June 2010

29th: Back to Swordale, ROC and SINTONs
I'm back fossicking around Ross & Cromarty again.
Prompted this time by a posting the other day against my prior posting re the John SINTON and Catherine CROSS family mentioned back in Feb 2009.
I've also now followed another apparent 1851 SINTON family, from Roxburghshire but living in Lochbroom, around for a while, before, this time, convincing myself that they were misindexed in 1851 as SINTON and are really LINTONs.
John and Catherine however remain firmly as SINTON with a few more details now being found.
Those with ancestry access can see where I've got too adding sources to the family as I've included John on my tree there until such time the rest of my published data catches up with this branch of the SINTONs.
Farrell, the poster of the comment, is a descendant from John and Catherine's daughter Janet/Jessie via her son John GRAHAM (b. 1867 Swordale).

27th: Another Runciman line
No idea as yet if there's any connection to the Crail/North Berwick line of William, and hence to my Wanton Walls RUNCIMAN families, but an update to the One Name Study pages has been done to include some details on Alexander & Janet (HENDRIE) RUNCIMAN and family of Dunbar, or at least as I currently see them.
Can't actually remember what started me on them, but Harry provided some info that had been shared with him some years ago, and I had a good dig around.
More to come later on what is increasingly looking like the growing family of Thomas RUNCIMAN & Jane/Jean/Christina SIMPSON that looks as if it fits into this line.
The DNA project would love to get some representatives from this line to see what might show up on who is related (more closely?) to whom. (Discounts apply until 30th Jun).

20th: Watch this space in a couple of months
With the Family Tree DNA summer sale under way activity of late has mostly been on finding those elusive candidates to represent assorted lines in their respective dna projects while the kits are cheaper.
Success so far with a couple of RUNCIMANs on a new line, ditto one FAIRBAIRN, and the first participant for the FAMILTON project.
With a bit of luck and a tail wind over the remaining five days of the sale there might be a few more recruits to help piece together the jigsaws.
All projects welcome new participants, and now is a good time to be in.

1st: Delayed by bad weather!
Anyone waiting expectantly for a new post (well I do assume at least some people read this) may have a while to wait.
I'm in consolidation mode - both in rationalising my computing to eventually, I hope, simplify how I do assorted things. However that has meant a complete change to how I work with my emails and assorted email addresses and hosts, and buying a new laptop (a Mac, yet to arrive, but that's probably going to be an interesting new experience for this previously completely pc based computnik).
So that's all time away from research.
I'm also slowly working thru checking back over assorted things, primarily my updates to OneGreatFamily both to see that they've been connected up correctly, and to see if anyone else is working on the same families.

And I've committed myself to giving a course for the local WEA on comparisons of assorted genie packages in Sept, so that needs research....
The list goes on.

All that aside, a recent new contact will mean updates to a branch of the CREBER/WARE family as Hugh has provided a husband for Jane dtr of Richard CREBER and Elizabeth WARE, which involves connecting up assorted links, including a few stray STUTTAFORD/CREBERs that I had in my database suspecting there was a connection, and now seeing what it is.  Despite a move to London and back to Somerset (parents from Devon), she married a CREBER rellie.

May 2010

22nd: Triumph of hope over experience?
Recently one of my FAMILTONs was on the same page as a FAIRBAIRN I was chasing around the Earlston records. Which got me thinking about the FAMILTONs again.
Are the Earlston weavers related to the Ancrum weavers? And do the Northumberland ones fit in or not? So I've set up yet another dna project.
Not sure if this one will fly or not, but there are several modern day families still with the name around, mainly, as far as I can tell, in Northumberland, New Zealand and the States, but none in the Scottish phone book.
I know that my particular line did change to HAMILTON, during the course of one 1753 deed, and seem to have stuck with that surname for successive generations.
Any takers?

Over view of the assorted links, which have been set up with the same structure as most of my other DNA projects can be found on the introduction of the project at the DNA Projects Portal.

21st: Main web pages updated
About time I did a republish of my main web pages (Big Brother) given it's a month and a half since the last update.
Don't think any new people have been included, but several existing people have either had new information added, or their exisitng page tweaked. In general, the FAIRBAIRNs are there because of new information, probably either London records, or 1911 census lookups. The FAMILTON/RUNCIMANs are merely tweaks to how the information is displayed.
All are listed uner 21 May on the Recent Changes index.
One tweak was to alter the place index legends to G and B from G and L, as the former Live Earth has been Bing for a while.
If you've not visited any of the little information icons on the place index, nor explored street views on google, I thoroughly recommend doing so.  Great fun driving yourself around an amazing number of filmed locations and doing 360 degree panning shots simply by sitting at home at your computer using the arrow keys!

14th: William found, and possibly James
Some work on the FAIRBAIRN entries in the Washington State vital records found me the missing death entry for William, son of David FAIRBAIRN and Jane HERD (HURD to them).  Which led me to updating some of the descendants of David and Jane, and finding another researcher on descendants of Mary FAIRCHILD dtr of Archibald FAIRBAIRN and Catherine KEMPS (Archibald being the son of David's brother James).
I think I've probably also found James son of Archibald FAIRBAIRN and Margaret GRAHAM, living in Stillwater, Minnesota by 1880, and by 1930 in Thurston Co, Washington State. In which case he could explain how John (married Sarah DAUGHTERTY) was living there, John being Archibald's brother, I think (see DNA project).
10th: FAIRBAIRN/RAMSAY Maxton
See Fairbairn DNA project blog for research on a family from Tonbridge in Kent I believe belong to James FAIRBAIRN of Maxton, then Spencerville, Ontario.

5th: More Walters, and yet more FAIRBAIRNs.

The activity on a Walter led me to trip over one of my own Walters, and reminded me that they lived in London for a time.
With the increased availability of London records on Ancestry, it was time to go digging to see if I could now find a few more baptisms, marriages etc.
Which I did, very successfully.
The families of Walter FAIRBAIRN & Elizabeth CHAPPELL and his brother Archibald (married Isabella DAVIDSON) have now had some missing data filled in.

I'm no closer to solving the 1881 census mystery of supposed "son" James to Archibald however.
(1881 Maplin St, Mile End Old Town, James is given as 21, joiner, so to Archibald, who is himself only 33).
So, if anyone has a James joiner they'd like to place in 1881, or a 2 yr old.....

As usual, WorldConnect database LornaHenderson will be updated in due course.

3rd: Still on FAIRBAIRNs
Tied up a few loose ends in my FAIRBAIRN database today.

Sidetracked onto a separate Yorkshire family, a Walter, and got curious as to any possible connection to either mine, or the Yorkshire confectioner Thomas (see 1st May), or to mine, given Walter is a name common amongst my lot.

Instead of leading in either of these directions it lead me to connect up several loose ends and tie the family back to Alexander, son of John FAIRBAIRN & Grizel JOHNSTONE of Oldhamstocks (which family is not yet represented in the FAIRBAIRN Surnmae DNA project should any potential candidates out there read this and be interested in seeing if there is any connection to the existing tested families).

1st: FAIRBURN (Surrey) back to FAIRBAIRN Great Stainton, Durham via Yorkshire
Intervening time since last post was mostly on FAIRBAIRN chasing as I tried to work the line of John FAIRBURN back to the Borders family he had told me he connected too some years ago.
John had died back in Dec 2008, a month before I decided to re-contact him after a gap of several years - note to self, keep up with the contacts before the threads get broken.
I'd got stuck at his grandfather Fred born c 1865 in Leeds, having a bit of trouble sorting out the options.
Rootsweb FAIRBAIRN Message Board post Who were Fred, George and Harry?, refers.
With English BDM certs about to go up in price my curiousity had overcome my wallet and I ordered Fred's marriage cert. and am now back to Fred's grandparents, George and Mary FAIRBAIRN who lived at Kirkby Malzeard in North Yorkshire, with George born abt 1784, at Great Stainton, Durham, so I'm not quite joining up the dots yet, and nor have I found what I hoped for initially, a candidate for the line in the FAIRBAIRN Surname DNA Project, all lines appearing to have either died, or daughtered, out.
The intervening generation was a Thomas married to Mary Jane BAIRSTOW (Halifax, 1858).
Anyone recognise these names as their ancestors?

Apr 2010

28th:"John Armstrong" = Margaret FAIRBAIRN
The 1894 baptism entry for "John Armstrong" daughter of Walter FAIRBAIRN and Grace ARMSTRONG, is one of the more curious baptism entries I've seen (image on the blog version of this).

In my FAIRBAIRN One Name Study digging, I happened to notice an indexed entry for a John Armstrong FAIRBAIRN born or baptised in Dumfries 11 Feb 1849, to Walter FAIRBAIRN and Grace ARMSTRONG, and thought, ohhhh, one I didn't have in their family.
Before succumbing in paying SctPeople for it, I had a quick look at my database and was a bit puzzled as the dates just didn't work.
Walter and Grace married May 1848, 1st child after their marriage that I had was Agnes, born 3 Feb 1850, or so a baptism entry on a page headed 1855 births stated.
Before their marriage were the first Margaret, aged 3 in the 1851 census, and a William aged 5 in the same census.
So, whether John Armstrong FAIRBAIRN was born, or baptised in 1849 he was going to be a tight fit.
Reading the entry raised even more questions.
Why would a daughter be named "John Armstrong" (quotes from the entry itself)?
Anyway, the dates indicated that this has to be the birth/baptism entry for the first Margaret, who died aged 4.

This activity led to several other updates on their extended family with the 1911 census now more readily available, and a few birth/marriage/death date gaps filled.

27th:Activities of late have mostly been on the RUNCIMANs, with some small analyses done on a couple more parishes for the One Name Study, and a lot of digging to make connections between families, namely those I think may all connect at Thomas and Jean (SIMPSON) RUNCIMAN.
It does rather pay to keep checking back against past research, as I've found I had a piece of that puzzle tucked away in my database from some time ago, an occupation for the John who married Marion/May/Mary WEATHERLY, which implies to me that I was worrying needlessly about the change of occupation for the family from taylors to hinds/farm stewards/ag labs etc.

22nd:Megsmire updates:
Thanks to George, a descendant of Walter TURNBULL & Mary TELFORD, I now have copies of several wonderful snippets from his recent visit to the Carlisle Record Office and hope to see if my theories about where his Walter TURNBULL "fits" (refer recent post re Megsmire) hold up to scrutiny.
I've only had a chance for a quick squizz so far, but it's looking good, (and there are one or two other fascinating leads to follow up on).

11th: Rev Archibald TURNBULL
A helpful lady on the Rootsweb India list pointed out that the family had some baptisms on the IGI (which I'd not thought to check, thinking that the dates were too recent, given that Scottish extracted records mostly stop at 1875).
That netted baptisms for all bar Mary of the known children, and added an 1896 Betty into the family.
Then another web search netted an article about the Turnbull School in Darjeeling, which was built in memory of the Rev. Archibald TURNBULL in 1906 after his death (1905).
The article also includes a photo, reproduced on my GenBlog, with the implication that it was taken at the opening of the Scotch Kirk (St Columba's) in Darjeeling, 15th May 1894

9th: Where things (continue to) lead
Having updated some of the related TURNBULLs that connect to my tree, I strayed onto another TURNBULL line, that of Archibald TURNBULL of Minto, who married Agnes WILSON, one of my SINTON tree descendants.
The only census data I'd ever checked for them was 1881 when it first came out on cd.
Updates nowhere near finished, but what a fascinating family, and a wonderful happenstance.
Given there were 14 children, could take some time to work thru what updates should now be more readily available to be found.

Thought eldest son Archibald might not have lasted beyond 1871 when I couldn't find him in 1881. But a family that certainly looked like it would be his popped out of the woodwork for 1891 - from farmer's son to "Minister of the Established Church - Foreign Ministry", and an absence in 1881 probably explained by the birthplaces of the children - Indies, East in 1891, India in 1901.
One of which census records I was lucky to find as he left for India 5 days later!

The marriage cert. for his second marriage, to Catherine Agnes FERGUSON nee WEMYSS proved I had the right chap, so I kept digging.
And happened upon the burial of his son Archibald McDiarmid TURNBULL in Calcutta.
He appears to have gone from a 17 yr old "artist-painter" in 1901 boarding in Glasgow Govan, to tea planter in India - with a video being made (for reasons as yet unknown) of a search for his burial record in the records of the Scottish Church of St Andrew in Calcutta with enough of the found record shakily legible.
Talk about happenstance!
WIGHT and SINTON descendant charts have had a preliminary update, Rootsweb db LornaHenderson updates will follow in due course.

7th: Where things lead
Started catching up on processing the transcripts from NRH that Robert so kindly sends every so often.
This one was a 1936 FAIRBAIRN/HALL marriage I was trying to slot into his correct FAIRBAIRN tree. In the process of that I corrected one of my FAIRBAIRN trees convincing myself that the informant for their son Robert's death (his son David) got his grandmother's name wrong (given as Elizabeth WATSON, instead of Margaret **see below).
That sorted, I turned my attention to the 1936 bride, whose father was given as Robert Oliver HALL.
With names like that it was a fair bet that that their just might be a connection to one or other of my Southdean trees - and how.
Robert turned out to be the brother of Isabella and Margaret, both of whom I already knew had married into my tree, one to a WIGHT line, the other to a SINTON line. All are children of James HALL and Alison OLIVER, with James having a brother Thomas who also married into my SINTON tree.
A wonderful set of connections.

But wait, there's more.
Keying all of this into my ancestry tree as I found the related census records etc up popped a family tree match down the WIGHT line.
I had never gotten back to John James TURNBULL (or many of his siblings) to figure out their fate beyond 1881, and there was Morag's tree. So an email was sent and I now have a newfound cousin in Canada, who replied promptly, and has given me some updates on her farflung branch.

** and even more.
Checking back to my database as I wrote the above, I realised that although I had corrected Robert's mother to Margaret WATSON, I had not noticed that I already had others of the correct family in my database already. Robert had a brother James whose son James married in Quebec (1860 to Catherine PIDGEON). When time permits an outline tree will probably be included in the Wanted! pages of the Fairbairn DNA project to see if there are any additional connections.

6th: Ignore the supposed recent changes listed in that index for the 6th April are merely background database tidy ups, no new information.

3rd: Still rather busy on real life, but making a tad more time for little discoveries.

Checked my GenesReunited hot matches for the first time in ages recently and found several new connections, if not relations. One from Shona led me back to my SINTON tree, adding in a Thomas STRATTON as the husband of Agnes LAURENCE and providing two children.
This of course prompted me to do a quick check around to see what else might be available on the surrounding family since I last looked some years ago.
Family now mostly brought up to 1901, with a few of the spice added, and an all too common death from typhoid found (Euphemia, who had married boiler maker master David ANDERSON and was living in Camlachie, Glasgow).

My main web pages SINTONs of Southdean descendant chart has been updated, as have the charts and page associated with Francis Douglas SINTON, one of the William and Isabella (SCOTT) SINTONs, whose mother was one of my WIGHTs. Interestingly enough, his wife Margaret Alice RUNCIMAN has also recently popped back into research view as I was looking at her RUNCIMAN tree the other day trying to sort out who where her grandfather Thomas (married Alison CURRIE) belonged (before I realised my SINTON connection to the tree).
My conclusion, unproven, was that Thomas was the son of John RUNCIMAN and May WEATHERLY, given that Margaret's mum was a Margery Weatherly RUNCIMAN, and there's a Thomas born to a couple of that name in the right timeframe and place.

Mar 2010

19th: More RUNCIMANs
With the DNA project showing that the William of Crail line is a good match to my Earlston/Wanton Walls RUNCIMAN line, I'm beginning to check up on some of the NZ branches of the former.
One web search brought up this from the Presbyterian archives: Photographs 1861-1870:
Green Island Parish, Dunedin
First Office-Bearers, Green Island.
Montage Of First Office-Bearers Of Green Island Presbyterian Church, Elected In 1862; Incl ; - Richard Runciman; James Runciman; James Neill; John Johnson; David Howden; David Andrew; William Martin; John Blair. c.1870 Ref: P-S11-22
Which I'm sure I've seen before, when I was researching the HOWDENs who married into my HENDERSON tree!
Richard is father of James RUNCIMAN, and the grandson of William of Crail. David HOWDEN is the father of the James who married Isabella HENDERSON.
Think this comes into small world territory.

18th: Michigan RUNCIMANs
A descendant of the other branch of Michigan RUNCIMANs has popped out of the woodwork, so there have been some updates published on the chart for James and Isabella (CARTER) RUNCIMAN - more to come.

17th: Megsmire
Back in 1994 I was fortunate enough to be able to visit Nichol Forest in Cumberland, where my TURNBULL ancestors (great grandmother Ellen TURNBULL and her parents) came from, and to research them in the Carlisle Record Office.
While there I noted any likely looking information that may at some stage connect, even if I didn't know exactly how, where or when at the time.
One such was the 1842 will of Walter of Megsmire (which place I visited, or at least where I decided it probably was from census data). It was a very detailed will, and sexist (but of its time), dividing his moss up into sixths, with each of five sons getting one sixth but three daughters sharing the remaining sixth.
Walter survived to appear in the 1841 census as a 75 year old, but that didn't lead me to match him up to the known Nichol Forest families.
Yesterday however George, a descendant, provided me with a copy of Walter's 1842 death cert, which gave his age as 80, and an added impetus to try again, given that between then and now much more research on TURNBULL baptisms had occurred. I now believe Walter to be the son of James TURNBULL & Betty BELL, and baptised in 1762 (at Canonbie). This makes George and I 7th cousins, which has taken us at least 9 years of (very) intermittent correspondence trying to prove our relationship via the TURNBULLs.

With both yesterday's news re Lester LESLIE aka Jack WALSH, and this TURNBULL reshuffle, my webpages have been updated, and the next batch of changes included in my WorldConnect database LornaHenderson (Walter has been shifted from LornaPotential, which has also had an update, as has the data I contribute to OneGreatFamily, which can include other families unrelated to me, but of relevance to the FAIRBAIRN and RUNCIMAN DNA projects and One Name Studies - FAIRBAIRN, RUNCIMAN).
I even had a rush of blood to my head and also gave the much less often updated Rootsweb pages a refresh. They don't contain as much supplementary information as my main pages, but will hopefully still exist long after I've ceased paying for my own domain name.

16th: Fromelles and the power of mtDNA
For all my work on Surname dna projects, which by their very nature concentrate on the Y chromosome and direct male lineages, mtDNA has really paid off in the extended DAWE family.
Back in Feb 2009, Anne, the wife one of my (many) DAWE relations, contacted me as I she had been contacted by Tim Lycett of the Fromelles project asking about a Leslie LEISTER aka Jack W(alsh) WHITEMAN. (the link probably still shows Leslie as the son of his adopted parents, his uncle and aunt Robert Watson Donald LEISTER and Elizabeth WAY)

Tim believed, after extensive research, that his Fromelles database mystery Jack WALSH was probably Leslie LEISTER, the son of Sarah Jane Way born after her husband Robert Henry Whiteman had died and shortly before she married John Young in 1894.

The Fromelles project needed mtDNA candidates that should prove a match to Leslie aka Jack, of which we had at least one genealogist in the family immediately identified (who agreed).
In the time between then and now Leslie aka Jack's short life (he died aged 22 in 1916) has been further researched, and closer relatives tracked down, with Anne keeping us all posted on progress.

Today, emails have been flying with notification that despite the great odds against any of the bodies in the mass grave at Fromelles being able to ever be identified, Leslie's has (one of 75 identified so far).
We have a mtDNA match with direct female line descendants of Sarah DAWE (daughter of William Smith DAWE and Mary WAY). Quoting Tim in an email to us all:
"I have to say that finding out Leslie (aka Jack) has been identified has provided me with the greatest sense of satisfaction of all.

Virtually everyone in 'officialdom' had given up hope due to the fact that he was adopted and given a new name but we were determined to do our best. It took months of hard slog and lateral thinking to sort it out and with the wonderful assistance from yourselves, we have finally been able to give him back his identity."

Leslie LEISTER aka Jack Walsh WHITEMAN, (13 Aug 1894 - 20 Jul 1916) R.I.P.

13th:Can resist everything but tempatation (and wine and chocolate and..)
Couldn't resist also updating the front end to my RUNCIMAN families as a result of yesterday's findings.
William of Crail has been included as well as a descendant chart of some of his family (by no means complete).
12th: An interesting day
Life is still interfering far too much and stopping me from indulging in my genealogy obsession, but today I couldn't resist any longer. A full set of new RUNCIMAN DNA results were available, with a 12/12 match to the next set due - which was fully expected, given the paper trails, but always a relief to have confirmed, with no blips down the generations.
However, the real excitement of this was that this family line has vindicated the effort I put into helping a group of researchers from the line of William of Crail, even though I didn't really think there was any connection to my lot (the weavers of Earlston, and farmers of Wanton Walls). They have turned out to be an excellent match - so farmers and fisher folk DO sometimes mix and match after all, despite my quite long held theory over several family lines and many generations.
The icing on this particular cake will be to finally find a willing representative amongst the descendants of Thomas and Alison (GRIEVE) RUNCIMAN to (dis)prove my current theory that William of Crail is Thomas' brother. Any takers? There must be some out there somewhere willing to help.

And then to cap all of that, I also noticed that partial results were in for the confirmed representative for the line of Archibald and Alison (CROSSER) FAIRBAIRN, and again, thankfully, it looks like there have been no blips down the generations AND they are showing a good match so far, as expected to Lineage 1 "clump 1".

5th: In the absence of substantial research
Been too busy with real life of late but felt I had to pass on this interestingly odd snippet from one of our esteemed newspapers.

We have an Arts Festival on at the moment, one of the Fringe items is based on a family book of Scottish songs c 1800s, with the artist reported as having a connection with Scotland because her great grandparents were cotton farmers there.
My idea of the Scottish climate has just altered dramatically!!

Feb 2010

19th: Long time coming
It's been a while, but every time I set too checking my updates were ready for the web, I got sidetracked, so next time there were even more to check.
The task got too big.
Now, however, three months later, it is done.
The recent changes index shows the people affected who actually have a page of their own, but the descendancy charts will also include whichever people I've found since the last update, back in mid November. Most will have been mentioned in passing here on this blog, but not necessarily.

The latest contact has been from another descendant of the William McADIE who married Sarah ABBOTT trying to convince me that this William is the William of an age and birthplace, son of George McADIE and Elizabeth ROSIE.
I'm not altogether sure why I'm resisting this quite so strenuously as it does seem a likely match BUT there are still at least two other William's not yet sufficiently ruled out of contention, the naming pattern doesn't quite "fit", and if we've all found the only 1851 census contender for the chap marrying Sarah (or the son of George and Elizabeth for that matter), his occupation doesn't gel with the rest of the family and his own later occupation.
Whichever way it goes, I've ended up putting what I know about both of them on the web. Check out William and William.

16th: Long overdue updates
I normally manage to update my WorldConnect database LornaHenderson about once a month, but things just keep rolling in, so the update slipped out to two months.
There now.
Checking of the related updates for my own family tree web pages however, has taken a backseat as I'm having too much fun with the Fairbairn DNA project and the Runciman One Name Study (ONS) (and some real life intervening).

11th: Foulden, Berwickshire
Gave up on trying to find an Andrew RUNCIMAN on ancestry's 1841 census transcripts the other day.
He had to be somewhere, but I could NOT find him.
Went to Scotlands People, and yes, there was a chap of the right age in Foulden, Berwickshire in the search results.
Even armed with this new info, I still couldn't find him on ancestry, so paid out my shillings for the SPeople copy.
Out of curiousity and armed with all the people on the page, back to ancestry.
Spot checks, nary a one of them anywhere, and Foulden didn't appear in the list of parishes available.
So I logged it with ancestry.
Some year, it may arrive, their response:
---------
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. This databases should be complete, so it appears that this parish may be missing from our records. I have reported this to our content team to look into and correct when possible. Feedback from you, our valued customer, helps us correct errors and improve the website. Your patience and efforts to assist us in this matter are appreciated.

Please understand that fixes to errors on Ancestry are posted firstly in the order of those which affect the greatest number of users, and thereafter in the order in which they are reported. For this reason, fixes for some errors may take longer than others to be posted. We appreciate your patience.
--------

7th: From bigamy to ... make up your own mind
What an innocuous start to a conversation.
---
Hello Lorna

Could we talk about Oswald?
I can't find him on your Lornahen website Regards from Veronika
---
As he was on the far reaches of my WINES, all I knew about him was that he existed, hence my reply:
---
Hi Veronika,

You can't find him on LornaHen for two reasons, one I only write up and publish people on that site that I know something about and I don't know anything about him other than he existed, and two, the other place he may appear there would be in a descendant chart but I've never done one for the WINES, they're just too prolific!

Are you related to Oswald? Can you remedy the fact that I know little about him and his branch of the tree?
---

Which led to:
---
Subject: Re: Oswald Dixon ancestry

Hello Lorna

Sure can...

Oswald Henry Dixon, born 1884 Gundagai in 1913, married my Marguerite Alice Wakeford, born 1885, Newtown, NSW died 22 Jun 1917, The Rock, NSW Her parents :
George Wakeford and Ellen/Eleanor Smyth

I'm led to believe that they had one daughter, before...

The Sydney Morning Herald... Saturday 30 June 1917, page 14 ALLEGED WIFE MURDER. WAGGA, Friday.

----
I've not yet dragged myself away from the RUNICMAN One Name Study, and latest set of FAIRBAIRN DNA results, but here's a link to one of the articles for those interested in the spicier side of family history to be going on with.

Veronika's summary:
He prepared the capsule purporting to contain liquorice powder, and gave it to his wife
And he is reported as having an affair with a young girl who works in the Bank

And at the end of it all, he got his wife's inheritance
He got rewarded for poisoning her!

5th: What's the word for a serial bigamist?
(other than cad and bounder and several other stronger terms I suppose).

The answer appears to be two words, you call him "Robert FAIRBAIRN".
Sue (of Clapham nurserymen fame) and I have strayed onto a cooper Robert instead of her nurserymen FAIRBAIRNs for a while, having found this chap in passing:
There's a Robert born abt 1817 in St Giles, London.
We’ve figured out that his first wife Elizabeth Stedman OSBORN(E) had died in 1849 and that he had remarried a Frances YELVERTON nee HUBBARD in 1852.
I may or may not have mentioned the trail for an Elizabeth aged 3 with what looked like a sister Elizabeth aged 6 that I eventually rationalised as being the Alexina who was baptised as such with her sister Elizabeth on the same day, but born in the right timeframes to identify the 3 yr old as Alexina.
I figured the enumerator had been told she was Lexie, heard it as Lizzie, and wrote Elizabeth (by 1871 she’s Alesandra, and the only likely matching birth reg. we can find is indexed as Alexander)
Anyway, by 1861 she is recorded in the census as Angelina, living with step mum Frances and older sister Elizabeth, with Robert nowhere to be found (yet), and Frances giving her occupation as “supported by husband”, and showing as married.
Frances continues thru 1871 as “married” with both (step) dtrs with her, and by 1881 is an imbecile, widowed, in the infirmary workhouse. Then in 1881 up pops a cooper Robert of the right age and birth place, married to a much younger Jane, with three children, Louisa, Frank and Eliza, aged 13, 4 and 1
But none of them anywhere to be found in 1871. (and we cannot find Jane/Louisa with or without a FAIRBAIRN surname in 1871)
Two people researching this latter tree believed their Robert and Jane had indeed been married before, but to an Elizabeth CASTLE, which neither Sue nor I can corroborate.
We thought we were onto the trail of a bigamist, or at least a two-timer, as we could not find a marriage to Jane.

Sue thought she'd cracked it, sending me a simple email saying:
“could be why we can’t find him in 1871”, with a link.
The link was to the criminal registers, with the source showing a Robert FAIRBAIRN, imprisoned for 3 mos for bigamy days before the 1871 census.
On the surface, case solved.
(The Old Bailey Proceedings actually call him Robert FAIRBURN).
Far from it and what an interesting journey that turned out to be and all.
I went to the newspapers. The 19th Century British newspaper collection came up trumps with two separate reports.
One going on about a Richard Fairbairn and bigamy sentences saying it was right that he got the lighter sentence of the two bigamists tried that day as his “wife” knowingly married him, whereas the other chap had deceived his wife.
I could identify that the bigamous marriage was likely the marriage of a Robert to Ann Jane MOORE, the other pair of that marriage page being identified elsewhere, in qtr 1 of 1871. Turns out it was complete coincidence that I found the right one, as I was specifically looking for a Robert/Jane marriage.
The report said he first married in 1864 – which would fit a date for an 1868ish Louisa born to Jane and our cooper. BUT, the 1864 marriage turns out to be a Richard Robert FAIRBAIRN marrying Mary Elizabeth DOYLE, which you’ve probably guessed by now, was “known to us”.
She was the first wife of father of Richard Robert FAIRBAIRN, the Worcester politician of the 1890s, and one of the lines of the Clapham nurserymen.
Full circle I think you can call that.
But wait, there’s more.
This chap was a lighterman, and obviously a budding politician in his own right, as earlier in the year newspaper reports show an R FAIRBAIRN representing 8000 lighterman pushing for the Admiralty to get some law thru parliament. But that little bit of history aside, this newly proven bigamist was already identified as a bigamist as I’d much earlier found his marriage in Canada in 1875 when he says he’s a widower.
He brings the Canadian wife back to London between 1876, birth of first dtr Ann Jane Agnes FAIRBAIRN in Toronto, and 1881 when first wife divorces him, and he’s living with the rest of his new family in Bermondsey.
If I’d found the other newspaper report first, a Lloyd’s Weekly Register report of the Old Bailey trials which gave dates and first wife’s forenames, the journey may have been shorter, but I suspect I’d have missed a step or two of discovery along the way. So, there’s such a thing as serial bigamy!
Fancy calling your first child by your second bigamist marriage the name of your 1st bigamist wife!!
We still haven’t proved that the Robert / Jane that started this lot is definitely one and the same cooper Robert we're looking for.


4th: When is an exact search not an exact search?
A friend was trying to direct me to something she had found on ancestry, and I simply could not see what she was seeing. Given I believed she wasn't telling me porkies, we went through our respective settings.
I nearly always use the "exact matches only" setting, with wild cards if need be, she didn't.
I don't see that it should have mattered as I had typed, accurately, and later rechecked by doing a copy/paste of the exact name from the results, but still, the chap only came up when "exact matches only" was unticked!

3rd: Non conformists
Been reading a bit about the Non Conformists of late, given that so many of the Scots who moved south can be found in their records.
Some links:
Dr William's Library
The Surman Index
Some indexes to registers are available for free searching at BMDRegisters.co.uk (but pay to view images - thanks Sue, for pointing me to this one).

Adam SCOTT appears in the Surman index, so I had a bit of an update for his family.
I knew he'd died between 1901 and 1924, and now also that Marion was a widow in 1911, but hadn't bothered tracking down his death given his name is a bit too common. The Surman index gives his date of death as 14 Sep 1908, so I thought it likely that he was the 1908 registration indexed in the District of Blackburn - but that chap is indexed as 39.
At the moment, I'm assuming it's a mistranscription for 59, even though the image of the index does show 39.
Can't yet figure out what happened to children Sydney and Margaret E after 1901. One day.
1911 did add another descendant into the tree, a dtr Jean Evelyn for Bertram & Christian Pettigrew WAGSTAFF in Ealing.

2nd: FAIRBAIRN approved
The FAIRBAIRN One Name Study has now also been registered to me with the Guild (See the Guild of One Name Studies aka GOONS, for what this entails).

A set of basic introductory web pages are now in existence, and probably bear a remarkable similarity, apart from content obviously, to those for RUNCIMAN.

Links to both have been added to the list of web sites on the lhs of this blog.
Both have their related project diaries, so if you think I've been a bit dilatory posting anything here, simply look around my other projects/blogs, chances are extremely high that I have not been neglecting genealogy.

Jan 2010

31st: In for a penny, in for a pound
Given where my research has been leading over the last couple of years or so with the dna projects, I've decided to bite the bullet and try to get a bit more methodical, probably an impossible task for someone as easily distracted as I am by the next shiny email that arrives in my inbox.
Anyway, I have applied for, and been granted, registration of the RUNCIMAN surname as an official One Name Study (See the Guild of One Name Studies aka GOONS, for what this entails).
Discussions are in train with the existing registered owner for FAIRBAIRN, as she currently has it as variant on her FAIRBURN, but there's no doubt ample scope for both of us. Only one person can be registered for a surname, so it firstly has to be removed as an alias from her study to be able to be registered to me.

Off to a grand start for RUNCIMAN as a set of basic introductory web pages are now in existence.
All of this was primarily prompted by Ros popping out of the woodwork again linking up her Fife/East Lothian RUNCIMAN family tree to the latest recruit (back in December) in the DNA project, thus reviving her interest in RUNCIMAN research as well.

The activities required for the DNA projects, and for One Name Studies are very complementary, so let's hope I can stay focused, but not completely neglect my own family, which is already well overdue a replublish of my web pages, and Rootsweb databases.

26th: Interesting reading
Some interesting sites brought to my attention (from a list of Unusual Websites" included with Ancestors Magazine): Oh well, back to my own version of reality...

25th: Rounding up Runcimans
An excited Ros emailed me after a long hiatus today, long term RUNCIMAN friends had turned out to be related, and thought that their brother was "doing something with DNA and was into family history". So she quickly sent the brother info I had previously sent her on the RUNCIMAN dna project, and an email to me to let me know, hoping I could get him into the project.
Been there, done that, awaiting the t-shirt (kit results), he was R-7 of the RUNCIMAN blog back in December.
Downstream effect however is a break from researching London FAIRBAIRNs and a quick peek at their respective RUNCIMAN trees to see how they were connected, and whether there was any possibility they'd connect with my Earlston lot. Looks unlikely on the surface, but who knows what may happen in this world of genealogical happenstance.
As part of my digging I could see that there was a connection to Crail in Fife, and of course, cousin Harry is an expert on such things, so I thought he'd have the actual headstone transcription being referred to.
Sure enough, and after much digging in several old boxes of research, also unearthed several other interesting bits of data he'd extracted back in the 1980s when he came across an unexpected RUNCIMAN family in Crail, RUNCIMAN being one of our shared ancestral names. Ros is delighted, Harry exhausted, Lorna in catch up mode, but a summary of the family will eventually make it to the RUNCIMAN DNA Patriarchs page.

23rd: Foundlings
Reading the Prologue to Stella Tillyard's "Aristocrats" made me chuckle about the poor genealogists descended from those first admissions to the Foundling Hospital in Hatton Garden in 1741 (assuming of course any of them survived, both physically and in recorded history).
They were all apparently baptised in the names of assorted sponsors and their families, eg Caroline Lennox, daughter of the Duke of Richmond.
Could cause some hopefully very momentary confusion if the names were recognised.

21st: SUTHERLAND Treasure Trove
My "Originals" sub site has been updated to include the beginnings of the publication of a treasure trove of family memorabilia received courtesy of a very kind lady in Melbourne.
She had been clearing a relative's house and found a large number of items belonging to a family she did not recognise as hers. Having determined that they really were no connection to her, she did some web searching for anyone researching the family, that of Alexander Bain SUTHERLAND and his sister Jessie.
(It is believed that her relative was a friend of Sandy's and that he had helped clear his house after his death, and Sandy had obviously done the same for his sister Jessie).
Her search found my web pages. So I now have a wonderful box full of family bits and pieces that most certainly bring the family of John and Jane (McKENZIE) SUTHERLAND to life rather more than previously.
I had already benefitted in my research on this family by having a friendly genealogist in the Shetlands contacting people who may have known, or known of them, so I was already one step ahead of the bare names, dates and places, but this is magic.
Heaps of postcards, some letters, some official documents, many photos (of course, most unnamed, but several look identifiable).
With only a very few of the documents scanned and examined for clues, I have already been able to pinpoint which of the many Jessie SUTHERLANDs heading for Australia she was (having her passport certainly helped, although I'm not so sure Jessie SUTHERLAND would have approved of the use of her passport photo, I know that I would hate to have mine published!), found the death of Jessie's uncle, John McKENZIE, son of James & Janet (BAIN) McKENZIE), identified the wife of Matthew Williamson SUTHERLAND, and finally determined which of them was the schoolteacher.
The Shetlands memory banks were sure that one of the family was a teacher, and assorted people assigned this occupation to different siblings.
It was Jamie, there's a letter from him to Sandy dated Nov 1947, from the Mertoun Schoolhouse, St Boswells, Roxburghshire. It will all take quite some time to sort through.
Many of the postcards are from all over the place. Looks like Jessie collected them, and people obliged by sending one from wherever they were.
I've already spotted one of Cockingford, down in Devon, which can hardly have had a connection to this family, but most certainly does connect to my Dawe family!
And one of a train stuck in a huge snow drift in Thurso - wonder if the current winter is similar?

20th: Some people make genealogy hard
I do so hate it when I cannot find someone who has to exist.
Last sightings were a marriage in Ontario, Canada in Peterborough 1893, followed by the births of two daughters, Edith and Gertrude, and death of wife Sarah (1899).
His name was supposedly Harry FAIRBAIRN, and he (they) should have appeared in either the Ontario deaths, or 1901 and subsequent 1911 census records.
No joy. Casting the net wider to outside Ontario, and even into the States still didn't come up with any likely candidates.
So I worked backwards to figure out which FAIRBAIRN family he belonged too, and quickly found that he was more usually known to his family as James Henry, and enumerated variously as Jas H, or James H with the surname as FAIRBAIRN or FAIRBURN. This latter is easily overcome by doing exact searches using wildcards, eg FAIRB*, but the forename variants are a little harder to cope with.
For the 1901 Ontario census I eventually resorted to simply leaving the name blank but putting in a birth year with +/- 5 years, and the township where I thought he would be, and scanning the entire 400 names for anything that could conceivably be a mis-indexed FAIRBAIRN. Still no joy.
By now I'd found that he had remarried (1899), as James Henry, to a widow Amelia COUTTS nee HUNTER, so it really seemed unlikely that he would be missing from both the 1901 and the Ontario deaths. But nothing anywhere in Canada to an Amelia with husband James or Jas or Henry or Harry, nor in the States.
I don't give up easily, so decided to try the known children. Gertrude had died at age 1, so it had to be Edith.
She did eventually provide the missing link I required. At age 17, in 1911, she had married in Renfrew Co, Ontario, "with parental consent", and gave her place of residence as Port Huron, Michigan, and her parents as Harry FAIRBAIRN and (incorrectly) Amelia HUNTER. Working from the known to the unknown, always a good maxim, 1910 Michigan census finally provided what I'd been looking for, but even then only by putting in Edith with father Harry born Canada in the right timeframe, no surname. They were indexed as RAIBOURN. By 1920 Harry is indexed as "H FOUNTAIN", but as they still had son Percival aka Percy who was with them in 1910, with them in 1920, they were more easily found.

Even son Percival/Percy, supposedly born Ontario, I had missed in the birth registers first time through. His mother had been indexed as Ammelin, and father recorded as Henry J. And was he Percival? No, John P.
Those we chase around the records don't make it easy for us, nor do the transcribers.
How many forename variations? Jas, James, Henry, Harry, H, Henry J Coupled with FAIRBAIRN, FAIRBOURN, RAIBOURN, FOUNTAIN, FAIRBURN as indexed surnames, which makes strking the right combination of both names a bit of a challenge.
And after all that I probably still wont find a dna candidate for the line of Andrew FAIRBAIRN and Elizabeth HAGERMAN in the FAIRBAIRN Surname DNA project, but it sure wont be from lack of trying!

18th: if they can't get it right...
I was browsing the Scotlands People feature on Famous Scots and noticed it had the will of Sir William Fairbairn.
Wrong.
Yes it was the will of a William Fairbairn who died about the same time (1873), but that of the Edinburgh surveyor, married to Agnes Hamilton DODDS, and brother of the Free Church Minister of Allanton, and most definitely not that of Sir William, engineer, born Kelso 1789, living in Surrey at the time he died in 1874.

Check out the Fairbairn DNA project for the outline pedigrees of the people mentioned.

11th: Where things lead
One of the Message Alerts that Rootsweb sends out for message boards I have registered an interest in mentioned an IVISON.
I thought that name sounded a bit familiar, and given it is also a little unusual, I went searching in my database to see why I thought I had someone of that name.
Well, only one.
Last year I had pieced together a theoretical family for one of my WIGHTs based on one of the children being Isabella Ivison WIGHT, as I'd found a possible marriage for John Adam Thomas WIGHT to an Elizabeth PERCIVAL, whose mother was an Isabel IVISON. (see blog filtered for IVISON)
I later confirmed they were indeed the right family.
Spurred on by this more recent reminder of the name, and with more information now available, I spent a while checking the ancestry indexes for births, deaths, and marriages 1916 thru 2005 and have updated the family a bit more.
Couldn't find them anywhere in England in 1911 however under any search criteria I could think of. Which was a little surprising as they do seem to have stayed around Northumberland.
Next WorldConnect update will have a few more twigs on that part of the WIGHT tree.

8th: WARE branch updated
Thanks to Nick providing an outline descendant chart for Gertrude TURNER (dtr of William TURNER and Mary Ann WARE), I spent a happy time checking it off and adding dates and places, where I could. Surnames added into that branch of the tree include: SHARRATT, NORTON, PEPPER, HIGGINBOTHAM, BRASNETT, McCAUSLAND, LOVELESS, ATKINSON, ASHMAN and HOPE, none of which feature elsewhere, so no new inter-connections for this Devon family that moved to London.

The results of our endeavours will appear on WorldConnect in due course, and are already in my ancestry tree LornaHen, included there as I found the source records.

4th: Gateshead to Manitoba, DODDS reviewed
Although I've not renewed my sub to MyHeritage (well it was free for five years from the old GenCircles and now will cost), the tree is still sitting there, searchable.
A side effect of this is that people may still send me emails about matches, but I wont be able to reply (unless they include an email address).
One such arrived today, a Katie asking about her 3*great grandparents William DODDS and Agnes Robertson DAVIDSON of Gateshead.
Up to now I'd not advanced all the family as far as 1901, but spurred on by the knowledge that at least one branch must have produced several more generations, I had another look today.
Still don't know where Katie fits, but do appear to have found that dtr Rosina Hunter DODDS married an ELLIOTT, a descendant of whom has a tree on ancestry; and that the John (who had married a Sarah someone by 1901) and family had all hopped off to Manitoba by 1903.
I've also resurrected father William, he can't be the one of the right age in the death index in 1902 as he's a widower in the 1911 census with son James.
So, Katie, I hope you find this eventually, and contact me from my website as I'd love to know where you do fit into the family.

1st: PURDIE mystery solved
I'd previously given up trying to find Margaret PURDIE nee FAIRBAIRN and family in 1841, although I had eventually found hubby Charles gamekeeping in Buckinghamshire.
Got a bit more stubborn today, having found that in the 1871 census daughter Cecilia thought she was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, so thought they might be there.
No wonder I was having trouble. The Wherstead Suffolk census shows Margaret saying she was 40 instead of 48, and they had been indexed as PURDUE born Ireland, instead of Scotland, even Cecilia, who was shown as Acilia, 5 born Scotland, not England.
It did add a daughter Elizabeth into the family, but didn't solve the mystery of the Williams in the family.

If you're wondering where the rest of the research log went, I've archived off the last 6 months of the 2009 log into a new menu item at left - 2009: Jul - Dec

 
one name study pages:
surname pages: