My Great Uncles Dick and Bert CHERRIMAN 1925
Oh what a tangled web of spellings: Cherriman/Cherryman/Chereman and the list goes on. It all depended on which parish clerk was entering the details in the parish register or how the census enumerator decided he wanted to spell the name - or these days how a computer has decided to interpret a handwritten entry. Not an easy task when it comes to genealogy, but who wants research to be easy. The solution for most people researching this surname has been to break the family down into distinct parishes: The Cherriman's of Henfield, The Cherriman's of West Grinstead, The Cherriman's of Ashurst etc. But of course later generations left the rural countryside and made for towns along the south coast so we get descendants from all these parishes ending up in Brighton. Confusion reigns supreme.
I started researching my Grandmother's family back in the 1980s. This was back in the day when the most useful aid to research was the IGI (or International Genealogical Index for those who are far too young to have heard of those initials). It was a wonderful index produced by the Latter Day Saints and normally accessed on flat pieces of plastic known as microfiche. Think of old negatives and you will be on the way to visualising the technology of the time. The individual microfiche had to be inserted between glass plates on a microfiche reader for the image to be displayed on a screen where it might or might not be legible - that all depended on whether the reader needed a new lamp. I spent hours peering into dark screens and scribbling down details of Cherriman's from Henfield, West Grinstead and Ashurst. Having separated the wheat from the chaff I would then visit St. Catherine's House and spend days going through weighty index ledgers of birth/marriag/death to find a reference for certificates. The bare dates were never enough for me. I always wanted to know a little more. Details that only the certificates could provide. Who were the witnesses to a marriage? Was the spouse a widow or widower? And most important of all - what was the cause of death? Oh the joy when a death certificate arrived for some long lost ancestor showing that a coroner's inquest had been held. That would lead to a day trip to the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale where I would spend hours fighting with reels of microfilm and again peering into dark screens trying to find a short article about yet another Cherriman suicide. Yes, this appears to have been a trait of the Cherriman family. Then there were visits to County Record Offices where the Parish Chest and Poor Law records could be found. Sometimes a mere scrap of paper would show that the parish had bought a pair of shoes for a young boy named Cherriman.
These days the IGI has been digitised and forms the basis of the Family Search database. Add to that the databases on Ancestry and Find My Past etc. and us researchers can breathe a sigh of relief at the advances in technology. It really has never been easier to gain the basic details of birth, baptism, marriage, death and burial. But how much is missed if we never go near what used to be called a County Record Office or we never order a death certificate?
Over the past 40 years I have collected a number of stories about Cherriman Characters and would hate the thought of all my research dying with me. Hence this little blog where I hope to share The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
If any reader should also be researching the Cherriman family please let me know as I would love to hear any quirky stories that you may have uncovered - or just say hello to a distant 6th. cousin goodness knows how many times removed.
