Success Stories

Well I suppose I have had a bit of a success recently. I have always wondered what happened to my grandad, Ernie Days siblings. I knew the family came from Wealdstone - Poets Corner, I should do I was born there! The local church was Holy Trinity, Wealdstone. My family had come down from Harrow Weald in the late 19th century when there was a drift from agriculture to industry to live in what was then the new town. I looked at the LMAs web site to see if Holy Trinity had lodged their Parish records with the LMA, no sign of it. I contacted the church who told me they had placed their records with the LMA! So I went to the LMA and discovered that it was a recent deposition and not microfilm yet, nor in their index. So I looked at the records of marriages for Days between 1900 & 1920. I found Rose Day marrying Charles Swansbury in 1908. I found them christening a child, Violet in 1916. Coming home I wondered why the name Swansbury had never been mentioned in the family. At the christening he was described as a soldier. I looked on the Commonwealth War Graves site and found he had been killed in September 1918, just two months before the end of the Great War. That site refers to his widow as Rose Howarth, so she must have remarried. That ties in with something my dad said to me years ago about having a cousin Cyril Howarth who was a stick short of a bundle. From this I can take one branch of the family further. That is further into the 20th century!