Tracing Jane McNabb - Part 3
This is part 3 of 3 in a series about tracing Jane McNabb. See here for part 1.
Last time, we followed a DNA trail to find that Arabella Janet Melville, who married James McKendrick Jack on 31 December 1891 in Christchurch, seems to be a daughter of Jane McNabb’s parents, Francis & Catherine.
Now that we suspect Arabella and Jane to be the same person, can we find some documentary evidence to prove it?
Arabella passed away in July 1951 age 85. Now, we know Jane’s exact date of birth from UK records – it’s 31 January 1866. Jane would indeed have been age 85 at the time of Arabella Janet’s death. We also can see from electoral rolls that Arabella, like her parents, lived in Christchurch.
It’s looking like we have found the missing aunt. The forename change can be explained – it was fairly common for people to take on middle names that weren’t on their birth registration. In fact, Jane’s sister Margaret did the same – she married in 1902 under the name Margaret Veronica McNabb.
Another wee clue that the eagle-eyed researcher would have spotted from Part 2, is that Arabella names her eldest son Percy – and Jane’s grandmother was named Catherine Percy. It was a common British & Irish tradition for parents to name their children for the mother or grandmother’s maiden name; we should always suspect that a “surname-like” forename might have been handed down in this way.
The piece of evidence that sealed it came from a Google search – something that is often forgotten about in genealogy! An archived GeoCities page from before 2009, states that on the birth certificates of her children, Arabella gave her maiden name as McNabb.
This image of Arabella and James McKendrick Jack was provided by a descendant who contacted us after coming across Jane’s WikiTree page.
We now have enough evidence to be confident that Jane changed her name to Arabella Janet, and married under the surname Melville. To really close the case, it would be good to figure out where the name Melville came from.
Now, probate files (a person’s will and the legal proceedings surrounding it) can be searched via the Archives New Zealand website. Probate files often have useful hints about the deceased’s background; although in Arabella’s case, the only clue we get is a sworn statement from her son that she was only married once.
So it doesn’t seem that Melville was a former married name. Furthermore, Irish genealogical research and deeper DNA analysis has not yielded any reason to believe the name came from Jane’s Irish ancestors.
We haven’t been able to get any further with the Melville name, and would love to hear your theories!
Perhaps she read Moby Dick and found a connection. Whatever the reason may have been; she passed down the Melville name to her son, so it was clearly something important to her.