Genealogy - In The Beginning ....

In the beginning, a few years ago, I was shown some old documents which David Carter (second cousin) had in his possession which had come down from his Grandmother (Dorothy), my Grandfather's sister.  

Her mother (my great grandmother, Eliza) had lived with Dorothy after she had become widowed, so I think all these papers must have just been transferred from Eliza's home, down to Dorothy's and eventually on to David.

There were names which we'd never heard of before and a great deal of new information:  the surnames were Waddon, Putt and Stocker, and the documents related to Plymouth and someone being in the Navy.  We weren't aware that the family had ever lives in the Plymouth area, we though they'd come down from either London or the Portsmouth area.

We were intrigued!

These documents were copied and put away.  Then with the opening up of information on the internet (and broadband) I could start to look up - and double check - information given in these documents.  

There were several free and cheap sites to access information and so gradually I got hold of all sorts of details and started building a tree.

Then I came across information which my Grandmother had mentioned before she died in 1987 which I'd jotted down and kept, along with all the other 'memorabilia'.  There was no way of checking the information at the time - and I'm glad I kept it as many of it was borne out when looking up information on the internet.

This included the poem mentioned elsewhere on this blog and info about her early life, her husband, her mother (no mention of any father), her grandmother, and her in-laws, of whom she was very fond.  Other names which popped up included: Gasper and Adams.

With so much information to start with it was not complicated to start to build a good picture of the Smale/Waddon/Stocker/Putt part of the family.  It did help that they all, initially, came from Plymouth before the diaspora when many of them moved to London.

But Gasper side was more of a conundrum.  I could find my grandmother's birth and her mother's marriage (later!). But nothing else.  And only this year, several years later, a relative very kindly looked into this and, to our surprise, found that my grandmother's birth name was not the same as the name she used to get married (or even the name that she told her daughter!).  We found out because, although the marriage certificate was different from her birth certificate, in the margins of the volume where her birth was recorded there was a note saying her new name: