WHITEHOUSE FAMILY HISTORY CENTRE

Newsletter,  25th September 2008

QUARTERLY UPDATE

This has been a busy quarter, as I have begun work on establishing a fuller marriage index for Whitehouses, with all the important detail given on the civil marriage certificates.  I shall be concentrating my efforts first on Dudley registration district.  The results of this are yet to appear on the website.

Eight Lichfield diocese wills and administrations in the period 1725 to 1730 have been indexed and added to the probate file.  The 1891 census of the Cannock area, covering pieces RG12/2220 - 2222, has been re-launched after checking.

There were 57 new correspondents registered in 2006 or 2007.  They have the references 415 to 458, 107, 112, 118, 124, 127, 128, 138, 140, 159, 169, 177, 230 and 266.  In the first quarter of 2008, I registered 6 newcomers, referenced 216 and 459 to 463.  In the second quarter, there were 8 new registrations, numbered 146, 149, 172 and 464 to 468.  In the last period, over the summer months, there were another 8 new registrations, numbered 126, 129, 275, 343 and 469 to 472.  Once again, some correspondents were de-listed, since their data did not include a firm marriage or census reference of 1881 or earlier.  The numbers were then re-allotted.

The files of 15 existing correspondents were put on computer under the RADAP (Re-indexing, Archiving, Digitisation And Paper-destruction) project.  Following an overhaul of my register and a re-count, the number of correspondents with trees on computer has risen to 264, which is 56% of the total.  It’s morale-strengthening to have crossed the half way mark.

EXPERIENCES OF THE QUARTER

No laughing matter

A new correspondent (467) unearthed a strange event in which after his wife died, the widower married his step-daughter.  James & Sarah Whitehouse, who lived in Birmingham, married in 1839 and had 7 children, including Sarah Jane Whitehouse, born in 1847.  James, a metal roller, died at the age of about 45, probably at around 1862.  His widow, Sarah, re-married in 1866 to Thomas Laugher, a wire weaver.  The marriage lasted 20 years until Sarah’s death in 1886.  Just ten weeks after that, Thomas Laugher married his wife’s daughter, Sarah Jane Whitehouse.  

This wasn’t legitimate at the time, but, perhaps strangely, it would be now.  This is because Sarah Jane was over 18 when her mother married Thomas Laugher, so Thomas was never in a parent-child relationship with the step-daughter.

I am no stranger to dodgy marriages, as my own ancestor, Charles Whitehouse, brassfounder of Birmingham and later gas fitter of Dudley, illegally married his deceased wife’s sister in 1844.  Amusingly, her maiden name was Sly.

Whitehead rears its ugly head in the GRO index

Correspondent 154, whose native language is not English, has done exceptionally well to ignore my website and look for a suspected Whitehouse marriage as late as 1882 in the IGI.  Worryingly, from my point of view, the General Register Office indexed it under Whitehead.  I inspected the church register (Bordesley, St. Andrew) and found that the name was unmistakeably Whitehouse.  After resolving a query about the exact date of another marriage there, I opened up the tree of correspondent 423 and realised that there might be a connection to tree 154.  So I got in touch with correspondent 423 - thank goodness she had told me of her new e-mail address, as she had moved and changed her telephone number - and obtained the evidence needed to confirm the connection.  A link-up was thus created. 

I tell the story to show yet again that the WFHC works and to remind all correspondents please to tell me when they change their e-mail, telephone number or home address.

Humbled in Bristol

My good friend Gary (362 & 414) has accidentally humiliated me by finding his Elizabeth Whitehouse in Bristol in the 1851 census, an entry not in my database.  It seems that part of Bristol was omitted from the local indexes, probably because it fell into a hole between Gloucestershire and Somerset.  I have carried out Whit* searches in “Ancestry” to plug the gap, so the 1851 census database is a little larger.

The vital clue was a sampler

A new correspondent added an extra sibling and an unexpected cousinly tie-up to an existing tree.

Geoff (343) knew of a sampler dated 1808 which had passed down his line of descent, but was made by a girl in another part of the tree.  This and other evidence combined together to make a strong case for a Whitehouse marrying a 1st cousin of another name.  It’s a reminder of how well the WFHC can operate sometimes, to the advantage of all who register with me.

The GRO Marriage Index

One thing seldom mentioned in these newsletters is the GRO Marriage Index database.  Every quarter it improves in a variety of ways, through correspondents’ trees, by the kindness of fellow-members of the Guild of One-name Studies who send me entries and by my own searches.  Sometimes the index changes subtly, as this last quarter when a Whitehouse was found who had been mis-registered as a Whitehead and a Whitehead was found who had been mis-registered as a Whitehouse.

It has been reported that the GRO’s project to computerise their births, marriages and deaths indexes and make them available on-line has run into trouble.  The contract has been terminated.  This is a great pity, as we are being deprived of ages at death before 1866 and the names of spouses before 1911.  All this makes me pleased that my Whitehouse GRO Marriage Index is now a really valuable tool.  Very often one finds that there are so many spouses listed that are not the right ones for a particular marriage, there is only one possibility remaining and a search in FreeBMD can provide a degree of confirmation.

“A place in the Sun”

Volunteers are still hard at work in the Guildhall Library, London, transcribing the names and addresses from the fire insurance policy registers of the Sun Fire Assurance Co.  They have been working backwards from 1839 and have now reached 1803, although the index goes only as far as 1808.  They hope to join up with the work done many years ago on 1775-1787.  The latter project also covered Royal Exchange policies.  I have ordered up some of the registers and thereby have been able to improve my index of Whitehouses slightly.  During this process, I discovered an entry which had not been indexed in the Royal Exchange names index, but this joy was offset by failure to find one which was indexed, despite many guesses at the mistake.

Thank you, Caroline

Caroline Whitehouse (469) has been kind enough to respond to my recent appeal for help with the details of Sedgley marriages.  Such kindness gives me a great boost.  Is there anyone else who could help with certain other churches in Dudley and Tipton ?

Best wishes, 

Keith