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| How do some Cornish relatives vanish into thin air? |
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Page 1 of 4 I mentioned at the end of my last Cornish World article that a lot of people spend a lot of time looking for that elusive long lost relative and that it often has to be an accepted part of our research that some folk just seem to disappear off the face of the Earth with no trace. Sometimes this is as a result of a tragedy at sea, details of which are never known or as a result of some other accident or misfortune. As well as simple entries in parish burial records such as “a man found drowned”, you will also come across the odd entry like “a man, found dead on the Common”. The poor deceased may have been an itinerant worker or, like many, one who had left his wife and family to go off and seek employment in another area, fully intending to send for the family once he had a foothold in that new area. With no means of identification and no other way of knowing who the deceased was or where he had come from, the body would simply have been buried at the expense of the Parish, probably in an unmarked grave. I have a few folk who have eluded me over my years of researching other people’s families. You know they were born, got married and died but exactly where and when remains a mystery. I had one just the other day who told her family that she was born in Cornwall and later moved to the north of England where she married a man who subsequently left her and then, as far as we can tell, died. She then emigrated to America with two children of this first marriage, where she settled down, married again and raised a second family of four more children. We had clues about her name, approximate year of birth and other snippets of family names which had come out in conversations but could we find her? No we could not. Was the story about being Cornish just that, a story made up to hide a past she would rather forget? Perhaps it was, but a search of wider UK records also failed to find her birth so perhaps even the name she used was a bit of fiction, the answers and the truth died with her in the 1950’s, well before her family became curious enough to fully question the truth of the story and the small clues left to them don’t unfortunately add up to a full picture. They don’t always stay “lost souls”, sometimes they turn up in some unexpected place, just when you thought you had covered all the angles and all the possible locations. That is a very satisfying part of research and is always well received. Another very satisfying part of research is putting folk back in touch with distant family members who they did not know existed. |
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