I decided to dust off this old blog, mostly because the story I want to tell you guys would never fit on Facebook. It's a pretty neat story, so I have to tell you it's pretty long. Stay with me; it is interesting.
Let me get you into perspective. The person I have this cool story to tell you about is James Calvert, our great-great-great-grandfather. We connect to him from this direction: go to your parent (my Mom, Cheril, Ann, Judy, or Gene), then to Grandpa Peterson. Then his mom, Maria Worley, her mom, Mary Jane Calvert, and then her father James Calvert.
What did we know about James Calvert? Well, not very much as it turns out. He became, what the genealogists call, "a brick wall". That's a person where the ability to go back any further just stops and you can't get past him to go any farther.
What we did know was that he joined the 3rd Dragoons (a sort of mounted infantry unit in England) when he was about 19. He joined in Dundalk, which is a port city in Ireland. That puts his birth year about 1824. At some point in his service, he transferred to the 5th Dragoons and ended up in Warwick, England around 1853. There he married Elizabeth Hiley. In 1854, they had a son they named James Thomas Calvert. James' family must have followed him around during his military service because in 1857, a daughter - Mary Jane Calvert - was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Our linage comes through this daughter, Mary Jane.
James died in 1858 at the age of 34 and was buried in Aston, Warwickshire, England; the same place his son was born, so he ended up coming back to that location. This also appears to be where his wife, Elizabeth grew up. Elizabeth was born in Birmingham, which is close to Aston. There was a census showing Elizabeth, James Thomas, and Mary Jane in Aston in 1861, but the census of 1870 has Mary Jane and Elizabeth in Utah. The son did not come with them as he only lived to 8 years old and was buried in Ashted in 1862, which I believe is somehow close by Aston.
But what of James Calvert? Where was he born? Where is his family? No one seemed to be able to provide any information on him and his line in our family history came to a screeching halt. There has been no new information on him for some time; our family history merely named his father as "Thomas Calvert" with no proof of the existence of this person.
Recently, a marriage certificate was located showing James' birth location as "Ireland" and listed his father as Michael. It also said that Michael was a farmer by trade.
A few months ago, there was a Rootstech conference in SLC that I went to the last day for. They had several speakers and I noticed one in particular that focused on researching Irish ancestors. I got excited at the prospect of being able to delve into James' situation and maybe break something loose. The conference was excellent. Genealogy is fairly new to me, but given my computer "geekyness", I always felt like if I invested myself I could get into a groove and make a difference. I have been successful in other areas, so I thought I'd take a shot at James Calvert.
I came home from the conference energized with great ideas on how to find things out about our Irish ancestor. Jumping on my computer, I dug around using the techniques taught at the conference. Several hours later, I struck out completely. Apparently, I ran face first into the wall, just like everyone else that had taken a shot at James in the past.
You see, the problem with Irish genealogy is first, very little is digitized. Even what they have, if you don't know a city or, what they call a "town-land" (in Ireland they call what England would call a "township" a "town-land"; they can be anywhere from 2 or 3 houses to 6,000 acres in size) - if you don't have that, you really can go anywhere, and we had no such information on James.
But I stuck with it. I went to the National Archives web site for the UK and started digging there to see if I could find something by keying on James' service in the Dragoons. Apparently, the English were pretty good at documenting their military people, even dating way back to very early years. I found several references to the Dragoons, with a lot of places I could look into to find information, but, as the vast majority of most of these records are, they are not digitized. That means, you have to go and look at them in person.
A trip to London? Sounds like fun, but that could take a while to come up with the funds! I actually decided to do just that; start saving to make a pilgrimage to London to find info about James! Well, not quite.
In my poking around the National Archive website, I found a link to where you can hire independent researchers to dig through the documents for you, if you can't get to London yourself. I emailed 4 of these people, hoping to hear back from someone who could help me. Only two responded, and they both told me they were too busy to help.
Except one referred me to a friend that specializes in British military research. I got with him and he dug in immediately.
And the results were oh-so-exciting! In a matter of hours, he had located James in the Dragoon's records and felt like he could come up with a detailed history of his military career! 11 hours of his work, and about two weeks later (and about 185 British pounds), I had in my hands, a documented, detailed history of his entire military career.
Included in that was his transfer from the 3rd Dragoons to the 5th Dragoons. This is significant because for whatever reason they had for it, they listed his EXACT birth city as well as his previous occupation! Which was a farmer, and that fits with what we knew on the marriage certificate. No doubt at all, this was our guy!
We now know what city James was born in. My next steps will be to dig into the Irish records where he was born to see if I can find his birth certificate. If I can, and I feel pretty good that it will yield more information, it could open up a huge door that will lead us to his entire family in Ireland.
I am excited by this development, but I have to be a little reserved knowing what roadblocks lay in store for us right now. Ireland, as you know, remained Catholic and so the parishes where we would be searching are in the hands of the Catholic church. They are more open now than they have been in letting information out, but it could be a challenge to get some of that information. I have Dad helping me in getting the documentation on James loaded and then will help me get going on digging up James' family.
While I am reserved about the challenges ahead on finding out more about James' family, I can't help but think that the divine intervention that helped me get this information will lead to more breakthroughs. Someone is wanting this information found. It has sat dormant for a long time, but the Calvert family wants to be found, and soon!
This post is getting really long, so I am going to wrap this up. I will post in the future to let you know about James' military career and some interesting things associated with it. To help with your curiosity, no - he did not go with the company when they went on their campaign to China about that time frame; he stayed home at headquarters. I don't know if it was because he was injured; (he did spend some time in the hospital around that time frame), and he ended up dying shortly there after; there really is no record as to why he died. But there are other items of interest in his military career that may be of interest to you. I'll get that, as well as other updates, as soon as I come across them.
