Saturday was a good genealogy day.
I’ve been asked why I spent so much time covering new and updated resources on the blog. Additional material comes online at regular and irregular intervals. There are monthly issues of magazines and updates to FreeBMD, annual updates as closure dates for civil registration records are passed. Sometimes news arrives unexpectedly; maybe an organization finished indexing a collection — we may be alerted to it through our subscriptions.
But as I discovered just this past weekend, sometimes updates fly under that routine scan.
As you may recall, I’ve been researching my great uncle Edward Cohen who died in the Great War serving in the British Army. In writing up his story, watch for it in the next issue of BIFHSGO’s Anglo-Celtic Roots, it occurred to me to check again whether his father Maurice had ever become a naturalized British citizen. I’d looked before without success, finding it hadn’t been a priority. Now there was a reference to a detailed application at TNA. So I asked a friend in London to do a lookup at Kew on their next visit.
I found out that the family emigrated to London in 1868 when he was four years old. That’s much earlier than I thought. I knew he had a sister born in Amsterdam in 1867, he was in the 1881 census and married in London in 1878 1887. As I didn’t find him or the family in the 1871 census it seemed emigration would be in the 1870s. I still can’t locate him or the family in the 1871 census.
His citizenship application was in 1919, so it was closed until 2019. It’s worth keeping and periodically reviewing a list of outstanding facts you’d like to discover.
Did your ancestor really marry at age 14?
So, is Maurice your great grandfather? Maurice does not sound like a Dutch name. I suppose Anglo-Celtic Roots will elaborate.
Thanks for catching that Linda, It should be 1887, not 1878, I should have looked again!
I agree completely John. I have one back to old brick walls and had them smashed with virtually no effort on my part because new record groups are released all the time.
And when I read in your blog about them, noting specific geograph locations, I will often go abck and update what I have told other people about their family histories as well. Cheers, BT