IF BY CHANCE

The great fascination of family history, for me, are the millions of decisions, circumstances and chance events that occurred during many centuries to make me, me. If just one of those crossroads had been navigated differently, I would not be here. Whether this is chance or destiny, it is a miracle that I am me … and that you are you.

This story illustrates just one of the circumstances in my miracle: a story about the discovery of a link between two unrelated four-year-old boys who died in 1844 and three octogenarian cousins all meeting together for the first time in 2019. Although the boys were unrelated they had a lot in common. And it is what they had in common that allowed me to find them and to ponder the potential consequences of what I discovered and the effect it could have had on my family.

Genealogical déjà vu

Have you ever had that feeling of déjà vu when looking at genealogical records – that feeling when you think that you recognise a record? Maybe because you had forgotten that you had already searched in this place before?

I had that feeling while searching for a burial record for my 3x great-uncle, Frederick James Holding. Even though I had never looked for the record for Frederick before it seemed remarkably familiar when I found it. The reason for this was quite simple: the entry directly above Frederick’s