Success Stories

Thankyou! You've enlightened me and the rest of my family about a long-buried "skeleton" which we had no idea existed. My cousin began researching our history about 20 years ago and told me a year ago that she suspected our paternal great-grandparents weren't married in spite of having 6 children. I put down what I knew onto the GR site and Beckie contacted me as we had the same name in our trees. My g-grandmother and her g-g-grandmother were one and the same person --- this Mary Ann had married, had a child then upped and left them both, going back to her parents. She then formed an attachment with the next door neighbour who was a navvy like her father and brother and the 2 extended families travelled all over the north of England building canals and railways. Their children (who included my grandfather) were born in many different places as a result. Because Mary Ann registered the children in her name (with her estranged and unseen-for-many-years husband as the father!) her partner James was the only one to have a different surname, so at some point in the 1890s he decided to start calling himself by the same name as the rest of his family. The result being of course that our family, although having the same surname as Mary Ann's husband, has absolutely no genetic connection with him and his family other than with the son that Mary Ann left behind with him. When Beckie and I began exchanging old family photos, the resemblances were marked and striking --- what we have always known as the "Hallam" nose is actually the "Goring" nose. To further add to the mystery, none of us has been able to find a date or certificate of death for Mary Ann and we suspect she may have once more "done a runner" and gone to America! She may have liked to know that her 2, very separate, families have met and get on very well!! from Marjorie Lord