Out of Place

For quite some time, I had the given names of parents and children for my great-great-great-grandparents’ family.  I also had a few dates.  One was a really cool find that currently sits in a safe deposit box without having been scanned first (can you see my aggravated face?) – the death notice that family over there sent to family over here about my great-great-great-grandfather, Edmund John Harris.  So, I’ve had that date and place and the approximate birth and death dates of his child who is my direct ancestor, as well as the places of burial.

But that’s most of what I had for a long, long time.

When it became easier to obtain digital copies of birth, marriage, and death records from the General Register Office, I began voraciously looking for all of the ancestor records I could find.  And I found them, lots of them.

Now back to this family.  They had fourteen children between 1838 (in Belgium as English citizens) and 1867.  My grandmother in this family, Emily Fellows Harris, died on November 29, 1869 in the place they had settled, Hadley Hollow, in Shropshire, England.  I knew of thirteen of the children, and for some, I had more than just a name.  They had names like George and John, Mary, Ruth, Samuel, and Richard.  The only one with an out of place name (that I’ve known about for a long period of time) was Zillah, born in 1855.  However, Zillah turned out to be something of a family name for a while.  This may have been the second Zillah in a couple of generations, and there were definitely a few of them afterward – including someone I knew.  Her name was Zillah Catherine Curtis, and Edmund was her great-grandfather.

The Zillah in Edmund and Emily's Family

But now I’m rambling.  In my massive search for GRO records, I accidently found child number fourteen.  I had to look everything over a few times because I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.  In this family of relatively “normal” names (if you discount the ubiquitous Zillah), on April 13, 1862, Sheba was born.  She only lived until October 8, but her name was definitely out of place.  To my knowledge, there was never a Sheba Harris before her, and there hasn’t been one since.  

Sheba's birth record!