It’s very easy to see something, a name, a place, a date, while researching something and jump to the completely wrong conclusion.
This was so when I was looking for information on my great-great-grandfather’s ship, the Lady Denison. She was named after Caroline Denison who was the wife of Sir William Denison. Sir William was the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land while Samuel Moses was living in Hobart. Sir William went on to be the Governor of New South Wales and then Governor of all the Australian colonies until in 1861 he became Governor of Madras in India until 1864.
As I was looking down shipping lists I came across another barque, smaller than the Lady Denison, called the Henrietta Nathan. My eyes lit up! Samuel’s sister-in-law, wife of his partner Louis, was Henrietta Nathan! It must be their ship, I thought. If I wrote about it, I think I did say ‘probably’ or ‘perhaps’… just as well, because I have since discovered that the ship belonged to Burnett Nathan of Adelaide. Presumably Burnett’s wife, daughter or mother was the Henrietta Nathan!
Two Lois ‘s… not the same person, although at least we are related!
Lois Elsden 
The amount of work you put into the tracing of your history is amazing – all the connections, the research, the details. It must b emarvellous to mak eall these links and to be able to share them 🙂
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It is… it really is! Census information is interesting because in the nineteenth century not all the enumerators were very literate themselves… also people speaking with strong regional accents and were unable to write themselves had their names transcribed in a variety of ways. Sometimes they didn’t know when they were born either! There is sometimes a lot of lateral thinking involved!
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