Who Do I Think They Are? – Is this the ANSCOMBE family?

I have been puzzling over this photo for many months, it belonged to my great-aunt and has no names or dates on the back.

One of the reasons I love this photo is because of the varied clothing in evidence, but also I love that the old man’s trousers are tied with string just below the knees! What is that all about? To me the man on the right at the back looks like a cowboy who has lost his horse and the man next to him might just be a mad scientist.

The setting of the photo doesn’t really provide any clues, it is a rural setting but that doesn’t really help narrow anything down at all. The only clue I have is that the young man second from the left on the back row looks like my great-aunt’s father (my great-grandmother’s partner) Trayton ANSCOMBE.

So I wonder whether the old man sitting in the front is his father, who was also named Trayton. The woman on his left is wearing a wedding ring and I wonder whether she is his wife Fanny? According to the census his wife was ten years younger than Trayton (and I suspect she may not have been his first wife), but even so there still seems quite a large age difference, either that or he had a very hard life.

The older Trayton ANSCOMBE died in 1914 aged 65 years, when his son Trayton would have been 18 years old. So the age of the young man in the photo looks about right if it was taken not long before the older Trayton’s death. My problem with this is that the old man looks a lot older than 65 to me.

I really need to get my photo-dating books out to see if I can learn anything from the clothing of the younger people in particular. I also need to do some more research on the ANSCOMBE family, to see if there were enough children for this to be the family. In the meantime, if you recognise any of this group please let me know.

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Personal Genealogy Update: Week 50

It was a very disappointing week for family history last week, I think perhaps I have just been a bit too lazy for my own good, although the run up to Christmas doesn’t really help either. I achieved very little this week in the way of actual research and not much housekeeping either.

All the stuff that I wrote about last week (the KIPPS and KINGHORN families) didn’t get finished off and there was no new work on either of those branches. I was hoping to finish off those lines (to a reasonable level) and carry on with my housekeeping, but that never happened. I will try again this week, I really need to concentrate on the KINGHORNs of Carlisle otherwise I wont be ready to go up there and research them next year.

On the housekeeping side of things I didn’t progress much further, perhaps another two or three individuals. I think now I am scared about the size of my to-do list! It is getting to a state where it looks like it will be almost impossible to complete it all within my lifetime, and I shall soon have to start prioritising which items I really want to work on.

I did try to put some work in on George MITCHELL, but have struggled to find much information about the London to Brighton Railway (and specifically its engines) online and after some preliminary work in the catalogues it looks like I might be out of luck when it comes to finding information on his widow and some form of poor relief. I wont give up hope yet, but it doesn’t look promising.

So what do I realistically expect to achieve this week? I think I shall be setting the bar low this week, so I have a good chance of achieving something I set out to do. I will probably work on a few more individuals, tidying up their records and adding more to-do items. I want to do a bit more work on the ANSCOMBE family, now that I have their entry in the 1911 census to work with, but I think I am going to be running short of time again this week.

NEWS: 1911 Census summary books on Ancestry.co.uk

You never know what you are going to find when you go poking about the Ancestry.co.uk, especially their Genealogy Databases Posted or Updated Recently page. Last night at the top of the list were entries for the 1911 Census summary books (Channel Islands, Isle of Man, England and Wales). Hopefully this marks the beginning of the promised release of the 1911 census on Ancestry.co.uk and The Genealogist.

I expect we will hear more about them in the next few days when they are officially announced. From what I have seen though they are nice crisp colour images of the pages, looking very similar to the Findmypast ones.

You might wonder why this is such good news, after all Findmypast.co.uk have had the images (both the household schedules and summary books) available for some time. For starters you never can have enough different indexes, just in case one of them is wrong, but more importantly (to me anyway) Ancestry.co.uk have made the summary books searchable for the first time (I think?).

Being able to search the summary books for the head of household has helped locate one of my “missing” families. Within about 10 minutes I had been able to locate the ANSCOMBE family in Cuckfield, Sussex, something which I had failed to do on using Findmypast alone, despite many previous attempts.

It wasn’t a straight-forward process, on Ancestry I searched for the surname ANSCOMBE in Cuckfield and found several likely households. After getting the schedule number from the summary book image and finding their neighbours on Findmypast, I was able to work out what the census reference should be for their household.

Searching on Findmypast using the census reference brought up a transcription without my ANSCOMBEs anywhere to be seen. I viewed the image and it all became clear, the cause of my inability to find them revealed.

The household schedule began with three individuals (a tutor and presumably two pupils), all described as boarders. Beneath them was a gap of two lines and then the six members of the ANSCOMBE family I had been looking for. For some reason they had not been indexed, just those first three unrelated individuals, no wonder I couldn’t find them.

I now need to find out how to report them missing to Findmypast, but this just goes to show the value of looking in multiple indexes. I am sure that once the household schedules are available on Ancestry that there will be similar examples of missing individuals, it is inevitable with any index of this size that there will be errors.

Sometimes all that is need is a little bit of teamwork (thank you Ancestry and Findmypast) and some creative thinking to get around a problem.