Tracing Jane McNabb - Part 1
This is part 1 of 3 in a series about tracing Jane McNabb.
Francis & Catherine McNabb, my great-great-grandparents, came to New Zealand in 1873/4 aboard the ship Isles of the South with four children – recorded as: Jane (7), Edward (5), Catherine (3) and Mary A (5 months).
Francis & Catherine were from near the village of Drumquin, County Tyrone, Ireland. His parents were Michael McNabb & Jane Mullins, while her parents were Patrick Farnan & Catherine Percy.
They would have five more children in New Zealand, whose birth registrations can be looked up on the New Zealand Historical Births, Deaths and Marriages website:
New Zealand death certificates list the person’s living children. Not their names, unfortunately, just their age and sex. Francis’s death certificate records four sons and five daughters:
With a little bit of maths, we can check that the nine children recorded on the certificate align with the nine children listed above. Francis and Catherine were blessed to have all nine of these children not only survive infancy, but survive their parents. Unfortunately, their first-born child, Susan, had passed away in infancy prior to the voyage to New Zealand.
A little more searching of the Historical Births, Deaths and Marriages website starts to unlock the lives of several of the children. We find marriage registrations for four of the five daughters: Catherine, Mary Ann, Margaret, and Sarah. We find death registrations for Edward, Catherine, Sarah, Francis, and William.
However, we find no death registration for Jane, Mary Ann, Margaret, or John James. We find no useful clues under an Archives New Zealand search, nor under a newspaper search. No burial records were found either; and Jane never appears in electoral rolls. What happened to them?
When a person seems to disappear from the civil records, we can roughly say that it must have been one of the following reasons:
- They emigrated.
- Their marriage or death was unregistered, or so badly misspelt that we have been unable to find it.
- They changed their name (either through legal process, or not).
Fortunately, we were able to trace Mary Ann, Margaret and John James through family knowledge of a relative that was known to my father. As it turns out, all three emigrated to South Africa.
However, none of the South Africa contingent knew anything about Jane. What happened to Jane?
If you would like to challenge your research skills, see if you can find anything – without looking up other people’s online McNabb family trees, who have since updated their trees with the results of our research!
It turns out that DNA was necessary to trace Jane. We will explore the DNA trail in Part 2 of this trace.