My book launch two weeks ago seems to belong in the dim and distant past now. It went very well thank you, with 120 Zooming in. Thanks go to Devon Family History Society for hosting. The book is selling steadily and I am starting to get some lovely feedback. If anyone could face popping a teeny review on the dreaded Amazon I’d be grateful, as this open doors to other reviews. You don’t have to have bought the book from Amazon, you just have to have bought something from them. Reviews elsewhere are also welcome of course. In case you’ve missed all this book news and if so where have you been? details are here.

Plenty of news in the Family History world. 2021 is going to be exciting. Rootstech, for which I am an Ambassador once again, is to be virtual and free. This really is a chance to embrace the Rootstech experience without going to Salt Lake City. 25-27 February are the dates to save and you can register now. I am also proud to be joining my down under friends as a speaker for the Family History Down Under conference in March. This too is a virtual event, with a great international line-up.

Then those of us who have done Ancestry DNA tests had our ethnicity estimates updated. These are of course just that – estimates but it seems that the whole world is now Scottish, not just me. My own estimate changed very little, 5% moved from England to Scotland but there are many reports of increased Scottishness appearing in people’s estimates. See here for my take on ethnicity estimates.

On the subject of Scotland, I still haven’t added any ‘born in Scotland’ ancestors to my tree. It looks likely but I am waiting for more supporting evidence. Really exciting news though. After more than forty years of searching, I have found that my great great grandparents did get married after all – sort of. In preparation for heading north, I reviewed my Northumbrian ancestry for the nth time. This branch is the one that gets stuck first. I am pretty sure who my 3x great grandparents are, I just need more evidence (a bit of a theme you’ll notice). For those who’d like all the details of this sorry search, I’ve written about it before. My great great grandparents, John Hogg and Elizabeth Pearson, were not married in the 1851 census and apparently married by the time their daughter was born in March 1854. Despite four decades of not finding the marriage, I am always optimistic so I tried again. This time though a glimmer of hope. Family Search led me to a notice in the Newcastle Chronicle recording a marriage of Mr John Hogg and Miss Elizabeth Pearson on the 13^th April 1853. The names and date were right but was this my great great grandparents? They were not of the class to put a notice in the newspaper and they were in the Morpeth area not Newcastle. Finding the actual article was a challenge. It didn’t show up in a newspaper search on FindmyPast; I had to look for the individual newspaper and then find the page. The column was one of those in a margin, so distortion meant that it was not picked up by OCR. The snippet made it clear that this was the right couple as both were ‘of Espley’, a small Northumbrian hamlet where I knew they were living in 1854. Helpfully, it gave the place of marriage ‘Lamberton’. A quick google revealed that this was not the breakthrough I had been hoping for. Lamberton Toll was the location for Scottish irregular marriages; a less well-known Gretna Green. I suspect they travelled there because he was 23 years her senior, with children as old as his new wife and she had already had two illegitimate children. Perhaps that was why they put the notice in the paper,because they didn’t have an official certificate. It was an odd paper to choose though, why not pick a Morpeth paper, which was their nearest town? Some records of Lamberton Toll marriages do survive, sadly not for 1853 though, all that there is is an index. So there is my hope of confirming John’s father’s name gone (I was so hoping that it was Robert). The only faint chink in the brick wall is that John’s first marriage is also missing, was that another irregular marriage?

The moral of the story is don’t give up. At least I have a date and a place for the marriage if not the vital father’s name. The next post may come from the wilds of ancestral Northumberland, might just sneak in a quick trip to Lamberton!