Monday 16 July 2018

The Lost (fictional) Ancestor

Family history researchers spend a lot of time reading. Original records, collections of transcriptions, and indexes all clamour for our attention; or even space on our desks. Can we really find room for fictional genealogy? (Not public Ancestry trees, but tales about researching.)

Yet, there is a burgeoning sub-genre of popular fiction that has been dubbed genealogical mysteries. I thought that the collection on the Goodreads shelf was comprehensive until I came across the enormous list maintained by Jule Cahill Tarr at Julie's Genealogy & History Hub.

Clearly, there was a huge market for these books but I had never been enthused. A few years ago, I dipped into works featuring Jefferson Tayte and Nick Herald without any great passion. When a colleague commented on how much she enjoyed such works, I wondered whether it was the basic proposition or the US background that I had found unappealing. Which is how I came to encounter Morton Farrier.

Nathan Dylan Goodwin describes how he "... came up with the idea of a genealogist who has to solve a crime in the past, using genealogical research methodology, but who ironically knows little about his own past" in his (very) occasional blog The Forensic Genealogist. Since Morton lives in Rye on the Sussex coast, his (predominantly) UK-based research experience might strike that chord his american counterparts had missed.

I selected The Lost Ancestor (the second of a series of (currently) seven titles) which opened with Morton being engaged to locate a "missing" grand-aunt for a rich client with a terminal illness (thereby ensuring that cost was no object for the investigation but time was definitely constrained). But this was not a conventional brick wall despite the apparently prosaic nature of the brief. Of course, Morton is blissfully unaware of the threat he was to face; but if the case were straight-forward, why was the subtitle of the book A Genealogical Crime Mystery?

The structure of the narrative is split between events from 1911 to 1925 interspersed with descriptions of the research task in the present. Which is the source of some unease for me. The (historical) mystery or thriller elements are clearly designed to lead me to leap to conclusions about whodunit that will then be shown to be completely unjustified in the following modern-day segment. But the researcher would never have drawn that incorrect inference (not only because of his professional caution, but) because the eavesdropper lurking behind a door left slightly ajar would have left no documentary record and so is utterly irrelevant (and invisible) to the research process.

There is another element essential to the formula of this genre. The target ancestor was not simply "lost" and there is a living person prepared to go to any lengths to ensure that her true fate is never revealed. This allows Morton to employ some modern gumshoe techniques (spiced with just a little family history expertise) to save himself from a similar fate. This is not a complication that most of us need ever consider in developing a research plan. Although I am not sure how I would react if, while I was desperately seeking the identity of a mystery hitman stalking me, my associate reported: "I've spent the rest of the time digging around the Findmypast website, but nothing so far".

Despite these quibbles, I enjoyed the book enough to finish it in four days. I cannot claim that it ever took me away from real work (on actual family histories) but I was happy to forego my daily (mental-agility) routine of Crosswords and Sudoku for the period.

It is certainly not great literature but there is something appealing about the familiar ordinariness of his securing a locker at the archives, searching the catalogue and requesting a bundle of papers. (Although no staff member of any archive that I frequent would ever be as uncooperative as the dreadful Deidre from "The Keep"!) Do I have sufficient empathy with Morton Farrier to delve into more of the series? Well, I am ambivalent about his next cold case but now that he has learned that Aunt Margaret was actually his birth mother, we need to find his father. Don't we?

Monday 2 July 2018

If the name fits

There are many different ways in which our given names are decided. Some prospective parents spend months poring over books and magazine articles devoted to anthroponomy. Others wait for inspiration to strike after the birth: "As soon as I held her for the first time, I just knew she was a Marie".

The decision-making method of most interest to family historians is the practice of following a traditional naming pattern: "This is my fourth son, so he is named for my eldest brother". If you are researching a family who adopt this method and an expected name is "missing" from your search results, then you have a good idea of whom you are looking for.

The best known of these patterns are found in thousands of families within a particular culture now spread across the globe. Sometimes you may detect a pattern with limited applicability that proves equally useful in guiding your research.

Arthur Chandler, gamekeeper of Beckenham in Kent, and his wife Jane Taylor had a large family (at least by modern standards). Some online trees listed as many as 12 children for the couple. I was able to account for five of them in the civil registrations of birth and they were confirmed by the details of the 1851 Census. Pre-1837 baptismal records added four more documented children.


As I contemplated the list of known children and those yet to be found, a pattern in the names suddenly became glaringly apparent. Arthur and Jane had named their children Arthur, Asenath, Alfred, Andrew, Amelia, Antoinette, Amy, Angelina and Alice.

Might this explain my inability to find evidence for their purported siblings Joseph, Caroline and Bob?


It was a straight-forward task to establish that the births supposed to have occurred in 1851 (Caroline) and 1853 (Bob) did not involve Jane Chandler (or take place anywhere in England, for that matter). Perhaps these were added to the family by international "cuckoo" researchers dropping their ancestor into the nest of any UK family of the same name to establish their immigrant origins - a type of retrospective informal adoption?

The status of Joseph is more challenging. In the 1841 Census he is listed after Arthur and Janet with the surname "do", but without any indication of a family relationship (a feature not introduced until 1851). His stated age (15) would mean that he was born some years before the marriage of his putative "parents". Might he be an ex-nuptial child of Jane or a pre-nuptial child of the couple who was named by Jane's parents (and so missed receiving an A-name from Arthur)? On the other hand, Joseph might be a nephew or cousin of Arthur residing with them at the time of the census. I said that a naming pattern could guide your research not find all the answers!

In case you are wondering how the children felt about their names; Arthur junior had thirteen children (born in Surrey and then in New South Wales) and he named them Arthur, Amos, Alma, Andrew, Abraham ... you see the pattern. Young Alice (who came to Queensland) was a rebel with a not a single A-name among her five children despite (or perhaps, because of) the fact that their French father Gustave Collin also had the names Antoine and Alexandre.

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