It has been a while since I have looked at the TRENDALL
family tree. I have been working on
other families, but I will get back to it soon.
I do always keep half an eye open for developments and my attention was
drawn to an interesting item that popped up during an internet search. Our family is a little short of exotic
adventure. There is the connection to
India of course and side bars to Australia and Canada, but little else. I was therefore rather pleased to see a
reference to my 3 x Great Grandfather in Mexico!
An entry on a well known genealogy site has Joseph TRENDALL
(1770-1838) in El Higo, Veracruz which is west of Mexico City, in the 1830s. What was an elderly retired baker doing in
Central America? Is there a Mexican
branch of the family? Do I have distant
cousins in the land of the Aztecs? Did
he introduce the bloomer to the Americas?
Alas, like so much else in the world of on- line family history the entry
was a load of nonsense.
It didn’t take me
long to realise that the entry related to his death in 1838. I know where he died. I have his death certificate and burial
details. He died in Shoreditch, half a
mile from where I was born (although the family lived in lots of other places
before returning to that part of east London).
He was buried in the modern Borough of Barnet where he had spent many
years running a bakers shop and bringing up his family. On looking at the on-line entry which
references Mexico it records him in the region described above. The exact location was a small hamlet called…….El
Hoxton, El Higo, a place of a handful of residents. Sloppy data entry is the curse of on-line
family trees. The author probably
selected the wrong drop down box or was especially inattentive in geography
lessons.
The lesson is a simple:
Be careful how much trust you put in the internet. The problem is I now have a mental image of Joseph
wearing a poncho. It’s going to be hard to
shift!
21 March 2023
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