- Kelly Family History Challenge
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If you are finding it a little difficult to change the settings on Jigsaw Explorer because the controls are not well explained, this image may help.
The evidence seems clear. After the death of Susan (nee Lansdown), John Kelly remarried. But just who was the new bride.
It is fashionable among "serious" researchers to dismiss Public Trees on Ancestry as poorly documented collections of mismatched claims. And in this case there were no cited sources. But I have found a document that was apparently the origin of the claim and I find it disturbing. Review the evidence below and add a comment on how you would explain this mystery. Now that the hyperlinks between WWISP and NAA have been restored, it is even easier to access the service record of the diggers with links to the Moreton Bay Region. There is now no excuse not to brush up on your skills in interpreting these extremely rich but challenging sources. To add some spice to the task, this little puzzle asks you to locate several pieces of numeric information in a particular record and to place them into an interlocking grid. So it is a crossnumber rather than a crossword, and uses letters to indicate the starting location of each number (and a little arrow to show whether to write across or down). But not like the ones that Maths teachers make up -- there are NO calculations. You can print a pdf file containing the clues and the grid to complete the puzzle with a pencil. (Alert: Answers are on the second page.) Or you can see if this document opens in your word processor. (No guarantees that it will look the same on your computer.) In response to Bob's use of the Marriage Index available on FamilySearch, Troppo suggested a look at FindMyPast (currently available free for at-home use through the Library website). A search within Life Events > Parish Marriages for {Kelley 1862 Landown} showed two different transcriptions - one that matched the information on Family Search and a second (far more comprehensive) made by the Berkshire FHS.
That second transcription showed these details of the marriage between John Kelley aged 22 (hence, a calculated birth year 1840) a Bachelor, Gardener, residing at Western Elms Cottage, son of John Kelley [no occupation], and Susan Lansdown aged 23 Spinster [no occupation] residing 24 Sydney Terrace, daughter of James Landown, mason on 29 Sep 1862 at St Mary (The Minster) Reading, Berkshire, England by Banns before the witnesses Thomas Duncan and Catherine Duncan With all this additional information, the search for more details of the background of John and Susan in England should be much easier; but like all good family history finds, it raises more questions than it answers. Susan's age (23) as stated at her marriage would imply a birth in 1839-40. But there is no record of a baptism corresponding to this. So is it possible that she was the same person as Susanna Lansdown (daughter of James, a labourer, and his wife Elizabeth) who was baptised at Walcot in Somerset on 24 September 1837? Surely there must be another Susan Lansdown (or some variant spelling) born somewhere in the UK between September 1837 and September 1840. Not according to the GRO records: the only birth of a plausible candidate for the bride of John Kelley in 1862 was that of LANSDOWN, SUSANNAH Mother's Maiden Surname: GIBBS GRO Reference: 1837 Sep Quarter in BATH, Volume 11 Page 40 Confirmation that this is the same Lansdown family in the records of the baptism and the marriage can be found in both the 1841 and 1851 Censuses when Susanna (born circa 1837) was recorded as the fourth child of James (a mason) and his wife Elizabeth living at Walcot, Bath, Somerset. The entire family had been born in Bath, with the exception of Elizabeth who was recorded as being born in Wiltshire. James Lansdown married Elizabeth Gibbs at Chippenham in Wiltshire on 5 July 1830. This was approximately 6 weeks after the baptism in the same church of Caroline, daughter of Elizabeth Gibbs, later known as Caroline Lansdown born in Bath. In the 1861 Census, James was recorded as still living in Walcot with James jnr, George, Mary Anne and Joseph. His wife at that time is listed as Isabella, a laundress born in 1809 in Grittleton, Wiltshire. (The death of an Elizabeth Lansdown at age 47 was recorded in GRO Reference: 1855 Mar Quarter in FROME, Volume 05C Page 499. But no marriage to Isabella has been located.) Susan was recorded on that Census (in April 1861) as living and working in Walcot (near her father's home) as a Housemaid for the (four) unmarried Frowd sisters of independent means. If these facts do relate to the woman who married in Reading in 29 September 1862, why would she choose to wipe a couple of years from her age? Would her father not have noticed and corrected her? Or does the naming of the two Duncan's as witnesses suggest that the bride's parents were not present in the church? Will investigating the birth of her intended husband cast any light on these mysteries? A couple of weeks ago we extended our investigation into the immigrant Kelly family with the assertion that "Mrs Susan Kelly was the daughter of James Landsdowne. ... this information can now be used to begin to search for details of her marriage, and the birth of her two children before departing England."
Have you had any success in identifying UK records that provide more details of this young family before they made the desion to relocate across the world to Queensland. Bob has prepared a video of his research and uploaded it to YouTube (https://youtu.be/u10NN7Kaysg). At this stage the only access to that page is to use the link here, so feel free to ask any questions or make a comment on YouTube or at the end of this post. At the end of the video, Bob claims that there is now sufficient information to track down the births (and the parents) of John Kelley and Susan Lansdown. That task will form Part IV of the Challenge. Are you prepared to take it on? How do you plan to start? If you prefer to focus on Australian records, Part V of the Challenge (and possibly Part VI) will be to investigate the life of the Kelly family (or is it Kelley) in Queensland. We have their date of arrival, and that of Susan's death. Where did they live? Where is Susan buried? Were there more children born here? Which of the children married? Where and when did they die? John senior said he was a gardener when boarding the ship, what occupations did he actually follow in Queensland? Did he remarry after Susan's death? Did they have grandchildren? We have another word puzzle to add just a little spice to practising your search strategies for vital records. The first eight clues require you to search Queensland BMDs. But the eighth clue has a word missing, you need to construct it from one letter in each of the answers to the first seven, then you can search for the eighth answer. Then fire up FreeBMD for questions 9 to 15. By the way, clue 15 has a missing word that needs to be ... do you see the pattern? Finally look at your answers to questions 8 and 15. There is a sequence of consecutive letters common to both. What is it? These skill-builders relate to Baptisms that took place in churches now located in the conurbation known as Greater Manchester. So, use the A-Z of Record Sets in FindMyPast to locate the correct source to be used for all these questions.
Two weeks ago, we proposed extending the challenge of investigating the history of the Kelly family beyond the limited facts of their voyage of migration. (Read this to catch up.)
A necessary first step was to learn the birth surname (or maiden name) of Susan Kelly. Bob approached this by investigating the registrations of death of "possible" matches. He identified a list of 8 and eliminated 7 of them. You can follow his reasoning in this pdf report. He now believes that Mrs Susan Kelly was the daughter of James Landsdowne. And that this information can now be used to begin to search for details of her marriage, and the birth of her two children before departing England. Are you ready to join in the search? I hope that some of you had fun with Jigsaw Explorer earlier in the week. It is a very powerful tool for converting almost any image into an online puzzle, but how is that useful for family history? You could claim that the old photos are sort of relevant but even that is a bit of stretch.
But what if the image that needed to be reconstructed was a portion of your family tree and you could send the link to other family members (especially the grandchildren you are trying to convince to follow your path as the keeper of the family story)? Where can you get that image? Make it yourself: it is surprisingly easy. Go to https://jigex.com/4bDo to see what I was able to come up with. Legacy Charting gave me the basic tree but leaves some empty corners which are not good in jigsaws. It was easy to fill them with a title and a picture of the target person in Irfanview. And that tool also has a great facility to automatically add a border (which makes finding edge pieces easier). If you do try out my puzzle, remember that the blue rectangle in the centre of screen when it opens will let you change the number of pieces. Just click on the grid on the left end before you click OK on the right. It opens by default with 72 pieces which took me 13 minutes to assemble (and I reckon I know that tree!) So perhaps try a smaller number of bigger pieces to get a feel for the puzzle before you launch into the 1000 piece version. |
Here we are collecting snippets for group members to use while social distancing. Archives
July 2020
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