According to that well known authority, Google (!), there are Micklethwaites in New York. Rev Clark Micklethwaite is or was in Brooklyn, as are Linda and Franklin.Given the limited information that I’ve found, I haven’t been able to work out exactly who these folks are, but I strongly suspect they relate to Lloyd Micklethwaite born about 1907 in Maryland. Lloyd is a descendant of Walter Joseph Micklethwaite who emigrated to America from Thornhill by Dewsbury in Yorkshire in the 1860s. Walter is descended from Joseph who married Nancy Nutter in 1805 – the one I mentioned in the last post.

If you are, or you know Rev Clark, Franklin or Linda, please contact me

[Edit: for an update, see my post in July 2014]

After the grafting comes the pruning!

Comments from several people have persuaded me to take a look at Joseph of Thornhill who was born about 1783. He married Nancy Nutter in 1805. When I expanded the One Name Study out from Huddersfield into the rest of West Yorkshire, it seemed obvious that this Joseph was the natural son of Fanny, daughter of Jonas of Mirfield (1725) as there was no other viable alternative. Other people have Internet trees which suggest that Joseph was from Darfield, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the Darfield Joseph is not in any way connected to the Thornhill Joseph as there is clear evidence for both the ancestors and descendants of the Darfield branch. Looking again now I have expanded the Study to other areas, I see that yet another Joseph comes into the picture. This Joseph baptised a daughter Nancy in 1805 in Ashton under Lyme, along wife his wife Mally. There is no indication of where this Joseph comes from either. So reluctantly I have decided to prune Joseph from the “Jonas of Mirfield” branch until such time as further evidence is available. Y-DNA testing will not help in this instance as no Y-DNA is passed from mother to son, i.e. from Fanny to Joseph.

As I mentioned in part 2 of Finding Living Relatives, the modern social trend of not marrying in England, if at all, makes life difficult for the genealogist. In my database I have a number of Micklethwaite families where I have found 2 or more children born with the same mother’s maiden name, but so far I have been unable to locate a marriage. This means I don’t know who the father is, so I don’t know how they fit into the jigsaw. There are more such names where there is only one child, but I’ll leave that for another time. Here’s a list of mother’s name and location of the children’s birth registration.

• Bolderson, Dewsbury
• Broad, Barnsley
• Brown, Liverpool
• Fareed, Los Angles, California
• Gill, Repton
• Goldman, Sheffield
• Hallsworth, Barnsley
• Hanson, Barnsley
• Jackson, Leicester or Bakewell
• Jones, Barnsley
• Leonard, Doncaster
• Makinson, Huddersfield
• Prest, Halifax or Huddersfield
• Speck, Doncaster
• Taylor, Barnsley
• Whitehouse, Barnsley
• Wilcock, Halifax

If you can help me sort out any of these families, I’d me most grateful.

Grafting has 2 common meanings: hard work, and attaching twigs to a root stock. What I’ve been doing lately is both of those! That and trawling!

As regular readers will know, I have a database which contains all the information on Micklethwaites (and variants) that I can get my hands on. Over the last months I have added voter lists from Canada and England (very productive), prisoner lists (only a few), as well as a couple of other sources which have been less worthwhile. I’ve also trawled sites like Genes Reunited, Facebook (luckily, people do list their relatives there), and LookupAnyone and have increased my knowledge not only of people bearing our name, but also of the relationships between them. This is very consuming both of time and energy.

Once in the database, I can then try and sort out who belongs to which family. (Sometimes my guesses are wrong, but thankfully not often). As more people are linked together, sometimes other links stand out. I periodically trawl through the database looking for such potential links.

Last week I had a major success. I noticed that the branch head, William of Kirk Smeaton (born about 1729), fitted remarkably well with a number of other entries. Looking at his family, things seemed to hang together. I mentioned this to a co-researcher, who came back with even more information to complete the picture. So now William is no longer a branch head, but has been grafted on to the branch headed by Richard of Cawthorne (born about 1604) and which includes the major American branch. And my number of separate branches has dropped by one.