Returning to Sarah McComb, you will recall that her marriage certificate to Thomas Bready gives her father’s name as Stuart McComb.  How to find the rest of her family though?  Well, I have several clues.  The marriage took place in 1861 after the census, and Stuart is not listed as deceased on the marriage certificate.  So, it’s possible I might find him in the 1861 census, also.  Knowing how names can evolve, I looked for Stuart, Stewart, or Steward McComb, McCombe, or McCoomb and came up empty.  So having nothing to lose and everything to gain, I looked in the 1871 England census.  After all, you just never know.  And I found him!  Stuart McCombe, living with his wife Sarah, son William and his wife Mary, and Stuart’s widowed daughter Jane Hough and her six children were living in Burnley, Lancashire in 1871.  I also discovered that Stuart, Sarah, William, and Jane were from County Down, Ireland.  Then I backtracked to locate Stuart in 1861.  I now knew that Stuart’s wife’s name was Sarah, as well as that he had a son William and a daughter Jane, who by the ages of her children was Jane Hough in 1861 as well.  Great!   But – still no luck.  I wasn’t able to find Stuart, Sarah, or William McComb under any variation of the first or last names.  So I moved on to Jane Hough – and I found them!  It turned out that the index I was searching had mis-transcribed the last name McComb as McCanb, and that Stuart was listed as Edward – my first clue that his full name might be either Stuart Edward McComb or Edward Stuart McComb.  But there they all were in 1861, living in Livesey, Lancashire.  Edward, his wife Sarah, son William, another son James, and Joseph and Jane Hough (all born in Ireland) and their two oldest children who were both born in Bentham, Yorkshire had been found.

So now I knew that Sarah McComb, who married Thomas Bready, was the daughter of Stewart (Stuart, Steward, Edward) McComb and his wife Sarah, and that she had a sister Jane who married Joseph Hough with whom she had six children, a brother William who married Mary, and a brother James.

Next, I looked for Stuart’s and his wife Sarah’s death certificates.  I discovered that Steward’s (sic.) death certificate was signed by his son-in-law Bernard Rooke, and that Steward died on June 4, 1877 at the age of 73 in Burnley, Lancashire.  Immediately, I wondered if Jane Hough had remarried to Bernard Rooke!  Then I looked at Sarah McComb’s death certificate.  She died aged 83 on May 7, 1881 also in Burnley.  Her death certificate was signed by her daughter Mary Ann Rook.  Unfortunately, death certificates in England do not give a married woman’s maiden name or the names of her parents as do Scotland death certificates from 1855 on.  To discover Sarah’s maiden name I would have to locate her marriage to Stewart McComb, and given the birth location of their children it would most likely be somewhere in County Down, Ireland.  So now I had Stewart and Sarah McComb, and their children William, Jane, James, Sarah, and Mary Ann.  I then looked for Bernard and Mary Ann Rooke in the 1861 census, and found them in Dalton, Lancashire where I also learned Mary Ann was born in County Down, Ireland.

© Deborah Ray and archivecookie.com, 2010.