Genealogy Chat

brick wall? Thought members stories may encourage others not to give up!

I looked everywhere for my Gt G/Mothers marriage and cos someone had done a 1 name study of the surname belonging to the man she married i was able to carry on

Wish I could add - but after 4 years I still haven't even made a chink in mine - but I'm ever the eternal optimist LOL

Mary

By posting on this thread again after one year,and the kind,clever,helpful people found my gt gt grandfather.Which in turn helped me discover where my relatives originate

Been researching my tree for 14 years, one brick wall over my great grandfather was recently solved (after following a red herring of someone else having the exact same 3 christian name fathers name) by obtaining his service records, they enabled me to go a further generation back and his father was service as well, so now waiting for a third set of records. Why I did not do it before I dont know!
Incedently great grandfathers sibliings were born worldwide!

Found my GGGrandfathers will at London Metropolitan Archives and found out that the name of the beneficiary was my GGGrandmother but that they had never been married and that she had been married before and had four other children.

The name on the will as beneficiary was her first married name. I had always thought that was her maiden name.

Linda

:-)) Its always nice to hear people's success. My brick wall (one of them) was my great gran, a Romany fortune teller with no birth or marriage record. I decided if I didnt make a breakthrough within a month, I was going to abandon that line. It was driving me mad getting nowhere, when I was sure they'd been a big family and no-one else seemed to be researching her at all. I then wrote to the newspaper in the area she'd died (I'd already done the paper for the area her kids were born), and lo and behold, my great grans brothers granddaughter phoned me. She can actually remember my great gran and has given me so much info, enabling me to research back to 1789. My next wall is my Swedish/Latvian grandfather who burnt his birth cert! I don't think I have the mental energy to tackle that one at the minute!

I had been looking for the parents of my husband's 2x gt grandmother Grace Beech b1823 for a couple of years without success.

In the 1841 census she was lodging with an elderly couple plus a younger woman and child...different surnames. In 1851 she was lodging with her future inlaws.....and no record of her baptism anywhere. The only bit of info I had was from Grace's marriage cert...her father's name was Joseph.

Earlier this year I decided to check out an extracted entry for a baptism on IGI that took place 25 years after the said birth with parents Joseph and Betty. Totally amazed to find it was the adult baptism of Grace!!

After further research I found the 1821 marriage of Joseph and Betty in another village. The elderly couple on the 1841 census were Betty's parents so my husband's 4x gt grandparents. The younger woman was Betty's widowed sister and her young son. 3 generations on one census entry!!!

I was so excited but it taught me not to take anything at face value as I had been sat on the baptism for several months....arghh!! Mind you I am still looking for Joseph's family lol.

Happy hunting

Linda x

An adult baptism, I'd never have thought of that!

Tracing my Irish mother's ancestors.

When I started my family tree 4 years ago, I only knew who my Irish Grandparents were...nothing else. Mum and all her siblings except the youngest, Maureen, had passed away and Maureen has Alzheimer's.

As I knew what year Maureen was born, in Dublin City I applied for my Grandparents marriage certificate as I guessed that they would have married 1 or 2 years previous. 3 months later it plopped through my letterbox.

Now I had something to work on as I had details of both of their fathers' names and my Grandparents ages. Searched the IGI for Dublin births...Zilch!

I then applied for my Grandparents birth certificates but I only had an approx year and I wasn't sure if they were born in Dublin or not..but what the heck, nothing ventured nothing gained.

Bingo..they were both born in Dublin City. Well worth another 3 months waiting. My GT grandparents were Michael Brady & Bridget Conboy on Gran's side and Joseph Pollard and Margaret Lawless on Grandpops side.

Searched the IGI records again...still Zilch. Now what do I do?

I then remembered that when I was small my Mum used to write to an aunt Alice in the USA. But was she a Pollard or a Brady? I had no idea nor did any of my cousins.

I joined Ancestry.com and a few months later I found Pat who had posted a message on their website looking for relatives of Joseph Pollard and Margaret Lawless! I quickly sent a reply but didn't get any response. A couple of months later somebody else (her uncle) had posted a message to Pat regarding her American side of her family...so I sent a message to him explaining who I was etc. He replied to me straight away and sent Pat an email direct, telling her to get in contact with me pronto!

Her Gran was my Mum's aunty Alice (Pollard). and I then discovered that Mum had kept in contact with Pat's parents right up until she died in 1992!

Pat's Gran had written down details of her siblings and parents for her family to keep..before she died and luckily for me Pat was researching her family tree too. It turns out that my Grandpop was one of 9 children all born in Dublin City.

Only a couple of weeks later Pat and I were contacted by another Pollard second cousin living in Australia....then another one living in Ireland.
The 4 of us now share 64 Pollard ancestors and relatives.

In the meantime I had phoned my cousin Susan to ask how her Mum, Maureen, was and I was telling her all about I had found some of our Pollard relatives. Susan then told me that she had her Mum's address book at home and she knew that some of them were cousins of our Mum's..but didn't know if they were Brady or Pollard related. I quickly took down addresses and phone numbers so I could contact them and find out how they are related to us.

3 were grandchildren of one of our Gran's sisters in England and I had to write to one other lady, Oonagh, in the USA.

Oonagh wrote back and told me that she was the grandaughter on another of Grans sisters, Martha Brady but she also enclosed photo copies of my Brady Gt Gt and Gt Grandfather's death certificates plus the Baptism certificate of my Gran's sister Martha and all copies of her immediate family's marriage and birth certificates. Wow...what a wonderful result!

Since then I have found even more Brady descendants of my Gran's siblings...and I never knew that she had any!

The 1911 Dublin City census revealed that my Gran's parents had 18 children..but only 11 survived. Her Dad was born in Co Dublin and her Mother was born in Co Roscommon.

My research still continues for further information on the Irish.

I’d traced back some Culliford ancestors to West Somerset and a village called Ashbrittle.

I had been researching in the Somerset Records Office and saw that the family were farmers in the village but there were no obvious ancestors for my Edward Culliford in the village.

I spent months going in circles outwards from Ashbrittle and found very few Cullifords in the area (none mine). I saved details of those I’d got and gradually started an unofficial one name study.

I opened an online group for fellow Culliford researchers and many of them made contacts but not me!

Then I found the will of my Edward’s brother Thomas. One of his bequests was to his sister Jane who was described as the wife of George Bridle now in America.
I found the entry of the Bridle family into Ellis Island (George, Jane and two named daughters...one called Susan).

A contact in the USA found them for me on a census and I found out that George was a shoemaker. I also discovered him in the Newark Directory. I traced the marriages of his daughters.

Then I looked for the baptisms of the two little Bridle girls before they went to the USA. They were in Evercreech in the east of Somerset. I found George’s baptism there too and eventually the marriage on the IGI to Jane Culliford (though George was referred to as Brille there!).
I checked the marriage in the Records Office and found that Jane was of Ilchester.

Ilchester is the other side of the county from where I’d been looking and I would never have got there by going in ever increasing circles!

When I looked at Ilchester I was able to find my Edward and his siblings and to go back another 2 generations.

BUT they didn’t come from Ilchester and I’m stuck again!

I also found an old online tree for someone in the USA descended from one of the daughters of George Bridle. His brick wall was the daughter of Susan Bridle. All he knew was that her mother came from England but I had researched the family group so knew who she was.

I tried contacting him but his tree hadn't been changed since 2002 and the e-mail address didn't work. It is sad because I have generations of Cullifords (plus Bridles now) which I could share.

All complicated but it is surprising how you can come across some information.

Sue
x

I spent months trying to track down my one g g g grandfather in census returns. I already knew my g g grandma was in service in 1851, so ran a search on her sister. There, top of the heap, was the family. Rerunning the search on g g g grandpa showed nothing, even when the census return data were added. The moral here is, try to find other family members.

Two more brick walls were demolished thanks to contacts made by GR members. In both cases I was confronted by 2 pairs of girls with the same forenames and similar YOB - in the one case the 2 girls had been baptised on the same day, in the same church. Thanks solely to these contacts it was possible to identify the correct ancestor.

Another breakthrough must fall into the "Someone up there likes me category. I was searching local records to help someone, and found myself staring at a missing link.

I now have another mystery to try and solve thanks to information re the informant on a g grandmother's death certificate (1939). Had expected the informant to be my grandmother, but she is a completely unknown niece. Think I have identified who she was, but just where she sits on the tree is a total puzzle right now.

Mind you, I am trying to find Taylors, and my g granddad was one of 11. Great grandma is a complete mystery as her birth was never registered and there is no trace of her in either the 1861 or 1871 censuses.

David