Twiglets
Diarist Gill Shaw charts the rollercoaster ride of researching her family history
DIGGING DEEPER
Last issue I had a daft notion that the Joseph Holdsworth who lived in Ramsbottom, Lancashire, and had four children baptised and three buried at nearby Emmanuel chapel in Holcombe, might have been the lastborn son of my 5x great-grandmother Sarah Holdsworth. Sarah, I decided, was pregnant when her husband Samuel died in 1783, and left to bring up not six children on her own, as I’d thought, but seven.
So off to Ancestry.co.uk to look for a Joseph Holdsworth born 1783-84 to a woman called Sarah, and miracles of miracles, up pops one straightaway. Joseph Holdsworth, son of Sarah Holdsworth, 1784, St Mary’s Church Prestwich. But nooo! It takes me a minute to realise that I’m not looking at a baptism, but a burial. Poor little Joseph, I don’t think he lived very long. There’s no corresponding baptism, so this is perhaps the only record to show he even existed.