EUREKA MOMENT
When Keith Stanton was struggling to find his great uncle, it was tracking down the fate of another relative in Australia that provided the key, says Claire Vaughan
The name that broke a brick wall
How long have you been researching your family history?
I’ve been researching my family history for about 20 years – albeit rather sporadically. My early research involved looking up census returns, but it was more of an exercise in using the internet than a serious attempt at genealogy! In 2004, when clearing my parents’ house after they had passed away, I found two documents. One was a marriage certificate for my grandfather’s eldest brother. The second was more of a mystery as I didn’t recognise the name on it, Bridget Mullen. She turned out to be my great great grandmother. Finding out about the people named in these documents was what got me hooked on genealogy.
What did you discover before hitting your brick wall?
Investigating my Stanton family roots, I discovered that my great grandfather John Stanton was from Ireland – the census records revealed that he was born in Partry, Co Mayo. The certificate of his marriage to Cecelia Mullen recorded that his father’s name was Martin. John and Cecelia had ten children: three girls and seven boys. I also uncovered the unusual cause of John Stanton’s death: he was fatally injured in a tram car accident. I was able to find information on all of the children, with the exception of John Stanton Jr. The only information I had about him was his date of birth and a vague memory of being told at some point that he had gone to Australia.
What was stopping you from progressing your research?
When I began to research what had happened to him ‘down under’, I discovered that there were lots of John Stantons in Australia and I had absolutely nothing to link any of them to ‘my’ John Stanton. Also, there was the possibility that he had returned to England, moved to another country – or never actually left England at all.
How did you try to overcome the problem?
As well as general hunts using his name as a starting point, I carried out searches with the emphasis on his date of birth.
What was the ‘eureka’ moment?
It was a complete accident. I remember my grandfather telling me about his mother, Cecelia, and brother Thomas (known as Tony to the family) emigrating to Australia; Cecelia was about 68 when she went, and they returned two years later because she didn’t like it. I decided to look into this story by checking the emigration and immigration records on Ancestry. Sure enough, they were recorded as both going to Australia in 1928 on Hobsons Bay and returning two years later. However, the records revealed something else: my great grandmother’s 13-year-old granddaughter, Evelyn Gutcher, had travelled out with them, though there was no record of her returning. Her unusual name helped me find John.
I tried online searches for Evelyn, with little success. Then, out of sheer desperation, I entered her name into the Google search engine to see what would come up. Amazingly, I did get a result. Sadly it was a newspaper report on the Trove website detailing a fatal riding accident involving Evelyn in 1934, just four years after her grandmother had returned home.
The report provided the clue I needed: it said that a Mr J Stanton, her uncle, of Willoughby, New South Wales, had requested a copy of the coroner’s findings. I now had a lead for ‘my’ John Stanton.
What did you do next?
I searched the Australian electoral rolls on Ancestry for Willoughby around the time of the accident and found John Stanton listed, along with his wife – Amelia Irene Signa – in 1933 in North Sydney. I hunted down the couple’s wedding and sent for a copy of the certificate in the hope that it would prove I had found my man. Unfortunately there was very little information on the document. John disappeared from the electoral roll after 1972, so I started searching for a death certificate for him – without success.
From the rolls, I had possible names for a couple of John’s sons. When I searched for the name of the eldest, John Noel Stanton, I found a newspaper death notice in the Sydney Morning
Herald in 2001 that gave the names of his siblings (Norman, Beryl and Keith), his daughter Roma ( John’s granddaughter), his son-inlaw and his grandchildren. Armed with this list of names, I searched Facebook and found Roma. I made contact and she told me that John had died in about 1974.
I still couldn’t find a death listing, so I contacted the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages to ask if anyone there could help. They responded with a listing of a death, in 1976, of a John Stanton whose parents were recorded as John and Cecelia. I sent for a copy of the certificate and it proved that I had finally found out what happened to my missing great uncle.
Did you discover anything else along the way?
I have discovered some living relatives in Australia, and possibly more still to find.
What would your advice be to other family historians who hit an obstacle on their family tree?
Repeating a search, after a period of time, can produce different results. The first time I searched for Evelyn Gutcher, the reports didn’t mention J Stanton. Another search about two years later gave me the name I needed.