Don't you love it when you knock down a brick wall by coming at it sideways?
I decided it was time to have another bash at tracing the family of my 3x great grandmother, Elizabeth “Bessey” Holland. Bessey was born in Eccleshall, Staffordshire, in 1813 and I knew from the parish record of her marriage to Thomas Shelley in 1840, that her father was called Thomas. But as Staffordshire was awash with Thomas Hollands, it was impossible to know which Thomas was the right one.

Check out those witnesses
Going back to the marriage record image, I homed in on one on of the witnesses, Benjamin Bradbourne (also spelled, so I’ve since discovered, Bradburn, Bradbourn and, wrongly transcribed in some places as Bradbond).
I tracked Benjamin down on the 1851 census and wasn’t surprised to find him living in the same area as my 3x great grandparents. His wife was called Ann and a record popped up for a baptism in 1845 of one of their children, named Thomas Holland Bradburn. Aha!
Betsey not Bessey?
A trawl through the marriage indexes confirmed that Benjamin was Bessey’s brother-in-law, his wife being Ann Holland (though not, the Ann Holland with a baby called Emma who I came across recently – see Another Out-of-wedlock Story).
When I tracked down Ann’s details, I found she had a younger sister called Betsey, born the same year as my Bessey - 1813 - and, like Bessey, had been baptised in Eccleshall as had Ann and all her other siblings. Could it be that my failure to find Bessey in the past was because she was known as Betsey? I’m surprised the name variant tool hadn’t picked up on the one letter difference!

Anyway, the nice thing is that, subject to cross-checking, it looks as though I can add my 4x great grandparents to my tree: Thomas Holland, born 1766 and the delightfully named, Ann Butter, born 1772. I look forward to finding out more.
Tantalising mystery
While browsing the family records, I came across something intriguing. One of the hints which came up was an image of a marriage certificate apparently concerning the wedding of one of Bessey's nieces. In the notes someone had transcribed all the information on the certificate and next to the name of the groom, had written: Bachelor!!!!!!!!
Why so many exclamation marks? Sounds like an interesting story worth unravelling. I think I should go and investigate!
Oh I know what you mean, Tracey. I’ve got Roberts, Evans & Griffiths and searching can be so demoralising! You find yourself avoiding those lines or you’d go bonkers. But I guess we have to keep at it in the hope of finding the elusive nugget of information you mention... and a little bit of luck!
Yes, it’s very odd, Carolyn, isn’t it? I must admit it’s a few years since I’ve done a serious search so a multi-database approach might have cracked it before, had I tackled it earlier.
I’m with you on the exclamation marks. To me they said, “Are you kidding?” 🤣
Congratulations! I just love it when those extra bits of information smash through the brick walls and all of the pieces just fall into place. It is very hard when you have ancestors with common names, even if the name isn’t usually a particularly common one, but their ancestors have lived in the same region for many generations and there are multiple close and distant cousins around the same age, all with the same name - aargh! I have Smiths on 3 completely separate branches of my tree, Browns on 2, Wilson, Hall, Williams, plus don’t get me started on my tangled web of Welsh ancestors of Thomas, Davies, Rees, Treharne and Evans. I just keep digging, looking for that…
It's amazing how one letter can make a brickwall seem unsurmountable! I am really surprised, like you, that wildcard searches hadn't found that. I would have thought that searching a multitude of databases would have come up with something! I always look closely at witnesses on wedding certificates. It has been quite illuminating on more than one occasion. I wonder if all those exclamation marks next to batchelor should have been question marks lol.