RootsChat.Com

1851 Census - Frances appears to have died as Aaron and children are in the workhouse

Aaron Mansfield  51
John Mansfield   21
Robert Mansfield  17
Elizabeth Mansfield  12

Yes - the subsequent family story is not a happy one, and hard to trace since poor rootless people tend to leave less clear traces than wealthy stable people.

I'm working on an Elizabeth Mansfield, b1835(ish) in West Wratting.

Her father is given as Aaron Mansfield (on her marriage certificate), and this leads neatly to a 16 Dec 1838 baptism at St Andrew the Great, Cambridge.

The Parents are given as Aaron Mansfield and Frances Mansfield. Since the birth is after 1837, the GRO index can provide the MMN, and this turned out to be "Moss".

So I'm now trying (and failing) to find a marriage between Aaron Mansfield and Frances Moss.

Can anyone help?

9 years later...

I contacted the Dachsund society.

Some people still remember Bob and Rene.

It turns out Bob and Rene spent their Honeymoon boating on Womack Water (on the Norfolk broads).

And they commemorated this in the name of their dogs. 

I thought I understood Ancestry's DNA matches. Turns out that was something missing in my understanding. (important bit in red)

I have spent around 6 hours carefully researching ALL the people for whom I have DNA matches AND either trees I've researched myself or "other peoples tree" on ancestry. This means I (or ancestry) know the common ancestors for the matches. I have then labelled (in my own database) the set of g-g-grandparents (a pool of 16) from which each matching person descends.

The point of this exercise, beyond recording information, was to allow the following process.

If I take a person descended from (say) ancestors 5,6,7,8 and get a list of their shared matches...

and then get a similar list for a person descended from only 7,8...

Anyone in the 5,6,7,8 list who is NOT in the 7,8 list must be descended from 5,6.

Right? So I can manipulate shared match lists to gain more detailed knowledge. Cool.

But it turns out DNA matching doesn't work like that.

Since you only match on shared fragments, who you match with not only depends on the ancestors they're descended from, but which particular fragments you (and they) have from those ancestors.

The upshot was, on my first trial run, the 7,8 list included a person who I KNOW to be a 7,8.

But she was NOT in the 5,6,7,8 list.

So my deductive process, for which I had high hopes, doesn't work.

When decoding dubiously written (and spelt) place names from old documents, I would very much like to use wildcards, regexes and "sounds like" (SONDEX and others) on a list of known places.

Does anyone know of a large list of UK place names, ideally with as many old variants as possible, that I could download?

I have a collated list from the Facebook group "Place Names of England" which has around 30,000 names, that the best I've found so far.