What made you fall into a black hole when finding out about your ancestors ?

[WinterBerry40]

Mine was on my mother's side in the mid 1800s a family with unusual names led to me deep diving into finding out as much as I can about them .

Names :
Thomas , Joshua ( my gg x times gf ) Ambrose , Emmanuel , Hercules ,Charity , Penella , Lendon , Joan .

I discovered they were travellers and had led lives ( and thanks to their names ) which were easily traceable with lots of info available .
They were quite well known in their area and even have things wrote about them in historical incidents .
My mum would have never known she came from traveller stock and I'm quite proud to have that in my family history .
Hello out there if these names are linked to your family also !

Fascinating stuff on here!

I've just stumbled across something interesting. I've done some family history work on both mine and my husband's famiies and found out that one of my great grandmothers came from a village very close to where DH's paternal line originates from. I've often wondered if the families ever met - it's a weird coincidence that DH and I both have ancestors from adjacent tiny villages nowhere near where we were born ourselves. I never thought I'd be able to find out if the families knew each other but today I had an Ancestry "hint" that was a newspaper report about a church fete in the mid 1800s. Amongst the attendees listed were people with my DH's family name and a woman who has a very unusual name that I have previously identified as one of my great grandmother's relations. Both the first name and surname are very unusual so I can't believe there was more than one person with that combination in the same geographical area at the same time - it must be her. DH's surname is also unusual, though there were quite a few of them in the area. If a person named in the report is not the direct ancestor I think it is, he must be a relative. So it does seem likely that we have ancestors who were attending the same Church 175 or so years ago and likely were at least acquaintances.

I read an article once about this X thing - apparently it was fairly common for the celebrant to assume the person couldn't read or write, so simply asked them to mark the document with an X, and the person did as they were told.

Fascinating stories! Keep them coming.....

I literally drove past that match factory this morning! This thread is fascinating. I started my family tree but haven't looked at it for a while. Need to pick it back up

This is a bit complicated, hope you can follow.

l am from Fife in Scotland and my DH is from Dumfries and Galloway, so a lot miles between us. Both of us have Irish ancestors on our mother's side.

My gr gr Aunt Maggie from just outside Edinburgh married an Irish chap called William in Stirling in 1909 (abt 50 miles from her original home), and they had 2 children. Her sister had moved there when she got married to a miner, but I don't know how Maggie and William met. He was born in Glasgow and was a professional soldier and unfortunately died in action in 1914, right at the beginning of WW1.

I looked at his Military Record on Ancestry and noticed that the address for William's Dad (also called William) seemed familiar. My DH also has a William "same Irish surname" in his tree and I realised that my William's Dad lived 2 doors away from my DH's relative.

So I have my Wiilam Snr and DH's 3 x gr Grandfather with exactly the same first and last names lived in a mining town in Lanarkshire, with a 25 year age gap between them, again miles away from Stirling, where where William Jr and Maggie met and their birthplaces. Turns out both Williams are from the same place in Ireland.

So, it eventully turns out that DH's gr gr Uncle married my gr gr Aunt and we have a connection through the children of William and Maggie. What are the chances?

I also found a similar neighbour story. My great grandparents on my grandpas side and great grandparents on my nannas side were next door neighbours around the 1901 census! My nanna knew about this but confirmed that by the time she and my grandpa had met both families had long moved from that street. Again, what a coincidence!

My very proper MIL was born in 1922. When doing DH’s family tree we discovered that her maternal grandparents married when she was 6 years old meaning her mother was born out of wedlock in the late 1890s.
We can find no reason why they delayed marriage until they were nearing their 60s. No social reform that we can find.
I was very close to my lovely MIL and broke the news to her gently “ Oh darling, your mother was a bastard!” She found it highly amusing.
In other news again on DH side his grandfather’s cousin was stamped and kicked to death by his lodger. However as the lodger was very drunk he only received 2 years. This was in the 1950s when the family were all living in the same town ( DH was 6) and so family must have known but it was never mentioned and MIL denied all knowledge. We did find out some nice things to offset these tho’
We were able to find her brother’s grave in West Africa where he died as a young g soldier and obtained a photo of it for her.

I think my granddad and his siblings were all illegitimate. Can't find evidence of his parents' marriage anywhere, and my mum was always into family history and hired a genealogist years ago to trace her family tree, and he drew a blank as well. They moved from England to Ireland when very young, bringing their eldest, definitely illegitimate child, but I don't think they ever got round to marrying. My granny and mother would have been so shocked!

My great grandfather was a bigamist.

A great (x a few) aunt spent 3 weeks in Holloway for being drunk and riotous 😁 and died young of cirrhosis 😥

A great (x a few) uncle was hanged for murder - a drunken brawl.

In more recent decades we have been tediously respectable...

Finding out my 4 x great grandfather was accused of grave robbing. He was a livery stable owner and was hired to help the local Dr carry a large package. It turned out "the package" was a recently buried local woman. This was in the mid 1800's. I have the whole court case, describing what he was wearing, what he looked like etc. Also, his daughter, my 3 x great grandmother is called as a witness. Fascinating stuff!

Also, my Grandmother, father unknown, for all her life has been tracked down via DNA on Ancestry. We've been searching for many years! It seems he was a bit of a lad and had several illigitimate children in the town.

So many more "black holes" I'm still investigating.

One more: My Grandad's little sister who, we were told, "Great grandmother was pregnant with her when her husband died", I have discovered, was born 18 months after his death. No judgement here. Times must have been tough for my great grandmother with 11 mouths to feed. I haven't shared this information with other family members. Her other 10 children were put into a cottage home until they were old enough to work and provide much needed income. Looking a past census returns, it looks like my great grandmother sofa surfed with her offspring until her death aged 84.

And also that people had double lives. My dad's great uncle, I have discovered, died of syphilis. 😬 He lived in Dublin and it was utterly rife there in the early 20th century. His death register entry states that he died in an asylum of 'paralysis of insanity', which was the end stage of the disease. Yet he was married with a large family. He may have contracted it from a prostitute (female, male, who knows). Luckily didn't pass it to his wife or children, to my knowledge.

He was far from alone @AInightingale . Syphilis was the number one cause of mortality among French men in the 19th century 😬. How miserable that must have been. Thank goodness for antibiotics. I’ve worked in the NHS all my life including 16 years doing a weekly HIV clinic ( as a dietitian) and only a handful of times have I come across a case of syphilis in someone’s medical notes

I’m trying to remember who it was on Who Do You Think You Are? An episode where great grandpa whatsit was ‘killed in a pony and trap accident and his wife subsequently died of a broken heart’ turned out grandad was a travelling salesman, caught syphillis and died, but he’d passed it onto his poor wife who died in some kind of asylum after being carted off. Sounded like a horrific way to go, no good old days vibes.

Oh I think it was Jack Whitehall with his dad on the episode.

I think a lot of family stories when passed down are like that, @EverybodyLTB! The poor woman.

My mum was really keen to learn about what I found in my research. Her side were generally quite respectable people, working class but all had a trade or were in the military so seemed to be a step up from the deep poverty of so many. Ordinary lives of no interest to anyone outside the family really.

My dad listened to what I found about his family and told me what he had heard as a child. I answered a few questions he had had as a child but otherwise he had no curiosity. Which is a shame as his side is the one with poverty, workhouses, bigamy and murder and people falling out never to be spoken of again. My great grandmother had a life that would have seemed far fetched had it been a plot line in Corrie or Eastenders.

Love the username! Should be on Mumsnet’s coat of arms ( maybe in Latin). I think forgetting/ not seeing is actually an active choice and cultivated in some families, without being explicitly stated. Plenty of that on my dads side of the family- illegitimacy ( dad liked to boast that all 3 of his sisters were virgins on their wedding day - er, no Dad), remarriages, people emigrating then dying v young. Never talked about.

The other thing about marking a signature with an X was that it could also be done so as not to embarrass the husband if the wife was literate and he wasn’t.

I’ve seen it where a woman signed her signature on her marriage certificate but when her husband died and she remarried, the new husband signed with an X and the wife did too. Clearly she was able to write, but didn’t want to embarrass him. Or perhaps the registrar assumed she couldn’t and she didn’t correct them.

I love the stories in this thread!

When I was looking at my husband's family, I discovered that one of his great, great grand-aunts started her working life as a housemaid and ended up as housekeeper to aristocracy. I've probably done more research on her than anyone else, following her around the UK in the censuses and contacting archives to ask for information about her wages etc. This particular archive even managed to find a couple of photos of her!

My DH, a white (as far as he knew) South African, was astonished to find out from my genealogy research that one of his ancestors was a political exile from the Philippines who fled to Cape Town. (When he did his DNA the Filipino link was absolutely confirmed!) That strand of his family has proved to be far more interesting than much of the rest!

Love this thread. I wouldn't say I fell own a black hole, more a rabbit warren. My great grandfather was a drunk, born in the 1870s. I knew that and he was in and out of Wakefield jail for various crimes. He was a green grocer with a horse and cart.

His 2 year old daughter was killed by being run over by a horse and cart shortly before he was jailed for child neglect. Make of that what you will, poor baby.

My great-grandfather escaped the famine in Ireland by joining the British Army. He moved to Belfast later and never lived on the west coast again, but our family has always holidayed there, and I never knew why exactly that place until I read about him.

My great-great-great grandparents were rich Americans and my ggg-grandfather was an architect who designed several buildings in America, some of which are still there today. I had heard rumours that I had an American relative from way-back, but it was interesting to find them. As they were rich, they also owned an early camera, and there are lots of photos of them. What is best about them is that they aren't all in formal poses, there are also photos of them in their garden, at the beach etc. You get a real sense of them as a family and their relationships. It is odd looking at them knowing they are my family, but they don't know our family today.

It was just pieces of paper in files. They lied.

My mother's birth certificate has her father giving his name as the same as my grandmother - he wasn't her husband; she met him after her husband died (that bit is actually true) and refused to marry again. Well, that and they didn't actually know whether his wife was dead or alive...

My mother wouldn't have been best pleased about the other massive skeletons - firstly, that she wasn't married, as her husband had never got around to being divorced and secondly, that she was part GRT and part Jewish (both groups she was exceedingly prejudiced towards).

When I was a very small child my aunt and uncle moved from London to a small village in the middle of Devon. We have recently discovered that DH's ancestors once lived on a farm just outside that same village.

Same village. 150 years apart.