Genealogist Amy Johnson Crow, who blogs at No Story Too Small, has set a challenge to write about one ancestor each week. I’ve decided to take up that challenge to wake up my (somewhat) languishing blog, but to honor my ancestors. I plan to post every week on Sunday, and I encourage others to join the challenge with me.

Considering that my Welsh great-grandmother died in the 1900s, I have only scant details about her. I cannot find a birth record for her, nor can I find the marriage of her parents. It doesn’t help that her maiden surname was Tyler. The variations are all over the place—Taylor, Tylor, Tyler, Tayler, Talor. Why couldn’t her name be unusual, like Emma Muggleworth, who was born in Monmouthshire, Wales about the same time? Perhaps they even knew each other!

Emma Tyler was born ABT 1867 in Abertillery, Monmouthshire. I have not found an Emma TYLER birth in the indexes, but may have to order one or two of the Emma TAYLOR birth certificates in case that’s how she was registered. I know from her marriage to my great-grandfather, Charles Milton, that her father’s name was Daniel Tyler. He was deceased by the time of the marriage, which was in 1889. I only found Emma Tyler once in the census as a child, when she was 3. Even then, her father was listed as David rather than Daniel, but other facts seem to fit. At least she had a brother named “Bazil” (or Basil) which made it a little easier to find her.

From the point of her marriage forward, Emma was easy to track in the census. But as with many of my female ancestors, Emma did not live a long life. She passed away at the age of 42, after 20 years of marriage and the birth of four children—one being my grandmother Hilda Doris Milton.

Emma lived and died in Abertillery, the town where she was born. She and her siblings were the first generation of her family born in Wales, as her father was originally from Gloucestershire.