Last weekend, after a truly enjoyable day at The Family History Show, South West in Bristol, I then headed down for a rendezvous in Devon with some of my first cousins.
Our paternal line hails from Dartmouth, Devon and like so many family history researchers we have some brick walls that we would like to knock down. By using research on the internet we have come up with an address for our ancestor’s home. The problem being that in the 1861 census they lived in Mill Pond, a name of a road that is no longer in existence.
The enumerator’s route
I am always surprised that more researchers are not aware that each census enumerator’s route can be found by scrolling back through the household images on some of the subscription sites.
This tells me that Mill Pond was just after Mariner’s Place and before Market Square. But even an old map doesn’t pinpoint where these dwellings were!
In the end I resorted to walking the area myself and as I turned into Market Square I noticed that a large house had a sign giving its name as Mill Pond House along with its number in Market Street (as opposed to Market Square). This was my first clue as to where this long gone street name may have once been.
Now I know that my ancestors were not that wealthy to have lived in this house, but what it does prove that by actually visiting an area you can sometimes make more headway than you can from behind your computer screen.
That being said, it was down to searching out the enumerator’s route on TheGenealogist website* that gave me the tools to walk the correct area!
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