The Gritquoy Blog

I’ve just noticed the date on my last posting in the Genealogy section here and, goodness me, it is almost eleven months since I last said anything on the subject.

Does this mean that I have moved on to other hobbies? Not a bit of it! A day doesn’t go by when I haven’t fired up Firefox and its 13 Home Page tabs which open up specific pages on the Ancestry site.

So, what have I been doing?

Well, I’ve put my attempt to sort out all the Roscoe surnames, and their variations, on hold but I will return to it in due course.

At the moment, I’m mainly concentrating on tracking Robertsons in the east of Fife on behalf of a friend and it is a slow process because there are quite a few of them and, it being Scotland, it can be pricey too.

Recently, I have also actually ventured out to wander round a cemetery or two which is something I haven’t done in decades. There is a big difference, too, because a digital camera is so much more useful than the old pen and paper. And it is a very pleasant activity on a sunny day with congenial company!

I receive a steady trickle of emails and messages from people who have tripped over my website so can I never predict what I will be doing each day because I never know what tangent I’ll be sent off on next. And I always have the ToDo folder in my email Inbox nagging away at me – I really should open it up.

So much for the update – Firefox, here I come (the blog is open in Google Chrome!)…

My mother was a Roscoe and I’ve been able to track her family back to the 1841 census but not much further. Most of them lived in either Cheshire or Lancashire but what makes it complicated is that a lot of the records show inconsistencies in the spelling of the surname.

Recently, I decided to tackle as many of the Ancestry records as I can so I have been working my way through the National Probate Calendar on their website. Records give the date and place of birth and also mention members of the family which is really useful for fitting the pieces together. I enjoy the challenge of sorting it all out.

I will transfer a lot of the records to the Gritquoy website eventually, but don’t hold your breath!

It is also interesting to see how much each individual was worth at the time of their death. Three of my great grandfathers are there:

• Rev Alexander Sandison – born on Yell, Shetland, in 1854 and died in South Croydon, Surrey, in 1921 – left £1,022 10s 10d.

• Robert William Gold – born in Battersea, Surrey, in 1856 and died in Cuckfield, Sussex, in 1937 – left £3,416 10s 1d. He was an Inspector with H M Customs.

• Rev John Roscoe – born in Kirkby, Lancashire, in 1861 and died in Ovington, Norfolk, in 1932 – left £1,575 17s 0d.

It occurred to me just the other day that the ancestors closest to me by blood have almost the least information on their pages on my website. This is because I put them there when I first set the site up and although I was able to find some census information on the Ancestry website, back then, there is now so much more available.

So I have been spending the last couple of weeks seeking out some of my London-based ancestors because it is good to be able to find things such as their exact dates of birth from the christening records.

But I got stuck yesterday with a particular family: that of George Styles – a surname his brother, my gt gt gt grandfather, spelt as Stiles. In 1841 George was a baker in Marylebone in the centre of London and, despite the fact that a child was baptised there in 1848, by 1851 he and his wife and nine children had disappeared and one of his brothers had taken over his business.

I paused long enough to muse upon a repetition of the 1666 Fire of London – it started in a bakery, after all – but there were no death records so I had to count that out. And I went off to what Ancestry has on Australia – which isn’t very much at the moment although it is increasing – but couldn’t find any of them.

Today, however, I tripped over another tree on the site and there was one of George’s sons without much detail but enough to send me to the National Library of Australia and there they all were!

Dear George, who became a Justice of the Peace in South Australia, was very proud of his family and obviously kept in touch with the folks back home. I was soon able to forget any doubts about whether he was the right person because he made sure that his local community knew all about the deaths of his father back in Buckinghamshire and a couple of his siblings in London, along with the hatching, matching and dispatching of his Australian descendants.

Well done, George! I wish you knew what a help you’ve been!

My genealogy takes me nowhere. Time was, I would accompany my father around graveyards carrying a pen and a pad of paper or even work through giant ledgers in Somerset House or New Register House but I seldom joined him in his hobby because it was too much like hard work!

Now that I’m hooked on the subject myself, I simply stay at home, go online, open umpteen browser windows, and get down to the task of tracking. And I wander where the whim takes me.

A family tree can be like a giant jigsaw especially when it comes to the middle classes. Get into the realms of the toffs and the internet is bursting with records and you don’t even have to bother.

As for the working classes, well most of them spent their lives within a small radius of their birthplace and it’s easy to find them on the census returns.

But I’ve been very busy this week working on some puzzles. And, although others have usually gone before me and have trees available on Ancestry, I do like to see for myself.

This week I’ve been to India and Canada. The Families in British India Society site is really useful and was able to tell me what had happened to an elusive son, once I eventually found him. A Major in the Royal Horse Artillery, he died when he fell off his horse in India.

They won’t keep still, the middle classes. They up sticks and pop over to Canada for a while, or go to India as medics, soldiers or civil servants. Then they send their young home to school and unless you find the children on a census visiting grandparents or other relatives then you never find them.

Edward, the unfortunate man who fell off his horse, left a young widow, Marion, and she and three children were all with one of his brothers in 1881. She was born in Canada as was the first child. The second child was born in India, the third in England. But whom did she marry and where?

The first task was to establish how many sons there were in the family and I found 7 sons although I was able to eliminate two immediately because Marion was staying with one and another was also there and was unmarried.

Their father was married twice and I have found 18 children, the oldest born in 1807, the youngest in 1849!

I worked through all the sons and none of them were right. Eventually I found Marion and Edward’s marriage in Canada – I had been thrown by a misspelt surname but I got there in the end. Those records name parents as well, and there he was – I had found no other record of him at all and still don’t know where in England he was born. But once I had his forenames I was able to discover how he had died.

I’m still working on the family although I’m not actually related to any of these people but it is gratifying to know that what I have achieved will be useful to others who follow behind.

My family tree database is so large now that I am contacted on a daily basis by people with questions, information, offers of photographs, etc, which explains why I am forever going off on tangents. Here are some notes on my latest exploits:

Schomberg and Duff

My cousin Louis’ Schomberg ancestors are still shrouded in the London fog but we think that we can link two of them. Caroline Jane Schomberg born 1806 was probably the sister of Rev John Duff Schomberg born 1792. Both were born in London and she had a grandchild called Henry Duff Schomberg Anderson.

Her father was Henry – did he marry a Duff?

If Caroline was a goddaughter of Queen Caroline there must be a record of the christening lurking somewhere. And some Schombergs were descended from Mary, Queen of Scots, which makes it all the more interesting.

Lankester

I was asked this week if the Edward Lankester who died in Victoria, Australia in 1911 could be my one born in Poole in 1830. His obituary published in the “Colac Herald” on 27 Jan 1911 said he was “a cousin of Sir Ray Lankester the Royal physician” and “One of the last acts of his life was to read and appreciate Sir Ray Lankester’s Half hours with Science.”

So I went looking and it appears that Edward enjoyed name-dropping almost as much as I do because his “cousin” is perhaps rather more distant than was implied and I have yet to find the connection. But their families did both come from Suffolk and I could be wrong, of course.

Orton

Talking of name-dropping, I have always wanted to connect my Orton first cousins to the infamous Joe Orton but I’ve found he was a descendant of an Oliver Orton born in Leicester in 1836 – son of William Orton – which, although it’s the right county, rather rules out any close ties. I’m disappointed!

National Library of Australia

It was recommended to me that I visit the National Library of Australia and I found it has an impressive collection on its website.

They have, amongst other things, scanned in old newspapers and are leaving it up to visitors to edit the results. What a brilliant idea! You read the article and can correct the text as you go along. This means that they’ve been able to make such things available far sooner than would have been the case had they had to check it all themselves.

One of my first cousins – yes, I have some of them too, in amongst all those fifth cousins, sixth cousins twice removed, and those I claim as cousins who aren’t at all – is descended from a Margaret Fraser who was born in Inverness in 1828 and we knew that.

But I delved further yesterday and discovered that although her father, Alexander Fraser, was a wood merchant in Merkinch, Inverness – he died of cholera when she was about four – her mother was not a scot from the surrounding area.

Her mother was Caroline Jane Schomberg and, although it was in Inverness that she married Alexander in 1825, she was born in London to Henry Schomberg who was a courier between the Courts of St James and Brunswick!

My cousin says there had been rumours of a connection to Brunswick which they had only half believed but we’ve found it now. So, quite apart from anything else, there is now the intriguing question of how these two met…

Talking of sixth cousins (which I wasn’t, in particular, but am now!), one is Gary Wheeler in Canada. He submitted a script to Wildsound and it has been turned into a short film which will premiere at the Wildsound Festival in Toronto on 16 October. But you can see it here: The Audition. Enjoy!

I knew there would be one: I found a plugin which insists on a Captcha on all comments and the spam here on my blog has ceased – wonderful! The comments have too, but as they were all spam…

And what is even better is that I found some coding to solve my banner rotation problem* so no longer need to worry about it. The Iframe has gone and it uses php in my php files which avoids the use of javascript – fantastic!

Perhaps I’ll now be able to get back to the genealogy! Or perhaps not because I’m still waiting to hear back from the other merchants I’ve applied to. This is beginning to be like a snowball: the more adverts I display, the more merchants will be happy to join in.

It’s a good thing I enjoy fiddling about with the coding because, so far, my earnings are miniscule but I refuse to be pessimistic about it.

As for the coding, another friend has asked me to have a look at his website with a view to tidying it up and I look forward to doing that.

Just now, though, I must tackle the latest in the stream of genealogy-related emails I constantly receive…

* Random Text

I had some spam the other day – it was fried with mushrooms and tasted good!

But nowadays it means something else and it is frustrating that I am receiving spam comments for this blog on a daily basis but I suppose I have exposed myself in the virtual world so am an easy target.

I have been busy the last few days organising my adverts and that has also been, and is being, frustrating. The banners are now delivered to my pages individually and although it is working, after a fashion, it is not being done very efficiently.

To set it up, I headed for the internet and found an IFrame command which is what I am using at the moment. And it will have to do for the moment too because I need a break! But I’m told it’s not the modern way and could throw up a virus message when none is present so I will have to replace it soon.

The merchants I am advertising are slowly increasing but I’m being realistic about how little revenue they will actually generate. Site visitors are looking for family tree information not shopping opportunities but I’m hoping some might bookmark things to use on another occasion.

Time for lunch – I find that when I get tired or hungry I am happy to sit and watch my banners fading in and out and that can’t be good. It’s almost like watching one of the Eyjafjallajökull webcams but not quite the same, really, I suppose…

* Monty Python

There I was searching for an Abeyta (or was it Abeytia?) in Colorado (or was it New Mexico?) – the two places overlapped and changed the names, I gather – in 1870 and I was getting nowhere.

And was the teenaged Leonarda who is home with mum in 1880 and marked with a D for divorced just on a break from her husband and really the one I want who had 14 children or was my one lurking elsewhere?

But it all went out the window because someone kindly pointed out that I had mixed up two William Hannafords on my Ancestry tree so I spent the rest of the morning rectifying my mistake and making sure the two are clearly separated.

This is why I end up on tangents and it happens all the time but it’s what keeps my old grey matter alive so really can’t be bad!