Genealogy Chat

Just finished unravelling a very nasty ball of threads.

My relation William Robb married a Christina Beveridge and had five children before poor Christina died. As is usual, he married quickly a Mary Burns and they had three kids...so far so good....

However. Mary Burns was illegitinate and was adopted by a farmer called Drysdale. Mary then had TWO illegitimte children before she met my relative hence she came to the marriage as Mary Burns (her birth name) but brought two Drysdale children with her.

Where it gets really messy is that William has a cousin in the same county and time span who married a Christina Drysdale!

Two William Robbs, a Mary Burns, Mary Drysdale, Christina Beveridge and Christina Drysdale. It was a trap very easy to fall into and took me several weeks to get out of. Good fun though!

Yes Malcolm I know what you mean about 'good fun' sorting it out.

I had been asked to help find a couple's marriage details which seem to be missing on freebmd but eventually found them in a boarding house on the 1901 census in Liverpool - not married.
He entered his age as 40 instead of 46 together with a similar sounding surname to his original. Her name was correct but she had knocked off 9 years off her age and entered her place of birth as Bradford. I eventually found her born in Wigan. The date of their marriage had been altered by 4 years in a family booklet. When the marriage certificate had finally been tracked down in the new surname the one correct detail was the woman's father's name but he had died when she was 8 months old.
Her death certificate, years later aged 67, was registered by her family who entered truthfully her age together with the surname she should have been registered, not the similar sounding name on their marriage certificate. Getting one bit of truth at the end brought all the deception out in the open.
I can only reiterate your viewpoint ' good fun'-jl

My that WAS a good bit of sleuthing! Leaps of faith are often needed as you know.

I sometimes wonder how many problems are due to illiteracy and how many due to plain fibbing. When i'm working at GROS in Edinburgh I sometimes ask supervisors to append notes to documents I can prove have "deliberate errors".

I think in the case of this couple it was down to gilding the lily. The man wrote his own glowing report of his life, as he had been a printer and later described himself as an author. His family of today believed every word that was printed and that was where it started to fall apart. In the course of trying to find something about him I had used the 19c newspapers and found that he had been bankrupt in 1888 which probably was the reason for changing his surname. I have to say though it was one of the more interesting tangled webs-jl