Saturday 25 April 2020

Starting with the information on hand



Before I go haring off to Australia, even if it is only virtually, I'd best check out what I already have on hand. As I showed last time, I have a handwritten family tree with first names only; nothing helpful like last names, dates or addresses. It's a sketchy start.


I also have a travel diary, a very small book with a green cover with notes on the places seen, the weather and some information about people; mostly first names again. There are some small black and white photos between the book's pages and there are actual notes on the back of the photos. Again, the notes are helpful to a degree but they lack clarifying last names and locations. There is one photo of a house with a sign that says "Lyttle" on the fence. Was this the name of the family or the name of the house? The '50s was a time when people still named their houses.


But there was another document that shed a bit more light on the information that I already had. Fortunately, Harold S Chambers was not married when he signed up for WWI and had to name a next of kin on his attestation papers. This was altered later when he married but the previous entry was still legible showing the information for his Australian cousin with an actual address and last name; looks like Lyttle was a family name although it is spelled differently on the record.




It must be remembered that the address on the war record predated the information on the travel documents by about 40 years, so changes may have happened during that time period. The Australia of the '50s was probably a lot different than the Australia of today as well. I just hope that I will be able to find traces of the family I am searching for.

Saturday 18 April 2020

Off to Australia


It's wonderful to have mementos from the past but using them to find further information can be a challenge. Back when I started this blog, I began with the story of Harold Strange Chambers who had emigrated to Canada by himself. I wanted to understand why he was all alone. What had happened to the rest of the family he left back in England? It turned out that he was the last one his family left in the old country. All of his immediate family had died. No wonder he decided to leave.

He started a family of his own in Canada. His wife was a member of a large, close clan so he gained a family through her but that's not quite the same as having family of your own in the background. He must have been so happy to finally meet up with his own clan but it took a voyage to Australia for that to happen.

The family tree up above was one that he sent to his daughter while he and his wife were travelling around the world in 1955. It's a helpful start but I'm not expecting an easy time with the research. I've poked around a bit in some Australian online records but never got anywhere with them. This time I'm going to make an effort to do a methodical search and see what I can find and what clues are in the documents that I already have.

I recently attended the ISBGFH Commonwealth Conference's Australia Day and I'm hoping that what I learned there will be of some guidance. The webinar library at Legacy Family Tree Webinars also had a healthy selection on Australian research when I looked there. Hopefully this will help get me further than I was able to get before.

Saturday 11 April 2020

Inspired or Lead Down the Garden Path?


I'm still delving into the MacNeil research but it is taking longer and getting more complicated than I anticipated. I originally came to the MacNeil line through a marriage into the McLaughlin line. The McLaughlins seem to have been from Albion Mines in Pictou County. But just last week, I found a baptism entry that shows the McLaughlins may have been in the area I am researching for the MacNeils, Arisaig/Malignant Cove, earlier than I thought. This calls for further research. I will write about this Nova Scotia research again later.

In the meantime, it is time for me to start exploring another line of inquiry as there are several deadlines looming for Tripp articles related to Rhode Island. Most of my research is in the UK and Canada. I am not very familiar with US research so it will be a learning opportunity. It is, of course, a bit more complicated than usual US research because I will be looking at colonial Rhode Island, a place with a colourful history.

But I am so torn because, with the proliferation of online webinars and conferences, I have had wonderful research and writing ideas pop up in so many different directions. I recently attended the Australia Day of the ISBGFH Commonwealth Conference and now have a better idea about searching for my relatives there. Then too there is the idea of researching how my family in two different countries fared during the last pandemic and, of course, there are books.

I am slowly making my way through Common People: The History of an English Family. It is not a slow read because it is hard to get through, it is because there are so many parallels with what some of my own family experienced. On page 35 of the book the author relates the story of Fanny Temple:


               At seventeen she was a draper’s assistant, one of seven at James Kirby’s shop in Norfolk
               Terrace in Kensington, more migrants seeking a better life: their families came from all
               over the country, from Scotland to Sussex (Fanny’s own father a Yorkshire builder). In the
               1870s Fanny and her fellows lived over the shop, sharing beds and working all hours, as
               many did, for the sake of more respectable employment – ‘a sacrifice to their own notions
               of self-respect and the throng of thoughtless purchasers to whom they are less than
               nothing’, according to the Daily Chronicle in an exposure of shop life. None of the
               protective laws governing factory employment applied to shops. The autumn of 1881 was
               a terrible time for Charles and Fanny; in September, within a fortnight, they lost their five-
               month-old, Arthur, and Gertie, who was eighteen months, to tuberculosis; then in November
               Fanny herself died of the disease. She was thirty. One in six people died of tuberculosis in
               Victorian Britain, and Fanny Dowdeswell, living in their crowded accommodation in the
               Kensington slums, was likely to have passed it on to her children.



My family research uncovered the story of Sarah Ann Chubb, also a draper's assistant like Fanny, but in Yeovil, Somerset. She too lived over the shop with the other assistants. My theory is that is where Sarah Ann first picked up the tuberculosis that eventually killed her and her youngest son, although she lived a longer time than Fanny. Was her prolonged life with the disease as a result of moving from industrial Birmingham, where she moved after she married, to the healthier air of Bournemouth? The tale of the Chubb/Chambers family and tuberculosis was one of the first stories I covered in my blog and can be found at: http://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2016/04/living-with-tuberculosis-in-england.html.

In her book, Alison Light, continues on from the excerpted passage to recount the development of Kings Norton, an area gradually enveloped into Birmingham and a place that the Chubb/Chambers family lived. I'll have to explore the area of Kings Norton further as well. It's hard not to go down a rabbit hole these days!


Sources:

Light, Alison. Common People: The History of an English Family. Penguin Random House, 2015


Saturday 4 April 2020

Gems in the 1871 Antigonish County Census

Illustration from the 1849 Illustrated London News

 My MacNeils are proving elusive as I browse through the 1871 census of Nova Scotia on Ancestry. On the site you can search by a specific name or browse by area. I didn't meet with much success searching and browsing the sub district of Arisaig where my John, son of John Breac MacNeil, was supposed to have settled. I then tried Morristown which had more MacNeils but not "my" MacNeils. Finally, I ended up searching the town of Antigonish.

I could tell the town was a busier place. For one thing, there were many more pages of names and more varied occupations. There were still lots of farmers, like in the smaller areas, but also different occupations, ones that could be found in a larger place where there could be more specialization.

It gave me insight into the commercial life of the town. Only one of the three lists of industrial establishments at the end of each district named the business proprietors. (page 66 of 91, if you're looking). There was one carpenter, one tannery and one blacksmith listed but two milliners with female proprietors. I found it interesting that the town could support two bonnet makers which showed that women had a place in the town's commerce in 1871 and that, then as now, fashion was a vital part of the economy.

The most intriguing entry I found, however, was the household of a stage proprietor, no, not a theatre production company as I first thought, but the stage coach company which, at that time, would have had horses and drivers.


 
 As you can see by the transcribed entry up above, there were a diverse group of people in that household. Their religions were either Presbyterian or Catholic but it is their ethnic origins which are the most intriguing; for the most part English, Scottish or Irish although the grooms are both of African origin. It makes me wonder how that household came together. The entry for Malcolm McNeil also shows some of the challenges in browsing for a "Mac" surname. Which reminds me, I should get on with my search for MacNeils. 


Sources:

Ancestry.ca Canadian census collection https://www.ancestry.ca/


Images:

The Illustrated London News Vol 15 July to Dec 1849. William Little, 198 Strand p 52