Surprises deflated

In my last post I forecast some surprises as I started to research the ancestry of Catherine Mitchell. Sorry to disappoint, but the surprise did not stand the test of forensic investigation!

About 3 years ago I received a message through ancestry.com asking if I knew that Catherine had a half-sister in Australia. The suggestion was that John Mitchell, Catherine's father, had married Isobel (or Isabel) Miller in 1800 and had a daughter named Mary Ann in 1801 (in Alloa). Isobel died in childbirth and he later married Catherine McGregor in 1807 and had a large family with her.

My normal course of investigating family connections is as follows:

• First see if I can find a birth or baptism record that names the parents.
• Next look for other children of the same parents - this is usually a search for baptisms based on parents names, a rough location and a timeframe of 10-15 years either side of the person I started with.
• Next I look for the marriage of the parents, based on the birth of the first child.
• Finally I look for the birth or baptism of the parents, assuming they were between 20 and 40 when they married, or when their first child was born.
• If I find the parents baptism or birth, then the next cycle starts from the beginning.

There are some other checks and balances that I use, but you get the picture.

When I started to apply this process to the story I was given by my contact, the alarm bells started to go off very quickly. First the marriage he was quoting was some 30 miles from where Mary Ann was born. Then the search for siblings turned up other baptisms in Alloa before the supposed marriage and after Isabel supposedly died. A final check of baptisms near the supposed marriage suggests that there were almost certainly two separate families. Our John Mitchell and Catherine McGregor were married before the last of John Mitchell and Isabel Miller's children was born. I doubt our John married twice, with the marriages overlapping!

My next step was to look at how my contact made the connection in the first place. He was tracing his wife's family and came to a Mary Green (married name)  who was in and out of a Benevolent Asylum in Sydney with her two daughters. On one of her discharges in 1859 there is a note that 'Mary Green would be going to her sister with Mr Spears at Brisbane Waters'. My contact then discovered that the Convict Catherine Mitchell had been assigned to William Spears at Brisbane Water and he immediately concluded that Mary Green's sister was Catherine Mitchell.

He failed to take account of the fact that 22 years had passed between Catherine Mitchell leaving the Spears household in 1837 to marry William Ward (he knew about that) and Mary Green's discharge in 1859. So I don't think there is any likelihood that Mary Green's maiden name was Mitchell, let alone that she was in any way related to our Catherine.

This is a side story, but it is a good illustration of how badly done research can easily lead people astray. The problem is that people put this stuff on internet family trees and it gets copied as fact.

If anyone is interested, I will include the details of this proposal and the results of my searched, in the research notes as I progress the Catherine Mitchell story.