The Mystery Of The Eldest Sibling
Back in 2017, I joined Ancestry. Fascinated by genealogy, I decided to dig into my own. Six years later, and there is still one ancestor that puzzles me, the mystery of the eldest sibling.
On one branch of my family history, the eldest of 12 children, Thomas, basically fell off the face of the earth.
Records take me as far as the 1891 England & Wales census where Thomas is only 13 years old and still living with his parents and siblings.
Fast-forward to the 1911 England & Wales census and I came across a tidbit of information that threw me.
The 1911 England & Wales census has a section for married women, where they state the total number of children born alive, children still living and children who have died.
I was in two minds reading this.
On one hand, I couldn’t believe how intrusive it must have been to ask that of anybody. On the other hand, how useful this information has proven to be. From this, I was able to account for all the living children and Thomas was not one of them. That concludes that by 1911 he’d died…right?
I cannot find any death certificate or burial record for him.
Unfortunately for his mother, she lost a number of children. But I found all those who have passed have death and burial records, so for Thomas not to have one really stood out as strange.
I went back to the 1901 Census. Being 23, I would have suspected he had moved out. But I cannot find him listed anywhere.
It has raised many questions, especially as Thomas entered his adult years as the new century approached.
Did he enlist? There was no war or conflict when he turned of age, but the Boer War did see high losses. Did he decide to travel abroad? Some manifests are still not as illegible. How did his parents know that he had passed by the time they filled out the 1911 England & Wales census? That is the main question I have had about this. I also wonder why Thomas’s story isn’t in anyone else’s family history tree, whether on Ancestry, Find My Past or My Heritage.
He truly has disappeared and I don’t like that. Something sits uneasily with me, when I see all his siblings who passed young have death and burial records. Could the family not afford anything at the time? Did they have a falling out?
Join me, as I start with a clean slate and discover the mystery of the eldest sibling.
As always, thanks for reading…