Ask An Expert

You must be an unusual man in actually wanting to find your mother-in-law! I am afraid I have no panacea to help you here, though, as your enquiry is really a 'missing persons' one, and you have described a scenario here in which this lady's whereabouts is unknown both to her daughter and to her ex-husband. However, is it a given that her whereabouts would be unknown to any of her own blood relatives. Did she have any siblings, for example, or nephews and nieces? .You never know - one of them may have heard from her. You can also try this: http://www.ic.nhs.uk/services/nhs-adoptions-service/alive-or-deceased-service - which will do no more than confirm whether she is alive - but that should help.

It's not unusual to find such discrepancies in ages, given in the censuses. Sometimes, the people themselves got confused (I'm 44, but approaching my 45th birthday, so have started thinking of myself as 45, and sometimes have to think hard about how hard I really am!). Also, often, it was someone else in the family giving the information, and they could of course make all sorts of mistakes. Do remember that many people were illiterate then, so had nothing written down, and could easily get things wrong.

And good luck with it! Maltese records are on Malta - you'd be wanting the registrar of births, marriages and deaths. I cannot give you any precise addresses, but you may well find them on www.cyndislist.com.

You want to keep a record of exactly how each person's name is spelled in each records you use to piece your family tree together. For the purposes of presenting a clear family tree, it is perfectly acceptable to chose the prevalent spelling, or the one which finally ended up being used, and applying that to all. Having said that, for this website, it may behove you to use the different spellings that crop up for different people in your tree, as then there is more chance of someone searching for your family under a variant spelling to pick up on your presence on the site.

Please tell me a bit more detail

Ah well, maybe this is linked to the same problem - and now you've told me what the surname was. Try writing Bumford in loopy handwriting: you will see quickly how many different interpretations of the penstrokes are possible, by nineteenth century clerks and modern indexers alike. Bamford, Burnford, Bunford... .

It's an appealing story, and may of course be correct, or partially correct (maybe you are actually descended from a cousin of the novelist), or completely wrong (once one person tells a story, of course it gets repeated, and Henry Fielding's continued fame ensures the story would not be forgotten). You could approach this by seeking your ancestor William's baptism in London, assiduously - the censuses should indicate exactly where to look - and you could also seek wills for members of Henry's immediate family, to see if they refer to your William. Good luck!

Yes, do persist. Families who are difficult to find often turn out to be much more interesting, and memorable, than those which are.

That is interesting: they had not simply changed from one surname to another. But, you cannot find the family in the 1891 and 1901 censuses, which is what you want, so I'd advise you to keep your mind open to the possibility of their being in those censuses under a different name or, as I suggested, a different spelling of their existing one. You could do what I suggested for another questions this evening - obtain a birth record for one of their children born near 1891 or 1901, and then search the census for that place.

My first reaction reading this is that Danton could easily be mistaken for 'Denton', so I'd suggest looking under that spelling. You could try the 1891 census for the two Henrys, father and son. I'm not sure if you mean that his father Henry was a solicitor, but if so you can check that fact using the annually published Law Lists, available in good genealogical libraries.

Maybe they were out of England and Wales in earlier census years, elsewhere in the Empire, or in Scotland or Ireland - but if so, you'd expect that to be hinted at by the foreign birth places of their children. Otherwise, maybe they had changed their name - or just changed the spelling subtly, so try variant spellings. If one of the children was born about a census year, do what we used to do in the old days - obtain the certificate, and then search the census for the address where they lived.

If there is a memorial inscription at Peterhead, then maybe a death notice will appear in the local Peterhead newspaper - for which see the at the National Archives of Scotland (www.nls.uk/collections/newspapers/indexes/index.cfm) and the British Library in London (www.bl.uk/catalogues/newspapers). For obtaining records from South Africa itself I suggest you contact my colleague Jean Blanckenberg: : jblanckenberg@netpoint.co.za

.... or write your £37 cheque - I maintain that going to great lengths to avoid buying a GRO certificate is generally a false economy - however annoying and perhaps unfair it is that the GRO charge so much for them.

In that case you've already been to the horse's mouth, but I'm curious to know how you know the parents' full names if you don't have the birth record. Maybe you will find it there, but indexed as Adela, Delia or Delilah. Or, yes, you can try Catholic baptisms, if you know exactly where to look: no Irish Catholic baptisms are on this site, but there's an increasingly good coverage on http://www.rootsireland.ie .

You can ask the local registrars in each place (though they'll likely charge you too) or seek a will instead, or a death notice in a local newspaper (some are on this site) or if you can guess the actual place, you can seek a burial record - but you don't. Travelling to four different areas would cost you hundreds of pounds. Four certificates will cost you £37, and if you order them one at a time you may be lucky first or second (or third) time.

I think you have probably what we term a 'short birth certificate' that has no spaces for parents' names at all. If so, order a full one, that costs £9.25, from http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/default.asp

My pleasure

There are two options here: you can use (Northern) Irish civil registration records (Registrar General of Northern Ireland, Oxford House, 49-55 Chichester Street, Belfast, BT1 4HL, 028 90 252000, www.groni.gov.uk) to seek siblings and trace the family line back, or you could use the church registers (Catholic or Protestant) as appropriate. For genealogists there you can use Association of Ulster Genealogists and Record Agents or I can organise it for you - send me some more details at mail@anthonyadolph.co.uk.

The best way here would be to add Lawrence as Emma's son, and show the father as an unknown partner. If you were drawing it out on paper I'd advise putting Isaiah on Emma's left, the unknown man below her, and the second husband on the right. It is worth bearing in mind that Lawrence's father might always have been the man who later became the second husband: maybe he could not marry Emma until, say, his own first wife had died.

If I could see it I'd be happy to try to help! Can you e-mail it to me at mail@anthonyadolph.co.uk and then send me a message via this message box to tell me you've done so, so I can reply.