How I located my grandfather's missing father

Finding David Scott Ritchie's father was a real challenge. For a start, no-one in the family had ever spoken about him. He seemed to have been completely absent, yet surely, if he had died young, Grandad would have talked about it? The whole matter seemed to pulsate with dark intrigue.

Conspiracy theories abounded on our family WhatsApp group but I was the stick-in-the-mud who thought there must be a simple explanation. I began with what I had: First, a marriage record for Maude Alice Parker and David Scott Ritchie dated 1902. Second, the statutory declaration about my grandfather's birth which said his father was a butler. While this occupation sounded pretty grand, especially given the rumour that one or other of them had worked in a palace, it did seem odd that his actual name hadn't been included on the declaration. Clearly, he wasn't part of their lives anymore. Something dire must have happened between 1902 when he married Maude and 1918 when the statutory declaration was signed.

Searching online for David Scott Ritchie, husband of Maude, I soon realised how complicated the process was going to be. Ritchie is a name that crops up all over England and many of the Davids who appear on the census came from Scotland. I didn't think my great-grandfather had been born in Scotland as there'd been no trace of a Scottish accent in Grandad. Still, he did have a very Scots-sounding middle name. I could be wrong.

Meanwhile, another David Scott Ritchie kept cropping up in every search I ran. This was David Scott Ritchie born 1903 in Lambeth. Not my grandfather, obviously, as he had been born in 1902 in Paddington. Yet their identical names suggested a family relationship. It occurred to me then that they could be cousins, sons of brothers who held strongly to the tradition of family names. And sure enough, when I examined David Scott Ritchie of Lambeth's family tree, I found several useful leads.

David of Lambeth's father was William Ritchie, born 1872 in Stratford, Essex. His mother was Ada Sarah Ann Ritchie, born in 1871 in Blackfriars. The 1911 census taken at 105 Upper Tooting Road Tooting S W, Wandsworth Borough, London also included William's mother, Emma Eliza Lavell, and his step-father, James Lavell. From this I deduced that Emma Eliza had once been married to William's father, which allowed me to trace the family back one more generation.

It was fairly easy to find Emma Eliza Ritchie. Aside from there being lots of primary source records online, her name cropped up in the public family trees of people whose ancestors had emigrated from England to the United States and Canada. In fact, David Scott of Lambeth was among them. But back to my tree. I discovered that William Ritchie, son of Emma Eliza, had been the eldest of 3 boys. The youngest brother was named Thomas Scott Ritchie and the other...wait for it...was David Scott Ritchie born in Tottenham in 1873.

The online records and public family trees gave surprisingly little information about this middle son of Emma Eliza but it was enough to satisfy me. David Scott Ritchie of Tottenham was the most likely candidate I had found for the father of my grandfather. There would be time enough to delve into the facts further.