We are in the middle of the long summer holidays here, so I’m not doing a great deal of blogging or genealogy. However, I did have a rummage a couple of days ago looking for more information about the STALLAN family from Duxford in Cambridgeshire and, to my delight, came across the will of my 9 x great grandfather, John Stallan which not only provided some useful family details, but also revealed the fact that his wife Elizabeth, my great grandmother, had been a widow at the time of their marriage. Great stuff! I had assumed her surname at that time was her maiden name and had been trying to find her under that name for a long time. Not so good, the parish registers in Duxford (St. John) don’t include a mother’s maiden on baptism records, so she only appears as Elizabeth in the entries for the children from both her marriages 
Even more infuriating, I realised from the dates that my 10x great grandfather John SWANN was the curate at St. Johns when many of these babies were baptised and therefore may have been responsible for the omission.
You know those questions often posed on genealogy forums, the ones that ask ‘if you had a time machine who would you visit?’ I think my answer will now have to be, John Swann, to suggest he takes a bit more notice of mothers, not just because it is the right thing to do, but also because it might avoid his granddaughter banging her head against her monitor screen.
