Tag Archives: religion

Family history, Forster, Poulson

Born in London with ancestors in Utah?

21 Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, London (picture courtesy Google Street View)
21 Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, London (picture courtesy Google Street View)

Deciding to take a DNA test has been a source of all sorts of surprises – an unknown cousin, for example. The discovery of Cornish mining ancestors for my husband’s family as another. My current puzzle is how a kid from Camden Town in London (photo on left is the flat my parents lived in) has DNA matches to a group of people who have been living in the USA since the 1860s. The more digging I do, the more clear the picture becomes with one small, but important, missing piece – how this group of related people in the US is genetically connected to me!

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Family history, Forster, Procktor

Emigration charities and “pauperism” in 1870

Yvonne Mary Forster's ancestors
Yvonne Mary Forster’s ancestors

My mother’s stories about her Procktor ancestors, based presumably only on what her mother had told her, told a story of her great grandfather, a cabinetmaker, being a Quaker pioneer who went to Canada, returning to London when her grandfather was 12. It turns out the real story has no connection with Quakers at all (that I can find anyway).

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Family history, Forster

Winifred Adelaide Procktor in Mum’s social history

Winifred Adelaide Procktor 1918
Winifred Adelaide Procktor 1918

I provided an overview of my mother’s social history of her parents for teacher training college in a separate post. This is the detail section for her mother, Winifred Adelaide Procktor. I scanned and converted into text (production note: OCR software is still sadly an almost-success where fixing up errors almost negates the time saved) to improve readability, but the spellings (English versus US) and rather odd sentence structure – more like notes than an essay – I left intact. You’re seeing what my mother turned in – it surprised me to see such ragged work, but possibly she was pushed for time given other coursework.

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