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May 3, 2019

Losing 8 Generations of Ancestors

I just lost 8 (EIGHT) generations from our family tree......

Extracts of church records I found many dozens of years ago for a marriage in 1785 in England did not give all the data! I had previously found that my 5th great-grandfather Philip Hubbard married in St. Lawrence, Thanet, Kent England on 17 October 1787 to Elizabeth Moses. At least that is what the transcribed records listed. No image was available to compare at that time.


Then I found a scan of the original church register which showed his wife to be Elizabeth Moses Burbank, widow. Since I was curious about this first husband, I did more research and found that on 03 June 1785 Elizabeth Moses Hinds, spinster married Richard Burbank, a widower.


Thus it turned out that my 5th great grandmother was not Elizabeth Moses but Elizabeth Moses Hinds. Hinds was her maiden name, not a previous married name, and Moses was her middle name.

So my 8 generations of research going back for the lineage of Elizabeth Moses was wrong. Ouch. And yet...  I can have the fun of searching a new set of ancestors

In fact I have now found the baptism record of Elizabeth Moses Hinds in February 1764 to parents John and Mildred.


It pays to review old research!!! It also pays to be cautious accepting a transcript or extract without viewing the original.

Snce discovering the new surname, I researched the line back several generations in England, and wrote a small (28 page) book about the family. I originally wrote this book to share with my adult children but ended up also putting it on Amazon for sale.


The Hinds Family of Kent England

List Price: $6.99
8.5" x 11" (21.59 x 27.94 cm)
28 pages

The Hinds families were in Ramsgate Kent England for many generations. This book follows the descendants of Thomas Hinds and his wife Sarah Ammis who married in 1693 in Canterbury.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I feel your pain, and also your enthusiasm for beginning anew. I lost a large portion of my husband's tree when his DNA test at Ancestry showed an obvious non-paternal event. Ooops! So I begin again.

Peter said...

Several years ago I found a transcription of the birth of my great grandmother, Abigail Hall, on Family Search. It said that she had been born March 3, 1842 in Dirleton, East Lothian, Scotland, to John Hall and Beatrix Monfries. When I finally got an image of the original record I got an additional piece of information not available on the transcription. John was a servant in Kingston. So even when transcriptions are accurate it pays to check the original.

RoseyGlow said...

Periodically rechecking data you have collected some time ago can be very helpful even when there are no errors found.

* As you chip away at information, bit by bit over the years, a family at the bottom of a census sheet may suddenly become extremely important as another, previously unknown branch that you hadn't recognized before.

* Or it may suddenly dawn on you that the home addresses found in the census can mean a great deal. (I had been ignoring them for years as insignificant.) I was able to identify female family members who had remarried over time because they lived at the same address that my grandfather did 130 years ago, a tenement in Cleveland.

* I inspected an image of a late 1800s newspaper that I had saved because of a juicy story it had about one of my great-granduncles when I realized that one of the women mentioned in a patent medicine ad was my G2GM! I have since found out that many of those ads used endorsements made by real people in the area where the ad appeared. I had always assumed that the endorsements were as fabricated as the "medicine". It gave me an insight into a medical condition she had.

* Etc! So, periodically re-examine your data for golden nuggets that are lying there waiting for you to recognize their value.

Happy New Year!