All a Big Mistake

As we look back on life, we realise that experiences are instructive, and bad experiences more so than good.  In the overall scheme of things, this week's lesson is not among the greatest disasters ever.  Far from it.  But it has taught me to expect the unexpected and to follow the 'rules', such as they are.  It won't surprise you to learn that this is all connected with my family history.

For the last few weeks I've been digging into the Garrard family.  They're not my blood relatives, but my 6th-great aunt married a Garrard and these are their descendants, so variously my fifth, sixth or seventh cousins.  Last week I was looking at a particular family of eight children born between 1855 and 1873 and by this week I found myself making interesting discoveries regarding their fifth child, Beatrice Mary.

She married a Scottish migrant in 1897 - I found myself thinking of a song by the Dubliners, 'The Dundee Weaver', but this was a draper from Dunbar - and settled in Essex.  In the 1901 census they were shown there with two children, a boy of two and a girl only a few months old.  I eagerly moved on to 1911, hoping to discover the rest of the family.  There, sure enough were John the draper and the children ... but who was this Gertrude, his wife ... and she only 30 to his 48?

It didn't take long to establish that Beatrice had died in 1907 and, after a respectable interval of just over two years, John had remarried in the autumn of 1909.  As seems often to have been the case, the truth was massaged when it came to ages on the census return and I always wonder just how honest a couple was with each other.  Not having access to Scottish birth records, I could only refer to the age given on an earlier census, but when I found Gertrude's birth registration in late 1881, the two together revealed that that eighteen-year age difference was actually more than twenty!

I began to think about the family situation in those years before the First World War and, I confess, my view of the Scottish draper and his young bride was not particularly generous to this man.  However, when I discovered the birth of their daughter in 1912, and imagined the role of the dominant male in the decision of her name, my heart melted somewhat.  She was named Mary Beatrice Gertrude, obviously in honour of both of his wives.  (I do accept that there could be other interpretations, and who are we to judge the motives of those long dead?)

The family was still together in 1939, with Mary now the head of the household, a clerk in the Ministry of Labour, and her parents living with her.  I found no sign of her step-sister, but I traced the draper's firstborn to a soldier's death with the RASC in 1941.  He is commemorated on a memorial in Greece and was mentioned in despatches.

After recording the various discoveries, I was reviewing this whole story and suddenly noticed that, although she was born in 1867, I had recorded Beatrice in 1891 and 1901, but not the two previous censuses in which she would have appeared.  To my surprise, she wasn't there.  The best match I could find was a Beatrice M Garrard living in Ipswich, but her parents were Joseph and Sarah and not the Jonathan and Mary I'd been following.  Amazingly, this Beatrice had two younger siblings whose names matched 'my' family.

Suspicious, I retraced my steps.  How had I come upon these children in the first place?  It was a natural sequence: Jonathan Garrard had married Mary Girling in 1854, so I'd sought Garrard children in the succeeding years, whose mother had the maiden name Girling, and found these eight reasonably spaced registrations the first six of which were all in the same district of Suffolk where Jonathan and Mary had married.  I began to look into Joseph and Sarah and - lo and behold - there was a marriage in 1866 between Joseph Garrard and Sarah Girling.  So far as I could find, although Joseph and Jonathan were born in the same village, they weren't related ... certainly not brothers or first cousins, and there seems to have been no link between Mary and Sarah either.

The principle of 'family reconstruction', which I follow these days, says that you find everyone in all the censuses - or else explain why they aren't there - before you can say hand on heart that the family is the way you are portraying it.  During this period of 'confinement', I decided I would look at some of the earlier discoveries of my twenty years or so of research, and clearly I hadn't been following that discipline when I added those eight children!

My lesson learned, the Scotsman and his family have now been expunged and, although more accurate as a result, my tree is the poorer for their departure.