Found by the Back Door!

It's impossible to know how far our ancestors travelled in their lives, and how far their knowledge extended.  I have friends who are probably more familiar with Barcelona or Majorca than with Birmingham or Manchester, Bridgnorth or Motherwell or any other place you care to mention in the UK, and I have no doubt that knowledge and familiarity in past ages would have varied from person to person just as it does today.  I particular, I wonder whether some of our Victorian ancestors knew who they were related to!

One thing that has fascinated me since I discovered that my future wife was already related to my cousin's cousin (that's well over forty years ago!), is the existence of what I call 'back-door links'.  In other words, the fact that, for two people - typically living, or having families, in rural communities - who aren't even distant cousins - i.e. don't have a common ancestor - through a marriage or sequence of marriages there is a chain of people who link them together.

The cousin whom I've referred to above is my cousin because our mothers were sisters.  That link to my fiancée was through her father's family, so there was no blood relationship.  Earlier this year, as I was researching, and later following up, the twin family trees that I presented to my cousin as a golden wedding present, I tripped over not one but two more such links.

The first of these linked my cousin and me to her husband, John, through the family of our mothers' maternal grandfather.  His great-aunt (we're now back to the early nineteenth century!) married a man called James Pawsey.  John's side of this link is through his maternal grandmother.  Her grandfather's niece married the nephew of James Pawsey.  The link is therefore based on two marriages and a totally independent third family.  In conventional terms, there is no relationship at all, which is why I call this phenomenon a 'link'.

The second such link that I found this year is between John and myself, this time through my father's family.  Dad's paternal grandmother had a first cousin (the son of her mother's brother) named James Bootman.  John is linked once again through his maternal grandmother.  Her uncle married James Bootman's daughter.  This link hinges on just the one marriage, and this time there is no other family involved, but we are still not directly related to each other.

The existence of such links is perhaps not so rare as one might suppose.  Only a few weeks ago I discovered, through a 'memories' website, a second cousin (i.e. granddaughter of one of our grandfather's brothers) who is now living in Australia.  Like us, her descent from this family is through her mother.  However, when I discovered her maiden surname - not a common one - my imagination went into overdrive, and I began making some investigations.

That name, Munford, was the same as that of a family who are linked to ours (i.e. to my cousin and me) by marriage only.  We knew of them because of two elderly cousins of our grandmother who used to visit regularly when we were children.  Their link to us was through the marriage of our great-grandmother's sister, Susan Brickham.  Our newly-discovered second cousin's great-grandfather (her father's grandfather) was a brother of the husband of Susan Brickham.  Amazingly, her father had chosen as his wife a first cousin of our mothers.

You may have switched off after the first paragraph, and decided to wait for next week's blog ... which I assure you will be different!  If, on the other hand, you've persevered this far - with or without pencil and paper - you may be wondering about your own family!  If you have any interesting examples of links like this, do share them through the comments facility below.