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.