What I know/don't know about....
Well, we’d all like to find a goldmine and I just did! That is to say, I came across the Kent Archaeology site www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/Research – and there found a transcription of the gravestones etc at All Saints Church Loose Kent – and there was, among others, Hannah Froud. Brilliant!
Well, I’m back to work on the Ancestry.com project. At the moment I am having trouble finding any information on Hannah Gilbert (married John Froud b.1772). No-one in the Ancestry community seems to have any further information on her. The only Hannah Gilbert birth I have been able to find which could fit the bill is one in 1761 in Essex – which would make her 11 years older than her husband (not impossible of course) and also not a native of Kent. I will pursue this further.
I have found a likely death for her – Hannah Froud buried 29th October 1827 in Loose Kent. Still trying to find some evidence to back this up.
I have been amusing myself over the last few weeks by continuing to post on the Tribalpages Facebook page, complaining about no chart and no response to my enquiries – and I was not the only one dissatisfied with the Tribalpages support. However, my sense of humour was obviously not shared by everyone, as I found myself “blacklisted” from the site, with all my comments deleted and no longer able to add comments to the site. On the same day I received an email from Tribalpages tersely informing me that my money had been refunded via Paypal and that they were no longer posting to Australia – oops, did I upset someone? 
Sure enough, the refund has arrived and I have, in return, sent them a terse email saying what I think of their management of the matter. I doubt if I’ll get an answer though.
I am still plodding away at this project and finding it most useful in defining where the blanks are in the family history. It is a slow process, it takes me at least an hour to put on two people – usually husband and wife – and by then my mind is starting to boggle.
I am currently working backwards from myself in a direct paternal line, so this hour or so does not include any siblings.
I love it!
Further to my last post, I have to report limited success. I decided to put my complaint on Tribalpages’ own Facebook page and had some interesting feedback from various people. What it amounted to was that there seems to be very little support for anyone from Tribalpages, one woman said that in 4 years of paying membership , she had not had one reply from them. I will let that speak for itself.
Anyway, I finally had a communication, via their Facebook page, from Tribalpages saying that they would refund my money and that charts being sent to Australia had been going amiss or taking a long time to get here but that they had sent mine.
I suggested that, instead of a refund , they send me another chart and this time by airmail.
So far, there has been no response to that. Why do I get the feeling my daughter will never get her Ancestors chart?
Today I begin my anti-Tribalpages campaign. www.tribalpages.com is the site I use for my family tree and I have always found it satisfactory – until, that is, I ordered one of their Ancestors Charts for my daughter’s 40th birthday. A month afterwards I emailed them to say it had not arrived and received an answer saying they had shipped it out 10 days previously (about the end of August) and would check on its current status and get back to me within 24 hours. Since then, there has been no sign of the chart and not a word from the Tribalpages support team, despite my further enquiries.
Needless to say, I am not happy!
First of all, who sends small articles by sea anymore? I am amazed that this was done and have visions of the chart buried in some huge container – possibly foundering off the coast of New Zealand.
Secondly, how rude, unbusiness-like and inefficient is it to ignore a customer’s complaint? I cannot understand it. I am going to try nagging them into, at least, acknowledging my complaint!
I have finally begun to publish the family tree on Ancestry.com, but am doing it the hard way ie one person at a time, rather than by importing a gedcom file. This enables me to check the facts as I go and also to compile a list of questions still to be answered. At my current rate of work I estimate it will take me 5 years to complete – perhaps I’d better speed things up a bit!
The advantage of having the tree on Ancestry.com is that the program immediately provides links to other people researching the same people, access to appropriate historical links and various hints. The disadvantage in all this is that it can be very confusing and divert one from the current matter in hand – I must not get distracted!!
I have added a few of Ann’s siblings to the website plus the name of her mother. There are many family trees on Ancestry.com which mention this family – due perhaps to the large numbers of children produced by various members of the family – but none of them shows the information (with satisfactory proof) that I am seeking at the moment.
This information is
a) Ann’s death date – I have already sent away for two certificates but still have a couple more to try
& b) her father’s date of birth – I can find no record of his baptism on the IGI.
Thanks once again to the LDS site – http://FamilySearch.org – I have found some more information on William Hutchings. His origins have been unknown so far, mainly due to wrong assumptions (see previous posts). The only census (1851) to show his birthplace shows it as Tong in Kent, but I assumed this was meant to be Thong, a village quite close to the Hoo peninsula where he subsequently lived. However, I have found a whole batch of Hutchins (without the final g -spellings are always variable) in a village well south of the Hoo area, called, you guessed it, Tong!
There is a slight problem with dates, his baptism is shown as 1797 (cf the 2 censuses (1841 & 1851) which show his birthdate as 1799) – this could be correct, or it could be an error on the part of the transcriber. Such errors are not uncommon on the LDS site, I always try to double check things if I can. In this case I have been unable to find any parish records for Tong online – perhaps in time they will come. Either way, I am happy that this is the correct family, so that is a step forward – or is that backward?
Next job is to put all the new information on my website etc.
It’s been an exciting week for this family historian as I have found out a bit more about Robert Capon Guy (1829-1903). Until now I knew very little about his early years as I could not find him in the 1841 census, or indeed any record of his birth. Censuses indicated he was born in Ashbourne Derbyshire, but I could find no trace of this. All I knew of his parents was that his father’s name was William and that on Robert’s marriage certificate his occupation was listed as “gentleman”.
I had wondered about the name “capon” , as it is unusual and assumed that it was from his father’s side (somehow thinking gentlemen can have unusual names). Anyway, it turns out that the name was his mother’s surname (which is in fact a common practice to give the maiden name as a second christian name) – my assumption had led me astray. I had also assumed finding other members of this family would be easier because of this name, but the only one that cropped up (in the right time frame) was a William Capon Guy – but he was born in Norfolk so I assumed that was a different family.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, Robert may have been born in Ashbourne Derby (there is another brother born there) but was baptised in Gloucester. This seems to have been a family that moved around a bit as it turns out, they originated in Norfolk – yes, William Capon was another brother – and in fact the parents were born there.
So, the sequence is, Norfolk until about 1824, then a gap, then Derby about 1829, then a move to Gloucester where another son was born in 1833. After that who knows, possibly London as Robert appears there in 1851 and the aforesaid William Capon died there in 1840. . I can find no trace of any of them in the 1841 census and indeed the parents seem to have vanished after 1833.
As for the gentleman bit, well William the parent started off as a tailor (his son Robert’s later occupation) – I don’t know how he got from there to the status of gentleman! What I need is an inspired guess – I’m trying to give up assumptions!
Next job – to get all the information on to my website!
