Matrilineal Monday – Mary Devlin

Mary Devlin is one of my third-great-grandmothers, and I don’t know very much about her yet. She was born in Ireland around 1830 and came to Canada sometime before 1840. She and her husband, William Lloyd lived in Mulmur, Ontario until the 1890’s, when they moved to Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. They had at least ten children (most of the birth years are approximations based on variances across censuses):

Mary Lloyd Ferguson Graham: b. 1855 – d. 1936
William Lloyd: b. 1858 – d. ????
Eliza Jane Lloyd: b. 1860 – d. ????
Margaret Lloyd Bannister: b. 1865 – d. 1931
Harriet B. Lloyd Leeper: b. 1866 – d. ????
John J. Lloyd: b. 1868 – d. ????
James H. Lloyd: b. 1869 – d. ????
Annie Sophia Lloyd: b. 1874 – d. 1892
Richard Victor Lloyd: b. 1876 – d. 1959
Martha Ellen Lloyd Solomon: b. 1877 – d. ????

As a bit of a wildcard, there are two more possible children I am trying to find more evidence for. The first is a daughter listed in the 1871 census. Her name was either Ama E. or Anna E., and she was born in July of 1870. I am fairly certain that this is not Annie Sophia, because every bit of documentation for her states a birth year of 1874. (I don’t have a birth record.)

The other is Emily S., who only appears in the 1881 census. Her birth year is given as 1872. She could be Anna E. or Ama E. maybe?

I’m still working on the Lloyds and Devlins, and hope to get them sorted a bit more in the coming months.

Slow Around These Parts

Lately, I have been dealing with the temporary closure of my neighbourhood library. A few weeks ago, a pipe burst and they were flooded. This has happened before, and it was months before they opened again so I am pessimistic about being able to use it again any time soon. I have been working with all of my family tree documents at home, but it sure would be nice to get to the library to find new documents that support the old ones or do research to flesh out history and geography. There are other libraries nearby, but none of them are as convenient as the flooded one. To get to the library downtown, I have to schedule it around my daughter’s naptime so she doesn’t get bored, and that hasn’t been easy to do.

I hope to be blogging regularly again soon!

Saturday Surnames: Last Names Like First Names

There are times when I just want to use transcribed indexes to get my bearings or do a quick Google of a name to see if some cousin out there is already doing research. It seems like I get thwarted at every click, because of that common scourge: a surname that is also a common first name.

All of these searches turn up a glut of results that it takes more time to sift through than if I had actually intended to look manually. No, I’m not looking for George Lloyd Smith or George Lloyd Jones. His name is George (forename) Lloyd (surname). That’s it. Or Family Search decides that a man named Ralph Thomson in Michigan is more relevant to my search than the Thomas Ralph in British Columbia that I was actually searching for. Or, forbid if you go from having a first-name-surname to marrying into another one like Jennie Irving when she married John Jack.

Those are the times when I take a deep breath and remember that the best way to find something is to relax and then concentrate on it. It’s like asking a stranger to find your keys; they might look between couch cushions because they don’t know that you usually throw them on the kitchen table and forget about them when you come in. A search engine has a different way of considering relevancy than I do, and I’ll have to forgive it for not being in my head.