Where else can I look for Gainsborough, Lincs birth record please
For over ten years I have been trying to find my G-G-grandfather's birth & marriage records.
I have census records and his army records which all say he was born about 1806 in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. This is the obvious site to search, but nothing. We have even spent a day researching the actual records in Lincoln Archives looking at the Gainsborough records (although they are not separated into births, marriages and deaths) and we searched everything from 1800 to 1808 and there was no mention of Conuel (or Connel etc) in ANY of the records. Can anyone suggest where else I can look to find more records.
His marriage was to Catherine Cassin (or Cassein or Casson) of Dublin. He was stationed in Dublin (where he possibly met her), then went to Devonport with his unit and their son was born there. Any help is appreciated
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Finding these records is just not always possible. As you probably know, civil registration in England was not introduced until 1837. Most records before that time will relate to baptisms, although a birth date is sometimes entered as part of the baptism entry. Unfortunately (for genealogists, at least) not everyone was baptised. Even with those that were, there is the chance that the parish clerk or vicar simply omitted to record details of the event in the parish register.
I can empathise with your problem because I have two examples of my own. In spite of having dates and places of events (baptisms, if not births & burials, if no deaths) going back to 1667 in my paternal grandfather's line, there is still one event missing: the 1835 birth / baptism of my g-g-grandfather. His two elder brothers have baptism records and his younger brother has a (1838) birth registration record (though no baptism). I have long since abandoned all hope of finding any record, and only know his year of birth from his marriage and census records.
My example of a missing marriage record (of around 1800) is particularly troublesome. I was hoping to trace my maternal line (mother's mother's mother, and so on) for well over 200 years, but am stuck by not having a surname for a certain Richard Gamble's wife "Elizabeth", as there is no trace of a marriage whatsoever in the counties of Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire (or any other county I have searched) prior to the 1808 baptism of their daughter at Loughborough.
Exasperating as it is, we just have to try, try try, but eventually accept there is probably no way we will ever be able to locate certain vital events in the lives of our ancestors and relatives.
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Thanks Paul. I agree with you it is so frustrating. I feel really stuck with it as I can't find his parentage yet I know there are other Conuels around the area prior to that time (early 1800's). The other drawback for this name is spelling lol. Can you imagine broad accents pronouncing it and the few people who can write (maybe from another area altogether) trying to decide how it's spelled. I have seen Kennywell & Conewell (plus varieties of them too) and I feel sure they all belong to the same family. My maternal grandmother was a Conuel so it's been a frustrating journey as that was my very first starting point after parents :)
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I recommend looking through the birth/baptism records available at my site, ogindex.org. I checked all of Lincolnshire on FreeReg.org.uk and didn't see a lot of good matches. It may be possible that your ancestor was a member of a non-conformist church.
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Thanks Tim. I will have a look - but like you say, there aren't a lot of good matches. I know there has been a variety of spellings, mainly Connel really but when you think of how things were spoken in rural communities and that that educated people who wrote may have been from a different area and speak differently, I feel that Conuel can have become Kennewell, Kenuel, Conewell - and many many other variations lol. I have seen quite a few Conewells prior to 1800 and have wondered if the name derived from that - and there is also the Mexican option too as there seems to be quite a few in Mexico with the name Conuel. Well, I guess my search keeps going. Thanks for your help
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Just a thought on your predicament of not finding a baptism for your Great Great Grandfather, have you considered that he may have been a Baptist? in which case you would need to look for an adult baptism or at least a child aged 8 or more.
Another reason could be that his parents had other children and that they were all baptised at the same time which could put the baptism date a lot later than 1808! I have seen records where 6 children from the same family were baptised together on the same day. One reason for this can be that they wanted to claim settlement in the parish for receiving parish relief, so perhaps you need to extend your parameters of research.
Good luck!
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Thanks Ross, that's a few things I hadn't considered about Baptist / adult baptism. I know we'd gone through about 8 years worth of records and during that period there were no mentions of Conuels for anything - it was mixed records for birth, marriages and deaths, so quiet a long time for no marriages or deaths in particular. Might have to now go and hunt out the Baptist records to see if there is any mentions there. Thank you
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Maybe this is what you are talking about that you already searched but when I can’t find information I will go to the catalog and search a particular location such as Gainsborough England. Then all the records for the place show up and sometimes there are records you have to access while at a family history center or that just aren’t indexed yet and so you have to search through the actual photos for the information. I recently had a family where I was searching some of childrens’ births records and couldn’t find them in a regular search, so I did this and found there were some nonconformist Methodist records not yet indexed and ended up finding most of the children there. Another time I was looking for a woman’s birth record and found you could only access the records at a family history center, I went and searched the images, didn’t find the woman’s but did find a brother I didn’t know about. There are many other denominations available in Gainsborough https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/results?count=20&placeId=16422&query=%2Bplace%3A%22England%2C%20Lincolnshire%2C%20Gainsborough%22&subjectsOpen=393886-50 Also if I have trouble finding records here I search on find my past as they sometimes have English records that family search does not have yet. You can get a free account of find my past through familysearch.
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