A Sting in the Tale!

My title is mis-spelled deliberately, for it applies to what follows at many levels.  I leave you to work out the details.

With last week's excitement subsiding after a family history 'triple', and my charity work-giver on holiday, normal genie research took pride of place once more this week. There were just five more individuals left in the Burlingham sector of my tree to be checked out.  The five comprised a couple with an unmarried only son, and the father's unmarried sister with her young daughter.  I really felt close to the end of this project that has dragged on - as my readers well know - for so long.

However, those who study censuses should, of anyone, be most aware of the dangers of the premature summation of small fowls as yet unborn!  The Burlingham couple were Francis and Lucy; I had no maiden surname for Lucy, but this was easily overcome from marriage registers, and was confirmed by checking the birth of the son, Frank, on the GRO website.  The 1911 census revealed that Frank had married four years earlier; there were no children, however, and it seems they never became parents at all.  The last of these four died in 1950.

On then, to Hannah, the sister who had fallen victim to an early pregnancy.  Her baby was born on Boxing Day, 1860 and died during August the following year.  While Hannah was still only 17, she had no doubt gained a degree of maturity through her experience.  She caught the eye of George Ashford, a young man who had grown up in the village.  Following the death of his mother the previous summer, George was living alone at the 1861 census in the house they had formerly shared, making a living for himself as a sawyer.

Hannah and George were married at the village church in the December quarter of 1862.  Looking back with 21st century eyes, it's impossible to fathom whether or not the following decades are likely to have fulfilled Hannah's expectations, perhaps putting life to dreams she had formed as a fifteen-year-old when her daughter had been conceived.  It may even have been the case that this young woodworker had been the baby's father.  Whatever the background, the facts of the next years are simply put.  The couple welcomed a daughter in the third quarter of 1863 and over the next seventeen years further children followed at almost regular intervals of nine quarters or so until, in December 1880, came the arrival of Hannah's tenth child.  Her body no doubt exhausted, Hannah Ashford, neé Burlingham, died in the summer of 1881 just weeks after her 37th birthday.

I've begun tracing the lives of those nine surviving children, and the signs of an early end to my labours are not great.  Emma, the eldest, gave birth to a son in the early months of 1883.  Her brother James was married in the autumn of that year, and I can't help wondering whether his plans might have had some bearing on the fact that she and her son's father followed suit just weeks later.  By the time of the 1901 census these two couples had produced a total of 22 children, albeit that one of each family had died within weeks of being born.

Their second-youngest brother Albert was living in Harrow in 1901.  Ten years later he was in Hampstead and had been married for 8 years, during which he and his wife had suffered the loss of two of their four children, while only one of those remaining was with them at the census: more work for me to do there!

Another brother, William, joined the Royal Marine Light Infantry (one of the branches of the armed forces that later became the Royal Marines), had married a woman named Susanna, and was living in Hampshire in 1901.  The marriage register indicated that her maiden name was Hillier.  I have often moaned about the family I'm researching sometimes being recorded as Bullingham and sometimes Burlingham, often changing from one generation to the next.  Here was another name to provide hours of wasted research time!

In the 1901 census, Susanna's place of birth foxed the transcribers; looking at the original I could see it was Sturminster Newton.  She was 27 years old, so I looked for a birth in 1873 or '74.  It is clearly a regional name, but the only ones I came up with were in Pewsey and Devizes districts, neither of which included Sturminster - which had its own district!  One of these had the full name, Susanna (albeit with an ending 'h'), and was within the range to give age 27 in 1901.  The other was Susan, and a year older.  I followed up Susannah, who was born in Burbage, and her family in 1881 and 1891, all the time wondering why, after getting married, she should say she was born some 50 miles away.

Puzzled rather than satisfied, I turned for inspiration to the 1911 census.  Here I found yet another birthplace for the girl: Belchalwell (which again foxed the transcribers!).  When I looked for this and found that it is only a couple of miles from Sturminster Newton, I was convinced I had been on the wrong track.  Why change the place of birth a second time, to an obscure village that was close to the first fiction, ... unless it were true?  In my search for Belchalwell, I found an unexpected entry on the Google results page, headed 'Belchalwell Parish Records'.  This led me to the page of the Online Parish Clerk, which was full of fascinating information, not least of which was a transcription of the 1871 census for the village.  One click and ... Bingo!  The fourth household listed proved to be Susanna's family (without her, of course), whose name was given as Hilyer, a search for which finally gave me her birth details.

That was one of the families nailed but, with more of that generation, and at least a couple of dozen of the next, it looks as if there's to be no end yet to my quest and, with the prospect of more voluntary work next week now confirmed, the coming weeks are likely to be very busy!