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The following is a piece of advice aimed at people who think they have got stuck, and is based on my reply to a recent query.
Tracing your family tree is like doing a jigsaw puzzle where
key pieces may be missing and some pieces may be wrong, incomplete or
misleading. Others pieces may have come from a completely different puzzle. The
fun is in trying to fit the surviving pieces together and filling in the gaps.
What you have done is found a "place of birth" piece which
doesn't fit on a modern map of Hertfordshire and assumed that you have hit a
brick wall.
But there is no reason to come to a halt. Use your imagination!
You have other pieces of the jigsaw you can place. You know your ancestor's names
(you have several pieces which can be used separately or together), when she was
born, and the county in which she was born. So are you really stuck?
In fact the answer to your question is available to you online
in minutes if you ignore the "place of birth" piece and use the others. What you
will find in the first five minutes online will depend on which genealogy
package you are using.
If you are using FindMyPast you should look at the 1871
census for anyone with her first and last name born in Hertfordshire in about
1867? This will provide you with the name of her father and also allows you to
identify the mysterious "place of birth".
Ancestry is not always better than FindMyPast but in
this case it is very much more informative. A search for her, born Hertfordshire
in 1867 will quickly provide you with a ready made family tree (I didn't bother
to check how far it goes back) and if you add the place and date of her marriage it will provided you with a copy of the marriage register - which includes the name
of her father. The family tree may also make it possible to contact distant
cousins you didn't know existed.
But remember, when trying to solve your ancestral jigsaw
puzzle, most of the fun comes from trying to work your way round the "missing"
and "mysterious" pieces. If you think you are stuck collect all the pieces you
can find and try various combinations. You will find yourself shouting "Eureka!"
every time you find a place for that awkward piece you put on one side some time
ago when it wouldn't fit.
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This is the newsletter for the Genealogy in Hertfordshire Web site. Comments on this blog are moderated and may be transferred to the web site where appropriate. If you have a local or family history query you want answered you must use "Ask Chris" - See box in right hand column. Anonymous comments cannot be answered.