She was Already There, Just Waiting for me!

I focus this week on a fortunate happenstance in my labours over the (now famous) eighteen children of the Kerridge family.  Like many young people growing up in rural Suffolk in the dying years of the nineteenth century, Arthur Kerridge had migrated to London in the 1890s.  In my earlier - very hurried - work on the family, I'd found him in Paddington in 1901 and in Stoke Newington in 1911.

Earlier this year, as I've narrated here from time to time, I began to consolidate my earlier research into those eighteen siblings, one of whom was Arthur.  When his turn came, I decided to try out a technique I'd read about concerning the 1921 Census.  Once an initial search has confirmed the identity of the person you're looking for, a limited amount of additional information can be obtained without paying a fee to see the original entry, or even the transcription of it.

Having found Arthur with the confidence of seeing the correct year and place of his birth faithfully presented, I was thus able to obtain two female names in the same household.  It was reasonable to assume that one might be his wife and the other his daughter.  I next looked for the birth of a Kerridge daughter in the years 1911 to 1921, using first one name and then the other.  The family name is sufficiently rare that there was only one index entry that fitted, and I thus discovered that the mother's maiden name was Millership, and this was confirmed by finding a marriage entry a short while before.  I entered the marriage and the birth into my records, and successfully went on to find the good lady's birth entry.

The final step was to see where she had been from birth to marriage.  I looked for this rather unusual name in 1911, noted the reference and found the place to enter it in my records.  I have now to link my amazement with the admission of my blinkered examination of the family I'd just found in my search.  I discovered that they were already entered there ... along with a boarder named Kerridge!  I now had the answer to the unasked question: how did he meet his wife?

I recall writing here about an earlier example of a pre-recorded discovery, so I had decided against telling this story here today.  However, as I look back over a busy week, I notice a couple of similar 'already there' situations, which I can now add  for interest.

I wrote last week about wrestling with QuickBooks, in an attempt to revitalise an account that hadn't been used for some years.  Apart from the historic entries already in the system, another problem I face is my aim to utilise the program to record information relative to a number of different sectors of an operation.  It appears - and I hope I will be proved wrong - that the field where this information can be input is not available when entering bank receipts and payments ... which is one of the key areas of what a charity does!

On Thursday, I faced the possibility of having to revise every single transaction that I'd already entered, but yesterday I looked again at one of the reports that I'd printed out in my efforts to establish what was going wrong.  I noticed that in one column was listed the totals, by account, of all the entries that didn't have this information.  All I had to do was to transfer these numbers - about 40 of them - to the right place and ... Bingo!  The next report I ran had all the results I'd expected to see, and nothing that was unwanted.  It appears to be 'all systems go' from here on.

I also mentioned last week a lull in my work for WEBBS.  It came to an end earlier this week.  When I received a second assignment the other day, I was warned that one chapter would need to be re-typed because the original had been over-written by half of the next chapter.  As I looked into it, I wondered how this could have happened.  I have no proof, of course, but it did seem possible that the 'save' operation offers the name of the file last saved.  Suppose the typist had got halfway through the following chapter and needed to take a break for a meal, perhaps, or simply to ease the mind.  It's the easiest thing to simply hit 'return' instead of keying in a new filename, especially if fatigue had been building.  There was already a name on the screen ...

So, having realised just how common this phenomenon is, I'm now wondering what next I shall look for when it's right under my nose ... for good or ill.