John Matthews's Blog (6)

My recent excursion into the Forscutt family reminded me of a problem that I run into every now and then - circularity. The biggest example concerned my grandfather, Joseph Matthews, an early photographer. My research into his life had come up with some interesting happenings, but the story needed a bit more evidence. In the mid 1990s some of his work appeared in a published collection of old photographs and there was a short biography of him that confirmed my research. I was over the moon.…

Time to review what I thought I knew about Robert Forscutt and his sister Elizabeth. The family wedding (from which I have a photo showing Robert) took place in the September quarter of 1902. My great aunt, from whom I obtained the photo, was not born until 1904, so she could not have been present at the wedding. On the other hand, she would have known many of the family members who were there. Eileen's mother did not die until 1953 and her sister was alive until 1973. Eileen could have been…

I first met the Forscutt family more than forty years ago when I began my interest in family history. My grandmother knew that her mother's maiden name was Forscutt. She thought her grandmother was named Elizabeth, but couldn't remember her grandfather's name. She knew her mother's date of birth, so I obtained her birth certificate and discovered she was illegitimate. This was not something a teenage boy wished to discuss with his Victorian grandmother, so the certificate was quietly placed…

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…