Baby Rose

Long Lost Baby

The Story

If you talk to any genealogist as soon as you say the word "Ireland" it will send a shiver down their spine and keep them awake at night because Ireland is extremely challenging to research.

In the UK censuses were taken every 10 years between 1841 & 1921 and therefore a huge amount of data is available to aid with searches. Ireland is another matter altogether though.

In Ireland there were censuses in 1851, 1901 & 1911. Aside from that there are SOME old parish records available but these records were either incomplete, lost or destroyed.

Furthermore as Ireland was largely emigrated FROM and rarely immigrated TO then there are a huge number of common surnames as well as a number of common first names.

This task was to complete a 5 generation family tree for a family with a common name who moved to the mainland from Ireland some time before 1918.

All we had to work with was 2 common names and an old family story that they had a baby in Ireland but that it died on the journey to the mainland. A 2nd goal of the task was to find if this story had any truth to it.

The Investigation

Analysis of the 1921 census gave us a city of origin in Ireland to work with but no maiden name of the wife in that relationship. The 1939 registry gave us supposed dates of births (people were often inaccurate on this survey). The combination of an area to work with, both first names and a surname for the male, plus a city of origin would normally "crack the case" but the difficulty with Ireland is they often wrote either "full" or "minor" on marriage certificates rather than actual ages so 15 marriages were identified as possibly our targets.

Trees were produced for 8 of these and were ruled out but on the 9th we finally found whom we believed to be correct and produced trees. Birth records showed a 1915 birth for a baby named Rose and mainland records showed a death for baby Rose with the dates alligning with travel documents of the parents to the mainland.

From this we were able to produce a family tree and correct years of birth for the parents of Rose. Cross referencing years of birth to death records allowed us to find a graves for the parents on the mainland and analysis of burial records confirmed these were the correct people and gave exact dates of birth. From their we got some luck as all records were intact and present as we worked the tree backwards.

This tree was extremely challenging and a real test of our skills in hunting down records but ended successfully and proved the old family rumour to be true.

If you have a long lost relative you would like to find please contact us on the form below including as much detail as you have as well as your contact details and we will be in touch to see if we can help you have a similar positive outcome.