Hi JenB,
Thankyou for your patience in looking at this problem. I have spent many hours searching and got nowhere either.
I was hoping someone over in England would know if the North Shields records actually exist and have been transcribed/filmed/put online somewhere that I don't know about here in Australia.
Yes, Eleanor Campbell died in Sydney, living at her nephew Alexander's house with his wife and family. I will order a transcription of the Death Cert, but am not confident that it will have much detail, even though most of the Australian State's death records can contain a lot more info than the English ones.
There are several trees from the Australian Bell family on Ancestry and most of them don't even have Christiana and Robert in them, so Alexander may not have known who his grandparents were. I have emailed the Tree owners but had no response. But the Death Cert is worth a try -thankyou for the suggestion.
I spent yesterday trying to track Robert and Christiana's daughter Christiana (groan! so confusing) hoping I might find her widowed mother with her in the post-1851 Censuses. No luck there either. Christiana married John Collis Jones in July 1860 in London, and they appear on the 1861 Census together -then disappear! I think he might have died in 1865 (as John Callis Jones), but Christiana has vanished. I can't find a re-marriage, any children, no sign of her or her mother Christiana in England or Australia. Very frustrating!
This research has the ultimate aim of trying to identify the birth parents of one of my husband's uncles. Five of the uncle's chn/grandchildren have now done DNA tests, and we feel we are getting some good hints as to the family lines of the birth parents. But there are matches we cannot connect yet, and so I am trying to extend the Tree sideways and upwards in an effort to link the DNA matches into the network I have created so far.
We have one match that is on this Bell/Campbell line, and also several from the Birt line, which is the family that Robert and Christiana's other daughter Eleanor (another groan!) married into. This Birt line is believed to lead directly to the birth mother (a girl who has been a strong candidate for many years but no way to prove it).
The Bell line is very frustrating too. I can't go back before Robert Bell, he never appears on a Census as he was a mariner (and a Captain by the time of his death sometime before the 1851 Census). I have no DOB, no parents, no birth place, nor a date or place of death either. He may have been from Glasgow, but again very time-consuming and difficult to pin-point. I have spent months chasing Robert Bell!
Thanks again for your time looking into this for me. Let's hope the NSW Death Cert will give me some details.
