Have you ever repeatedly hit a genealogical brick wall over and over again and despaired of ever breaking through it? Have you ever felt as though your ancestors would let you know about their lives when they were good and ready and not a moment before? And have you then suddenly had an amazing coincidence that has seen those brick walls tumble? That’s genealogical serendipity, and it can feel downright spooky!
Ever driven past an overgrown cemetery in the middle of nowhere and decided to stop and take a look? Serendipity is when you find a grave with a surname you recognise and it turns out to be someone from a long lost branch of the family tree! That’s genealogical serendipity.
Genealogical Serendipity Strikes My Tree
When I moved to Australia with my parents as a child, I thought we were the first of our line to live in the state of Victoria. My mum had lived briefly in Sydney as a young girl before returning to England. However no one had ventured south of the New South Wales border. It turned out however that we were unwittingly tracing the steps of an ancestor.
Mary Scriven was my 4 x great grandmother. She spent most of her later adult life around Walsall in Staffordshire, after living quite a nomadic early married life with her husband William Sartain. However she suddenly turned up in a census under a different surname. I would have had difficulty finding her if she wasn’t living with a daughter. She had remarried and been widowed again in the years since the previous census. However, I could not find evidence of this second marriage.
I ended up putting this puzzle aside to brew, and instead traced where her various children went, in the time honoured FAN Club way. It turned out two sons had gone to Australia. Not just anywhere in Australia. One, Joseph, went to a tiny place in my state of Victoria that I happened to have visited a lot! Jamieson is literally just a tiny dot on the map, a former gold mining town of about 300 people. The other, Thomas, went to Melbourne (where I currently live), but then moved to Hamilton, a town in Western Victoria where I lived as a child. He is buried there in the cemetery just a few minutes walk from my old home.
Intrigued, I started to investigate further…and discovered their mother, my missing Mary, had spent some time in Australia with her sons. Her second marriage took place in Melbourne. Thanks to the detailed nature of Victorian marriage certificates, this confirmed her mother’s elusive maiden name for me, and allowed me to progress the tree backwards. Genealogical serendipity. Mary’s second husband died soon after they wed and he is one of the first interments in Brighton Cemetery.
Have you had any serendipitous moments with your family history research? Comment below, I’d love to hear your stories!