No time for a detour to Cranbrook, where the Rev. William Eddy was vicar at St. Dunstan’s during the time of Shakespeare. Made a pit stop in Oxford, but too short to look up the Rev. Stephen Batchelder. Saw Westminster Abbey, but the line was too long to pay his respects at the tomb of King Edward I. Couldn’t even get to Trowbridge to search out Alfred Hart, who came to Maine and served in the Civil War from Dexter.

OK, so my younger son, Tony, didn’t exactly hit the genealogical trail for his English forebears on a recent trip to England. But you know he wouldn’t dare come home without something about an ancestor – anybody’s ancestor.

In Burton-on-Trent, a town in Staffordshire, north of Birmingham, Tony of the Frenchville Sauciers and Brother Rex of the Ohio Norrises found a cemetery in a park where the gravestones were laid on the ground in rows that were slanted or banked, as he explained it. Tony found one with this inscription:

Sacred

To the Memory of

Thomas Leicester Bladon

Of This Town

Who Departed This Life

April 19th 1854

Aged 87 Years

Also

Jane His First Wife

Who Died April 21st 1833

Aged 80 Years

I thought it worth a try to look for Thomas Leicester Bladon on a Web site, such as the Mormon Church’s www.familysearch.org, especially since we know where he is buried and that he was born approximately 1767.

The International Genealogical Index on the site lists more than 370 entries for Thomas Bladon or Bladen, several in Burton-on-Trent. Nothing seemed to match up, except possibly a marriage for a Thomas Bladon on May 18, 1796, in Burton-upon-Trent, as it also is called, to a Jane Dixon.

Maybe it’s the same one, maybe not. There were Thomas Bladons in that area from the 1600s to the 1800s.

We’ve talked before about the fact that www.familysearch.org has recently added the 1880 Census for the United States, and the 1881 censuses for Canada and Great Britain. Here’s something I hadn’t noticed.

The British census for 1881 includes not only the town where the person was born, but the town of residence and street address.

The Thomas Bladon who was born in 1823 in Burton-on-Trent lived at 98 Bull Lane in West Bromwich, Stafford, in 1881. The Thomas Bladon born in 1868 lived at String Hey Road 2 Bponte Villa in Liscard, Cheshire. The Thomas Bladen born in 1851 lived at 18 Perseverance Street in Bermondsey, Surrey.

If you are not familiar with genealogical resources at the University of Maine’s Fogler Library in Orono, you absolutely want to attend the tour being organized by the Penobscot Valley Genealogical Society.

It’s free – just show up at the library on campus at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 19. Our guide will be Richard Hollinger, Special Collections librarian at Fogler.

If you want to carpool, meet at 5:30 p.m. across from Bangor Public Library on Harlow Street in Bangor.

Mark your calendars for upcoming activities:

PVGS will hold its next regular meeting at 6 p.m. March 19 in the Lecture Hall at Bangor Public Library. Rhea Cote-Robbins, founder and executive director of the Franco-American Women’s Institute, will tell us how to find Franco-American women’s life stories and their contributions.

PVGS also will sponsor an “Introduction to Genealogy” workshop 9:30 a.m.-noon Saturday, April 5, at Bangor Public Library. Stay tuned for details.

Also, watch for information on a spring genealogy fair sponsored by Wassebec Genealogical Society, to be held on an upcoming Saturday in Piscataquis County.

The Mid-Coast Genealogy Group will meet at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 26, at the LDS Church on Old County Road in Rockport.

Civil War historian and military history author Blake Hines will speak about the Union Army and the culture of the mid-19th century. He also will discuss a database he created of 40,000 members of Civil War regiments from Connecticut pension records.

All are welcome. For more information, contact Marlene A. Groves at 594-4293.

Send genealogy queries to Family Ties, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor, ME 04402; or send e-mail to familyti@bangordailynews.net.