Don’t ignore witnesses and family acquaintances with a different surname to your ancestor: they may reveal new relationships that you didn’t know about, as Simon Wills explains
WITNESSES AND CONTACTS
In the determination to trace members of our own family with a particular surname, it’s easy to overlook the possible importance of people with a different surname that are associated with our ancestors. These individuals crop up in all sorts of settings: in the same house during a census; as witnesses to marriages and legal documents; as people reporting a death; as employees; the masters of apprentices; beneficiaries in a will and so on. These acquaintances, for want of a better word, may be simply unrelated people connected with your family, such as friends, work colleagues and neighbours; but are they more than that? Are they relations? It’s worth investigating them because sometimes they yield valuable, or even surprising, family connections.
Occasionally these people are interesting in their own right. A friend of mine has a story about her Victorian ancestors who decided to get married on the spur of the moment in a remote country church. The minister was happy to oblige. The churchwarden was one witness but they needed another. They asked an elderly man rubbing a church brass in the corner, who readily agreed, yet only after he signed his name did they realise that he was William Gladstone, the Prime Minister.
Confirming relationships
However, the main potential value to genealogists of these ‘witnesses and acquaintances’ is twofold. Firstly, they may provide corroborating evidence to establish or confirm relationships within a family or between families. Secondly, they can help to separate two or more people with the same name, especially when you’re not sure which one is your ancestor.
Censuses quite often include other family members in the same household as the people that you are researching. Sometimes the enumerator includes a clear explanation for who these individuals are. You will see ‘uncle’, niece’ and so on to indicate their relationship to the head of the household. However, a lot of the time these relationships are missing, illegible, or unclear for other reasons. The census enumerator may use the vague word ‘visitor’ even when there is a family relationship. Similarly, certain words could be used quite loosely in the past: ‘cousin’, for example, may be a more distant relation than the child of an uncle and aunt. Likewise, the word ‘sister’ may turn out to mean s
