The Nosey Genealogist

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.

I had got nowhere with this ancestor’s birth, marriage or death - on or off-line - then a chance revisit of a fhs website and an hour or two looking at the transcripts and a brickwall in my family history research came tumbling down! Together, this and the thinking of spelling variations of names opened up a new line to me.

My paternal line in Dartmouth, Devon, UK has always been a bit frustrating once the census records ran out (1841 being the earliest on line) and I had to start looking at parish records and so on. I had worked out that my three times great-grandfather was called John Thorn and from the information given in the census collections I knew that he had been born in about 1795. His wife and my three time great-grandmother, Elizabeth, was born in about 1799 or 1800.

I don’t have the luxury of living near Dartmouth, or even visiting the area that much, so I am somewhat hampered in researching these ancestors in their own locality. I had decided that a trip to the Devon Record Office, in Exeter, was probably going to be necessary. As my family have migrated away from Devon, however, while relations that still lived in the county when I was a child have since died, most of my UK breaks take me much further north to the East Midlands.

A recent trip to London gave me the opportunity to go to The Society of Genealogists in Goswell Road, EC1. As a member I am well aware that they had a good collection of Parish Records on microfiche on the lower floor and also some transcripts in one of the other reading rooms, on the middle floor.  Unfortunately for me, on this visit, there was nothing in the microfiche collections of parish records for Dartmouth. There was, however in the Middle Library, a selection of Devon Family History Society booklets of the marriages of some of the churches in the town, including St. Saviour’s Dartmouth.

Perusing this book for any likely Thornes, or Thorns, I noted down that on the 13th day of April 1817 a John Thorn married an Elizabeth Sissell.

When I returned home with this tentative lead, I hit the Internet. I was looking for any evidence that may indicate if this was the marriage of my ancestors. I went to the website of The Dartmouth Archives,  www.dartmouth-history.org.uk and found that this voluntary organisation dedicated to the research and recording of the town’s history, had a very comprehensive family history section. Included were transcribed baptisms, burials, marriages and census records. I discovered that I could find the very same details, as I had seen in London, on this really useful niche site. The page I had found began in 1586 and ran to 1850!

There again was the marriage of John to Elizabeth and this time I noticed that the witness were given as John Adams and Sunass (sic) Sissell. I assumed that this last person was a member of the bride’s family and perhaps was her father, but the name Sunass caused me concern.

I am, after doing this family history thing for a few years now, aware that names can be transcribed incorrectly. They will have been written down as the transcriber had seen it and not changed by them to conveniently fit in with what they would consider to be correct. I also wondered if both the first name and the second had been written down not by the person in question, as they may well have been illiterate. When you come to do your own research you should bear in mind this point. The minister may have interpreted the name as he had heard it spoken to him and so in this case “Sissell” could possibly been “Cecil” or something else entirely. As for Sunass? I hadn’t got a clue what that could have been!

While I was on the page of weddings I did a search to see if I could find any other Sissells, the result was a disappointing zero, especially as Elizabeth was born in Dartmouth according to all the census data. Thorns gave me a handful of results, but I have yet to work out any relationships with these names. There were no early enough christening records for John and Elizabeth on the Dartmouth Archives website, but I opened another browser and navigated to the Latter Day Saints (LDS) website or FamilySearch.org and here I did a search for Elizabeth’s christening.

This gave me a lead to a baptism that took place in one of the other churches, St Petrox, in Dartmouth on the 16 of September 1878. The daughter of James and Sarah Sissill was one Elizabeth Gardener Sissill - and here you should note the spelling has changed to Sissil with an “i” and not an “e”. This made me wonder if the witness to Elizabeth’s marriage could have been her father “James” and this has been interpreted as “Sunnas” because a flowing “J” for James had looked like an “S” and the other letters had been misread as well, the “a” as a “u” and the “m” as double “n”.

Now, while still on the LDS site I did a search for James Sissill. The only promising result was for a marriage of a James to a Sarah Gardiner 17 April 1780, not in Devon, but at St Nicholas’ in Gloucester. This time the surname: Sissill was spelt S-y-s-a-l and Gardener was G-a-r-d-i-n-e-r!

So what I am emphasising here is to be wary of names and the way they were spelt. Before more general levels of literacy among the public became the norm, our ancestors relied heavily on a clergyman writing down their names as they sounded. A further search of the LDS site for Sysal or Sissill has not given me James’s baptisim details and so I don’t know where he came from or, indeed, where he died.

I closed the browser open at FamilySearch.org and returned to the Dartmouth Archives site and did a search of the burial indexes that they have uploaded for us to view. In the St. Saviour’s internment area at the Long Cross extension, north of the town, I found Elizabeth Gardner Thorn, a 69 year old widow buried on 25 July 1868 in plot 59 in a walled grave (re-opened) . Also in 59 was John Branton Thorn, a boatman who was 73 years of age when buried on the 15 September 1866.

In the next plot, number 60, I find Henry Thomas Thorne and his wife Ellen who are my two times great-grandparents and who both died in 1908. Can I assume John and Henry to be father and son? More work is required, but at least I now have a lead.

This is all down to finding that the town of Dartmouth has an active family history website and then using the indexes in conjunction with other Internet resources, such as the LDS site. I can now take the names and details further by looking for death certificates for John Branton Thorn and his wife Elizabeth Gardener Thorn, as they died after civil registration of deaths took place in 1837 and trying to get to see more parish records with a physical visit to the Devon Record Office.

The first lesson is that you should always look to see what other research may have been done for the area your ancestors came from and which has been published on the Internet. If you find a family history society, or local interest group with a website, can any of their publications or website pages help you with your quest?

Secondly, be aware of the misspelling of names and keep your mind open to possibilities. In my case I need to think of other spellings for the Sissells or names that may have sounded like Sissell in order that I may trace this line back further.

Nick Thorne