(Yes, More Than One This Week!)
This week I had not one but several eureka moments – breakthroughs in an early nineteenth-century brick wall, only to find another one waiting behind it!
The brick wall began while researching the life of a client’s ancestor. I had the name and occupation of his father, together with an approximate year of birth (1808) and location (St Marylebone, London). However, despite searching across numerous databases, including Ancestry, Findmypast and FamilySearch, I could not find a baptism for him. Searching for the father’s name rather than the child produced no useful results in London either. Were they from Suffolk? Norfolk? Kent? The surname certainly appears to have roots in Suffolk.
The first breakthrough came when I found a man of the same name in London Land Tax records from the early 1800s. Could this be the father I was looking for? Adding these records to my working tree led to a second breakthrough: a possible burial record in 1814 for a man aged 50, in the correct parish of St Marylebone. The record had been incorrectly transcribed as age 30, which explained why I had missed it initially.
Armed with these clues, I searched for a marriage and found only one likely candidate within a twenty-year period around 1800. This led me to two baptism records in St Marylebone, dated 1803 and 1812. Neither was for the ancestor I was seeking, but I felt I was on the right track. The elder child sadly died at the age of ten, and her burial record provided her father’s name and occupation – both matched the details I already had.
But where was my ancestor? Why wasn’t he appearing in the searches? Was this really the right family?
Convinced there must have been more children, I began searching through the digitised parish registers page by page. Sure enough, between 1808 and 1812 I found a baptism in 1808 for the child I had been looking for. Eureka! The reason it had not appeared in surname searches remains something of a mystery. The only difference was a single letter – a “u” instead of an “i” – yet it had escaped every search I had tried.
By this point, I was confident I had identified the correct family. The father’s name, occupation, location and dates all aligned, and there appeared to be no realistic alternatives.
Continuing through the registers revealed another sad chapter. The boys’ mother was buried just seven days before the baptism of the youngest child in 1812, aged 42. Their father followed in 1814 at the age of 50, leaving two young sons, aged approximately six and two, as orphans.
The elder brother went on to serve in the military and eventually settled in Australia. The younger brother – the direct ancestor I was researching – followed his father’s trade as a carpenter and married twice, fathering three children.
But that leaves my next challenge. What happened to the boys between 1814 and adulthood? Who took them in after their parents died? And who were their grandparents?
One brick wall has fallen, but another is already waiting to be tackled.
Sarah Pettyfer 