For the full background on this subject please see here.

A couple of months ago I acquired a CD with the Parish records for St Nicholas (Chiswick) from 1855 to 1901. It revealed the details of my main suspect for my Alice West, living a stone’s throw from my great-grandfather Henry Clinch… this was not the right Alice West. My great-grandmother was Alice Maud West, and this one turned out to be Alice Jane West. Disappointing maybe, but by this point I had two options, and this removed one of them.

The other major development during the past couple of months was the early availability of the 1911 census (following a successful challenge under the Freedom of Information Act to bring it forward from 2012). Of course, I headed straight for the record of Henry Clinch and ‘wife’ Alice – information recorded six months before the birth of my grandmother – and it revealed one important detail… that she was born in Acton. This was rather interesting – it recorded Henry as being born in Chiswick, but the 1901 census shows the two birth places reversed. This could have been an error on the part of the census recorder. Ten years later the head of the household was responsible for entering the details, so you’d have to assume Henry wouldn’t have got it wrong.

So, knowing that Alice West was born in Acton, I turned back to a birth certificate that my mum’s cousin Susan had sent me (she acquired it based on a strong hunch) and two previous census records (1881 and 1891). Although the family had moved from Acton to Hammersmith everything matched up… Alice Maud West born in Acton at the right time, and her parents’ names matched the census information to the birth certificate.

Knowing this was the right Alice West, it confirmed the names of her parents – Frederick West and Harriet Underwood (and we’ll call him Frederick West, not Fred West). Tracing back further, Harriet was born in the tiny Hampshire village of Froxfield Green and was the daughter of Stephen Underwood and Harriet Restall. Stephen, born around 1819, was listed as an agricultural labourer, but also as the Parish Clerk – which says that he was literate. Frederick West was born in the Kingston area, the son of John West (unfortunately not an heir to the tinned fish empire) and Sarah (surname as yet unknown). Frederick lived in The Bittoms, an area of Kingston now dominated by a large car park and County Hall.

And there you have it… a mystery solved but opening up new avenues of investigation. What prompted young Harriet Restall to leave a tiny Hampshire village and pair up with Frederick from Kingston and then live in Acton? Today it’s commonplace to move around – I think about my own life moving between Twickenham, Isleworth, Shiplake, Hounslow, Shepperton, Knaphill and now Camberley. In the 19th century it was fairly unusual to go far from your place of birth – maybe for employment or education reasons, but that’s quite difficult to pin down. The search goes on.

As part of the quest to track down long-dead relatives… sorry, connect with my past… I have subscribed to a couple of web sites. Genes Reunited was one of them. Now, before I have a pop at Genes Reunited, as I’m undoubtedly going to (and let’s face it, you’re now looking forward to it), let me first say that it’s actually a very good site to join if you’re into the family history research fad. I’ve discovered some good info, and I’ve made contact with a relative who has been tremendously helpful. In short, if you’re researching your family history, you should join.

However…

The one feature I have an issue with is ‘Hot Matches’. Let me explain. Genes Reunited allows you to upload your tree (it supports the GEDCOM standard, blah blah, technical stuff). To give you an idea of the quantity, in the last month over four million names were added to the combined trees of Genes Reunited members. Every two weeks the Hot Matches feature will look at your tree and then look at a cross section of the other tress and match up details – the idea being is that if I have a Mary Brown in my tree, born in 1855, Hot Matches will tell you about Mary Browns in other trees which may belong to distant relatives. And in doing so you make contact, swap details on ancestors, have tearful reunions with people who have the same great x7 grandfather, and so on.

Sometimes this works rather well. The first Hot Match in my list for this fortnight contains details for ‘Emma’ whose tree contains one of the Ottaway family, born in Norfolk in 1816. This chap I know is the wife’s great x3 grandfather, and therefore Emma may be a distant relative of the wife. So, this is rather good, eh? Hmmm…

Back to Mary Brown. You’ve probably guessed by now that I’ve used that name as an example because a) she was an ancestor of  mine and b) it’s a more frequently-occurring name than anyone in the Ottaway family… or just about any other family. If you stood in any street of any town in the mid-1800s and threw a handful of gruel over your shoulder, you’d probably hit a Mary Brown. So you can probably believe me when I tell you that the Hot Matches search for Mary Brown, born in 1855, brings up quite a few results. But how hot are they?

This evening I started to plough through eleven pages of Hot Matches, and got through two pages worth before I got fed up and started writing this. Among the ‘Hot Matches’ were Mary Browns born in Hull, Bury, Glasgow, Plymouth, Staffordshitre, the Shetland Islands, Georgia (yes, the US state) and Tasmania. If you were playing hide-and-seek none of those could be considered hot… or even luke-warm. Not when you’re looking for a Mary Brown born in Chiswick.

Ironically, Hot Matches would ignore Mary Browns born in Chiswick in 1854 or 1856 – which is a bit daft considering that you have to give a bit of leaway with dates, especially if your research is based on censuses where the ages are often rounded up or down.

Let me finish by saying that I understand why Hot Matches can’t work with exact matches for locations. The GEDCOM record doesn’t break a place of birth down into towns, counties and countries… it’s one single location. If exact matches only were paired up, Mr Ottaway’s record wouldn’t have been matched due to a spelling discrepancy and the fact that Emma used the town and county, whereas I just used the town. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have nine more pages of Hot Matches to get through.

For those of you who have been following the roller-coaster ride of my search for my ancestors here on dadams.co.uk, you’ll know that as yet I haven’t really left my proverbial chair. All the research so far as been done on various web sites… oh, and not forgetting info from my relative Caroline (who I got in touch with via a web site). The first reliable national census was carried out in 1841, and central birth / marriage / death records started in the 3rd quarter of 1837 – this info is available on-line. There are some parish records available on-line, but there’s a lot of info missing. While Norfolk is very complete, London and Middlesex records are very infrequent. So there comes a time when you have to leave the chair and get down among the old records.

My research so far had revealed that one of my great x4 grandfathers was Russell (sometimes spelt with one l) Brown, born around 1791, a fisherman living at Fisherman’s Place in Chiswick. Fisherman’s Place was a group of run-down cottages situated very close to St Nicholas Church, otherwise known as Chiswick Parish Church. Fisherman’s Place, incidentally, was known as Slut’s Hole until they changed the name (for the better, methinks). So, was it safe to assume that the Brown family and some of my other nearby ancestors were recorded in the Parish of St Nicholas? The answer, it seems, is yes. If you’re interested, you should refer to the map in this blog post.

The web site of Chiswick Parish Church states that the church “is privileged to hold almost complete Registers and Vestry records in the Archives dating back to 1622″. And they welcome enquiries from researchers. Fantastic. I e-mailed Jane Watson, keeper of the archives, who responded very quickly and said that they would look for some likely records when they held their next research meeting. A couple of weeks later Jane replied and said that they’d found many relevent records, but the best course of action would be to contact her colleague Carolyn Hammond at Chiswick Library. Jane explained that the library’s local research room had transcripts of the parish records, and it prevented handling of the old original records. Carolyn has written a book on the history of Chiswick (you can find it on amazon.co.uk) and she invited me to meet her at the local research room where she works part-time as a volunteer. I took an afternoon off work and made my way to Chiswick.

Carolyn started by showing me an entry found in the parish’s poverty register, describing the condition of John Cotton (another great x4 grandfather), his wife Sarah and their seven children. Actually I didn’t have proof that this was my John Cotton, although research during afternoon proved this was him. This is how the entry from 6th April 1840 read…

Husband sat by fire either tipsy or sick – wife says he worked for Jessop – but out of it now – was turned away by Finch for misconduct

2 sons – 5 daughters

1 son aged 24 laid up sick for many years

One daughter seemed a tidy girl – walked lame

All brought up in Charity School – some there now cloathed

In coat club

A great start. No, seriously, for good or bad this is a piece of my family history. Carolyn then showed me how to go through the parish baptism records and I spent the next two hours searching through a hundred years worth of records. There were many successes – I confirmed that the aforementioned Russel was the son of Russel Brown and Mary Dukes, and that Russel Brown senior was baptised in 1756 (his date of birth was missing). I found Russel junior’s date of birth (14th November 1790, so just off the 1791 estimation). I found many siblings for my ancestors – these can be very useful when details about your own ancestors are missing. I also nailed down the identity of John Cotton – I’d known that was the name of my great x4 grandfather through his daughter Sarah’s marriage to James Brown (Russel’s son)… but in the 1841 there was no Sarah in the household of the most likely John Cotton.  There was however a Sarah Cotton at Chiswick House, which was situated (I now know) at the end of Bennett Street where John Cotton lived. The baptism records matched up John’s children with those listed on the census, and there was a baptism record for Sarah in exactly the right year to match her age on the census and marriage certificate.

Another discovery is that John Cotton’s father, John (yes, another one) had acted as the Parish Clerk for a number of years. And just to confuse everyone, his wife was Sarah too.

Although I found a lot of details, there’s still some missing – not all the events happened in St Nicholas Parish. Marriages typically took place in the bride’s parish (as they do today) so I didn’t find some of the marriage details I hoped to. But that’s okay, it gives me something else to search for… and I now know that local resources are the things to look for.

In closing I’d like to say a big thank you to Carolyn and Jane for their dedication and time. No payment was requested, although I will be making a donation to the fund that helps to maintain the records.

My relative Caroline has been incredibly helpful with my quest to discover my ancestors, and the other day she spotted something very obvious that I’d missed. Back in August I solved the mystery of my great x3 grandmother – this had been tricky because there was no record of her marriage to Henry Clinch or of the birth of James Clinch (my great x2 grandfather). Henry, born in 1819, was quite a challenge because he didn’t appear on the 1841 census and his birth was before the official birth / marriage / death records started. So although a couple of other Clinch ancestors provided some information on his lineage, I wanted the proof for myself.

Caroline’s find was just so obvious – Henry Clinch took a second wife, seven years after his first wife Sarah died in 1855. This marriage was on record, I knew about it, but never thought it was that important. But of course it was… it revealed his father’s name. As luck would have it, my mum’s cousin Susan already had the certificate. And there was the name of my great x4 grandfather, Charles Clinch. According to the parish records, he was born in Chiseldon, Wiltshire in 1785. This was rather spooky – I found out this information on Friday, the same day I drove past Chiseldon on the way to Swindon.

Although I have yet to confirm it, the information about Charles allowed me to trace back a couple more generations (but I stress, this needs more research) – Charles was the son of Thomas Clinch and Ann Arman, and Ann was the daughter of Richard Arman and Elizabeth Savoury. Richard was born in (wait for it) 1718 and was my great x6 grandfather. Confirming this is going to require a visit to the Berkshire archives to double-check the Charles Clinch information and also see if I can confirm the name of Henry’s mother (Charles apparently had four wives), and then a visit to the Wiltshire archives in Swindon. Realistically it’ll probably be next year by the time I get a chance.

When the earlier series of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ were on television I hadn’t yet been bitten by the genealogy bug and so didn’t see any of them (and crikey, according to the web site there’s been five series… and I missed them all). This time round I’ve ensured that I haven’t missed a single second.

In one respect it’s been slightly disappointing – I was hoping that it would serve as a good guide to researching a family tree, but with the exception of Patsy Kensit it seems that most of the celebs have managed to hop on a plane and travel to exotic places to carry on their research (well, okay, admittedly Poland isn’t really what I’d call exotic).

The high point of the series so far, although not relevant for helping in the research of British ancestors, was Jerry Springer’s voyage of discovery. His realisation that his two grandmothers died during the holocaust was one of the most moving and compelling pieces of television I’ve ever seen, and his anger was balanced nicely with the final moments of joy when he discovered unknown cousins in Israel. Any viewer without a lump in their throat must have been truly devoid of emotions.

Ainsley Harriott’s journey was also bitter-sweet, but in a different way – he was angry at discovering a grandmother several generations back had been a slave in Jamaica… but then also discovered another ancestor had owned slaves. Still, Ainsley got to travel to Jamaica and Barbados on BBC expenses (paid for by me and some other British television viewers).

There has also been something slightly irritating – mere mortals like me have to do their own research… time-consuming and sometimes fruitless. I’ve been waiting for a chance to get to the archives in Kew for six months and I’m still no nearer to marking a day for a visit. By contrast, our celebs have had an army of researchers, historians and genealogists on hand – so when David Suchet walked into an office in Lithuania there were already a pile of documents waiting for him. Patsy Kensit seemed to go from not knowing the name of her grandfather to identifying a mid-1800s relative (and visiting his grave) in the space of one day. Maybe it was more than one day, but she was wearing the same clothes.

Final point – I wonder how many celebs the BBC researched before they came up with eight interesting histories. All of the six so far have had interesting ancestors and stories. Was that a lucky guess by the producers or did they research many more celebs and discard the boring ones? My father’s roots in Scotland and Sweden may have been interesting but unfortunately are untraceable. On my mother’s side we have fish mongers, cheese mongers, general labrourers and drapers from nowhere further afield than Essex to the East and County Mayo in Ireland to the West. If I were a celeb, I wonder if anyone would have found this interesting. What prompted the young Henry Clinch to take up cheese mongering, move from Berkshire to Chiswick, and then switch from cheese to eggs? It doesn’t exactly promise a great moment in television history.

Those of you who have been following my family tree exploits here on dadams.co.uk (so that’s my brother Steve and perhaps one other person) will know that I’ve experienced two major roadblocks. One is my great-grandmother Alice West, where the lack of any evidence of her marriage to Henry James Clinch (yikes) has so far made it impossible to trace her roots. No marriage certificate, no dad’s name, and there’s loads of Alice Wests to choose from in West London around that time. I have a prime suspect but no evidence.

The other problem was the identity of my great-great-great grandmother, the mother of James Clinch and grandmother of the afore-mentioned Henry Clinch (and wife of Henry Clinch Senior, the butterman / cheesemonger). Would this be easier with a diagram? Vital pieces of evidence were missing… no record of James’ birth, no obvious record of Henry Senior getting married (blimey, bit of a trend emerging here) and no record of Henry Senior’s wife in the 1851 census… just Henry, his son (Henry William), his daughter (Jane), and a mysterious laundry woman named Sarah Thwaites. Triple bad luck.

James wasn’t born until circa 1853, so who was his mother? Where was his mother when the census was being recorded? I guess that’ll never be answered, but she may have been out of the house, plain and simple as that.

However, a couple of months ago I made contact with a very distant cousin who said that Henry William’s mother was named Sarah. At the time I was engrossed with the Alice West conundrum and have only recently put that on the back-burner. Turning my attention to the possibility of a Sarah Clinch there were three things I could follow up. #1 was a marriage record for a Henry Clinch in the St James (Westminster) district in the 4th quarter of 1845 – in those days the marriage index didn’t record who married who (as it does starting early in the 20th century), just that a certain set of people got married. If you’re very lucky you can work out who married who via census records. In that same quarter that this unknown Henry Clinch was married, two Sarahs were also married (Greening and Milnes). So I ordered Henry’s marriage certificate.

#2 was Henry William’s birth certificate. He was my great-great-great uncle so I’m not one of his descendants, but this should tell me the name of his mother and hopefully tie up with…

#3 – a death certificate for a Sarah Clinch, 1855 in Brentford. I know that Henry Clinch Senior married in his later years, long after the children were born, so was this Sarah Clinch his first wife?

When you order these certificates they offer ‘reference checking’ – this allows the General Register Office to check a vital piece of information you give them to ensure that the certificate is the one you want and that you’re spending your £7 wisely. For the wedding in 1845, I asked for a check on the mystery Henry Clinch marrying one of the Sarahs. For Henry William’s birth certificate, I asked for a check that his father was also Henry Clinch. For the death certificate, I asked for a check that the late Sarah’s husband was Henry Clinch.

Today, two certificates turned up. The first one I opened was Sarah Clinch’s death certificate  – and bingo (I shouldn’t really get too excited, this detailed my great-great-great grandmother’s demise), she was the wife of Henry Clinch the butterman. She died aged 33 from “albuminuria, dropsy and diarrhoea”. You know what the last one is, that’s the green apple splats, but you can look up the other two in Wikipedia. Clearly she was most unwell and I hope her passing was peaceful.

The second envelope contained Henry William’s birth certificate. Bingo – son of Henry Clinch the butterman and Sarah Clinch formerly Brown. Two pieces of an ancient jigsaw snapping into place. My conclusion from this would be that Sarah Brown was James’ mother and therefore my great-great-great grandmother (given that James’ birth took place in between these two events).

The third certificate hasn’t turned up – I would guess this is because it failed the reference check and that Henry Clinch married Hannah Chapman or Jane Esther Prothero.

So, this is progress, but look at that name… Sarah Brown. Brown is the 5th most common (I mean frequently occurring, don’t get upset) surname in Britain behind Smith, Jones, Williams and Taylor. The death certificate tells me her age (and therefore a birth year of circa 1822) and pretty much nothing else. The birth certificate of Henry William confirms her maiden name… so we have a Sarah Brown, born around 1822, place of birth unknown, parents unknown. What I need is a record of their marriage, if indeed they did get married. Their first child was Jane, born in 1848, so it’s likely they were married no more than two or three years before that (unless they had children prior to Jane who didn’t survive). The official marriage register started late in 1837, but as Sarah would have been just 15 at the time I think it’s unlikely they married before records began.

The geneologist Anthony Adolph reminds budding ancestry hunters that military records are often overlooked, and a marriage which happened while in service isn’t usually recorded on the general register but in a separate military marriage register. I have no idea if Henry Senior served in the forces, but it could explain why he seems to be missing from the 1841 census (although admittedly that census was very hit and miss compared the later ones). Unfortunately a search of military marriages has drawn a blank.

Another roadblock, but it’s a roadblock one generation further back, and I call that progress.

Big news just in from the BBC…

“Actress Patsy Kensit has said she was so upset to find her grandfather was a criminal on TV show Who Do You Think You Are? she stopped washing her hair.”

Is it just me or does anyone else fail to see the connection between Kensit’s ancestral vices and her hair-washing routine? I know that I gave up cutting my toe nails for three weeks after discovering that my great x4 grandfather was a fishmonger, but this is different kettle of, errr, fish.

Now there’s a bizarre blog post title, but it’s all to do with my family tree (of course). It’s a strange process – I’ve had success getting back to an ancestor born in 1791 but still no luck with someone born 90 years later. My great-grandmother, Alice West, still continues to elude me. I recently acquired her death certificate (this is jolly, isn’t it?) but it confirmed nothing of any importance. It did confirm that my mum and uncle were right in that she died on Shrove Tuesday (my mum carried on making pancakes while my grandmother went to Alice Senior’s bedside), and it also showed that she died two streets away from where she lived (a bit odd, but I’m sure there was a reason).

Unfortunately this was in 1953, before changes to the death certificate format were introduced… so useful stuff like her date of birth are missing. It provides her age (72) but I know from experience that there’s often a year or two’s margin of error. So a best estimate says she was born in 1880. That fact however doesn’t nail down her identity and leaves three possible Alice Wests to choose from. I have a prime suspect but no confirmation so the search goes on.

One factor you can hope for in genealogical research is unusual surnames. Alice West became part of the Clinch family, and Clinch is a fairly unusual surname. There was a few knocking around the Brentford and Chiswick area (there probably still is) but they have been quite easy to trace and follow. What you don’t want to find in your family are Smiths or Browns because, quite frankly, there’s hundreds of them in a square mile. So, imagine the mild tinge of despair when it was revealed that my great great grandfather James Clinch had married Mary Ann Brown in 1875. Mary Ann… very common (or should I say “frequently-occurring”?) given names, and Brown… well, you get the picture.

However, this is all about getting the right clues, and on James’ and Mary’s marriage certificate was the killer clue. Mary’s father was James Brown (yes, ha ha, James Brown). James, a frequently-occurring given name, Brown. Great. But there was James’ profession… fisherman. Fisherman? This was 19th century Chiswick, not Grimsby. A fisherman in West London (Middlesex to be precise). Was there a big trade in hauling gudgeon out of the Thames? Hmmm, tasty. However, this one piece of information made it possible to trace James in the censuses, and pin-pointed him and his family. I knew his name, his trade and that he had a daughter Mary Ann born around 1850.

The term ‘fisherman’ as his occupation was, I think, a bit of a generalisation, as a few of the census documents state his occupation as ‘fishmonger’ – which is a lot more credible. The bonus was that I was able to trace James’ parents – his mother Mary Ann (see, I told you) and his father Russell. This was great, as Russell was a fairly unusual name at the time, and while you could take your pick from hundreds of Charles Smiths there was only three Russell Browns… one was my great great great great grandfather, born in 1791, and another was his son (James’ brother). In 1841 Russell and the family lived at Fisherman’s Place in Chiswick, and James had obviously entered the family trade as Russell was also a fisherman / fishmonger.

Also living at Fisherman’s Place in 1841 was a Mr George Brown and his family (including the other Russell). George’s occupation? You’ve guessed it, fisherman. So a good shout that he was probably my great great great great great uncle.

Now it starts getting difficult. 1841 saw the first complete census, so beyond this point you have to research parish records. In genealogical terms Russell Brown’s parents lived in the Dark Ages. They may have been alive in 1841 but there were 10,122 people with the surname Brown included in the 1841 census in Middlesex.

Finally, just for fun, I’ve included a little map of an area of Chiswick just to prove the wife was right, that a part of my family didn’t move more than a mile in 150 years. Actually this isn’t true because Henry Clinch Senior was born in the Reading area in 1819, moved to the Ealing area and is off this map in Brentford. However, these pins do cover over 100 years… the blue pin (bottom-right) was the location of Fisherman’s Place, home of Russell Brown in 1841.

The cyan pin (top-right) was where my grandparents lived until the 1980’s. The sort-of dark pink pins are James Brown, the red pins are James Clinch (James Brown’s son-in-law), green is Henry Clinch Junior (my great grandfather), and purple is where his wife Alice died. Yellow is the unconfirmed location of John Cotton, father of Sarah Cotton who married James Brown.

The family tree project is going well, but there are still a few gaps to be filled in for the mid and late-19th century. I received an incredible amount of detail from a distant cousin from my grandfather’s side of the family, including details of where my great-grandfather was born, where his father died just a year later, and where my great-great-grandfather was married. However, I decided that I didn’t just want too much information handed to me on a plate, so I will do my own research on that side of the family.

Over at my grandmother’s side of the family, the Clinch dynasty, there have been a few walls to knock down. Still the most pressing is the identity of my great-grandmother, Alice West. This was not an uncommon name in 19th century London, so some clues were required. I decided to cough up for my grandmother’s birth certificate, even though I supposed I had all the info that it would contain. However, it arrived yesterday and it revealed one crucial piece of information… a middle name, Maud. This meant that I could discount any candidate who wasn’t shown as Alice, Alice M or Alice Maud… and that narrows it down significantly.

There was one other interesting piece of info… my grandmother (also Alice) was born at the family’s home, 32 Wood Street. Yet in the 1901 census, ten years earlier, the family lived at 30 Wood Street, and my great-grandfather’s older brother lived at number 32. Stranger than truth, except it’s true (or it could have been an error on the part of the census taker).

The next obvious step in revealing more details of Alice Maud West would be to obtain her marriage certificate. This should be found by cross-referencing marriages of Henry Clinch to Alice West in a time period and in London. I’ve used this method successfully for other ancestors, but on this occasion it drew a blank. Despite an exhaustive search, one that I’ve repeated several times, with variations on names, I’ve failed to find any record of their marriage. Perhaps they didn’t get married. There’s a thought…

But then I hit on something. Normally if you search a marriage register and view an index number in a given district it will display an even number of men and women, signifying that these men married these women, although you won’t be sure who married who (in 1911 they changed the marriage register to show who married who without the need of the actual certificate). However for the 2nd quarter of 1898, in the London district of St Saviour (Southwark) there are five names… three women and two men. So, a fair guess that one of the men’s names is missing. The trouble is, the Alice West listed could have married one of the other two men, that I can’t tell from the marriage register.

I then looked at the birth register and discovered that in 1879 (the right year) an Alice Maud West was born in St Saviour. Okay, this could all be highly coincidental. There is only one way to find out, and that’s to obtain the 1898 marriage certificate for Alice West of St Saviour and see what it says. It could be £7 down the drain, but it could be one of the most important pieces of the jigsaw. If she does turn out to be my great-grandmother, I already know the names of her parents and her grandmother (courtesy of the 1881 census). Mind you, I’ve been sure of details before, only to have found they were wrong later. It’s worth a £7 gamble, so here goes…

A few evenings spent digging through census records have revealed quite a lot. Getting hold of my grandparents’ birth certificates will make some of my findings certain, but I’m 99% sure that I’ve identified one branch of the clan going back to my great great great grandfather Henry Clinch (and we’ll call him Henry Clinch Senior as my great grandfather was also Henry Clinch).

Henry Clinch Senior was born in 1820 and his profession was listed as cheese monger and also ‘butter man’ (so clearly in the diary produce game), but then later (in the 1871 census) he was a poulterer. So far this is scuppering my hopes of turning up a long-lost wealthy relative from which I can inherit some unclaimed fortune. And funnily enough Florida Steve was hoping the same.

It’s possible I can go further back to my great great great great grandfather on the current evidence, but the past starts to get murky. Henry Clinch Senior has no wife listed on any census until 1871. Up until then it’s just him, the offspring and a servant. The offspring included my great great grandfather James Clinch. Then in 1871 Henry Senior’s wife is listed as Ellen (aged 38 to his 51). However, in the 1881 census, Ellen appears in James’ household, but has the surname Manning. So, the question is, was she James’ mother or did she meet and marry Henry Senior sometime between 1861 and 1871? To be sure I’d need James’ birth certificate.

I do hope Ellen was the mother of James, because she was fairly easy to trace on the 1841 census, and this reveals the possible identity of my great great great great (there has to be easier way of writing that) grandfather – David Manning, a labourer (sadly, not a duke) born in 1791. This is getting exciting, getting back to the 18th century, but unfortunately I will then exhaust the census information as a source as 1841 was the first (as far as I know).

This is just one branch of the family. At the moment I know little about my great grandmother Alice West (Henry Junior’s wife), or Mary Ann (James’ wife)… I don’t even know her surname.

More soon, I know you’re all riveted…