Hints in the far reaches of the family tree

                                                 Is that branch on the tree headed in the right direction?

Resources usually get fewer and farther between when you reach beyond the 2 X great grandparent level. So it was for my 2 x great grandmother, Mary Maidment. I know that she married Thomas Rideout but that was before civil registration so the marriage entry in the parish register didn't contain any information about her parentage. Interestingly, one of the witnesses to the marriage was a Harriet Maidment. How did she fit in?

I puzzled over Harriet and her origins for a long time especially as I found her living with Mary and Thomas Rideout and their children in the 1841 census. Harriet had a child of her own but she still went by the last name of Maidment. I had followed up on these clues years ago then put the problem aside.

I would go back to the puzzle every once in a while. Mary Maidment has intrigued me since I found her especially as her husband, Thomas Rideout, died in 1842 and her last child was born in 1845. This child also had the last name Rideout although Mary had not remarried and no record of his birth contained the name of a father. Hints about Mary's own father started appearing on my Ancestry family tree giving the name of her likely father as Elias Maidment. In weak moments, I was tempted just to add Elias to my own Ancestry tree but life has taught me to be skeptical.

Along came a DNA course and a chance to look further into the puzzle of Mary Maidment and her connection, Harriet. While going through my paper records, I came across a marriage certificate for Harriet Maidment. I didn't remember ordering that. The listed groom was George Roberts and, of course, the bride was Harriet Maidment who named her father as William Maidment, a labourer. But Harriet Maidment was not an uncommon name in Dorset in this time period. Plus the marriage was in 1844 and the Roberts family in the 1851 census for East Stower showed the oldest child of the couple as Catherine aged 9. That didn't compute.

My next step was to look for Catherine Roberts' baptism in East Stower.  What came up on the Ancestry search was an 1868 marriage for Catherine Maidment whose father was named as George Roberts. Looks like that 1844 marriage for George Roberts and Harriet Maidment was the one I was looking for. The later 1868 marriage certificate had proved it. The 1844 certificate named Harriet's father as William Maidment, labourer not Elias as the hints on my tree had suggested. Only now that I look closely as the certificate, George Roberts' father was named William as well. So could the second name of William be a clerical error or perhaps Harriet had misremembered. Looks like more genealogical research will be needed because DNA can point us to genetic relatives but it can't prove the validity of their family trees.  

Family branching out from Dorset

                                                                                Road out of a Dorset village

Well it didn't take long for my Dorset family to take me further afield. A few of Mary Rideout's children stayed in the village of Ashmore in Dorset but it was a small place and there were a lot of offspring. Soon many of them left the village and, in many cases, the county. As I filled in the various added members to the next generation born to Mary's children, they seemed to move frequently. Some of them having children born along the way as they moved from place to place. That meant access to digital images of baptisms varied. I'm not sure if that's because the babies weren't baptized or just that the big genealogy companies haven't come to an agreement with the holders of the records.

In the case of one Rideout brother, Charles, his children were born in Herefordshire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, then back to Yorkshire, followed up by two born in Staffordshire. In different towns or villages in the last county, of course. His sister, Sylvia Raymond, confined the births of her children to Hampshire but had two children in Winchester, before moving to Headbourne Worthy where she had two children, then moved to Ropley where she had another two.

Perhaps all this movement when they were young made immigration an easier step to take for the next generation of the family. I know that some of my Rideout line ended up in Australia. I wonder if they were offspring of Charles or Sylvia. 

DNA and Dorset

 

                                                       A picture of me in Evershot, the Dorset village I got to visit

I'm going back to Dorset. No, not physically (I wish) but through family records. I'm currently taking the DNA Skills Course through Your DNA Guide. As part of this course, each participant needs to find a research question to look into to practice manipulating DNA information to answer the question(s). In my case, I'm going to try and prove the link to my 2 x great grandparent, Mary Maidment, through genetics. We'll see how far I get.

The course has begun and I'm frantically trying to get caught up and fill in my family tree at the same time. I have a bare bones tree on Ancestry at the moment but I need to fill it out with siblings and descendants. That means adding all those collaterals that I ignored for the longest time.

It will be good to delve back into the research on my Dorset lines. It will remind me of being there back in the early years of this century. At the time that I visited I only made it to one ancestral village, that of Evershot where my maternal line of Chubbs had been for a while. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to Ashmore, where my line of Rideouts had lived for at least two generations that I know of. I'm looking forward to going through the records I collected on that branch of the family. Who knows how far DNA might take me on the research into that line.  

Happy Easter

 

                                                                            Daffodils, a sure sign of spring

Easter always makes me think of spring as, happily, they coincide, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere. But my childhood was spent in the suburbs of Montreal, so it was usual to still have snow on the ground when that particular holiday rolled around. I still remember spring flowers for the holiday because our school had a lengthy time off for the religious celebration. (It was Quebec, after all, a very Catholic province.) My family chose that time to leave the snow behind and go back to England. There were lots of spring flowers there and, even better, British chocolate!

May you enjoy your time at Easter as much as I enjoyed the Easter Eggs I ate during those English vacations!

Picturing social context part 3

 

                                             The interior of an early Ontario schoolhouse at Fanshawe Pioneer Village

After finding out about my family's roots in early Ontario, I revisited Upper Canada Village with my father. It was fun to see but the village didn't seem as big as it had when I was younger. By then I had discovered other living museums as well, so it didn't seem quite as much of a wonder.

Many of the other living museums I visited were also in Ontario. While Upper Canada Village depicted a place in what is now Ontario in the 1860s, the other outdoor museums covered a range of historic years. At Fanshawe Pioneer Village, visitors could walk into the primitive cabins of first settlers, where, we were told, the occupants slept sitting up so they wouldn't choke on the smoke of the fire keeping the cold at bay. Early schoolrooms showed battered desks, well-worn chairs, aged slates and primitive blackboards. I was especially interested in the framed houses including the large one with its Victorian sitting rooms and well stocked kitchen. Upstairs there was even an early Singer sewing machine, much like the treadle one that my mum used to have. I can remember getting her machine up to a speed high enough to drive a needle through one of my fingernails.

Some of my ancestors also lived for a time in Owen Sound. There, the Grey Roots Museum and Archives is a great resource. Many hours were spent in the archives trawling for family info. I found some which included photographs of my maternal grandmother as a child with her parents and some of her siblings. The museum part of the enterprise also had historic houses covering a few different eras but the thing that really caught my eye was the gravity fed gas pump. Old technology can be fascinating. 

                                                          Old time service station with a gravity feed gas pump

Picturing social context part 2

 

                                                   An Upper Canada Village view my father painted after a visit there

My interest in history started when I was young. One frequent family outing was a trip to Upper Canada Village. It wasn't that far a drive from our home in the Montreal suburbs but it was a world away in time. I was charmed by the cozy homes and primitive industries and they also made excellent cheese, as I remember.

At the time, I didn't think that the village's version of history had anything to do with my own family background. After all, most of us were immigrants to Canada although my mother did have roots there. But she came from Winnipeg, so an historic village in Ontario would have nothing to do with her family, right?

That was before I started family history research, of course. My preliminary forays into my mother's family history showed that her Scottish ancestors had lived in Ontario before the push west to the Prairie Provinces. It was also before I discovered the family line that moved from New York State just after the American Revolution. After those discoveries, the streets and buildings of Upper Canada Village became a window on my own family's past. 

Picturing historical social context

 

                                            Dr Williams Library in London holds records about nonconformist ministers

When adding depth to the world of an ancestor or ancestral family, I often turn to books about the history of an area or event. Because my family's past takes in so many places, that is a double edged sword as I often (probably too often) buy books about areas where they lived. That's especially the case when on research trips in places where they lived. Books can take up lots of space in a suitcase and on ever expanding bookshelves. 

Books and online searches aren't the only way to add context to past lives. If one is lucky, it's possible to find the buildings which featured in their lives still standing. That happened when on the trail of my 4 x great grandfather, Reverend Thomas Strange. He was the first Congregational minister to preside in that religion's church in Kilsby, Northampton. It was a thrill picturing where he would have stood preaching to the congregation. He was even buried in an aisle which meant that I walked on his commemoration stone.

                                                The burial stone in the aisle of the church in Kilsby, Northampton*

Taking my research further, I visited Dr. William's Library when I was in London. They have lots of information about the nonconformist religions. Among their records, I found some of Reverend Strange's sermons. Each sermon covered multiple pages in a notebook. Remembering the hardness of the pew in that Kilsby church when I sat on it and considering the length of the sermon in the books really brought home the experience of being one of the congregants in the church.

*Transcription of  the Strange burial stone