Researching Ancestors is like doing a Jigsaw

I have always enjoyed doing jigsaws. As I was growing up, for a lot of years, their was a family present under the Christmas tree of 1000 piece jigsaw which was taken to our holiday house and set up on the bench between the kitchen and the lounge room. Anyone that visited over the holiday period was drawn to putting at least a few pieces in that puzzle, often a lot more! Two things happened this week that made me think how similar, in some respects, family history research is to doing a jigsaw. We are all searching for the many pieces to make our ancestors stories complete just like we put all those pieces together to make a picture with a jigsaw.

As a reply to a Facebook request for help in locating the ship an ancestor had arrived on, I suggested looking at baptism records in England and also the 1841 census as the death certificate indicated she hadn't left England by then and also gave a place of birth. This I thought would narrow down the time frame to look at as well as show parents she may have traveled with. Rather than a thanks for the suggestion the reply I received was - 'I only want to know the name of the ship'! It is often impossible to find the piece of the puzzle we want until we have all the surrounding pieces to help us.

Following on from that, I learnt myself the hard way how true this is. For many years I have had both the 1841 & 1851 census showing my 2x great grandmother, Ellen Tanner and her parents in Pitts Deep and then Boldre in Hampshire. I have the shipping record of them coming to Port Adelaide in 1855, Ellen's baptism, her death certificate and index records of 2 of her 3 marriages, but I have never been able to find anything further about her mother, except that she was born in Beaulieu, Hampshire. In order to have all the details I could for my trip to England, I decided to order a pdf of her birth certificate while the GRO are still doing their trial. Perhaps there would be a different address or some other detail I didn't have. Four days after my order the pdf was available to download.

At first I thought I had ordered the wrong certificate, as the surname for her mother was a name I had never seen 'Nutbeem' and an unusual one at that! As far as I knew Ellen's parents, William Tanner and Ann Etheridge, had married in Boldre in 1834. However after some more research I found that Ann Nutborn (don't you just love the variations in spelling) had married James Etheridge in Beaulieu 10 years earlier. They had one son, George before James died in 1830. Interestingly enough George appears on the 1841 census as William Tanner's son, George Tanner, so he obviously took on the role of father when he married Ann.

So it just goes to show you do need to gather as much information as possible to get the full story of your ancestors, just as you need every piece to make a complete jigsaw puzzle.