By golly it's Bollington

This is an image taken from the probate indexes.  I originally found this in 1992, but this was long before digital photography and when I later got a camera, taking pictures was forbidden in a court building, and I had too many research items to waste time getting a microfiche print-out.  But here it is.  I deduced that Esther Fox had died young based on the will that never was: it even let me guess the year, 1856.  With a determination perhaps stupid, I combed through all the Fox probate indexes in the fiddly fading volumes above the Next 'clothing' store, as a schoolboy, and found this!  It was then an easy matter to wait three years and take the tube from Lancaster Gate to Chancery Lane to view the Bollington town microfilm for 1861 at the census rooms.

You can do all this at the touch of a button, but I had the upper-hand, genuinely being on virgin territory. I don't even believe the local family history society had even yet attempted a crude surname index, and the various 1881 indexes on fiche were absent too. I was very confused to find a whole load of Fox stepchildren mingling with Esther's children in the census owing to James having taken n his brother's children and their mother, too. The family was living across 5 counties by 1891, but I have finally laid them all to rest, 18 years later.

Sure looks like my Ellen in Chowbent

Every so often I have a purge of hard-to-find relatives.  I clapped my hands with joy when I found Ellen and her eight siblings back in the 1990s thanks to the will that never was.  Little did I know that each and every one of them would prove a cow to find, across five counties.  Nathan gave me microfilm finger, Anna became Elizabeth, Sarah had the same name as her step-sister, while Carrie never married her husband.  And Ellen, I eventually found, had married as Sarah Ellen and moved to Lancashire.  When I saw this census entry I knew I'd got her.  Born in Matlock orphaned at 16, her father took the family away from that town's helpful records to Bollington where she disappeared.  Until now.  Thanks to the Atherton records at the online parish clerk, the Davies next generation haven't been too painful to follow up.  Census image: Crown copyright

Omitted from this account is my method. Well, I wasn't really convinced that Ellen might have died between the censuses. I went through all the Ellens born in Starkholmes, before spotting the Starkholmes reference in the above census. The name Esther clinched it as it was her mother, mother of the brood of nine.