UPAASA YOUR GENEALOGY GAME!

The Family Tree Academy is here to help you grow your genealogy skills. The aim is to help teach more about the search skills and source know-how needed to step up your family history research. In this issue, Family Tree Academy tutor David Annal shares advice on a case study in which missing records and scant details are the order of the day. The only clue giving hope is a helpfully unusual name

David Annal

ESSENTIAL SEARCH SKILLS TO MASTER

The February 2022 Family Tree Academy piece on the importance of names in family history research inspired reader Geoff Manning to write in again (the topic having been raised by Geoff in the June 2018 issue of Family Tree, on the Q&A pages). He wrote regarding his brickwall, which he was hoping it might be possible to solve thanks to an unusual first name in his family.

Geoff writes:

I first encountered the name Hercules as the middle name of my 3x greatgrandfather who was christened John Hercules Manning in 1778. I then found that his father and grandfather each had Hercules as their only Christian name. The latter, who died in 1780 aged 79, is causing me a bit of trouble as I am unable to get back past him with any certainty.

They all lived in or around East Wickham in Kent but there are no records available for the church there before about 1715. At that time, though, there were a number of Mannings in Somerset including a Hercules baptised in 1678 with three brothers baptised in the same decade: their father’s name was also Hercules.

Unfortunately, records for this area around 1700 also appear not to exist but it is a possibility that one of those four men could well have married and given a son their father’s name around 1700.

I was interested in Geoff’s statement that ‘there were no records for the church’ [and] wanted to check whether it was true

We can’t rule out the possibility that there was once a record of baptisms from this date -and possibly earlier... It’s possible a whole register is missing

There is a record in 1727 of a marriage in Taunton for Hercules Manning and a couple of years later a burial record of a ‘female Manning, married’ with no further details.

Did his wife die and did he decide there was nothing left for him in Somerset and went to London to try his luck? It is interesting that when ‘my’ Hercules married in 1738, he described himself as a widower!