Hints in the far reaches of the family tree

                                                 Is that branch on the tree headed in the right direction?

Resources usually get fewer and farther between when you reach beyond the 2 X great grandparent level. So it was for my 2 x great grandmother, Mary Maidment. I know that she married Thomas Rideout but that was before civil registration so the marriage entry in the parish register didn't contain any information about her parentage. Interestingly, one of the witnesses to the marriage was a Harriet Maidment. How did she fit in?

I puzzled over Harriet and her origins for a long time especially as I found her living with Mary and Thomas Rideout and their children in the 1841 census. Harriet had a child of her own but she still went by the last name of Maidment. I had followed up on these clues years ago then put the problem aside.

I would go back to the puzzle every once in a while. Mary Maidment has intrigued me since I found her especially as her husband, Thomas Rideout, died in 1842 and her last child was born in 1845. This child also had the last name Rideout although Mary had not remarried and no record of his birth contained the name of a father. Hints about Mary's own father started appearing on my Ancestry family tree giving the name of her likely father as Elias Maidment. In weak moments, I was tempted just to add Elias to my own Ancestry tree but life has taught me to be skeptical.

Along came a DNA course and a chance to look further into the puzzle of Mary Maidment and her connection, Harriet. While going through my paper records, I came across a marriage certificate for Harriet Maidment. I didn't remember ordering that. The listed groom was George Roberts and, of course, the bride was Harriet Maidment who named her father as William Maidment, a labourer. But Harriet Maidment was not an uncommon name in Dorset in this time period. Plus the marriage was in 1844 and the Roberts family in the 1851 census for East Stower showed the oldest child of the couple as Catherine aged 9. That didn't compute.

My next step was to look for Catherine Roberts' baptism in East Stower.  What came up on the Ancestry search was an 1868 marriage for Catherine Maidment whose father was named as George Roberts. Looks like that 1844 marriage for George Roberts and Harriet Maidment was the one I was looking for. The later 1868 marriage certificate had proved it. The 1844 certificate named Harriet's father as William Maidment, labourer not Elias as the hints on my tree had suggested. Only now that I look closely as the certificate, George Roberts' father was named William as well. So could the second name of William be a clerical error or perhaps Harriet had misremembered. Looks like more genealogical research will be needed because DNA can point us to genetic relatives but it can't prove the validity of their family trees.  

Family branching out from Dorset

                                                                                Road out of a Dorset village

Well it didn't take long for my Dorset family to take me further afield. A few of Mary Rideout's children stayed in the village of Ashmore in Dorset but it was a small place and there were a lot of offspring. Soon many of them left the village and, in many cases, the county. As I filled in the various added members to the next generation born to Mary's children, they seemed to move frequently. Some of them having children born along the way as they moved from place to place. That meant access to digital images of baptisms varied. I'm not sure if that's because the babies weren't baptized or just that the big genealogy companies haven't come to an agreement with the holders of the records.

In the case of one Rideout brother, Charles, his children were born in Herefordshire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, then back to Yorkshire, followed up by two born in Staffordshire. In different towns or villages in the last county, of course. His sister, Sylvia Raymond, confined the births of her children to Hampshire but had two children in Winchester, before moving to Headbourne Worthy where she had two children, then moved to Ropley where she had another two.

Perhaps all this movement when they were young made immigration an easier step to take for the next generation of the family. I know that some of my Rideout line ended up in Australia. I wonder if they were offspring of Charles or Sylvia. 

DNA and Dorset

 

                                                       A picture of me in Evershot, the Dorset village I got to visit

I'm going back to Dorset. No, not physically (I wish) but through family records. I'm currently taking the DNA Skills Course through Your DNA Guide. As part of this course, each participant needs to find a research question to look into to practice manipulating DNA information to answer the question(s). In my case, I'm going to try and prove the link to my 2 x great grandparent, Mary Maidment, through genetics. We'll see how far I get.

The course has begun and I'm frantically trying to get caught up and fill in my family tree at the same time. I have a bare bones tree on Ancestry at the moment but I need to fill it out with siblings and descendants. That means adding all those collaterals that I ignored for the longest time.

It will be good to delve back into the research on my Dorset lines. It will remind me of being there back in the early years of this century. At the time that I visited I only made it to one ancestral village, that of Evershot where my maternal line of Chubbs had been for a while. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to Ashmore, where my line of Rideouts had lived for at least two generations that I know of. I'm looking forward to going through the records I collected on that branch of the family. Who knows how far DNA might take me on the research into that line.  

Happy Easter

 

                                                                            Daffodils, a sure sign of spring

Easter always makes me think of spring as, happily, they coincide, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere. But my childhood was spent in the suburbs of Montreal, so it was usual to still have snow on the ground when that particular holiday rolled around. I still remember spring flowers for the holiday because our school had a lengthy time off for the religious celebration. (It was Quebec, after all, a very Catholic province.) My family chose that time to leave the snow behind and go back to England. There were lots of spring flowers there and, even better, British chocolate!

May you enjoy your time at Easter as much as I enjoyed the Easter Eggs I ate during those English vacations!

Picturing social context part 3

 

                                             The interior of an early Ontario schoolhouse at Fanshawe Pioneer Village

After finding out about my family's roots in early Ontario, I revisited Upper Canada Village with my father. It was fun to see but the village didn't seem as big as it had when I was younger. By then I had discovered other living museums as well, so it didn't seem quite as much of a wonder.

Many of the other living museums I visited were also in Ontario. While Upper Canada Village depicted a place in what is now Ontario in the 1860s, the other outdoor museums covered a range of historic years. At Fanshawe Pioneer Village, visitors could walk into the primitive cabins of first settlers, where, we were told, the occupants slept sitting up so they wouldn't choke on the smoke of the fire keeping the cold at bay. Early schoolrooms showed battered desks, well-worn chairs, aged slates and primitive blackboards. I was especially interested in the framed houses including the large one with its Victorian sitting rooms and well stocked kitchen. Upstairs there was even an early Singer sewing machine, much like the treadle one that my mum used to have. I can remember getting her machine up to a speed high enough to drive a needle through one of my fingernails.

Some of my ancestors also lived for a time in Owen Sound. There, the Grey Roots Museum and Archives is a great resource. Many hours were spent in the archives trawling for family info. I found some which included photographs of my maternal grandmother as a child with her parents and some of her siblings. The museum part of the enterprise also had historic houses covering a few different eras but the thing that really caught my eye was the gravity fed gas pump. Old technology can be fascinating. 

                                                          Old time service station with a gravity feed gas pump

Picturing social context part 2

 

                                                   An Upper Canada Village view my father painted after a visit there

My interest in history started when I was young. One frequent family outing was a trip to Upper Canada Village. It wasn't that far a drive from our home in the Montreal suburbs but it was a world away in time. I was charmed by the cozy homes and primitive industries and they also made excellent cheese, as I remember.

At the time, I didn't think that the village's version of history had anything to do with my own family background. After all, most of us were immigrants to Canada although my mother did have roots there. But she came from Winnipeg, so an historic village in Ontario would have nothing to do with her family, right?

That was before I started family history research, of course. My preliminary forays into my mother's family history showed that her Scottish ancestors had lived in Ontario before the push west to the Prairie Provinces. It was also before I discovered the family line that moved from New York State just after the American Revolution. After those discoveries, the streets and buildings of Upper Canada Village became a window on my own family's past. 

Picturing historical social context

 

                                            Dr Williams Library in London holds records about nonconformist ministers

When adding depth to the world of an ancestor or ancestral family, I often turn to books about the history of an area or event. Because my family's past takes in so many places, that is a double edged sword as I often (probably too often) buy books about areas where they lived. That's especially the case when on research trips in places where they lived. Books can take up lots of space in a suitcase and on ever expanding bookshelves. 

Books and online searches aren't the only way to add context to past lives. If one is lucky, it's possible to find the buildings which featured in their lives still standing. That happened when on the trail of my 4 x great grandfather, Reverend Thomas Strange. He was the first Congregational minister to preside in that religion's church in Kilsby, Northampton. It was a thrill picturing where he would have stood preaching to the congregation. He was even buried in an aisle which meant that I walked on his commemoration stone.

                                                The burial stone in the aisle of the church in Kilsby, Northampton*

Taking my research further, I visited Dr. William's Library when I was in London. They have lots of information about the nonconformist religions. Among their records, I found some of Reverend Strange's sermons. Each sermon covered multiple pages in a notebook. Remembering the hardness of the pew in that Kilsby church when I sat on it and considering the length of the sermon in the books really brought home the experience of being one of the congregants in the church.

*Transcription of  the Strange burial stone

 

Finding deeper American roots

 

                                                      Did my early Ontario ancestors live in a rustic cabin like this?

My ancestors lived in many and diverse places, more than I imagined when I started my journey into family history. But even when I began, I realized that my parents came from very different backgrounds. So different that I knew that if I pushed the button available on some DNA sites to find out "are your parents related" it would always come out negative. Their backgrounds were different enough that it was easy to identify my maternal and paternal sides on Ancestry's DNA circles.

Not that there was huge diversity in those backgrounds. Both ancestral pasts were tied to the British Isles and, in fact, my parents were married there. A few years after their marriage they immigrated to Canada. But they weren't the first in the family to immigrate to that country. My mother's father had immigrated there in 1911. My mother had been born in Canada, daughter to her recent immigrant father and his wife, my grandmother, a product of two Scottish lines that had first set foot in Canada in 1843 and 1853. In the early years of my ancestral search, I confined my research in Canada and the province that was to become Ontario to records after those dates.

While those were early years in the history of what was to become Ontario, I felt I could safely ignore any history that came prior to those years in the mid 1800s as it wouldn't be relevant to my ancestors. In fact, the subtitle of a book in my personal library insists that where they settled had already been set up before they got there. That book was Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784-1841.

But I didn't pick up that book until later. When I first began my genealogical journey, the histories I read about Canada West were mostly confined to the years after my Scottish ancestors settled there. Even in the later years when they arrived, most of the towns and farms where still in the eastern portion of what eventually became Ontario. It wasn't until later in the century that settlers began to explore further west. My families followed that trail so far in that direction that they ended up on the Prairies.  

That seemed like a formidable start to those families experiences in North America and to my genealogical research but subsequent breakthroughs would show that some of my ancestors were in Canada West decades before the mid 1800s. In fact, they had been in North America for generations before then showing that my American roots were far deeper than I thought. Family history research can bring some surprising things to light!

Tips from genealogy magazines

 

                                                         Some of the many genealogy magazines I have collected

I have started to go through my stash, or should I say stashes, of genealogy magazines. There are a lot of them, many not even read. In the past, when I made an attempt to keep up with perusing the articles, I tagged the pages I wanted to get back to. Those were the pages with links to websites or other information of interest. It is only now when I look at the date of some of those publications that I worry that many of those links are out of date. Oh well, that's one way of seeing what stood the test of time.

Your Genealogy, March/April 2016, in an article on Scottish Research, mentioned two prime research sites, Genuki, which I knew about, and A Vision of Britain Through Time which rang a faint bell. I tested that site out by looking up Horkstow, Lincolnshire, where I knew my earliest known British ancestor had been born, but that probably wasn't the wisest choice, since the history on the site only goes back to 1801. However, it does offer links to other sites as well as information about historical places and writing.

The article was just one of many that I've tagged in my piles of genealogy magazines. I'm hoping to get through the stack of publications that I've already read before tackling all the other magazines that have piled up over the years. The "already read" heap is pretty daunting itself but I just have to remind myself that there could be treasurers in there to discover. 

Researching an ancestor's character

                                       Some of the books that may give me clues to my ancestors' characters

As a storyteller, I like to convey the personality of my characters whether they are fictional or are people who actually lived. With real people that can be easier if we have actually met the person, although any impression gathered may have been coloured by circumstance and our relative status at the time. Trying to understand historic figures can be trickier.

Some of their personality can be gathered through their actions, but it must be remembered that those actions happened at a different time. Society then had different rules, written and unwritten. There were also different social supports in place or, in some cases, lacking. So actions were constrained by circumstances that need to be explored if we are to have any hope of understanding them.

A chance remark at a recent online meeting put me on the path of another clue. It was an observation about the presenter's own behaviour being typical for a middle child. Could birth order hold some clues for understanding our ancestors? So many families in earlier times seemed to be big and messy with many more children and often featured changing partners for the parent couple if one of those parent ancestors was long lived. I have a few families in my own ancestral background in mind while I ponder this. I've also plucked a book about birth order from my shelves to see if I can find any potential for using the idea of birth order to explore ancestors' characters further. Let's see if The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why by Dalton Conley can offer me insights into my ancestors and their families. 

Time to explore my genealogy collection

 

                                  Copies of documents I forgot about recently found among my genealogy records

I'm currently following along with the DNA Study Group presented by Your DNA Guide. One of the prompts that Diahan Southard says after we have finished processing our DNA matches is to ask yourself "What have I gathered?" Really, that question can probably be used outside the DNA context. I know I have a bad habit of hunting for information while researching, obtaining the treasured data, gathering it and then storing it away somewhere. I fall down at the stage of putting it into use.

It's the same thing with books. My personal library is filled with tomes on my subjects of interest. A lot of them are histories of places that my family have lived and they have lived in a lot of different places. There are other pet topics as well, such as genetic genealogy, medicine and diseases, transportation and books about Jack the Ripper - I have a weakness for murder mysteries, and besides, my family lived in the East End of London where Jack hunted.

The time has come to actually find what I have gathered. Part of that happens as I delve into various sources to bring to life a story of family so writing various articles and this blog are part of the process. The project of broadening my family tree also helps. I've run across things I didn't remember I had. Things like a family tree related to the husband of one of the McKay daughters that I found tucked into the pages of a binder along with copies of documents related to that couple, including their births and marriages. The family tree was a bonus that can take me off in another direction if I let it, but the husband's line is not directly related to mine and, before I use the information on it, it would need to be checked out. So I should probably save it to look at later. But those books on the shelves are something I need to start exploring. Maybe they hold important clues to how my ancestors lived. 

Research and a family mystery

 

                          The Bridgend Hotel on Islay where my Auntie Peg once stayed while doing research in the area

My first forays in family history research happened many years ago. It was a time before personal computers were the norm in family homes, a time so long ago there was no internet. Do you remember those days? They seem remote now as I sit writing this blog post while taking part in an online writing sprint on Zoom with the Family History Masterclass for the February Writing Challenge.

But as far away as the start of my own first steps into my family's past take me, there was someone who had gone before me, my great aunt Peg. Unfortunately, I never spoke to her about her search or anything she had found. She lived in Winnipeg and I grew up in Montreal, so we were not close. She died in the 1970s and my first halting steps on the path to researching family history happened a decade later.

Perhaps my great aunt's interest in family percolated down to other members because it was some family stories that first made me perk up my ears. It could have been the subject that caught my attention, though. That old question of whether he fell or was pushed. I was a fan of murder mysteries at an early age. I have a distinct recollection of my Gran talking to my mother about a death in the family. It was a mysterious end that I later found out had become part of Canadian mythology.

Did Auntie Peg read The Tom Thomson Mystery by William Little? It was about her first cousin once removed and it came out in the '70s while she was still alive. That book might have sparked the conversation I heard between my mother and grandmother. My grandmother was Auntie Peg's sister. It's a real boon to research an event that drew public attention because family details make their way into the account. It's like newspaper research on steroids.

But, as much potential as those sources have, I would still like to be able to see what my Auntie Peg had found during her researches. I know that she went as far as travelling to the places that our ancestors hailed from as I have evidence that she travelled to Islay, where our Gilchrist clan came from. I'm sure that if she had known of my interest, she would have passed on the results of her research. As I've gotten older, I know it would ease my mind knowing there was someone I could leave my research to. Who to leave our research to is a common topic in my genealogy society at the moment and many of us wish we could pass it along to an interested person in a younger generation. 

A chance for Australian Research

 

                                 My Grandad's sketchy family tree that started off my research into my Australian family

It's very hard to stay the course with one area of research. This time my distraction was a post on Genealogy à la Carte advising that Australian records on MyHeritage were free to access for a short time. So I decided to concentrate on my Australian connections for the time the records were available. 

I previously wrote a series of posts about the McKay family who started out from Dorset and ended up in Australia after detouring through Malta and India. Such was the life of the British forces and their families at the time. William McKay, his wife Henrietta and their children ended up in New South Wales, Australia after he retired from the military in 1888.

                       The birthplaces of William and Henrietta McKay's children reflect the moves of his military career

There are no census records to help place the family together in Australia. I've been trawling through electoral rolls and death notices. But, while looking through the binders of information I already have, I found a printed family tree for the family that Margaret McKay married into. She was the McKay daughter my grandfather was closest to. It looks like this might be more of a distraction than I first thought but then I can always expand this part of my family tree as well. Maybe that will help me identify the families on my Ancestry Community labelled: New South Wales, Australia, European & British Settlers 1775-1975. I know that the McKays would be some of those connections but there were descendants of some of my other related families too. My people weren't very good at staying in one place. 

DNA update: A link to deep ethnicity

 

Vikings! That conjures up a certain image, doesn't it? I've long been fascinated by tales of the Northern raiders and have a number of books about them in my personal library. Among the world regions my Ancestry DNA ethnicity results come up with are results from Sweden and Denmark. As I have no known ancestors who came from those areas, I chalked it up to Vikings. It only made sense when I could track back ancestral links to Islay and the Isle of Skye, islands on the west of Scotland. It was common knowledge that they were part of the area that been of interest to Viking raiders.

My Scottish ancestry come from my maternal side so that's probably where the Viking link comes in and I used that information in my ethnicity inheritance to separate my maternal and paternal sides when Ancestry came up with the function that allows you to differentiate between inheritance from your parents if they have sufficient differences in their ethnic makeup. I assigned Ancestry's 5% Sweden & Denmark result to my maternal side. But maybe my links to that inheritance came later than the Vikings. After all, they stopped being a nuisance around 1100 or so and genealogical records don't go that far back.

Just to be sure, I opted for the further analysis of my DNA for Viking links at Living DNA as I had also tested at that site. Turns out that my Viking index is 78%, which means that my DNA is more similar to Viking DNA than 78% of all Living DNA customers. They also place my Vikings as coming from Sweden and Denmark rather than Norway.

I found this very interesting and it confirmed my belief that my Scandinavian roots were related to the Vikings but the thing was that I forgot part of the English history that I learned in school. As the Vikings put down roots in the British Isles they were given (or took) what was called the Danelaw. This was described in Current Archaeology magazine as the part of England lying east of a line from Chester to London. It was an area that would include Lincolnshire and I know that one of my family lines, the Tripp line, transplanted to North America in 1630 in the person of John Tripp who came from Horkstow, Lincolnshire. So it left me wondering, did my Viking ancestors end up in England or Scotland or maybe both?

Google Map approximation of Danelaw drawing a line (the roads) from Chester to London, Danelaw being the part east of the line

Sources:

Current Archaeology January 2015, Issue 298 “A prey to pagan people”? The Viking impact on Britain and Ireland” p28-36 

Take the research further or record and move on?

 

                                                               Family tree branch based on an SAR application

My progress on filling out my family tree has been halting at best. There are too many other things happening at this time of year. As you can see by the scan of the family line that heads this post, I've filled in the lineage that was outlined in the Sons of the American Revolution application which I found on Ancestry in December. The pension records I reviewed for Charles and Jane Tripp also contained proof of James Lanfear being married to Elizabeth Woodworth, so I'm pretty confident about the information tying the applicant back to Selah Woodworth. At the other end of the supplied data, I expect the applicant, Clarence Edmund Hyatt, would have had intimate knowledge of his parents' dates and probably had accurate information about his grandparents too. I also thought that any entries in an application to the Sons of the American Revolution would be of a high caliber. But was I justified in that belief?

I looked into the Ancestry database, U.S., Sons of the American Revolution Membership Applications, 1889-1970. According to the page about this source, these were applications approved by the Sons of the American Revolution between 1889 and 31 December 1970. There is a caveat though, in that present applicants basing their current application on an old SAR application might have to supply further documentation as older applications may not meet current genealogy standards. There is no mention of what year constitutes an older application.

Should I look into the application I have further or just accept the information on it at face value? A random overview of both Ancestry and FamilySearch shows that there is more information available about SAR and DAR applications and possibly documentation that accompanied them. Should I take my research further in this direction or just accept what I have? On the one hand, I want to continue with the expansion of my family tree and on the other, there could be treasures to uncover if I go further with my research on the application that I found and I might even pull up further applicants who also fit on my tree.

Sources:

Ancestry – U.S., Sons of the American Revolution Membership Applications, 1889-1970

Continuing my Revolutionary War records review

 

                                                         Tripp/Woodworth military and pension application papers

I've been sitting on the information from my 3 x great grandparents' pension application records for years now and I knew there was good stuff in there. At the time though, I was busy gathering information. Analysing what I had was always something I'd get to later. It probably wasn't the best approach.

After making notes from the pension records, I now have quite a few names to follow up on as you can see in the table below:

The Woodworth connection looks like the most interesting one to follow up on. Many of the documents made reference to Jane's father, Solomon Woodworth, who lost his life during the conflict, a fact that seems to have weighed in her favour when it came to the granting of her widow's pension.

I was able to access several stories on Ancestry about what happened to Solomon Woodworth. Some of the facts vary slightly but all paint him as a hero. Several mention his brother Selah, who also fought, another family connection who probably ties into some of the cousins mentioned in the table. Looks like my analysis has given me leads to further research, no doubt a reason why the analysis should have been done shortly after I had the pension records.

Sources:

Ancestry – U.S., Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land Application Files, 1800-1900