I can’t find her! What next?

[PatientGriselFirebeard]

Family legend tells of an ancestor who met a grizzly end in 1750. I’ve found a mention of a court record with the date but I cannot find any birth or death record anywhere. I’ve got a 2 week ancestry freebie and poured through 1 local parish record and millions of other ancestors (they all had 12 children and were all called Sarah) but none match.
Any idea where to look next?

Where did the death occur? She may not have been buried in that area if it wasn't her home parish.

Mistranscriptions seem common especially for older records. Have you tried wildcards?

Not all parish records are online.

But also, family stories are not always completely accurate.

Very rural. No sign of her in place of death, home parish or surrounding.
This is my first foray into family history and I am now weirdly obsessed

There is a mention of her in a book, in a list of assize records and a newspaper. Date matches.

Could she have changed her name between birth and death

Many women back then had such little social status that if they got with a man might start to call themselves Mrs "mans name" or just started to call themselves whatever they liked

Maybe her birth wasnt actually registered?

It is really interesting as a subject

You could search on British newspaper archive online, you may find enough detail there to locate tree records or simply enough details to answer your questions.

Many local records haven't yet been transcribed, even when a particular parish had lots of their records online. If its not there yet you could try again in a could of years.

Records for 1750 will be patchy and unlikely to record all the detail that would be captured 100 years later. In many cases, any parish records of baptism, marriage and funeral may simply be a name in a book. This means that although you could make an educated guess, it would be impossible to properly verify the family link ( ie place them in context of their relationship to your direct line).

This far back, it isn't unusual for their to be no surviving records at all for those people in the poorest ends of society.

If they met a grisly end because they committed a crime, you also need to consider that their family perhaps didn't care to have them remembered and associated with them.

Good luck though, family research is addictive!

*couple of years

So is she a murder victim or someone who was executed herself?

How many of the other family members have you found in her part of the tree? Sometimes you need to leave it be, and carry on working sideways and around the missing records. That way, sometimes you get a lead from the marriage and death records of siblings, cousins etc.

How old was she when she died? I'm researching someone at the moment from the same sort of era who was the eldest in a family of nine. All the children were baptised on the same day shortly after the littlest was born, and my subject was in her early twenties by then. So maybe your ancestor has no baptism record because she wasn't baptised (yet)?

Agree with the pp that sometimes something gives when you leave it for a bit and look at other things.

Search on every platform you can - eg familysearch and also on find my past.

Not every platform has the same records, also there are mis-teanscriptions and errors and their search engines work differently as well. I have ancestors who come up on a fmp search bit not ancestry.

Family search is free. Of you cant get a trial to FMP look to see what your local library is offering - ours is letting people access the library version of FMP from home while the libraries are closed.

Civil registration of births, deaths, marriages didn't start until the 1830s so you will not find birth, marriage or death certificates. Or certificates for her children probably, if she died in 1750, or her grandchildren even. First census wasn't until 1841.

You're solely relying on parish registers. This can be hit or miss - not everyone was baptised. Different clergy recorded different details - you won't often find mothers' details on baptismal records, for example. Some parish registers have been lost, or destroyed, or chucked out, or damaged. So if you can't find someone, that's not unusual.

If you're finding crime records and newspaper reports that's often about as much as you're going to get!

Civil registration of births, deaths, marriages didn't start until the 1830s so you will not find birth, marriage or death certificates. Or certificates for her children probably, if she died in 1750, or her grandchildren even. First census wasn't until 1841.

Yes, this is a really good point actually! You mentioned looking at parish records, so I was assuming you knew you were looking for baptism and burial records rather than bmd but they're very partial as Raspberry says, and also Ancestry and FMP are more or less thorough in different areas.

If you're using a two week free trial of Ancestry are you quite limited in what you can look at? If you're OK with giving more details of your ancestor, perhaps people here might be able to help you find something, as I expect we all have different levels of access to different databases.

As well as trying the parish registers, have you considered that the family may have been non-conformist? There may be chapels for other denominations in the locality which have not had their records transcribed.

I suspect I’ve got as good as I’m going to get - I’ll keep digging and going off on tangents, and counting just how many children they all had (so many Sarah’s and Williams).

I feel your pain. George and Janet here. For about 8 sodding generations.

Poor baby William is dead. I know. We’ll call the next one William too.

Oh dear. This one is a girl. I know, she can be William too

National Archives online has free downloads at the moment. It sometimes also has indexes for local archives so might be worth a punt.

We have someone in my tree who is called Thomasina Secunda.

Because the first Thomasina died. How awful is that, going through life labelled as a replacement for your dead sister?

Yes, the thing of naming a new baby with the name of a dead one completely freaked me out when I first started noticing it. If the idea was that the dead baby's spirit would somehow watch protectively over the new one, it failed massively as a strategy as far as I can see. In fact in some families it almost seems as though reusing a particular name was like putting the evil eye on the new arrival. My tree bends particularly heavily under the weight of sickly Williams, Johns and Thomases. I felt so sad for those mothers. Pregnant every year or two from their late teens until their forties, and so many of those babies died before their first birthday.