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.