The Search for Sabrina

... or "Sucked Down the Rabbit Hole"

Three weeks ago, I wrote about making rules concerning 'rabbit holes'.  "What are man-made rules," I ask, "if not to be broken?"  So, this week, with the digital ink scarcely dry on that edict, I'm breaking the rule (echoes of our PM here, I confess, but not with such devastating consequences).  To explain the situation, let me begin with a parallel from my Welsh course.  If I'm confronted by a word that - frankly - I've forgotten, I might remember the shape of it and take a punt at filling the gap.  If I'm a letter out, it gets counted as a 'typo' and I don't lose the mark!  I then remember that word next time through remembering that good fortune (sometimes).

Back in the autumn - the second lockdown - I commented here about entering a spouse, discovering that the couple had two children and then entering the first only to find that she's there already, waiting for me!  That surprised me simply because I hadn't remembered the spouse's name, Stangroom.

This week, following my new rule, I began the task of completing that distant family with the intention of documenting births, adding deaths and declaring them 'closed'.  In the case of the first sibling, Mary Ann Batley, being female, I needed to find a marriage in order to locate a death.  When I discovered that she had married Henry Stangroom in 1849, the 'Rabbit-hole Rule' went out of the window!  It's not a common name - and I remembered it this time! - there had to be a link with November's experience.

In the 1851 census, the Stangroom family, living in the Norwich parish of St George, Colegate, comprised Henry, 29, and Mary Ann, 22, a 2-year-old daughter named after her mother ... and one Sabrina Stangroom aged 11, also described as daughter.  My immediate thought was, 'daughter of a previous marriage - Henry must have been a young widower'.  Then I looked again at the ages ... it was possible for him to have been married at 18 and a wife to have died, but was it likely?  I sought the foggy area of the 1841 census for clarification.  Henry was there with his parents and a younger brother, but no sign of wife or daughter.

the Sabrina of Welsh legend - sculpture
discovered in Worcester museum

Sabrina was said to have been born in Roydon, the next village to where I believed Mary Ann to have started life - Bressingham - (although the 1851 enumerator had clearly entered her birthplace as Loddon! which I take as a mis-understanding of Roydon).  I checked birth registrations for the area, but there were no entries for Sabrina or Stangroom, let alone the combination of the two, for a wide range of years.  I also browsed Roydon baptisms for any child with that name, again without success. Would 1861 yield any clues?  There was no trace of the family at all.  Had they been struck by some epidemic?  In this search, I discovered the death of Mary Ann aged 6 in 1855, but of her parents ... again, no sign.

How about 1871 ... did they just not register in 1861, or had the pages simply been lost?  Sure enough, Henry and Mary Ann were there, along with three more children and a 'nurse child' (about which I shall have to seek some meaning later).  There was no sign of the mysterious Sabrina, though.  I began to retrace my steps.  What actually did I know about this family?  I went back to 1841.  There was Stephen, 50, wife Ann, 55, and sons Henry, 20, and John, 10.  Stephen was a weaver, Henry a shoemaker.  Then I remembered my autumn experience and looked back at that Stangroom family.  John, the father of the 'surprising' daughter Edith, was born in 1830, according to his age recorded in 1861, where he was ... a shoemaker.

I returned to the image of that 1861 entry, in the parish of St George, Colegate, and browsed back and forward from it, looking for Henry and Mary Ann.  Sure enough, there they were, only two pages away, with the same three children listed ten years later ... and an elder daughter SABINA!  The family's surname had been mis-transcribed as Stangaard, although how they came by that, I couldn't see.  Much more understandable, though, was the transcription of the girl's name as Labina: the initial letter could easily be mistaken were it not for the S of the surname ... which they had got correct even if what followed was wildly out.  The key to the mystery, however, was not so much the clear spelling of Sabina, but her age ... she was 15.

Armed with the correct details, I easily found her birth recorded in the December quarter of 1845 in the Guiltcross district, which includes both Roydon and Bressingham.  She was registered with the surname Batley!  How Henry and Mary Ann had met - he was from a Norwich family, and this was before the Batley family had moved there - is not clear, but it does seem that Henry, who clearly acknowledged Sabina as his daughter, might have made an effort to shield his wife's potential embarrassment in 1851 by adding a few years to Sabina's age to make it seem impossible for Mary Ann to have been the girl's mother when she would have been only 11.

Perhaps this six-year-old was big for her age!