Brick Wall Time
Aug. 8th, 2008 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaceyI've been galloping through the generations - racing ahead with my family history on best Beloved's side of the family so this week I decided to take another look at my maternal side and see if I could get back any further beyond the Crows (or Crowes) and the Shaws that are almost within living memory.
It was this lot that sparked off my interest in the first place because i had photographs of my maternal grandmother's parents and grandparents.
This is George Crow and Eliza Lindley. They had ten kids including my great grandmother, Emma and I've managed to trace them on all the census returns back as far as 1861 when George and Eliza are 22 and 19, married with 9 month old Mary, so they must have married when Eliza was barely 18. They live at Dickinson Square, Darton. But I can't find any trace of them prior to that, either on the 1851 or the 1841 census, so I don't know anything about their family before their marriage. I can't trace birth certificates for either one of them via BMD (Birth Marriage Death) indexes but George was born in 1838 and the new registration act which started in 1837 was followed a bit patchily for the first few years.
OK... so the obvious thing is to get the marriage certificate which give the name and occupation of the fathers of the bride and groom. So I sent for it a few days ago and this morning the certificate arrives and... Eliza Lindley is the daughter of Thomas Lindley, a nailmaker. Now that's interesting because there were old deserted nailmakers workshops in Mapplewell village when my mum was growing up and I can remember them (just) standing derelict in the early 1950s.
But George? Nothing. Nada. Zip, Zilch. George doesn't have a dad.
It looks like he's a bastard... and now it looks as though the only way I'll find him is by going and staring at microfiches of the Darton Parish registers in Wakefield to find a Crow female having a baby out of wedlock in 1838. Hmmmm.... I'm not sure I'm that dedicated to the project.
I had a bit more luck with the Shaws though after a shaky start. Though I'm not sure you'd call it 'luck' exactly.
James Alfred Shaw, a miner by the age of 16 was the son of Henry Shaw who started out life down the pit but ended up as a shopkeeper. I found a wife for Henry, Martha, on the 1881 census and was happy with that. And then found an earlier census which shows him as a widower with three children, living as a lodger at the home of Mary Yeardley (who is described as a simpleton!). One of those three children was James Alfred, so Martha wasn't in the blood-line I was looking for. I needed to know who the deceased wife was. Much searching later revealed her to be... Elizabeth Yeardley, so the simpleton is probably Elizabeth's mother and is in the bloodline.
So today I traced my family lines back to a simpleton and a bastard. Ho-hum!
Oh, wait a minute... I went back and checked again. The writing was scrappy. She wasn't a simpleton at all - she was a seamstress, but they've written it as sempstress. I'm almost disappointed.
It was this lot that sparked off my interest in the first place because i had photographs of my maternal grandmother's parents and grandparents.
This is George Crow and Eliza Lindley. They had ten kids including my great grandmother, Emma and I've managed to trace them on all the census returns back as far as 1861 when George and Eliza are 22 and 19, married with 9 month old Mary, so they must have married when Eliza was barely 18. They live at Dickinson Square, Darton. But I can't find any trace of them prior to that, either on the 1851 or the 1841 census, so I don't know anything about their family before their marriage. I can't trace birth certificates for either one of them via BMD (Birth Marriage Death) indexes but George was born in 1838 and the new registration act which started in 1837 was followed a bit patchily for the first few years.
OK... so the obvious thing is to get the marriage certificate which give the name and occupation of the fathers of the bride and groom. So I sent for it a few days ago and this morning the certificate arrives and... Eliza Lindley is the daughter of Thomas Lindley, a nailmaker. Now that's interesting because there were old deserted nailmakers workshops in Mapplewell village when my mum was growing up and I can remember them (just) standing derelict in the early 1950s.
But George? Nothing. Nada. Zip, Zilch. George doesn't have a dad.
It looks like he's a bastard... and now it looks as though the only way I'll find him is by going and staring at microfiches of the Darton Parish registers in Wakefield to find a Crow female having a baby out of wedlock in 1838. Hmmmm.... I'm not sure I'm that dedicated to the project.
I had a bit more luck with the Shaws though after a shaky start. Though I'm not sure you'd call it 'luck' exactly.
James Alfred Shaw, a miner by the age of 16 was the son of Henry Shaw who started out life down the pit but ended up as a shopkeeper. I found a wife for Henry, Martha, on the 1881 census and was happy with that. And then found an earlier census which shows him as a widower with three children, living as a lodger at the home of Mary Yeardley (who is described as a simpleton!). One of those three children was James Alfred, so Martha wasn't in the blood-line I was looking for. I needed to know who the deceased wife was. Much searching later revealed her to be... Elizabeth Yeardley, so the simpleton is probably Elizabeth's mother and is in the bloodline.
So today I traced my family lines back to a simpleton and a bastard. Ho-hum!
Oh, wait a minute... I went back and checked again. The writing was scrappy. She wasn't a simpleton at all - she was a seamstress, but they've written it as sempstress. I'm almost disappointed.
