Saturday, October 12, 2013

Monumental error!

(Thank you Alan for the phrase.)

Those of you checking off the more recent updates may notice Jane(t) RUNCIMAN nee PREACHER/PRITCHARD's page, with picture of her headstone in the Peebles Cemetery.

This has been included for a reason.
Her SKINNER surname is rather misleading.
I've concluded that the headstone has to have been erected long after the fact, and that her death cert. was used to derive her maiden name, but rather hurriedly read.
Jane's father was a Thomas PRITCHARD, his occupation given on Jane's 1904 death certificate was skinner (journeyman).
The photo did send us all scurrying to our records to review our data, but as Jane is baptised to the correct parents as Janet PREACHER, appears as such in the 1841 census with her father Thomas, is indexed at her 1847 marriage to Charles as PRITCHARD, and her death is indexed as Jane RUNCIMAN, other surname PRITCHARD, I think it is reasonably certain that her name was not SKINNER.

Yes, I've been using capitals for the surnames intentionally here, although I do not always do so. Pity the death certificate didn't.
Or perhaps there's a family story yet to come to light?

ONS lineage section update

Along with the One Name Study updates mentioned in the last post, the lineages section has also been republished to bring it up to date with the (few) published updates from the last few months.
Yes there has been a lot of activity, but most of it has been behind the scenes, eg trying to identify dna matches from respective FamilyFinder results.
Yes we are still very much interested in finding direct male line dna representatives for the assorted RUNCIMAN lines either with puzzles, or yet to be represented, but these days we aren't as restricted to Y-DNA for our DNA findings.  

Read about the various tests and join the project here.
Y-DNA 37 is our recommended minimum for the direct male line, although Y-DNA 67 is preferred. The project also welcomes anyone with a RUNCIMAN, or variant surname, in their ancestry to join us and do the FamilyFinder test.  Although this latter s a far less direct way to prove connections there are a growing number of us with results able to be compared and all data is grist to the RUNCIMAN dna mill.


1851 Census

The One Name Study analysis pages have been republished to include more data about the RUNCIMAN-like names from assorted 1850/1/2 census records.
It's going to be an interesting exercise reconciling the discrepancies between the various sources: FamilySearch, Ancestry, FindMyPast, ScotlandsPeople just being some of them, most of which disagree with each other on both the names and the numbers thereof.
These are totals only, the investigations are very much ongoing, and in background mode.

Examining the Canadian data did lead me to conclude that the Andrew, marr. to Margaret THOMSON, and in Ontario by 1846 at least, just has to be the nephew of the James married to Janet HOGG already in Ontario by 1833.
He has been connected to that family on that assumption, documented on his page in the lineage section.