Finding Minnie: taking stock

I have to admit that my Finding Minnie project has got a little out of hand and has grown way beyond my original expectations.

I was a little surprised at first to find my research taking me into Essex and away from my comfort zone in Sussex, but now I have left that comfort zone way behind and I am now trying to get to grips with research in both Ireland and Canada (with plenty of research still left to do in England).

I have no idea where or when this project is going to end. I have already achieved my initial goal of finding out who Minnie was, but instinctively I have just carried on investigating.

Taking a short break has given me chance to review what I actually want to find out and how it is going to happen. My attention has now turned to finding out what happened to Minnie’s mother Kate and the rest of Minnie’s siblings after they arrived in Canada, and also about the life of Kate’s second husband Patrick Vaughan.

I know this process is going to take some time, so whilst I get to grips with Irish and Canadian research I want to return much closer to home and find out more about my grandmother and my great-grandmother who brought up Minnie.

I also want to find out more about the village of High Hurstwood in East Sussex, where they were all living. I can find very little information online about the history of the village, so it will be quite interesting to see what I can find out and it could possibly evolve into a one place study in the future.

One of Kate’s brothers also emigrated to Canada, so as I am starting to explore Canadian research it would be a good time to find out some more about him and his family as well. There is also another brother who I haven’t been able to trace yet, I have a suspicion that he might also have emigrated to Canada so now would be a good time to find out more about him.

Now I see this project more about investigating this particular generation of the Driver family, so I may have to come up with a new name for the project.

Copyright © 2012 John Gasson.

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Wordless Wednesday: Holy Trinity Church, High Hurstwood, East Sussex

Holy Trinity Church, High Hurstwood, East Sussex (19th August 2009)

Copyright © 2012 John Gasson.

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Postcard Album: Inside High Hurstwood Church, Sussex

Last week I showed you a postcard of the outside of Holy Trinity Church, High Hurstwood, Sussex, so this week I will give you a glimpse of the inside of the church.

This postcard is a bit of a mystery, it is unused and doesn’t name a publisher or photographer. The caption is of a style that I don’t recognise, so I am at a loss to tell you any more about this card. If I had to put a date on this card I would have to guess that it was around 1910-15.

I haven’t been inside this church (but I really should) and can’t find a photo of it online, so I don’t know whether it still looks the same inside.

Copyright © 2012 John Gasson.

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

Wordless Wednesday: High Hurstwood Village Sign

Village Sign, High Hurstwood, East Sussex (19th August 2009)

Copyright © 2012 John Gasson.

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

I need to find out more about my grandmother

All the work I have been doing “Finding Minnie” and the subsequent blogging of the story has brought back into focus one of the big weaknesses in my family history. It is something that I have known for a long time, but perhaps not really acknowledged fully.

The more I began to dig around the story of Minnie, the more it became obvious that I have some big gaps in the knowledge of my grandmother’s life. Those gaps haven’t stopped my research, I know all the basic facts that I need to build a family tree, but I am missing background on her early life.

When I say early life I really mean from when she was born to when she married my grandfather at the age of sixteen. My knowledge of her first sixteen years is pretty much limited to her birth and baptism records, and as she was born in 1916 I don’t even have a census record for her.

I am not sure how much more information can be found, school records and church records are obvious sources that need to be investigated, but it would also be good to confirm exactly where she lived and what work did she do after she finished school?

Further information can probably be learnt (or implied) by looking into the lives of her parents (like using Electoral Rolls), but there may be other sources that I haven’t yet considered.

I don’t really know much about High Hurstwood, Sussex where my grandmother was born and presumably grew up, I really need to find out more about the village and village life. This might present further opportunities to find out more about my grandmother.

One big question that I would like to answer is how did my grandparents meet? My grandmother was from East Sussex and my grandfather from West Sussex, many miles apart, what brought them together in a geographical sense?

Further to this lack of knowledge there is another problem. Much of the information I do have after their marriage is not recorded in my database. From things such as baptism and school records for their children I have addresses that should be recorded and dates when the family moved house.

To some extent this problem doesn’t just apply to my grandmother, but to all my grandparents, but I have to start somewhere and it is a natural addition to my ongoing work on “Finding Minnie”.

Copyright © 2012 John Gasson.

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