Hey, Rosetta Stone! Can I Buy A Vowel?

Rhybudd: Nid tw tystysgrif yn profi pwy ydych chi. No, though many believe it's already happened, I haven't gone completely around the bend. Great Britain is devolving and any official document from Wales is now bilingual. The first sentence says "Warning: A certificate is not evidence of identity."

I've mentioned before that my great great grandfather Abraham Hands was rather a mystery. We knew he was Welsh and supposedly came to the US in 1865. For the longest time things were stuck there. There were Hands around Birmingham, England, but none in Wales. With Ancestry.com the Welsh family popped into view with both British and American records connecting Abraham and his wife Amelia to my great grandfather Frederick. Censuses in 1880 and 1910 indicated that Frederick had arrived in America in 1865 when he was eight years old. However, the family doesn't show up in the 1870 census and Frederick's brother Herbert claimed to have arrived in the US in 1876.

So when did Abraham come to America? Turns out he didn't. A kind Welsh researcher noted a death certificate for an Abraham Hands in Abergavenny, Wales in 1863. Abergavenny was where Frederick and Herbert were born so it was worth a look. I e-mailed to the General Register Office in England and got a copy of Abraham's death certificate. The certificate included a copy of the original book entry which was happily in English. Unlike American death certificates, the parents weren't listed so I was left to connect this Abraham to my family with circumstantial evidence. First, he was from Abergavenny where my Abraham and his family lived in the census year of 1861. That Abraham's occupation was given as a commercial traveler, the same as the man on the death certificate. Finally the age matched. This man who suffered a fall and blow to the head in June of 1863 and lingered until early September was my great-great grandfather. The family lived on Frogmore Street and a so far unconnected William Jacob Hands was in attendance at the death.

What of Frederick's claim that he arrived in the US in 1865? It's hard to fathom. Some deep digging turned up the fact that he became a citizen in 1889. His brother Herbert          who claimed to have arrived in 1876 became a citizen in 1883 after the normal seven year waiting period. I don't know when Frederick died, a visit to Forest Hills Cemetery is probably in order, but he didn't appear in Ancestry's census records after 1920. Then suddenly he popped up as Frederick Hans in 1930. There he claimed to have arrived in 1881, a good trick since he was listed in Boston's 1880 sentence, but much more reasonable given the 1889 citizenship date.

Genealogy is often considered to be just a long list of names. I enjoy it for the puzzles that need to be solved and for the connections to history. In the 12th century a Norman soldier named William de Braose invited all the leading male citizens of nearby Wales to his castle at Abergavenny for a Christmas party. His soldiers then hacked the unarmed Welshmen to pieces ending any future disloyalty to the English crown. That William was an ancestor of my mother. Strange how both sides of the family are connected in a little town in Wales.