Snippets of history from my family tree
Scottish naming patterns can be a great help when researching family history, but they can also be very frustrating when trying to write unambiguously about those same ancestors, and when a brother marries a girl with the same name as his sister and that sister is the one who is named after their mother, those matching cousins can end up with a grandmother, mother and aunt all called Christina…
The #52Ancestors prompt this week is changing Names, so I’ve written about my Desrez side of the family, whose French surname has been modified and mangled by Australians, and other English speakers for the past 170 years
This weeks #52Ancestors challenge – Origins prompted me to look at the concept of foreignness.
I have a letter found in my Grandfather’s desk, which illustrates the lengths to which we need to go to work out what our ancestors were doing. I guess they never imagined that we would be trawling through their letters and their lives 100 years or more after they had died, or what we’d be able to find out.
On this day – September 25th 1902 Gertrude Ellen Wilson was born.
Originally I was confused about who “my Martha Wiggins” was because there were two girls of that name in Tasmania in the right time frame. At first it seemed that Martha born in 1825 to Thomas Wiggins & Susanna Welch must be the correct one as she would have been about 20 years old when the 22 year old George Tilley married in 1845.
However, further evidence on certificates, and newspaper reports of George’s death in a whaling accident confirmed that his father-in-law was James Wiggins. James’s daughter was the other Martha Wiggins born 1829 in England, so she was only 16 when she married George.
After George Tilley’s death I lost track of Martha as there was no record of the death of a Martha Tilley in Tasmanian records.
When I finally found out what happened to her I uncovered the story of someone I would really like to have met.
On December 10th 1852, David Wilson married Euphemia Hay in Dundee Scotland, 18 months later on the 4th May 1854 they left Liverpool, bound for Australia on board the “Miles Barton”, with their 6 month old son David. In July, their only daughter Catherine was born on board the ship […]