Surprise contacts

Quite early on in my genealogy work I found myself in touch with a woman who was related to my wife. The genealogy websites put people in touch with each other where they believe there is a link. Genes Reunited refers to possible links as Hot Matches. Occasionally you find it is the real thing. Kathleen Massingham (nee Gregson) is the granddaughter of my wife's grandfather's sister. She made contact as a Hot Match and we have been able to compare family trees and photographs. Kathleen made two trips to see the old Shore Baptist Church cemetery near Todmorden where she and Pauline have relatives buried. By coincidence this church was my very first place for preaching as a lay preacher.

Once Pauline and I became engaged she used to accompany me to preaching appointments there and introduced me to a distant relation living close by. Auntie Hilda, as she knew her, is also now remembered on a plaque in the churchyard together with her husband Sidney whom I also met. Interestingly, Hilda's father, James Webster Jnr was a former mayor of Todmorden and we have a photo of the procession on the day he came to office.

Another person to make contact found that her great Grandfather and mine were brothers. As I said in another posting, John Bryan turned out to be my third cousin and continued to provide some very interesting information as time went on. His most recent contact was to email me some photos of Alexander family graves in a cemetery in Luton. He found he was in the vicinity one day when going to his dentist for treatment. Later he paid a longer visit with his camera and the result more evidence of my family members in Luton. The headstone at the head of this posting is that of my great grandfather, Nathan Alexander, who came down from Scotland to help a brother in his credit drapery business and ended up with his own business. Although buried in Luton he died in Hertford, Hertfordshire of Pneumonia.

Some months ago, back in 2009, I had a contact from Leslie Naile in the USA to say that my cousin's grandfather, Smith Mason, was her great uncle. Some time later she emailed to say she would be over in the UK at the end of July to visit old family homes. This was the day before we were to be not far away for my daughter's 40th birthday celebration. I therefore arranged to meet up and show her some of the Nelson area. Leslie and her husband, Bob, turned out to be lovely people and we had a lovely meal with them that at the Fencegate pub near Burnley, Lancashire.

To say this hobby is fun is to mark it down. I love it greatly and look forward to more discoveries as time goes along.

Getting lucky

In June 2009, my wife suggested a couple of days out to include an overnight stay at my brother's house near Burnley. She thought it would be a good idea if on the second day we drove up the motorway to Kendal to find the lodgings where my father and his second wife lived in 1934. I had found the address from my half-sister's birth certificate. We ended up, during the morning, visiting also a house in Lancaster where Dad had lived when he worked as a motor fitter for Lancaster City Transport. At the end of an interesting morning we adjourned to Heysham where we had a pleasant lunch in a pub.

After lunch I asked my wife if she had anywhere she would like to visit. Quick as a flash she suggested Kirkby Lonsdale where her grandmother was born. We had my laptop with us so when we arrived in the small market town I pulled into a car park and switched on. It was difficult to see the screen and I lost patience with the time taken to boot up. I thought it was not working, but I was later proved wrong. I had wanted to find the address where Eva Mary Hodgson had grown up. I next suggested a walk round the churchyard in the vain hope we might find a family grave. After wandering round I stopped b y the corner of the churchyard where it overlooks the River Lune. Suddenly I heard my wife calling me over. When I reached her I could not believe my eyes. There was a large headstone with an amazing amount of information on it. I took a photo to remind me of the wording and it is at the head of this posting.

It was a headstone for John Wells Hodgson (my wife's great grandfather) which also included his widow and his mother! Here was a real chunk of family history for it told how he had died in 1910 in Brierfield, Lancashire and that his widow had died in 1933 in New Zealand. It also surprised us in stating that his mother (also buried there) was Adelaide Bell. He did have a daughter called Adelaide and at first I was confused. But she was referred to as his mother so I reckoned it was true.

I could not understand why he was called Hodgson whilst she was called Bell. Later I discovered that he was illegitimate and had taken her maiden name. She later married but his name remained unchanged. These are all matters one has to be prepared to accept in genealogy. It is so easy to think all is going to be straightforward. John's wife was Mary Jane Routledge before they married. Because it is a name with many spellings it took me a long time to find her in census returns when she was younger. However, she was a very junior servant in the house of a very prominent man of that time. He was Thomas Pilkington, the glass manufacturer.

Following this I undertook some research into the Hodgson siblings. It appeared quite simple because I had a little information to start me off. I was told by my wife that her Great Aunt Adelaide had been in service and that she had married her employer's son and emigrated to New Zealand with him. Through GenesReunited website I received help from other people who found, as I did, that there was no record of Adelaide emigrating. By this point there was online access to the shipping records of the time and a few of us trawled through these records with no luck.

I decided that the information was incorrect and pursued another route. I looked for census returns for the brothers and sisters of the Hodgson family and found them all except one. This was a problem until I took another look at this sister's marriage certificate and realised I had read the registrar's writing incorrectly. Jane Elizabeth Hodgson had married Hardy Robinson McPherson and not McPharson as I had taken it to read. The registrar who recorded the information wrote the letter E like an A. At this point I revisited the shipping records and very quickly found that this was the sister who had emigrated to New Zealand. In the last census before they left they were recorded as having two daughters who did not travel to New Zealand and this remains a mystery. I even found in our family photos a colour photo of Hardy with his family. Names were recorded on the back but it was impossible to know who was who.

Later I tried to locate the whereabouts of living relatives and see what other information the registration records of New Zealand could give me. I was in for a great disappointment as I discovered that recent legislation to stop personation barred me from accessing the records.

However, taking the rough with the smooth, I have truly enjoyed this research work. I now know considerably more than I used to know. Myths have been expelled and misheard names corrected. One such case was when I asked my later mother in law to put names to a family photograph album. She had Great Aunt Lucy marrying Tommy Ramsden but in fact he was Tommy Ramshead. Errors like this take a long time to find sometimes but we get there in the end.

Digging deeper

I have previously commented that the Internet has been a place where genealogists have found great help in their labours. It was through posting family tree details on Ancestry.com that I came across another tree with an error on it. I contacted the tree owner to say that his date for the Death of Nathan Alexander (my great grandfather) was incorrect. His father in law, John Bryan, emailed me to say the error had now been corrected. He is a direct descendant of George Alexander who founded the drapery shop in Luton. This makes him my third cousin. He later sent me some very useful information he had acquired. Firstly, I received a family tree for the Alexanders of Luton which included many names. One name was that of Bruce Alexander, another third cousin, and his photo is the one you see above.

For those who have been keen viewers of the Frost series with David Jason on TV you will, no doubt, recognise "Horn Rimmed Harry" or "Superintendent Mullet". I often wondered if Bruce was a relative and with the receipt of the family tree it was confirmed. Another item (or should I say three) was the report in a local Luton newspaper about a big wedding at a Baptist Church there. The report gave a list of guests and the wedding presents they gave. I also received a photo-copied photo of the wedding. On the back row I recognised my grandfather, John Edgar Alexander, a man in his thirties then. The wedding was between John Bryan's grandmother, Mabel Alexander and an Italian man, Celestino Bagni.

It was not long before I was speaking to John by telephone. Further emails came and we are now in touch and keep each other up to date with any information we glean. He recently emailed me a set of photos of the Alexander graves in a cemetery in Luton. And so the story keeps on growing.

What I like about pursuing this hobby is that I can picture my family from the past going about their daily life and comparing their life with mine. It is also useful to have details of a bygone time when values were different and love was expressed in a different way. It is simply all about the starting lines of a well known book, "The past is a different country. they do things differently there."

The Black Hole

It was always a mystery as to what had happened to my father before my mother met him. During the Second World War people found themselves quite often away from home. It was not just the servicemen fighting overseas but also people back home found they were employed in unlikely places because of the war. My father, John Basil Alexander, was employed around 1941/2 at the ICI chemical factory near Fleetwood. He was a maintenance engineer and he had a labourer called Wilfred Duerden. Both were working away from their birthplace. Dad was a widower, his second wife Olive having committed suicide in May 1941. Dad and Olive had a daughter, my half sister Dawn. Wilfred Duerden was the son of a lay reader called Hartley Duerden of Nelson, Lancashire. He had married Jane Leach in 1910 and they had two daughters, Alice and Joan. Wilfred was there as someone engaged in "war work". He was a warp dresser in the textile industry.

It was through Wilfred Duerden that his younger daughter, Joan, met John Basil Alexander. They were married in Fleetwood in August 1942 and lodged in a house in Conway Avenue, Cleveleys. The photo above was taken at their wedding. They had a problem with Dawn because there was nowhere for her to stay with them. Sadly, Dawn was farmed out to a number of people until she was fostered by "Uncle Tom and Auntie Mary" a couple living in Goldbourne near Wigan. I feel sure this gave her great insecurity in later days. She had lost her mother in tragic circumstances and then had been excluded from her new family when her father remarried. How would anyone expect her to feel?

I was born towards the end of 1943 in the Barras Nursing Home, Cleveleys. I don't think it was very long before Mum and Dad moved house to live in a terraced "two up, two down" house in Pine Street, Nelson. The house was owned by Mum's Auntie Alice and Uncle Adam used to call in to collect the rent each week. By December 1947 my brother, Graham was born. Dawn was now living with us so it was getting rather crowded in the small house. So it was not long before we all moved to live in a council house, 38 Marsden Hall Road, Nelson. It was during the short period at Pine Street that we received a surprised visit from my father's brother, Gordon Alexander. He was in the army and was in the area because he had a delivery or collection to make at the Ordnance Depot in Colne nearby. He was the only member of Dad's family I ever met.

My father's years before meeting my mother were a mystery about which he rarely spoke. All I knew was that he had a disciplinarian father who was a commercial traveller in millinery and that there were three boys and one girl in terms of siblings. Claude was the youngest boy and he had died as a POW in Singapore. Gordon was the next oldest boy and Tiss (Grace) was their half sister. I still possess a photograph of my grandfather, John Edgar Alexander and my Uncle Claude.

After a few years of genealogy the Internet began to provide more and more information about family relationships as websites came to existence that had a means of searching for births, marriages and deaths. This meant that I could have another try to find details of my father's past. Mum had pieced together snippets and ended up with a tale of fiction! My grandfather had remained in his family home following the untimely death of my great grandfather, Nathan Alexander in Hertford. Nathan had been the last brother of Peter Alexander to travel south to settle in the Luton area where he built up a lucrative business as a credit draper. In the 1891 census he was shown with his family and a general servant in the household. In 1901 the census showed his widow, Annie, being supported by John Edgar and living in Church Street, Luton.

Looking up John Edgar in 1911 Census, I found that he was living with Gertrude Mary and by then they had two sons, John Basil and Cecil Gordon. Referring to my previous posting, I found that Grace's two full brothers were in the household of Gertrude Mary's parents. I could find no trace of Herbert Jeakings, their father, so I think he must have left without trace. It is my guess that my grandfather decided to live with Gertrude Mary, who was his cousin, and help rear Grace. It is probably the case that because no trace could be found of Jeakings the matter was solved by pretending to be married. They lived in Nottingham before moving to Great Yarmouth where they settled permanently.

From my searched in the General Register Office records I discovered that my father had first married in 1926 at the age of nineteen when he was described as a professional musician. His wife was Eileen Mabel Dye, 19 years old and pregnant. Their son was born in February 1927. They named him Keith John Alexander! At some point later my father must have had an affair with Olive Elsie Cushine of Norwich because I found him living in Kendal, Westmorland when Dawn's birth was registered in 1934. I rather suspect that, because my father had been the guilty party, Eileen was unwilling to give him a divorce until she wished to marry which did eventually happen. My father married Olive Cushine in 1940 by which time Dawn would have been six years old. Olive took her own life the following year. How unhappy she must have been.

Back in Great Yarmouth my grandmother had lost her youngest son in the war. I have the death certificate for Claude and it does not make happy reading. When I first read it I felt that for the first time the war had become a personal thing for me. Gordon had married in 1939 and by 1944 they had a daughter, Barbara Ann. Grace had married in 1923. John Edgar had died in 1938 at the age of sixty five.

All this information I acquired without having to leave my PC! It is surprising to learn the amount of family records in the public domain. FreeBMD is a website where many members have transcribed the GRO indexes to provide the clues to many mysteries for many families. This website is by no means complete as the transcribers keep ploughing on with their work. I would commend genealogy to anyone wishing to know more about their personal past. It is quite fascinating.

Getting started

For a long time I was aware that I had a family history which had a dead spot right in its middle. No doubt I could trace my maternal pedigree to a degree, but it was my paternal side that was the blockage. I felt this was a great pity. "One day," I thought, "I really ought to visit Great Yarmouth where my father grew up and see if I can trace some of his history." As a child you are told snippets of information about the past and your family's part in it. This can be the trigger later in life to starting a family tree. Yet, despite what you have been told, never assume it to be correct. Despite their best attempts, your relatives can get it wrong. You must also realise that what you thought you knew from personal experience is also prone to error.

A friend of mine once remarked that he had done research on his family tree at a local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I thought this was a very strange place to work on a family tree. I later discovered that the Latter Day Saints encourage baptismal candidates to provide details of their ancestors who can also be received into the church "by proxy". Hence this church possesses perhaps the world's largest deposit of information on genealogy to help people locate details of ancestors.

I logged on to the LDS website and began a search for my grandfather, John Edgar Alexander. After a long search his name popped up and I had a start. Knowing that my father had a sister and two brothers of whom I knew very little I hoped to locate them too but was disappointed. I joined the website, GenesReunited, in its infancy and used it to build my online family tree. Looking at a chat section I read of someone being advised to consult the website for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I checked on this site and found an entry for my uncle Claude Nelson Alexander who had died as a POW of the Japanese forces. I had been told as a child that he had died whilst working on the Burma Railway. It was at this point that I discovered he was buried on the island of Singapore! As I said, never assume the accuracy of information you are given by word of mouth. Like all oral tradition it is vulnerable to inaccuracy.

My father's sister went by the nickname, Tiss. All I knew was that she had sent a wreath when he died and Tiss was the name on the message. So I became fascinated to know her real name. It was a number of years before this was revealed when the genealogy website, Findmypast, published the 1911 Census. Until then all was darkness. When I realised that the 1911 Census was available I did a search and was very surprised at what I saw. My mother, Dad's third wife, had said she thought his sister was called Gladys. But the name turned out to be Grace and in the census she was described as adopted daughter. This was true but it opened a real can of worms for me.

A census always requires the compiler to provide the year and place of birth for each person listed. From this I learned that Grace was born in 1901 in St Albans, Hertfordshire. I was over the moon at finding this information together with my father's address in Nottingham at that time. I once went to Nottingham for a job interview and my mother commented that this was where my father came from. I was surprised because everything he had told me as a boy was about growing up in Great Yarmouth. The census provided confirmation that my mother was right.

Now for the can of worms! A fellow user of GenesReunited tried to help get information about my paternal grandmother, Gertrude Mary Alexander nee Carrington. Despite many searches no evidence could be found of a marriage between my grandparents! Subsequently I too did a lot of searching and came up with her marriage to another man, Herbert Jeakings, by whom she had three children. By now the world wide web had become a mine of information for genealogists and I was able to search more deeply for information. It is one of my attributes that I can search long lists and find information if it is there. I did a great deal of this and came up with nothing. I searched year after year for a marriage between John Edgar Alexander and Gertrude Mary Jeakings and drew a blank. I can therefore say, without fear of contradiction, that my paternal grandparents were never married.

Research on my mother's ancestry was much easier. I found on the LDS site my great great grandfather, Wilson Duerden plus many other family members. But more of that in a further posting. I did have the help of one of only two people to possess a copy of the entire parish register of St Bartholomew's church, Colne, Lancashire. Many years before I had taught him to drive, so I looked him up with a view to enlisting his help. It was only when I spoke about the wish to trace my pedigree that he made the comment about having a full copy of the local parish registers. Until 1837 people were recorded in their local parish church register for baptisms, marriages and burials. Until then a couple attending a non conformist church had no option but to be married in the local Anglican church. So one did not have to look far for information on what my mother referred to as "Hatches, Matches and dispatches."

In the next posting I shall give more information on how I expanded my family tree and that of my wife.