Wednesday 4 August 2010

A time of correction and frustration

Around three weeks have passed since my last post and during this time I have been busy in a number of areas. Firstly a point I need to correct from an earlier blog. On 1st of July I wrote of the tiny village of Wildboarclough and what I was told was the old school house. Since then, whilst at work within the local jobcentre I was engaging with a lady who had just lost her job, we were going through her financial statement and she remarked on the incorrect post office entered by the contact centre, I looked and it was one in Macclesfield, this turned out to be where she was brought up and the post office was the one where she had claimed her family allowance in years past. I afforded myself a little chuckle and the lady in question asked why, and if I had relations up there. I told her part of my story and her eyes widened as I spoke. As it happens she had spent many a long day in this beautiful little place as her schoolfriend lived in the old school house at the time!
This is where the correction comes, the photo I have posted is not the school house, which apparently was located opposite the church. I really can't remember whether there was a nearer house than the old post office building (which at one time housed the schoolroom) or not. Suffice to say, the one I was told was, isn't!

Anyway,
I have made a little progress on the search for Pop's sibling relations but it is most frustrating at the moment. I have got a "hot match" on Genes Reunited which shows three of the descendants, Eric, Audrey and Patricia Holdsworth. I have contacted the tree owner, but as yet haven't received any response. As you can probably imagine this is a matter of considerable frustration. It's been almost a month now and I'm starting to suspect the tree owner no longer uses the site.

I have also renewed and redoubled my attempts to progress further up Fanny Tearle's line and have at last had some success. Going over old ground is sometimes fruitful, as the online records are sometimes amended when someone  (like me) picks up some errors in the transcribing of the details. I decided to do a trawl of the area of Hexham by postal address rather than by name, a most laborious task I know. However, I started to notice that some of the entries were for a family name of Rigg, I looked into the original records and spotted these were actually Pigg and had been read incorrectly by whoever made the original web copy. Doing a search using Rigg I was able to locate the census records for Ann Pigg (mother to Fanny) for 1841 and 1851, also gaining provenance between these and records already in my posession by locating her widowed mother at the same address that Fanny was born.
So there we are, moving back yet again I now have Annie Pigg's parents, both from the Northumberland area although I'm still not certain of Ann's (Annie) father. On all the censuses it is stated her father was William Pigg, a stonemason or quarryman, so why did she enter her father as William Fenwick on her marriage certificate?
As the old song goes "There are more questions than answers".

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