Searching for her ancestor Catherine in the newspapers, Gill Shaw uncovers claims of adoption, abduction, inheritance and insanity…
I’m on a street in Reims, northern France. Capital of the champagne region. And the city where the banns were read in May 1888 for the forthcoming marriage of Catherine Mary Riboldi and Marie Paul André Ruinart de Brimont.
And the name of the street? Rue Ruinart de Brimont – yep, seems Catherine’s fiancé’s family have a whole street named after them!
Of course, I’m not really here (though it’s on my growing list of places to visit…). But the golden Google Street View man is here, and he’s the next best thing. Street View is just one of the resources that didn’t exist years back when my cousin first began looking for our 2x great-aunt Catherine, and now I can’t imagine family history research without it.
Flying the little yellow figure from one end of the street to the other, most of the architecture seems to date from the second half of the 20th century – Reims was heavily damaged by shelling in the First World War, and again in the Second – but one grand-looking old building, now part of a school, appears to be still standing. Whether it has any connection to Catherine, I don’t know.
First, a toast...
My initial search for ‘Ruinart de Brimont’, though, has thrown up a tantalising parade of possibilities, and piecing the puzzle together will take some time. But to whet your appetite – with champagne, naturellement – let’s just say that Maison Ruinart, or Ruinart Père et Fils, is hailed as the oldest champagne house in the world, and Ruinart today is one of the premium brands of the Moët group. Santé!
But Catherine, how did you manage it? No, really! How did a desperately poor girl from east London come to marry into a prestigious champagne dynasty?
To try to find out, I’m going to put the Ruinart research aside while I dive into another amazing resource we didn’t have so many of readily at our fingertips 20-odd years ago – digital newspapers.
I’ll need to keep my wits about me, though. Even if you’re lucky enough to find an ancestor in the news, it doesn’t necessarily mean the account is totally true, does it? Much like today’s press, stories were copied and circulated and syndicated, and some reporters may have muddied the waters or accidentally lost things in translation. (In the case of Catherine Riboldi en France, perhaps literally…)
But let’s go for a paddle in the murky depths, and see what we can find.
Paper trail
First stop, the British Newspaper Collection at Findmypast. I enter my 2x
