Joshua Stafford--Family History is Never All Done, Part 1

Several years ago the 1881 British census became available on familysearch.org.  I wanted to learn how to use this new resource, so decided to search for my great great grandfather Joshua Stafford.  This was a family line that I had never explored.  I felt that there was nothing left to uncover on this line since the family organization had hired a professional researcher years ago.  The information that I had on Joshua Stafford included his birth in Melton Mowbray, his marriage to Eliza Dennis, and the birth of my great grandmother Ann Stafford (known to our family as my Dad's Grandma Annie Snow Condie) in Chesterfield.


I was so surprised when the 1881 census showed that Joshua had moved to Leeds, and they had a few more children.  I realized then that there might be more research that we could do on this family.  Using the 1891 and 1901 censuses together with the civil registration indexes on Freebmd.org.uk I was able to piece together much more information on the family.  I sent for several of the civil registration certificates from the General Record Office in London.  I learned that Eliza Dennis had died in childbirth and that she was buried in the Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds.  I also learned that Joshua had married again, to Elizabeth Stafford, and had more children. 


In May 2008 my husband and I took a trip to England to visit my parents who were serving as missionaries in the London Family History Centre.  In preparation for the trip, I googled the names of some of our ancestral towns, hoping to find information for tourists and get some ideas of what we would want to see when we visited those towns.  While googling Brampton, the birth parish of Annie Stafford, I found her baptismal record was indexed online.  We didn't have that record yet.  Dad found the original record in the microfilm collection of the Family History Centre the next day. That was my first inclination that we were going to have a great trip.  We did some research in the centre on Sunday and then later in the week rented a car and drove up north to Farnsfield (where Eliza Dennis was born), Chesterfield (where Annie Stafford was born), Leeds (where Joshua Stafford and family lived at the end of their lives), and Melton Mowbray (where Joshua Stafford was born).

St Michael's and All Angels church in Farnsfield, Nottinghamshire.  The Dennis family was from Farnsfield.