My mum always told us that her father's father Charles Young was a seafarer from Cork, whose family came from Nova Scotia, but when I was looking at his son's entry in 1930 US Federal Census, he recorded his father's nationality as English ( as opposed to his mother's who was Irish). Charles was living in Barry, Wales by the time of the 1901 Census but was not at home on census night and before that he was in Ireland, so I have no record of his age, birthplace or parents names. I know he died between the 1901 census where his wife Jane is recorded as "wife" and 1911 where she is recorded as "twice widowed". A classic genealogical brick wall.
When I was sent details of Jane's burial in 1946 I started wondering why she had not been buried with either of her husbands. I know from his son's birth certificate that Charles Young was a seafarer, so I wondered if he just might have died at sea, and I do have a vague memory of my mum saying that both of her grandfathers had died at sea. So, I took a look at the National Archive website in their section on the Merchant Navy and they directed me to records of deaths at sea held by Find My Past.
I put in the information and lo and behold there it is! He died on board the SS Longbenton in 1903 where he was working as a ships steward. I am taken aback by the cause of death, given as asthma, because my mum, my daughter and I are all asthmatics.
But what really, really, throws me is that his place of birth, in 1861, is Stettin in Prussia, now Szczecin in Poland.
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