A while back I wrote about Douglas Lionel Horace Leonard Hyde, my Auntie’s husband and a real mystery man to boot. I put what little knowledge I had of him (namely the two marriages and the name of his father) on Ancestry.com and really did not expect to find anything new.
However, Ancestry.com came up with a clue – a link to a workhouse record of admissions featuring an Arthur Henry Hyde and four children, one of whom was named Horace.
I have spent considerable time hunting through records to find out more but could not definitely link this child to Douglas Hyde – until now, when I suddenly found that the GRO official record of the first marriage names him as Horace L Hyde and indeed he signed his first marriage certificate the same way!
So, now I can start to try to make sense of all the information I have gathered – it is a mishmash of changed names, missing people, somewhat dubious record-keeping and general confusion, mine as much as anyone else’s!
It’s moments like this that make a genealogist smile!