Stewart and Douglas Family History

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I started off with the family bible of William Stewart born in 1865 as my main source of information.

Now, that’s an interesting source because he starts off with his parents and keeps going right into the early 1900s with pretty much all the births, deaths and marriages recorded over that time. Unfortunately, after he died in 1894 the information recorded becomes more and more patchy or at least it did because I’ve updated it all so now it’s quite complete up to the present day.

What’s a greater problem is that he didn’t record all of the information and in some cases there are gaps. The most important omission is that he didn’t record where the various events took place which makes it somewhat more difficult to fill in those gaps. For instance, since I don’t know where he was married, I can’t get his marriage certificate and therefore can’t confirm the exact date of birth of his parents.

When the Mormon family history site went online about 10 years ago I thought I’d hit a goldmine. Not only did it fill in a number of gaps but they had all the locations recorded! Brilliant, eh? Well, no, actually it was a disaster. For example, it says that William was married in Ballymoney in 1859. The bible records that he was married on September 6th, 1858 which is almost certainly correct as William would have known when he was married; in fact the bible itself was more than likely a wedding present.

So we went to Ballymoney a few years later to get a copy of the marriage certificate. Nope: he wasn’t married there.

In fact, when we started checking on the locations, the majority appear to be wrong so we needed to start from information which we were sure of and work backwards from there which’ll be the topic of our next post.

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