Success Stories

Thanks, Genes, for helping me to find the place of birth, in Ireland, of the parents of my gran, a war widow, who lived with us.More Irish than the Irish, we used to sing Irish tunes, but she was unable to tell me the place of origin.As anyone researching the famine era in Ireland knows, many Church records are too late and in Mayo, the first surviving census was in 1901.
we had a fairly unusual surname and on Griffiths valuation, the register of householders and those renting land, who were taxed by the English Church, I had my eye on two possible places.My ggf worked in a cornmill, too, but there were plenty of cornmills.
I had checked all censuses in England and rechecked and had great hopes for the 1911 census, with no success.
They were first in the 1851 lancashire census, staying with an Irish family, together with a few other Irish families. All were visiters and had no jobs. new mills were opening in the area and there were few Irish.
This usually means that they were related or at least from the same area.
I tracked the other families for years and concluded that they had gone to America.
In fact, one of the families appeared in American family trees and the father of the family was listed as dying in a horseriding accident.
I was fit to give up and shredded a lot of my material.[Yes, I am an oap and still print stuff .]
I told my husband that the American trees would be correct, as when you do family research, you are very thorough and it seemed so well sourced.
Well, I checked with the Registrars in England and discovered that the mother of the family had a different maiden surname, so it was a different family.
Thanks to one of your eagle eyed members, I found out that the census enumerator in a later census had wrongly, but understandingly, indexed the surname wrongly, as the writing was scrawley and because of the spelling being two letters out, this census had escaped me and they, in fact, never left England.
It also gave the place of origin in Ireland, which had escaped me for years.
WWW,familysearch.org had indexed some irish bmds from the mid 1860s and to my very great joy, I believe that I have the death certificates og my great great grandparents.
I have been so happy and excited for weeks, as this was very "deep " for me and a life ambition to find them.
Joining Genes was the best thing I ever did and thanks a million for your help and the wonderful lady who was a better spotter than me.
Moral of the story is to never never give up and not to think, as I did, that I had come to the end of the line, because of information on other family trees, which is not always accurate.
I have ordered the relevant Parish microfilm and am off to check it out tomorrow.If I had won the lottery, I would not have been so excited.
Good luck everybody..