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Tag: genealogy

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Accentuate the Positive 2023 – Genealogical Year in Review

2023 accentuate the positive

The Accentuate the Positive Geneameme, created by GeniAus is something I really enjoy taking part in each year. It’s an awesome opportunity to reflect on the year past and what has been achieved. I find it helpful in channelling my thoughts for goals for the upcoming year as well!

2023 Accentuate the Positive

I’ve been a little bit slower than usual in posting my responses this year. Just as with my activities on the genealogical front (including maintaining this blog!), the year was overtaken on the personal front – deaths in the family, illness, you name it! I’m very much hoping for a less eventful 2024. Accentuating the positive is more of a challenge than usual for 2023.

Anyway, here goes…

Let’s Accentuate the Positive!

1. On revisiting some old research I found … newspapers to be especially helpful in filling in the gaps in the stories – two of which I wrote about this year, the Millen Murder and the suicide of John Rigby. I am such a newspaper junkie, and I heartily recommend going back to old research and seeing if the newspapers can illuminate the stories of your ancestors.

2. In 2023 I hooked up with a new (to me) living cousin … none I’m afraid, quite the opposite. An old to me living cousin who I’d been in contact with for about 15 years and met on a trip to England suddenly passed away. But lest that be seen as an answer that doesn’t accentuate the positive, I will say that he added so much laughter to my life in those 15 years that I’m really glad we met.

No, really, positivity…!

3. I’m pleased I replaced a tool I had been using with  … Goldie May. Research logs are so essential to our genealogical work but let’s be frank…so tedious. Goldie May automates the process with one click and has saved me hours of manual labour. Another super-useful tool has been Cite-Builder. Source citations are so essential to our genealogical work but let’s be frank…so tedious (I’m sensing a pattern here!). Cite-Builder has also saved countless hours by allowing me to enter the information required into a template for each record type and generating the citation. Sometimes they need a little tweak, but still it’s been hugely labour-saving.

4. My sledgehammer did great work on this brick wall … finding the origins of William Townley and who his mother was. This came out of thinking I was disproving an Ancestry hint, which turned out to be valid even though it looked improbable! Building out the family and checking probate documents turned out to be the key.

5. I was pleased that I finally read … The Floating Brothel by Sian Rees. It had been on my bookshelf for years but I’d never got around to reading it.

Getting more sociable…

6. I enjoyed my geneajourney to … a behind-the-scenes tour at the Public Record Office of Victoria. When we go to the archives, we’re in the reading room, being served up documents from the mysterious depths ‘back there’. It was great to actually see ‘back there’. Nerdily delightful.

Group of GSV members at PROV behind the scenes tour, accentuate the positive of being sociable
Visiting the depths of the PROV!

7. In 2023 I finally met … many of my fellow Genealogical Society of Victoria volunteers in real life. I really only got involved with helping to run the Midlands and East Anglia Discussion Group during the pandemic so our Volunteers’ get-together early in 2023 was the first time I’d met many many people in 3D!

8.I was the recipient of genearosity from … someone who is not a relation but who has been researching the lives of all the Parkhurst Prison juvenile offenders, one of whom was someone in my extended tree. He sent me everything he’d discovered, and I was able to add further details to help him in return. We ultimately found that three children from the same family had been sent to Australia as convicts!

9.  I am pleased that I am a member of … so many family history societies. I can’t choose just one, because they all provide so much value for the small amount of money it costs to be a member. Supporting the family history societies for the areas of your research helps to ensure that they can keep on going, and their resources and journals are invaluable to our research.

Getting some research done…

10. I made a new DNA discovery  … when I dug into a line where the documents made sense but there had been no DNA matches generated with any of my family members anywhere over many years. There’s a blog coming on this one so I shan’t say much more other than a revisiting of some mystery DNA matches provided the answer and corrected the line.

11.  An informative journal or newspaper article I found was … I found an excellent thesis online (do you check for theses about the people or places you’re researching? You can strike gold!). It gave a full and in-depth history with maps, photos and records of a rural area of Victoria where my client’s family went on their immigration. It opened up so much further research for me, and provided a great background.

Research accentuates the positive

12.  I enjoyed my wander around … cemetery. I didn’t actually get to do any cemetery wandering this year other than on a personal level, which was not enjoyable. That’s one to pick up again for fun this year I hope.

13. AI was a mystery to me but I learnt  … the value of using it for transcribing, summarising, extracting and tabulating those long handwritten documents like wills that are so essential to our research. Upcoming blog on this!

Giving…

14. The best value I got for my genealogy dollars was …  so hard to choose just one. I subscribe to all the major and several smaller genealogy websites for the areas I research. They all have their own strengths. I’d hate to do without any one of them.

15.  It felt good to contribute to  … the Midlands and East Anglia Group at the GSV. I love giving presentations, and as someone born in the Midlands, it’s nice to be able to share context with those who have the ancestry but have never been there.

16. I wrote … an article for the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly on the importance of critically evaluating DNA matches from far-flung places as well as those closer to home.

 17. I got a thrill from opening someone’s eyes to the joy of genealogy … with a client who was so thrilled with what was being found that the original project got extended, extended, and extended until it filled most of my year. It’s now continuing with another family member’s branch into this year. It’s been thrilling to bring so much enthusiasm and joy to someone just by doing what I love to do!

Finally…

18. Another positive I would like to share is … no matter what hurdles get in the way, the research is always there to come back to when the time is right. And it’s therapeutic!

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The Duddleston Family – Another Brick Wall Is Demolished!

brick wall demolished Duddleston family

Edward and Ann Eginton (also Egginton) are my 4th great-grandparents and have been a bit of a nightmare, to be honest! No matter where I looked, I could not find the record of their marriage. Ann stubbornly remained ‘just’ Ann. This week, I uncovered her maiden name. She was born into the Duddleston family, and I now have a whole new family to explore.

Edward and Ann Eginton

So how did this brick wall tumble? Like the Vaughan story, it’s a long tale. Strap yourself in. I knew Edward was from Birmingham, baptised as the son of William and Mary (nee Holt) at St Martin in 1778. Edward and Ann had baptised their first known child William at the same church in 1802. Immediately above this entry in the register is the baptism of his brother Francis’s daughter Ann on the same day. There were no more children baptised to Edward and Ann in Birmingham until 1818, when three more were baptised over the next four years. How odd.

Building the tree forward to the era of censuses, I found links between William and some other Egintons born in Yorkshire. This led to me to travel north (in a virtual sense!) and do some more digging there. Edward and Ann had settled in Sheffield for several years where he worked as a silver plater in the cutlery industry. Many children had been baptised and some buried there before they returned to Birmingham. I now had a beautiful timeline of their offspring, with no overlap between the two places or unexplained gaps, that covered Ann’s entire expected fertile years.

But I still had no wedding to give me her maiden name. There was nothing for an Edward Eginton and an Ann in or around Birmingham, and nothing in Yorkshire either. I now knew that it had likely taken place around 1800/1801, given their ages and when their family together had commenced.

Grasping at straws

The other day, on a whim, I decided to check out FreeReg.co.uk for this marriage. This site can be useful as it contains transcriptions of parish registers from all across the country, including many places which don’t yet have good coverage at other sites. There are no images, it contains purely derivative sources, but it’s a starting point. Bingo! There was an entry that was in the right timeframe, just 10 miles from Birmingham in Walsall, Staffordshire. It was, however, between an Edward Egerton (not Eginton) and Ann Duddeston.

It wouldn’t have even turned up on the search if it weren’t for the eagle eye of the transcriber, Dale Braden, who made a note that the vicar had entered it as Egerton, but the groom had signed clearly as Eginton. The transcriber entered the transcription under both surnames. THANK YOU DALE! I’m not surprised the vicar got it wrong. The couple were clearly not really of the parish, as claimed. It had been almost forty years since any Eginton had appeared in the register and would be more than twenty years until an Egerton turned up. There were no Duddestons at all.

Egerton Eginton note on marriage transcript Duddleston family
The note added by the transcriber at FreeReg which set me on the right path.

Now I needed the image. Reminder: always get back to the original source if possible! FindMyPast holds many but not all of the images for Staffordshire parish registers. Unfortunately, their Walsall, St Matthew coverage was only transcriptions, and they had indexed it only under Egerton, not Eginton. FamilySearch had similarly indexed the entry, but I knew they would have an image available on request. So I used their free lookup service to get the original parish register image.

I already knew Edward’s signature looked like this:

Duddleston - Edward Eginton signature 1836 Duddleston family
Edward Eginton’s signature at the marriage of his son Thomas Eginton to Mary Locke, 14 March 1836, at Aston, St Peter and St Paul.

He had been a witness to his son Thomas’ marriage in 1836. So, seeing a matching signature on his own marriage document would be great supporting evidence.

When the ‘Egerton/Duddeston’ marriage image arrived though it was clearly not the original entry, but a Bishop’s Transcript. Everything, including all the signatures, was written out neatly in the same hand, and they’d written ‘Egerton’. I would have to take Dale’s word for it for now and find some other sources of evidence until I could track down the actual parish register.

Finding Ann Duddeston [sic]

Yes, this was an error as well. The Duddeston surname quickly turned out to be a dead end. However, there was an Ann Duddleston of the right age who was baptised in 1780 by Hugh and Ann Duddleston in Birmingham where she was known to be from. Could this be her Duddleston family?

I turned back to Edward and Ann’s marriage entry. The witnesses were John Webster and Elizabeth Yeomans. I decided to see if they were related. By now I knew most of Edward’s family and nothing jumped out at me from there. But Elizabeth turned out to have been Elizabeth Duddleston, who married William Yeomans in 1795 in Harborne, just outside Birmingham at that time. Elizabeth was a member of Hugh and Ann’s Duddleston family…Ann’s elder sister!

Hugh Howard Duddleston and Ann (nee Hilton) were really beginning to firm up as Edward’s wife’s Duddleston family. So I began to build their family tree down and peruse their associated documents. It wasn’t long till I found Edward Eginton again signing his name with his distinctive flourish on his initials when he witnessed the 1818 marriage of Ann’s brother Thomas. His signature had matured over the years but it was clearly the same man. The other witness was Elizabeth Yeomans, Ann’s sister.

Duddleston - Edward Eginton signature 1818 Duddleston family
Edward Eginton’s signature at the marriage of his brother-in-law Thomas Duddlestone to Deborah Foster, 21 April 1818, at Birmingham, St Martin.

So now I had the same Edward Eginton witnessing a Duddleston marriage of another child of Hugh and Ann, his hypothesised parents-in-law, alongside the woman who had witnessed his own marriage. I’m happy with that!

Does DNA support the hypothesis?

Now I decided to turn to the DNA…it was stretching the limits of autosomal testing but would I find matches who descended from the same Duddleston family? I sure did. Since I’d built the tree down as far as I could on all lines and attached it to Ann over the course of several days, Ancestry had had a chance to do its magic, and I had four matches who connected with the common ancestors being Hugh Howard Duddleston and Ann Hilton. Three had public trees, and they were from different lines of the same Duddleston family. My brother had six matches, four of whom were unique to him, tying him to this Duddleston family through still other lines. So far there are DNA matches who descend from three of Hugh and Ann’s children. My half-sister (on the ‘other’ side!) had no Duddleston relatives amongst her matches at all.

One further match even extended a further generation back. I had already come to the conclusion that Hugh Howard Duddleston was the son of Ralph of Wolverhampton. There are not many Duddleston families. In fact, Ralph’s was pretty much the lone Duddleston family in the area at the time.

Rather conveniently so far, at least two of his sons emigrated to the US. This is always a bit of a bonanza when it comes to DNA. More people in the US have had their DNA tested, and those early immigrants often had large families with most of the children surviving compared to England. Therefore, the chances of a DNA match with a descendant are good.

The match that was from this generation was a descendant of Hugh’s brother Thomas Duddleston who as it turns out was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. I’ve been able to find a swathe of documents on him and will be building his line of the Duddleston family out too. Sigh, I feel yet another one-name study emerging out of this find. I just can’t help myself.

So, in conclusion…

We know that original sources are better than derivative sources. However, sometimes we need to start somewhere. Without that note on the transcription of the ‘Edward Egerton’ and ‘Ann Duddeston’ marriage in Walsall, I perhaps would never have found the Duddleston family branch. Do not dismiss transcripts and indexes when you are having trouble finding an elusive ancestor.

Remember to look at collateral branches, check witnesses, use the ‘FAN club’. It may make your tree big and unwieldy to include all these other people, but it’s often a great source of pieces of evidence that may not lie with your direct ancestors. And that big tree also helps with identifying DNA matches in that family line.

Good luck with breaking down your next brick wall. The Duddleston family look like keeping me busy for a good while now!

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Workplaces – The Most Exciting New Addition To The Census in 1921

workplace 1921 census Austin Birmingham
The Austin Motor Works, Longbridge, Birmingham around 1920

The 1921 Census of England and Wales was released with great fanfare on January 6th 2021. It is the last census that most of the current generation of family history researchers will see (the next will not be available for 30 years!). So it’s important that we take the opportunity to mine it for all the information we can extract. Countless articles and blogs have been written about the 1921 Census itself. I’d like to focus today on an aspect of it that can be extremely helpful with our research – the inclusion of workplaces in the 1921 Census.

Every census contains slightly different information, depending on what the government of the day wanted to know about the demographics of their population. We tend to forget as genealogists that the census was not designed for us, but for their planning purposes! I am very grateful that they focussed on workplaces in the 1921 Census.

Workplaces in the 1921 Census – what’s the big deal?

Every previous census has contained the occupations of people at each address. So why is adding the name and address of their workplace in the 1921 Census of any additional advantage? Well, it’s all about context. It’s all about enriching the stories of your ancestors’ lives. As a passionate seeker of my family’s stories, this new addition of workplaces in the 1921 Census has been my favourite thing so far!

I have focussed on only looking up my direct ancestors while the census is pay-per-view, cheapskate that I am. Just wait till it’s included in my FindMyPast subscription, they won’t know what hit them! There were seven households containing my grandparents, great-grandparents and even some great-great-grandparents still living in 1921.

What have I found so far?

My ancestors of that era mostly worked in the metal trades around Birmingham. Unsurprisingly, many of them worked at the Austin Motor Works in Longbridge (see photo above). Two of my grandparents grew up to work there too, so it featured in my childhood a lot. Good to know it was a multigenerational thing!

I knew that one of my great-grandfathers, William Simpson, worked as a painter and decorator and that he had died falling from a ladder. It was wonderful to find his workplace in the 1921 Census. It wasn’t a major factory like the Austin. How was I able to establish that? I found a photo online. It was a small firm called Pitts and Phillips. The address showed me how close he lived to his place of employment and I was able to map his likely route to the office on Google Maps (although I’m sure he spent most of his time onsite at jobs).

workplace 1921 census Pitts and Phillips Birmingham
Pitts and Phillips, Bristol Rd, Birmingham in 1923

Now I intend to dig through Birmingham Archives and see if they have any documents from the firm. Perhaps they might have records of the workplace accident that led to his death? Perhaps they kept employment records? Dig through the relevant archives to see what you can find in their catalogues.

If I’m really lucky there might be a published history somewhere of this or one of the other companies I’ve discovered my ancestors working at. If I’m really REALLY lucky there might be photos that could include them, or at least show more of what their work involved.

For the larger companies like the Austin there might be staff magazines. For any company, a search of newspapers using their name might pull up some stories, where the ancestor’s name wouldn’t. if the company is still going, you may find a history on their website…

You get where I’m going with this? Workplaces in the 1921 census lead us to all sorts of record sources to help flesh out the family stories. Find them, plunder them and build out your family stories!

“Out of Work”

One apparent oddity you may notice is that ‘out of work’ is written next to the workplace. How can someone be simultaneously out of work and employed somewhere? Many of my family members had this on their census forms.

William Simpson – employed but ‘out of work’

This is for the same reason as the census was delayed from April to June. 1921 was a time of great industrial upheaval and strikes were occurring at the time they were originally going to hold it. They delayed till June to allow it to go ahead less impeded by strike action. However, many people were still involved in or affected by industrial events by June. So they were employed by a company but may not have been actively working there at the time of the census. When I see the size of some of the households and how many were out of work, I wonder how they survived, and hope they were soon back to paid employment!

Enjoy trawling the 1921 Census, I hope it brings you luck in adding colour and enrichment to what you know of your family in that era!

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Goodbye (and Good Riddance?) 2021! But Let’s Accentuate the Positive!

Happy New Year 2022
Photo by Mariia Ion on Scopio

Every year, Jill Ball, aka Geniaus, encourages us fellow geneamates to do a review of our year in genealogy focusing on the positives. It’s a great idea that I recommend everyone does, even if not as a blog. It’s very heartening to realise that we have all made achievements in 2021 from the countless hours we have spent slaving over a hot keyboard!

So here is my contribution…

1. I got the most joy from…

…finally identifying the last of my 3 x great-grandparents. This was the father of an illegitimate son who became my 2 x great-grandfather. It’s been decades but finally, I have a name…and it’s not the rumoured name that made it down through several generations. An entire complex cover story took several years to be systematically disentangled and disproved. Now I realise why it was constructed. This was absolutely one of my biggest achievements for 2021.

More to come on this one, I can’t NOT blog it, but it may take a while to find the time to devote to the telling of this saga! it could even end up as long as the Vaughan story…

2. The Covid situation gave me an opportunity to…

…get more involved in local family history societies that weren’t at all local to me. Most of them opened up Zoom meetings instead of their usual face-to-face ones 12 000 miles away from me. Often the timezones were challenging, but it has been especially nice to put faces to names of members that I’ve heard of but never seen for up to 35 years!

Achievements in 2021 - Community
Photo by Francisco Javier Martinez Navio on Scopio

3. I managed to attend a face to face event…

…nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. Everywhere I had booked for this year cancelled their face to face events and for much of the year, we were in lockdown. Luckily, they were often replaced with online versions!

4. My main focus this year was…

…my Dad. Getting him home from Ireland after an ill-timed holiday in early 2020 was a 14-month marathon effort. He left just before Covid struck and international borders closed while he was away. That was followed by 5 months this year living with him in Tasmania on his return. I packed up his home and life around him whilst providing the 24/7 care he needs and brought him back to Victoria to be closer to family and quality care. This was a single-handed task and is definitely my greatest achievement of 2021. He’s now settled and happy again. Family is everything. It evens trumps family history, though I couldn’t abandon that entirely!

5. A new piece of technology or skill I mastered was…

…I don’t know if this counts as ‘mastering’ or just ‘discovering and making use of’! But I’m gradually working my way through the list of things to look up if I’m ever again in an FHC affiliate library by using the new FamilySearch Record Lookup Service.

Have you found an index entry for your probable ancestors but need to see the original image? This fits the bill perfectly. I’ve found it especially useful for my Worcestershire ancestors while I continue to wait for Ancestry to put the Bishops Transcript images online. It’s free, it’s fast and it’s a whole lot cheaper than paying 16 pounds per image to get it emailed from the Archives!

6. A geneasurprise I received was…

…the sudden and almost simultaneous purchases of the two main French genealogy sites by the big guns! MyHeritage purchased Filae, and Ancestry purchased Geneanet. In a year when my Huguenot heritage was confirmed this is perfect timing! I’m already a Geneanet subscriber but was tossing up whether to join Filae. Now I don’t have to, the records are appearing where I already have access!

7.  A Facebook Group that helped me was…

…The Genealogy Squad. I learn something new on a regular basis from the friendly conversations amongst the 45 000 global members (the Squad’s achievement for 2021!)

Confession – I’m also a moderator there and this is a shameless plug for people to come join the party!

Achievements in 2021 - Teamwork
Photo by Francisco Javier Martinez Navio on Scopio

8. My 2021 social media post that I was particularly proud of was…

…the one where I unravelled the mystery of where my Morter family came from before arriving in London, I knew it was likely to be East Anglia somewhere given the surname distribution, but it’s been a needle in a haystack until DNA knocked down the brick wall.

Since then I have had more and more DNA matches also turn out to be descended from the Norfolk family a further generation before my London ancestors. The hypothesis just keeps on firming up.

9.  A new genealogy/history book I enjoyed was…

…‘Spitalfields’ by Dan Cruickshank. As someone with significant ancestry from that area of London, it was a great read, adding plenty of context to my family’s lives and even mentioning a couple of addresses that my ancestors were linked to.

As for fiction, Nathan Dylan Goodwin’s ‘Chester Creek Murders‘ was the beginning of a great new series to get hooked on!

10. I was impressed by…

…so many of the speakers at webinars watched throughout the year, either through conferences that converted from live events to virtual ones (such as RootsTech Connect and Family History Downunder), various family history societies, Scottish Indexes, Family Tree Webinars, etc.

I love how technically the subject of genealogy is finite, but there was never a presentation that I didn’t take away something useful from.

11.  A great journal or newspaper article I found…

…was not a big one, not a particularly complex one, but a very enlightening one. It reported the 1844 death of James Underhill, father of my newly identified 3 x great grandfather Samuel Underhill (unnamed father of Frederick George Seal). This newspaper article added a layer of context that linked the Underhill and Seal families directly, not just by locality and occupation, but by specific workplace and hierarchy.

12. I got the most value from this subscription…

…oooh, this is a tough one. There are very few subscriptions I have that I would willingly give up. They all provide value in their own way.

Naturally, I am subscribed to the major sites for accessing records – Ancestry, FindMyPast, MyHeritage, TheGenealogist, but I’ve also increased my society memberships to 10 (doubled!) to cover the main geographical areas of research, and I am a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists.

More niche sites such as DNAPainter, Genetic Affairs, the Talking Family History Virtual Lounge, Geneanet, IrishAncestors, RootsIreland, Fold3 and Family Tree Webinars are invaluable, and of course, I save EVERYTHING I find to Evernote for easy accessibility and searching. I’d rather go without shoes than lose any of my subscriptions.

A little hint though…check each of your society membership benefits, they may offer significant discounts to other subscription sites which will save you some significant outlay!

13. I progressed my DNA research with …

…a return to network graphing after a couple of years break from it. I always loved how visual it is, but I needed to familiarise myself with all the new DNA tools appearing on the testing sites as well as 3rd party tools continually popping up. With limited time, network graphing was shelved for a while. But I’m pulling on my wellies, wading back in and finding clear confirmation of conclusions drawn as well as some further intriguing ‘clumps’ to explore.

Achievements in 2021 - Connectivity
Photo by Francisco Javier Martinez Navio on Scopio

14. A DNA discovery I made was…

…a couple who are repeatedly popping up among  US DNA matches, and are clearly connected to one of the branches of a certain pair of great grandparents. I must find time to build out the tree of this couple and see where and how they fit in. It could set a load of dominoes falling to parse this branch more effectively.

15. A newly found family member shared…

…photos of her family members that showed we were definitely of the same line. Then the same thing happened on another branch of the same line, from another relative who didn’t know the first. We’re all so similar, the Seals definitely have a ‘look’.

16. I splashed out and purchased…

…a package of 40 courses at the National Institute for Genealogical Studies which will keep me busy for the next year or two! The perils of being the ‘lifelong learner’ type, it keeps you poor!

17. Another positive I would like to share is…

…a really helpful side effect from what has been such a tragic and challenging couple of years is the number of records that have been digitised and indexed and are now available to us via home access. So many long-term projects sped up, so many ongoing projects were completed. This has to be the greatest global achievement for 2021 in the genealogical world. I am so grateful to all those who have made this possible.

So how about you? What will you remember as YOUR genealogical achievements of 2021?

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Immigration Stories – The Tragic Voyage of the Ward Chipman

Artist’s impression of the Ward Chipman by K.A. Marshman from In Search of A Better Way by Aubrey Harris

All too often, when we read immigration stories written by descendants, we hear little of the actual immigration itself. Why did they leave their homeland? What was the journey like? When we delve a little deeper into this momentous portion of our ancestors’ lives, too often summarized as a set of departure and arrival dates, their story becomes richer and deeper as a result.

I hope to illustrate this a little today with some of the immigration story of John Harris and his family who came to Australia from Bristol on the 1841 voyage of the Ward Chipman.

John Harris of Shirwell, Devon

John Harris in 1872, detail from ‘The Explorers and Early Colonists of Victoria’, State Library of Victoria

John and his wife Elizabeth (nee Trump) were from Shirwell, near Barnstaple in Devon and came from farming families. They had married in 1829 at nearby Loxhore, and Elizabeth had borne seven children, though two had died in infancy.

After the death of their sixth child James in 1837, they had moved to the busy port of Bristol, Gloucestershire where their last child Elizabeth was born. John became a policeman, recruited into the recently formed Bristol police force.

We cannot be sure what drove John to uproot his family from Devon to Bristol, and then ultimately to Australia. However, there was a lot of political unrest at the time and the economic situation was challenging. An unsuccessful vote of no confidence in the government took place that year. Ultimately the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne was to resign.

John Harris and family in the 1841 Census of Clifton in Bristol.

At the time of the 1841 Census, the family was living in Whittaker’s Buildings, Clifton. A government sanitation survey taken in 1850 stated that:

“the lower storey of one house is used as a public receptacle for filth“

and that the building was set into a hillside and terribly damp. It is therefore not unreasonable to believe that the family was struggling to make ends meet, and saw emigration as a potential remedy.

The Harris Immigration Story Begins

A week after the census was taken, the following advertisement appeared on the front page of the Bristol Mercury, and the decision was made to make a new start.

The advertisement in the Bristol Mercury on June 12th 1841 that triggered the emigration of the Harris family.

In order to qualify for free passage as a bounty immigrant, John had to meet the occupational requirements stated in the advertisement. He had previously worked as a mason in Barnstaple, and he stated this as his occupation in order to get his family aboard this vessel.

The Ward Chipman was scheduled to sail on August 1st, but from the very beginning, this voyage was a disaster. Poor planning meant that there were delays in Government inspections and the ship was not ready to sail on that date. Despite that, the passengers were required to remain on board for over three weeks until she finally set sail on 27th August 1841. This must have been an awful beginning to their journey, with 325 cabin passengers crammed together in the height of summer, consuming much of the water and food intended for the voyage.

The Harris family in the Ward Chipman passenger lists

Things went from bad to worse during the journey, with not only shortages of provisions and implements, but also an outbreak of food poisoning from faulty tinned food. Twenty-one people were to die on the journey, nineteen of them infants and children. Sadly, as an assisted migration vessel, there are no known surviving ship’s surgeon journals for further insight into the dreadful experience endured by the passengers. Luckily, none of John’s family succumbed.

Detail of deaths on the voyage, found on the summary page of the passenger list.

Research tip: Don’t confine your searches of passenger lists to the page on which your ancestors appear. There is much more useful information that can be found within its pages!

They finally arrived in Port Phillip Bay on December 16, 1841. This did not however mark the end of the scandals regarding this voyage. On arrival, a claim for 4524 pounds of bounty payment was denied to Arthur Kemmis, a prominent local merchant and Managing Director of the Steam Navigation Company. Several people who had worked on the ship were also denied pay.

A New Life in Australia

After this inauspicious start to their new life, John and his family initially settled in Melbourne. He apparently bought some land on the corner of Spring and Lonsdale Streets (what would that be worth now?!). Ironically, this was either on, or immediately across from the present-day site of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

Finding the then dirty and primitive Melbourne not to their liking, their immigration story continued when they moved to the Western District of Victoria. Details of this journey and its timing are not yet known, but it must have taken place by 1845 when his eldest son William died in Port Fairy. It is highly likely that the Harris family were part of a contingent of forty families who travelled there together in early 1843 according to reports in the Port Phillip Gazette on the 25th February of that year. I need to have a dig about and see if I can find the names of those families! He took up land, and went back to his farming roots, eventually dying in 1900 in Mailors Flat, leaving behind a large and comfortably-off family.

Immigration stories – not just departure and arrival dates

When looking into the immigration stories of our ancestors, it can be really helpful to check out newspaper reports (in both countries!) and advertisements to find more detail about the voyage. They can also provide information more broadly around the political and economic landscape impacting their lives, which may have influenced the decision to leave the country. Don’t forget history books (try the Internet Archive or FamilySearch Digital Library!), both general and local which can give marvellous insight into the time and place our families were experiencing. Archives may even hold diaries and letters, if not of our family, perhaps of their fellow passengers. Dig, dig, dig!

Note to Regular Readers…

Apologies, ‘life’ got in the way for a few months and the blog suffered neglect as a result. It’s taken a while to have the mental bandwidth with everything else going on to be able to get back into the swing of regular activities. I hope to bring you more regular blogs in the coming months, though it may take a little while to become as prolific as I was previously. Bear with me, thanks for your patience!

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Reel in the Relatives – Cousin Bait and How to Make the Most of it!

This week’s 52Ancestors challenge is ‘cousin bait’. What is cousin bait? It’s any way you are sharing your family tree, stories and information that allows other family members to find it (and you!). When you connect with others researching the same tree, you can share information with one another. There are bound to be things each of you didn’t know. There may even be artefacts, photos and documents passed down to another branch of the family that you hadn’t been able to access before.

A case in point – the family bible that was pivotal in solving my longest-standing brick wall, the Vaughan family. It was through a third cousin who I had been in contact with for several years before she realised that I might find its contents useful. We had originally connected through the discovery of our similar trees online. The family lines had long since lost track of one another in real life. Once the bible was shared I was able to solve the mystery that had held up both of our research.

Cousin bait tools

Cast a wide net when looking for cousins! Image: Chandan Mohapatra at Scopio
  • Online family trees
    • make them public so your cousins can find you
    • consider more than one site, different people fish in different ponds
    • make them wide as well as deep, your cousins may recognise their families’ names or those more closely related to them
  • Website or blog
    • share your names, places and stories
    • ‘cousin bait’ is a major and unashamed motivation for this blog! I’ve shared stories and information about several family lines, usually containing some useful (I hope!) ideas on how to approach problems or resources to use. Unknown cousins who Google our surnames and places in common will be greeted with a story about our mutual ancestor in the search results and a way to contact me!
  • Social media
    • join groups that cover genealogy for your places or surnames and post a query
    • also join general groups such as The Genealogy Squad, as they can have large member numbers across the globe. They also provide lots of guidance on methodology, tips and resources to help you!
  • Mailing lists
    • many of the old Rootsweb lists still survive, at least the ones that were active! Most of them are now over at groups.io, and can still be a great source of information and connections
  • Lost Cousins
    • The Lost Cousins site will match you with people who have ancestors who’ve flagged the same census entry as you. Therefore, when you connect with them you already know where they fit into the tree! There’s also a very useful fortnightly newsletter as an extra benefit.
You have soooo many cousins you’ve never ‘met’!

Do you have any other tried and true cousin bait tools in your tackle box that I haven’t mentioned here? What works for you?

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Finding Esther…Who Was John and Charles Morter’s Mother?

finding esther maze

Inspired by digging into a long neglected family line last week, I decided that this week’s project was finding Esther. This was a good reminder of the value of returning to old research with new eyes periodically. If I could just find out who the mysterious Esther was, this would open up a whole new family for me and tumble a long-standing brick wall.

Esther Morter…

Esther Morter only appears in one document that I have found over the last couple of decades. She is named as the mother of John and Charles Morter, who were baptised together on 14th October 1796 at St Mary and All Saints, the parish church of Kidderminster in Worcestershire. Worcestershire is a difficult county to research unless you are lucky enough to be close to The Hive, their county archives. Currently, only transcripts of parish registers are available online with no access to digitised images. (A little bird tells me that their records are currently being digitised by Ancestry so watch this space over the next year or so, the situation is changing!). So, that was all I had to say that Esther existed. A transcript of a single document.

There was no record of she and Benjamin marrying. Although he married Elizabeth Cupee in 1798 there was no record of a burial for Esther, which was even more puzzling. To add to that, he described himself as a bachelor at that wedding. Did he not marry Esther at all?

Or is she Esther at all?

Digging back into researching Benjamin I found that he had a daughter Elizabeth with an Elizabeth in 1792, before he left London. Was this the same Elizabeth he’d eventually married? Did he just have an affair with Esther in Kidderminster and leave her behind there? Hypotheses were running thick and fast. It occurred to me that if the two Elizabeths were one and the same, she would have had the first child at the age of only 15. Could it be that her family disapproved of their relationship? Benjamin was ten years older.

Did they run off to Kidderminster together? It was another weaving area where he could easily find work. Was Esther really Elizabeth Cupee? This would account for the family of five being removed from Christ Church to Shoreditch after they returned to London in 1797. It would also mean that he was not lying when he said he was a bachelor, and their marriage coincided with her turning 21 and being able to marry without her parents’ consent. Finding Esther, and unravelling her story became even more of a pressing urge.

Finding Esther

I decided I couldn’t wait for the Worcestershire records to become available online. The key could be in that lone pair of entries in the parish register. I needed to see the vicar’s writing. The transcripts at both FamilySearch and TheGenealogist both said her name was Esther. But could it be a mistranscription, or even a mistake? The first theory could easily be proved or disproved by seeing the document at least.

I contacted The Hive. They responded very quickly to say that for the princely sum of 16 pounds they would photocopy and email it for me. I requested that they send the entire page rather than just the two entries so that I would have plenty of the vicar’s handwriting to compare against. Thank goodness I did.

The next day, I received an email with images of both the entries and the full page as requested. I looked at the entries. Sigh. Her name was clearly written as Esther for both baptism entries. The mistranscription theory was disproved immediately.

john charles morter baptism finding esther
The baptism entries for Charles and John Morter, clearly showing Esther as their mother.

Esther is revealed

I looked at the full page. And there was what I believe to be the answer. The vicar made a mistake. Sometimes it happens. Indeed, Benjamin’s brother John had a son in Bethnal Green in 1809. The vicar there recorded him as a son of Benjamin, despite later documents including his will showing he was clearly John’s son. Perhaps this family never made themselves well known to the local clergy except for family occasions.

On October 14th 1796, the Kidderminster vicar baptised four babies, an unusually high number at one time for him. Of the four baptisms, three had the father Benjamin. Two were John and Charles Morter. The third was the child of Benjamin and ESTHER Hemmings. It also appears that one of the entries on the page is in the wrong place, non-chronological. I believe that the vicar may have written down the details on scraps of paper at the time and then neatly transcribed them into the parish register later. Somewhere along the way, all three entries with a Benjamin as father on that day ended up with Esther listed as the mother.

kidderminster baptisms October 1796 finding esther
Reading the entire page shows where the vicar almost certainly messed up!

My current working hypothesis

Benjamin and Elizabeth got together in Bethnal Green when he was in his mid-20s and she in her mid teens. Her parents, Huguenots (Benjamin was not), strongly disapproved when she bore his child at the age of 15. The little family left together for Kidderminster, where they had the two boys. They then returned to the Spitalfields area in London by 1797, where they were described as a family of five on removal from the parish. Elizabeth was five months pregnant again in 1798 when they finally married quite truthfully as bachelor and spinster. She was now 21 and able to do so despite any parental objections. There was no finding Esther. Esther did not exist.

Obviously even though this hypothesis fits all documented facts known so far, it could contain a degree of confirmation bias. I am now digging through DNA matches to see if I can find a match with a descendant from the Cupee line. This of course means my new task is to build out her tree as much as possible to help with this. Previously thinking Elizabeth was a second wife I had done very little with her tree. So that’s what I’m doing now. When DNA matches are verified, I will be fully confident that not only do I have a document trail that works logically but that it is backed up by science! Finding Esther has taken a long time, but finding someone who never existed has been well worth the effort.

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Lost Child Reunites With Parents! A Small DNA Match Story

Image source: Tim Ellis

This week, another longstanding brick wall tumbled. This one was thanks to a relatively small DNA match (19cM) that popped up at one of the sites I have tested with.

Benjamin Morter

Benjamin was my 5th great-grandfather. I had not had any luck in unraveling his origins over the years. He’d lain a little neglected in recent times. Morter is not a common surname and is localised around East Anglia, so I suspected he or his ancestors probably came from around there somewhere. But I’d had no luck in definitively finding a likely candidate.

The only indication of a birth date I had was the fact that he was recorded as 65 years old when he was buried in the Globe Fields Wesleyan burial ground at Mile End Cemetery in 1834. This meant he was likely born around 1769 if the informant was accurate about his age.

His will named five surviving children and I have DNA matches with descendants of at least four of them. It also named a brother, John, and DNA matches to me have turned up on several branches of HIS descendants too.

small DNA match Morter
Benjamin Morter’s will named five children from two mothers, almost all of whom have descendants I share DNA with.

His children were from two relationships. The second was a marriage in St Dunstan, Stepney, London on January 7th, 1798 to Elizabeth Cupee, but the first was with a woman named Esther who remains a stubborn mystery and is my 5th great-grandmother. No marriage has yet been found. Perhaps it didn’t take place and the twins he had with her were illegitimate. It might explain why he was able to call himself a bachelor when he married Elizabeth…or he may just have been telling a fib.

The twins, John and Charles, were born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire in 1796. So for a while I thought that may have been his place of origin. However, I found no evidence of his baptism there, and there appeared to be no Morter families in the area. He likely went there for work.

Benjamin’s London life

He turned up next in London. In 1797, he and his family of five were removed from Christchurch, Middlesex to Shoreditch. I don’t know who made up that five, other than the twins and possibly Esther (there is probably at least one other child to discover). Though given he married Elizabeth soon after that, and she was five months pregnant at the time, perhaps she had already died. I am yet to find her burial.

He and Elizabeth had five children together, all baptised around Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. When he wrote his will, he was ‘of Exeter St, Strand, Middlesex’, so appears to have moved back to the area he was originally removed from in 1797 at least for a time. He was living back in Bethnal Green when he died in 1834.

I had never found a baptism for him in the London area and had no evidence to suggest where else he may have been from.

Serendipity strikes with a small DNA match

Not all useful DNA matches are enormous. Do not ignore your smaller ones.

And then…I got this small DNA match and it all fell into place over the course of the next few hours. Guess who stayed up all night? She was a shared match to multiple other Morter matches. Sure enough, she had Morters in her tree, but it didn’t go back very far. It was a start though.

So off I went and soon found out why she had run into a brick wall. Her furthest back Morter ancestor was orphaned young, raised by an uncle and aunt, and gave the wrong name for his father at his subsequent marriage. He had been born in Norwich and it was a fairly straightforward job for me to find his birth, his parents’ real names, and their marriage.

How a small DNA match tumbled the brick wall

Tracing the tree back, he turned out to descend from a Charles Morter, born around 1763 in Neatishead, Norfolk, who in turn was the son of John Morter and Hannah Walsingham of that tiny village of fewer than 500 people at that time. I checked their offspring. Lo and behold, they had sons Benjamin and John born within a couple of years of the estimated ages of my Benjamin and his brother John. Could this be it at last? Were John and Hannah my 6th great-grandparents?

small DNA match Morter
Benjamin’s baptism in the Neatishead parish register – found at last!

I worked the trees of a few more DNA matches. Some of them also went back to John and Hannah. I constructed a hypothetical tree including as many of the matches as I could and checked the Shared cM Tool at DNA Painter for each one of them to see if it all hung together. It did. I checked that their Benjamin didn’t stay in the Neatishead area or die as an infant. It all gelled beautifully, there was no sign of him anywhere.

This shows that you don’t need to have a huge DNA match to make a brick wall fall. With some solid tree building, research and a thorough analysis of the shared DNA matches you already have, sometimes it can be achieved with a small DNA match which is possibly at first glance not especially helpful.

My conclusion is that John Morter, collar maker of Neatishead, and his wife Hannah are my 6th great grandparents. Now who on earth is Esther…?

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Death in a Teacup. How Leah’s Fortune Became Her Misfortune.

Teacup fortune telling
Photo by  Birgith Roosipuu  on  Scopio

This week, the 52Ancestors theme is ‘Fortune’. My contribution, for something different, is a fictionalised account of the true story of my great grandmother’s death. Don’t be too startled, I don’t intend for this blog to turn into a series of fictionalised accounts, it’s just nice to change things up and try something new once in a while!

You may remember Leah Swinbourne as the mother of the unfortunate Alfred Mario Beckett. Her life continued to be challenging and was cut tragically short at the age of 42. Read on to see why written from her point of view…

Leah as she may have appeared in real life, using the MyHeritage Deep NostalgiaTM feature (from a photo taken in 1913)

Her fortune in the tea leaves

Leah jumped back, startled by what she had seen in the chipped teacup. She was renowned in the family for her fortune telling skills, a legacy of her gypsy grandmother, Mary Ann Hayden. Mary Ann had never lost her gypsy ways and had made sure to pass them down to her daughters and granddaughters.

This morning, Leah had done her customary swirl of the leaves in the last drops of her tea and up-ended her cup to see what lay ahead. Often it was trivial; otherwise-unexpected visitors, children’s bumps and scrapes, rain coming…but today was different. Today she foresaw her own death. The cup dropped from her shaking hands and smashed into pieces on the cold kitchen floor.

“But I’m only 42…”, she whispered to herself, “…whatever will become of the children?”
She didn’t question the patterns in the tealeaves, never for a moment doubted what she saw in her fortune. They were never wrong. Even so, they were very odd. Leah could see a fall, a knock to the head…and then being locked away somewhere? That made no sense. And soon after that, she would be gone from this life. This she knew, and she felt a huge weight of dread settle upon her.

So when would it happen? She knew it would be soon, the dregs of tea were not long-range forecasters. She was a pragmatic woman, Lord knows she’d had to be over the years. Husband number two had been a practical rather than romantic choice. He’d recently died, a late-claimed victim of the Great War. The mustard gassing in the trenches had finally knocked off his kidneys, leaving her alone with eight children to raise.

She had no one left to call on to care for her remaining children. Little Ruby especially was a concern, she was only five years old. Leah’s own family had dispersed with the death of her mother – her brother Alfie had been shipped off to America as a British Home Child and her sister Florence had died tragically young. Leah herself had the poor fortune to have been disowned after trying to run off with her unfortunate choice of first love – Joe, the attempted bigamist.

She couldn’t make firm arrangements anyway, not based on the swirl of a teacup. Her friends good-naturedly accepted that she told fortunes using tea leaves but didn’t especially believe in what they predicted – it was purely a parlour trick to them.

Her misfortune on the tram

So Leah was deep in thought as she headed off to the city with her basket to do her shopping. The tram rumbled to a stop in front of her, teeming with people as usual.
“They really need to run these things more frequently”, she thought yet again. She was squashed up against a musty-smelling old lady and a large man who stank of tobacco and his lunchtime pint, as she precariously held onto the pole just inside the door with her free hand. The tram jolted to a halt suddenly as a dog ran into the road in front of it in hot pursuit of a cat. The large man stumbled heavily into Leah and she felt herself falling….

Groggily, she lifted her head to find herself somewhere else entirely. A cold, gloomy place in one of a row of beds. Was it a hospital? She groaned as a spasm of pain shot through her head where she’d hit the road, unable to break her fall. The face of her eldest daughter Ann appeared above her, with a concerned look on her face.

“Mum, you’re back with us! We’ve been so worried the past couple of days!”

“What’s happened? Where am I?”, Leah mumbled.

“Don’t you remember? You fell off the tram, you’ve got ever such an ‘egg’ on your head!”

And so it transpired as Ann related the tale, that Leah had somehow made her way back home that day, blood streaming down her face, refusing all offers of help. She’d patched herself up, made dinner for the children, put them to bed and had seemed alright, if a little dazed. But later that night she had gone wandering, calling out for her daughter Dorothy who had died of diphtheria as an infant, peering into people’s windows and under bushes trying to find her. So they’d brought her to Hollymoor two days ago, sedated her and she’d been asleep for the past two days.

Hollymoor asylum - misfortune
Hollymoor Asylum, Birmingham

An unfortunate era for head injuries

Hollymoor was not a hospital. It was the local asylum. Because of her sudden erratic behaviour it had been assumed that Leah had had some kind of breakdown. Nowadays we would know it was a concussion, not insanity that drove her actions that night. Nowadays she would have been taken straight to hospital. Instead, she had been ‘put
away’. It was chilly. It was damp. No one except the Director was medically qualified. No one was giving her medical care.

As the lump on her head began to subside over the next few days, Leah began to return to her clear-thinking self. She worried that this was what had been foretold in her fortune– the fall, the head injury, and being locked away. Was she going to be here for the rest of her life? Surely not, couldn’t they see she was herself again and let her go home to her children?

But every time she asked to go home and was rebuffed she couldn’t help breaking down in tears. And every time she got a little more high-pitched and shrill when she asked. This wasn’t helping her case, but she was exhausted. She couldn’t sleep in these awful conditions, with wailing mad women all around her. She couldn’t eat the vile slop they called food. She couldn’t keep dry with the rain leaking in through the roof above her bed.

Two weeks later she was dead. Pneumonia, in an age before antibiotics.

The tea leaves never lied. Her fortune was never wrong.

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The Name’s the Same! And the Names are Different!

This week, the 52ancestors theme is “Name’s the Same”. In a few days, it will be St Patrick’s Day. So I decided to combine the two themes and provide an update on the recently discovered Irish corner of my family tree. My challenge with this branch is now that I’m tackling a massive problem of the same given names AND multiple variations of the same surname concurrently!

For those who have been playing along with my meanderings, my great-great-grandmother Norah Vaughan was eventually found to be an Irish famine refugee from Cork. Since I wrote up the 30-year journey it took to find her Irish origins, I’ve found her baptism which gave her mother’s surname. That led me to her parents’ marriage.

Blarney roots

John Vaughan and Hanora Manley married in Blarney in 1836. Blarney Roman Catholic parish is in the civil parish of Whitechurch about 5 miles NW of Cork city. The Blarney parish registers are some of the earliest Catholic registers available in Ireland. However, there is a significant gap of over an entire generation between 1792 and 1821 for baptisms, after only commencing in 1791. The marriage registers have a gap from 1813 to 1821 after the early flurry of recording from 1778. The details included also varied from parish priest to parish priest over the years.

Manley – the Worst. Surname. Ever (for variations!)

Her surname was given as Maley (as was one of the witnesses), so at first, I was unsure if it was them. So I did a bit of digging. The original Irish name was Ó Máinle. In a Cork accent, the ‘n’ is not strongly pronounced. In fact, the pronunciation can come out sounding like Mauley. Therefore, it’s also occasionally spelt that way.  So, surname variations include all the ways to spell it with an ‘n’ in it. Or without. Or with a ‘u’. Also, occasionally a ‘ur’ or even an ‘or’. With or without the ‘e’. Possibly a double ‘l’. And sometimes an ‘O” on the front for good measure. Most of these variations appear in the Blarney register. They are all at the end of the day, the same name.

There no such thing as one way to spell an Irish surname! Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Blarney appears to be Manley Central for Ireland. It looks at this stage as though there were at least 7 separate but related families by that name in Blarney in the early days of the parish registers. However will I work out which family is which and where my Hanora fits in? Especially given that her baptism was never recorded. Hers is the generation missing from the registers. And their townlands were rarely recorded in the register until after the mid-1850s. Time to FAN club the Dickens out of the entire community!

But the first names are also the same…

The first names are consistent. Sigh. The names are the same, over and over. John, Daniel, Patrick, Timothy or Cornelius for the males. Ellen, Mary, Margaret, Johanna and Honora for the females.

The other ‘name’s the same’ issue that I run up against here is that the pool of other local surnames is also small. I am trying to analyse the witness/sponsor names to gauge patterns that might tie branches of the Manley families together, but it was a community where the same surnames appear over and over too, so conclusions cannot be reached with this approach. Even where there is a pattern it’s potentially a hint only.

Sadly, it was rare to baptise with a middle name. Therefore, there’s been no opportunity to take advantage of the old middle name trick as yet!

The ‘Manley Blarney’ project (because I need yet another project!)

Blarney Castle, site of the Blarney Stone. No wonder I talk a lot. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The ‘Manley Blarney’ project has begun. I have extracted every single person with every variant of the Manley surname from the Blarney baptism and marriage registers up to the turn of the 20th century (so far). Unhelpfully but not surprisingly there are no burial registers to help me kill off the early ones. Now I am systematically trying to cross-reference against Tithe Applotment Books, Griffiths Valuation, civil registration for later entries (especially marriages to tie them to a father’s name and townland), surviving census fragments/pension applications, gravestone records, will indexes, estate records etc. Irish newspapers have not been helpful so far; I need more time to try all those surname variations out!

I will be working through the Catholic record collection on FMP looking for emigrant families in the US, UK and anywhere else, as I suspect many families left during those famine years. Did any other related families end up in the Chepstow area too (it doesn’t look like it so far)? Passenger lists for further-flung locations will also be trawled. Certainly, the parish registers showed fewer and fewer Manleys as the years went by.

I have created a hypothetical tree with a ‘Connector Manley’ as a pseudo-father to each of the Manley children with unrecorded baptisms and uploaded to each database that generates record hints. This has been helpful in discovering a branch that went to Buffalo and another that went to Detroit so far and occasionally helped me give them their real father’s name. Bit by bit as I explore further the children will find their true families.

I’m going to continue to build down the lines to see if I get any DNA hits too. If this happens it may also help me unravel the families. By using WATO, I may be able to see which lines are genetically the closest to my Hanora.

I think this will be a long-term project. It’s turning into both a mini (i.e. localised to one parish) One-Name study and a bit of a One-Place study as so many other local families of the time are being dragged into it!

There will be a further update. It may be a long time coming…

I realise I am setting high expectations on myself, given that it’s not common to get back into the 18th Century for most Irish families. But I don’t give up easily and am looking forward to the challenge of seeing how much of the Manley family I can untangle! It’s a quagmire of names the same and names different. It’s just another temporary brick wall. Let me at it!