Genealogy Chat

I will have to get the documentation to be sure, but...

Yonks ago, when I first started this malarky, my mum gave me all the info she knew, including info about her mother's aunts and cousins. There was one aunt Emily who married a William Evans and another aunt whose daughter Alice married a Frank Evans. Well Evans is a common name, I just thought it was a coincidence. Then I found when looking for my great-grandfather in the electoral rolls that his sister Emily was living next door to him with her husband JOHN William Evans. John was a Met policeman, so I got info about him from Kew. He had been widowed. It was only when I was looking at the tree I'd drawn up in a rough bit of paper from mum's info that I realised that on the 1901 census John William and his first wife were living next door to great-grandad with their children - one of them is a boy named FRANK. nell

Don't you just love it when that happens!

Nicky You aren't thick! You can only know what you find out! I was looking at electoral rolls from the late 1890s to 1932 (cos that's when my gt grandfather died). This info is from the Getting Started section, which you can find by scrolling down on the homepage: 'Electoral registers began in 1832 and by 1884 all male householders over the age of 21 were entitled to vote. By 1918 all men over 21 and women over the age of 30 could vote, changing to the age of 21 for women in 1928. In 1969 the age was lowered from 21 to 18. They are usually kept by local libraries and county record offices and are an excellent way of trying to trace down towards the present.' So if you have wealthy men in your family you can find them further back than poor women! Incidentally the rolls I looked at were bound books and they were in a local history centre. nell