A Numerical Adventure

It's been one of those weeks ... Everyday life continues to flow according to a comfortable structure.  Work has changed from full days to half days because of the latest lockdown, but it's just as satisfying and involves getting up with the alarm on the same two days.  On the news front there's nothing spectacular happening either.  Covid is still killing hundreds every day - though I know that's certainly spectacular in a very sad way for those who've lost loved ones - and even Biden winning the presidential election isn't news any longer.

One piece of good news yesterday was the picture of a bespectacled northern gentleman walking out of 10 Downing Street.  I say 'gentleman' in its broadest possible sense, of course.  His cold and sinister appearance, along with the reputation that goes with it, betrays the warmth and welcome of all the northerners I know.

But, blog-wise, this tranquillity provides me with a lack of substance and, as is so often the case, I turn to the family history for inspiration.  I wrote the other week of my current major projects, each in its way a correction of earlier oversight, and the way that my attention to these had been distracted by the discovery of a whole branch of my family tree where records I had received from distant cousins had remained un-checked and undocumented for many - too many! - years.  This distraction has grown legs!

Digging up records, whether on line or at the record office, is far more attractive than entering administrative cross-references, and I decided that I would take each person in this branch and trace them, so far as I could, from birth to death through all the available censuses.  According to a book I got a few years ago, this is a process known as 'family reconstruction' and, ever since I discovered that the 1911 census carries the details of every married woman's children: how many she had borne and how many were still living at the time of the census, it's something that I've tended to do for the majority of my 'new discoveries'.

This particular family is the one that embraces my 'ancestor no. 27'.  This reference is derived from a system that will be known to those of my readers who have dabbled in family history themselves.  It's known as an Ahnentafel number.  The name is derived from German and means 'ancestor table'.  In this system, I am no. 1, my parents are nos. 2 and 3, my grandparents 4,5,6 and 7, and so on, with the father of each individual being given a number that is twice his or hers, and the mother that number plus one.  If you run this sequence up two more generations, you will find that no. 27 is the mother of my mother's paternal grandmother or, in other words, one of my eight great-great-grandmothers, by name Eliza Burlingham (or Bullingham ... some members of the family used one name, some the other).

The family I'm working through therefore comprises all of her brothers and sisters, their respective wives and husbands, ... their children ... and their spouses and grandchildren.  So far, since the middle of October, I've added to my database 31 individuals of whom I had no knowledge before, and who were born between 1830 and 1911.  The greatest surprise came after I'd entered the husband of Sarah, one of Eliza's elder sisters, and discovered that they had two daughters.  When I made to enter the name of the first to my database, I found that she was there already ... along with her own husband, eight children, three grand-children and a great-grandson with whom I've been exchanging Christmas greetings for many years!  That daughter had married her cousin, who happened to be Eliza's son.  Having discovered the son's marriage some while ago, I'd never explored his wife's family.

I'm fascinated by the way that, although in a comparatively small area of the country, there are links between different branches of my tree, albeit not often so closely linked as this.  This is the twenty-first time one person has claimed two places in my researches and I can't help wondering how many more I shall find!