A few months ago, I posted several names that were solid
brick walls in my research. One of them was Elizabeth Rachel Lacy, my gt.
grandmother. I had been unable to find any documentation for her for many
years. I finally decided to go back to what my cousin, Pete, had originally
said about her. My reasoning was that he had been the first born grandson of
Jesse Pye, who was the son of my elusive Elizabeth .
He had spent many years listening to Jesse talk about his relatives and life in
Newfoundland and Labrador .
Just because I couldn’t find anything to prove what he had written didn’t mean
some or all of it was not true.
So, I started off at square one, as they say. Elizabeth, who
went by her middle name, as seems to be the way in NFLD, which was Rachel. It was
always a given that her name was Lacy and not Lacey. But for my search
purposes, I looked at every, Elizabeth
and/or Rachel who had a Lacy/Lacey last name. Now the next thing Pete had
recorded was that her parents were known as John Lacy and his wife Esther
Reynolds. Off I went to connect the dots or so I hoped.
To begin with, The Grand Banks site for NFLD has added quite
a few more searchable records. This was an enormous help. I was able to extend
my search to places I hadn’t been able to check on before. I was looking for a
Murray Cove near Carbonear. But with more records, I stumbled upon Mulley’s
Cove and hit the jackpot. Over the years, the location’s name had become
corrupted in our family’s version of the story, so my searching was in the
wrong place. As Dick Eastman suggested in a recent newsletter, family history
can be lost in just three generations. In this case, thankfully, it wasn’t
lost, but some definite distortions had occurred. But here I found that John Lacey had married
Esther Reynolds on Nov 13 1839. Then I went into the census and found my gt.
grandmother, Elizabeth Rachel Lacey, b. Jul 27 1843 in Mulley’s Cove. Finally I
had validation of who her parents were and that she had 10 siblings. I also
discovered that her name was spelled Lacey in all the records, contrary to
every thing our family tale reported. Long ago I had discovered that one needed
to look for every variation of the spelling, so this didn’t surprise me much.
The Lacy ‘tale’ was based on John Lacy having been born in Belfast and that he was of the Irish Lacy
family.
Now I realized that earlier records were also on line and to
my surprise and delight, I found John Lacey was actually born in St. John’s , NFLD on Nov 13 1812, not in Ireland . His father was Robert Lacey
and his mother was Rachel Thistle (nee) who married at St. John’s Congregational Church, May 6 1809.
In 1817 Robert was a shoemaker but in later documents he became a fisherman.
Robert’s father was John Lacey, also a shoemaker. So far I’ve found four
children for Robert and Rachel: Daniel, John, William and Mary Ann. But now a
new mystery presents itself, where was John Lacy/Lacey born?
I have discovered that, my Newfoundland ancestors were the hardiest,
toughest people. They had large families and many of the children died young.
As Darwin
suggested in his Origin of the Species, these folks were “better
designed for an immediate, local environment.”
Interestingly, while following some history on the Reynolds
family, I discovered that this Lacy/Lacey family may have come from Devon , England
and not from Ireland
at all. The Reynolds history also suggested that the Thistle family came from
the Channel Islands .
I was very satisfied with this session of research. Not only
did I find my gt. grandmother, but I found her parents and her grandparents as
well.
Reminder to self – do not shelve family history stories
until they can be proven wrong!!
Congratulations!!! You must be so pleased!
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