Not Seeing The Moores For The Trees

This family photograph from the 1930s perfectly captures a marriage of style and elegance. It also captures a marriage between two people, but I am a little uncertain as to who they are. The one person I can identify is the man seated second from the left, the man with a hairstyle of sculptured grandeur, and he is my Uncle Harry (Harry Moore 1903-1982). He did have a brother, Eddy, who married Minnie Noble in Bradford in August 1933, so there is a reasonable chance that is who the bride and groom are. In the hope of finding more information about this relatively remote branch of the family tree I turned to an on-line genealogy site. I quickly found the elusive Eddy Moore and his bride and for further information I was directed to a public family tree of the Moore family. To my surprise this identified generations of potential relatives I never knew I had: the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of my Uncle Harry and his wife, Annie.

This, however, was where the potential problems started. Aunty Annie and Uncle Harry never had any children, especially not in London when they were just teenagers and long before they had met. In constructing this elaborate family tree - which contained a host of photographs of real members of my family - a simple mix-up with a fairly common set of names had falsely grafted our two families together. What I should really do is to write to the person concerned and point out the error of their ways. I won't, however. Let them share our branch of the family - there are enough eccentric characters in there to go around. And let Aunty Annie and Uncle Harry have their descendants erect trees in their memory. They deserve it.