My Week In the Dungeon Among the Dead

Well, actually, it wasn’t as bad as all that,  but “The Dungeon” is what I lovingly call the bottom basement level of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, also known as B-2 or the British Isles floor, where Jim and I just spent the past week.

Last September I had received a rogue e-mail from a guy in New Zealand who had been googling “Barnes” and had seen a query I had sent out a year before about my Barnes family in England.  He was going through his mother’s English research and noticed we shared a common name, Upton Barnes.  He mentioned that Upton’s great granddaughter, Susanna, married Esau Elliott.  Well, I tried to write him back many times looking for ANY names or dates that could show a connection, but he never again responded.  Fortunately, Esau Elliott is a rather unique name and he was not hard to find in the census records.  By ordering his marriage certificate, which gave me the name of Susanna’s father, and some more hunting in census records, I was able to piece together a little about this family.  Monday, the first item on my list was to check the parishes listed in the census where Esau and Susanna’s children were born and see what I could find.

My goodness.  I spent the next day and a half on two microfilms of the Hambleden, Buckinghamshire parish registers.  They were indeed our family.  They had two more children that weren’t listed in the census, making nine children total born there. Seven of them married in the parish there and had families as well as two granddaughters, one which had 13 children.  None of them had had their work done.   I felt at one point like I was gathering Israel all by myself.

Too bad it’s not always like that—which it ISN”T.

Wednesday evening we had a mini-Walton reunion at Andy and Kathy’s house with Janet and Terry,  three aunts, Fern, Bonnie and Marge, and some cousins; Earl and Mary Lou Henrie, and Dale and Cavelle Lawlor.  We hadn’t seen Andy and Kathy for over 25 years.  Andy and Kathy put on quite a spread  and it seemed we never quite stopped eating . . .

Or telling stories . . .

Or laughing . . .

Trying to eat and laugh at the same time became an issue.  We were surrounded by grandmas with hilarious grandkid stories.

After dinner, Andy had everyone in the circle give a little summary of what they were up to and what their kids were up to.  No grandchildren information allowed at this point, however. He and Kathy told us about their recent mission to Lebanon, which was incredible.

Earl  is serving as a Bishop right now, and he and Mary Lou live up in Tremonton, Utah.

 

Andy, as the baby of the family, and his next three older sisters—Bonnie, Fern and Marge.

After everyone else had to leave, Jim and I hung around for awhile visiting with Andy and Kathy.  Of course Jim just had to try out the  kid space up above only accessible through a secret door in the pantry.

Jim spent a couple of days working on Boeing stuff, and visiting a work site there in Salt Lake, but also had some great success tracking down one line of his family using information that had just come from England via three marriage certificates he had ordered.

Thursday, while searching in the parish registers of Wales for the husband and children of Rachel Clinch,  I came across the name of what appeared to be her brother, Walter.  I was surprised to find that he had come to Wales from Oxfordshire with his sister  and was having children in this same parish.  I was sad to see that his first daughter died as a two-year-old.  I began to wonder if I could ever find his marriage to this Welsh girl that was listed as his wife in the census records when I couldn’t even begin to read any of the Welsh place names.  To make a semi-long story shorter, the library catalog had listed two LARGE volumes of books that contained an index to millions of Welsh marriages.  It took two days to find someone at the library that could locate the volumes, but when I did, and hefted those things off the shelf, I almost gave up.  I opened the first volume, flipped one page, and my eyes landed on the names of Walter Clinch and Catherine Pritchard, the year of their marriage and the parish they married in.  Within five minutes, I had located the microfilms of that parish, and was looking at their marriage certificate.  Those kinds of things always make me wonder if maybe they have an interest in being found and are helping out somehow . . . 

Well, those good times occasionally have to come to an end.  For me they certainly did on Friday morning when I got hit by something unexpectedly nasty.  There was a point I was almost wishing I could lay down and join my dead people, but fortunately, I wasn’t calling the shots during those times of delirium.  It’s been four days.  I’m home and up but doing some serious shuffling.