Page 352 - Just another English family (Sep 2019)

Coincidences
COINCIDENCES
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Coincidences can be interesting but also hazardous. In tracing family trees, coincidences can suddenly appear without warning. They seem more likely to happen in the nineteenth century rather than in the twentieth century. Perhaps it is that the territory of the twentieth century is more familiar and coincidences don’t spring up so suddenly when you are more aware. Also, of course, there seem to be the use of fewer names in the nineteenth century. A child will often have the name of a parent and so it may be difficult to distinguish between father and son or mother and daughter. A child may die early and a later child of the same parents may be given the same name. These sometimes appear to be coincidences but they are not really so. There is a human agent that is choosing the same name as the parent or the dead older brother or sister. They are not real coincidences. Real coincidences seem much more out of control than that.
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What seemed to me to be the biggest coincidence in developing this family tree was noticed when I was working on the family tree early one morning on the balcony of our hotel room in Sri Lanka. I had been working on the family tree for around a decade and a half, so did not expect any major surprises. I had brought the index to the 1871 census on holiday, but I had not yet printed out the detailed entries from the Ancestry source. I was just checking through that the individual entries could be linked up together into families, for the task I had set myself on holiday was to try to link the main branches of the family by using the censuses of the nineteenth century with their current counterparts still living in the early twenty-first century.
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William Edward Soothill, who became Professor of Chinese at University College, Oxford after half a lifetime as a missionary in China, is perhaps the best known person in the Soothill family tree. Few would have heard of him now but in scholarly circles, as the author of the first English-Chinese dictionary, he has an
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