Archive for the ‘Mystery Solved’ Category

Joseph Knight (1736-1808) and his second wife Jane Harvey have long been identified as the parents of Sally Knight (baptised 1798). I now believe that Sally’s parents are in fact Joseph Knight (1763-1837), the eldest son of Joseph Knight (1736-1808) and Elizabeth Mark (1842-1783), and Jane Moss* (1778- ).

Here’s why:

Both my father and myself have had our DNA analysed by Ancestry DNA. I thought I’d play DNA detective and see if I could narrow down who my father’s unknown great-grandfather could be. I grouped my father’s unattributed fourth cousins or closer into clusters and managed to identify a surname of interest. Of the 19 matches in the cluster that had a public tree, I was able to build a tree that connected 14 of them to a common ancestor couple. So I had a tree and a hypothesis that someone on it or connected to it was my father’s mystery great grandfather. Where to next? I decided to link my father, his parents and maternal grandmother to the tree though proxies and see what Ancestry DNA would throw up in terms of connections with shared matches.

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March was a good month for extending the family tree. I managed to find four older siblings for my great great great grandfather George George. George, son of George George, a baker, and Mary, was born in 1813 and baptised the following the year. There is a candidate marriage between a George George and Mary Fage in 1805, leaving a gap of eight years before the first known child was born. The indexed London baptisms at Ancestry begin in 1813 and browse-able images of registers for Stepney are limited.
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Joseph Hancock, son of George Hancock, boot tree maker, died at 3 Haddon Place, Waterloo Road on March 7, 1844, aged 3 months 9 days, of convulsions.
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Joseph Coles got married between his hospitalisation in 1817 and the presentation to the Somersetshire Society of a report into his conduct as an apprentice in March 1819 (Somersetshire Society, 1819, March 15) that said:

… subsequent to the time when he was in the hospital for the cure of the Venereal disease he had been in the habit of staying out all hours of the night sometimes all night and frequently whole days – that he had formed a connection with and had ultimately married their discharged Servant maid …

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The London Metropolitan Archives are in the process of digitising their genealogical resources in association with Ancestry.com. These resources are being progressively made available, and having recently upgraded my subscription to Ancestry, searches for Benjamin Coles have uncovered some new information.
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A couple of weeks ago I googled my 4 × great grandfather Joseph Coles and was pleasantly surprised to see an entry in the results that looked suspiciously like a reference to an article in a scholarly journal. Following the link proved my suspicions correct but unfortunately the full-text of the article (Keane, 1975) was not available to me online without paying a hefty fee. Luckily my local university library held the journal in print format so I was not inconvenienced too much.
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