The 1921 Shortcut Misfired ... and how!

In an attempt to help people like me (mean and patient), or others who simply couldn't afford it, someone put forward a means of utilising the 1921 Census data without paying the per-view fee.  If you hover over the image logo of a suspected record, you can obtain the name you entered for the search together with the first names of two others and the total number of people in the household.  By repeating the search for others you expect to be there, it is possible to build up a fair picture of who was in the household ... but, of course, still lacking the details of age, relationship, occupation, etc.

Last year, this was fine and gave me all I really needed for a score or so of families I was working on,  Since upgrading my Findmypast account when I renewed my subscription last month, I've been working through those results and adding the previously hidden data.  One result has underlined to me the ultimate folly of relying too heavily on this sneaky technique.  I feel it my shameful duty to tell you the whole story here.

Jobes is a fairly uncommon surname, found principally in County Durham and the area around Newcastle-on-Tyne.  I had discovered the family of Mark Jobes, born in 1859, and Sarah, née Bruce some 6 or 7 years his junior.  They were married in the June quarter of 1886 and I had followed them through the censuses of 1891 and 1901 as their family grew: George (whose birth was registered as Joshua in 1887) was followed by Sarah Jane in 1889, Mary Hannah (1892), Mark (1893), Jane Isabel (1896), Ethel (1898) and Edith Mary in 1901.  All was going well although, in a typical coal miner's terrace home in Annfield Plain, things were probably getting quite tucked up space-wise ... especially when twins Jonathan and Robert arrived in 1904.

Mark died in 1906 at the age of 47 and into this crowded house came a younger miner looking for board and lodging.  Thomas Palmer, born in 1882 on the outskirts of Durham, lost no time in making himself at home.  

In the census entry for 1911, he was listed next after Sarah Jobes, although described as a boarder, before all the children.  Although only 28, his age was shown as 32, while Sarah was shown as 39, when she was actually 45.  (Mary Hannah had left home but was lodging nearby in another large household, where she was described as married, although retaining the name Jobes.)  Sarah said that she had been married 24 years and had borne 9 children all of whom were still alive.  Since she was a widow, she wasn't required to provide this information; the nine children were correctly recorded, and she was indeed married 24 years before the census, although taken with her supposed age of 39 that would imply marriage at 15!

The family also boasted a granddaughter, Ada, born in the June quarter of 1907 and correctly entered as 3 years old.  As can be seen here, the sons were listed first after Sarah and Thomas, and then all the daughters.  It would appear that Sarah's thoughts as she entered the name of her eldest daughter were on her granddaughter, because the age 20 for Sarah Jane was superimposed on the 3 for Ada, suggesting, perhaps, that Sarah Jane rather than her absent sister Mary Hannah, by then aged 19, was Ada's mother.

So we come to 1921.  I adopted the strategem outlined above and found the names Edith Mary (my prime concern), Thomas, Jennie Isabella, Robert, Jonathan and Ada out of a total of 7 individuals.   Given that I had already found the death of Sarah in the March quarter of 1918 (with a recorded age of 48 ... closer to her real age of 52 than had been the case in 1911), These were close enough for me to construct the family as Thomas Palmer, 42 and the remainder all unmarried Jobes at varying ages based on the 1911 census.  So far as I was concerned the seventh person could have been either a lodger or a younger child fathered by Thomas on either Jane (now calling herself Jennie) or the now-missing Sarah Jane. 

Now I'm in a position to review, with the support of  civil registration, the true story as revealed by the 1921 Census.  Firstly (another thing not revealed in advance of subscribing), the precise address.  Apart from a change of name from Edward Street to Edward Terrace, it was the same house as their home in 1911.  Another assumption I'd got right was that Jane had married Thomas Palmer.  This was perhaps under a degree of duress; it took place in the June quarter of 1914 when she was just 18, and he was 31, but purporting to be some years older than that.  More significantly, she was on the brink of delivering his child, who was named Edith Mary, after her aunt, the original cause of my interest in the family.  This was in fact the Edith Mary I had unknowingly found - ages are another element not revealed without payment.  Two years later came another daughter, Ethel May, who lived only a few weeks and died later in 1916.

When Thomas Palmer died towards the end of 1920, at the (now corrected) age of 37, we might imagine a sigh of relief pervading the house.  Within weeks - certainly within that same December quarter - Jane had re-branded herself Jennie Isabella and had married Thomas Bailey, a hewer at East Pontop colliery, who was just five months her senior.  The 1921 Census therefore shows Thomas and Jennie Bailey as head and wife, supported by Edith Mary Palmer, stepdaughter, aged 7, entered with the description 'Father dead'.  Next are listed Robert and Jonathan, the 17-year-old twins, both described as 'miner (driver)' at South Derwent colliery.  Ada was described as niece and her condition is stated 'NK', where the choices were 'both (parents) alive', both dead', 'father dead' or 'mother dead'. 

The seventh person of the household was the Edith Mary Jobes of my original search.  Now aged 20, she was listed as a visitor.  She had left the family home, perhaps glad to get away, and was engaged as a waiting maid at 'Stray Lea', 20 Victoria Avenue, Harrogate (now known as Osborne House).  She later moved to Farnham, Surrey where, in 1928, she married Arthur Herbert Farley, a nephew of my cousin's husband's grandmother.

Readers may be curious about Thomas and Jennie.  Apart from Jane's first-born Edith Mary Palmer,  they had four children of their own: Gwendoline (born 1923), Jessie (1925), Minnie (1928) and Norman George (1931).  By 1939, Jennie had reverted to plain Jane I, Thomas was still a hewer, Jessie, Minnie and Norman were still at home, and they lived with Thomas's widowed father at 100 Lily Gardens, Dipton, which was the part of Stanley where Jane had been born.

Were These the Consequences of a Hard Bargain?

I suspect there are many researchers who have adopted the same, almost 'casual' attitude to their family history digging as mine.  I find that the son or daughter of a family has married, I track down their children and follow them through census after census, and so on, working forwards and outwards.  Then finally - almost as an afterthought - I'll work backwards from those spouses, tracing each of them back to birth.  If anything catches my interest along the way then I'll broaden the present track before again following that general pattern.

Last April and June, I posted in two parts the story of a family tragedy that began as a newspaper obituary following a dual death in a Suffolk village.  You can read about it here (part one) and here (part two).  In the autumn, I combined those two posts into an article for the local family history magazine. Eventually the trail circled round and I received an e-mail that drew my attention back to that tragic family.  As a result, earlier this week, I found myself working backwards along the life records of someone who was a daughter-in-law of the couple who died.

Working forwards, I had come to a stop at the 1939 Register, which added a date of birth to the ages on the intermediate censuses.  Married in 1895, she was born in 1875 so, typically, there were only two earlier census entries to find between the couple's marriage and this woman's birth.  And there she was, Anna Barker, in service at the age of 15 in 1891, one down, one to go.  Anna Barker aged 5 in 1881 proved impossible, however.  I found one, but her place of birth didn't match, and the appropriate birth registration - there was one - didn't match with the date on the 1939 Register.  Usually if there's a discrepancy there, it's the correct birthday and the wrong year, for one reason or another.  And anyway I'd already found a birth registration for the Anna I was looking for ... and that one matched both for place of birth, Occold, and a September registration for a 10th June birth, which wasn't out of the ordinary: Anna Barker, mother's maiden name Davey.

After I'd found James and Anna's first three children, and the registrations  of their birth, I'd noted a peculiarity, and this note was brought to mind now, as I puzzled why a 5-year-old girl should be missing from the census.  Her first two children (and, I later discovered, her fifth, too) had been registered with mother's maiden name - so often the key to an identity puzzle - 'Lambert'.  Why so, when her name was Barker.

Just on the off-chance, I tried looking for an Anna Lambert, born 1875. Bingo, there she was with her family in Occold as one might expect, along with five brothers, three born in Occold like her and the eldest two in neighbouring Wickham Skeith like their mother.  The father of the family was the key identifier: he was born in Aylsham, Norfolk.  Like a hound on a strong scent, I followed this family back to source.  The names of the children came and went but there were enough overlaps, together with parents Thomas born Aylsham and Eliza born Wickham Skeith, to be sure I had the right family.  As I worked back through 1871, 1861 and 1851 I realised I had the answer about those children being registered Lambert instead of the expected Barker  Sometimes they appeared as one, sometimes the other.  In 1851, I believe I might have the explanation.  At least my imagination has concocted a story that might or might not fit the evidence I had unearthed.

The 1851 census recorded the whole family, living 'by the Knowl' in Wickham Skeith.  William Davey, his wife Susan, aged 50 and 51, four sons, aged 15, 12, 10 and 3, a daughter aged 5 and added at the end was Thomas Lambert, 21, son-in-law, Eliza, 19, daughter and Jacob, 1 month old, grandson.  There were two interesting points there.  The only one of those with an occupation was Thomas, an agricultural labourer.  Ordinarily, one might suppose that William and at least two of the sons would also be working.  No one was indicated to be unable to work, and none of the younger ones was listed as 'scholar'.  Then I looked into the Lambert trio.  

I found a marriage for Thomas Barker and Eliza Davey  in the March quarter of 1851, and in the same quarter a birth record is Jacob Barker, with mother's maiden name Davy.  The family appeared with the name Barker in the census of 1861, as Lambert in 1871 and 1881, and then again as Barker in 1891.  They had up to 17 children altogether, for 15 of whom I found birth records ... all as Barker and all with variations of Davey as mother's maiden name.  No registration was found for the other two, but the birth years are close enough for the names to become confused across the various censuses.

So, why the dual identity?  This is my theory.  William Davey was not a violent man, but he was a man of great internal strength.  When he discovered that this man Lambert had, to use the comedian's euphemism, 'been a bit previous with his daughter', he was livid, but realistic.  He made a hard bargain with Lambert and attached a severe penalty to it.  Lambert would marry Eliza (which he did, about the same time as she gave birth to his son), so his grandson would not carry the stigma of being illegitimate.  William Davey would provide him with a home, but in return Lambert would be expected to work hard enough to keep the family.  Naturally, Thomas Lambert didn't like this arrangement, but he didn't like whatever penalty went with default.  So he devised an alternative identity.  Why else was he married as Barker, and all his children registered as Barker?  He and Eliza left her dominant father, and made their own way in the world, occasionally lapsing to the old name when the censuses came around.

Little wonder, then, that almost half a century later, When Anna's first children needed to be registered, that she should be confused and uncertain which guise to adopt.