Where Did Your Family Come From?

When you start your family tree you think you know where your family comes from.  If asked "where did your family come from?" you'll have an answer, the answer you believe, but dig down a few generations and you might be surprised.

My journey started by looking at my mother's ancestors.  She had been brought up in the village of Chesterton, Cambridgeshire - and I expected to find everybody there, but I was surprised.  Her grandmother had come from the villages of Caldecote, Cambridgeshire and Bourn, Cambridgeshire.  Going up another two generations and then looking at where everybody had come from and gone to, the net started to really widen.

My GGG-grandmother came from Upton, Huntingdonshire - unfortunately this is a small parish with few records transcribed and available online, so I was a little stuck there.

I guess my curiosity was really piqued when I saw that my GG-grandmother had gone into prison, for abandoning her family - and I started with the question of why she'd have done that.  Where were her siblings, her aunts/uncles and cousins, that they weren't in a position to help.  Of course, that sets aside the issue of personality, there's always the chance that she was simply unlikeable!  I'm sure we've all got family we'd rather avoid and never speak to - imagine if they turned up on your doorstep wanting to move in!

In the latter half of the 1800s Caldecote was depopulating - people first moved into the village as the railway was built through the area and then for the coprolite digging work (that's dinosaur poo) - and when that industry started to die people had to move away.

A lot of my GG-grandmother's siblings and uncles had migrated to Lincolnshire, to Norfolk, some to Suffolk - and a few towards London.  Others had moved closer to the Huntingdon and St Ives areas.

Then I was obsessed with finding out where everybody went and what happened to them.

My great-grandmother moved to Cambridge, as did three of her sisters, so they were together in the same area from about 1890 onwards.  But I found two brothers who moved to Lincolnshire - and then their sister's lads in the next generation also moved out that way - so there was a group of Stokes' and Edwards' in Lincolnshire that would've had associations and ties with each other.

As the net gets wider, you find people who simply "disappeared" - this is mostly due to the cost of finding/proving them.  e.g. if you have, say, 3 deaths it COULD have been a distant, 2nd cousin, 3x removed, then you're not going to invest £10 for each of three death certificates just to see IF any of them are your man!  So, the chart gets marked "disappeared" - and, who knows, one day their descendants will have done the research and published the answers!

Right now my main focus is on the lot that moved to Lincolnshire and I've a family mystery to solve there as I am trying to find "two brothers who married two sisters" - I'll find them one day!