Don't Let the Facts ...

... (or the lack of them) get in the way of a good story. It's the would-be historian's motto.  I don't claim to be a well-researched historian, but I do try to stick to the facts where I can.  This new-year yarn is fertile ground for truth to give way to fiction.

Having cleared my decks before the holiday period, and having no great desire to join the crowds sampling the latest excitement, i.e. the 1921 Census, I looked around for another area of my family history to which to apply some spit and polish.

It didn't take long to pick up some details given to me getting on for twenty years ago by my fourth cousin, once removed, whom I shall call Jane. Our common ancestor is my 3xgreat-grandfather, Robert Botwright (1759-1847); Jane is descended from his third son, John, and my line is that of his second son Robert.

Apart from entering this family into my tree, I've done virtually nothing with the data since the day Jane's e-mail fluttered into my inbox.  Just a few births and marriages had been found in the National Indexes, but that's about all.  While waiting for my 'other job' to re-activate, I started tracing Jane's family in the early censuses.

Her great-grandparents, James and Caroline Tyrrell married in Bungay in 1877 and were living in Mettingham in 1881.  This is the first of three villages along the road from Bungay to Beccles in the Waveney Valley of north Suffolk.  James was born about 1851 at another of those villages. Barsham.  His middle name Scaggs suggests that he might have been illegitimate, and I've parked him to look at another day.

His wife, Caroline Warnes, was born at Wingfield, some fifteen miles to the south-west of Mettingham, in 1856, and was recorded there in 1861 along with her parents and eight siblings.  Her father, Robert Warnes, was a local man and her mother Martha was born about three miles away at Brockdish, just over the border into Norfolk.  Martha was the daughter of John Botwright mentioned above.  The puzzling thing so far was the fact that - according to Jane - Martha and Robert were married at Pulham, another six miles or so further into Norfolk.

I must explain here that Pulham is actually two villages, not one. Each has a medieval church, dedicated to St Mary, so that negates the saint's name as an identifier as is the case in several places.  (If you want extreme and local evidence of this, just look eastward to South Elmham and to Ilketshall, where about a dozen different villages in total are known simply by their saint's name, with either South Elmham or Ilketshall tagged on almost as an afterthought.)

But both Pulham villages are St Mary's.  Nowadays the northern village is the larger and has a market, or did in former times,  so its name is Pulham Market, while its neighbour rejoices in the original Pulham St Mary.  However, it's not the same actual saint in each case and I found this fact utilised for distinction in some of the earlier censuses, where the larger village is referred to as Pulham Magdalen and the other as Pulham Virgin.

Robert and Martha were married in 1843 at Pulham Market Methodist Church.  You could be forgiven for thinking that that explains why they married so far from the bride's home, although there was a Methodist chapel in Brockdish from the 1800s.  Maybe that wasn't licensed for marriages - if that was a factor in those days - or maybe it wasn't big enough ... the present church (now converted for other use) wasn't built until 1860.

I said that Caroline was living at her birthplace in 1861; given the venue for her parents' wedding, why was I surprised to find the whole family living at Pulham St Mary in 1871?  All of the children, born between 1844 and 1865, had been born in Wingfield; why should they up sticks after twenty-odd years and move to the village where they married?  Could it simply be the ongoing search for employment (Caroline was described as a servant, her father and elder brother as agricultural labourers but the younger children were scholars), or was there some other reason?

Her mother, Martha Botwright, was living in Brockdish in 1841, with a young labouring family, perhaps as a servant.  Meanwhile, Robert (known then as WALNE, and also when he married Martha, and in 1851), was found recorded in ... Pulham St Mary.  The household there, on North Green, consisted of Isaac & Sophia Elmar, 38 & 35, their teenage sons George and James, Sarah Walne, 60, and Robert, 20.  Isaac and Robert were agricultural labourers and Sarah was described as 'independent'; Isaac, his sons and Sarah were born in Norfolk, the other two not.

Since Robert was born in Wingfield, why had he and his mother now moved so far away?  Given the limitations of the 1841 census and the absence of any earlier record, we can only guess at possible family structures.  Further research is clearly needed, but my present guess is that Sarah, now widowed, and her (given her age, youngest) son had sought security with family members.  It's possible that Sophia was her daughter, or that Isaac was her brother.  Either way, it establishes an earlier connection with the village that was maintained by Robert and Caroline years later.

We are constantly reminded that distance was no barrier to movement in past times, either for a daily commute or for the longer term.  Even so, movements were rarely random, and we should always look for other links to support the decisions behind them.