Nicholas went to St. Nicholas’ in Gloucester
I had previously discovered that my 3x great grandparents were John and Elizabeth Thorn from Dartmouth. But who were Elizabeth’s parents? Family history can sometimes throw up brick walls before us. I had thought that there would not have been much movement about the country of my ancestors at this time and so assumed that they would all be from Dartmouth or the surrounding area. I spent quite some time searching the parish registers for the town and started to move out to the parishes in a twenty mile radius using the Parish Locator software that I enthuse about elsewhere. (See my Beginning Family History report available from my commercial website if you really want to know about Parish Locator!)
John and Elizabeth’s marriage had been in St. Saviour’s Dartmouth and one of the witness to the wedding ceremony was Sunass Sissell. I have come to the conclusion that this was a transcriptional error and was in fact her father James Sissell. The line of research that I did to find his name was to examine the baptisms in all the Dartmouth churches on the IGI. One Elizbeth Gardiner Sissell was christened on the 16 April 1798 in St. Petrox, Dartmouth. This is the church at the mouth of the Dart towards Dartmouth Castle. Try as I might, though, I could not find the marriage of James there, or at any of the other Dartmouth churches and so I had to assume that his spouse came from outside of the town.
Returning to the IGI I eventually found a marriage in Gloucester on the 17 April 1780 of James Sysal and a Sarah Gardiner in the church of St. Nicholas, Gloucester!
On a recent trip to Gloucester I was able to find this old church, still consecrated, but closed up and take pictures of a place of worship that not only bears the name of my own patron saint (St. Nicholas) but is also the place of marriage of my 4 x great-grandparents Sysal/Sissill/Sissel/Sizzall/ or how ever it was spelt! We can only guess that they themselves didn’t know and relied on the clergy to interpret it as they will.
Tags: Beginning family history, Brickwalls in family history, family tree