General Chat

I have been at our local library this morning and after just an hour of searching old news papers found the death record of my great grandfather which has told me the date he died and who attended the funeral and where it took place. Very helpful if you are not sure if you have found all the family

That's a useful avenue to find information I hadn't thought of.

Thank you for sharing it Mark.

I have done that on two occasions, finding the inquest reports for two of my wife's great grandparents who, coincidentally, were both killed in road accidents within half a mile and two years of each other in the 1920s.

One of those helped me to identify a son who had been killed in WWI. (it was mentioned at the mother's inquest that she had been killed on the anniversary of her son's death.)

The other place is to use your Local Archives and Study Centre


I live in Canada, so it's impossibe for me to visit the local library.

BUT I discovered on their website that Oldham Local Archives and Study Centre had a holding of all the newspapers published in Oldham ...... some of them only lasted a matter of months!


I emailed them on a Sunday evening. By early Monday morning I had an email back saying they had found the account of the inquest in one of the papers, and would copy and mail it to me if I would send them my postal address.

That paper had lasted about 16 months back in the 1870s


No charge ............... they even refused to take any money for the postage.


I got the two copied pages about 4 days later.




sylvia

I always always always recommend that people do this -- for deaths in the last 10 or 20 years, get the death certificate to have the exact date and place of death, and look for a published obituary in a local newspaper in library archives. Obituaries do ordinarily name spouse, children, grandchildren, often parents and siblings.

This is usually for someone looking for living relations of an uncle or aunt or the like.

I'm not aware of anybody (on the TTF board) who has ever actually taken that advice ...

I found some newspaper cuttings among my late Mum's things, one was reporting the death and funeral of her Mother, who died when my Mum was just 16 so in 1932. I couldn't believe she had managed to hang on to the cutting for so long unless it came from another member of the family because at the time my Mum was moved from the family home to live in a different town in lodgings and she moved quite a few times with her work in the Land Army etc before she married my Dad and moved to his home village in Buckinghamshire and then back again to Norwich. There were also some cuttings Dad had obviously had sent him from Bucks, about his Dad's funeral and that of one of my Uncles too. Not everything has a date on it but it still tells a lot of information and I can work out the dates to within a day or so.
She also had a copy of the Parish Magazine of the Church in which she and Dad wed, with their names in the list of marriages for December 1945. Coincidentally there were adverts in the magazine and one was for a funeral director whose daughter I later moved next door to and became very fond of and friendly with, she had married at the same church a year later! There were also other notes and ads in the paper that were about people and places familiar to me.

It was fascinating that in the funeral reports it mentioned all the messages on the floral tributes etc. Obviously not much else of interest in the newspapers lol

Lizx

In my grandmothers effects I found a newspaper cutting of an obituary for 1945.
"The birth of a stillborn daughter to Gladys and Edwin."
Edwin was my great uncle killed in the last few months of the war.
Gladys gave birth to their daughter a few months later

I would never have thought to look for an obituary for a stillborn.

It was the graphic account of the death of the "Heaviest Man in England' that led me onto genealogy. Gran had a typed account in a picture frame. Apparently he was 'Something to do with my Grandad's side' (grandad died before I was born), but the surname was different. I traced him backwards.

This man turned out to be my 6 x grandfather. He had 2 daughters, and he weighed 32 stone (a lightweight nowadays). They had to knock the bedroom wall down and lower him to the ground. The newspaper reports are amazing - the coffin size (nearly 7 ft tall, it even has the depth and width) and 2000 people attending!

Oh Maggie, that's so sad! Had their daughter lived it would have been a little part of Edwin to help Gladys through her loss. Her only consolation must have been that Edwin was waiting to hold his daughter and look after her till they were reunited.

Lizx

Liz, Gladys died less than a year later of TB.
Edwin had been hit in the leg by shrapnel - not in itself a deadly wound - but died of shock before they reached the hospital.

A couple of years ago, before marriages in the WWI era were all transcribed, I helped someone find her great-aunt's marriage. She had a wedding photo and wanted to find family of the husband, who was killed in WWI, to share it with them. When the young woman got the news of her husband's death mere months after their marriage, she suffered a sort of breakdown, and not long after had a stillborn baby as well. She too died young.

Once I had the husband's name by crossmatching the marriage ref, I found his birth info, and searched here at GR and found four people with him in their tree. One, it turned out, was his granddaughter. He had had a child back home in Nottinghamshire before his marriage in Portsmouth just before leaving for the front, and the GR member was that child's daughter.

As it turned out, once we got to chatting about where we live (maybe Sylvia knows her cousin in Vancouver!), and how I'd visited Worksop where she lives and my grandmother's uncle once owned a pub still in operatoin there in 1994 ... it transpired that she was good friends with my great-grandparents' granddaughter in Worksop, who had just recently contacted me via my census notes for the family at Ancestry -- and had told that GR member all about me!

That's some strange degrees of separation. ;)

But anyway, the woman with the WWI Devon wedding photo was able to pass on a photo of the GR member's grandfather she had never known to her.