A forgotten family branch

 

                                                                        A street in The Rows, Great Yarmouth

Some of my latest posts have been about the Maidment family as finding the parents of my 2 x great grandmother, Mary Maidment, had been a long time quest. But you know, another 2 x great grandmother was also missing parental information and she rarely came to mind. Her name was Sarah Minister and she came from Great Yarmouth. I know very little about her story.

A recent episode of Walking Wartime Britain made me think of her and her ancestors as the show host was in East Anglia. Before the program I didn't know exactly where East Anglia was but apparently it takes in Great Yarmouth, which is a port city and would have been the area where the Nazis landed if they had invaded Britain. Precautions were taken at the time, of course, especially along the coastline but Great Yarmouth would have been hard to defend. The viewers were taken on a brief tour of an area of the town called The Rows, where the roads are narrow paths between the buildings. It made me wonder if that was where Sarah had grown up.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I will be able to determine that as both of Sarah's parents appear to have died prior to 1841 and the earliest Great Yarmouth directory seems to be from 1839. Sarah herself was no longer in Norfolk by that time as she was married in Hoxton, Middlesex in 1838. When had she moved from Great Yarmouth and had she done it on her own? It looks like there is more to find out about her story.

Sources:

GRO certificate of marriage between Benjamin Cavanagh and Sarah Minister 11 September, 1838, District of St John the Baptist, Hoxton, County of Middlesex, (Registration District of Shoreditch)

University of Leicester, Special Collections Online – Historical Directories of England and Wales  https://specialcollections.le.ac.uk/digital/collection/p16445coll4/search/searchterm/1820-1829!1830-1839/field/period!period/mode/exact!exact/conn/and!and 

Images:

By Great Yarmouth's Rows - Row 95 (Kittywitches Row) by Evelyn Simak, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=142379971 

September resolutions?

 

                                                    Just some of the genealogy magazines I haven't yet gone through

This week I watched as the kids went back to school and it felt like things were getting back into the normal grove after being relaxed for so long. In my case, I don't have to go back to work or school but I am affected by school traffic as I live adjacent to a school so have to time my activities to avoid high traffic hours when school lets out. It also left me with a feeling that I should be getting back to something too. And, you know, I probably should figure out where to focus my time. So I thought, why not resolutions in September.

January resolutions are traditional, I know. But September feels like the start of the year in a lot of ways. Besides, January could get in on the deal as well. It would be a great time to look over my list of resolutions and see which ones are doing fine and which might need more work or maybe some tweaking.

I foresee the compilation of a comprehensive list to get myself back on track only part of which would be about family history. I'll start with my genealogy resolutions though and they are:

That should keep me going for awhile!