Sometimes we hit genealogy brick walls and no matter what strategy we use, they just won’t tumble. Sometimes all we can do to save our sanity is to put them aside and move on with other lines until we find another relevant database or repository to search. That may become a repeating cycle for many years. In my case, 35 years – until genealogical serendipity occurred. Strap yourself in and make yourself a cuppa (perhaps not in that order) – this is a long post, but one which I hope you’ll find useful and interesting!
Searching for Norah Vaughan
My great-great-grandmother was Norah Vaughan. Norah obscured her early origins well. Perhaps not intentionally, but nonetheless the result was the same. The first documentation I had for her were census records in 1871, 1881, and 1891 after she became known as Norah Simpson. She was living in Birmingham with her bricklayer ‘husband’ Thomas and their children. The censuses indicated that she was born around 1848 in London. She died in 1893, but her death certificate shed no further light on her origins, as English death certificates rarely do!
The London connection
The censuses showed that her eldest son was also born in London. He was born in 1867, so I looked for a marriage certificate around that timeframe in the London area. Nothing. I kept broadening the search in both time and geography, and used wildcards. Nada. No apparent marriage. Interesting. I filed that away for future reference.
Thomas’ mother Hannah Simpson and his three youngest siblings turned up in the 1871 Census living in Wandsworth, just south of the Thames in London. His father William meanwhile, also a bricklayer, was back in Birmingham lodging with an unrelated family (presumably temporarily). Thomas and Norah were also in Birmingham by that point. I began to form a hypothesis that the Simpson family had moved down to London during the building boom of the 1860s, and that Thomas and Norah had met there. This family proved adept at not only building brick walls for houses but also genealogy brick walls!
At this stage, I only had Norah’s first name and no surname. There was no marriage certificate, so I looked for birth certificates for her children. Not all her then known children were registered, but I managed to find her maiden name on one – it was Vaughan. This explained the strange mistake made in the 1871 Census where Thomas was enumerated as Thomas Vaughan initially, then the ‘Vaughan’ scribbled out and replaced with ‘Simpson’. Now that I knew both surnames I tried again to find a marriage. Still nothing. The genealogy brick walls were just as high.
There was quite a gap early in the ‘marriage’ between the birth of the first, and so far known second child. Looking in the GRO indexes I found another child, Edward, born in Wandsworth in 1869. Given that it was likely that’s where my Simpson family were at about that time it was worth the punt. I bought the certificate. Lucky call, the mother was ‘Laura Vaun’!
Norah’s early years
I looked everywhere for a potential baptism for Norah. I started in London then spread the search wider. Nothing in the parish registers anywhere. There was one that caught my eye over in Herefordshire, but I followed her through, and her life continued on separately to our Norah’s.
I scoured the censuses of 1851 and 1861 for any possible misspelling of Norah Vaughan, and ultimately every Norah or variant of that name without a surname in the greater London area!
Once the Poor Law records for London were available on Ancestry, I found a reference to a workhouse admission in Stepney for a ‘Hanora Vaughan’ of the right age in 1863. She was admitted with a fever for a month and then discharged to the care of ‘an Aunt’. Not helpful, other than suggesting she was perhaps orphaned by then! There was an address that no longer exists, though I know where it was. I am still trying to trace who was living in that house at that time. I could find no other Hanora Vaughans in London that this one could be, other than my Norah.
There was only one other reference to an Honora Vaughan, also in 1863. It was a marriage – I sent for the certificate, but she turned out to be in her 30’s and a widow. Not mine, and not the workhouse Hanora.
The Irish connection
Here came another hypothesis…why would Thomas and Norah not marry, and why would she be in no parish register? Why would her family perhaps be avoiding the census and the parish church? Why were they not baptising or even sometimes registering their early children? I began to get a distinct feeling that she may have been Catholic. Thomas was bog-standard Church of England. If neither could jump what was a wide religious divide in those days, perhaps they could not agree to marry.
What group of people were often Catholic and were less likely to feel comfortable being documented (or had literacy levels which made it problematic)? Next hypothesis – her family were possibly Irish. London had a large population of Irish immigrants in those years, often living in desperate poverty. Also, one of the names that Norah is a derivative of is Hanora…but generally only if the child is of Irish origin. I was grasping at straws at this point, but looking at the context of place and time and social history helped me to make some educated guesses.
It occurred to me that this may be where my splodge of Irish DNA had come from. I had initially thought it was just a bit of noise, as I had no known Irish ancestry. But as time went on, algorithms tightened, reference populations grew and I tested in more places. As I write, it seems to have settled into a fairly consistent and substantial 10% across most testing platforms and is flagging Cork as the likely source.
So now I realised I needed the Catholic records. Where were they? I had Norah pinpointed to Wandsworth, and at least in 1863, in Mile End New Town (possibly her ‘Aunts’ address). Wandsworth is in the Diocese of Southwark, and Mile End New Town in the Diocese of Westminster. Westminster was available through FindMyPast. Nothing. Southwark was unavailable. I settled myself in for possibly a very long wait, knowing that they were likely to become available on FindMyPast in due course. The genealogy brick walls remained up and I turned to other lines for a while.
I try with a little help from my friends…
For those who have been following along with my blog for a while, you will know that I took a genealogy cruise last year. Part of that included a workshop session focused on breaking down genealogy brick walls. I enlisted the help of a room full of hardcore genealogists, just to see if I had missed anything, and what a fresh look could do.
It was suggested that Norah may have been born in Ireland but moved to London so early that she didn’t realise. I hadn’t really considered this possibility, so we scoured Irish records, finding one possibility who had unfortunately eliminated herself from consideration by dying young. But otherwise, the consensus was that Norah was just being bloody difficult.
The moment I’d been waiting for arrived…
On the 26th June 2020, FindMyPast announced that they had released the Southwark Diocese records. Thanks to the difference in time zones I found out right on bedtime. This always happens with new record releases, so I am very glad that FMP has theirs on a Friday when I don’t need to be up early the next day!
Naturally, that was it for the next few hours. I held my breath and checked for Norah’s baptism…
…it wasn’t there.
After a small sulk, a cup of tea and a hitching up of my big girl pants, I decided to take a look at all the Vaughans in the Southwark records and reconstruct family groups. The next step would be to cross-reference against other records such as censuses etc., to see if I could work out who were Norah’s people.
Then, targeted DNA testing occurred to me. If I could build out these trees enough then connect Norah’s tree to them with enough good quality DNA descendants of hers attached, I could perhaps get a nibble from a DNA descendant of one of those trees.
So whose DNA did I have? I had myself, my two siblings, and two maternal first cousins in my generation, but that wasn’t ideal for this distance back. Who did I have further back? My mum, my uncle and their first cousin. Pretty good, but it would be better to also have a descendant of another of Norah’s children for improved overall coverage of her genome. I know one descendant of her daughter Elizabeth. If her Dad was still alive, he’d be perfect!
I wrote to Sue and explained the situation, then gently asked if he was still with us and if so, would he mind if I bought him a DNA kit? Yes, he was alive. No, there would be no DNA test. She was still busy working with documents and wasn’t ready to go down that path. Okay, it was worth asking, and I totally respect that. These bricklaying families make good sturdy genealogy brick walls, even if their descendants don’t want them broken down! Or do they…?
She wrote back again within minutes to say…but we do have the family bible with a lot of dates in, and some pressed flowers from between the pages, would you like photos? YESSSS!!! (please).
You thought this was going to turn into a DNA story, didn’t you?
Very quickly, Sue went round to her Dad’s place and took copious photos of the bible which had been presented to Thomas by the reverend at St Martin’s church in Birmingham in 1889. Thomas had written in the dates of birth for himself, Norah, and the survivors of their twelve children. I had only known about nine. He had put the children in order, and just written ‘dead’ after any that hadn’t survived.
This bible was literally a godsend! The minor win was being able to pinpoint a couple of the more commonly named children in the 1939 Register using these birth dates.
The major win was using the naming pattern to make some educated guesses about the names used on the Vaughan side of the family. I was then able to use those predictions to follow a paper trail to identify Norah’s birth family to my (almost) satisfaction. It wasn’t a DNA story after all, but I will only be 100% comfortable once I get a DNA hit using the family I found!
Following the names
Now that I had the full complement of children I could make sense out of the names and see the pattern that was followed. Many of the names were repeated throughout the Simpson tree.
Of the first six sons, there was one named after each of himself, his father and his grandfather. There was another that may have been his brother but was a younger brother rather than an elder one so I wasn’t sure, it was a bit out of whack. So that left a Charles, John and possibly Edward that were likely from Norah’s side.
The daughters made less sense. The first was Mary Jane, presumably from Norah’s side as there were none in the Simpson family. Elizabeth was too common a name to be specific, and Thomas had a sister called Harriet. His mother didn’t have a child named after her at all, perhaps she was due to be next but they stopped having babies!
So I did some poking around to see if I could find a Mary Jane Vaughan possibly associated with a Charles or a John that had any connection to London, and were maybe Irish, or had some other factor that could be pursued as a possible link to Norah.
Charles and Mary Jane Vaughan
Bingo! I’m sure I had seen and dismissed this family many years ago, perhaps before I made the Irish connection, and possibly because they were more of a Birmingham family than a London one. Charles Vaughan married Mary Jane Young at St Peter’s Catholic Church in Birmingham in 1865. Charles was a bricklayer. A BRICKLAYER! His father was Edward. EDWARD! I felt the bricks in the Vaughan genealogy brick walls begin to crumble.
I followed the family through the censuses. Charles and Mary Jane went to London soon after their marriage, i.e., around the same time as the Simpson family went there. LONDON! They had their first two children there before returning to Birmingham by the 1871 Census (as did Thomas and Norah). My final hypothesis is that Charles Vaughan and William and Thomas Simpson went to London together and it was through this that Norah and Thomas met.
Moving backwards through the censuses was easy enough. Mary Jane was from a small town called Chepstow, just across the Welsh border, and that’s where I found Charles too, although he was born in Cork, Ireland. CORK, IRELAND! In both 1851 and 1861, he was living with his parents Edward and Ellen (nee Reardon). I was expecting to find little Norah in the household in either 1851 or 1861. No such luck. My hopes were dashed. It had all been fitting together so well, perhaps I was just seeing patterns where none really existed, and those genealogy brick walls would remain standing.
Because Charles was Irish-born I took my search from Ancestry over to FindMyPast, where the Irish records are fuller. And by then I’d done a bit of reading about Chepstow and Irish immigration. There was quite a dense population of Famine refugees from the late 1840s onwards. They all lived around the Thomas St area where Charles was living at the time of the Censuses.
I did a blanket search on Vaughans in Chepstow and found another family in the same street in 1851. John and ‘Anora’ and their daughters 10-year-old Margaret…and 3-year-old ‘Anora’. NORAH! For some reason, even knowing how she was enumerated I simply still cannot find this record on Ancestry, it seems a page has been missed from their collection. A reminder to check the same database on other sites if you can’t find what you’re looking for on your first site!
In 1861, Edward’s household contained an 18-year-old niece called Margaret. There is no record of a death of John and Anora’s daughter, nor was there another Margaret Vaughan around the area in 1851, so unless the first Margaret left town and another arrived to take her place, the evidence suggests that John and Edward were brothers. This makes Charles and Norah first cousins, although he was a dozen or so years older than her.
Life was tough for the Chepstow Vaughans. Norah’s mother died later in 1851. Edward and Ellen lost their youngest daughter 4 days later. A newspaper search finds multiple references to Edward and Ellen’s family, mostly in the court reports. They appear to have been a hard-drinking family with very short fuses. By 1861 I can find no trace of John and little Norah – I suspect they are in London by then – and they managed to avoid the census. Margaret, as we know, is with Edward and Ellen. She is still with the widowed Ellen in 1871 with her illegitimate daughter (also Margaret) then spends the rest of her life in the Workhouse, noted as an imbecile.
Charles is the only one of Edward and Ellen’s family to do well for himself. He leaves Chepstow with Mary Jane, marries her and the rest is history. I found some photos of them and their descendants back at Ancestry. The same cheeky face that my grandad had is there in several of those photos. Sue says the same of her family. That is not evidence of course. But it makes me smile.
Now what?
I have built out the trees for the Chepstow Vaughans as much as I can at this point. I’ve attached that tree to another containing Norah and her descendants, then linked my spare DNA test at Ancestry to it. Hoping that I’ll get some hits on Thrulines. A DNA hit would really put the icing on the cake for me.
The odd names in the family bible have all been given homes. Mary Jane was not just Norah’s cousin’s wife but was probably almost a substitute mother to her. Charles was possibly considered a substitute father if her own had died or abandoned her (remember it was ‘an Aunt’ who took her to the Workhouse Infirmary, not her father). John was her father and Edward was her uncle…but I suspect John and Edward’s father could possibly be Edward too. Interestingly Charles had one son who he named Charles Edward John Vaughan. He distributed all the names to one child!
I’ve spent significant hours looking for the Vaughans in County Cork, but with no luck yet. It’s interesting that one of Charles’ daughters moved to Ireland for a few years and had some of her children there. Her husband was originally from Tipperary but they lived in Ballincollig, Cork. This may be a clue to pursue, or it may be a red herring. Time will tell.
This blog post is also unashamedly cousin bait. I’d love it if a descendant of Charles and Mary Jane was to stumble across this and reach out!
Finally, I have a renewed sense of hope around genealogy brick walls. This one had been niggling away at me for years. I guess it took a while for Norah to feel ready to make herself known. So this blog goes out on the 5th anniversary of losing my Mum, Norah’s great-grandaughter. I hope they’re getting along well!
