Digging up a Soldier

The 1911 census is the first one for which the individual householders' schedules have been preserved ... as opposed to the information that enumerators extracted from them in previous censuses.  It's clear from his entry that Patrick Robert Howard Henry was a man to whom other information was more important than his own name.  He referred to himself as 'Robert' (the other names came from other records), but provided two forenames for his wife and sons.  He was born in Leitrim in about 1849 but he was keen for all to know that this wasn't just anywhere within that county, but in Leitrim town itself, for the name was written twice on the form, to indicate both 'town' and 'county'.   

He was also meticulous in declaring his 'occupation', stating that he was 'Pensioner Sergt. Major, 4th Suffolk Regt.'.  In previous censuses he had rounded his age up: 42 in 1891 and 52 in 1901, but was he sensitive about being eleven or twelve years older than his wife when he rounded it down this time to 61 years?  The '4th Suffolk Regt.' was actually the 4th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment.  It was formed, when the army was re-organised in 1881, by the amalgamation and absorption into the Suffolk Regiment of the Cambridgeshire Militia, which was based in Ely, and the Cambridgeshire Rifle Corps.  These two units became the 4th ('Cambridge University') Volunteer Battalion of the newly-formed regiment.  Robert was an instructor of musketry and in 1891, he was awarded a 'long service and good conduct' medal.  It isn't clear just when he enlisted, but it was almost certainly before 1880, for in that year he married Mahala Marjorem in the garrison city of Colchester.

Sadly, Mahala died in Ely at, or shortly after, the birth of their son in the summer of 1883.  She was only 24 and the son was named Robert Marjorem Henry in her honour.  Towards the end of the next year, Robert married again.  His bride was Mary Esther Rignal, who had been born in the Fenland city in 1860.  Their first two children, Mabel and Albert, were born in Ely, where the battalion was based, in 1892 and 1894.  It may have been about then that Robert retired, for their third child, John, was born in 1896 at Hopton in north Suffolk.

Mabel was married in the spring of 1909 to Charles Boggis.  Charles was the youngest surviving son out of eleven children born to Benjamin and Harriet Boggis.  These two were both from Norfolk; Benjamin was from Fersfield and Harriet from Garboldisham, where they had been married in 1866.  They settled in Barningham, where all their children were born, but then moved to Market Weston in that same northern corner of Suffolk.

Charles was a blacksmith and the occupations of the rest of the Boggis family were all in that general mechanical and production sector: carpenter, mechanical engineer, engineering apprentice, and so on. It was no surprise, then, to discover that the son of Charles's brother Arthur was the William Arthur Boggis who founded the famous organ building firm of W A Boggis, based at Roydon next door to my own native town of Diss.

Robert died in 1929, but it was actually Mary who led me into this story, for she appeared as a widow - described almost casually as a 'visitor' - at the home of her granddaughter on the 1939 Register.  Unlike the censuses, the Register contains no indication of the relationships within a household, and I was curious to prove or disprove whether she was in fact the grandmother of Mrs Jerrold in the household at Felsham where she was registered.

And why, you may ask, was I led to be looking at this family in the first place?  Simply that in 1917, when they were both widowed, my great-great-aunt, Sarah Francis née Sturgeon married Charles Boggis's eldest brother John.