Family history part 3

One of my hobbies is family history research, which I do when I can between everything else. Recently I’ve been researching two families from Cornwall, partly because the Cornwall Online Parish Clerks website has an extensive database and easy-to-use search. 

One of my great-great-great-great-grandmothers had the surname Trevaskis. Except that it appears as Trevascus on her baptism record in 1798. The baptism records for that parish record a Trevaskes in 1693, then Trevascus (1708), Treveskeys (1711), Trevascas (1768), Trevaskis (1780), Trevaskus (1780) and  Trevarcus (1785). Then in 1819, everyone decided that they were going to use the spelling Trevaskis. It is possible that these were different families, each with their own spelling, and that the others died out, but I doubt it. The family which used the  spelling Trevaskis in 1819 previously used Trevascus in 1804 and 1807, Trevaskus in 1809, Trevascus again in 1811 (two records, for Jennifer and Jenifer), Trevascus and Trevaskus in 1814 (two records for one child), Trevaskis and Trevaskus in 1816 (two records for another child) and finally Trevaskis in 1819 (two records, for Margaret Trevaskis and Margaret Edwards Trevaskis).

But we can’t blame the families for this. There was less standardisation of spelling in general, and the information which I am seeing on the internet has gone through at least two sets of ears/eyes, brains and hands – the vicar or parish clerk of the day and the volunteer transcriber of recently. The database search allows for wildcards – I found all of the above (as well as Trevanen and Trevorrow, each with a smaller number of variants) by searching for trev%. (PS the website says, in the small print: “We make no warranty whatsoever as to the accuracy and completeness of the data”.)

I’ve discovered branches of the family which I either didn’t know existed, or only had the most basic information for. But sometimes I hit a brick wall. One great-great-great-grandmother was married in 1855 and came to Australia in 1857. Is she the girl of that name baptised in that village on 12 Apr 1835, or the one of the same name baptised in the same village on 17 April 1836? Or was she one of the six other girls of the same name baptised elsewhere in Cornwall in those two years, or was she older or (possibly) younger than that? (And it’s not the case that the first one died young and the parents gave the second one the same name – the two have different parents.) I may never know. It also does not help that there was a limited supply of given names, and most children only had one given name – this one had a middle name, and there’s still that choice. (But I did find another ancestress (and more of her family) because of a very unusual middle name.)

By the way, my ancestry is English and probably Welsh on my father’s side, and Scottish, Scots-Irish, Irish (probably Scots-Irish) and Cornish on my mother’s. Various great-, great-great- and great-great-great-grandparents came to Australia between the 1840s and 1880s. We know almost of the great-great-great-grandparents’ names, with a greater or lesser amount of details, and with some families traced beyond that. Most of what I’ve done is collating information from other family members, plus some research of my own.

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Family history part 2

After our father died, a cousin of my mother’s father sent a card and we needed to figure out where she fitted in. I found a family tree which traces that family back to the Kings of Scotland. I was looking at that again, and spotted the name Margaret of Scotland, who was the wife of Malcolm who becomes king at the end of Macbeth (which is before they were married). She was known for her faith and charity, and is a saint in some parts of the church.

(I suspect that millions of people of Scottish heritage can say the same.)

Family history

My sisters and I have been notifying relatives and friends of our father’s death. One of them got a card from our mother’s father’s cousin. Given that our grandfather would be 115, how old is his cousin? One sister found a family history website that gives her year of birth as 1926, so she’s 92 – her father married late.

That’s a very big family history website. How far back does that go? One section (a family tree showing names only) traces that side of the family back to Scotland in 1520 (with a lot of Majors and The Reverends along the way). (At one point there were three Major John [surname]s in a row. The first was the son of Sir John, just to be different.) Impressive. But another section of the site (giving more or fewer biographical details for each person) traces the family back through earls of various places in Scotland (at one point there were three Earl Patricks in a row) to King Duncan – you know, the one fictionally killed by Macbeth (apparently the real Macbeth didn’t kill the real Duncan, but defeated him in battle) (you mean Shakespeare made stuff up?). The male line stops at Duncan’s father, but Duncan’s wife’s family traces back to Kenneth MacAlpin, the first ‘King of Scots’ (my 35x great-grandfather, if I’ve counted correctly) and past him to semi-history/semi-legend then complete legend.

I may have written a different essay for year 11 English if I’d known that.