Why I still Use Spreadsheets — Part 3 Identifying Offspring

Once I’d identified the right Henry, then I used a spreadsheet to identify his offspring. Like his son, Henry Lowe was also in the army. He moved around the UK and even went to India, with his wife, Bridget Fox, accompanying him during some of his military career. So the family didn’t stay in one place.

I was lucky to find a couple of baptism records that showed both parents, but the civil registration index didn’t provide enough information to determine which births belonged to my great-great grandparents.

I was able to get a list of ‘potential’ children from the UK’s GRO website. The GRO search function lets you enter the family name of the father and the maiden name of the mother. But there were dozens of records with a father named Lowe and a mother with the maiden name Fox. There were far too many children for one couple to have had, especially since in some cases there were multiple births in the same year.

The only sure way to identify which of the children belonged to my great-great grandparents was to order the birth certificates. But ordering dozens of certificates would be costly. So, to narrow down the prospects, I entered all the records into a spreadsheet. Then I cross-referenced the location of Henry’s regiment with the locations of the births that happened that year. I quickly found three likely children and ordered their certificates. Two of them turned out to be correct, but one was not. The surnames of the parents were the same but the first names were different. Returning to the spreadsheet, I found several other children who likely belonged to that couple based on their location. I then began searching for baptism records for each of the children to see if their parents names could be found. I was able to assign several children to specific couples. Colour coding helped me see at a glance which family each child belonged to.