FAMILY LORE - DARROCH FAMILY WEB SITEOvercoming Obstacles in Family Lore and More. E. Gail Benjafield. Gail Benjafield was born in Calgary but raised in Toronto. She and her husband and family have lived in Boston, New Jersey, Sheffield England, Cardiff and St. She is a recently retired librarian who was the Special Collections Librarian at the St. Catharines Public Library when the Special Collections Room won the OGS Award of Merit in 1.
She has written articles for Families, branch newsletters, British genealogy journals, newspapers and more. The tips most useful to family historians are those that discuss solutions to “brick walls.” We all know that both 1.
BMDs) can be deeply flawed, often because transcribers did not spell a name correctly, a person’s age is off by as much as five years, or a place of birth is wonderfully helpful, as in “England.” While Internet genealogical sources make things much easier, we all know incorrect information can get online far too easily. Misinformation easily gets mixed into family history, and can result in the proverbial brick wall. Years ago, when I wrote to the Office of the Registrar General of Ontario for registrations of family members, I received one birth registration with the area known as “Delmer” in southwestern Ontario spelled as “Edlmer.” A simple typo, indeed, but if I were a beginning genealogist, what would I do with Edlmer?
My grandmother’s own birth certificate listed her as “male.” Those are just two of many transcription errors. I asked the Registrar’s Office for my money back, and corrections. To my complete surprise, I received both. Family Lore. Our family research has dealt with such problems, but the particular brick wall that throws me is the dreaded “family lore,” which I like to put in the category of folktales. In the days of letter writing in the earlier part of the 2. Perhaps that was because they wanted so much for all our ancestors to be “respectable.” In my own family, certain things were not talked about, as they were considered improper.
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Such topics included religion, sex, and politics. Not all families were as open as families are today. Not all families could accept the idea that a family might include a suicide, a mentally ill person, a 2. Families . When asked about an elusive family member, parents often said little, and responded to the awkward situation by staring at their shoes. Many people have written about this topic as a theme in memoirs, most notably playwright Alan Bennett in his latest book, A Life Like Other People’s.
His attempt to uncover his own family history, complete with folk who were unstable, suicidal, gay, or just plain reticent—yet were otherwise just like the rest of us—is touching. Family lore can set one on the wrong path entirely. Propriety kept elders in the family from passing on any information about someone who had strayed—had an unwed child perhaps, or had spent some time in jail or in an institution.
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Death by other than natural causes—suicide, for example— often led to dead ends, genealogically speaking. So when I speak of the dreaded family lore, it can include much—anything that someone wanted to sweep under the rug, as it was downright embarrassing. Better to embellish the story about Uncle George who went missing, rather thanto face facts. How many of us have uncovered unseemly accounts of an ancestor’s behaviour? I would suggest that many have. In my husband’s family, there is a notable big- time scoundrel.
We regularly check out a fun Internet site called Blacksheep Ancestors. We also use our library’s interlibrary loan service to follow up on this man’s nefarious activities. While we actually revel in knowing about his infamy now, and collect all the information we can on him, I doubt his immediate family in the late 1. Misinformation. Another problem with a smaller impact for genealogists is that of simple misinformation passed on through the years.
In my own family, as I suspect in many others, the women wrote letters back to the relatives in Europe, or kept diaries. If you are lucky enough to have discovered a diary or letters, consider them as the treasures that they are. While they can be wonderfully informative, they can also be incredibly ill- informed, especially about geography.
A case in point in my family is a great- aunt’s address book, written at the end of the 1. It has short names and addresses, often with just the name of a person, a town, and a country. I find it amazing that a letter addressed to “A.
Waters, Roach, Cardiff, Wales” could be delivered. But apparently, it was! Old Ordnance Maps.
In my great- aunt’s writings, she indicates that the Waters family originally came from Garboldisham near Glamorgan. This information is certainly not helpful because Glamorgan is a large county in the Principality of Wales, which includes many towns, villages, and hamlets, but not one named Garboldisham. In fact, Garboldisham is about as far away from Wales as it can be. It is a village in Norfolk on the east coast of England.
So a neophyte genealogist, lacking good maps, would be utterly stuck. Luckily, I did have excellent old ordnance maps and more information on the Waters family of Wales, so I was able to sort it all out years ago. I highly recommend to historians who are pursuing British family history that once they do determine what part of the country they come from, they purchase one of the 1. The maps are particularly helpful for town name changes over time. Examining the names on the map may also lead to a Eureka moment. The ordnance maps are incredibly detailed, with neighbouring hamlets and villages named, ones that may have been alluded to in one of the ancestors letters and diaries.
Sometimes, even the names of people appear on these older maps, as in so- and so’s farm. In my case, this has led to (sigh!) more research, but revealed some really interesting links to other ancestors. An example of such an ordnance map is found in Figure 1 below. These reprints of ordnance maps are widely available at most genealogical conferences, and while other publishers may have come onboard, the maps I have used are published by David & Charles. They are invaluable tools. My Welsh family immigrated to Guelph, Ontario, and I often wondered why they chose Guelph. It turned out to be for the most obvious reason—an older kinsman had emigrated and ended up locating there.
My family probably received Figure 1: A typical cover of a reprint of a first ordnance map, 1. While researching their records at the Baptist church in central Guelph, I came up against yet another brick wall. The records correctly recorded my great- grandfather’s name as Abram Waters, but the transcription stated he had come from Glencoury, Wales. By this time, I knew this was impossible. I knew precisely where he was born in West Wales, County Dyfed. He met his wife nearer Cardiff in the eastern county of Glamorgan.
More than that, I had studied the Welsh language and knew that Glencoury was an impossible grammatical construction in Welsh. So I turned to the old ordnance maps of Glamorgan, and with the help of a magnifying glass, looked all around Cardiff, Port Talbot, Aberdare (my great- grandparents were married in Aberdare), and there it was—Glyncorrwg, bold as brass—a 1. The transcriber had not understood my great- grandfather’s deep Welsh accent, and had written down only what he heard. He had heard incorrectly. Glyncorrwg is a beautiful little town in a deep valley in the Rhondda area of County Glamorgan.
It was once the home of a well- known mine. See Figure 2 for a current map of the area. One can see how misleading all these incorrect transcriptions and geographic misunderstandings can be. Those ordnance maps can be a most useful tool in unravelling that dreadful family lore. Anyone who has been researching their family history knows not to trust all the census records as fact, the information on BMD certificates, as well as a lot of the information typed into the Internet by amateur genealogists. I would suggest to anyone that all family lore be taken with a grain of salt, and to be unafraid to find out that an ancestor may have feet of clay, to mix metaphors. As prominent genealogist, Dave Obee, said so well in the August 2.
Families, most of our ancestors were fleeing a country for a better life in a new land, and we should not expect that they were to the manor born. Wherever our ancestors were from, “they were the immigrants who helped shape Canada, bringing their dreams and ideas .
Parents and grandparents wish for a better life for their descendants, and struggle hard to make that happen. Sometimes, if they fail to remember faults, or they simply do not know enough about the larger world to pass that information on to us, they are doing what they think right, what they think is for the best for us, even if that makes today’s family historian’s research more difficult. Damifino (What's in a name?)In April, 1.
Ted and Enid Darroch of Calgary purchased . When recently asked about the original name of the cottage, Enid Darroch admitted that as a young mother she had thought the obvious pronunciation offended the sensitive ears of her four children; she took the expedient route of simply changing the pronunciation - .
Our sense is that in those years the Lake was quite a distance from the cottages, but not so far that short legs couldn't get there in seconds – or maybe a minute or two. The lore was, in retrospect, no doubt, a mother's common sense way of having momentary midday peace.
Smiling family members and friends beam from them while they loll in the shallows and strike poses on the beach. One story our mother has often recounted has it that a squirrel routinely met her in the morning – on the inside rafters of the structure. We think it was on Mondays, when the train whistle could be heard close by, just at dinnertime, often interrupting the meal.