I grew up in New Zealand and although I knew my mother's mother (she died when she was 63) I didn't know much about her. I was more interested in my father's family, holding the mistaken belief that I was directly descended from Scottish royalty of some kind. A couple of year's ago my sister emailed me and asked what our grandmother's last name was--Wood or Woods. She was looking for in the 1901 Census, which had just gone online. From my home in Canada, I went online to look for Violet Flora Rose Woods, and there she was. She was living with the Gray family in Walton-on-Thames, described as a niece. She was supposedly born in Marlesford, Suffolk. I knew it was her--the uncommon name, and besides she grew up in Shepperton, not far away. As well, I remembered that my brother had visited with some Grays when he went to England in the 1960s.
After dropping several pounds to actually look at the details of the 1901 census, I eventually subscribed to Find My Past and grew with them as they added more and more census years. When that wasn't enough I also subscribed to the English version of Ancestry.com. And when I was stuck for times before 1837, I checked Family Search, the Church of Latter Day Saints database. Although I found hundreds of ancestors, I gradually started to focus on the direct line of mothers--my mother's mother's mothers, as it were. What I found was two with more than ten children, two who died in childbirth, and one who was committed to an asylum with "puerperal psychosis." One survived a terrible cholera epidemic in London, the same one that saw Dr. John Snow develop his famous ghost map that followed the spread of cholera through the water pump in Broad Street.
Tracking mothers takes some skill. But finding them is that much more exciting. Now I am looking forward to going to England to see where they lived. The country homes where they worked as servants, the farms where they grew up, and the hospital where my grandmother met my grandfather, a rifleman in WW1 who took her back to New Zealand as a war bride. Stay tuned!
