As
I look at information about my ancestors, both direct and otherwise, I find
there are many where one partner in a couple had been married before and, in
most cases had a child or children from those unions. Those relationships can sometimes get in the way of identifying what the situations really were and who was
directly related to whom.
I
wrote about one such family in a post on 15 September 2013, Mistaken
Assumptions from Register Notes: Nicholls-MacKenny Case Study. I also
commented on 13 January 2015 about these blended families and half-brothers and
sisters in my post, Don’t Forget
About Those Half Brothers and Sisters. And then there was the story
about my wife’s great-grandfather Hugh MacKay who married successive women
named Isabel (blog post 29 September 2015, Hugh and the
Isabels).
I pointed out in a post of 18 August 2015 that the photo on this blog is of a
mixed family, Moving 3 –
Mayfield Family. The children of the ladies on both ends of the
back row of the photo, are my “Half 1st Cousins – Twice Removed.”
Anyway, I keep running into these kinds of families. They seem to be very common,
especially those who lived hundreds of years ago. That may be partly, or mostly
due to the fact that life was more fragile and diseases or accidents often
had tragic endings with one parent succumbing leaving the other to look after a
young family. Often a sibling of a deceased individual married the survivor. At
other times, two widowed people, each with their own brood found solace in a
union together – in part out of compassion and in part from economic necessity.
And sometimes a lady with an illegitimate child (or two) found a fellow to
fall in love with and marry. Children of these marriages were undoubtedly lucky,
to gain a father, protector and supporter.
I
have noticed that many family trees online do not seem to take into account, or
possibly even notice that one partner or another had been married more than
once and had more than one set of offspring. Many children are confused among
the group and are attached to a mother or father that really was not their own, biologically speaking.
Occasionally there is a young child shown on a census as a son or daughter of
the head of the household who was actually the illegitimate offspring of one of
their own near-adult children. These youngsters end up being raised by their
grandparents and unless their birth records are found their origin may well be confused.
On
my wife’s side, both sets of her grandparents were part of blended families.
Those were somewhat easy to sort out as we had first-hand accounts from her
parents as to whom all the siblings were. It does not mean we have been able
to find out everything we would like to know about all of them. That is proving
to be a challenge. On her paternal side, both sets of great-grandparents also
had mixed families. So she has a lot of half-cousins, half-aunts and half-uncles!
Interestingly,
my Legacy program shows one such person from her paternal grandfather’s family as
her Uncle but his spouse as Wife of Half-Uncle. Their children are
identified as 1st Cousins, and the spouses or those individuals as
husbands or wives of Half-1st Cousins. In a different branch it
identifies the son from her maternal grandfather’s first marriage as
Half-Uncle. The connection through bloodlines is the same. The program did
indicate the mother of her half-uncles and aunts as Wife of Grandfather rather than Step-Grandmother. I did go back further and found a Half-Granduncle and his Wife of Half-Granduncle.
Now
I am curious why it does not recognize all such relations with consistent
terminology. Do other programs do the same thing? Perhaps Legacy can provide
information about this one. The one thing the program does do with mixed
families is show the children differently, with the designation “1/2” in front
of their names depending on which spouse you are looking at.
So
why am I writing about this aspect again today. Well, a return to searching for
information about my wife’s family, in particular her grandfather that I
referenced above, led to me looking for one of her Half-Granduncles. He is
shown on the record of his marriage as “Robert Milne, known as Robert McKay.”
He was illegitimate, born in 1898, and grew up in the family of Alexander McKay
after Alexander married Mary Ann Milne in 1902. What is interesting is that he
was identified occasionally under both surnames.
 |
Robert
Milne, aka Robert McKay – ca 1925
Sometimes
children from the children of one marriage may end up living with members of
the second family. This may particularly be true where grandparents are
involved. That was the case with a granddaughter of my wife’s
great-grandfather, Hugh MacKay. Her presence on both the 1891 and 1901 Scotland
census allowed me to identify children from his first marriage and, thus, the
name of their mother in that post about Hugh and his wives named Isabel.
Families
get mixed up! Most of us will find ancestors who married more than once and had
children with different spouses. Sometimes both parents will have married
previously complicating the relationships further. On our family trees these
half-cousins may also have half-siblings and half-cousins of their own,
completely unrelated to us. It can be a challenge to work out all the
relationships that make up our “Family”
but those people are still part of our overall history.
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
