Chipping away at the brick walls…

In family history research, all researchers, sooner or later, come up against what we call ‘brick walls’ in our research. These are people on our family trees who present a puzzle or a blockage that we cannot get past, whatever records we try, we cannot find some crucial bit of information, a baptism, a marriage, where they were born, where they died. They are brick walls between our present research and earlier generations. Sometimes those brick walls stand for a very long time.

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Quite early in my research, probably soon after I started researching in about 1980, I hit a brick wall in the form of my 3 x g-grandfather Thomas Morton. I just checked, he appears on my very first paper family tree that I drew up starting in 1980, (yes, I still have that paper tree, it’s the foundation of all my research!) so it must have been quite soon after I started. I had found his marriage to Elizabeth Hill at Tipton in 1825, I had found his death and burial in Rowley in 1836 and I deduced from the age given at his burial that that he had been born in about 1800. I was able to track his descendants through succeeding generations. But I could not find any earlier trace of Thomas Moreton anywhere in the area, no baptism, he died before Civil Registration started in 1837 and before any censuses to tell me where he had been born. So he was a brick wall for me.

When I later made contact with my distant cousin Margaret Thompson, who is also descended from this couple, I discovered that she had had the same problem. We were both experienced and careful researchers but both of us were standing in front of that wall. At least I knew it wasn’t just me!

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working on another piece for this study on one of the ‘core families’ who were living in the lost hamlets over many decades, even centuries. This time I am working on the Hill family. As I was writing about them, I double checked all my earlier research and added to my tree any new material which has become available since I did the work originally. Since the 1980s a huge amount of material has become available online, including censuses, parish registers, indexes – there were not even computers when I started! – and, very usefully in the case of Rowley Regis, within the last couple of years, copies of the Bishop’s Transcripts have become available through Ancestry, filling some of the gaps caused by the destruction of registers in the church fire at St Giles.

Although I always check my sources carefully and never simply copy from other trees– (which is possible on Ancestry but ill advised, there are many errors which are duplicated from tree to tree), it can be helpful to look at other trees to see whether there are any properly recorded facts which I had not seen before and which I could verify independently. Similarly, I look at the wonderful Black Country Connections Tree online[i] as I have often picked up useful snippets from that – such the marriage of one 3xg-grandparent which I had not found anywhere else, which was not at that time available online but which another researcher had found at Dudley Archives and made available through that tree.

So, after checking through my research on Thomas Moreton, today I took a look to see whether he appeared on the BCC tree. He does, though sadly there was no information on his parents, that brick wall was still intact. But I checked the other information there against my information and found to my surprise that there was an additional child listed who did not appear on my family tree. Another researcher had noted that Ralph Thomas Moreton had been baptised at Dudley St Thomas, on the same day as another child William Moreton who does appear on my tree and to the same parents – Thomas and Elizabeth Moreton of Rowley Regis. This baptism took place on 2 April 1837. The other researcher had correctly noted that Ralph Thomas Moreton had been born in or before 1837. Perhaps he and William were twins? You can tell this in later records from looking at Civil Registration Records because the entries for twins have consecutive reference numbers. But Civil Registration began in July 1837, this was just a few weeks too early… sounds of teeth grinding …

Ralph Thomas Moreton did not appear again in any records – for another fifty eight years. He was absent from his family in the following censuses, did not appear to have married or had children, there was no record of a death or a burial for him. But two of his brothers, William and Thomas had named sons Ralph Thomas.

But the BCC tree had one other entry for him. In 1895, a William Morton, marrying in Oldbury, gave the name Ralph Thomas Morton as his father, a miner. So it appeared that he had a) survived into adulthood and b) married and had children. How odd. And the couple getting married later named one of their sons Ralph Thomas so it was obviously a family name. But where was he?

I looked up the Civil Registration records for the bridegroom William Morton who was 24 in 1895, so he had been born in about 1871. There was only one William Moreton (The two spellings, with and without the e become interchangeable in records in this period) in Civil Registration records who was born in that period in the area and I found from this record that his mother’s maiden name was Siviter. And when I looked at my family tree for a William Moreton born in 1871, there was one William Moreton and his parents were Thomas Moreton and his wife Alice nee Siviter. Thomas was apparently the older brother of the mysterious Ralph Thomas. So, even though the name Thomas appeared in every other record for him – census, marriage, baptisms of his children – as Thomas Moreton, this son knew that he was actually Ralph Thomas Moreton. He was the Thomas on my tree born in 1832 for whom I had not been able to find a baptism, he had been baptised at the age of five, with his new baby brother. So Thomas and Ralph Thomas were the same person!

And I had been unable previously to find a death registration or burial for Thomas Moreton, despite knowing that he had been alive in the 1891 Census but that his wife was shown as a widow in the 1901 Census so I knew he had died in that ten year period. With this new information I searched for a death registration in that period for a Ralph T Morton and there he was, Ralph Thomas Morton who had died in the Dudley Registration District in the first quarter of 1894. Bingo!  How satisfying. I was now sure that Thomas Moreton/Morton and Ralph Thomas Moreton/Morton were one and the same person. I haven’t found his burial yet but I’m working on it!

Three successive generations of this family had named sons Ralph Thomas Moreton. My mind went back to the original Thomas Moreton, (1800-1836), the one for whom no-one had been able to find any baptism. Might he have been Ralph Thomas too?

So I searched FreeREG for a baptism of a Ralph Thomas Moreton anywhere within ten miles of Rowley Regis for a period of five years either side of the birth year of 1800 which had been indicated by the age shown at his burial. And up came a baptism in November 1798 at Harborne when Ralph Thomas Moreton had been baptised, the son of Francis and Anne Moreton. And when I then searched Ancestry and FindMyPast for this Ralph Thomas Moreton, I could find no further trace of him, no burial, no marriage, no trace. I think he had morphed into Thomas Moreton and moved to Rowley Regis.

Is this a chink of light, a brick nudging out of my brick wall after nearly forty-five years of chipping away at the mortar? I really think it might be. I shall do some more research on the Harborne connection and the family there, when time permits. I already know that other members of my family at this period who were living at Oatmeal Row, Cakemore were married at Harborne and described as ‘of this parish’ so the parish boundary of Harborne at that time might well have extended well into the Cakemore area.

So this sort of diversion is why I do not manage to post every week to my blog. I get side-tracked into all sorts of side alleys and rabbit holes and it all takes time to work through. So, I promise that another ‘families of the Lost Hamlets’ post is in progress for my blog and my apologies for those of you who wait hopefully for new posts on Sundays. Hopefully in the next week or two there will be another post on the Hill family – unless, of course, to mix my metaphors, I find myself down yet another rabbit hole, digging furiously!

Edit: The bricks from this particular brick wall now lie scattered around my feet! Checking out Ralph Thomas’s siblings, also baptised at Harborne, I now find that at least one sister – Phebe – married James Hipkiss also at Tipton a year after her brother and lived thereafter in Rowley, on Turner’s Hill and in Gadds Green and Perrys Lake, yards from the Moreton and Whittall families – so I am now fairly certain that I have broken through the wall. And I have now confirmed that the Harborne Parish Boundary appears to have extended right through to the Oldbury Road in Blackheath and Whiteheath so it is quite possible that the Moretons lived as close to Rowley as that. More research ongoing!

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[i] https://bcconnections.tribalpages.com/tribe/browse?userid=bcconnections&view=9&ver=659117