what the small a means?

Had to share this oddity I found during my research earlier today. Okay, so I'm following the line of a cousin branch on my Barclay side. Isabella Barclay, the only daughter of John Barclay and Margaret Gillie. She marries, age 21, to a guy called James Gibson Clark. They're on the 1871 census (less than a year after their wedding) in North Shields running the Golden Fleece pub. So far, so good.

Fast forward to 1881 though and things start getting squirrely. James Clark (still in North Shields but now running the Pineapple Inn) is described as married but Isabella isn't with him. There's a younger woman named Margaret Tully who's stated to be the housekeeper, but also a 7 month old child called Algernon J. G. Tully Clark, stated to be his son. I found the kid's birth under the name Algernon James Gibson Clark Tully. Isabella at this point is living over the river in South Shields with her mother and 6 year old daughter, Blanche Clark. So I'm thinking they've seperated, Isabella went to live with mum again and James is now living with his housekeeper. Nothing too unusual so far. Except I can't find hide nor hair of Blanche's birth. As far as the GRO's Birth Index is concerned she doesn't exist.

Fast forward a couple of years to 1883. The Newcastle Courant publishes in the death announcements section of its 28th September edition: "Alnham, Northumberland, on the 19th inst., Margaret, the beloved wife of James Gibson Clark of North Shields." Margaret Tully did indeed originally come from Alnham as I traced her backwards to where she's with her parents Andrew and Jane up there. So James married Margaret then? Isabella must have died I'm thinking... or they divorced, but divorce was still fairly uncommon then, so I'm thinking death, and that freed up James to marry Margaret. Sound theory. Problem was I couldn't find any record of a marriage between a James Clark and Margaret Tully.

I also wasn't getting any good matches in the GRO Death Index for an Isabella Clark of the appropriate age. I then checked the National Probate Calendar to see if I could indentify any possible matches there. Success. An Isabella Clark, wife of James Gibson Clark, died at Roman Road, South Shields.... on the 19th September 1883. Wait, what? Both Isabella and Margaret died on the exact same day??? That can't be right, can it? I rechecked the death index and there was an entry in the third quarter of 1883 for an Isabella Clark in South Shields, but the age given was 29 rather than the 34 she would've been. Not an insurmountable issue though as she was fudging her age by then, the 1881 census saying she was 28. Maybe she just didn't want to admit being in her 30s?

At first I thought there could've been a mixup with the newspaper announcement. Maybe Isabella was mistaken for James' new partner? So I check the index again, this time for Margaret (under both Clark and Tully) to make sure. Sure enough, there's entries in 1883 for both a Margaret Clark and Margaret Tully, in Rothbury (the district Alnham was in), same volume and page number. I buy the digital image of the entry in the register. It confirms that "Margaret Clark, formerly Tully" died on 19th September 1883 in Alnham, age 29, "wife of James Gibson Clark, an innkeeper, and daughter of Andrew Tully (deceased)" The informant was her mother, Jane. Curiously, the death wasn't registered until mid November, almost two months later. I'm not sure why that would be as there's no mention of an inquest or anything that might've delayed the registration.

To complete the picture so to speak, I also got Isabella's death record, which confirmed everything said in the probate calendar. The informant in her case was a cousin named E. Ord, living at the address Isabella died at. As an aside, quite the coincidence that she apparently has a cousin with that name given that Isabella grew up in East Ord near Tweedmouth.

So yeah, the woman everyone was treating as James' wife but wasn't, and his actual wife, both died on the same day, 45 miles apart. You have to wonder if the cosmos was pranking him, killing off the woman he presumably would've married, the same day as the woman who was preventing him doing so. At least, you'd think they would've married. There is the slight matter of why Margaret was back in Alnham. She was probably just visiting her mother, but it could also be that she packed up and left him too.

Weird stuff.

Incidentally, Isabella's mysterious daughter Blanche Clark is on the 1891 census, still living with grandma, up in Berwick this time... only she's now 19... from 6 on the previous census... Oh, don't you start

I've found a possible record relating to my great(x3)-grandfather in Ancestry's "Canada, British Regimental Registers of Service" collection, however I'm a bit non-plussed by the information given in the Where Born column. It says "Somerset, St James". I can't find a place called that and if it's a parish, the number of churches in the county dedicated to St James make that unhelpful. Am I missing something? Is being from St James somewhere obvious to someone from Somerset which as a daft notherner I'm just not getting, or is it really as vague as it appears to me?

Does/did St Aloysius RC in Hebburn have it's own burial ground, or would any deaths recorded by that church have just been buried in Hebburn Cemetery? I've found transcripts on familysearch (images are unfortunately only available at LDS family history centres) for 3 children, in 1923, 1933 and 1934; and then later the father in 1960.