Happy Holidays

 

     

                                      Happy Holidays!

                                          

End of the year planning

 

                                                                              Pirate ships in a local light display

It's the time of year when people stop to take stock of how their year has gone before making plans for the coming year. I was reminded of that recently when the person who runs one of my DNA groups sent out the itinerary for our December meeting. The plan for the meeting is to share our successes/breakthroughs for 2025 and to reveal our genetic genealogy goals for 2026. Nice to do if things have gone well but my year is like the sinking pirate ship in the picture. It has been scuttled by events beyond my control.

I did make a DNA breakthrough in 2024 when I used DNA and genealogical evidence to work out the parents of two of my 2 x great grandmothers, Mary Maidment and Sarah Minister. That task made me aware of the time and concentration needed to make those kinds of breakthroughs. Checking through my family tree, I see there are a few more 2 x greats that I can use similar methods to attach to their parents, so that could be a goal for 2026 but most of those family lines are from the UK which adds to the difficulty.

A more realistic goal for 2026 would be to continue expanding my family tree with the families that ended up in North America because it is more likely that descendants from those lines will have tested their DNA. I want to be able to identify those descendants in my match list. And then, if I have time, I hope to be in fine form to start working on the Acadian lines that attach to mine through marriage. Maybe I'll be better equipped to deal with those entangled genealogies once I've straightened out my own North American family links. 

A possible link to gateway ancestors

 

                                                                 Richard III lying in state in Leicester Cathedral

The discovery of Richard III's remains in 2012 fascinated me. I can remember when the skeleton was found in a car park in Leicester and it all seemed so nebulous. Could that really be the skeleton of the deposed king whose body had been misplaced for centuries? I read books about the discovery particularly Philippa Langley's The King's Grave: The Discovery of Richard III's Last Burial Place and the Clues It Holds. I also toured Leicester a few years later, seeing the site of the discovery as well as Leicester Cathedral where the last king of the Plantagenet line now lies in state.

This week's study group topic on Your DNA Guide was about the painstaking investigation which proved that the remains found were indeed those of the former king. One of the resources mentioned might prove to be of use in finding gateway ancestors if your lineage boasts one of the descendants listed in The Plantagenet Roll, a resource published in 1905 which can be found on Internet Archive. There is an index of the listed names of descendants. See the link under sources. So far I've found one possible link in the name Devonshire and I've only just begun. 

Sources:

Internet Archive index for Plantagenet Roll: https://archive.org/details/plantagenetrollo00ruvi/page/650/mode/2up

Records with mixed messages

 

                                      I still haven't added my tree for the descendants of Samuel Tripp but I'm getting close

Time for genealogy research has been limited lately so I've been doing it in fits and starts. I'm still tracking down my Tripp links, the offspring of Samuel Tripp and their descendants. There have been a few mixed messages as I troll through the records. By searching through public family trees on Ancestry I was able to find an obit attached to a tree that included Edward Herbert Tripp, a prime candidate to be one of Samuel's sons. According to that 1958 report, Edward Tripp lived in the Kingsville district of Ontario for most of his life. A fact that would tend to negate the 1916 census record that I found for Edward and his family in Lethbridge, Alberta. Was the census record wrong as it stated that Edward Tripp was Chinese? On the other hand, the names of his wife and children were the same as I'd seen elsewhere.

Interestingly, the information in the obituary also mentioned his time serving with the First Hussars in the Boer War. I've had ancestors who served in various armed conflicts but never one in the Boer War before. I'll have to see if I can find any military records for him. Maybe those records will name his parents. The search goes on as I create a timeline of the various records I've found for the Tripp family. They are all tucked into my Ancestry shoebox for now and it's getting very full. 

Overwhelming hints

 

                   Still working on expanding the family tree of Samuel Tripp and his descendants but nothing new to add yet

Most of my research on my personal family tree has been in England or Scotland. I'm quite familiar with digging for information in the records that are kept there and I've become used to tracking things down. My latest endeavour involves American/Canadian research and I'm finding the amount of Ancestry hints and the records that come up a bit overwhelming. I can see the temptation to accept hints and records because the only options are to accept the record into your own Ancestry family tree or to ignore the hint. There is no option to place it in abeyance to think about it for a while. It would be easy to fill in your tree quickly that way but would it be right?

I think I'll be better off searching for records myself using the hints to steer me in the right direction. Finding out what happened to the children of my 2 x great grandfather, Samuel Tripp, and his wives is helped by the fact that so many of them were sons so kept their last name. So far the deepest mysteries are about the daughters: my Charlotte, the daughter of his first wife, Sarah Ann, whose mother has not been determined and Mary Elizabeth, the daughter of his second wife. It will be interesting to see how far I get with my search for all of Samuel Tripp's descendants. 

Census problems in research

 

                                                        My Tripp family tree hasn't expanded any since last week

I'm still on the trail of Samuel Tripp and his family although my research time has been a bit lacking lately. That's not the only thing that's holding me back from filling in the subsequent years for this family that I last found on the 1881 Ontario census. The last information I found was that of the last child in the family, James Wilbert Tripp who was born in Buffalo, New York later in 1881. With the amount that the family moved around, I thought they might have returned to Canada by the time of the 1891 census was taken. No such luck.

The logical conclusion is that they stayed in the US. But that presents a problems as very little of the 1890 US census survived. It looks like following up on this family will be trickier than I thought.

I've run into problems searching for family links in places where census information is sparse before as members of my family have ended up in different parts of the globe, usually those areas are English speaking but diverse for all that. When I followed up on Australian family links, I was dismayed to find that there were no census records to search. There were electoral records but nothing that showed a family with its members all together. Then there's Ireland. There are some Irish censuses available but I haven't been able to find one early enough to link my family in the East End of London with their Irish roots.

I'm hoping for more research time in the coming weeks so that I can find out what happened to the various members of my Tripp family. If I bring Samuel Tripp's descendants forward in time that should go a long way to figuring out some of my DNA matches. That's more incentive to continue my search.

Adding descendants and more mysteries

 

                                                  Samuel Tripp's children (without Sarah Ann, the mystery girl)

As I wrote about last week, I've started adding the descendants of my 2 x great grandfather, Samuel Tripp, to my family tree. Well, I've added his children, at least the ones for which I found birth records. It appears that he had six children with his second wife, Mary or Mary Ann Redin or Rowding. Samuel and Mary Ann started having children in 1870 and then every two years or so they had another one. The birth records are a road map of the different places that they lived in around Ontario until the last child, James Wilbert Tripp, who was born in Buffalo, New York in 1881.

The move to New York State must have been just before James Wilbert's birth as the family appeared in the 1881 census in Pickering, Ontario. The 1881 Canadian census was taken on April 4, 1881 and James Wilbert made his appearance on October 23 of that same year. Interestingly, there was another child who showed up on the 1881 census, Sarah Ann Tripp, aged 13.

In past searches while looking for evidence of what happened to Catherine Matheson/Tripp, Samuel's first wife, I've found traces of Sarah Ann. In some cases Catherine has been given as her mother. I'm not sure if she was the child of Catherine or Mary Ann and have not been able to find a birth record for her. In the 1881 census her age was given as 13, so a birthdate of 1868 maybe or, as the census was taken in April, perhaps the date of birth could be 1867. Samuel Tripp and Mary Ann tied the knot on September 5, 1867. It remains to be seen if I can pinpoint who Sarah Ann's mother was as I continue to research this family.