User:Goldenoldie/Family

This is my paternal-paternal line.

It is pretty complete up until my great-grandparents: Henry and Elizabeth. However, I had never discovered the surname of Henry's mother, George's wife.

I only discovered George's antecedents about ten years ago when I had an email from someone who noticed the similarities between our families in Ontario in the mid 19th century. After a bit she came up with a letter written by her direct ancestor back to his father in England. The letter, written 1847, must have missed the post. It had the complete address in Yorkshire on it. In the last sentence, her ancestor, another Henry, mentioned his brother George.

I live in England, not far outside London. The next morning I was on the train to visit the Family History Centre (no longer there; all records are now at The National Archives in Kew) and the Society of Genealogists. Before the end of the day I had found George's birthplace and matched his baptismal date with the date on his gravestone in Ontario.

Another discovery came along one New Years Eve a few years later. I had been trying to discover what happened to the siblings of my 3x great grandfather Lyle and was in email communication with a lady up in Scarborough, Yorkshire. Just in passing one day I asked her if she had any idea of the maiden name of my George Lyle who went to Canada. I knew her given name was Martha but there were no records of George and Martha's marriage on either side of the ocean. My correspondent answered that she thought Martha's maiden name was Maw. I left this morsel in my email box for a couple of weeks while Christmas came and went. Early on New Years Eve I opened my computer to genealogy again and went though FamilySearch for the marriage of Martha Maw somewhere in Yorkshire and somewhere around 1830. And there it was! According to the transcriber Martha had married George Lyd. I looked at the microfilm image and realized that the 'l' and the 'e' of Lyle was squeezed up together. Not only that but Martha was the daughter of Newyear Maw and Newyear was the unusual name that George and Martha had given their eldest son. George and Martha's home villages were about 10 miles apart.