Following family lines in and out of a Dorset village

 

                                                 Notes from one day's research into my Rideout/Maidment family line

I'm still working on filling in the collateral lines of one particular line of my family tree. That's the Rideout/Maidment line that I wrote about last time. The reason I'm concentrating on this particular branch of my family tree is because I'm using it as a means to learn more about what DNA can reveal about my family's past. I'm taking a course to help me figure out how to use genetic genealogy to expand my research into my family and some of the advice given for beginners in this endeavour is to have a bushy tree, one that includes collateral lines. With those extra twigs included it becomes easier to see connections with DNA matches.

Following the censuses every 10 years is a good way to find any children that have been born as well as the new couples that have formed their own families. A lot of the clan stayed around the area of Ashmore in Dorset but the ones that left often bounced around from place to place. It doesn't help that there is a huge gap in what is available between the 1911 English census and the 1939 England and Wales Register. The lines blacked out as official closed records on the latter aren't helpful for my quest either. Neither is the fact that one part of the family strayed into Scotland and then there is the 1921 census which still costs extra to view. I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet on that one, though. Searches on FindMyPast have hinted at matches in that census for the names I've entered and added lines that look like possible children as well. I'll let you know how my quest goes and if I succumb to the lure of possibilities in the 1921 census.   

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.