Update time

My RootsWeb WorldConnect database LornaHenderson has been refreshed.
Can't recall exactly what all has changed but there have been some general tidy-ups and checking of early research, and an unexpected new branch on the SINTON family.

You may have read this post about Catherine SINTON, not two people whose fates and "tree" were unknown, but one person now placed in her tree.
Turns out that Catherine had yet another illegitimate child, Ethel Janet.
Ethel's marriage certificate was an interesting blend of fact and fiction, but the family stories passed on to the descendant who found me had fitted with Catherine's life in Alford Forest, so yet another mystery placed in her SINTON tree - same tree, same Catherine.

Can you spot any resemblance between Phyl's great grandmother Kate (1850-1939)

and my 2* great grandmother Helen WIGHT nee SINTON (abt 1820 - 1883)

and Helen's sister Jane TELFER nee SINTON (abt 1812 - 1902)?

(Helen and Jane are 1st cousins once removed to Kate.)


Noone seems to know what happened to Ethel's brother Ernest John SINTON - last sighting Auckland in 1928 - anyone got a stray Ernest needing a home?

Twenty years is too long

I spend rather too long on trying to join dots on long dead, distant relatives at the expense of maintaining contact with the living.
I was forcibly reminded of this the other day when I finally figured out a long time puzzle in the family tree and went to share it with a descendant of John BAIN and Sinclair MANSON whom I knew would be interested *.
Too late. She had died in the too long an interval since we'd been in contact, which I was rather shocked to note was 20 years ago.
That did lead me into an, ongoing, update on the more modern branches of my BAIN relatives in New Zealand.
Two others lost in the interim (so far), but I did also re-connect with the last surviving representative of her generation - great to catch up, and to get another representative down from Donald BAIN and Maggie TAYLOR into the DNA tested category for posterity and future research into our Caithness inter-connections.
If interested in exploring your genetic connections, do consider a FamilyFinder test from FamilyTreeDNA, and if a descendant of Donald and Maggie, the autosomal DNA project FFLornaHen would love to hear from you.

* For anyone else who may be interested in the ancestry of John WARES, whose death index/certificate I'd not found all those years ago - the phrase in probate records "who died on or about (insert date here)", covers a multitude of sins, but I'd never found one two years out before.
In years past I'd given up looking through the fiche index for the matching death.
Now, we can simply click on a website.
There he was, right day and month, two years later than the probate stated he had died (yes it was a probate well after the event).
Turns out that his parents were John WARES and Janet BAIN in Staxigoe, Wick, Caithness.
FamilySearch tree has been updated to connect him to his parents, my WorldConnect Database LornaHenderson will be updated shortly.
No known connection, yet, between his mother Janet BAIN and his wife Jamesina BAIN's families.

The BATEMAN Family

This photograph may be of use to someone.

It comes from my Nana DAVIDSON's photo album and was labelled by my Aunt Isabel as "The Bateman family  no relations"
Taken at Wrigglesworth & Binns studio in either Wellington, Christchurch or Dunedin, but most likely Dunedin.
Further over in the album is a photo of a young man on a bike labelled Ted Bateman, possibly the one on the left above, and even further over, two baby photos labelled Ted and Bert Bateman, another of a young girl labelled Ruby Bateman luxuriating against a fur rug!

A quick search of the NZ BDM Historical indexes indicates they could be three of the children of John Henry BATEMAN and Annie Logan REDPATH, which couple married in 1894.
PapersPast helpfully provides a marriage notice:
MARRIAGES.
Bateman Redpath. On 20th June, at the residence of the bride's mother, Mt. Stuart, by the Rev. Jas. Skinner, M.A., Waitahuna, John Henry Bateman, eldest son of Thomas Henry Bateman, late of Bampton, Oxfordshire, England, to Annie Logan, fourth daughter of the late Thomas Redpath, Mt. Stuart.
(from Tuapeka Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 4116, 7 July 1894, Page 2)
Which does make me rather puzzled as to location at the moment.
Redpath however is a good Borders name, so perhaps Adam DAVIDSON's network of friends includes Annie's family, although by the dates, the friendship seems likely to be a generation closer to present day.

Nephew Dodds

On my Round TUIT is a task to work through Nana's photo album scanning the photos, and publishing them, some for identification purposes.
The album itself has seen better days,

but does hold a treasure trove of photos, mostly from the DAVIDSON/BAIN side of the family, some even identified, albeit well after the event, by my late Aunt Isabel HENDERSON. These notes were invaluable to me when I began, all those years ago, to try and work out who on earth was who, and where they all came from.
Whereas the BAIN and HENDERSON side of the family has some chance of finding others in NZ with the same photos and some family knowledge, I am the sole remaining DAVIDSON descendant from the two brothers (Adam and James) who emigrated in the late 1870s, all of their siblings remaining in Scotland, with only Agnes (below) moving away - to Gateshead.
The next generations spread further afield with representatives in Canada and Australia as well.

The photo selected today was labelled as a nephew of Grandfather Davidsons named DODDS.

Research had indicated that he was therefore likely to be a son of William DODDS and Agnes Robertson DAVIDSON who married at Chirnside (Berwickshire) in 1869 where the known sons are James (born Chirnside, 1870), John (b. Chirnside, 1871) or William (b. abt 1877 Gateshead).
The only other obviously identified photo of this branch is of a family group

labelled as "Mr & Mrs DODDS & family Grandfather Davidsons relations", with the reverse showing the photographer as Woodcock & Robinson.
This same photographic studio was responsible for other unlabelled photographs in the album  (same backdrop) that seem likely to be the prior generation of either the FAIRBAIRN or DAVIDSON forebears of my Great Grandad Adam DAVIDSON, and it is assumed, his sister in the photograph above, Agnes Robertson DODDS nee DAVIDSON.
BUT, those two children look further apart in age than James and John would be, and if the younger is actually a girl and Rosina, where's her other older brother? (All survived to adulthood.)
Wonder why there's no photo of daughter Rosina Hunter DODDS (b. 1874, Chirnside)?

Anyone recognise these photos?

Here's a WikiTree descendant chart from John DAVIDSON, father of Adam and Agnes.
Anyone interested in contributing to WikiTree to update the family knowledge would be most welcome, registration is free.

What changing a letter can uncover

Twice in the last month I've had reason to review past research that had come to a full stop.
One because of a contact on WikiTree who had connected up another branch of the FAIRBAIRNs, the other from a post on my guestbook that I've only just noticed.
Both led me to review the families concerned in my database to see what might now be available.

The first made me realise that although a marriage certificate was indexed as HIGGINS, and clearly to me even on a reread, stated the husband of Elizabeth FAIRBAIRN was a Thomas HIGGINS, it was actually WIGGINS.
No wonder I got nowhere trying to find what happened to them after their marriage!
Thank you Bill for uploading data on the WIGGINS - happy to have helped untangle the two related Elizabeths.

The second correction was from bad arithmetic on my part and a blurry certificate.
Carrie May FAIRBAIRN married in Toronto in 1914 to, I interpreted, a Charles D COWIS.
The COWIS instead of COWIE I have an excuse for as it was rather unclear. Marrying him off at 16 instead of 26 when the 26 was clear enough on the cert. however I do not have an excuse for at all.
Again, amazing how people are more easily found when you have a more correct age, and surname.

Time I updated RootsWeb WorldConnect database LornaHenderson methinks.

Clintons or Austins or Parkers for a change

DNA results just in for another descendant of William CLINTON and Jemima PARKER have given us a few more identifiable segments for our chromosome map.

Click to enlarge

This is presented slightly differently to the last two snap shots in that  the common ancestor(s) to blame for the dna still detectable in descendants today is identified as opposed to the initials of the matches.
As some of the matches descend from Emma Parker CLINTON's 1st and some from her 2nd marriage we can specifically identify the dna we've inherited from Emma.
Which will be very handy as more matches arrive at those spots.
I thought that nice long segment on chromosome 18 might bring in a few more matches to explore for some ancestral hints, but no, not yet, just two small matches.


For quick reference, the last two shapshots were

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

MANSONs of Caithness anyone?

Have had another great find from DNA testing this week.
Although I do suspect that at least part of it was under my nose, un-analysed from a while ago.

One of my larger matches on 23andme shared genomes, ie we can now see the details of where we match.
Turned out to be at a spot I already knew about two other, smaller, matches and had got as far as determining that we shared some unknown ancestor back up my father's side somewhere.
Needle in haystack.
But the haystack has just got quite a lot smaller.
It is looking far more likely to be my Caithness ancestral lines.

Although none of these matches were on GEDMatch where we could compare across all three companies, one had helpfully tested on both 23andme and on FamilyTreeDNA.
Where I could see that he matched not only myself, but also the late David FINLAYSON, and David's 1C1R who shares his James COGHILL and Isabella WATERS (married 1873 Dunnet, Caithness) as their most recent common ancestors.

But did I also match David there? Not according to FamilyTreeDNA.

Back to the wonderful GEDMatch to see if there was a match below the matching thresholds FTDNA apply. Yes, just below the FTDNA threshold, two segments, totalling 17cM in all, one right where I wanted it to be.

I don't, to my knowledge, have any known COGHILL or WATERS direct ancestry, but we all do have MANSON families - who doesn't if your ancestors come from Caithness? Not that I can see any immediate connection, but somewhere, somewhen, there is a common ancestor who gave us that shared bit of dna on chromosome 13.

My known MANSON ancestry is more from Watten, tiny bit further south than Olrig/Dunnet etc.

Love to hear from anyone with any of the above MANSONs in their ancestry, particularly if you've ventured into DNA testing for genealogy so we can share research and genetics, and hopefully begin to pinpoint which family lines are involved.

Pity that it didn't show up as David's paternal side as we had always considered that our FINLAYSONs just might be related, just back from the beginning of parish records in Bower.
Looks to be a bit far for atDNA to prove, even with the inter-related Caithness families ensuring dna survival beyond the normal expected inheritance probabilities down the generations.

My RootsWeb WorldConnect database LornaHenderson will be updated shortly to include the relevant bits of the above pedigrees, or more accurately, the one or two missing linkages to connect up people already there, as many of David's "cousins" married my "cousins",  in Caithness, Australia, and New Zealand.