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  • upsetting twists

    have you ever been researching your family and found out information that was upsetting?

    i was cleaning up my tree yesterday when ancestry had hinted my distant aunt went to tasmania, aboard the cataraqui. when i googled this ship, i learned it sunk off king island in the bass strait in tasmania on 4 aug 1845. it is australia's worst civillian maritime disaster. 9 survivors from 400 people. it was an assisted emmigration ship, full of families. it was an absolutely horrific disaster, and i can't help but think about the terror they went through. or the grief their families in england would have felt upon learning it.

  • #2
    just when you think you have found everything,,,,,,That is sad. When I started out 20+ years ago I didnt even know how to use the internet and started nice and easy with my dads side from kent and as more records went on line I was lucky as medwaycityark put a lot of the parish records on line for free and they were all from where my dads family centred from so spent many hours scrolling through parish records expanding his side of the tree. I grew up knowing some of his aunts and cousins but never really knew anything about his fathers side as he fell out with him. So when I got a high match recently and couldnt work out how they fitted in it took a bit of communication to extract that they had been adopted out of the family. One of my dads cousin had a child before marriage. I was quite taken aback by finding this

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    • #3
      When doing a tree for my late cousin and her husband, in his line I came across a tragic death by burning in a house fire.
      In my own tree I have a death three days after being crushed when the roof of a coal mine collasped on the man, a suicide by hanging and a tragic agricultural work related death.
      Very close to home though was the discovery of a pregnancy that I knew nothing about that resulted in a hasty marriage and then a miscarriage.
      My great grandparents had a similar experience. Just managing to get married before the baby arrived but he died only 3 weeks old of an infected tummy button. I can only guess that the umbilical cord got infected when cut. My great grandparents were church regulars but try as I might, I cannot find a baptism nor a burial for the child. He’s not with his parents nor either set of his own grandparents. He isn’t in any burial register for the two parishes where they are. That bothers me a lot.
      Children born out of wedlock are ten a penny in both sides of my family including that of my recently found “missing quarter”. I have one female who didn’t stop at one wee blip, she had two 19 years apart. The father of one is known from the RCE. Worse than that though was a female who we knew had had two sons before marriage. The first died just a weeks old. However I found evidence of another one and after getting together with a descendant of her children after she eventually got married we now have the count of her illegitimate children up to six!!!
      Hubby’s 2x GGF was a bigamist, so was my 2x GGF’s eldest brother and there have been a couple of them in my “missing quarter” too along with a fair few illegitimate children.
      As my dear old Gran was fond of saying “there’s nowt as queer as fowk”

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      • #4
        As I say to people when asking for information, I am not there to judge, but simply record our family history. Warts and all, good and bad.
        Any accident or disaster is tragic to read about, amplified perhaps when there is a personal connection. I also find it a bit sad when trawling through parish register images and see a lot of infant burials in a short space of time.
        Illegitimacy is not that big an issue in my eyes; obviously it was for our ancestors.
        One thing that has caused me to stop and think is finding some distant connections to the slave trade in the US and the Caribbean.

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        • #5
          I've found painful deaths, suicides, abandonment of families, and coercive control. These are just the documented ones, who knows what private miseries ancestors endured.

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          • #6
            Jill, you have reminded me of the brother of my 3x great grandmother. Quite an interesting character, he started out as a dissenting minister, and then became a vet. Sadly he committed suicide by prussic acid in 1847.

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            • #7
              My great great great grandfather has a son called Charles born in 1852. I came across a newspaper report of this event at age 9.

              The house the family were in was struck by lightning. They were at dinner and Charles was standing at a small table facing the window. He was just in the act of raising a cup to his lips when he was struck in the pit of his stomach by the lightning which passed down his legs leaving an impression of his foot upon the floor and making 2 large holes in the wall immediately under the window facing him. The poor child's shirt boots trousers and other clothes were ripped open as with a knife and the toes and toenails on both feet were sady disfigured presenting the appearance of having been dreadfully scorched. He was undressed and put to bed and attended by Mr Barlow, surgeon, who pronounced him to be in a very critical state.

              It appears he survived as I cannot find his death.
              Interested in the following:CRUSH from Essex and London; YOUNG from Wanstead Essex and East London; HODSON from Chester; and GERAGHTY/GERRITY from Chester and Co Mayo

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              • #8
                Strange to offer condolences when the event was so long ago, involving people you never met - but it does have an impact, doesn't it?

                I was very disturbed and saddened when I found out that my g'grandfather had committed suicide. Fortunately, there were those who could tell me some of the situation he was living in.

                When I first started researching, I found a birth that I initially attributed to my grandfather - just a registry entry, and just "baby" for the first name. It gave parents' names and birth location, and it was a doctor who was making the report. Some time later I was entering the record into my database and stopped - the birth date was not that of my grandfather's. I've never found a birth registration for my grandfather (not unusual in Chicago pre-1900). My best guess - my g'grandmother was having difficulty with the birth, a doctor was brought in - he did the registration, but the baby didn't survive. I always thought (as did my father) that my grandfather was an only child.

                I agree with Jill - we don't know all the trials, nor all the joys, that are in others lives, especially in generations gone past.

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                • #9
                  I have one that fell into a vat of burning dye in the mill and was put into a cab and sent home where of course he died from his burns. Tragic because previously they had been on strike and he had agreed to return to work

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                  • #10
                    My great grandfather, Albert, was twice imprisoned for one month for neglecting his family. The first time my granny was less than 1 year old. Then the next time there was a warrant for his arrest he ran away and wasn't apprehended for 6 years, during which time my great grandmother died (of gangrene) and granny and her 3 older sisters were looked after by their grandmother, with the help of the Poor Law Union.

                    Albert was in prison for another 3 months in 1899 and then disappears. No sign of him on the 1901 or 1911 censuses but he turns up in Manchester in 1913 and marries a widow. Apparently two of his older daughters went to see him there. Not surprisingly my Granny either blotted all this out or genuinely didn't know what had happened.

                    Anne

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                    • #11
                      I've mentioned this before but I did my Dads family tree for his 80th birthday which was in 2004 and as soon as I showed him the first page with his Mum and Dad and siblings on, he said where's Gladys. Who is Gladys, only his sister who died and he went to the cemetery every Sunday with his Dad when he was young. I knew nothing about her and never would have done if I hadn't started this.

                      One good thing to turn up was that I took him to the archives and let him look up her burial up himself as he knew where it was and I ordered her death certificate for him.

                      There are a lot of sad things that happened but they all get to you.
                      Lin

                      Searching Lowe, Everitt, Hurt and Dunns in Nottingham

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                      • #12
                        Originally posted by PhotoFamily View Post
                        Strange to offer condolences when the event was so long ago, involving people you never met - but it does have an impact, doesn't it?
                        many of the occurences in this thread i find sad but not upsetting.

                        i have ancestors from mauritius, i don't know if they were involved in slave trades, but they owned them. Parish registers for mauritius are filled with slaves and their owners names, my family among them. They mention them like property in marriage contracts, and wills. They are listed in the reparation registers after slavery was outlawed in the 1830's. It's horrid. It's just unthinkable that people believed they could own another person.

                        And while i agree, that the event was so long ago, the reason the shipwreck brought tears to my eyes, was just reading the account.

                        it was smashed on the jagged rocks of a reef in "hurricane like conditions". People were swept overboard. About half were in the hull when it sunk. About half survived the sinking, clutching to the wreckage. They too, were dashed against the rocks or drowned.

                        the ex convict who found the wreckage said the bodies were horribly mutilated by the rocks, and the thing that gets me the most, is the women with their babies tied to them, so they wouldn't be lost. His family said he was never the same. The 9 survivors and himself had to wait 5 weeks for rescue.

                        last year was the 175th anniversary of the shipwreck. They erected a lovely plaque with the names and ages of everyone onboard. Mum was in tasmania last week and i said i wish i had known as she may have gotten to go. She said she had wondered if king island was worth visiting. And now she knows, she said she feels she has must visit.

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                        • #13
                          The one that upsets me most is something I always knew about but assumed was one of those family tales that was close but not quite true.

                          An family member was shot dead on the street in America aged just 25. His death certificate says 'Gunshot wound in the heart. Murder'. He was unmarried, his family was hundreds of miles away, and he'd been begging for money for food.

                          I have a photograph of him taken just a year earlier and he's the absolute double of my cousin, which is probably why it upsets me so much.

                          100 years later and America still clings to its guns, and young men still die needlessly.

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                          • #14
                            I can't imagine the horror of a shipwreck, and the trauma of the survivors and the person who found the remains. Even though it happened a very long time ago, it still has an impact. It certainly doesn't compare to anything I know about my family, although there are certainly some sad and distressing events.
                            Jenny

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by pinefamily View Post
                              As I say to people when asking for information, I am not there to judge, but simply record our family history. Warts and all, good and bad.
                              Any accident or disaster is tragic to read about, amplified perhaps when there is a personal connection. I also find it a bit sad when trawling through parish register images and see a lot of infant burials in a short space of time.
                              Illegitimacy is not that big an issue in my eyes; obviously it was for our ancestors.
                              <snip>.
                              I think illegitimacy is more of an issue for people born in the earlier part of the 20th century.. There seem to be more attempts at hiding it. I think a lot of the "adopted out" babies in the 19th c were simply out of economic necessity. Going off the number of babies born out of wedlock prior to about the mid 19th century I think it was generally regarded as just one of those things, with no great stigma attached. Though I had to raise an eyebrow when I found my 4x ggf was named as the father of an illegitimate child baptised 9 months after his marriage to my 4xggm!


                              Originally posted by pinefamily View Post
                              <snip>
                              One thing that has caused me to stop and think is finding some distant connections to the slave trade in the US and the Caribbean.
                              I've been digging into a branch back in the 17th and 18th centuries and found a prominent soldier who went on to become governor of Jamaica. He must have been involved in the slave trade.

                              I've come across my fair share of bigamy, illegitimate births (annoying when you can't find out who the father was), suicides and gruesome deaths in accidents of all kinds, including an eight year girl old being killed in a mining accident. The latest was a two year old boy who died after falling into a tub of scalding hot water. My ggm was one of only 3 children who survived to adulthood out of 10 born to my 2xggps. Three died within a month from scarlet fever. Ggm made up for it though, living to be 93.

                              I also have at least 2 couples who don't seem to have actually married, despite living together for decades. I am in contact with a granddaughter of one of these unions. She told me that her grandfather came back from WWI suffering from shell shock and he was very violent and abusive to his wife, so she left him to move in with another man. She couldn't, or wouldn't, divorce him. Great scandal in those days, "living over the brush". There's always a backstory to these findings, and it serves to remind us that these are real people with real lives, not just names on pieces of paper.
                              Vicky

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                              • #16
                                I recently came across documentation that relatives of mine were "killed by Indians" back in the 1600's. This was in Rhode Island during a time when Native Americans decided it was no longer all right that English settlers had taken over most of their lands (even though much of it had been sold to them by these same Native Americans). It was distressing to read about how they'd died.

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