Someone else claimed my Great Great Grandparents

or

Don't take anything for granted

The search for Frank Baker Born 1857 Nottingham area

The advantage (or disadvantage) of putting your family history research on the web is that any mistakes are there for all to see. And of course, there are flaws in records and humans too - covered in my Technical Note.

I am currently in the middle of an investigation to double and triple check information relating to the parents of my great grandfather Frank Baker #1, b 1857 Nottingham area.

In September 2005, Genes ReUnited introduced a new facility called Hot Matches. This generates potential matches in trees held by that site. One of them was for Frank Baker b 1857 Basford Nottinghamshire. I was on to it like a shot, suggesting that the contact look at this site for more information.

I then received a very nice message via my Visitors Book saying that Frank Baker b 1857 etc was her great grandfather and that he had married someone completely different.

I had "inherited" this area of research from a cousin of my Dad's who had trawled through Nottingham records. There had been family discussions about the fact that no marriage certificate could be found for our Frank and Annie Langridge, and this is covered eleswhere on this site. So I don't have source documents to point to to prove our understood picture of our ancestry.

So I'm now trying to find out what information my dad's cousin used to come to the conclusions that she did, and then we can assess the "competing" claims. Thankfully the dialogue on this is very friendly - and I think we both want to get to the truth rather than "win".

There is a possibility of course that it is the same man, and he led a double life. Intriguing, exciting but probably a bit fanciful!

So the moral of this story, is don't taken anything for granted and check your sources carefully for alternatives (don't just settle on the first person you find).

As a consequence (and while the jury is still out) there are two Frank Bakers born in 1857 in the Nottingham area recorded on this site - the pink option and the blue option. At the moment the blue one looks slightly more likely, and I can't even rule out a third option!