A year ago, ‘Hanging by a thread‘ traced the delicate strands which led to establishing the family of John Harper Smith junior, master mariner {1}. I speculated that the reasons he and his spouse couldn’t be found in 1871 and 1881 England census was that they could be on voyages out of British waters.
Continue reading Word-Smithing from Smyrna or Lyrical lines from Lydia {2}.
Discovering more about the Smith part of the family tree has proved remarkably easy, after having put off looking for ages due to the very common surname.
See Entirely to the Water from Birth for first stages.
Continue reading Hanging by a thread Discovering the Smith family
It is not often nowadays that an article in Who Do You Think You Are? magazine sends me off immediately to follow it up. But the March issue, received yesterday, has a Focus article on ‘Masters and Mates Certificates’ {4} which indicated it was worth checking to see if the 3 x great grandfather who had the title Captain could be found. He was born in the 1790s, so was already a master mariner when certificates came in from 1850.
Continue reading Entirely to the Water from Birth The nautical Harper Smiths
So this makes the nice large wall chart of dad’s family “out of date”, if that’s the right phrase for having newly discovered historic information. With a bit of help from the Ancestry Facebook page {1}, I’ve downloaded the 1911 census form for my ‘half great great uncle’ William John Cullum from the actual Ancestry site. And yes, there is another offspring who was not recorded in the 1901 version. I had guessed there would be two, so I won’t make any great claims here.
