in pursuit of a pedigree

I was very fortunate when I began my family genealogy — my mother had done work on her own lines a few years ago for a project in college and had completed a lot of the ground work, particularly on her maternal line for her mother Beatrice TRAINER (1938-2006). She had already gathered a great deal of information about Beatrice’s father Harold TRAINER (1907-1967) and his parents, the first of that line to emigrate to the United States from their native England.

Harold TRAINER is descended from Alice WINSTANLEY (1868-1942), who was born in the English county of York, in Leeds. (Further breakdown has her being born in the civil parish Holbeck). Her parents were William WINSTANLEY (abt. 1840 - abt 1874) and Eliza Ann GAME (abt 1844 - 1905). She had four siblings - John William WINSTANLEY (1863-1922), Elizabeth WINSTANLEY (1866-??), Clara WINSTANLEY (1876-1883) and Ann Eliza WINSTANLEY (1879-1960). I know that Clara and Ann were born after Eliza was already widowed — believe me, I’m looking into that but this post is related to John and Elizabeth.

Thanks to my mother, I knew that John had married a woman that we only knew as Rebecca H (1859-?). Whether the H was the first letter of her last name or her middle name, we weren’t sure. Elizabeth married a man named Charles Thomas JAGGER (1863-?) and we were able to track her quite easily in the 1891 and 1901 census.

England has this beautiful resource that I freaking adore and that’s their free indexes for birth, marriage and death records, all of which are available for free at Ancestry.com and probably at other resources. These indexes give you the names of the ancestors in question, the year in which the event is registered, the county and the district and then the volume and page number to make ordering records from the General Register Office. I have done this very easily for about six records and even with the general weakness of the American dollar, I’ve been able to order a record for roughly $14 USD, so two records are about $29. This is a bit less those available in my own home state of New Jersey, where vital records can run from $30-$70.

Anyway, I used the BMD Index for marriage records and found that John William WINSTANLEY married Rebecca Hannah NEWELL in the district of Hunslet in the county of York in 1881. From census records in 1891 and 1901, I was able to find out that Rebecca was born in the same place that she married. I just like to have a complete idea of all the people I research, even though Rebecca has no actual blood relationship to me. I attempted to locate her in 1881 because I knew thanks to finding John’s census record in 1881, that they were not yet married at the time of the census.

I was expecting to find Rebecca in a household with a father who’s last name was NEWELL. Imagine my surprise to find Rebecca H Newell living as a widow with her parents William JAGGER (1835-1913) and Rachel DOVER (1832-1891), along with her brother Charles. I checked my records for Charles Jagger and found that the date and location of birth for Rebecca’s brother matched that of Elizabeth’s husband and it would be way too much of a coincidence if Charles and Rebecca were not siblings.

Though again, neither are my actual relatives, I went ahead and did a little bit more research for their family just to have a total pictures. Rebecca married William NEWELL in 1878 and he later passed away in 1880. She waited about a year and married again, having three children with John. Elizabeth and Charles Jagger had about nine or ten children, most of whom still live in England but one or two moved to the states.

Though the fact that two of my ancestor’s siblings married siblings isn’t exactly going to help me in tracing more generations of my family, it’s a lovely little fact to file in the folder and I wouldn’t have found it unless I traced the spouses backwards to their own families. It reminds me of something that I tend to forget every once in a while — genealogy is about more than just the names, dates and places. It’s about the people

It’s also interesting to note that thanks to Ancestry.com, I found all of the above information in a single sitting in about a half hour.