I love the interplay of family relationships in family trees. I am sure we are all accustomed to the principle of what a simple family tree looks like. It is linear in it’s appearance and the principle of it is very straightforward. We begin with ourselves and progress in a straight line backwards in time branching out to the next generation.
Example of a simple family tree
However, in reality family trees are rarely this simple. People have multiple marriages, have children to different partners, cousins marry cousins and with all of that, those very linear looking branches suddenly look not quite so linear. In fact they can become very convoluted and for me that is where family history becomes really interesting. I love to see and try to get to grips with the intertwining of those branches and discover where connections between different sides of my tree are made and I find the complexity of relationships really fascinating in the unravelling. I have lots of examples of this in my tree but am posting today about the one I discovered just this week and I stumbled across this one quite by accident whilst going over some family lines to try and fill in some gaps on family members I hadn’t been able to find much on to date.
Ruth Norton was one of those people I was doing a review on. She was my 3rd Great Aunt, daughter to 3rd Great Grandparents Wright Norton and Sarah Marshall. She was the youngest of 5 children and I had successfully researched all of her siblings, tracing them right through to their deaths but so far I only had a picture in my mind of Ruth up to the age of 19 when she married and then I had lost all trail of her and couldn’t find out what had happened to her after her marriage and so what started out as a day of trying to find out what happened to her I discovered a whole lot more than I bargained for.