Cobblers' Children!

The proverb that gives me my title this week is centuries old.  One source places the earliest reference to it in a book of 1546 and another even suggests that a similar meaning is to be found in Holy Writ at Luke 4:23, but I think this is stretching the point somewhat.  The version I heard in my formative years ran, "Cobblers' children are always the worst shod", and it came to mind earlier this week as I found time to dabble in my favourite lockdown hobby, the family history.

In recent weeks I've had two major 'background' projects on the go, and these get neglected when they unearth something worthy of the diversion ... rather like the snow plough patrol that discovers a hole in the road and turns workers enjoying seasonal overtime back into road maintenance operatives on an emergency shift.

The first of these projects is to label all the unlabelled birth and death records that I've collected over the years with a reference to the subject characters in my database.  The other is adorning the database itself with reference to the appearance of each character in the censuses that took place during his/her lifetime ... if not all, then at least those that indicate a change of locality or an interesting occupation.

It was this latter that I was engaged on the other day when I came across a couple who were the parents of a sizeable family but oddly enough, my record showed no trace of their marriage.  Now this might be a fairly common situation today, but it was far less so in early-Victorian England.  Added to this was the fact that the woman was a sister of one of my great-great-grandmothers, i.e. a close enough family member to warrant all possible facts to have been documented and recorded.  On closer examination, my horror was extended by the absence of the deaths of either her or her husband and few, if any, birth references for their children!

What had gone wrong with my system?  The answer was simple, but no less incriminating.  The arrival of these 'characters' in my records was many years ago, when my known tree was expanding far more rapidly than is presently the case.  I had been in correspondence with two of their descendants, who had each provided details of their own families, linking back to this couple.  I had incorporated these names and dates into my database before hurriedly moving on to another letter or e-mail.  I had then been so engrossed in the further expansion of my tree that I never gave a thought to verifying and properly documenting the information I'd been given.

So, thank you, third cousins Brenda and John (some eighteen years late) for all these details.  I have at last filled in the missing link in our joint families.  I can now tell you that your great-great-grandparents were married in the June quarter of 1849, and confirm the legitimacy of each of you being my fourth cousin.