Not Just Ancestors

It's four years ago tomorrow that Dad died. I'm writing this today because someone is about to take the back off my computer ...

The other day I had a note from an Nth cousin about the Ash family. My great grandmother was Elizabeth Ann Ash and she married George Horswill (b1851). There's a photo of her below in an earlier post. I'd always thought she must have missed her family when they moved to the north east but that wasn't the case. Her entire family (she was one of 12 children) moved to Durham. No doubt entire villages moved for the work. Dad always thought they would have heard about the coal mining opportunities as the ships passed through Plymouth and indeed that's how they would have travelled. That's another research line there in the ships' passenger records. My great great grandfather Roger Horswill went back to Plymouth to find his second wife. ie after his first wife had died, not a Mormon thing!

It was a revelation to me that the Ash family had moved to Durham. I immediately thought "I must tell Dad". It's amazing how you forget people are gone.

To many the family tree research looks dull and boring and getting people to join in is like pulling teeth. This is a shame because in another 20 years the people who can't be bothered will have their grandhildren asking "Nana, why don't we have a family tree?" Duh ....

A family tree is more than a list of dead people. It connects you to your ancestors. Not just ancestors - these people are your family and you are who you are because of them. My cousins in Co Durham live there because the family made a momentous decision to moved 500 miles 140 years ago. Finding out more and more brings me closer to Dad as if he's still here.

It's not just dead ancestors either. I've found lots of second, third and "we're sill working on it" cousins, many of them in our Facebook group if you'd like to meet them too. I found a fifth cousins three times removed of John's who worked with my second cousin. Small world ... We all pool research and find whole branches of family this way.

Dad would absolutely love all the work we're doing on the family tree. I wish we could have done it years ago so it could have joined in but the online research methods have really only come into play in the last few years.

So let's do it - join us on the My Heritage tree now: www.horswillfamilytree.com and join our Facebook group. All the links are on www.horswillfamilyphotos.com

Here's a nice pic of Dad:

I found Grandad Hills and Great Great Grandad Ash!

Yesterday was Dad's birthday (he would have been 85). So it was a good day - I'd say propitious but probably can't spell it - to work on the family tree.

Joseph Hills 1888 - 1947

I'd spent months looking for my maternal grandfather Joe Hills. We knew when he died because Mum was 19 at the time. We knew how old he was when he died so we found his date of birth. However, he was nowhere to be seen in the censuses. Then the lightbulb came on. He was Hill in the censuses and various other documents, not Hills. It's the Horswill/Horswell problem all over again!

I dug and dug and came up with two possibilities for his family. Armed with a list of potential sisters I rang Mum to ask if she could remember any of her aunt's names. Previously she'd said she couldn't remember any (although she remembered he had sisters) because the family didn't keep in touch. She said "There was a Louie and an Ada ..." Yes!! Got him!

Here's the list of his siblings from Ancestry:



The good news is I found a new second cousin, Paul Ainsworth, and he's already joined our My Heritage site and our Facebook group. He is Johanna Hills' grandson. There's also a sad tale. Johanna, who was Ada's twin, died when she was about 36 leaving 4 young children. The two older children went to live with relatives and the younger ones went to a Barnardo's home. Life was very tough when a mother died young.

Now, the Horswill family ...

There's a clever print function in Ancestry which gives you a summary tree. More about various ways to print trees later. John has a really good summary with the whole page filled. I had annoying gaps in mine so I need to find more great great grandparents.

Geroge Horswill b1851 is my great grandfather. He married Elizabeth Ann Ash who was born in 1856 in Northill, Cornwall. Here's a photo of her:
How did we know her name? Because she was on the censuses. It stands to reason then that she must have been on the censuses, living with her parents, when she was a child. Fortunately she is shown as "Elizth Ann" on the 1861 census and not just Elizabeth so she was not hard to find. In some early family trees she is shown as Ann so the enumerator probably realised she had both names and entered both. You don't see this very often.

Her father was John Ash and her mother was Susan Hannaford. Luckily for us there are dozens of Ancestry members researching these families so I was able to find ancestors back to the 1600s.

All these new relatives will eventually be put on the My Heritage tree. Some are there already. If you want to see them now, along with all the evidence, go to our private site at www.HorswillFamily.com and you can see the full Ancestry tree (FREE!)

Cool names from this research:

We have a Hezekiah Webb on the Hills side and a Jemima Trengrove on the Horswill side.