Well I should have know better but I got over confident and jumped the gun. I have the marriage registration for my husbands great grandparents. His great grandmother's family came to Toronto for a few years, had a couple of kids then went back to England and had his great grandmother. His great grandmother returned to Toronto and married a man from Simcoe (would be interesting to know how they met). I have their marriage record which gave me her mother's maiden name (Eliza Garret) and in turn led me to her parents's marriage record. The names as usual were common. After digging around, I did manage to order the birth cert for Eliza Garret but misplaced it almost as soon as I got it... I did remember her mother's name was Hannah and I thought her maiden name is Barber. I went on happily finding census records for George, Hannah and Eliza (and siblings) which in turn allowed me to trace additional birth and marriage records for the family. Fast forward a few months and while reviewing my tree details, I decided to bite the bullet and order the records from GRO (at the cost of ~$180). I got them this week. Now that I have them I can see that this Hannah has the last name of White.... and looking a lot closer at things Eliza Garrat was born in Cheshire and the census records I uncovered and used as the basis of my Garret research clearly shows repeatedly that the Elizabeth noted was born in Basford Nottinghamshire.....
How did I get myself into this situation? I have everything housed on ancestry and did not take the time to print and file and organize things on paper to make things easier for me to review and not make these types of mistakes....
Time to step back and organize!
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Trying to work out relationship between people with the same name in the same town
My focus this week in Simcoe and the Gilchrist, McNabb and McLean side of the tree. One thing I have noticed is that large extended familys emigrated from Scotland together and along with their neighbors settled in the same area, in my case Oro. There were many cases were more than one child in a family married siblings from a neighboring family and this happens through the generations. The result is a lot of people in a community with the same first and last name having children with the same first and last names as their neighbours born in roughly the same time frame.... Talk about confusion. One way to weed through it is to look at the big picture. Look up the parent's marriage record to confirm maiden names of the wives then find the birth registration of the children and hoping that the wife was registered with her maiden name and not married name. Finally look up all of the death registrations to make sure they all match up. Another resource that has help me in this endeavor is the cemetery pics available in Tombstone Territory on Wayne Cook's website. It's not fully indexed or transcribed but with some searching around, I've been lucky in most cases in that the woman's maiden name is on the stone along with the husband and possibly (unfortunately) some children. Using these dates helps to confirm various records as well if there are still some outstanding questions that hold up a true confirmation of records.
What would we do without genealogy volunteers??
What would we do without genealogy volunteers??
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Welcome to my blog!
Hello,
Genealogy is both my passion and my hobby, if I could figure out how to quit my day job and get by, I'd spend all day doing it. I really started my genealogy research about 3 and a half years ago. It's had it's ups a downs but so do most things in life. My roots start in Canada with me and my parents and in the case of my mom, her parents. After that the maternal roots trace back to Poland, Ukraine, and Austria (a part which I believe was once part of Poland). On my paternal side my father's parents and ancestry trace back to Poland. The research on my own tree has been slow going. If not for the high school project one of my cousin's Barbara did, I would know very little about my grandfather whom she did a family history interview with. As for my maternal ancestry, even though my moms parents hailed from Manitoba, it is has been difficult to get information. As a result I put my side on the back burner and focused on my husband's tree. His paternal ancestors almost entirely emigrated to Canada generations ago and settled predominantly in Simcoe County and York County. Others were in Halton, Grey and Victoria. I've managed to trace back to the mid 1700s in a few lines to Scotland and the UK. For the hubbies paternal side it has been alot of work, starting from scratch with very little information to work on and only a few tidbits from his family here and there but thanks to Ancestry, Scotland's people, Ted Larson's Islay page, the UK General Register office and the Simcoe & Ontario Archives, I've amassed quite a collection of information. My downfall: I did not orgranize from the start and now I must.
My goal of this blog is to share my tips, resources and stories as I do my research. I'm a young 40 :) and most people I talk to have little interest in hearing my stories. In sending them out to cyberspace I can feel like I am telling someone (even if no one reads it) :)
Cheers!
Debbie
Genealogy is both my passion and my hobby, if I could figure out how to quit my day job and get by, I'd spend all day doing it. I really started my genealogy research about 3 and a half years ago. It's had it's ups a downs but so do most things in life. My roots start in Canada with me and my parents and in the case of my mom, her parents. After that the maternal roots trace back to Poland, Ukraine, and Austria (a part which I believe was once part of Poland). On my paternal side my father's parents and ancestry trace back to Poland. The research on my own tree has been slow going. If not for the high school project one of my cousin's Barbara did, I would know very little about my grandfather whom she did a family history interview with. As for my maternal ancestry, even though my moms parents hailed from Manitoba, it is has been difficult to get information. As a result I put my side on the back burner and focused on my husband's tree. His paternal ancestors almost entirely emigrated to Canada generations ago and settled predominantly in Simcoe County and York County. Others were in Halton, Grey and Victoria. I've managed to trace back to the mid 1700s in a few lines to Scotland and the UK. For the hubbies paternal side it has been alot of work, starting from scratch with very little information to work on and only a few tidbits from his family here and there but thanks to Ancestry, Scotland's people, Ted Larson's Islay page, the UK General Register office and the Simcoe & Ontario Archives, I've amassed quite a collection of information. My downfall: I did not orgranize from the start and now I must.
My goal of this blog is to share my tips, resources and stories as I do my research. I'm a young 40 :) and most people I talk to have little interest in hearing my stories. In sending them out to cyberspace I can feel like I am telling someone (even if no one reads it) :)
Cheers!
Debbie
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