I am so thrilled to get myself back on the right avenue. I was doing pretty good with what I had from family records but then when everyone started having the same gosh darn names at around the same time frame, I got lost on a road parallel to the one I was supposed to be taking. So close but so far down the beaten path of my family history.
Intuition plays some roll in doing ancestry work, and I'll share what I did. I found a site from Cambourne with a list of every single name documented form 1537 - 1800. I was looking to see when Gill and Uren started showing up. My eyeballs started aching, but I kept going. Before I found any of the Gill & Uren names, I saw JASPER EDWARD from 1762 and paused, then wrote it down as the first name out of 36 names I'd list. Why? Because my great grandfather was Charles Jasper Gill and the name Jasper was unusual, to me. It turned out to be right. Blimey. I was to find out that Edward was a family surname.
UREN first appeared in Cambourne (from this list) in 1763 - Robert Uren son of Richard Nov. 20th.
GILL first appeared in Cambourne in 1808 - Mary Gill daughter of Richard and Catherine. April 11th.
After I spent 3 hours doing this, I asked myself what was the point? Get a life!! :-) But it was significant in that I discovered one thing - they didn't start acknowledging the husband AND wife's name until 1774.
And by doing this, I was now able to tell my 82 aunt who lives in my town in New York - a Cornish woman who was born Barbara Helen Gill at St. Michael's Mount in June 17 1930, that we were not always from Cambourne, as she would like to believe we were. It's easier that way to say the Gills from Cambourne, but we are the Gills from Cambourne and Helston and who else knows were?
I had intuitions about things like Helston being one of the towns we came from. I was so attracted to Helston when I was in Cornwall in 1990. I've been studying the history of Cornwall and that the cholera hit many homes killing everyone in families. I wondered if it had affected someone in my family.....and I did research on the epidemics of Cornwall just 2 nights, ago, and printed it out.
And OSPREY discovered that it did.
Today, I received such wonderful information from OSPREY , again, helping me in so many ways to find my true relatives, to place them in a family tree, and to honor them.
Thank you so much. I'm almost speechless. You helped me find out WHERE my great great garndfather got his middle name from. HOCKING. This is significant.
I believe I'm doing a less than stellar job keeping notes on my trail of discovery. If this computer should crash, I'd be devastated so I'm keeping a folder with most of it, but not all. I think I've got so much to correct, edit, and organize, I should stop for a little while over the next few weeks and get this cleaned up, and backed up.
My 3.4 version of Family Tree is antiquated and will not allow me to upgrade or access ancestry.com. My goal is to share this with everyone. I've got so much information on it and cannot import or export. It's time to find another service like paying Family Tree for an upgraded software and then sharing it. That is a LOT of re-doing what I've spent all winter doing. But why keep it for myself?
Thank you OSPREY so much for your brilliant assistance. I'm THRILLED at the documents.
Now I know that we are from Helston and that asiatic colera did take my great great great grandfather's life. <3 <3 <3 Linda
