Connections.......?

To give myself a break from finding missing sources and other.....er...little problems, I've set myself another *small* task......

To find the link between my "family" Culpins, who started out in Woodnewton, in Northamptonshire, and those Culpins in Spalding in Lincolnshire.  Geographically, not far apart but who can tell.....????

More soon.

Trains and stuff.......

Well, what a fabulous day I had on Saturday!!

This was lunch with my "new" cousins, in Reading.  A simple journey, down to London, round to Paddington and then the train to Reading.  A good lunch with the cousins and my sister, laughs and discovering some surprising similarities.  Then home again, sister and I in opposite directions but still hit by the same mini-tornado which seemed to cross southern England late Saturday afternoon.  My train was stopped in driving rain and very strong winds, when the overhead power tripped out, and sister's train by the more prosaic "tree across the line".  Good ol' Mother Nature.  Didn't spoil the day, though, so that's fine.

Finding the new cousins was the result of ....well, sheer bloody-mindedness on my part really; which is what we all need as genealogists (although we dress it up as "persistence" to be polite!)  I'm still in "check, check, check" mode and am updating my database to my somewhat-more-exact standards; more exact, that is, than when I started this hobby/obsession about 20 years ago.  And, of course, the software is so much better and can record things in a much more useful way.

I'm lucky that one side of my family comes from my neck of the woods so I have access to local newspapers as well as the records office; therefore I have a number of funeral reports, and a couple of marriages too, which give some wonderful lists of names of the attendees.  All good stuff!

So, back to the checking.

More soon.

Sources and how to make a note of them........

So, here we are in the new year and I haven't written a post about my resolutions.  That's mainly because my resolution for 2014 was decided for me by an email from someone who'd seen one of my trees on Ancestry.    It showed me quite clearly the way forward.....

Which is to check, check and check again.  Back when I was a baby genealogist I didn't seem to bother with sources, being more interested in simply logging the information I was finding.  This is now coming back to bite me; apart from offending my reasonably tidy mind, it also caused much embarrassment when the aforementioned contact asked me where I'd found a set of christening dates.

The precision of them suggested that I'd got them from the parish register, rather than a compiled index..  The particular village is not on the IGI so I must've been to the Records Office for them.  But I didn't write it down so I have no idea.

So I'm off to Huntingdon again tomorrow in the hope of a seat in their archives searchroom so I can look again at the parish register and, this time, note that I have done!!

On the positive side, I'm looking to keep in touch with some new contacts I made last year and lunch has just been arranged with my sister & I and our "new" cousins.  Excellent.

Happy hunting in 2014.

More soon.

Well, who'd'a thunk it......?

Next week I'm going to Bedford to meet Cynthia who got in touch after discovering that we share a 3xgreat grandfather, Benjamin Langford who married Martha Hatch in 1806.  So I'm going a bit more research.....

And I've got as far as Charlotte Haylock, my 2nd cousin twice removed, who was born in Grimsby in 1867, and married Ernest Frederick Kempton in Leicester in 1894.  So far, so very ordinary.

Except for one thing: Ernest Frederick Kempton is distantly related to my oldest friend Sally.  About the same relationship as mine to Charlotte.

That makes us practically sisters........

More soon.

I remember when......

Today I had lunch with my uncle and, as ever, the conversation ranged far and wide, including a catch-up on our last collaboration, his old school annual newsletter.  From there we moved on to a former colleague of his, and to the expansion of the Trumpington part of Cambridge.

The unc, being a few years older than me, recalled that, as boys, he and his brothers used to cycle to the "separate village of Trumpington" with their mother to visit relatives.  The family, by name of Gentle, consisted of two brothers and a sister who were all deaf and dumb.  He couldn't recall, though, whether they were "real" uncles & aunt or just "family-friend-uncles & aunt".....

Being a bit of a nerd I had my iPad with me;  it has the family tree stored thereupon (of course, I'm a genealogist!) and I was able to find a Mr Gentle in the index, married into the correct branch.  I impressed even myself!!

Once home, and after a cuppa, I got stuck into finding this family; success was not too difficult to achieve as the above-mentioned Mr Gentle (Arthur to his friends) and his wife Susan did indeed live in Trumpington, complete with two sons and a daughter.  The "youngsters" were all marked in the 1911 census as "deaf & dumb" and each was attending the "Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb Children of the Poor" in Margate in 1901.  Herbert, the eldest, trained as a tailor and Stanley, brother number two, as a cycle repair mechanic. 

Most pleasing to be able to back up the story with facts; the family is not related to me but there is a distant link between them and my grandmother.  Now to tell the unc!

More soon.

Bad news travelled fast......

Forming an inadvertent link to Andrew Martin's excellent blog at http://historyrepeating.org.uk/, I too will be talking about a family of Harrisons.....  Andrew's are in Cambridgeshire and I suppose mine are too...now, although at the time, St Ives was part of Huntingdonshire.  

My attention was drawn, by my friend Sue Anderson, to an article in The Times on 5th July 1927, entitled "Three People shot at St Ives".  Now, I should make it clear that this particular family of Harrisons are not related to me but are the in-laws of my 2xgt aunt May Culpin; but, honestly now, would you not want to follow it up?

So a quick delve into the British Newspaper Archive (no hardship, I promise) and I was able to fill in some more details:  Frederick Harrison, age 46, shot his wife Florence and his elder son Geoffrey and then himself.  His younger son Robert was out on an errand and found the results of this tragedy when he returned.  The subsequent inquest brought forth the information that Frederick had contracted malaria during War service and was unable to return to civilian life for for a year after the war ...."and it preyed on his mind."  

What I found fascinating was the number of newspapers which reported this, and their diverse geographical spread - the Aberdeen Journal, the Nottingham Evening Post and the Exmouth & Plymouth Gazette, to name but a few.  I guess that this, being linked with the Great War, was what caught the editors' eyes.

I now need to complete the story by finding the local Hunts Post reports - a trip to the Cambridgeshire Collection awaits!

As do more pressing domestic tasks, so ....

More soon.

Where there's a Will......?

....... there will, inevitably, be an entry in the Probate Index (but not always).  And also where there's an Administration.......

Thus it was that I came upon a puzzle.  When George Bentley died in 1907 he didn't leave a Will so his wife applied for an Administration and probate was duly approved, leave a decent sum.  Then I found another probate entry in August 1930, same person.  Applied for, this time, by George junior; this time also a decent sum but a few pounds less that the 1907 version.

Much confusion at Rambling Genes Towers.

A bit more poking about and I discovered that Mrs George, the aforementioned wife, died in 1930 and junior applied, in April, for an Administration of her estate, the total being a few pounds less than her husband left in 1907.  The plot thickened when this probate was resworn and the effects were reduced to a paltry £10.

After much thought, and consulting my accountant friends, I think this was probably to do with his property/estate being left to her, for her lifetime, and then to junior.  But how would this be conveyed without a Will being left - Administrations all round, remember?

I still don't quite understand......

More soon.