Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - "Problems" in your genealogy databases

From Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings

 

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1)  Open your genealogy software program (on your computer or online), and use the Help function to determine how to make a "Problem Report" or "Data Error Report" (or something similar).

2)  Create a "Problem Report" or "Data Error Report" in your software for the persons in your tree (either everyone in the tree, or for a selected number of generations of your ancestors.

3)  Tell us what type of problems or errors that your report found.  Tell us how many errors were found.  Tell us what problem or error surprised you.

4)  Tell us in a blog post of your own, a comment to this blog post, or a comment on Facebook.

 

Compared to some people here I have relatively small databases. I've kept my maternal and paternal lines separate; they intersect only at my parents.

 

I used the "Data Errors Report" in Family Tree Maker 2011. The data errors it searches for (with the results for my 2 trees) are;

• Name contains invalid characters
• Name contains misplaced dash
• Name contains nickname (0, 4)
• Name contains title
• Wife's surname same as husband's surname (1, 0)
• Birth date missing (113, 338)
• Marriage date missing (84, 180)
• Person is unattached (1, 4)
• Children out of order (25, 11)
• Birth date after father's death
• Birth date after father was age 80
• Birth date after death date (0, 1)
• Birth date after mother's death date (0, 1)
• Birth date after mother was age 60
• Birth date before father was age 13
• Birth date before mother was age 13
• Burial date before death date
• Age at time of death greater than 120
• Event date occurs before birth date
• Marriage date after death date
• Marriage date after spouse death date
• Marriage date before person was 13
• Marriage date before spouse was 13

Between my two trees of 1911 people the results were really pretty good. Lots of missing dates, but those I expected. The one case where the wife's surname is the same as the husband's surname is OK, they were distant cousins. The unattached people are those I've added to the trees "in case" they are related.

 

Follow up:

1. Review the 4 people with nicknames
2. Sort the children into birth date order. If some of these don't have a birth date try to find an approximate date to use.
3. Fix the obvious problem of birth date after death date and after mother's death date
4. And finally, keep plugging away at the baptisms, christenings, and marriages from the parish registers.

Mystery Monday - Where are you hiding Rosanna Parker?

Where are you Rosanna Parker? Or is your name Rose Anna, Rosina, Hannah, or Anna? Is Parker your maiden name, were you widowed, could it be Barker? 

Rosanna Parker is my GtGt Grandmother. My first reference to Rosanna is when she married my GtGt Grandfather Joseph Tissott on 4th May 1818 at St Mary's, Brewood, Staffordshire.

 

 Joseph Tissot of this Parish and Rosanna Parker of this Parish were married in this Church by Banns this fourth Day of May in the Year One thousand eight hundred and eighteen. 

Note that the condition of neither the bride or groom is mentioned; they could have been single, widowed or already married to someone else. Additionally, the "with consent of" has been crossed out indicating that both Joseph and Rosanna were of full age.

Here is a timeline of Rosanna's life, as far as I can reconstruct.

• 4th May 1818, Rosanna Parker married Joseph Tissot at St Mary's, Brewood.
• 31 March 1819, Henry, son of Joseph and Hannah Tissom was baptised at Ss Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Chapel, Wolverhampton.
• 23 September 1821, Rosanna, daughter of Joseph and Rosanna Tissot of Bishop's Wood was baptised at St Mary's, Brewood.
• 31 October 1823, Emma, daughter of Joseph and Rosanna Tissot was baptised at St Mary's, Brewood.
• 7 December 1825, Julia, daughter of Joseph and Rosanna Tissot of Bishops's Wood was baptised at St Mary's, Brewood.
• 4th Jun 1827, Antoinette Tissot, daughter of Joseph and Rosanna Tissot of Bishop's Wood, was baptised at St Mary's, Brewood.

This is the last sighting I have of Rosanna Parker.

At Henry's baptism in Wolverhampton the priest spelled Joseph's name "Tissom" instead of "Tissott". There are many variations of "Tissott", Tissot, Tissett, Tisset, are some of the more common ones. "Tissott" is the correct spelling as Joseph states during Henry's Petition for Clemency at Stafford Assizes in 1832. As for "Hannah" being his mother, that could very well be what the priest was told.

Before the end of 1829 Emma, Julia and Antoinette had all been buried at St Mary's, Brewood.
On 4th December 1835 a Rosina Tissett, of the Poor House, aged 17 years, was buried at St George District Church Wolverhampton. This girl could be either
     (a) Rosanna Tissot, aged 14
     (b) Rosanna Tissott, aged about 30.

The Stafford Record Office could not find any reference to Rosanna or Rosina in the Poor House Records they have and I have yet to search the films of the Wolverhampton Poor House that are available from the FHL in Salt Lake City.
I haven't been able to find a Baptism for Rosanna Parker in Brewood, Staffordshire or in the surrounding districts as well as over into Shropshire.
I've just done another search to see if anything new has shown up at FamilySearch. There is a Rose Hannah Parker who was baptised at Uttoxeter in 1790 and she could very well be my Rosanna. I have no way of connecting the 2 women since she was of age when she married in 1818.


For now, I'm stuck with this brick wall as to when Rosanna died. The Poor House records may show whether this was Rosanna or her daughter who died in 1835.

 

 

Lest We Forget - Reginald Sydney Merrett (1895-1917)

Reginald Sydney Merrett was the only son of my grand aunt Maria Antoinette Tissott and her husband John Thomas Merrett. He grew up in Mepunga, Victoria and enlisted in the AIF on 29 Jan 1915 at Melbourne, Victoria. After training for a year he left for Suez on HMAT A69 Warilda, arriving there on 08 Mar 1916. He spent 3 months in Egypt training before being sent to join the 12th Battalion in France, arriving there in Jun 1916. On 9 Apr 1917 he died with gun shot wounds to the chest and back and was buried at Pozieres British Cemetery (Plot II, Row J, Grave No 28), Ovillers-La-Boisselle, France.

AIF 12th Battalion, 14th Regiment, 1916

Australian War Memorial Negative Number DAX1124

After the war his family asked the Australian Red Cross for more details surrounding his death and burial however there was no new information.

Reginald died intestate, his will never being found in any of his service records.  There were bequests to him from his uncle, Alfred Tissott, his grandfather, Thomas Henry Merrett, and his father, John Thomas Merrett and this correspondence is available in the digitised copy of his file at The National Archives of Australia. His estate finally went to probate in 1939 with probate being granted to his half-sister Grace Teresa Merrett of Brunswick, Victoria.

In the beginning (or how I became obsessed with genealogy)

After my father, Eric Henry Lindsay Tissott, passed away in 2006 I was sorting out some of his papers and came across an envelope labelled "Genealogy". Now, I had no idea that he had started to pursue an interest in his family's history. Included in this slim envelope was a letter from his sister, my Aunt Ida, describing what she knew of their grandfather Henry Tissott. 

Ida's words are:
"Dad's father was born in Wolverhampton I think he said and was sent out as a boy of eight as a convict for pinching a cow and later a rabbit. Eric I forget the name of the place where convicts were sent. Evelyn and I went & saw the jail & where convicts were put in chains etc well he was there till he was 20 odd, then went to the mainland."

These few words started me climbing around the family rosebush.

My father's family grew up in Western Australia; from Tasmania, the rest of Australia is known as "the mainland" which means that my great grandfather, Henry Tissott, had been sent to the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land (now called Tasmania) sometime during the 19th century. The gaol that my aunts Ida and Evelyn had visited was Port Arthur.