William Cardwell, the cotton slasher, is not my great-great-grandfather after all. In my previous blog I did not check my facts, leapt to a conclusion, and committed an act of identify theft. William Cardwell, the cotton slasher of 1881, from Preston, Lancashire, is someone else's great-great-grandpa, not mine. My William Cardwell, from Blackpool, Lancashire, was a farmer, and fell to his death from a hay wagon in 1868.
The mix-up came about because I got over-excited (...didn't think I still could) about the history of the Cardwell family, of which my recently-discovered, 3rd cousin, Marilyn Nagy, has been making me aware. My apologies, Marilyn, for not being patient and running off half-cocked. As a creative blogger, I make a lousy genealogy reseacher. Oh well, I've always learned my lessons the hard way. Maybe it's in the genes.
I have to be careful, with my cousin, not to besmirch her years of Cardwell research. She has been to Salt Lake City to check the Latter Day Saints' genealogical microfilm, and she has walked the streets of Blackpool, which are haunted by generations of Cardwells. So she knows of what she speaks. She may already be regretting her offer to share information with me.
And now I have to worry about the credibility of the family history book which I am writing, entitled 'In Search of a Better Life'. Until I admit that I am basically lazy or prematurely senile, all family history errors, from here on, shall be referred to as computer data malfunctions, which I will vigorously run to ground, in the pursuit of accuracy.
Well, as my friend Peter Marsh says: 'Until I knock on your back door,'
BtheB
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