32 Ancestors Challenge - Week 23 - Mistake

 

With any genealogical research it is easy to make a mistake, especially when you are beginning your family research. 

Its easy to assume you have the right person if you find a person of the right name in the right place and the right time.  It is not always the case. 

Another common mistake is to believe that all online family trees are correct.  Some are, and have been compiled after many years of meticulous research, other are not, do not contain references to where the ‘facts’ have come from, attach chunks of other unproved pedigrees to their tree and so on.

In order to prove that your descent is as correct as can be ascertained by documentary proofs, each person on a family tree should be verified by at least three pieces of documentary proof. These proofs being evidence such as civil registration certificates of birth, marriage and death, wills, and census returns.  To this can be added parish register entries of baptism, marriage and burial, monumental inscriptions (if you are lucky), and other secondary sources. 

Each documentary source needs to be scrutinised  and the details from each compared to an extent that you are satisfied that you have discovered the right relation.   If there are several people in a parish with the same name, evidence of occupation, and family members from census returns can narrow down the possible outcomes, or indeed some can be discarded, at that point, if they are found to have died young.

Research methods and access to digitised records have revolutionised how and where we do our research.  Much initial research can  now be done via the internet at home, but, eventually most people will need to visit record offices and archives as not everything is online.

Easy mistakes to make are:

Picking the wrong ‘John Smith’ as your ancestor and therefore tracing the wrong family.

Right name, right wife, right date – but – wrong occupation?  You would need to look at a combination of birth, marriage and death certificates, census returns and parish registers to pinpoint the right person.  A census is a snapshot of a family at ten yearly intervals and a lot can change in the intervening years, there may be second or even third marriages, children are born and sometimes die young, people move for work.  

Right name, wrong location – Men sometimes had to move away from their birthplace to find work, or to pursue a career in the military, church or professional occupations.   You can also look in the parishes next to the one you think the family lived in – in my experience there are often marriages with brides from parishes surrounding the main parish of residence, and therefore sometimes children are baptised in ancestral or maternal parishes.

I can’t find any baptisms, but I know they lived there - Perhaps the family were nonconformist so did not worship in the Anglican church.  In England we have Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Quakers and many other smaller sects.  In my own family. Mum’s family were all nonconformist way back to the late 1700s.  Sometimes attendance at a different church was due to the vicar and his sermons, good or bad.

It's not spelt right, so he’s not mine – Spellings vary and up to quite late in the 20^th century there was no real standardisation of spelling of surnames.  As I have mentioned in a previous blog article, phonetic spelling was the norm as you delve further into your family.

I made a few mistakes when I was starting out in my research.  During lockdown I decided to revisit some of my collateral lines to see if I could make any more progress, with the advances in genealogical datasets and digitised records.  Way back in the 1980s we did have the IGI so to some extent one could find entries in parish registers which might be useful, but, to be sure you do need to see the original record, which in many cases today have been digitised.

For Hertfordshire research FindMyPast have digitised some of the parish registers, which have proved useful to me in my search for the true origins of my Mole ancestors, coupled with the census returns and other record sets available via Ancestry.com.

In the earlier 1980s research on the Mole / Moles / Moules family I compiled a huge Moles family tree, based on entries from the IGI, from the North Hertfordshire area, which in hindsight may not be as accurate as it could be.  Impressive it might have been going back to the 1600s, but could I tie my own family conclusively to those earlier people.  Top of the tree was a George Mole, a licenced Hawker from Baldock.   The names of Thomas, William and George were popular in all the family lines I traced.

My great grandmother, Emma, was baptised in Willian, Hertfordshire on 15 December 1868.  The baptismal record from All Saints, Willian states that she was born on 10 July 1868 and that she was privately baptised.  A private baptism was usually usually done because the child was sickly, sometimes by the midwife.  Luckily for Emma, there is also a note that she was received into the Church on July 28,so she must have flourished.  Emma’s father, George Moles was a labourer.  Emma’s mother was called Emma too.

In the 1861 Census of Willian, George and his family are living in a cottage in Willian

George Moles   Head     Mar        30           Farmer’s Shepherd          Herts     Willian

Emma Moles    Wife      Mar        24                                                    Beds      Biggleswade

Eliza Moles        Dau                      3                                                    Herts     Willian

Sarah Moles       Dau                      2                                                     Beds      Biggleswade

Susan Moles       Dau                      6ms                                                Herts     Willian

 

It is clear from this that the family were moving between Willian and Biggleswade, about 20 miles away in the first few years of their marriage.

George and Emma were married at Willian in 1857.  George’s father was stated as being a William Mole, whilst Emma’s father was called Thomas Rook.  Both fathers were Labourers.  George and Emma made their mark in the registers, as they were illiterate, with the witnesses being a Thomas Mole and a Mary Giles who could both sign their names.

You will notice the Moles / Mole spelling difference, whereas my Gt-Grandmother was married as a Moules.

From Quarter Sessions records indexes I discovered that a George Mole was charged with assaulting his Aunt, the publican of the Three Horse Shoes in Willian, knocking her down and giving her a blackeye, all over a disputed sum of money he owed her and she wanted repaid.   Is this the same George Mole as my ancestor? There is no other of this name of the right age in Willian at the time. A bit of a 'rough 'un' as they say, or was he desperate? 

It is clear from the census and parish register entries that my family were not very well off, with a large family to support, so it could be our George.   Whether the landlady was a maternal or paternal aunt I have still to discover.

From searching the Willian census returns 1841 and 1851 a clearer picture emerged of the parents of our George.

1841

Thomas Moles                   60           Ag Lab                   No (not born in Herts)

Thomas Moles Jnr            13           Ag Lab                    Yes

Mary Ann Moles               59                                           No

Eliza Moles                       15                                           Yes

Wm Moles                         35           Labr                       No

George Moles                    10           Labr                       Yes

Eliza Moles                        8                                            Yes

Thomas Moles                   3                                             Yes

Hanah Moles                     35                                           Yes

Maria Moles                       13                                           Yes

 

1851

Thomas Moles                   Head     69           Ag Lab                   Beds      Stotfold

Mary Ann Moles               Wife      67           letter woman     Devon, St Sidwell. Exeter

 

And further along the street

William Moles                   Head     47           Ag Lab                   Beds      Stotfold

Hanah Moles                     Wife      46           Platting                 Herts     Willian

Eliza Moles                         Dau        18                                                           “

Betsey Moles                     Dau        9                                                              “

Hannah Moles                   Dau        2                                                              “

Thomas Moles                   Son        12                                                          “                                             

 

From the Willian parish registers I discovered that a William Mole and a Hannah Pratt were married on 20 May 1827 at Willian, so this tallies with the knowledge we have so far.

Interestingly, there seem to be family ties with Stotfold in Bedfordshire, about 5 miles from Willian.

I then searched, via an Ancestry dataset, for a baptism of a Thomas Moles in Stotfold about 1800 and found a likely candidate, based on the approx. age stated in the census.

1804 May 20  William, the son of Thomas and Mary Moles baptised

Thomas Moles senior also stated that he was born in Stotfold, with an approx. date of birth of 1782.

A further search for Moles in Stotfold found another possible baptism

1781 April 13      Thomas, son of Thomas and Mary Moul baptised.

A marriage of a Thomas Moules and a Mary Langham was also found in Stotfold on 19 November 1778, so this could be the parents of the Thomas baptised in 1781.

Whether my original IGI based tree, and my ‘real’ tree will ever tie up I am not sure yet, but you never know.  The families all seem to come from the Willian, Norton, Baldock, Stotfold area, with a slight detour north to Biggleswade. 

If you look at the sketch map below, all the parishes are more or less in a straight line and straddle the Great North Road which is roughly where the A1 motorway is now, a trade and transport route for a very long time.  My Great Grandmother's family and their descendants mostly lived in the Hitchin, Norton and Baldock area, apart from the siblings who went north to Keighley in Yorkshire for work, but that is a story for another time.