A Sick Little Womble

I haven't been able to get a new post up for a few days because my 3 year old, The Womble, hasn't been well. Long nights without much sleep have been eating into my genealogy and blogging time. Hopefully he'll be back to his regular self in short order and life will resume....

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Myrtle Elsie Adelaide Turner 1889-1963

Myrtle Elsie Adelaide Turner was born in 1889. The youngest of the three children of Harlettee Louisa Groombridge and William Turner, she was only 4 when her father passed away. Undated photo of...

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Three Postcards

Tonight I want to talk about the Three Postcards. They came in the box of treasure from Linda Grumont that I've mentioned previously, and two of them are perfectly charming pieces of family history. The...

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Live Blogging An Ancestor Hunt

My fortuitous coincidence from the other day has continued paying dividends. Ancestry informed me that someone had the death certificate of my great great great grandmother, Hannah Maria Holt, saved in...

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A Fortuitous Discovery.

Well, the other half has returned from his jaunt halfway around the world and life is returning to normal here, so I've gleefully dived back into my tree. Tonight I put some effort into researching Hannah...

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I Aint'nt Dead

In the immortal words of Granny Weatherwax, I aint'nt dead. I'm just taking a few days off while the other half is away on a business trip. My kids, Poss (aged 6 years) and The Womble (3 years) keep me on pretty tight schedule of fetching drinks, cooking meals, adjudicating arguments, assisting with...

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The Ladies in the Photos

I wish I knew more about this photo! It came from Linda Grumont and she's the one who has written (and scribbled out) names on it. Eventually she settled on the left one being Auntie Annie (Marianne...

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The Day My Tree Went Off The British Isles And Wound Up In Prussia

My most unfortunately named ancestor is Fanny Leak. No, no, don't laugh. The woman actually existed. Want proof? And she wasn't alone. She came from a long line of Fannys... Ok, if you're going to...

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A Letter From 1920

The Turner/Groombridge line was tricky to get anywhere with, and I felt that finding out more about the daughter who was born Melinda Elvina Smith would help me get further with it. I began looking into...

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Got You On My Tree, Neighbour

Who's that? Oh, just a cousin of mine. Ok, not quite. The story goes like this: Eliza Clapton is my Great Great Grandmother. She married Nathaniel Higginbottom, their daughter Jessie Higginbottom...

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Family Legends, Mythology and Tall Tales, and Princess Alice of Gloucester.

Over the years I've learned to take family legends with a grain of salt. Someone will swear black and blue that the family are descended from the Duke of Suchnsuch, or that the famous artist Whosit Whatsisface is a cousin, and so on. I love these stories because they give you something to work towards...

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I've Hit A Brick Wall(er)

Last week I posted about Elizabeth Waller, wife of Forbes Scott Brown. I quickly found she was the daughter of George Waller, early harbour master at Penang, and I found he was married to Harriet Scott. Harriet turned out to be the great granddaughter of Jean Scott, who was a first cousin of Sir Walter...

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The Sad Demise of Maria Hanniver

Trove is the most aptly named site on the internet. Trove is the National Library of Australia's online searchable archive of newspapers, journals, pictures and photos and more, and it is a veritable treasure trove of fascinating history. While digging around on Trove, I found two articles relating...

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Bonus Post

I grabbed some images to add to my previous post and didn't use them. I thought I'd post them here so it wasn't an entirely wasted effort -grin-. Melinda Elvina Smith, aka Linda Stapleton Smith was married...

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A Man of Mystery

Robert David Stapleton, who were you? You are an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in incomplete and/ or inaccurate documentation. The births of Marianne (Annie), Henrietta (Ettie or Hettie), William,...

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Illegitimacy, illiteracy and all that.

I had a really hard time with the Turner family tree. Turners are a dime a dozen and it's a hard to narrow down allllll the "William Turners" in the records to be certain you have the right one. You'd think my Great Great Grandmother Turner would be the antidote to that with her very uncommon name -...

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The main family lines.

The sensible thing to do would be to choose one or two main lines of the family, and invest all my efforts into researching those. Well, that's not how I've gone about my tree. I follow where it takes me, chasing the paths of least resistance first and working my way around to the more difficult stuff....

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Through my fingers

I did some messy genealogy last week, and today it all unravelled on me. It came to me suddenly last Sunday - I'd never looked into Elizabeth Waller. She was the great great great grandmother of my partner,...

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