A Much-Blessed Survivor!

You know how it is when you're doing something repetitive.  You wonder if perhaps there might be a better way of doing it that would save time or effort ... or both and, depending on the circumstances, possibly a whole lot of money, too!  I found myself in just such a situation some years ago, tried doing it a different way and realised that this wasn't the first time that week that I'd changed my method and improved the technique.  Observing that that particular task, once finished, was unlikely to recur, I coined the mantra: "By the time I've finished this job, I'll have refined to the utmost a skill that I'll never need again."

Once it was into my head, I've been astonished just how often this has proved to be true.  The latest example of this truism came this week.  Early this year, I joined an organisation whose aim is the provision of ancillary services to Christian missionaries, one of whose activities is the conversion of printed scriptures into a digital format for more modern and wider use in teaching people whose first language might be in common use by only a few thousand people across the world.

Apart from the basic typing operation, which I started with, there are other standard processes that lead to the completion of each project, and I've now progressed to the second level of this sequence that carries the label 'Editing'.  In addition to these standard processes, the same bespoke software we use is also able to tackle a number of 'one-off' tasks that particular projects require ... I expect you can already see where this line is going.  One such task came my way this week, a case of basic data manipulation within a series of  digital documents, each of which was a book of the Bible in the client language.

Along with a small number of fellow-editors, I was asked to perform this job using the program in whatever way we found it convenient to achieve the specified object, so long as the result still adhered to the printed original.  Needless to say, by the end of the task I'd tried several different approaches, at the end of which the same 'By the time I've finished ...' axiom had been proven yet again.

Some eight years ago, in my family history studies, I devised a check-list to make sure that all the various records that I keep had been completed.  The form itself has passed through seven or eight iterations, reaching what - for the present, at least - is the most useful document for the purpose.  Much of my spare time over the last year and more has been devoted to one particular branch of my family, about which I've occasionally written here.  My basic intention when I set out last autumn was to fill in some of the blanks in earlier data that more recent use of my document had revealed.

The 'Bullingham Project', as it became known, proved to be many times bigger than I first thought and, the longer it dragged on, the more I bemoaned the fact that I hadn't devised my checklist earlier.  I can relate the story of one particular young lady, whose family had fallen victim to just the degree of glossing over and oversight that the project was intended to overcome.  I might add in mitigation that more information has become available since original research announced her existence, but my checklist might have avoided some of the problems had it been in use at the time. 

This particular woman delighted in the distinctive forenames 'Alice Octavia'.  Alice was the youngest of a family of eight (as you might guess).  In 1901, her family appears in as correct a form as possible: father, mother, two sons and five daughters, listed in sequence, of whom Alice was the last-named.  With that name, Octavia, she had to be the eighth child, though.  Usually in these circumstances, my next step would be to look at the 1911 census, where the so-called 'fertility' questions would provide the precise boundaries for the research.  In this instance this facility was denied me, however, since the mother of these children died in 1903.  (This resource isn't always as helpful as it might seem, either.  I remember looking at one family where the woman claimed to have had twelve children, of whom seven were still living.  However, apart from the seven living ones, I was able to trace only one more child who had been born and died between censuses, and therefore never been recorded.)

At the time of my original research, I had found one instance of a birth and death in the same quarter, and had included this child as the eighth one I had been looking for.  As I now looked at the page with fresh eyes, though, I was suspicious.  My cousin, Alice's daughter, had provided me with the precise birth dates of her mother and the six aunts and uncles she knew.  Her mother was born in November 1900, and her youngest aunt in July 1898.  The birth of the infant I'd found, who had died in the same quarter as she was born, had also been registered in the September quarter of 1898.  Although there was no note to that effect, I think I had previously thought of these two as twins, one of whom had died, and the other survived.

I felt I ought to check.  If this were the case, then their birth registrations would be identical (or would differ by one, if one child were the last entry on one page and the other the first entry on the next page).  In this case, Alice's known sister was registered with the number 974; the infant who died appeared under the reference 970 ... unlikely if they were twins.  Since that initial research, the Registration Office has released the new facility, where the mother's maiden name of each birth registration can be looked up on line.  This makes research of this nature much simpler.  I checked all seven of the 'known' children and found that the name applied to each registration was Bailey, confirming the family link.  The name for the child under reference 970 was ... Parsons.  She was clearly not the girl - or boy - I sought.

Next, I checked each year around the times these known children were born, right back to the time of their parents' marriage (and a little before 'just in case'), both in the Suffolk area where the family were living and also where the marriage took place, which was in London, Miss Bailey having been born in Kent.  Eventually, I came up with just one additional birth with the mother's maiden name shown as Bailey, and a quick check revealed that she, too, had died within weeks of her birth, and so missed any census record.  'Annie, born and died 1898' was quickly changed to 'Mary Jane, born and died 1890', and I noted with some satisfaction that this infant had also been given two forenames as had all of her siblings, except for two who had enjoyed the luxury of three! 

One of these - the firstborn of the eight - had his own distinctive name, George, to which had been appended both of his father's, Allen James, while the daughter born in the jubilee year of 1897 was called by the names of three generations of royalty, Victoria Alexandra May, these last two being the spouses of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and the Duke of York (later George V).

My wonderful checklist (now identified as version 3.2), though tedious, is one I now use constantly, and has long surpassed its original inclusion in the 'when I've finished' category described above.