How can I find out where and when my 3x great grandfather George Rintel was born?
QI’m trying to find a birth record for my 3x great grandfather, George Rintel. He was born in about 1841 – an estimate from the record of his marriage to Margaret Duffy at St Paul’s, Liverpool, on 24 August 1868. His occupation on the banns was mariner, as was his father’s William.
Nikcole Hassell
AGeorge isn’t listed in the 1881 crew lists database for British merchant seamen mun.ca/mha/1881/crews1881.php and he’s not in the Merchant Navy apprenticeship records on thegenealogist. co.uk. Neither George nor his father are included in the Merchant Navy occupational records 1835–1857 on findmypast.co.uk, but George may have been too young. George also doesn’t seem to have served with the Royal Navy or its reservists, according to the online service records via The National Archives’ (TNA’s) website.
I wonder if the key to this mystery could be the spelling of your ancestor’s surname. Rintel is sometimes a variant on ‘Rintoul’. It’s a Scottish surname, although some Rintouls moved to Ireland, and many people of both nationalities settled or worked in Liverpool. So one avenue to explore is a potential Scottish and/or Irish ancestry via parish and census records from those countries. A quick look at some of these records on findmypast.co.uk and ancestry.co.uk reveals a few potential candidates for you to investigate further. As you will have already found, there are many variants of this surname, so keep an open mind.
Another possibility is that the surname is actually ‘Rentel’, which is of German origin. If your ancestors were of German descent, this might explain their absence from many UK records. There are various collections of German genealogy records online via the main subscription sites, but also some free ones; see thoughtco.com/ german-genealogy-online-1421986.
Finally, note that some men lied about their age at marriage for various reasons – and, for example, familysearch.org shows a George Rentoul, son of William and Rose, christened on 30 March 1828 at Shenley, Hertfordshire. Could this be your family?
Simon Wills