Back in the saddle...[Yates Tree]

My goodness me, it's ages since I had anything of any interest to report.

Since the last post we had a bit of a nightmare with William being taken ill on holiday and needing hospitalisation both there and at home. Then, just after William was discharged from hospital here, Ben decided to help himself to half a big bottle of Calpol from the fridge (I didn't have a clue that he could open the fridge), whereupon he poured it into a bowl and proceeded to spoon it into his mouth in the manner of eating a yoghurt. Well, hopefully both boys are fine now (although Will still has debilitating hayfever) and we're back to normal: Andrew is on business abroad and this is giving me a little time now to devote back to the family genealogy.

Excitingly, a marriage registration copy came through the post this morning. The wedded couple were John Elcock and Elizabeth Hubball, parents of Sarah Ann Elcock who married Arthur Dales, my great-great grandfather. Naturally I was anxious to see who their fathers were, so I could go back the generation before.

The copy of the register is very poor, and it's really hard to read the spidery handwriting anyway. What I can see is that on September 23rd 1860, John and Elizabeth got married in Old Swinford; he was 28 and she 22: even at that time his profession was a gardener. His father's name was Thomas Elcock, a waggoner, and her father was William, a scythe grinder. I was excited about that last entry because it confirmed what I knew about Belbroughton in the 19th century, that it was the key manufacturing base of the scythe industry.

However it was not at all easy to follow back from this new knowledge. Ancestry.co.uk does give a William Hubball of Belbroughton, scythe grinder, in the 1861 census: however, in that year he is listed as being only 33. It would not be possible then, for him to be Elizabeth's father, as she was cited on the marriage register as being 22 in 1860.

Another William Hubball is found in the 1851 census; he is a carpet-weaver from Kidderminster and this hardly seems correct. Another is to be found in Bromsgrove - a nail-maker by trade. Another in nearby Kinver.

None of these really rang true, and to make matters worse, I had decided at last to become a monthly member of Ancestry, since you can do practically nothing research-wise without being a member. Normally I buy the pay-as-you-go credits, but even this doesn't enable you to check out other members' family trees. So I signed the deal and it worked beautifully for about 20 minutes: then, every time I wanted to look at an actual document, it told me that there was a problem and I should 'try again later'. So this completely stunted my research on the Elcock family too.

So I looked at the Latter Day Saints site for William Hubball around this time and it gave me a William Hubball marrying a Sarah Innfield on 12th December 1822 in Belbroughton. Bingo! Now unfortunately it doesn't give me anything else on Sarah Innfield at all, and it doesn't really give me much in the way of identifying where he was born, but it's better than I had this time yesterday, and it does give a way forward for research at Belbroughton if that can ever be accomplished.

Hopefully I'll have more to report tomorrow....