DIGGING DEEPER Twiglets
Diarist Gill Shaw charts the rollercoaster ride of researching her family history After my seaside sojourn with my 2x great-aunt Ann Ellen, it’s back to Manchester to look for the rest of my great-grandfather Mark John Leah’s siblings.
I was planning to skip to number five, Arthur Thomas, but first I want to tie up a loose end and find the death of his elder brother Theophilus, who was baptised in Henbury, Cheshire, in 1859. Aged two, he’s recorded with his parents on only one census, the 1861, so I’ve long suspected the worst.
At FreeBMD, I input his name, a date range of 1861-1871, select ‘deaths’… and hmm, no matches. Is it the spelling? I zip over to Findmypast to try there, and oo-er, I wasn’t…