Hi Everyone, I have been searching for the above for several years now. A Mary Ann BALL married a George EITCHER at Emmanuel Church Nottingham in 18 October 1890. I know mary Ann lived for many years, but I have been unable to trace either of them after that date, though I did find the birth of a child which I believe to be theirs. One of the witnesses was a soldier and I think George may have been. As the name sounds vaguely foreign I did wonder if they changed it because of the WW1, but this is quite a time after they married. If anyone has ideas I'd be most grateful. Many thanks. Joyce

From: J.M.Jupp@exeter.ac.uk > Hi Everyone, I have been searching for the above for several years > now. A Mary Ann BALL married a George EITCHER at Emmanuel Church > Nottingham in 18 October 1890. I know mary Ann lived for many years, > but I have been unable to trace either of them after that date, though > I did find the birth of a child which I believe to be theirs. One of > the witnesses was a soldier and I think George may have been. > > As the name sounds vaguely foreign I did wonder if they changed it > because of the WW1, but this is quite a time after they married. If > anyone has ideas I'd be most grateful. Many thanks. Joyce > Do you have the marriage certificate which would give the names of both fathers? FreeBMD, as I am sure you will have already discovered, has only two people called EITCHER at all in any forename(s) - the marriage of the George Eitcher you quote and his presumed son, George William Eitcher, born in 1894. This makes me think the surname was not always Eitcher but something else. Surname Atlas (a program that analyses all the data from the 1881 census and produces instant distribution maps of any surname) has no entries at all for the name. Indeed, EITCHER as a surname appears to be virtually non-existent. The IGI offers not a single example in the British Isles, though I haven't checked all other regions. Eitcher sounds vaguely German but there is no instance in Germany or Continental Europe, either. I did, however, find Mary Eitcher, George's wife, in the 1891 census. She was aged 20, married, a lace dresser, born Nottingham 1871, living at 25 Court St, Radford, Nottingham, with her grandmother, Elizabeth HEARD, 64, also a lace dresser. There seems no doubt this is your Mary, since also in the household was a 3-year-old boy called Ernest BALL, who was shown as Elizabeth's gt-grandson. This Mary is the only Eitcher I could find in ANY census! If, as you suggest, George was a soldier, then he could well have been abroad and in 1901 he could have been in South Africa fighting in the Boer War. However, a check at TNA produced no results. It occurs to me the name could perhaps have been FITCHER, since an "E" and an "F" can be easily confused. Or possibly FLITCHER/FLETCHER or some similar name. Do you have any other clues to offer at all? -- Roy Stockdill Professional genealogical researcher, writer & lecturer Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History: www.genuki.org.uk/gs/Newbie.html "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." OSCAR WILDE