RLP 93: Elizabeth Biddle: A Case of Parentage in England in 1800

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 93: Elizabeth Biddle, a Case of Parentage in England in 1800. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (42s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer co-host of Research Like a Pro, and I’m here with my mother, accredited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hi.

Diana (56s):
Hi, Nicole. It’s fun to be here today on the podcast, I’ve been having some fun working in Indian Territory this week. This is one of my projects for our Research Like a Pro study group. And I really wanted to find out more about our ancestor, Eliza Ann, and guess what helped me? It was remembering back to when we had Lisa Lisson on talking about female ancestors and she said to trace the males. So I was feeling a little bit at a loss thinking, okay, Eliza is not in any of these records. Then the light bulb went on in my head and I realized I needed to look at her husband’s Dawes Roll application. Her second husband, not our ancestor, but our second husband was one quarter Choctaw and he applied for land through the Dawes Rolls.

Diana (1m 41s):
And in his application, he talks about when they actually came to Indian territory. And that was so exciting because I didn’t have anything, it’s that loss of the 1890 census. So I have this blank spot from 1880 to 1900 and Eliza died in 1898. So I felt like there was all this time that I didn’t know what happened. So through her husband, I have found more information on the family and when they came to Indian territory. So it was kind of a fun, exciting week for me.

Nicole (2m 12s):
I love that. Are the Dawes Roll applications online, or did you have to order it?

Diana (2m 16s):
They are an ancestry, Isn’t that fabulous. So I was able to scroll through and read the entire thing and made notes in my research log as I was going. It’s just amazing because there’s so much more accessible now. Well, for the podcast today, we’re going to switch gears. We are often talking about our Southern ancestors, but today we’re going to talk about an English case. And this is a client project that Nicole did using the Research Like a Pro process. So we’re going to go through that and hopefully all of our listeners will pick up some tips on how to do a complete project, as well as researching in England.

Diana (2m 56s):
So if you are brand new to the podcast, and we know new people are joining us every single week, we have a book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogist’s Guide, which leads you through a research project. And we had purchased a lot of books because we were planning on selling them all the different conferences this summer that have all been canceled. So now we have offered those on our website, FamilyLocket.com. So you can go there and get special deal for $11.99 plus shipping. So you can also buy it on Amazon, but we’re a little bit faster right now with shipping. And if you want to dive deeper, you are one of those people that you really need to have something visual, you need to have some assignments, we’ve developed an e-course that follows the entire Research Like a Pro process.

Diana (3m 45s):
And we have a special on that as well. It was originally our RootsTech special, but we extended it for a little bit, especially with the COVID-19 happening so that all of you who are looking for something to do with more of your time could use that. So the e-course is also offered through FamilyLocket.com and we have a special price of $89 instead of the usual $125. To get that you just use the code RLP89RT2020. And we will have that in the show notes. So we are going to have that e-course on sale through the end of the month, through April 30th.

Diana (4m 25s):
So you have some time to check it out, go look at the reviews on FamilyLocket, see what people are saying about it when they’ve used it. One of the neat perks that comes with e-course is that you get to come on monthly office hours with Nicole and I, and we have a lot of fun. We typically can take about six to seven questions, and these questions are from your personal research. So people come on and ask us everything about how to read a record or how to create a source citation or what to look for next. And we record those. So you can watch those if you can’t make the live calls. So that’s a really fun way to get together as a community for all those who are in the e-course.

Diana (5m 6s):
So anyway, we invite you to check it out and see if that’s something that you’d be interested in.

Nicole (5m 10s):
We really enjoy talking to all of our students and friends in the office hours every month so we hope that you will join us. Today we have a listener spotlight from Linda. Linda says, “Love all your podcasts. Diana and Nicole have helped this one year family researcher, tremendously. I especially liked the podcast where Diana talks about her Alabama ancestor. Since my dad is from Alabama and his side of the family, also episode 82 on military records. I learned a lot. I started a research log, which has saved me time and helped me break down two brick walls. I’m a Research Like a Pro binge listener, 10 stars.

Nicole (5m 50s):
Thank you for all you both do.” Thank you, Linda. That was really fun to hear from you. And it’s great that you have ancestors in Alabama too.

Diana (5m 60s):
I love hearing from all my listeners that have similar localities as we do, and that’s really fun to kind of have that shared community of researchers in the same place. So we’re going to talk today, as I mentioned about an England project, and this is one that Nicole did. So I’m going to be asking her questions all about it. And I think you’ll really enjoy this little story. So Nicole, the first step of the Research Like a Pro process is coming up with an objective. So tell us how you were able to formulate an objective for this project.

Nicole (6m 36s):
Well, this is pretty easy. The client just told me they wanted to know the parents of their end of line female ancestor. Her name was Elizabeth Biddle and the client’s family had been researching her for several years and had gathered many sources and put them on FamilySearch. The client sent me the FamilySearch profile and said, we want to know the parents of this person. So I could look at the sources there and use the information in the profile to create my objective. So the objective I created was to determine the parents of Elizabeth Biddle born 17 March, 1800 in England, died 28 November, 1888 in Worcester, Otsego, New York, and who married William Rhodes in 1825 in East Claydon, Buckinghamshire, England.

Diana (7m 27s):
So I noticed in your objective that you have those key identifiers that we always talk about, complete dates, birth dates, the marriage, complete places. And you know, when we’re reading this, it obviously doesn’t sound like a novel it’s full of plates as in dates, but that really guides your research. Do you find that when you’re doing client work also, it kind of helps you to remember where you’re supposed to be, because we’re often not as familiar with another project as we are with our own research.

Nicole (7m 57s):
Yes. It’s really helpful to be able to review where she was born and where was that marriage? Because in our own research, it’s embedded in our memory, but doing that for somebody else, we need that guiding written objective.

Diana (8m 10s):
Right. Even in our own research, we may have kind of forgotten some specific details about our ancestors because we’ve worked with a lot of ancestors. So it’s just very, very helpful to have those key identifiers in the objective. So once that objective is written, next is the timeline analysis phase. So in this case, you are using FamilySearch, sources that have been put there. So what did you find out was known about Elizabeth?

Nicole (8m 38s):
I decided to make a spreadsheet in Google sheets that was a timeline of all of the events in her life, so that I could really get familiar with the starting point. I could have just gone to the timeline feature at FamilySearch, and it would have auto-generated a timeline for me, but I like to really go through each source and get familiar with the subject personally, by doing my own timeline. So I just went through each source that was attached to Elizabeth in FamilySearch and opened it up and looked at the original image and extracted the information to create the timeline myself. This also was a good chance to analyze the sources and figure out if they were original or derivative and if the information was primary or secondary and really determine what was reliable.

Nicole (9m 27s):
The first thing that I noticed was the headstone photo from FindaGrave. It stated that it was William Rhodes and his wife Elizabeth, and then it gave both of their birth dates and death dates. From that Memorial I also learned where she was buried, which was in Worchester, Otsego county in New York. And the stated birth date was 17 March, 1800 and then the death date was 28, November, 1888. The Memorial gave her maiden name as Biddle, but Biddle was not listed on the headstone. The marriage record was not attached to the family tree, but they did have the specific marriage date.

Nicole (10m 9s):
So that made me think that they had found the marriage record and just had not added it or attached it. One of the things I do when I do client research is I ask them to give me all their information and documents. And this client said that they, everything they had was in FamilySearch, but already I was starting to see that maybe they had found some information that wasn’t the actual record itself.

Diana (10m 30s):
Yeah. In fact, I was just thinking with FamilySearch when we see like a name or a specific date and there’s no source to back it up, we need to always think that there was probably something once upon a time that gave that information and we can go looking for a source.

Nicole (10m 47s):
Exactly. So I added that to my research plan to go find the marriage record just in case that gave any information about her parents. So I had that headstone photo, so I could put in her birth and death dates, her birth place wasn’t specifically given in the profile on FamilySearch, it just said England. But as I started reviewing the census records, I found something amazing. So one of the census records that was attached was the 1880 US Federal census in Otsego county, New York. And it actually stated the exact birth county of Elizabeth Biddle and her parents in Oxfordshire, England.

Nicole (11m 27s):
So this was unusual. That column in the 1880 census usually just says England or a state within the United States. It doesn’t say usually a county. So this was a special find. And I was surprised that the client had not noticed this or added it to the profile. So clearly whoever had done this research, hadn’t looked at the original image. They had just used the transcription and the transcription didn’t have a location to put the county of birth. It only a column to transcribe the state or the country. So sometimes the indexers are only given space to index certain things. And if anything extra is in the original image, they won’t be able to index it.

Diana (12m 8s):
That is such a good example. And I have seen that in other types of records as well, like a birth register that didn’t have a column for a specific location and the clerk just wrote it in above. That’s why we always go to the original images because you never know what might be hiding there in the margins and other people maybe skipped over it or didn’t notice it. So this is such a good example of going back to our original sources, looking at them again, mining them for every little detail. What else did you put in your timeline?

Nicole (12m 39s):
I also noticed the exact birth county for Elisabeth’s husband, William Rhodes, which was Buckinghamshire, England that was reported in that same 1880 census. And as I looked at that, I kind of analyzed that to try to figure out how reliable that county was. If Elizabeth really was born in Oxfordshire, that’s going to inform my research plan and where I searched for her baptism. So I looked at that and it was just those two living in the household. And so of course with censuses we don’t know who the informant was, but we can make an educated guess from all the information looking pretty accurate and specific, I guess, that it was probably either Elizabeth or her husband giving the information.

Nicole (13m 22s):
And both of them are somewhat reliable informants for the county of birth for Elizabeth. So her husband probably knew where she came from and where her parents lived and that kind of thing. I was really happy with that find because it really narrowed down the number of parish registers to be searched for her baptismal record. After that census, I looked at all the other ones that were attached. There were several New York state census records, including the 1855, 65 and 75 New York state censuses. Also the federal censuses starting in 1860 and going to 1880 were included. And all of these census records included ages for Elizabeth. I needed to know the range of years to search in parish baptisms.

Nicole (14m 4s):
So I calculated her birth date using the date of the census and the age reported in the census for each of those census enumerations for her. And what I came up with was a range of births that went from June 6th, 1797 to June 2nd, 1800. The client had been very focused on the date reported on the headstone as the exact birth date of Elizabeth Biddle. But from these censuses we’re given a little bit of a wider range. And I think it’s hard a lot of the time for people to broaden their mindset, that the date given on the headstone might be off by a couple of years.

Diana (14m 42s):
Well, and you’re lucky in this case that it was only a couple of years because sometimes we see that range between censuses and other records as being more like 10 years.

Nicole (14m 52s):
Actually, there were a few outliers that I, during the research phase, I found other dates that were outliers. So we’ll talk about that too. But I had that range of dates and I looked at that headstone Memorial and analyzed it. So the headstone photo is an image of an original record, but the information given on the headstone for her birth is secondary information because it was probably created by her children and they were not witnesses to her birth. So that was a really important piece of information to convey to the client because they had been so focused on this being the exact date of birth. And it was probably why they couldn’t find her parish baptism record because there was no parish baptism record in Oxfordshire for that exact date.

Nicole (15m 36s):
In that FamilySearch profile, it had the immigration to the United States listed in the year 1848 because of an obituary from their daughter Hannah, and the obituary just said that she had resided in the United States for 60 years at the time of her death. So that puts her immigration data 1848. So that was really key because then I knew that I could search for the United States census records in 1850 and not England census records in 1851. So knowing when they came to the U S really helped me with my research planning as well. Like I mentioned, the marriage to William Rhodes was listed as November 10th in 1825 in east Claydon Buckinghamshire, England, but there was no source attached.

Nicole (16m 18s):
So that was all the known facts that I had .

Diana (16m 21s):
You actually had quite a bit there. And you were able to really distill all of that information from those censuses into a nice timeline that you could refer back to over and over. And that’s one of the things I love because as you are doing the research, sometimes you’ll find a record and then you’ll think, okay, does this fit with the family? And you can just go straight back to that timeline as you’re doing the actual research.

Nicole (16m 44s):
Yeah. And I actually added things to the timeline as I researched because I wanted to keep everything straight.

Diana (16m 49s):
Yeah, I do that too. A lot of people ask about that once you’ve done your timeline, are you done? And I always say, no, of course not. As you find records for the family, put those in there. Our research really is never done on these families. We keep finding more and more things. So we have done the objective. We’ve done the timeline analysis. The next step is locality research. You’ve named a few different localities in England and in New York, what did you decide you wanted to focus on?

Nicole (17m 18s):
Choosing a locality for locality research was pretty easy with this case because I was given the exact county where Elizabeth was born in 1880 census. And since my objective was to find her parents, I thought the answer to that research question would be in Oxfordshire county. So that’s what I chose. And I’d created a guide for myself. I found that it was located in Southeast England and it shares a border to the east with Buckinghamshire, which is the county where Elizabeth and William were reportedly married in 1825. So that made sense that they were living in neighboring counties. I used a website, Genuk, to look for more information about Oxfordshire.

Nicole (18m 2s):
Genuki is a virtual reference library with information about the United Kingdom and Ireland. It’s kind of like the FamilySearch Wiki for England. There was an article about Oxfordshire there, and it had a description of the county from 1842 that was published in James Barclay’s Complete Universal English Dictionary. So this kind of gave me some background on what the county was like. It said it was 47 miles of length at 29 in breadth bounded by Buckinghamshire, Gloucestershire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Northamptonshire, and it was divided into 14 hundreds, which contained one city, 12 market towns, 280 parishes and 51 villages. I like this next part, “The air is sweet, mild pleasant, and healthy, for which reason it contains several gentlemen seats and the soil, though various, is fertile in corn and grass, and the hills are shaded with woods.

Nicole (18m 55s):
It is also a great sporting country there being abundance of game preserved here. It has no manufacturers of any account being chiefly agricultural. Its chief city is Oxford population 161,643. It sends nine members to parliament.”

Diana (19m 11s):
I love that description. I think it’s really interesting to look at the date. So that was published in 1842, which is when this family would have been living there. It does give us a really good idea of what it was like. It makes me want to go to England again. So we have got some background on the locality. Now I am guessing that you had some challenges as you are working on this project. That’s why we’re hired to do these client projects because there’s some specific challenges that make it difficult. What did you think some of the challenges were?

Nicole (19m 44s):
Well reviewing the records available at this time period in England, which is an important part of locality research, I realized that it would be difficult to discover the parents because civil registration didn’t begin until after 1837, and the 1841 census, which would be the only England census she would appear on, gave only a little bit of information about birth places. So the, some of the sources I have to work with aren’t that great, but we do have the parish baptisms. In case you didn’t know, the 1841 England census only asked very specific questions about where the people were born. You could either answer it with whether born in the same county to where they’re living in 1841, so yes or no, and whether born in Scotland, Ireland, or foreign parts.

Nicole (20m 32s):
So you’re not going to get a specific county of birth. That was kind of what I was working with. I was going to not be able to use civil registration, the 1841 census probably wouldn’t be that helpful and civil registration. Didn’t begin yet.

Diana (20m 47s):
On one of the other challenges for working in England are people of the same name. Let’s just face it, they weren’t super creative. The women were Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, I think not all of them, but there were lots of people of the same name. And I think that’s caused a lot of confusion on some of these collaborative trees, like FamilySearch, where you will have people of same name, their identities merged so often. So that’s another challenge if our listeners to haven’t research in England before, that is one of the neat things that Nicole alluded to is that in censuses after 1841, so 1851 and on, they actually do give their counties for their births, which is super helpful, but you didn’t have that because they were already United States by 1851.

Diana (21m 34s):
So you’ve got some limitations, you’ve got some things you’ve discovered. Now it’s time to create a research plan. Now, part of that research plan is figuring out what records to search, but then also methodology. What did you decide to do for that?

Nicole (21m 49s):
My plan was to trace Elizabeth backward in time in all the records in the US and England that might give clues leading to her specific town or place at birth and her parents and her siblings. So of course I would needed to find that 1850 census. I also wanted to look for passenger lists for their arrival from England, and then going back in time to the 1841 census, where they were probably living in Buckinghamshire. Then I wanted to find their original marriage record in 1825 in Buckinghamshire. Then of course, I’m going to search for Elizabeth Biddle in all parish baptisms in Oxfordshire from 1797 to 1800. And maybe even expand that range a little bit to find any candidates with the name of Elizabeth Biddle who were born in Oxfordshire in that time, and then eliminate any candidates that don’t seem to be a strong match until there’s only one candidate left.

Diana (22m 44s):
That is such good methodology. I think sometimes we find a likely candidate and we’re so excited. We just say, okay, this is our person, but it really does help if you can eliminate others, especially with people of similar identities. So eliminating is a great methodology to add in there. You have your research plan and I’m guessing you’re prioritized it so that you would be using the records most likely to answer your research question. And then as you were doing the research, how did you approach recording what you found?

Nicole (23m 15s):
I didn’t want to do research without recording it in a research log and keeping notes on everything I’m finding with source citations. So I did that and as I went along, I did find lots of good information. I found the 1850 census, which was a little bit tricky because they were not in the same county that they were in later in her life. In 1850 they were living in Rensselaer county and they had some information that was wrong. Names were a little weird and they were living with another person. So the informant been the head of household, whose name was George Self. And Elizabeth’s name was listed as Ann, there were just a lot of things that were weird.

Nicole (23m 59s):
Her middle name could have been Ann, I’m not sure, but I was able to find this because of their son Emanuel. He was listed there with the correct age and his name was Manual. So that was giving a clue that this was the right family. It didn’t really give me any helpful clues. It also gave her age as 48, which gave me a new range to extend the range all the way to 1802. But I also didn’t think this information was as reliable as other censuses, just because some of the other things in the census seem to indicate that maybe William or Elizabeth were not the informant. So then I looked in the passenger arrival list and I was able to find that the family arrived in 1849.

Nicole (24m 40s):
The ship that they came on was called the ship Devonshire. Elizabeth was listed as 15 years old, which calculates back to being born in 1799. It has all of their children who came along with them, Marianne, Hannah, Emmanuel, and Sophia, but it didn’t give me any more specific birth location beyond England. So then I went back to the 1841 census and I was able to locate the family living in [m?ley], which is a town in Buckinghamshire. Which is very expected, they would be living because they were married there. And it said Elizabeth was born in the same county, so that was conflicting information because the 1880 census said she was born in Oxfordshire.

Nicole (25m 23s):
This 1841 census is saying that she was born in Buckinghamshire. But it also just listed yes for everyone in the whole family. Then there was a servant listed, Hannah Borden, and she was a 15 year old general servant and it listed that she was not born in the same county. So not everyone on the same page was just automatically checked yes. That was a conflict that I had to deal with and consider that maybe Elizabeth Biddle who married William Rhodes was born in Buckinghamshire.

Diana (25m 49s):
Yeah. That’s really good that you didn’t just skip over that. Sometimes when we find conflicting information and we just want to ignore it, cause it bugs us, it’s not quite right. But we really have to take a look at the entire record and try to decide why would something be conflicting, good job in not just ignoring that, but trying to deal with it.

Nicole (26m 8s):
One of the ways I resolved that is by looking on that whole page and noticing that some people had the check mark that they were born in foreign parts, but then in the whether born in same county column, it’s still said, yes. So that gave me the thought that this wasn’t that reliable of a column because how could they be born in both foreign parts and in the same county.

Diana (26m 31s):
So maybe whoever was filling it out, just got confused.

Nicole (26m 34s):
Yeah. That information didn’t seem very reliable to me. So I didn’t get too hung up on that, but I did keep it at the back of my mind. So then I found the marriage of Elizabeth Biddle and William Rhodes, and it was from 1825. It was in the Anglican parish church records collection at Find MyPpast. And it didn’t say either of their parents’ names unfortunately. If you can find the civil registration of their marriage after 1837, that’s better because it does list the father of each person. But this was just the church record from 1825 and it listed the first witness as John Stevens and the second witness as Fannie Tombs. So that made me wonder if maybe these were friends or it could have been siblings who knows, John wouldn’t have been a sibling, but maybe Fanny Tombs could have been a sibling who was married.

Nicole (27m 19s):
So I wasn’t sure how they were related, but it’s good to keep track of their names and see if they can be identified somehow. Another thing that it said on the marriage is that they were both residents of East Claydon parish. I was kind of hoping that I might find a clue that she was residing in Oxfordshire, but it appears that at the time that they’re married, she had moved from Oxfordshire to east Claydon. The next step in my research plan was to just go ahead and search for baptisms in Oxfordshire occurring about 1797 to 1800. Luckily at Ancestry there was a collection of Anglican parish registers that included Oxfordshire. So I could just type in Elizabeth Biddle and see what popped up.

Nicole (28m 3s):
So within that range that I specified, there was only one candidate who was baptized in Oxfordshire. It was Elizabeth Biddle, the daughter of Thomas Biddle and Elizabeth, his wife. She was baptized on March 24th, 1799.

Diana (28m 19s):
So this is why the client had not found it because they were searching for baptisms in 1800 and hadn’t widened the search, correct?

Nicole (28m 30s):
Right. So they had figured if she was born in 1800, she couldn’t have been baptized in 1799. But what do you notice about the day and the month of the baptism? The day of the month of the baptism are just a few days after her reported date of birth, which is March 17th. And if the year was just calculated wrong for the headstone, you know, off by one year, then that could be a completely accurate date of birth with the baptism occurring in about a week later. This was the best candidate for our Elizabeth Biddle who married William Rhodes, but I wanted to expand the search just to make sure I’m not missing anything. So this was in the parish of Souldern. Souldern and was in the Northern part of the county.

Nicole (29m 12s):
That was another part of this process was looking at maps and seeing how close it was to the parish of their marriage in Buckinghamshire. And it wasn’t too far away.

Diana (29m 22s):
And I like that you put a map in the report, you’ve got noted that it was 17 miles apart. And it’s really nice to be able to see that if we don’t look at maps, we might see these two different parishes and just think, oh, that couldn’t be the same person. She’s not in the same place, but what if it’s on the border? Maps are so important. And as we’re going through these records to make sure we clearly understand the place that things are happening. So you’ve got your candidate one, Elizabeth Biddle, you found some other candidates I am guessing.

Nicole (29m 58s):
Yes. I did a search of all parish registers in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire from 1790-1810 to find any other possible candidates. The next one that I found was a girl named Elizabeth Biddle, who was baptized on March 17th in 1792 in Chipping Norton which was a parish in Oxfordshire. So what do you notice about that date? That’s the same date that was on the headstone.

Diana (30m 22s):
Interesting.

Nicole (30m 23s):
17 March. So if the baby was born and baptized on the same day, that could be the right date, but what do you think? Do they usually baptize the babies on the same day?

Diana (30m 33s):
No, they usually don’t. Usually see those happening a week or two later.

Nicole (30m 36s):
Right. That’s what I’ve noticed as well. I’ve seen some as early as the next day or a few days after, a week after, a month after sometimes it’s a few years after, you just never really know, but that was an interesting one to find the parents names of this candidate were Thomas Biddle and Anne, but Chipping Norton is in west Oxfordshire near the border with Gloucester and Warwick. And so it’s further away from Buckinghamshire where Elizabeth Biddle was married to William Rhodes. So the location isn’t as good. And also the year of her birth is pretty far outside of the range of the expected birth year for Elizabeth, no one ever reported her birth as being that early in 1792, the range of reported birth for her was from 1797 to 1802.

Nicole (31m 23s):
So I was pretty sure that I could eliminate this based on that year of baptism because it wasn’t very close. I also did a little research into marriages in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire that could match this candidate. And there were a lot of options there, but I didn’t have enough time from the client to really go into depth analyzing and researching these other candidates. So it was just kind of a preliminary analysis that I use to eliminate them. In my own research I might go a little further or if the client had renewed. So the third candidate I found was an Elizabeth Biddle who was born in Buckinghamshire and she was baptized on July 12th in 1791.

Nicole (32m 3s):
And so this too was outside of the birth year range. So it wasn’t very likely. Yeah. And it was also very far at the Southern tip of Buckinghamshire. Whereas East Claydon where they were married was up towards the Northwestern part of the county so it didn’t seem like a very likely match to Elizabeth Biddle Rhoads. So I was able to eliminate that candidate as well. And I created a little map showing the counties and plotting out where these candidates were baptized and how close they were to East Claydon, which is where they were married. The first candidate was the closest and it was also the best match as far as a year, 1799 is within the range that we’re expecting her birth to appear.

Diana (32m 44s):
Okay. So I just want to throw this question out there. What if these three candidates all 1799, what would you have done?

Nicole (32m 50s):
That would be a lot harder. I would have to trace each one forward in time if possible, and try to find out what happened to all three of them and where they were married and who they got married to, and then identify them as separate people until there’s only one person left, whose identified and who seems to be a match. And it would probably include research into their siblings and parents and their FAN club to try to place those witnesses on the marriage to see if I can figure out if that was a sister or a friend who came from the same town. So it would require a lot more work.

Diana (33m 26s):
But it can be done. So sometimes I think we get to this point and just give up. But another research project could say, okay, identify candidate number two, who is this person named Elizabeth Biddle down here in this part of Buckinghamshire and that could be an entire project. And then once you have that figured out and she’s eliminated, then you’ve made further progress thinking about some of these methodologies and ways you handle these problems. So beneficial.

Nicole (33m 53s):
Yes. I think that was a great point that we could do another research project, just focusing on each candidate and eliminating them. And it really is helpful to do a separate research log and a separate objective for that other candidate so that it stays separate from your main subject. And then if it seems like they can’t be separated from your original subject, then maybe you’ve found your, your person.

Diana (34m 14s):
One of the things I like to do is just create another page in my research log for these alternate people. Maybe I would have another page for just the Elizabeth of Buckinghamshire. And all the records that go with her. And then if I keep it all within the same spreadsheet, then I can kind of go back and forth, look at my timeline, compare, contrast. And so that’s what I like to do on my projects. When I have people at the same name I’m trying to separate out,

Nicole (34m 38s):
That’s good. You know, there’s one more clue that I haven’t addressed yet. And that was that the 1880 census. It says that her parents were also born in Oxfordshire. So I kind of followed that clue out for the client. And I decided that if I could find their marriage, I would get a mother Elizabeth last name. And so I looked for a marriage for Thomas Biddle and Elizabeth, and found it in Oxfordshire in 1793 in a neighboring parish Britwell, and I’ve found that they were married there and her maiden name was Elizabeth Pettabore. And then I traced back both parents to their baptisms and found that they were both baptized in Oxfordshire in Fritwell parish.

Nicole (35m 22s):
So that gave additional reliability to my conclusion, the evidence all still pointed to the same conclusion that Elizabeth Biddle was the daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth of Souldern and Fritwell parishes.

Diana (35m 33s):
All those things put together are really starting to hone in on this being the correct family. I love that she listed the county of her parents in that 1880 census as well. Oh my goodness. Wish they’d had that in our censuses would make our lives so much easier.

Nicole (35m 47s):
That really was a lucky break. You know, if I hadn’t had that this project would have been really difficult and probably would have had to use a lot of DNA evidence and taking a lot more hours to find all the candidates surrounding East Claydon parish and eliminating them one by one. So it really was a lucky break.

Diana (36m 10s):
That was. Well, your final step in this entire process was to write up a research report. You had to give this to a client and clearly explain everything that you did and looking at your report. I like that you have maps and you use tables to clarify some of the information and put the censuses into a table to make it easy to read. And then you also had some really good suggestions for future research so that the client could go on and do this on their own. And I think that’s such an important part because a lot of times people will get really off track because they think, oh, I should go do that. And that’s not part of the research plan. Just know that you can put that in your suggestions for future research.

Diana (36m 51s):
So what were some of the things that you thought could be done for another project?

Nicole (36m 55s):
Well, it’s kind of funny because the first thing I listed as a suggestion for future research was to order the death certificate for Elizabeth Biddle Rhoads using the New York death index certificate, number 41 54 7. And I gave the client how to order and the website, and she said, oh, we already have that. And I said, oh my goodness, you were supposed to give me all of your information about this woman.

Diana (37m 21s):
That is pretty funny, but I’m guessing it does not list her parents or anything or else they wouldn’t have hired you.

Nicole (37m 27s):
Yeah. It didn’t have anything helpful really. And then the next thing that I wanted to do was find the original parish register of the marriage for Elizabeth Biddle and William, because it was just indexed entry transcription that I had found. And you have to go into the Family History Center to view the original parish registers, which I hadn’t felt like I needed to do yet. So I put it in future research. The other thing I wanted to do is flush out those other candidates to find their siblings and marriages and their residences in the 1841 census to really eliminate them fully. That’s kind of a personal preference thing. I feel like they were pretty easy to eliminate based on the year, but because the client was worried about the dates being off, maybe they would want to be really careful.

Nicole (38m 11s):
Another suggestion for the future would be to research all of the possible siblings for Elizabeth in Souldern parish in Oxfordshire. And the client actually did hire me to do that. So the second project I did was to find all the children of Thomas Biddle and Elizabeth Pettabore in Souldern. And I went and researched them and tried to follow them forward in time with their marriages and 1841 census looking for any clues that would more concretely tie them to Elizabeth Rhodes. The last two suggestions for future research were to go back another generation and look for siblings of Thomas Biddle and siblings of Elizabeth Pettabore. So I did all of that in a future project for the client.

Diana (38m 47s):
Oh, that’s neat. I love that about England with those parish registers, if you can just hook into the family, sometimes you can just keep going back and back and back if they stayed in that parish.

Nicole (38m 60s):
Right. And a lot of time they did prior to 1800, it seems like there wasn’t as much movement.

Diana (39m 5s):
Yeah. Well, good job on this project. I think this was really fun to talk about and beneficial for any of our listeners who are maybe wondering how to get past a brick wall in England and in learning how to work through a complete research project. So thanks for going through that with us. It was fun to go to a different research locality for a little bit.

Nicole (39m 26s):
And you know, anybody can do this with finding candidates and, and eliminating them until only one conclusion stands and all the evidence just points to only that conclusion. So whether you’re researching an England or another country, you can still try that method.

Diana (39m 42s):
Right. The neat thing about methodology is it does translate to different languages. We can use it wherever and whenever. Well, that was a fun episode. And I think it’s time to wrap that up. So I just want to remind everyone that our e-course is discounted through the 30th of April. And if you miss the code that we gave at the beginning, it is RLP89RT2020. So we would love to have you join us and learn how to do the Research Like a Pro method along with us. And if you are interested in the book, book’s on sale for 11.99 at our website, FamilyLocket.com. It was kind of funny at RootsTech people would come by and say, oh, we listened to your podcasts, We’d love your podcasts, and I’d say, well, do you have the book?

Diana (40m 27s):
And some of them didn’t even know we had a book or they hadn’t purchased yet. We’d love to share that with you because then you have something printed and in front of you to follow and it can really help. Everybody have a great week, It’s been so fun to talk to you today.

Nicole (40m 45s):
All right, everyone. Bye. Bye.

Diana (40m 39s):
Bye.

Nicole (40m 40s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com. To share your progress and ask questions join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our eCourse or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.