There’s so much going on at the moment, of which more another time but for today a tale that shows you can still find something new, even after over forty years of family history research.

Yesterday I should have been giving my presentation ‘Madness and Melancholia: the mental health of our ancestors’ a final run through (incidentally still time to come along to this one if you cross my palm with £2.50) but my early morning email trawl dictated otherwise.

An email from My Heritage ‘You’ve got Record Matches’. Sorry My Heritage John Parr of Devon and Johann Jakob Parr are not the same person. Nor is Richard William Braund of Cornwall the one in Melbourne. Their third offering did catch my eye. An extract from a history of Alnwick, Northumberland, published in 1866, referring to Peter Eadington a miller. Now, lurking on my tree is 4 x great grandfather Peter Eadington, miller, not of Alnwick but of Norham, some thirty miles north on the Scottish border. I knew that Peter’s daughter lived in Alnwick after she was married but it hadn’t occurred to me that there might be an earlier family connection.

Although my DNA and tree have been uploaded to My Heritage, I don’t have a subscription so couldn’t look at the record but I found a free copy of the book online and could see that this was too late for my Peter Eadington. Nonetheless it set me thinking. about family connections with Alnwick. Firstly, my Peter Eadington was a bit of a lad. He was a miller in Norham between about 1788 and 1805, during which time he had six children by three different women. One, Alice, he appears to have been married to, although no marriage record has been found. His two eldest daughters were probably born within weeks of each other. His story, as was, is available here but now of course it needs updating.

So, the whole of yesterday was spent following this Bright Shiny Object, with some success. During the course of twelve hours’ research I found, amongst other things, that Peter, whose baptism and marriage still elude me, was sometimes called Patrick, as was his first cousin Peter/Patrick, who was also his brother in law. Ancestry tree owners have these two beautifully muddled and today’s task is to decide which of the two married Sarah Dodds. I am almost certain it is my Peter, in which case he lied about his age on his marriage bond, probably because he was nearly twenty years older than Sarah. Personally, I would have been a bit more worried about his chequered past but hey. Unfortunately, this makes him the right age for cousin Peter/Patrick. The will of his father, David, freely available on the North East Inheritance database, was key to all this but because it is not on Ancestry, it has been ignored and therefore the Peter/Patrick name change has not been picked up. Also key is a family gravestone in Alnwick cemetery. The great piece of luck is that all this came to light BEFORE I am due to stay just outside Alnwick. With the luck of 2020 it would have been after, although there is still time for a regional lockdown to sabotage the trip. The bad news is that there are nearly 600 gravestones in Alnwick cemetery – ah well at least we will be socially distanced.

I now know that he, or possibly cousin Peter (I need to check who was at which mill and what time) owned a boar that, when killed, weighed 52 stone. Thanks British Newspaper Library. The ubiquitous Ancestry trees claim Scottish ancestry for both of Peter’s parents. I still have to satisfy myself that this is correct. If it is, they will be my first direct ancestors born outside England, which is very exciting.

Beside this, last week’s discovery that my grandfather’s first cousin was an actor with the fingers of his right hand missing, who performed with Cary Grant, pales into insignificance. William Smith is, after all, a bit harder to trace. So don’t tell me your family history is ‘finished’ there is always more to uncover.

Now back to who married Sarah Dodds?

St. Michael’s, Alnwick