John Matthews's Blog – March 2010 Archive (3)

After all that breast beating about my failure to find my grandmother's birth in my previous blog entries, when the birth certificate for Florence Brooks eventually arrived, everything was wrong. The date of birth was wrong; the father's name was wrong and the father's occupation was wrong. Back to the drawing board! The census entry showed a sister for Florence whose name was Minnie, apparently born in Clerkenwell about 1873. I decided to look for her birth. Free BMD had a Minnie registered…

On reflection, I was a little harsh in my comments yesterday. I first began to look for my grandmother's birth certificate in the 1960s when I was in my salad days and green in judgement. I had no reason to doubt what my family told me about her date and place of birth. But even if I did doubt it, where should I look instead? There were dozens of people with the same name registered in the 5 years surrounding her suggested birth date. The crucial piece of evidence was the 1891 census and…

I have decided to blog my way through a family history project. The idea is to add at least one generation to each of my family lines. In some cases, this should be relatively straight forward since there are some female lines that I haven't yet looked into. In other cases, I don't expect any progress - for example, my gg grandfather born in Newry in 1828 and his putative father. I also expect no progress with my illegitimate gg grandmother. Apart from the above Irish line, all my ancestral…