Family trees with shaky branches

 

                                                         The wrong kind of weight can sometimes cause tree collapse

I thought it would be quick and easy. Just plug in Alexander Matheson's name and birthdate and check out Ancestry family trees to find out more about his family after he crossed the border into the US. Well, I found him in quite a few trees and attached to the right birth family too, for the most part, although those trees showed a few surprise siblings. Just where did that William Matheson come from? He wasn't listed in the family headed by Kenneth Matheson in any of the census returns which I had seen, not even after Alexander was no longer included. 

In the trees I'd looked at, the later information about Alexander himself was all over the map. I mean all over the map literally. Some trees showed him in Ontario which made some kind of sense as he'd been there with his family in 1851. Other profiles showed him dying back in Scotland. I wondered just where and when they'd tracked him back to the old country.

It looks like there won't be any short cuts in tracking down Alex and his family. I had hoped that it would be easier because, while I have his letters to give me clues they can be somewhat lacking in detail. Like the information he wrote to his sister, Margaret, catching her up with the 40 years of news she had missed out on. On one occasion in about 1890 he wrote: "Five years ago we buried our only daughter, a young married woman of 24. She died in childbirth. She left two little girls." Tantalizing clues but there are no names.

Perhaps it is just as well that I'll be building my history of this family piece by piece. At least then, I'll be sure of my facts and who knows what other clues the information I dig up will give me. Like the 1870 census that I stashed in my Ancestry shoebox. In any entry for Pleasant Valley, Grundy, Iowa was a record for Alexander Mathison with his wife Mary, daughter Anna aged 4 and son Frank aged 2. Anna must have been the daughter who died in childbirth 20 years later. Bonus though were the two other members of the household, Francis Gilpin 36 and William Gilpin 22, lending weight to the record of Alexander's marriage to a Mary Galpin being correct. Maybe doing things the slow way is an advantage after all. 

Sources:

Ancestry.ca search of Public Member Trees

Ancestry.ca 1870 United States Federal Census Pleasant Valley, Grundy, Iowa

Researching a wounded US Civil War soldier

 

                                                                        Surgeon's field kit from the Civil War era

While I haven't gotten very far adding collateral Dorset relatives to my Ancestry family tree, I decided to work on my Scots instead, adding Alexander, my 3 x great uncle, to my Matheson family. It was when I was adding life events to his profile that I came across an event that I knew about but, somehow, writing out the outline made me look at the information in a different way.  

Alexander Matheson enlisted in the Union Army in 1861. Various details of his service can be seen in muster rolls and pension records. He was wounded and taken prisoner in October of 1864. His right tibia was broken when he was shot. If he was going to be captured at any point, no doubt it was better timing that it was towards the end of the war.

I haven't yet traced the movements of G and B companies of the 14th and 15th Battalions of Illinois Infantry Volunteers to see which battles he was involved in. That will be a project for later. For now, the records show that he was at Big Shanty when he was wounded and was taken prisoner at Acworth, Georgia.

It would be interesting to plot out his movements on a map both before and after he was captured. Even after been wounded he moved around being transferred between hospitals. If that happened to him, it must have happened to many other soldiers too. It must have been hard being carted around from place to place in the horse and wagon age when too injured to walk under your own steam.

The treatment too, would have been fairly primitive, with amputation being common. When I visited Springfield, Illinois back in 2013, I remember seeing museum exhibitions about the practice of medicine in the Civil War. There were displays of the various implements used, scarily large some of them. But it was a time of medical progress as doctors and nurses learned from the sheer number of men being treated. It made me think about the difficulties of former soldiers once the war was over trying to get back to their lives which, in many cases, involved more physically activity than we are used to today. In Alexander's case, I believe that he kept his lower right leg but the impairment from his wound resulted in him receiving a pension.

Image:

By USG - The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (US Gov't Printing Office, 1870-88), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27857651

Sources:

Civil War Hospitals YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omq63mzHOfY

Civil War Medicine YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDYWP2fz4-E

Internet Archive – various books available about Civil War Medicine https://archive.org

PBS Learning Media https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/ms17.socct.cw.disinf/civil-war-disease-and-wound-infection/

Genealogy and the fluidity of surnames

 

                                                             The building at 82 Wentworth Street as viewed in 2019

When searching for family links, researchers rely heavily on surnames. But are surnames as reliable as we think? I ran into something the other day that made me question that.

I signed up for Diahan Southard's Your DNA Guide Study Group and this week we had our first class. We did a more in-depth dive into Ancestry's ThruLines than I've ever done. Not that that's saying much. I hadn't done more that get my toes wet with that tool before.

ThruLines uses DNA plus family trees to bring up likely scenarios for how you connect to your DNA matches. That's a good argument for why I should expand my family tree. But when I clicked on my great-grandmother, Charlotte Arment, I noticed something. I'd only added the children of her second husband to my tree. I say husband but I've never found a marriage between Charlotte Arment and Henry Cavanagh. That's probably because they never wed as she was still married to her first husband, John James Petherick, who was still living. Divorce was not an easy option in those days.

The problem was that I hadn't entered Charlotte's marriage to John James Petherick or her child from that relationship, William James Petherick, on my family tree. Without the Petherick information, some interesting DNA matches came up in ThruLines. Without the first marriage entered, William James Petherick/Cavanagh was my possible match, Charlotte's first child with the addition of her second husband's surname.

A check of the 1881 census shows that the conflation of the two surnames was easily done. At 82 Wentworth Street in Whitechapel, Henry Cavanah was listed as head of household, Charlotte as his wife and William, at the age of 16, as son. Henry and Charlotte's other children, Charlotte, Ellen, Nat and Jane followed as did Henry's mother-in-law, Ellen Armond.

By 1891 the family at 82 Wentworth Street had expanded into different units in the building. The census showed Charlotte's sister, Mary A Wright, with her children in the first unit. In the next unit were Henry and Charlotte Cavanagh and their offspring. Next door there appeared to be an unrelated couple, William McArthur and his wife Mary R. Living in the unit next to that couple, was W. James Petherick (our William James, son of Charlotte who was now Henry's wife). W. James Petherick was a widower of 26, living with his daughter Alice, aged 7 and his sister, Jane, aged 11. Was his sister, Jane, looking after his daughter? It was interesting to see all of these relatives living close together, an illustration of close East End family ties.

I was left with a favourable impression of Henry Cavanagh's character especially with what I know about the later history of the family. William James probably thought of him as his father, in deed if not in fact. The problem was that ThruLines brings together genetics with family trees and some of my possible matches through William J Petherick carry the surname Cavanagh and have for generations. As any matches on William J's line would be half relationships to me the amount of centimorgans would be different than that of a full relationship which a researcher might look for given the common surname of Cavanagh. Not only that, the ease with which one surname changed to another makes me wonder if it happened anywhere else in my family tree, perhaps on the Cavanagh family line which showed a propensity to mess about with surnames. 

Sources:

Ancestry.ca DNA ThruLines

Find My Past 1881 census for London, St Mary Whitechapel

LDS film 6095389 1891 census for London, St Mary Whitechapel

Adding depth to an ancestral story

 

                                                                                    Back lane in a Dorset village 

I've finally started adding collateral relatives to my Ancestry family tree and new information has already come to light. One ancestor who fascinated me ever since I realized her last child was born out of wedlock is Mary Rideout née Maidment, my 2 x great grandmother.

Mary Maidment married Thomas Rideout in Ashmore, Dorset on the 25th of April 1833. Their son George was baptized on December 1st of the same year. Maybe he was a premature baby or had they anticipated their marriage? The couple went on to have two more children, Harriet in 1836 and Charles in 1839. The 1841 census showed the family living in Green Lane with Thomas working as an Ag Lab. Also living with them were Harriet Maidment aged 20 and Henry Maidment 1 month old. That Harriet looked to be Mary's younger sister. Mary's age was given as 30. Interestingly, Thomas was listed as being 25. The ages of adults on the 1841 census are noted for being rounded up.

Thomas's age on the census might have been accurate, at least according to his death record. He died the following year, 1842, on March 26. His age was given as 26. Such a young age to die. What must it have been like for Mary left to pick up the pieces with young children to take care of? Her oldest, George, would have been 8 by then, her youngest, Charles, 3.

I felt bad for Mary all these years later but, until I started inputting the children I didn't realize the extent of the devastation Thomas's death would have brought. I knew from the 1851 census there were two more children. But because of the oddity of John's birth three years after Mary's husband's death, I hadn't really clocked the birth of Silvia born the same year that Thomas died.

A search for Silvia's baptism turned up nothing so I turned to Find My Past to see if I could find a listing for a General Registry Office birth record. A possible entry was for that of a female with the last name Rideout for the district of Shaftsbury, which was the district where the other registrations for this family were made. The birth was registered in the third quarter of the year, so July, August or September. That would have been a scant few months after Thomas's death. It makes sense that things like baptisms and naming the baby went by the wayside for a while.

When someone young like Thomas dies, initial thoughts might be that the cause was accidental. Not in his case. He was felled by typhus, a disease spread by lice. So, while not contagious per se, infected lice can spread it. The disease caused its victims to become listless, dim-witted, feverish and foul smelling. Thomas would have been unable to support his family for a time before he finally succumbed. Which meant that Mary, pregnant with young children to care for, would have had to find a way to keep the family going. It's a hard story which makes me wonder if I can find out more.

Sources:

Dobson, Mary Disease: The Extraordinary Stories Behind History’s Deadliest Killers Quercus, London, 2007

General Register Office death certificate for Thomas Ashmore

LDS film 1279479 Bishops Transcripts for Ashmore 1732-1879

LDS film 241341 1841 census for Ashmore, Dorset

Rounding of ages on the 1841 census https://durhamrecordsonline.com/updates/2010/09/added-explanation-of-1841-census-age-rounding/

More research clues for criminal links

                                                                  A ship in Portsmouth Harbour

I have a lot of books in my own personal library. Many of them are reads that I tell myself I'm going to get to someday. That works okay for fiction most of the time. Although sometimes I lose interest in the writer or the subject before I take the book off the shelf. It's the nonfiction that I really should get to. Not that most of it will go out of style. The problem is that I tend to buy books about subjects that interest me, like histories of places where my ancestors lived or events that many have affected their lives. But, every once in a while, I take one of those nonfiction tomes off the shelf and I'm blown away about the information that I find.

Often I need a good reason to delve into one of those books. As a member of LibraryThing that reason often comes from the need to meet a challenge posted on one of the group member threads. Recently, the challenge was to read a book about an empire. One about a business empire wouldn't do. It had to be about a geographic empire. I found an intriguing title on my shelves, Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain's Empire by Graham Seal.

I had a special reason to buy this book, as one of my London based families fell afoul of the law back in the 1840s. My 3 x great grandfather, Thomas Arment, and his son Thomas were sentenced to be transported, a punishment that was gone into in detail in the book. I covered the story of my criminal ancestors in a series of posts https://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2018/08/ . Those posts began in August of 2018. I found out quite a bit about the two Thomases before I wrote about them. Now that I've read the book about transportation I have more questions. 

One question should be easy to answer. On page 171 of the book, the author wrote about young prisoners up to the age of 22 transported from Pentonville and Millbank prisons who were treated differently once they arrived in Australia. I'm wondering if the younger Thomas would have qualified as that's where he ended up. A bit of digging in the records I have on hand should answer that query.

As for the older Thomas, he was held on a hulk in Portsmouth Harbour. Until I read the book, I was not aware that prisoners on the hulks were used as forced labour. In many cases, they were forced to build infrastructure in the various places that those old unseaworthy ships were parked. I wonder if his labour was used for any construction at Portsmouth Harbour. I was not aware of that possibility when I visited there. I'll have to look into that further.

It was interesting to find more clues by reading a book already in my possession. Perhaps I should read a few more of the tomes on my shelves. You never know what I might find. 

Sources:

LibraryThing http://librarything.com

Seal, Graham Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children who Built Britain’s Empire, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2021