Never Trust the Internet!

 

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