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I'm a bit confused as to whose parents you are looking for - Wilson Cottons? If so, you will need to get his birth certificate which will give full names of both parents.

If you don't know when he was born, you need to get the marriage certificate, which will tell you his fathers name plus how old he was at the time of his marriage.

Sam x

I thought I would run it past you all anyway. I am trying to help a friend who is at the very early stages of doing her family tree with no previous experience at all. We are stuck right at the beginning. Her parents Wilson Cotton and Amy Penketh residents of Sunderland married in Sunderland in 1925. She has aunts and uncles on the Penketh side but has never known aunts and uncles on her father's side because they emigrated to Australia prior to William and Amy's marriage in 1925. William had a brother Thomas, brother Alfred, brother Edward, and twin sisters Nora and Edna. We have no idea exactly when they went, what ship they sailed on and which town was their destination. We are unable to establish the names of the parents who presumably accompanied this little family and until we can find some trace of them either as passengers or on census returns for Australia, we cannot progress further. If we had the names of the parents we could trace the tree back through census returns etc. for this country. Anyone any ideas on how we begin to solve this mystery? Thank you for your time. Sorry this has been so long and I hope it is clear.