The Family Detective

This Word document is a work in progress... CLICK HERE OR RIGHT CLICK TO SAVE AS But I'm posting it now as I find it useful when I want to sort and search groups of names by place or date. I've used colour to group what I think are families. If you have any other information to add to the table, I'd be happy to hear it .. and then I'll add an update. LAST UPDATE OF TABLE: 18 March, 2012

The world was changing when Adam Weatherstone was born in Scotland in 1769. Captain James Cook was preparing to set out and explore the southern seas and to map the land that many of Adam’s children and future descendants would call home. For reasons we can’t be sure of, Adam set out on his own adventures to London sometime before 1809. The district of London he lived in was around the wharves and docks and his occupation as a watchman could give some clues to why he chose to live in London. [The London Docks were constructed between 1799 and 1815 so is not unreasonable to imagine Adam felt the lure of the growing prosperity in London and work as a labourer building the docks.] Census and death records show Adam Weatherstone was born in around 1770 in Edinburgh, Scotland. There are many variants on the spelling of Weatherstone and the death certificate of his daughter, Sarah, indicates he was also known as John. The first records I have found for Adam, is when he married Elizabeth B...

I use ancestory.com ... it's been useful, but I don't take their "hints" as gospel .. I use those as, just as suggested, hints! I take the information presented and then I go out and prove it to myself by finding other proof. One such example is my great grandfather John Lang. His death certificate tells me his mother's name was "Sarah Belford". This put a stop to my searching. I couldn't find any records for a Sarah Belford that would fit in with the details I knew about his father Henry, or John himself. I kept getting hints to other trees that listed her ... Strangely, when I look at some of the Ancestory.com family trees they have Sarah Belford as John's mother, and the trees just stop there. Some have gone on to find a Sarah Belford that "sort of fits" and then have a whole knew family history from some Sarah Belford attached to the Laing tree. But I found her .. proved through more than one source that her actual name was Sara...