Why the Bellshaws?

The original plan was to do a bit of family history research into Bill and Lettie's families. (Bill and Lettie are my parents-in-law.) Both have had interesting lives and had interesting tales to tell their children; tales that Kathryn is now sharing with our children. Quite apart from the fact that I'm very fond of Bill and Lettie, I thought it would give me some good practice at tracing a family history from scratch and developing my skills as an historian and genealogist.

As it turned out I quickly got into the Bellshaw side of the family. It's a lot easier to find people on ScotlandsPeople than any of the English sites. It's partly because Scotland has a lot smaller population than England, but I think it's mainly because ScotlandsPeople is simply a better, more user friendly, site. The main reason that I got stuck into the Bellshaws, however, was because I struck genealogical gold.

The Bellshaws are a very small Scottish family. Between 1855 and 1890 only seventeen Bellshaws were born in Scotland. (In the same period over seventeen thousand Hamiltons were born.) As a result,it quickly became apparent that the Bellshaws were all related; they were all descended from one man, John Bellshaw, who had moved to Scotland at some point in the first twenty years of his life.

His timing was fantastic. He arrived in time for Britain's first national census in 1841. This recorded where he was living, who he was living there with, and what his relationship with them was. It also recorded his place of birth (which is how we know he wasn't born in Scotland). He appears, every ten years, on every subsequent census until his death, along with his growing family.

Although his eldest two children were born before the existence of birth certificates, his subsequent children were born after their introduction in 1855. Their birth certificates give their names, their parents names and occupations, their place and date of birth and even the signature or mark of the parent registering them.

So it was extraordinarily good timing on John's part. If he'd moved to Scotland twenty years earlier, or censuses and BDM certificates had been introduced twenty years later, it would have been a much harder task to find the links between the different Bellshaw families. As it is a very interesting family saga was revealed.

Tomorrow: So what did I find out?