When I first started building my family tree, I was careful. I entered everything from a large handwritten tree compiled by a relative and checked it thoroughly against original records. At that stage, I felt quietly confident that I was doing things “properly.”
That confidence led directly to my first real mistake.
Once I had finished working through my mother’s maiden name - the Boliver line - I turned my attention to my mother’s father’s family, the Hinton line. Like many beginners, I began looking at other people’s online trees to see what had already been done.
One belonged to a distant cousin. His research looked impressive: original certificates, photographs, and generations already mapped out. He was a Hinton himself, and because his tree appeared well sourced, I copied a large part of it into my own.
I did some checking - but not nearly enough.
The Hintons were a close-knit family, and forenames were reused heavily across generations. In this case, the two men at the centre of the problem were first cousins, which only added to the confusion. Unsurprisingly, their names, ages, and places overlapped in ways that made assumptions feel reasonable.
Both men were named Thomas Hinton.
Both were born in 1855.
Both had genuine connections to Ightfield.
To complicate matters further, both Thomases had sisters named Mary and Ellen, and brothers named John and Frederick - making their families appear almost interchangeable when viewed quickly or out of context.
But they were not the same person.
What finally made me stop and look much more closely was not a census discrepancy, but a marriage - followed by two more.
I was following the life of Thomas Hinton who married in Ightfield, first to Elizabeth Dodd. After her death, he married Emily Hopkins, and on the 1911 census the couple appear together: Thomas aged 55, Emily aged 57. Living with them is Lillian Harrison, aged 29, described as an “adopted daughter.”
When Emily died in 1915, events took another unexpected turn. In 1916, Thomas married Lillian Harrison herself, before dying the following year in 1917.
It was such an unusual sequence of events that I began to examine the records much more carefully—not just for Thomas, but for Emily and Lillian too. Who was Lillian? Was she truly adopted, a stepdaughter, or something else entirely? I still don’t know the full story.
But while untangling those questions, something far more important became clear.
On every census record, this Thomas consistently stated that he was born in Agden, near Malpas, Cheshire. His childhood can be traced through Agden and Tilstock, and after his marriage in Ightfield to a local woman, his later life unfolded in Kinlet, Shropshire, and then Ribbesford, Worcestershire.
That life did not belong to the Thomas Hinton who was born in Moreton Say, grew up in Ightfield, and later moved to Tranmere.
Both men were real. Both were first cousins. Both were born in 1855. But their adult lives had been accidentally transposed.
I had copied that error into my own tree.
Once the two lives were separated and rebuilt independently from the records, everything fell back into place.
Takeaway: A shared name and a shared place do not make a shared identity — especially in close-knit families.
This was the first major mistake I made in my family history research—but it certainly wasn’t the last.
It taught me two lessons I’ve never forgotten: a shared name and a shared place do not make a shared identity, and the more convincing a tree looks, the more dangerous it can be.
Other people’s family trees can be invaluable guides, but they are not evidence. When I stopped following assumptions and rebuilt each life from scratch, the truth became clear.
Writing this post has also made me want to return to Thomas Hinton and look again—properly—at his three marriages and the complicated relationships around them. But that is another story.
In future posts, I’ll be sharing more of the mistakes I made along the way, and what each one taught me. If you’re just starting your own family tree, I hope my missteps help you avoid a few years of unpicking later on.
Thomas Hinton, number 1, brother of my Gt Gt Grandfather Dicken Hinton
