of Rabbit Holes and Fence Posts

Yesterday's post brought me a gardening magazine and seed catalogue.  They came in a scrunched up bundle, it having been folded in order to squash it through the letterbox.  I had wrenched this open before I had realised that it wasn't intended for me, but for someone with the right house number in a street the other side of town, whose mail I have had mis-delivered on one or two previous occasions.

Notwithstanding the confusion of the delivery service and the fact that these items are of no use to me, and can no longer be re-delivered either, they do provide a tenuous link to my title this week.  However, the only thing I'm likely to grow - in the total absence of a garden of any description - is a rich crop of mixed metaphors!

'Rabbit holes' is a genealogical term that has come only recently into my cognisance.  I understand it to refer to investigations such as have formed substance for posts here a number of times.  These have arisen because I have tripped over a family whose link to my own is, at the very least, distant but who have aroused my curiosity or sympathy.  In terms of furthering my overall aim, they are distinctly 'off-piste'.

I have often drawn 'fences' into conversations in the past in an accounting sense (although so many years after the event, I can no longer remember the precise circumstances when I might do so).  In essence, their purpose would have been to determine certain considerations that ought to be deemed someone else's concern rather than mine.  That same analogy applies here, but up to now, these metaphorical fences have never had posts to hold them in place.  They have moved to and fro according to the presence or otherwise of tasty lettuces on the other side. (Sorry - is that a metaphor too far?) 

I've been digging into the family - much reported here - of the siblings of my 2xgreat-grandmother, Eliza Burlingham, and more recently into that of one of her nieces, Eliza Batley, who had nine children with her husband Henry James Kent.  Of these, two were killed in the First World War, one died at the age of three and another was married for fifteen years with no children and died leaving a widow who subsequently married a widower with four children.  The other five all married and between them produced a total of seventeen grandchildren, most of whom also married and had further progeny ... all of whom would be my third or fourth cousins.

With so many actual relations to occupy my attention, you would think I'd be content, but no ...  This week I've become fascinated by Henry James Kent, his father of the same name, and his four siblings.  In the case of all of these, if I were to enter them into the report screen of my family history software and ask it to compute their relationship to me, I would be told politely, 'Having checked them up to a maximum of 350 ancestors in 20 generations, we have found no common ancestors.  They are not related.'  My interest has been intensified because - like the Jex family I wrote about here - they all grew up in Norwich, many in the city centre streets that I was familiar with when I worked there fifty-odd years ago, including one family living in 1911 in the very street where my office was situated sixty years afterwards!

Some of the occupations were peculiar to Norwich, too.  I wonder how many of my readers, or their parents or grandparents, would have added a blue bag to the final rinse of their white wash?  Some of these young people worked as 'blue packers'.  There was also a strong concentration of basket makers and rush platters and, of course, all the variety of specialisms in the shoe industry.

I have finally realised the need for my fences to have posts, and I have defined a post as a second marriage (but not in the sense of one person's second marriage following the death of a former spouse).  I have decided that, when I'm already looking at someone who is only linked to me by marriage, then I will include him/her and their siblings, and possibly the siblings' spouses, but if I then have to invoke two marriages in order to define their relationship to me, then their children, however interesting, will not qualify.

I take this decision just in time to prevent my having to delve any deeper into a mystery relating to the family of Amelia Scarles, the wife of Henry Kent's youngest brother.  She appears to have had two sisters named Elizabeth and Eliza.  Eliza died at the age of eighteen months, and Elizabeth married in 1884 and died soon after.  Her widower was living with the family as 'son-in-law' in the 1891 census.  But Elizabeth appears in the same census with a husband she married in 1883, and with five children, whose birth registration indicates that their mother Elizabeth had the same surname as Amelia!

Some people are better left beyond the pale!