Congratulations Amanda. This must make you feel over the moon. I hope you go on to make some more discoveries. Cheers Jenny Geraldton WA -----Original Message----- From: Chris and Amanda Assenbruck [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, 9 October 2000 7:58 To: [email protected] Subject: Mystery solved aka Maud DOUGLAS/MORGAN/O'BRIEN Hello everyone, have been sitting on the sidelines for a while but finally think i've solved a mystery (at least i can think that till proved otherwise). You may remember the saga where i couldn't find anything on my great granmother Pearl Ethel May Lake because she was illigitimate and her marriage and death certificates gave two different names for her mother being Maud Douglas and Maud Morgan. Finally i found an intestacy of Pearls fathers death in 1924. It was administered by the Public Trustee and as over 75 years have passed it was on open access however the records are not available to the public and one must go through the public trustee and it cost $40 for them to retrieve the file. Now knowing that he had never divorced his wife and that their only child was dead and no guarantee as to what would be in the file i had to hope that he had other beneficiaries, namely my ggrandma and i was suspecting a sibling by the same woman but i thought with my luck it would have gone to the legal widow. Well folks i was very lucky today. Obviously Maud didn't want the legal widow to get what little the was(about 100 pounds) and with the documents was an avidavit from the magistrate at Hughenden telling us that Samuel Charles had taken up with a Maud O"BRIEN and the birthdates of my ggrandma(which we hadn't known only about 1900 and her brother Percy(the suspected sibling). Now all i have to do is verify that the woman with the headstone in Charters Towers that says Maud Lake who died in 1954 is buried as one Maud O'Brien and i can order a death certificate and hopefully find who her parents were, though i may never know why she used the aliases. Sorry this is so long, but sometimes one piece helps it all fall into place and i'm so glad i decided to pay $40 on the chance that there would be something worth it in there. Amanda ==== AUS-NQ Mailing List ==== Search the Rootsweb World Connect Project - an ever growing collection of searchable Gedcoms at http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.com/