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.