Eureka Moment
A facility introduced by the General Register Office in 2017 has allowed Susan Moseley to break down a brick wall of nearly 40 years’ standing despite problems with the official records, as Gail Dixon explains
The website that helped Susan Moseley to break down a brick wall of nearly 40 years’ standing
Abrick wall is something that we all face in genealogy, and they are all the more frustrating if they relate to a beloved relative. This was the case for Susan Moseley, who began researching her tree in 1981, only to hit a brick wall with her paternal grandmother Elizabeth Rowley (née Watson).
Susan knew that she had been born on 26 February 1885, and at the time was unable to search for a mother’s maiden name on official birth records before 1911. All this changed in 2017 thanks to the introduction of a new search function on the website of the General Register Office (GRO).
My Brick Wall
I began tracing my family tree in the early 1980s, and naturally one of the first relatives I researched was my grandmother Elizabeth. I remembered her well. She married Alfred Rowley in 1906, and they had nine children. Elizabeth loved having all her family nearby, and had pictures of her many grandchildren in the front room. There was always a warm welcome, a cup of tea and a biscuit when we dropped by.
Elizabeth worked as a laundress and shirt-ironer before marrying Alfred. She lived in Middlesex and Hertfordshire most of her life, and passed away in 1971 at the age of 86.
However, I couldn’t find her birth record, although I searched for it in both counties and the surrounding ones. If you wanted to buy a birth certificate in 1981, you had to go to St Catherine’s House in London. I searched all of the indexes for an Elizabeth Watson, born in Middlesex or Hertfordshire in 1885. Nothing turned up, so I tried 1884 and 1886. Again, it was a fruitless search. At the time I didn’t know Elizabeth’s mother’s name, and there were no matches for her father George Watson.
My first breakthrough came when the 1891 census was published in 1982. I visited the record office at Kew, and was pleased to find Elizabeth Watson and her family. She lived with her parents and several siblings on Western Road, Tottenham. Elizabeth’s mother’s name was given as Hester, but this was a misspelling of Esther, which cropped up in later returns.
I purchased the marriage record of George Watson and Esther Newcombe, and they were the correct parents. So why couldn’t I find a birth certificate for Elizabeth? Could she have been adopted, or secretly the daughter of one of her ‘elder sisters’?
My Eureka Moment
In 2017 the brick wall finally began to crumble. I discovered that you could now use the GRO’s website to search birth certificates before 1911 by mother’s maiden name ( https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/ content/certificates/indexes_search.
asp). I began looking for all of the children born to Watson and Newcombe in 1864 across the whole of England. Within an hour I had found 14 entries, beginning with Mary Ann Watson, born in Islington in 1865, through to Edward Charles Watson, born in Edmonton, in 1887.
The younger children could be cross-checked with census returns, so I knew that I had the right family. Intriguingly, there were two Sarahs listed in the results. One was born in Edmonton in 1880 and the other was born in the same place, to the same parents, in 1885, the year my grandmother was born.
I ordered the birth certificate for the Sarah who was born in 1885 and the address was 3 Laurel Villas, Angel Road, Edmonton. It was the same road that the family was living on in the 1881 census. I knew I must be on the right track.
Esther gave her mark rather than sign her name. I was convinced now that a mistake had been made. My grandmother Elizabeth was the baby being registered, but either the registrar or Esther had got confused, and the wrong name was written on the certificate. Perhaps young Sarah was in the room at the time, and this is how the mix-up happened.
My Breakthrough
Another fascinating clue emerged when I looked at the detail on the birth certificate. The registration of the second ‘Sarah’ took place on 20 April 1885, 42 days after the date of birth, which was given as 9 March. Births had to be registered within 42 days or a fine was imposed.
My grandmother Elizabeth was born on 26 February, but I’m sure that Esther forgot the deadline for registration and gave the birthdate as 9 March to avoid the fine. Life must have been very stressful for her. She had 14 children and lost two sons, James and Alfred, in their infancy. So you can understand why she might have overlooked the deadline for Elizabeth’s registration.
Discovering my grandmother’s birth record has opened up new avenues of research with great aunts and uncles. I’ve found 60 grandchildren for George and Esther, and many more in the next generation. This has helped me to trace cousins I didn’t previously know, using DNA tests via ancestry.co.uk and findmypast.co.uk. I love solving mysteries, and it was so exciting to unravel this one.