wiltshire

52 Ancestors: Overlooked

Overlooking ancestors or entire lines can easily be done when researching. I find that I am more likely to look at one of my American lines, or my mother’s Holborow family than my father’s English side. That is just personal preference (and the number of people also seriously researching the Holborows is fairly small).

However, there are family lines that rapidly run out of steam due to a lack of records. In this case I wouldn’t so much say they are overlooked as under-represented: if the records were there, I’d be all over them like ants at a picnic. Case in point, my 3 x great-grandmother Mary McMillan/McMillian Payne. She appears from nowhere, married and gives birth and then disappears! Where did she go? Where is her family?

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Updates on Updates (Hallid-updates)

This shouldn’t be a long post, but I think that I may have blasted through the research quagmire of my Hallidays in Sherston that I mentioned last time. (Soon it’ll be back to business, i.e. more Holborows, more Murrays, some asylum records …)

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Updating Old Research – The Hallidays of Sherston

I should be preparing for a dinner party (do people still have dinner parties?!) tonight – for which I did a heck load of preparation for yesterday – but instead I am sat here with a messed up foot (we call it a Dom Special – I fell out of my trainer, and also off the edge of my stone path in the garden). It happens on … well, not a regular basis but more often than you’d think a grown adult would fall over (I once fell off the edge of a flip-flop and messed my ankle up, and once I fell over in a flat field and managed to break both my elbow and my wrist).

But I have been re-examining some inherited research again lately. I mentioned it a while ago as it forms part of my Halliday family work which I considered a bit of a done deal. Only … there were a lot of gaps in the data. Dates and no locations. Parents but no baptisms. Spouses and no marriages. You know the drill by now about double-checking everything, and not relying on other people’s research. Well. Egg all over my face.

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Netherstreet Farm

This entire post started as an addendum to the end of my previous post (Miss Holborow) as I wanted to add some additional information. However, I thought that it needed its own full post. And so I started to write a bit of a potted history of Nether Street Farm to track ownership and residency over the years. Only it grew legs and … expanded somewhat.

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Will Miss Holborow Please Stand Up?

Do you ever have “Duh! How could I have not seen that?!” moments? No, me neither. Ahem. And of those moments – which I definitely don’t have – this is very much not one of those moments … if you see what I mean!

But it’s a bit of a reminder for me in terms of checking other sources when confronted with brick walls and blind alleys. And nobody needs to be ashamed to have such kicks up the metaphorical behind. It’s a good thing to flex those research muscles.

Even if the result does make you smack your forehead …

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Missing Mary & Secretive Sarah

It’s interesting how undertaking new projects forces you to look at your tree and your research in new ways, and show up those pesky holes.

You know – those people who seem to evaporate like mist or (possibly even worse) apparate fully formed in front of you with kids and all but no sense of before.

I have two ladies on my father’s side who are very much of the disappear into nothingness variety. And, I’m not going to lie, it’s frustrating me!

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Random Find, Local Story

I am a (relatively) late convert to the wonder that is old newspapers, but I have to say that the British Newspaper Archive is a veritable gold mine when it comes to researching (right up there with Australia’s Trove, and the USA’s Newspapers.com and Library of Congress Newspaper Archive).

On a whim (because I don’t have enough of my own actual family stories to write up and share …), I recently searched for articles featuring the village in which I currently live. In amongst the articles about high pavements*, sewage problems** and upturned tractors***, I found a remarkable one that made my eyebrows reach for my hairline …

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When Is A Holborow Not A Holborow (Part 2)?

A year ago this week I wrote about a family who appear in records as Holborows but were, in fact, Neals. Long story short – their familial middle name of Holborow had replaced their documented surname of Neal. But whilst researching the origins of a different line of Holborows from the Wiltshire market town of Chippenham I came across a similar conundrum where the Holborow (or rather, Holbrow in this instance) line disappears, only to potentially be replaced. Unless I’m going mad. Which is a distinct possibility around these parts …!

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Martha’s Will

I’ve not been great with my blogging this year. I think I’ve only done one or two 52 Ancestors this year, and my Holborows in … series have kind of ground to a halt. Although slow and sporadic, my research continues onwards. Lately I’ve been focussing on one branch of the Holborows from the Wiltshire parish of Luckington (which – of course – is not one branch at all). This was all prompted by reviewing my transcriptions of Holborows in the 1841 census to see if I have them all – can I identify them and their family groups? Are they in my tree? And I came across a Daniel – it is always a damn Daniel – whose parental line I couldn’t place. He is worthy of a post all his own, so maybe we’ll have a little … double dip.

From there I moved onto a resource that I have overlooked – past tense – the most in my research: Wills. A good will is an amazing thing to find, especially in those years before General Registration and you’re reliant on Parish Registers to hypothesise relationships. Of course, that’s assuming you get a “good” will – and by that I mean one that names people and relationships. Of course, sometimes you just get a list of names, sometimes you get a cat’s home. But sometimes you get one that enables you – with a little bit of digging – to make some fantastic connections, even if you have to compare and connect other wills from the same area.

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52 Ancestors: Witness to History

Except for a short sojourn in Purley (sort of south London) I have lived in the countryside all of my life – either in Wiltshire or the four years I spent in rural France. Consequently, my immediate response to this week’s prompt is how much my ancestors would have watched the land around them change.

Not only the land, of course, but their villages changing as shops closed, services withdrawn and then acres of post-war housing and, of course, the rise of the motorcar and the roads they ran on. Now, some of those changes are still being faced by rural communities today.

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