So what I'm going to do now is take you through a search I carried out for my maternal grandfather. And this was a very lengthy search. It took me a very, very long time to do this and finally, find out what, where he'd come from. I'm going to show you all the whole process I went through to try and find him to help you when you come across similar difficulties, starting with the 1901 senses, partly because when I first started searching for my grandfather, it was before 2011 so the 1911 census wasn't actually up yet. So this is where I started. Now as you can see, I've just come to the results page here on the To no one sentences and as you can be to start with, there's a transcription error.

Let's go on to here. I know this was the right person, because when we go into here he is with his first wife who I know it was early. And you can see that in the actual original document. It is definitely Francis, not the female Francis, that it hasn't there. So that was a transcription error. So as I said in the past, you know, you count for those all the time.

So nothing. So we know this is him because he I know for sure he was a railway goods clerk, and that's what it says here and I know from his three children from this marriage my mother knew so we have absolutely the right person. Let's come over here. Now for the place of birth. He stated that he was born in Hanley in Staffordshire. That's stuff the stuff that's handling.

This led me to a wasted two hours in the record office. I could not find a baptism for him anywhere there. So that was really annoying. And yes, just come out of that. Now, as I said before, ancestry justice thing way gives you suggested records down the side. I'm not sure that they were doing this at the time I was searching because there's some interesting names coming up there that I didn't know at the time so I would not have seen those So let's just go.

So the next census I looked at, then of course, was the 1891 census. So let's have a look at that. So again, obviously the right person, spouse, their court, and again, as you will see, he says Where is he? Here we are. Frances manly railway Clark, again, Staffordshire, Hadley, that all seems fairly straightforward. They've removed a dress and getting in Garnet Street.

Apart from that everything very much the same. So I went to search on the 1881 census, let's just go to the search page for that. So 1881 so this is going to From the information that I had from the later censuses, I put Hamlet in Staffordshire and Manchester school where he was living. So on the results as you can see nothing really coming up there. That looks right. Only No, Francis Manley's in Manchester.

No Francis Manley is coming up as being born in Hadley and Staffordshire. No Francis Manley's with a wife called me so that's very odd. So then that's when you start playing with Your search criteria. So let me show you one of the first things you can do when somebody is not coming up on the census properly. On most search engines, you can do what's called a wildcard search. The most useful wildcard search is the star or Asterix.

And so you can put it if you put in the star that will stand for one or more letters. And if you put in, you can put in a minimum of three other letters. So we can start with M Asterix, e, y. So that would then come up with all names beginning with M and ending an E y. And maybe, as you know, probably more names are going to come up then if I've just put in manually, we might Put in exact, we know who was living in Manchester. And we know his name was Francis.

So we might do that. And let's see what comes up there. So I would have gone down here might have looked at that, see if it was a transcription error, but there was nothing, nothing really there. That would suggest anything. So you can play around with that for a while, you know, you could try starting with the star and, you know, and then doing a few other variations on that, or, you know, maybe starting with ma n and then ending with the star, whatever, or taking out exact taking out exactly, they're just playing around with that wildcard search. However, in my case, I still wasn't coming up.

With anything so another method I use is to take out the surname all together keep the exact on the first name and as many exact criteria as you possibly can. I was sure at this time he was born in Handley. So I might have clicked out and obviously I want to put in a date of birth. And again, you know, this is problematical because the dates of birth the the ages on offense are not always accurate. So and given that he was living in a city area, obviously, you know, there might be too many results here. This is much easier when you've got not too uncommon names and you're in a small parish where there's going to be fewer results.

But I did put in something like that and just see what came up again, There was nothing down here that looked anything like you know, you'd look for surnames, it might look a little bit like what you're looking for, there isn't nothing there are three pages. So that was fairly easy, you know, not not too lengthy search to go through, there was nothing that came up that looked like it might have been a transcription error for manually. And you can do it the other way around. You can take out the first name and type second name, and I tried all that as well. And nothing came up there. So why was tip coming up?

Again, you can try all kinds of moving the criteria, taking out the exact changing the criteria. Just, if you're having difficulty finding somebody, just try playing around with all that Details. Now, in my case, again, it was still not getting really frustrating. But Around this time, my aunt Dorothy said, she suddenly remembered that she thought that he at one time had been fostered by a family called McCune. And I thought, ah, when that case could be that he was living at that time he was living with still with his foster family that he was living under the name of McLaren. So yes, just try that.

Now there are all kinds of different spellings of the cue and that's found to one of those names that just has lots of variation. So if you come across that you ancestry and other search engines don't always give you all the different variations of a surname so you you you might still have to Try different spellings yourself. Let's just take out except that we left it up there so I tried to cure and let's see what comes up here. Okay, nothing there. So again playing around with the loops playing around with the criteria take out exact just see what comes up and here looking down here, there were three Frances McCune and one was living in opposition. Our open shore is an area of Manchester.

That was a little GPS about this because it says he was born in ardwick in the ankush another area of Manchester, which did not fit in with the latest census records which said he was born in Hadley and Staffordshire. But it was worth taking a look at birth was right. So let's have a look at this. Okay, let's go straight to the original record and see what's going on here. So let's just head down to Francis's entry, there's Francis. Francis McEwen.

No relationship to head of household says brother HFD. That's right cart boy. kind of fits birthplace artwork. So who's the head of household? And I found john manly. Very interesting.

JOHN manly was born in Staffordshire. It says Newcastle there, but funnily enough, in other senses records Jones Manley was born, it's in Hamlet. What the hell was going on here? Now when I investigated this, I discovered that john Manley. Here's his wife, Margaret, and I looked at their marriage and Margaret and her name was yes, you guessed it. McEwen.

So often this happens, you might find that brother is put in instead of brother in law. So don't always assume that brother or sister means actual brother or sister can just be put in instead of indoors. So Francis mucuna was john Manley's brother in law. And what I discovered from various searches was that far from having been fostered by McEwen family, Francis had, in fact being born and McEwen was after the death of his parents, fostered by his eldest sister, who was married to john manly, and in Francis's later marriages, he states his father's name as john manly. So that was a mystery solved, and thank goodness that my art now sadly departed, and had remembered that name MacEwan because if she hadn't, I think I'd still be searching. I probably would never have found him and finding him has led to quite some interesting research on his ancestry.

And it just goes to show how important it is to talk to your family especially enlightened now. You know my aunt has been gone a year now and it just goes to show you need to talk to your elder and elder family before they pass on because they can take stuff with them that you'll never find out. Let's just go and have a look now and then with this information if we can find him on the 1871 senses and we'll find we have another slight problem as we know now. Born Francis McCarran 1865 and this time artwork in Russia to Manchester. Just leave it at that see what comes up So as you will see, there's a few Francis McKellen's, but again, nothing. That looks right.

And this is where, again, I had to start doing my little fiddles with the criteria and cut a long story short, let's, let's just take out Francis and see if I could get what I found come up eventually. By taking out first name, let's see if it will come up here might have put in different criteria the first time it could just Okay, it's not coming up here. Okay, I think may have had a different spelling. This is the trouble with names like this. Thank you might have had the that kind of spelling. Let's try that.

All right, here we go. You see how difficult it can be now. Here we are a birthing option. Sure. Look at this spelling. This is why it took me so long to find him yet again in the 1871 census.

It looks like transcription error, doesn't it? Of course it wasn't absolutely sure because at this point I still didn't know the names of his parents. So let's just have a look at that. And let's go. Here we go. I look at this, it was not a transcription error that was the way it was spelt on the enumerators report, and he missed out the end completely so that you can see how just one little misspelling like that can can cause huge difficulty finding somebody.

So all those wildcard searches and methods I've shown you can be really, really useful in this case. Now, I know this was the right person because if you notice back in the 1881 census, we know he had a younger sister called Mary Jane, who was in that household who's who had also been adopted with him by the Manley's, but also I checked, the cheat the other children are This john and Jane and for short, they had a daughter called Margaret and, and she was the one that was married to john Manley. So there we are, problem solved. And Francis was actually born in Manchester. And I believe you you think, Why Why did he say he was born and handling in Staffordshire. My only explanation for that may be that he disassociated himself with his early life it was a very poor family.

His parents died when he was eight. He may not have, you know, possibly he did not even get on well with his parents or his father. And so, perhaps he just wanted to associated associate himself more with his adoptive father, john manly and gave himself his adoptive father's place of birth and use him as his Father's name. And in fact, he used he used the name manly for most of his life although he did go back to using the name McHugh and familia in the 1911 census. For reasons Yeah, who knows that some of these sometimes you just find little things like this that you will never go to understand because the person is long gone and you can't ask them. But I, I hope that's helped you to understand some of the difficulties you can find when searching the census and indeed other records and some of the ways you can use to just get around these difficulties.

So changing the names changing the spellings changing the criteria using the wildcards. Try trying to you know, just the first name or just the second name, making You've asked your family, everything they can possibly remember. And, you know, hopefully, if you have had any problems all these little methods will eventually help you to find your elusive ancestor