Not Irish after all?

I bought a few pay-per-view credits and had a look at findmypast's armed forces birth indices... and I found my ancestor. James Carden (spelled Cardon in the index... close enough) was born in 1818 in Island Bridge (an area of Dublin, Ireland). I already knew he was born there around 1818 or 1819, but now at least I've got the exact year pinned down. Too bad if I want to find out more I have to spend a lot more money to do so. And I really wish these certificates were digitized so I could just view them; I don't really care if I have a paper copy in hand (in fact, I'd prefer not to).

This new information also points to the fact that James may not have been Irish at all. It looks like his father was probably a military man as well. Perhaps the family didn't even spend much time in Ireland. Unfortunately, the time period we're talking about is before 1841, so I can't even search the censuses to find out the whereabouts of this family.

Mind the gap...

I thought I'd finally found that elusive royalty link... but it all depended on a rather spurious connection in someone's family tree that I could find no evidence for.

There are a few branches of the family that have names that are promising. When I search for information on these names, I come up with information about how so-and-so came over with William the Conqueror or that so-and-so was part of a highly influential family in the 1300s. The problem is, I have no way to connect my brick walls in the 18th and 19th centuries back to the Middle Ages. I have no idea if my Lovett family in Buckinghamshire is descended from Richard de Louet of Normandy. I have no idea if my Stafford family in Northumberland is connected to the 13th-century de Staffords. Stupid gap!

Brick walls all around!

I've hit brick walls with pretty much every branch of the tree now. Short of actually going to the British Isles and doing some in-person research, I'm probably not going to get much further.

"Ann" as a surname? And a Bassingthwaighte disappointment...

I've been searching for my Pike ancestors, namely James Pike and his wife, Hester. The family lived in Alveston, Gloucestershire and all the children were born there. The only marriage that seemed plausible, however, was between James Pike and Hester Ann on 26 June 1811 in Bristol. I'm not sure if people from Alveston would have gone to Bristol to get married. If they did, though, and this is the correct couple, then I may have found a whole lot of new cousins.

There seem to be a lot of people with the Ann surname in the areas of Alveston and Olveston. These were such small places that everybody must have known the family!

Oh, and as for the Bassingthwaightes, I don't think they're related to me after all. I've found a more likely candidate for my Robert Johnson's wife (Mary Elseygood rather than Mary Bassingthwaighte), and now all the censuses make sense. There may still be a connection, as one of the children of Robert Johnson and Mary Bassingthwaighte was living with my Robert Johnson in 1841. Unfortunately, I don't know what the relationship was. (The two Robert Johnsons are perhaps cousins?)

The elusive "Mary" finally has a last name!

When your ancestors are from Ontario, Canada and Gloucestershire, England, you never think to look for a marriage in Kent, England!

I think I've got the right family here... I knew that my ancestor, George Pike, had married three times. His first wife was Elizabeth Screech/Screen. His third wife was Catherine McCarter. His second wife (my ancestor and -- as luck would have it -- the wife I had the least information about) was either Elizabeth Daniels (according to family stories) or someone named Mary (according to the 1861 Canadian census). On that census, there was a Hannah Daniels living next door. I thought it might be Mary's sister. Was the Daniels surname correct after all?

And then I found a marriage in early 1855 in Dover, Kent, England for a George Pike (widower) and a Mary Daniels (single). Judging by the fact that their first child was born in England in August of 1855, this could very well be the right family. This Mary Daniels also had a younger sister named Hannah (which would fit with the census information I found).

Just when you think you've hit brick walls all around, you get a break. I love finding ancestors!

Ancestry.com

A while ago, I was a subscriber to Ancestry.com, which was great. But after a while, I couldn't justify paying so much for something I wasn't using every single day. So I switched to the pay-per-view system, so I could only pay when I was on a real genealogy kick and wanted to view a few records.

For a long time, I was able to attach census records to my tree without using any credits. As long as I had some credits in my account, I could do this. If I wanted to actually view the record images (and not just see the indexes), I had to actually use a credit. That was fine by me. I was also able to attach records from other people's family trees without using credits... which I thought was great, since the information there is questionable at best. Why should I pay for someone else's assumptions?

Last time I was on the Ancestry site, though, I noticed that I couldn't do anything without using credits, other than attach the 1881 England census or records from the FreeBMD archives. Curious, I fired off an e-mail to Ancestry, only to be informed that I should have been charged credits all along, and that I should be happy for this little mistake.

Excuse me?

I'm supposed to spend almost a dollar each time I want to attach some random person's record to my tree, even though there's no way of knowing if the information is even correct? Don't get me wrong; that attaching feature has been a great way of building up my family tree. But it's only a beginning. To ensure accuracy, I then have to go and find other information that corroborates the other person's tree. If this was already done (meaning the information had already been checked out and verified), I wouldn't have a problem with paying for it. But as it is, someone could make up anything, put it in their tree... and Ancestry would still make us pay for it.

I'm a bit put off by Ancestry at the moment. I have much of my information there as private trees, mostly for backup purposes (in case my computer explodes or something). But I don't know how I feel about them making money off my information... especially if it's not even 100% correct information. I know that companies want to make money, but I find it a bit disgusting that we genealogists have to pay ridiculous amounts of money simply to find out things about our own heritage.

Lambert family of Panfield Hall

I have some Lambert ancestors who supposedly lived at Panfield Hall in Essex. I have come across another Lambert family who also lived at Panfield Hall (that of John Lambert, a Puritan who immigrated to the U.S.A. with his family). I'm guessing that these two Lambert families are related somehow (Panfield Hall wasn't that big, after all), but my searches have turned up nothing. John Lambert was probably the contemporary of my Jeffrey Lambert; but I don't know if they were brothers, first cousins, second cousins, or even more distantly related.

It's amazing how much information is online these days. But it is still possible to come away from an Internet search disappointed... especially when you're researching things that happened hundreds of years ago.