Aaargh! Why do we do this?

[Nell]

I haven't done much family history for ages - house sale, move to flat, divorce proceedings, death of mother, sorting out her affairs, dealing with illness etc etc.

So today, as a treat, I thought I'd look at my tree and focus on filling in a few gaps.

I discover my gt x 5 uncle, James Ball has married Grace Ball in Little Petherick, Cornwall in 1809. That's great. Except that the only baptism for Grace I can find is for James' own sister Grace! On the same page for the marriage there are 2 other sets of Balls. My sentiments exactly!

[ElizabethHerts]

It is possible that Grace was previously married, although I haven't found anything to corroborate this.

Also, she might have come from a non-conformist family.

[Nell]

It is, but I am fed up with all these families in Cornwall. They are either Brewers, Balls or Broads and they all favour calling their sons James and John and their daughters Grace. They are probably all cousins but I just can't disentangle them!

I began by trying to figure out how my gt gt uncle William Broad ended up with Trevilledor farm. He was a labourer for most of his life but suddenly acquires a lot of land. Some of it came from his marriage to a farmer's daughter, but Trevilledor originally was farmed by William's gt grandfather Christopher. The James Ball mentioned in the above post is Christopher's son. I was trying to see whether all Christopher's direct male heirs had died - which would explain how William came to live at Trevilledor and I got sidetracked by Grace.

[Terri]

I feel your pain Nell. Intermittently over the past 5 years, I have tried to sort out one Pain In The Bum family where 6 brothers in one small Dorset town called, in their wisdom, all their children the same names, in the same order. Once the children have left home, I just can't work out which is which. It doesn't help that half the town seem to have the same surname anyway. I hate this family with a vengeance.

[Olde Crone]

Huh, think YOU'VE got problems?

I have eleven generations of Thomas Green, broken only by my 3x ggf John Green, whose baptism I cannot find despite the whole boiling of them living in the same farmhouse for nearly 400 years. Many of the Thomas Greens married a woman called Mary Robinson, one of them did it twice, wives one and three.

OC

[Nell]

So glad it's not just me! The Cornish lot just seem to go out of their way to confuse things.

I had another difficulty with two chaps, both called Adam Dunt, both baptised in the same village, just a year apart. One of them went to London and I thought he was the chap to follow but fortunately the one who stayed in Norfolk obligingly named his daughter Kezia, the name of his mother and my gt 3 grandmother, so I was able to distinguish Adam from Adam.

I also have a gt x 2 grandfather called William Williams. He refuses to either die or be buried and the same is true of his 2nd wife, with the startlingly original name of Susan. Wretched man appears on 5 different censuses with 5 different years of birth and 5 different (all plausible) places of birth. I think I have the right baptism for him...

[Phoenix]

Perhaps you'd like to swap with my Adams families?
Both of Petronel's grandparents were called William Adams and both married girls with Adams surnames. I'm not convinced that any of them are closely related as in the Tudor period there were at least a dozen healthy young men with the surname Adams in the village.

[Nell]

Phoenix

I had forgotten how frustrating it is when you can't find records or they don't help.
I'm still trying to kill off Antonetta Trundley Browning!

[Joy Dean]

Nell, it's the Cornish, Londoners, those from Suffolk, Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, the Irish etc.
I do empathise. :)

[Kit]

Huh, think YOU'VE got problems?

I have eleven generations of Thomas Green, broken only by my 3x ggf John Green, whose baptism I cannot find despite the whole boiling of them living in the same farmhouse for nearly 400 years. Many of the Thomas Greens married a woman called Mary Robinson, one of them did it twice, wives one and three.

OC

He was probably baptised Thomas but went by the name of John to distinguish him from all the others.

I can sympathise. I have Thomas and Mary issues too but only 2 generations. Thomas 2 had a middle name but only used it to be born. Being the eldest he married Mary and started to have children but Ma and Pa were still producing so I didn't realise and got really confused when I ended up with 2 children of the same name and the first hadn't died.

[Nell]

That's the trouble with our ancestors, no consideration for their descendants!