Here follows Ted COULBY's narrative of his search for the link.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 

“THERE’S NO DISCOURAGEMENT,………………”

“COULBY”, spelt with the “U”, is the usual form of the much more familiar “COLBY" “COLEBY” or “COLBIE”.  You may well imagine the excitement and speculation that this previously unheard-of Harry COULBY’s obituary notice created within such COULBY families as read it. 

At the time I was 12 and living on the Nilgiri Hills in South India where my father, Sidney COULBY was employed in a Government Ordnance factory.  It so n happened that he was presently due to return to the UK after an absence of twenty years, for urgent medical attention.  There, and then he resolved to devote such time as might remain after his convalescence to discovering whether there were any links between the two COULBY families.  Until January 1930 he was unable to begin his search which then started with a visit to Claypole.  Unfortunately there were no COULBYs living in the village then and none of locals could supply him with the leads he needed.  So apart from the pleasure and satisfaction that the solid evidence of Harry COULBY’s good works for Claypole had given him - he returned from there with little or-no idea of how, next to proceed.  What soon became evident was that it was necessary to concentrate on the job of tracing his own family back into the past, as well as that of Harry COULBY’s, before any possible tie-up between the two could be established.  My father’s sick-leave was running out by now and apart from obtaining some brief - and sometimes mislead information from his old mother regarding his late father’s early life, and his own and his father’s birth certificates from Somerset House, he returned to India frustrated and disappointed, but with a strong desire to discover more about his own roots and a determination to do something about it when he retired and returned to this country. 

In the middle of 1946 the family eventually returned to England.  Once again, unfortunately for my father, circumstances arose which finally put paid to any hopes that he had of resuming the search for his ancestors, for my mother’s rapidly failing health demanded his whole attention and care.  After her death he also became blind.  He died in 1969, but in the meantime it had become implicitly understood that I would make it my duty to undertake this task, for his sake, if not for my own edification and desire to know all I could about my ancestors So what had begun in 1929 never really started to move much until I began to work on iy after my own retirement in 1978 - a gap of 50 years!

I had set forth on my genealogical expedition scantily prepared and with almost no knowledge of the sources of information that I should have to employ and consult, nor of any of the obstacles or hazards that I should have to encounter and overcome.  I believed that I could achieve in a comparatively short space of time my fairly modest objective - that of finding the family link between mine and that of Harry COULBY, the millionaire.  The records of births, etc., at Somerset House should soon provide me with the answer.  This was January 1978. 

My genealogical education was to begin at the entrance to Somerset House where I learned that the records I sought had been moved to St.  Catherine’s House in the Aldwych - The General Record Office.  Arriving there, I was to receive my next unwelcome surprise - the records were merely indices, giving neither exact dates of occurrences nor particular places or parishes.  Instead, grouping was by the quarter year and by registration districts, making the ordering of certificates an expensive guessing game, unless one had absolute certainty about the meagre facts given in the indices. 

The first task was to trace my own ancestry, then do the same for Harry COULBY’s side.  I should come upon the common ancestor.  How easy it all sounded! Far from taking “a comparatively short space of time” the link was found, after the most arduous and complicated search, in January 1980, almost two years to the day since I had started the hunt. 

The expedition had floundered and almost failed in the process; but, paradoxically, it was because of this attenuated and wide - ranging quest, that the project’s aim now irrevocably became, unlimited in its scope and continues to lead us further back in time, revealing one astonishing fact after another, and compelling us to discover all we can about the COULBYs of the past. 

Whilst acknowledging that I have yet a great deal to learn, I believe that my experiences to date can be of some reassurance and encouragement to those readers who, like me, have set out to do a similar journey, without having done the obligatory preparatory reading and without a guide or friends to show them the way. 

Everyone who begins to trace his ancestry back through time must, of course, start in possession of some essential data concerning his immediate antecedents, and the primary source of this information is the family itself.  One should get to know from ones parents, grand-parents and older relations as much as possible about one’s forbears and, in particular, the dates and places of the vital events of births, deaths and marriages.  It was unfortunate that I was to find that I was most poorly endowed in this department.  The bereavement of his parents suffered by my grandfather when he was just four years old and the early departure from home and the country by my own father when only sixteen were the major factors which lay at the root of this ill-starred beginning to my own project.  At this point it might be helpful to set down just what I actually did have to go on with beforehand:

Again, under “Next of kin now living”, the entry dated 4 June 1878 states that his mother, Sarah Ann, was living at Brighton, Sussex, but the last two words were then scored out, which meant that he did not know where his mother was at all, although he gives his young sister Olive’s address in full.  The fact that his father is not mentioned confirms that he was aware of his father’s death, and since sister Olive was 11 years old at the time I now had a definite period within which I could search for John COULBY’s death entry at St Catherine’s House, - 1864 to 1878.  Grandfather’s regiment, The Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment) left England in 1876 for South Africa.  They were to serve in Singapore, Hong Kong, Egypt and not get back to England till 1886, during which time grandfather had risen in rank to become a Colour Sergeant had married a soldier’s daughter, Kate Thompson, and had his first child, John, in Hong Kong; my father, the second child of a total of nine children was born at Workington, Cumberland in 1888.  John COULBY’s birth was not to be found within the period 1837 to 1846 - he was married in 1860, and was of “Full Age” then.  I was left with no clues at all to help me over the 1837 “bridge” into the past.  I next decided, in desperation, to get his death certificate to see if that might perhaps contain anything which I could go upon.  It was now that my ignorance of genealogical search techniques led me to make a number of mistakes.  The first, and worst, of these errors was to exclude and ignore altogether any of the alternative spellings of the name COULBY.  I should have at least written them down as I came upon them, as this would have saved me a great deal of time when later, upon learning of the error, I had to go back over the whole process again.  It was because of this error that I passed over, without a second glance, the record of the death of a John ‘COLEBY’ in the register for the April to June quarter of 1865, besides, this John Coleby had died at Lincoln, a place discounted by me as I considered it to be a most unlikely location for the home of an agricultural labourer.  This was my second error, - that of making ‘snap’ judgements.  I was to make the same mistake again when, during the search I came upon the name of “Sarah Ann COULBY”, who had died during the April to June quarter of 1869 in the Greenwich registration district.  Was this my great grandmother?  Were all the stories of her being still alive in 1878 untrue?  Had my grandfather known anything at all about his parents and had he been confused about that which he only dimly understood?  Had my great grandparents separated?  There were questions by the score to be answered and.  doubts and suspicions galore! I would get to know something once I could see the death certificate.  If this Sarah Ann COULBY’s husband was mentioned on the certificate and if his forename was John, then surely I had traced my great grandparents and might then begin to get some answers to the questions. 

It was with mixed feelings that I saw from the certificate that it was indeed John COULBY who was ‘in attendance’ at the death of his wife Sarah Ann.  This was too much of a coincidence for me to believe anything other than that this couple were indeed my great grandparents, particularly as Sarah Ann’s age was given as 35, which would have made her 26 at the time of her marriage in 1860, a most reasonable age for that and for the subsequent births of two children in 1861 and 1864. 

These reasonings served to convince me that I had found my great grandparents, but I had to have answers to some serious questions now.  Why had they left their native Lincolnshire for the squalid, crowded streets of nineteenth century Deptford, where Sarah Ann was to soon die of typhoid fever and why leave their two small children with Sarah Ann’s brother in Gillingham just a few miles down river from Deptford?

This last circumstance was the most difficult to understand or acknowledge.  I now began a search of Deptford Rate Books for these COULBYs at the residence shown on the death certificate, hoping to find them with their children and thereby dispelling the otherwise inescapable conclusion that the children had been abandoned by parents who quite deliberately chose never to see them again.  Unfortunately, I could not find them in Deptford and so decided to go back to the GRO  to see if I could find the death of John COULBY in the Deptford area. 

All this had taken me over a year to do and by now I had become aware of certain other facilities which I believed might be of great assistance to me.  These were the Public Records Office census microfilms, the vast library of the Society of Genealogists, and the family History section of the SLHA.  It was now up to me to establish beyond all doubt that this John COULBY of Deptford was my great grandfather.  If only I could obtain his death certificate, I should be able to get his address from it and hopefully, make use of this knowledge to search the census microfilms to find him with his family.  This would undoubtedly help to clear up the matter and possibly provide me with even more information about the family.  After a long search at the GRO the nearest I could get to in terms of probability was the death of a John ‘COLBY’ at Southwark in the last quarter of 1872.  I took a chance, ordered and paid for the certificate and waited with some concern.  The only wisp of a lead that I could get from that certificate was the address, and since the death had occurred just one year after the 1871 census, with any luck I should find the family - minus wife Sarah Ann who had died in 1869, - still at the address in Rotherhithe.  This turned out to be the case and I was most surprised to find that the John COLBY there was from Claypole, Lincs, - the home village of Harry COULBY himself.  So there was a connection, but as there was a son aged 11 living with him, and born at Rotherhithe in 1860, then this John COLBY was certainly not my elusive great grandfather.  To make doubly sure, I decided to look for the family in the 1861 census to see whether the wife also came from Lincolnshire.  The family weren’t at the same address as in 1871 and it took a long time to find then.  When I did, it was to learn that Sarah Ann was from Sussex, which clinched the matter of elimination once and for all. 

The errors of omission and commission, failure to take note of name variants, the following of false trails with blind obstinacy despite the scepticism and incredulity experienced on the way, which had resulted in the loss of much time spent on fruitless work, were eventually to prove of much educational benefit to me in that I became a careful note-taker and now would not commit myself to undertake a genealogical hunt without strong evidence or clues to suggest that I would be going in the right direction. 

Now I was back to the search for my John COULBY once more, but this time I knew that I was bound to find him in the records at the GRO  as I would not pass by the entry of his death as before.  Surely enough, I turned up the entry for a John ‘COLEBY’ who died at Lincoln in 1865, and for a bonus the entry of the death of a child Sarah Palmer Coleby in 1863, also at Lincoln the most valuable piece of information, however, was that John was 47 years old when he died, thus confirming that his birth would not be found in the registers at the GRO.  I therefore knew that the hardest part of my work lay ahead of me, for where in all Lincolnshire would I find John COULBY’s birth and so continue the tracing of the family before 1837?

Had I but known it, I was now to embark upon the most exhilarating the yet the most arduous part of the journey. 

In the two previous instalments I had recounted the tale of the long and daunting search for my great grandfather, John COULBY, in the records at the General Register Office at St.  Catherine’s House, London; I had told of how this operation had been unnecessarily prolonged as a consequence of my failure to make myself conversant with the basic ‘modus operandi’ of genealogical investigations, and how, after putting all these matters right, I had finally come to find an entry for a John COLEBY, whose death at Lincoln in 1865, at the age of 47, closely following on an entry for the death of a Sarah Palmer COLEBY in 1863, also at Lincoln had made it almost a certainty that I’d found my great grandfather.  His wife’s maiden-name was Sarah Ann Palmer - such are the clues that prove to be so valuable in helping to direct and condense a search. The certificates of these deaths helped confirm that John COLEBY was indeed my great grandfather and that Sarah Palmer COLEBY was indeed his baby daughter.  From this information I now knew that John COLEBY had been born before 1837, the year from which the centralisation of the records of Births, Marriages and Deaths in England and Wales commenced and therefore I should have to look for him in the parish records or the Census microfilms at the Public Record Office. 

Unless one is in possession of accurate and indisputable proof of the birth-place of a pre 1837 ancestor - in which case the parish records of that place ought to be searched for the required information - one cannot do better than to look for this birth place in the Census records for the years 1851, 1861 and 1871.  Working on information from Marriage and Death Certificates obtained at the GRO it is possible, more often than not, to deduce where a particular individual might have been living when the Census nearest in time to that Marriage or Death was done.  In the vast majority of cases one is able to find the person being sought at the very place indicated on the certificate, or if not there, then at a place nearby. 

As John COULBY had died in 1865, the census for 1861 would be the one that I should search for him and hopefully find against his name the entry giving his place of birth.  From his Marriage Certificate (1860) I knew that he had been living at Toynton St Peter at the time; from the Birth Certificate of his first-born child, my grandfather William Palmer COULBY, I knew that the family were at Donington Eaudike in July 1861, shortly after the 1861 Census was taken.  Toynton St Peter and Donington are about thirty miles apart and I sincerely hoped that John would be found at one or other of these places, as the alternative would be to do an extensive search covering scores of parishes in the area in between and perhaps beyond.  My joy at finding John and his wife Sarah Ann at Badgate Road, The Dykes, near Donington was to be very short-lived, for the enumerator of the area had written John’s place of birth as “Aceby”, Lincs, and I was soon to discover that there was no such place as “Aceby” in all England or Wales! I had arrived at the most critical point of the search, for without the name of his birth-place I could not hope to find the record of his Baptism together with the names of his parents, and this would mean the end of my project to trace my family back as far as the likely link between us and the family of Harry COULBY, the millionaire from Claypole. 

Once again, however, what at first had been viewed by me as hopeless and irremediable soon proved to be one of those fortuitous and providential phenomena which turn despair into joyful success and defeat into a glorious victory.  This was because, faced as I was by a supposedly insurmountable blank wall, I badly needed advice and help, preferably from those who knew their Lincolnshire best - who but the SLHA and in particular their Family History branch?

Accordingly I wrote to the Secretary, Eileen Robson, who in turn put me in touch with her friend Eirlys Spawton from Newark, who had just completed the indexing of Newark Marriages and the 1851 Census.  We agreed, that living in London as I do, I could do searches here at the GRO, PRO and elsewhere whilst searches at the Archives in Lincoln, in Lincolnshire parishes ant from M.  Is,. could be done for me in return.  As we shall see, it is I who has been the greater beneficiary from this arrangement, for I now have in my possession a pedigree drawn up by Eirlys Spawton from the hundreds of names of the COULBYs/COLBYs/etc,. that we collected from several sources; a pedigree which is at present headed by a William COLBY of Westborough, Lincs,. who left a will in 1547 and who was born in the latter half of the 15th Century; a pedigree which shows the link, five generations ago, which gave a common ancestor with Harry COULBY of Claypole; a pedigree full of biographical details that do much to make if that more interesting than just a list of names and dates; a pedigree showing not just my main line of descent, but including many other branches of the COULBY family; a pedigree so extensive that, handwritten as it is at present, it covers nine large sheets of paper, which when put together, form a chart six feet wide by four and half feet deep. 

I must go back to the problem of “Aceby” and tell how this was tackled and eventually solved.  We first searched the records of parishes with names similar in either sound or spelling to “Aceby”.  One of these, Aisby, in the ‘Peculiar of Heydour’ caused us seriously to consider whether my family’s name had in fact been “CORBY”, later mis-spelled as “COULBY”! for at Aisby we had come across a family of Corbys with fore-names which corresponded with those commonly used by the COULBYs, and to make matters more difficult, a John Corby whose birth date closely matched that of the John COULBY for whom we were searching.  This false trail took up a considerable amount of time and effort, though, fortunately for us, we had not abandoned the search for John COULBY.  This had now taken the form of a two-pronged attack, so to speak, one from the London end on the 1841, 1851 and the 1861 Censuses for any COULBYs in the parishes in, and surrounding, Spalding, Sleaford, Boston, Spilsby and Horncastle, the other from Lincoln on parish and other records at the Archives Department at Lincoln Castle. 

I feel that at this point, I should warn readers that this particular method of tracking down one’s folk through the censuses is only for those who, like myself, have retired from work and live within easy reach of the PRO in Central London.  I did it this way because there didn’t seem to be any other alternative method.  It was, if you like, based on probability but very dependent on luck.  There were times during the long drawn-out search when I felt that I was wasting my time and that these COULBYs must have lived in some other area of the County - I knew that I should never have been able to endure the sheer physical and psychological strain of such a vast undertaking; the search through three censuses containing literally millions of names.  Thankfully, this calamity was spared me, and after five weeks of assiduous hunting I was delighted to read - with some difficulty on account of the faded and rather scribbled handwriting - in the 1841 Census for the little parish of Ashby Puerorum, the names of COULBYs who could be none other than my great great grandparents, William and Elizabeth, with some of their children, Hannah, Mark, Charlotte and Eliza.  I have underlined the Ashby for surely this was what local folk would have called it rather than the full name Ashby Puerorum, and this was what my great grandfather John told the census enumerator who somehow heard it as Aceby.  It was customary in those hard times for the older children to leave home to find work and accommodation elsewhere, to make room for the younger ones - large families were the rule also,

So it was to be expected that John, who would have been about sixteen in 1841, would be working fairly nearby.  And so it proved to be - he was an agricultural labourer, like his father, on a farm at Mavis Enderby, about ten miles away. 

It would be tedious to go into details as to how we then went on to find all the other members of the family.  Suffice it to say that from all the hundreds of names of COULBYs/COLBYs (and other variations of the spelling) we had accumulated from St Catherine’s House, from the Censuses, from the Parish records and printed books at both the Lincolnshire Archives Offices and the Society of Genealogists’ Library together with the considerable number that had been collected by the Salt Lake City Society of Genealogists on their Computer File Index, Eirlys Spawton drew up a pedigree which, at the tine, appeared to mark the end of my three year journey.  Had I but known it, we were entering upon the most exciting and rewarding phase. 

During the Easter holiday, 1980, I had, on one memorable day, the good fortune to accompany Eileen Robson to do work at the Archives Department - she to do her own research, whilst I had to tidy up some loose ends.  We had been at work for some hours when she called no over to her table to show me an extract she had found in .  a volume of “Lincolnshire Wills”.  This was the will of Elizabeth Thorold, a member of the famous Lincolnshire family, and sister of Sir Anthony Thorold.  In the will she leaves money to her ‘sister COLBEE’ and her ‘brother COLBEE’; also to her godson Thomas COLBY, and to Helen, Anthony and Markham COLBY children of Christopher COLBY.  It was Elizabeth Thorold’s sister Anne who had married Christopher COLBY of Granthan.  The Thorold pedigree covering this marriage gave us a clear picture of this link.  It was unrealistic to suppose that a Thorold would have married outside of their own circle, for were they not high in royal favour?  The only conclusion that could be drawn was that these COLBYs were of such standing that it would have been perfectly reasonable far one of them to wed Anne Thorold, whose brothers Sir Anthony and Sir William were in turn High Sheriffs of Lincolnshire in 1617 and 1630 respectively, and for Elizabeth Thorold, Anne’s sister, to be god-mother to the COLBY children. 

But were these COLBYs connected in any way with my ancestral line?  We argued that, were these COLBYs to have been people of some substance, they would possibly have left Wills, in which case these Wills would, in all likelihood, lead us to find the relationships we sought.  The Wills, when we found them, both locally in the Lincoln diocese and also in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, gave us a great deal of information regarding the family structure, but more importantly, we were now able to see these distant relatives as real people and not as a list of so many names.  And yes, these COLBYs were men of substance, - Lionel COLBY  (or ‘Lyon’) 1617 to 1650, born at Fulbeck, was a citizen and vintner of London and his will showed how wealthy he was; Dixon C,. 1679 to 1756 was a doctor in Stamford after having been to Oxford University, where he obtained his BA, MA and his MD; one COLBY was the Constable of the Wapentake of Loveden, another a Colonel on the Royalist aide in the Civil War; there is a COLBY coat of arms and several of the early COLBYs married into families who were also bearers of the same. 

All this information is to be had free for the asking, in almost every case, and during the three years that I have been engaged in this research, I have often marvelled at the great good fortune that has cone the way of the British genealogists; for time and again I have had to be thankful indeed that some ancient scribe had recorded a particular event, that this record had been carefully stored away for centuries perhaps, that someone in recent times had painstakingly, over many years, spent long hours collecting, sorting and indexing such formation from the past, getting this published and then presenting it to some central library, where you and I may get in a few minutes that which might never have been obtainable by the amateur family historian.  Now, almost any British citizen, starting with his own birth certificate and knowing little else of his forbears other than that they were truly of these islands, would, I’m sure, with the aid of these fine collection of records, find it perfectly possible to trace his “family tree” back to the sixteenth century. 

It is said that there can be no finite end to any genealogical expedition.  I now know this to be true, for having at first imagined that I could go no further back with my pedigree, I now realise that as those early COLBYs might well have been entitled to bear heraldic arms, the next course for me is to ask for a search to be made by a herald at the College of Arms to see whether the pedigree goes even further back in time. 

This, I believe, will be a very costly operation and so I shall have to accumulate the necessary finance before going to then.  In the meantime there is still a lot to do to prepare the existing pedigree chart for printing prior to its distribution, and much more has to be discovered regarding the lives of many of these ancestors of mine.  Just where, or when, will it end?  Perhaps I should now put in the next few words to complete the title of this article……

“THERE’S NO DISCOURAGEMENT,
SHALL MAKE HIM ONCE RELENT……”

E.  COULBY