I’ve recently had a new discovery – in one 1841 Scotland census, there was what I assumed was an older daughter Catherine Lamond with my family, along with 2 children, each with different surnames, that I assumed were grandchildren from another daughter or daughters not living there. Because of a DNA match and building a shadow tree to see how we fit, I realized she was descended from that Catherine and that both children were hers from 2 marriages. But when I was finally able to locate her death record, given her second husband’s surname of Stewart, it listed different parents.
So I pulled ALL the documents I had for her, and BOTH children in the 1841 census, including their marriage and death records, plus the records for my own family. One of the children – the one from the first husband – was still living with my family in 1851. In that census, he was listed as ‘nephew’ – and I assumed it referred to my ancestor Allan, also living there, and not his mother who was listed as head of household. But given the ‘daughter’ Catherine’s death listed different parents for her I took a new look from that perspective and realized she could have been my ancestor’s mother’s niece, making her son a great-nephew, and so the 1851 census could be correct. And so could her death record. I had assumed there were minor errors in the documents, when in fact they were all correct!
The only solution that fits with this now is if Catherine’s father and Allan’s father were brothers, making Allan and Catherine first cousins instead of siblings! What threw me was Catherine was listed in that 1841 census under her maiden name of Lamond instead of her second husband’s surname of Stewart or even her first husband’s name of Jones – perhaps the enumerator, like me, assumed she was the oldest daughter of the household. And her husband Hugh Stewart was not present in 1841. And I can find no lawful marriage record for them, so maybe they married later, even though they’d already had a child. Then there’s the fact their next child was born 5 years after the first so maybe he was away and they weren’t able to marry before the birth of the first child. And I can find no marriage or death for the first husband John Jones, but know there was a cholera epidemic in 1837, a year before the birth of Thomas Stewart, her first child with Hugh…
So there’s still a lot to discover about this Catherine, but I know more now than I did then. Thanks to DNA and documentation…
© Deborah Ray and archivecookie.com, 2018.
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