While Gladstone danced with Disraeli and Salisbury ...

The 1911 census may have gone out of fashion following the arrival of its younger successor, but its unique 'fertility statistics' have proved immeasurably useful to family history researchers.  It's one thing to scour the censuses of the late Victorian era, and thereby establish what we might think of as a complete family, but the 1911 record provides what in most cases is the authentic total, and may send us scurrying to the recently-released GRO records to fill the gaps by searching for the mother's maiden name.

By such means a family of six can become a family of eight, three can become five or, as in one case I found recently, two early children and two later ones book-ended four siblings each of whom lived only a few days or weeks before dying in the same quarter as their birth.

But, to go back to my title ... between the spring of 1868 and the summer of 1892 - fairly well matching the to-and-fro of those famous politicians - Arthur and Clara Kerridge were steadily going about their business of re-populating the north of Suffolk.  During those years, they produced a total of eighteen children and, by 1911, they could claim, 'eighteen children: eighteen still living'.  There was no need for me to search for more, nor to seek deaths of infants either.

I had long been aware of their number, and had dutifully recorded their births when researching the family of my cousin's husband, whose grandmother was their twelfth child.  But it wasn't until a conversation during a visit earlier this year, that I realised that I have noted death details for only four of them.  Somewhat taken aback by this shortcoming, I pledged to search for the deaths of the others.  

Now, at last, I've cleared my family history desk of other matters and have managed to squeeze in (between other regular demands on my time) the opportunity to take up this challenge.  So far, I've made a list, noting the quarters and years of their births, and have noted possible deaths accounting for name and approximate age, but allowing that they might have moved around the country.  However, I realise that this is only scratching the surface, for ten of the eighteen are females, so my search can only provide possible deaths if they remained single.

In making my list, I discovered that not all of these siblings have been accounted for in all possible censuses and only three in the 1939 Register, so one of my early tasks will be to complete that chart. Along with this will be the need to find marriages, thinking that these might at least be reasonably local, and then I shall look for evidence of military service for the sons, and possibly the CWGC records in case any died during the war (this was the line of conversation that sparked off the whole search back in January).  

It doesn't help that there was a family habit of the second forename predominating in common use, for eight of them had two forenames and the first two daughters had three each!  None of the names are particularly rare, if you discount the 'd' in the middle of Standley.  And then there's always the worrying possibility of Philippa Louise being known as Betty ... or similar (not that these specific examples appear at all, but you get my drift).

I did think of following the headlines of recent years, the 'Birmingham Six', the 'Guildford Four' and so on, by heading this piece 'The Hopton Eighteen', but apart from the inaccuracy in that the first three children were born in Hinderclay, and only the other fifteen in Hopton, this template would cast an undeserved slur on the family, and the names wouldn't be so eye-catching anyway.

Given the amount of time and resources I have available to throw at it, this challenge will probably occupy me for the rest of the year, but I think it will be instructive for me as well as an achievement if I can reliably fill all the remaining gaps.