Common Ancestor Tales

I spent a lot of yesterday getting nowhere with finding the families of William Fisher’s siblings. I like to do a tree on the page of each person showing the wider family so that I get a sense of who was around in terms of cousins, uncles and aunts.

This seems particular important for these families who travelled abroad because they were often reliant on this extended family to help out with the younger members of the family when they came back to england.
In this case I had four sisters all of whom I could find not record of after they left home. Unhelpfully the ancestry tree’s available had all three of the dying in 1845… which I imagine was somebodies guess that has been inherited across lots of trees!

Eventually I managed to find one sister Mary Henrietta by virtue of the fact that there simply are not many Mary Henrietta’s about. But still I could not find a marriage or death for Emily, Caroline or Matilda Lousia.

So I did a search on Wavendon in find my past because it is much easier to search on a keyword there. And it came up with a Caroline Whimpher… that absolutely rang a bell as some of the autobiographies of Fisher I have read mentioned an aunt Whimpher. I found a marriage for Caroline to Colonel Whimper (and a rather stern photo of him at the National Portrait Gallery).

So now I had two of four. And then I noticed Matilda Louisa was a witness at that wedding so she was alive in 1851… so that disproved the 1845 death. And then I found her staying with Caroline Whimper’s sister in law Aemilia Dickson with her brother Francis in 1851.

But after 1851 the trail was still dead.

At that point I did what I very rarely do and asked on a facebook ancestry page if anyone could help me. I should do it more often! Many eyes are often better than one. It took about 20 minutes for the post to get approved.

So I went back to have a look at the sisters I had found to see if I could spot an clues on their census information. It was then I noticed that I had added a will to Mary Henrietta’s record. In it quite neatly written (not very common) it discussed four sisters: Matilda Fisher, Emily Anderson, Caroline Whimper, Fanny Sargeaunt (who I did have info on) and two executors one of whom was William Sheppard Scarborough. I was so pleased . It confirmed what I had found (always a bonus), gave me a husband for Emily and confirmed that Matilda was alive in 1854. I felt like I was closing in.

I was able to find Emily Anderson and her family pretty quickly. Then I had a hunch about Matilda – I think I had seen a Matilda Scarborough in records while I was searching. So I started to look and at that moment my facebook post was approved and someone suggested a Scarborough marriage. I checked it out and indeed on the census Matilda Scarborough was born in Wavendon (lots of the census records are mis-transcribed on the name Wavendon so they are not easy to find).

So thanks to that ancestry group member and thanks to Mary Henrietta for her comprehensive will.

After a short dance around the room I went to bed happy!

And here is the final tree: