This week’s prompt seemed a bit familiar, so I checked my Archive from 2020 and here is the first time I wrote on this theme. All of that still holds just as true today as it did back in 2020 – and no shade to Amy for recycling prompts!

I’d like to think that with experience comes wisdom and that I am less prone to research oopsies. Still, this past week I did order a birth certificate for a suspected illegitimate Holborow birth which I discovered 20 minutes after submitting the order had been double registered with the obvious birth father’s name as well. So I am definitely not saying I am infallible. (And, yes, it was incredibly irritating.)

But have there been any earth-shattering oopsies in my research, something that has meant unpicking an entire family line and/or hours of research? Or have I ever uncovered someone else’s oopsie?

Well, I guess you could say that uncovering the secret family of a British Army Major was pretty epic: Kerry Bull’s Calves. I am pretty proud of that one.

Over the years I’ve uncovered illegitimacy, bigamy, criminals, abandonment, orphans, divorce, children masked as grandchildren, transportation, poverty … the entire gamut of the human condition.

But this post is kind of timely as I have been contacted recently regarding someone in my not-too-extended family having had a little oopsie of their own many, many years ago. More on that in the coming months as things develop …