Graveyard Jaunts

Michael Collin's grave at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin

 

Family history research inevitably involves trawling through graveyards, something that may seem strange to those not in the game. Most people ride past a graveyard with barely a second look while genealogists crane their necks hoping for a glimpse of a familiar name. I have visited many a cemetery through the years, from small burial grounds surrounding a church to graveyards which take up many city blocks. 

 

Whether big or small, you sometimes need help finding the right grave. Last year's trip to Ontario included a jaunt to the Greenwood Cemetery in Owen Sound on the hunt for the resting places of some of my Thomson relatives. I know many photos of the stones are available on Findagrave but there is nothing like an in-person visit, if you can find the grave. There were maps in the Greenwood Cemetery but I couldn't figure out the system. I was lucky there was someone in the office to confirm my Thomsons were there and there was a stone to find. Once I rethought my search, I found them all on one stone and right beside them on another stone, almost swallowed by a bush, was a stone for the Harkness family which included Elizabeth Thompson Harkness, also a member of the Thomson family that I was interested in. I wouldn't have known to look for the Harkness stone without actually being in the cemetery.

 

Online searches can show you a lot but nothing is really the same as being there. If you visit in person, you are in even more luck if you have a guide, like I did in the Welford Road Cemetery in Leicester this year. My cousin was able to point out our family stones there as well as those of some of the more well-known permanent residents. 

 

As for well known parties found in cemeteries, one of the tours from my recent trip took in the Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. There are lots of famous people buried there, many with connections to Ireland's risings and rebellions. *Our tour included a reenactment of the Patrick Pearse oration given in 1915 over the grave of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa as well as visits to many famous and infamous person's final resting places, proving, to me at least, that cemeteries can add a lot to our understanding of history.

 

Yews are traditionally found in cemetaries

 

Sources:

Glasnevin Cemetery Museum https://www.glasnevinmuseum.ie/daily_tours/

 

Questioning Family Tree Conventions

Although unrelated to family history, something I read recently started me thinking about automatic assumptions used when drawing up family trees. It made me look at the Tripp part of my family tree in a different way. For years, my Tripp family line was pretty solid back to Charles Tripp born in 1761 in Duchess County, New York, thanks to help from others who were interested in the Tripp family line. When autosomal DNA testing came along, I even had genetic proof.

Genetic proof multiplied as more and more Tripps submitted their DNA for testing. But I was hoping for UK matches and the Tripps I was connected to were in the US, hardly surprising given Ancestry.coms US bias. I ignored my Tripp matches.

That changed in April. An invitation to enter my line of Tripps in the Guest Book sounded easy. I had all the names on a family tree back to Charles Tripp (born 1761). So, it should have been easy to enter the info and get back to planning my pending research trip. No such luck. A return email brought a write up of an extension to my family line to be considered. The researchers had come up with a potential father for Charles which would link him back to a pedigree reaching back to the original American settler.

The report on Charles' father and the link to the founding family used extensive documentary evidence. Best of all, I believed that it met the Genealogical Proof Standard that I had been hearing so much about. At one fell swoop, I now had a line that took me back to the original Tripp settler, the founder John Tripp who ended up in Rhode Island in the early 1600s. My Tripp entry is now in the Guest Book https://www.trippgenealogy.org/wordpress/guest-book/ under John Tripp's third son Joseph. But therein lies my conundrum.

When the rest of the couples were added into my line back to John the founder, there was one of those pedigree collapse items in there that confuse family tree software programs. A Tripp had married a Tripp and they were both offspring of John the founder. Convention (and Y-DNA studies) list couples linking the male surnames if possible. But I started to question this convention while reading Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Was our way of recording a case of data bias? What about the female line back to John the founder? In my line, *Lydia Tripp, the granddaughter of the founder John Tripp, married Jonathan Tripp, John Tripp's great grandson, which meant that Lydia was a closer link to the original settler. She was the daughter of John Tripp's son James, so perhaps my line should be listed under John's fifth son, James.

Where did this alternate view of my Tripp family tree leave me? It had taken me a long time to figure out how I was related to one of my fellow researchers. I finally settled on fifth cousin once removed based on our line back through the third son Joseph. But the other researcher had the same pedigree collapse in his line as well (we won't even think about the fact that Jonathan and Lydia Tripp's mothers were sisters). I don't think fifth cousin once removed cuts it anymore.

Sources:

Andrews, Janet Tripp and Jan E. Tripp "Research on the Lineage of Charles Tripp (1784 - 1828), October 17, 2016

*Bock, Margaret Buckridge. "Descendants of John Tripp of Portsmouth, R.I." The Geneaologist 4, no. 1 (1983): 59-128
http://trippgenealogy.org/TrippFamily/sources/Volume-4-No-1-Spring1983-ed-2.pdf  

The Treasures at the Bottom of the Suitcase

Research trips are so much fun! Well, maybe not the preparation; figuring out which archives to visit, how to get there and if they are open when you need them to be, can be daunting. Even being there trying to understand how the archive works and what the best use of your time will be, can be challenging. A first quick visit and then a longer second one can be more productive. That was my strategy for the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) and I think I will do even better there on repeat visits providing they don't make major changes in the meantime.

As the LMA has agreements with Ancestry, many items are actually available online. A really detailed look at their catalogue is necessary to make sure you are accessing items that would not be available online so that you make the most of your in-person visit. My preparation was a bit lacking in that respect this time but I did come up with some interesting negative info on my Arment family line. For some reason their young children were buried at Wycliffe Congregational Church. I checked the roll of church members for 1827 to 1867 as the children were buried in the 1840s but their parents didn't show up as members. There were some other family names that may be clues as to why the children were buried there. That mystery deserves a closer look.

That is one of the hardest parts about a research trip, actually unpacking the suitcase. By that I don't mean just taking all the painstaking notes you have made and putting them with the other notebooks amassed from other research trips, but actually going through things to see what treasures have been found and how they fit into your overall family history. Do they hold clues to possible new research? Or maybe they refute something you have long held to be true. Whatever those facts are they deserve to be evaluated and worked on. You spent a lot of time and energy to find them!

(This was actually a pep talk to myself but maybe I am not alone in needing it?)

Past Homes

 

Was that how the street looked when my family lived there in the 1800s? Was that even the building they lived in or had it been replaced sometime back in history? Finding numbers close to street doors was difficult but judging the era of the street fronts they were attached to was even harder. It was obvious that some ancestral places had been razed and new places put in their stead. Goodmans Fields was not an upscale area of office blocks when my family lived there and, while there was a building at 82 Wentworth Street, it was doubtful that it was the one my Cavanagh family lived in for decades. It seems that even the street use had changed as surely Petticoat Lane Market was more than a few blocks away in their day.

 Visiting old family addresses is de rigueur for family historians. If you are lucky the places where your ancestors lived may still be standing and there might even be a chance that you could get inside. If not, just being in the area where their home once stood can give you a better idea of the lay of the land, which can help with the understanding of family stories or written accounts. It can also help you to picture their everyday lives. 

But there is nothing as sure in life as constant change. It happens in our lives all the time and it did in our ancestors lives as well. Many of them moved up and down the social scale as time and age changed their circumstances. Some of them moved from village to village, or village to town then city or even to different countries.

Did they keep fond memories of home in their minds as they pursued new lives in distant lands? But maybe the vision of home they held dear was no longer a reality. This came to mind after a conversation I had with someone who had lived in Halifax in his youth. It was a place we shared in common. Our memories stumbled over the street names but we recalled some of the geography, like the cemetery on the main street and the Public Gardens across the street from the Lord Nelson hotel. One of his fond memories was of sitting on the lawn in front of the library with chips from the food truck parked nearby. I told him things had change, that the city was proud of its new library but it was on the opposite side of the street and there was no lawn in front. He was sad he can only sit on the library's lawn in his memory and not look forward to doing that in person again one day. 

Did our ancestors have dreams of walking down the streets of their old homes one distant day in the future or did they embrace their lives in new lands and forget about what they had left?

A Channel Islands Legacy

A view of St Peter Port, Guernsey

So close and yet so far. My cruise ship stopped at Guernsey but my family links were to Jersey. Time to plan a future journey to that other Channel Island. All was not lost, however, as, even though there is a rivalry between the two islands, they have much in common.

The islands are closer to France than they are to England although they are British Crown dependencies. My search for family information online at Jersey Heritage https://www.jerseyheritage.org/collections/archive

brought up family records written in French although the heritage website was in English. I wasn’t sure which language would be spoken. No worries, our driver/tour guide sounded like a London cab driver. 

Given the history in living memory, this made sense. With German occupation eminent, many of the islands’ children were evacuated to Britain. There they would have picked up the language and accents of their hosts. The story of the occupation from the islanders’ point of view was brilliantly depicted in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. There were tours on offer which followed the episodes in that book but, as much as I enjoyed the story, I chose a more general tour which took in scenery, colourful sights and signs of German occupation.

When building their bunkers, the Nazi forces had no concern for the archaeology of the area and, the sources that I read blamed them for causing irreparable harm to the historical record. I hope that similar harm was not done by them or through other attempts at modernization when I search for traces of my family on Jersey when I finally get there.

My family’s stay was a short one, at least for the living.. My 2 x great grandparents left Dorset sometime in the 1870s, when the Channel Islands were opening up to more people from England. They settled in St Helier for a time and it was there that their daughter, my great grandmother, came to get married. As she and her future husband lived in Birmingham it took me a while to find that information through a newspaper notice as the marriages on the Channel Islands are not included in the entries at the General Register Office for England. 

 Some of the leftovers from the German occupation