I finally got to take one of my family lines back further because of a DNA cousin! I didn't think that would ever happen. What's more, I contacted this researcher over Ancestry's messaging system and they responded. That doesn't happen every day. Of course, this is not on the family line that I have been writing about so I got sidetracked again.
When tracing my Welch line, I'd been able to take that family and some of the families who married into it quite far back but there was one wife's family that I didn't know anything about. Who were the parents of Elizabeth Long who married George Welch in 1827 in Southwark, Surrey?
My DNA cousin was able to supply that information and more besides. Included in the information were the names of William Long's employers in Cheshunt, Herfordshire. William Long was Elizabeth Long's father and George Welch and Elizabeth also lived in Cheshunt for a while.
In my previous research on the Welch family, I had great success when I found out more about the employers of some of the Welch family. The movement of a factory provided reasons for the family to have moved at one point. Maybe finding out more about the employers would provide clues on the Long family as well. That led me to a search of the wills in Cheshunt. I hoped for a will for William Long or wills for the men who had employed him. That search sent me over to the National Archives site where the PCC wills are still available for download for free. No luck with William Long but I think I found the wills of two men who employed him at different times. Now I just have to transcribe those challenging documents.
This latest DNA discovery sent me back to regular genealogy research. I don't think that's how it's supposed to work. But we'll see how this pans out. BTW the National Archives sites says they will be reopening soon. No word about what will happen with the free downloads at that time.
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