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please can any one help me im looking for information on my grandad all i have to go on is that he was born aruond c1917 and that he was in the 2nd world war and that he married my nanna minnie bell [nee cain] and had two daughters my mam and her sister in cumbria i no my nanna died just b 4 i was born and i heard that my grandad died down the pit but dnt no if that bits true please help thanx xx

Hi Tanya. There are three Minnie Cain-s who could be your grandmother:


Minnie Cain 1921 Apr-May-Jun Gallimore Wolstanton Staffordshire
Minnie Cain 1917 Jan-Feb-Mar Brannen Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumberland, Tyne and Wear
Minnie B Cain 1913 Jan-Feb-Mar Gravestock Watford Hertfordshire


I'm in Canada and not an English geography expert. Do you know which one is, or most likely is, her?

There were so many James Bells born around 1917 it would be impossible to pick one without knowing where he was born, for starters. Figuring out your grandmother might help figure him out.

Actually, for Cumbria specifically, these are the likely suspects:


James Bell 1915 Jan-Feb-Mar Twentyman Cockermouth Cumbria, Cumberland
James Bell 1917 Jan-Feb-Mar Kirkpatrick Carlisle Cumbria, Cumberland
James Bell 1920 Apr-May-Jun Dixon Cockermouth Cumbria, Cumberland
James S Bell 1918 Jan-Feb-Mar Underwood Wigton Cumbria, Cumberland
James T Bell 1916 Apr-May-Jun Lindsay Cockermouth Cumbria, Cumberland


(the name that follows the date is the mother's birth surname)

Can you tell from that which one he most likely is?


What the problem is here is that the period you're asking about is when births, marriages and deaths have not yet been transcribed by the FreeBMD project:

http://www.freebmd.org.uk

So unless you have a good idea of when your grandparents married, and when your granddad died, it would be quite difficult and time-consuming to find the records.

Once you do find those records, the marriage certificate will tell you their fathers' names, so that you can match them up with a birth certificate, which has both parents' names, then find the parents' marriage certificate, and move backwards from there. The death certificate would tell you your granddad's cause of death.

If you know which of those births were your nan and granddad, we can give you the registration details and you can order their birth certificates, and get their parents' names.

So if it's your granddad's family, before him, that you want to know about, see whether you can get an idea of when they married. The dates of their children's births could help determine that.

If you know when and where your nan died, and if it was after 1984, we could find her in the searchable index. Her death record will give her birthdate, so you could tell which of those birth records was her. About 10 Minnie Bells died in England between 1984 and 1990, for example.

she died b 4 1975 as 4 my grandad god knows if its any help i no my mam was born in 1939 and i know my grandad waz in the 2nd world war my nana was moved to refuge/shelter in carlisle cumbria were she give birth to my mam were she moved from i dont no but i no there was family in london if u want to veiw my tree u can xreally appreciate this thanx

So Tanya - your grandad and nan were actually from the London area and your mum and her sister were only born in Cumbria because nan had been moved there for safety? Is that the facts? Who are the family in the London area?

Not nagging, but you do need to give clear info about the people you are interested in as by giving your mothers birth place in Cumbria without explaining the above, Kath (and others) will have been probably looking in the wrong area for your grandparents.

Where did your nan die? Where did your mum grow up?

ive just found my mams birth certificate she was born in brampton in the county of cumberland i heard my mam grew up in a home run by nuns my nanas adress on t birth cerificate is 34achurchill street ncle upon tyne and my grandads is the same he was a private northumberland fusilier i no her surname is pronounced cain but its spelt cein and finally on the certificate under when and where born its got convalescent home gilsland waterhead road sorry 4 being a pest x

Okay, and to be absolutely clear now:

on your mother's birth certificate, it says

her mother's name is: _________ (Minnie Cein?)
her father's name is: _________ (James Bell?)

and for good measure:

your mother's date of birth is: __________
your mother's name on the birth certificate is: _________.


It's just that there's no birth of a Minnie CEIN in the records. I wonder whether this was your grandmother's married name, if she was married before she met your grandfather.

Or your grandmother's birth might not be transcribed yet, so I can't find it just by a simple search. If her surname was CEIN, it looks like she would have to be the daughter of one of these people (assuming that her parents were married):


Births Jun 1891
Cein Thomas William Wolstanton 6b 150

Births Jun 1869
Cein William Newington 1d 209


because there just aren't any others!

Once you've confirmed the info on the birth certificate, just so we're sure of it, we can check for your grandmother's birth around 1915-1922 to see whether it's there under CEIN but not transcribed yet, and for your grandparents' marriage.

yes minnie cein & james bell n my mams d.o.b is 1939 n her name is josephine

i dont no if my mams surname b 4 she died will help regarding mariages coz that was armstrong

Tanya ... "1939" is not a date of birth. Date. Please. Day, month, year.

Your mum's name on the birth certificate is Josephine ............ what? Bell?

Ta!

17.9.1939 josephine bell

Okay. I just wanted to confirm the information from your mother's birth registration.

Q3 1939
BELL, Josephine
mother: CEIN
district: Border
10b 882

yes x

I would bet that this is the marriage of Thomas William CEIN who was born in Wolstanton in 1891:


Name: Thomas W Cain
Year of Registration: 1913
Quarter of Registration: Oct-Nov-Dec
Spouse: Elizabeth Gallimore
District: Wolstanton
County: Staffordshire
Volume: 6b
Page: 284


And one of the births I had identified as being possibly your Minnie was:


Name: Minnie Cain
Year of Registration: 1921
Quarter of Registration: Apr-May-Jun
Mother's Maiden Name: >>> Gallimore
District: Wolstanton
County: Staffordshire
Volume: 6b
Page: 200


The TW Cain who married Gallimore might not be the TW Cein born in 1891 -- but the fact that TW Cain had a daughter Minnie born about when your Minnie would have been born ... well, it's coincidental.


The only Cein in the censuses is a Matilda Cein born c1862 with daughter Alice, in the 1881. That doesn't mean there aren't more, mistranscribed.

This gets a bit complex ...

If you order

(1) the birth certificate for:

Name: Thomas William Cein
Year of Registration: 1891
Quarter of Registration: Apr-May-Jun
District: Wolstanton
County: Staffordshire
Volume: 6b
Page: 150

(2) the marriage certificate for

Name: Thomas W Cain
Year of Registration: 1913
Quarter of Registration: Oct-Nov-Dec
Spouse: Elizabeth Gallimore
District: Wolstanton
County: Staffordshire
Volume: 6b
Page: 284


and confirm that the two TW's had the same father, you'll be pretty sure that they were the same person, and they were the father of your Minnie Cein.


So if Minnie was born in 1921 and had a child in 1939, she couldn't have got married much before 1939. Let me take a look for the marriage ...

btw, Thomas Cain and Elizabeth Gallimore had these chlidren:


Births Mar 1914
CAIN Mary Gallimore Wolstanton 6b 209

Births Jun 1915
Cain Margaret Gallimore Wolstanton 6b 189

Births Jun 1916
Cain Thomas W Gallimore Wolstanton 6b 161

Births Jun 1920
Cain Juliana Gallimore Wolstanton 6b 194

Births Jun 1921
CAIN Minnie Gallimore Wolstanton 6b 200


in case you want to make a start on seeing whether anyone has any of them in their tree at GR!

thanks so much xx

Alrighty. Here's the marriage of Minnie Cain and James Bell:

jan-feb-jar 1939
CAIN, Minnie
spouse: Bell
district: Gateshead
vol: 10a
page: 1091


It matches the entry for James Bell -- no middle name or initial, unfortunately.


There you are! Order that certificate, and you will have their ages and their father's names. Then we can go looking for James's birth. It would be kind of pointless to do that before knowing what the marriage certificate says.

You can order the certificate here:

http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/

And we'll wait to hear what it says!

Just so's you know -- in the few years up to 1921, there were half a dozen or more James Bells, no middle name/initial, born in Gateshead alone. And that's assuming he was born there, and was not much older than Minnie. And wasn't registered with a middle name. ;)

What we'll have to do is get his dad's name from the marriage certificate, and find the marriage of a Mr. Bell with that name -- there will probably be more than one. So then we'll have to experiment by looking for a James Bell whose mother's surname matches one of the women who married the Mr. Bell named as James's father on James's marriage certificate ...

all i no about the london lot is one of them were called adaline may wheeler dont no if thats her married name and thats all i no i think she was my nanas sister

Well, Tanya, I don't know what that's about.

Are you planning to order those certificates to get the information we thought you wanted? Did you want to learn about his ancestry, or was it something else?

If your grandmother was Minnie Cein, then Adaline May Wheeler would kind of have to be her married name, wouldn't it? I just have no idea why you're suddenly talking about her.

If any of the information you've been given was useful, after quite a lot of time and effort was put into trying to help you, good.

If you don't want it and aren't going to do anything with it, that's up to you.

Just for the complete heck of it -- we seem to have established that your grandmother was born in 1921.

Of course, if you don't order that birth certificate, and her marriage certificate with James Bell, to make sure that the father's names were the same, you'll never know.

But here is an Adeline May Wheeler who died in 2000:

Name: Adeline May Wheeler
Birth Date: 8 May 1921
Death Registration Month/Year: Feb 2004
Age at death (estimated): 82
Registration district: Newcastle Upon Tyne
Inferred County: Tyne and Wear
Register number: D67C
Entry Number: 242

She was born at the same time as Minnie Cain.

Were they twins?

If the Adeline May Wheeler who died in 1921 was born Adeline May Cain, she was this one:

Name: Adeline M Cain
Year of Registration: 1921
Quarter of Registration: Apr-May-Jun
Mother's Maiden Name: Brown
District: Newcastle Upon Tyne
County: Northumberland, Tyne and Wear
Volume: 10b
Page: 161

Not a sister of Minnie. Maybe a cousin. Maybe completely different people.