The lengths to which our ancestors will go in order to cover up something in their past never ceases to amaze me. We’d like to think that when it came to recording their details on official documents they would have been reluctant to give false information and that we can therefore trust what they said. But sadly this is all-too-often not the case.
So when we see that our greatgrandmother claimed to be 44 at the time of the 1901 census we can’t necessarily take this as ‘fact’. She may also have lied about where she was born (or given a birthplace which didn’t exactly chime with reality) and worst of all, she might have ‘adopted’ a false name – or at least, one that she wasn’t born with.
With a reliable name and an approximate age we can (usually) work our way around most problems but if we can’t trust our ancestor’s name, we can really find ourselves up against it. If someone wanted to cover their tracks by adopting a new identity there’s often not a lot we can do.
A very useful tool
However, we do have one tool in our workshop that our ancestors could neverliving in the 19th century could possibly have imagined might be used to identify them and to uncover their attempted deception.
