Happy
New Year to all my readers! We took the opportunity to enjoy a nice break over
Christmas to visit children and grandchildren in China and Vancouver. Now it’s
back home and back to reading, research and writing.
In
my last few posts before the holiday I commented on the use of searches of
indexes
of the General Record Office (GRO) for England and Wales, especially to find
the maiden names of the mothers of individuals born since 1837. I have
continued to find the resource of great value in establishing the identity of
many family members.
As
the Online Parish Clerk for the parish of Plympton St. Mary, Devon, I had a recent request
from a family researcher to see if I could find information about a family who had
lived in the area in the mid-1800s.
What
he thought was that: William Collings may or may not have been born in Plympton
St. Mary about 1815; his wife, Mary Ann, was born there about 1829; and all
their children were born in the parish. He provided a list of seven children
born between 1852 and 1871. Mary Ann’s maiden name was not known, which he was
also interested in learning.
Very
quickly I found the family on the 1861 England census, living in Plympton St.
Mary with their first four children. William had been born in Sowton, Devon. I
also found them all on the baptism register for the parish. Many of the entries
also had their birth dates. I was able to show there were actually eight
children born to the couple. A daughter born in 1868 died in 1869, though. The
eighth child was named for the deceased sibling.
 |
| 1851 England Census - Collings family in Plympton St Mary, Devon |
None
of the children had second names that might give a clue as to their mother's
maiden name. I tried a search of the GRO index for all of the children and
found most of the births were registered in Plympton RD with a mother's name of
KENT. That led me back to the parish baptism record where I found Mary Ann
Kent, daughter of John and Betsey Kent, baptized 19 April 1829. I was able to
give the researcher most of the GRO registration data from which, if he wished,
he could order the birth certificates.
The
researcher also was looking for information on one of the sons of William and
Mary Ann, Frederick, born in 1857. Because of what was shown on the census, he believed
Frederick had a son named Harry F., but he could not find any information as to
a wife/mother. The problem with his logic was that the census showed Frederick
as being single. Sometimes information can be entered in error. To check his
status I looked for him on the 1901 census and found him living with his mother
and still single.
 |
| 1891 England Census - Collings family in Plympton St Mary, Devon |
The
census did show Harry was born in Plympton, Devon. A search of the GRO birth
index found an entry for Harry Ford Collings with a mother's name of Ford.
A
search of FreeBMD for a Collings/Ford marriage found that a Charles Collings
had married Mary Jane Ford in 1885. Charles was Frederick’s brother, so it
seemed then that Harry Ford was their son, not Frederick's.
I
have not yet found a marriage for William Collings and Mary Ann Kent. I am
wondering whether she was briefly married before and then whether she might
then have been registered with a different surname. Another possibility is that
William’s name was not indexed correctly or at all. On the FreeBMD marriage
index for the March 1848 quarter, there are three females listed – one named
Mary Kent, but only two males. The date is about right and Sowton, where
William Collings grew up, is part of the St. Thomas Registration District. One
way to find out is to order the marriage certificate for Mary Kent and see who
the husband was. It’s a bit of a longshot that I will leave to those actually
researching the family.
The
point here is that, with the new GRO search resource, two problems were quickly
solved: we learned the maiden name of William Collings wife and the names of
the parents of Harry F. Collings. With that information it was easier to find much
more about the various families.
Wayne Shepheard is a
volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program in England, handling
four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number
of articles about various aspects of genealogy in several family history
society journals. He has also served as an editor of two such publications.
Wayne provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated
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