Funny bits and pieces of your research

[M_ONeill]

Do you ever find things during your research that strike you as funny for no real reason?

I'm going through an inventory that forms part of the 1684 will of my (currently presumed) ancestor. In the item listing the animals it goes through all the various horses and oxen and cattle etc, and then it ends with.

'... & a little pigg'.

I have no idea why I find that so amusing, but it put a smile on my face. 

[DianaCanada]

Who doesn’t love little piggs?! 

A couple of weeks ago I chuckled when I found a relative named Minnie Beaney.  The visual struck me as funny.  I laughed even harder when I found she had married a man named Carrett...she became a  very small vegetable!

[Jool]

I couldn't hold back an immature giggle when I discovered an ancestor called Fanny Large 

I had another giggle when I found her parents were Joseph LARGE and Harriett BIGGS - they certainly didn't do things in small measures, they had 12 children.

[pharmaT]

Yes I have had a few moments of giggles in the Mitchell Library, probably that all decent people would find inappropriate.

A death certificate with the cause of death as "old"

The will of my 3x Great Grandfather's wife that states "I remind you of our pre-nuptial agreement where you agreed that no money coming from me would be used to fund your fancy women"

Finding the name "Ruby Murray Currie"

[Top-of-the-hill]

  I rather like the old probate inventories that end up with "old lumber and things forgot". I think we all have some of that!

[arthurk]

Does anyone remember going to one of the big reference libraries to look at the GRO indexes on microfiche? Each fiche had images of 32(?) pages of the index books that could be found at the Family Records Centre, before that St Catherine's House, and before that Somerset House.

On the top edge of each fiche were the first three letters of the surnames at the beginning and end of the fiche, so one going from Baker to Bell, for example, would have BAK BEL. I was mildly amused on one occasion to pull out a fiche and see that it was marked JAM POT.

[M_ONeill]

I had to share this one after coming across it today. I was looking into the life and career of one William Walmisley, who my 9x great grandfather apparently had to pay for the tuition of his nephew and niece as laid out in the 1700 will of his brother, which made him their shared guardian.

William Walmisley obviously practiced law, as well as being an MP for a time. He doesn't seem to have been the most popular guy in town...

To Lord Stanhope he was ‘a fellow of no fortune or extraction and so consequently can have nothing to make himself known in the world but the usual attendance of such people: impudence and insolence’. Indeed, so ‘insolent and troublesome a rascal’ had he been that Lord Stanhope asked Sir Henry Gough to ‘get two lusty porters to watch an opportunity to kick him soundly so that I may see the marks in his face when he comes down.’

Makes you wonder what kind of education he would have overseen.