23 December 2010

Respectability at last!!

Well, bless my soul, I've just discovered a "Sir" in the tree!

Say hello to Sir William Henry Clarke (1847-1930), land agent & bank manager of Chatteris, Cambs.  He married Helen Florence Smith, daughter of John & Elizabeth (nee Dunn) in Gosport, Hants, in 1874 and they went on to produce five children ..... who, between them, grew up into two doctors, a director of coal merchants, and the First Matron of the War Memorial Hospital in Gosport.  

This information leapt off the internet at me from http://morawel.com and I'd like to thank the compiler, William Walker, for such a wealth of detail.

Merry Christmas.

More soon.

19 December 2010

Piles & Piles

Ah ..... yes ..... now, you see .... I haven't abandoned you. honestly.  I've just been flitting around hither and thither and catching up on the pile of paper on the desk.  So far I've managed to decrease it by nearly a whole quarter-inch.

The problem is that I pick up a piece of paper - some of which, I'm ashamed to say, is months old - and read information that someone has kindly sent me.  And then put it down again.  Basically, I seem to ignore it.  "Embarrassed" just doesn't cover it.  My latest find in the "pending" pile was an email from a Freeman contact who gently pointed out a fairly glaring error in my research.

My gt-gt-gt-gt-gt-gt (six greats, I hope) grandmother Mary Armiger was actually a widow when she married William Freeman, having already married Francis Armiger and produced a daughter Mary.  Francis died a year or so before she remarried, in case you were wondering.  So, Mary Armiger was actually Mary Dean and I've known this since August and not done anything about it.  By the time you read this blog I will have changed the website ..... hopefully.

Thank you, Jennie, for the info - I've finally taken notice of it!  And, in the meantime, she also gave me a fairly major hint about Charles Freeman (1790-1875) which has sent me on another wonderful "journey" of research, claiming a few more Freemans for the tree.  Excellent!

And, just as exciting, I *may* have broken down a fairly major brickwall on my maternal side.  For quite a few years the tree stopped at Martha, who was the widow of John Bent when she married gt-gt-gt-grandpa Benjamin Langford in Chatteris in 1806.  Thanks to the new FamilySearch site, I have found that she was probably (no proof, remember) Martha Hatch.  

Mind you, I haven't managed to get any further back than her at the moment but at least the potential is there!

Onwards/backwards to the pending pile.

More soon.