Take one 4xg-Grandparent week 62 - 5 - 11 Oct 2012
 

This is our weekly challenge to see how much information you can find out about each of your 4xg-grandparents. Because there are so many brick walls at this stage, we are expecting that you will have quite a few missing 4xg-grandparents, and that the ones you do post up will have quite a few gaps to fill in. For this challenge, we ask that you only post a thread if you know the first name of your ancestor. You are allowed to post up to two threads each per week, e.g. your own ancestor and your OH's as well.


This week, we are focussing on your father's mother's father's father's father's mother.
If you want to take part, just start a new thread on this board and put your 4x-great-grandmother's name in the Title. Copy the following form and fill in the answers that you already have, then over the course of the next week you try to fill in the blanks and everyone else helps you. If you're lucky enough to have all the information already, then you can still post it up if you want, so that search engines can pick it up.

Can you fill in all of the following information about that person:

Name - "official" name and what they were known as
Date and place of birth
Names of parents
Date and place of baptism - if applicable
Details of each of his or her marriages - if any
Occupation(s) - if any
Addresses where they lived (including county if in UK) - and please list which censuses you have or haven't found him/her on (if s/he lived in census times!).
Date, place and cause of death
Date and place of burial.
Details of will / administration of their estate - if applicable
Memorial inscription - if any


Adoptive or step-4x-great-grandparents welcome!

Also, if you have posted a thread in TO3G for this ancestor's son, could you please include a link to that thread (tag search TO3G9).

And if you have posted a thread in TO4G for this ancestor's spouse, please also include a link to that thread. If you search for the tag TO4G3, you should find it.

Unfortunately I can't do this one - my FMFF was illegitimate so I've no idea who his father was.

This is a prob for me in quite a number of branches. Interestingly, in the Scottish OPRs, the fathers tend to be named and the birth recorded as 'natural' rather than 'lawful'. It's a big problem for post 1855 births where too many registrars left the father's name blank. However, the Scottish habit of feminising a male Christian name and bunging in surnames as middle names means I have managed to come up with likely candidates . Yes, Mr Alexander Brodie, living in Aberdour, you fathered a daughter with Christina Morris of Aberdour. Your daughter's name? Alexandrina Brodie Morris. Similarly, a Robert Swinton McGlary was born illegitmate. But living in the next street to Robert's mum was a certain Robert Swinton. Neither of these two men were named on birth certificates, though. So I do wonder whether it is OK to put them in my tree. Any thoughts?

Proceed with caution! I've added several people to my tree based on name-related hunches - most have them were later proved correct, but there was one which turned out to be wrong which I only found out about five years later, having wasted a fair amount of time and money on researching that branch. The aforementioned FMFF had no father named on his birth certificate - his given name was William and he had no middle name, so not too many clues to be had there! On my mother's side there's one woman (pre-civ reg) who had four illegitimate children; three were baptised and had the father's name recorded in the register, the fourth wasn't - and naturally the one who wasn't had to be the one from whom I'm descended. If the father was the same in the other three cases it would be a reasonable bet that he was in the fourth too, but no - they were all different, so the father of the fourth could have been any of the others or someone else again. Since some of the other documents which might have revealed the father's identity were considered too fragile to be entrusted to an amateur, I had to pay for the research service at the relevant RO to get at the information, but although the Overseer of the Poor's account book revealed some interesting details of payments made to the family, it didn't, as I had hoped, mention pursuing the father for maintenance money. I think it's reasonable to assume that if the professionals couldn't find any record of him either then it's almost certain that no such record exists, so I've given up on that one now.

Have you looked to see whether the likely fathers left wills?

Alexander Brodie - who was married at the time Alexandrina Brodie was born in the same village he and Alexandrina's mother lived in - left a will. No mention of Alexandrina, though. And that is the one and only will I have ever found in connection to my family.