Skip to main content

2024 Week 35: All mixed up!

On my 2 x great grandfather John Young's death certificate, his father is listed as James Young and his mother as a Helen Ravelton. John died at the age of 78 and was a widower. His son James was a witness on the death certificate and both of John's parents were marked as deceased.

Ravelton is not a common name and therefore you would expect researching Helen in the Parish records to be relatively easy, even when you consider its various spellings - Ravelton/Revelton/Raveltoun. However, with names getting passed on down through families, mix-ups can occur and this is what has happened in Helen's case and has led to lots of trees having the wrong Helen, the wrong dates or the wrong parents. Many even have the wrong James Young as her husband!

I myself have also made mistakes in researching her and her husband James Young - James Young is a very common name in this area and indeed throughout Scotland. In my case too, the Youngs and the Raveltons are also closely connected.

It has taken a while to get to what I believe are the correct people and  positioning of them in my tree. At one point I was even considering that my John Young was maybe brought up by his grandparents and it was their names on his death certificate! However, this is how I have 'unmixed' the Youngs and the Raveltons, with the pertinent records available:

John Young (1801-1879) is indeed the son of a James Young  (1764-  ) and a Helen Ravelton ( 1765 -  ). In turn, James Young is the son of a James Young (1739 -   ) and a ... Helen Ravelton ( 1729 -  )! This 'new' Helen is the daughter of a James Revelton and an Elizabeth Gibb, who would be my 5 x great grandparents.

Turning back to my original Helen Ravelton ( 1765 - ), her father was a John Ravelton  and her grandparents were .... James Revelton and Elizabeth Gibb. So my James Young - Helen Ravelton marriage was a marriage of first cousins.

Screenshot from my tree on Ancestry.co.uk

It is little wonder that so many family trees have got all those relationships and people mixed up. Some mistakes are understandable, but there is at least one tree who has one Helen getting married at age 8! 

I hope I have got it all worked out now. If I'm wrong, I hope someone will be good enough to tell me!


Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2024 Week 43: Lost contact #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

 When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot...
4 comments
Read more

2024 Week 19: Preserve #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

 A few years ago, I came into the possession of a family bible. It was the family bible of my paternal grandparents, John McAra and Christina Walker. Until her death in 2018, the bible had been in the hands of my Aunt Inez, widow of my Uncle Will McAra. When I started enquiring as to its whereabouts, I found that it was her grandson, John, who now had it. John himself had no real interest in it at all, so he was quite happy to hand it over to me. However, it was, to say the least, in a bit of a state. The front cover was completely detached and there were many loose pages as the spine of the book was also damaged and detached. I had no choice but to take it to a book repairer in Glasgow, where it was repaired as best it could be. The bible itself had been originally published in Glasgow in the late 19th century. In Victorian times it was common for Christian families to have such a large bible in which they could record events such as births, marriages and deaths. The one I have al...
1 comment
Read more

2024: Week 41: Most #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

Looking at my DNA matches over various platforms and my family tree research, it is obvious to me that my paternal grandmother's line - the Walkers - are the line which have the most descendants (or at least the most descendants who have tested) and who have spread out furthest over the world. My great great grandparents James Walker (1777-1862) and Ellen Muir (1790-1866) from Linlithgow in Scotland had ten children - eight boys and two girls. Such large families were not uncommon in those times. Two of the boys never married, but between them the other eight siblings produced at least 52 grandchildren! The eldest of the siblings, George Walker was, however,  the only one of the children to ever leave Scotland and that was later in life, when he followed his son John, a miner, over to the USA. It is, however, many of the grandchildren of James and Ellen who decide to leave their homeland for the USA and for Australia. Their USA destinations included Kansas, Colorado, Ohio and Maryl...
Post a Comment
Read more