Corfe Castle and the Pollard Family

Mind the Gap
Originally uploaded by StubbyFingers

Odd how things happen. Yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time looking up photos and sources for the Pollard line of my family tree - (on the Puzey side). I've been thinking about how to get to know some of the lines that aren't the BIG FOUR - the Rhodes/Root and Puzey/Toone surnames but instead those surnames that branch off those lines.

Then, today at lunch I listened to a podcast that advised me to get to know the cities, towns, villages, famous buildings etc in the places your ancestors came from. I absolutely agree that it adds so much more to researching a line when you have some familiarity with the location.

Ever since visiting Derbyshire and some of the locations there, it is great to find a record and know that Norton is that place where I drove around looking for Backmoor and that Bolsover has an amazing castle.

And speaking of castles, one name that had always stuck in my head since the first time I wrote it on a pedigree chart was Corfe Castle. I didn't have any recollection of who was connected to this location but that has now changed. Ancestry.com is offline for maintenance tonight so determined to not indulge my research compulsion tonight in some other way but to just do one last thing and turn off the computer, I clicked over to Flickr and checked out a group that I watch. There was a stunning photo of the ruins of a castle and the group "game" is to post a photo to follow that has a matching tag. So I scroll down to the tags for this scene and surprise! It is Corfe Castle. This photo isn't the one I saw first but since that was from quite a distance, I browsed around and liked this tighter shot. Home of the Pollard Family. Okay they didn't live IN the castle but this is a castle that they would have seen, known, and now I finally have a picture to go with the name.

Now just to find out how to pronounce it....

"The Voyage of the Amazon" - Hannah Webb's Passage to America

I was looking for an image of the ship that Hannah Webb traveled to America on, knowing that Charles Dickens had visited the ship before it left England and wrote about his impressions. Instead of the image, I found this Ensign article and Hannah Webb is mentioned as being part of the company of Elijah Larkin's family as the passengers organized into families and wards. Hannah is the mother of George Ernest Toone and my own grandmother Hannah is named after her.

LDS.org - Ensign Article - The Voyage of the iAmazon:/i A Close View of One Immigrant Company