Case Studies

Examples of some of the families we have worked on …

A change of name and the vagaries of the oral tradition …
Many of the families we research involve those who left Britain to seek a new life in North America, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand. Their tales of the old country were passed down the generations, and since the oral tradition is a richly creative process, some of the details inevitably changed along the way. The King family of New Zealand was a case in point. Joseph King, who emigrated in the 1870s, was believed to have had six sisters. His father, it was thought, married twice and there was a story of the young Joseph being consulted on the matter of his father’s second marriage; but another strand of tradition recalled that he was brought up by an uncle and aunt. Joseph himself always claimed that he was born in Devizes in Wiltshire. However, an old photograph captioned ‘Cottages of Amistbury [Amesbury], Wilts’ bore the additional note: ‘Third house along Grandfather King was born in’. Another photograph placed him in Gloucester in 1873.

Our initial searches found no trace of Joseph King in either Devizes or Amesbury, and the prospects were beginning to look dim when a new piece of the puzzle came to light in New Zealand. In 1919, following the death of two of his sons in the First World War, the old man had sworn on oath that he (Joseph) was born at ‘Bradbury near Swindon in Woolshire’, which could immediately be identified as the village of Badbury, Wiltshire. Despite this sworn evidence, the King family remained puzzlingly elusive until we eventually realised a surprising fact: the family used two completely different surnames – King and Fox – interchangeably, for three successive generations. Joseph himself was born, quite legitimately, in 1846 and baptised with the surname Fox, but he emigrated as King, and this was how he appeared in the 1861 and 1871 census returns. His father Robert was also recorded as Fox when he was baptised, but fluctuated between the two surnames all his life. His father (another Robert) also used the two names interchangeably, and here we finally lighted upon the reason: Robert senior was born illegitimately, the son of Mary Fox, in 1778. His father John Phelps was – at least in social status – a ‘gentleman’: Mary was of much humbler stock. At the age of 30, having had two illegitimate children including the ancestor, she married George King, by whom she had six further children. This worthy man died in 1807, ten years before his wife, and thereafter his illegitimate stepson Robert could never quite decide on which surname to use, his mother’s or his stepfather’s. His indecision was passed on down the family through two further generations, until Joseph Fox/King settled the matter by emigrating and leaving the name Fox behind him.

Incidentally, the story that Joseph’s father had married twice and consulted his son about his second was not true, but on the other hand his mother had been married before. He did not quite have six sisters, but he had six siblings (including a half-sister and a half-brother). He was brought up by his parents, not an uncle and aunt, but he did work for a while as a farm servant for his half-brother Thomas Prince – so the stories were all found to hold grains of truth.

A story of everyday farming folk …
Many of our families come from farming stock, and the Deaville family provides an example of the sort of results that can be achieved in a fairly straightforward English genealogy project. Beginning in 1900 with the birth of a miner, Alfred Deaville, in the Staffordshire town of Stoke-on-Trent, we were able to work back through civil registration and census records to the family’s rural origins a few miles away in the parish of Bucknall. A Standard Programme enabled us to trace back four generations to Thomas and Edith Deaville, who were baptising children in the late 18th century in Bucknall; a further programme established this earlier generation in more detail and discovered that Thomas came from a little farther afield in the parish of Croxden.

The Deavilles worked the land as labourers in the earlier period, moving briefly into shop-keeping in the mid-19th century, and acquiring a little land of their own by 1861. There were many mouths to feed: Thomas and Olivia Deville had 14 children, most of whom appear to have survived infancy. After the agricultural depression of the mid-1870s and 1880s they turned to the mines for employment. Although we met with no major problems, we did have to negotiate some of the stumbling blocks frequently thrown in the path of the genealogist: a wide variety of spellings (including Devil, Devol and Darvil), a multiplicity of families of the same name in a small area, a missing marriage record, and some parish register entries that had disappeared. This is the family featured in our sample pedigree chart.

Black sheep and bigamy
The villain of this story was Christopher Sydney Winwood Smith, who was born in 1846, the eldest surviving son of Sir William Smith of Eardiston, Worcestershire, 3rd baronet. As a young man Christopher was very much the black sheep of the family. He emigrated to New South Wales, where he worked as a labourer in East Maitland. Without telling his parents back home, in 1870 he married a poor and illiterate Catholic maidservant called Ann Mogan, who was born in County Galway. They had three children, including a son, William Sydney Winwood Smith, who was born in 1872. About three years later, Christopher deserted his wife and young family, leaving them to struggle in poverty. He went to Sydney, where in 1877 he married Caroline Holland in a Register Office. On the certificate he was described as a bachelor and a gentleman, but Ann Mogan was still living, and this second union was a clearly bigamous one. This time, he did tell his parents about his marriage, and in 1879 Christopher and Caroline had a son who was also named William Sydney Winwood Smith. This younger William was treated as the heir to the baronetcy, and throughout his life lived in ignorance of the existence of his elder half-brother and namesake. It seems that neither Ann Mogan’s children, nor Caroline Holland’s children, had any idea of each other’s existence.

Christopher died in Australia in 1887 at the age of 41, but his father, Sir William Smith, outlived him by five years. On Sir William’s death in London on 4 January 1893, Caroline Holland’s son, the younger William Sydney Winwood Smith, who was technically illegitimate, was recognised as the 4th baronet. Entirely unwittingly and in good faith, he used the title for the rest of his life, and his name appears in all the reference books, such as Debrett’s and Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage, and Who’s Who. When he died in 1953, his eldest son, Christopher Sydney Winwood Smith, was recognised as the next baronet, and he was known thereafter as ‘Sir Christopher Smith’ until his death in 2000.

Meanwhile, in 1995 Debrett Ancestry Research had been commissioned by a descendant of Christopher Smith and Ann Mogan to research the family history. As the facts came to light, it is little wonder that the family felt the need to put the record straight as to who ought to have held the title. There was no financial motive, since there was no landed estate or property going with the title. In fact, nothing could be done to restore the title to its true owner, since the last surviving male descendant of Christopher Smith by Ann Mogan died in 1983 in Australia. But the female descendants felt strongly that the records, particularly the ‘Official Roll of the Baronetage’ which is now held at the Crown Office in the Ministry of Justice, should be corrected to show who ought to have been the baronet between 1893 (when Sir William Smith, 3rd baronet, died), and 1983.

This request seemed entirely reasonable, but the process proved to be very time-consuming and complicated, since this situation has apparently never arisen before. The facts were set out in a ‘Statement of Case’ in February 2004 and submitted to the Attorney-General. We received help and guidance from Treasury Solicitors in making the case, and a good deal of further documentation and several Statutory Declarations were requested before the evidence was strong enough to allow the submission to succeed. This was the first time a formal request had been made to alter retrospectively the Official Roll. Now, to the delight of the family in Australia, a formal note has been added to the Official Roll to show the true line of descent, and a little piece of legal and genealogical history has been made.

An apprentice record provides the missing link …
The industrial and agrarian revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries set many families on the move, and young men sometimes travelled long distances to seek employment or better opportunities. Census returns (from 1851 onwards) show a specific place of birth; but what about the migrant ancestor who died before this date? If the surname is a common one, the field of possibility is enormous, and we have to look hard for any available clue.

The Bush family had been traced back to James Bush, a carpenter and builder of Kentish Town in Middlesex, who married Sarah Millis in 1770 in Marylebone, and after her death in 1790 remarried to Ann Brooks. London was expanding rapidly, and there were many opportunities for an enterprising carpenter to become a successful speculative builder. James Bush thrived in his trade, and he died in 1816 a prosperous man. However, his origins before 1770 were a mystery; the name is a common one, and attempts to link him with other London Bush families had been unsuccessful.

The breakthrough came when we began investigating apprenticeship records. Initial searches in records of the City of London Carpenters’ Company were unsuccessful, but from 1710, the government levied a tax on apprenticeship indentures, and from this date until 1774 the Inland Revenue kept records of the names of youths and their masters. Here we found a brief reference to the apprenticeship of a James Bush in 1756 to a John Williams of Bristol, carpenter. Subsequent work in Bristol records found a Poll Book for 1774 listing James Bush, house carpenter of Kentish Town, as an out-voter in Bristol, thus proving the connection. We were then able to trace the family back to their rural origins in the parish of Bitton, Gloucestershire.

An Irish fragment
In 1922, many public records were lost when the Public Record Office in Dublin was set alight during civil disturbances. These included some parish registers, census returns from 1821 to 1851 (returns for 1861 to 1891 were deliberately destroyed by the government later) and almost all original wills. Genealogists owe a large debt to Sir William Betham, Ulster King of Arms, who in the early years of the 19th century had laboriously made abstracts and indexes of wills.

In the case of the Perry family, one of Betham’s Abstracts, as they have come to be known, provided a crucial reference, in the will of James Perry, an attorney of Perrymount, Co Down (dated 1753), to his son Joseph and daughter Jane Perry ‘in America’. This provided the necessary evidence to identify the Irish origins of the emigrant family, and equally helpfully, James Perry named the first husband of his daughter Jane (Edward Usher). James Perry’s own wife was Anne Swift, and via this connection, the American descendants of this family are linked with Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, and with the poet laureate John Dryden. A full account of this complex family history is available: see our Books section.

A link with a Shakespeare play?
Tracing the true origins in Great Britain of early emigrants to colonial America always poses a real challenge, but we have had some successes in this difficult area. One such passenger on the ‘Mayflower’ in 1620 was Edward Doty, or Doughtie, who was the servant of Stephen Hopkins. Hopkins was immortalised in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which he appears as the drunken castaway butler Stephano.

We believe it is likely (though not proven) that Edward Doty/Doughtie was born in about 1593, the son of the Reverend Edward Doughtie, Dean of Hereford. As a youth Edward was apprenticed to a haberdasher in the City of London, and he was described as a gentleman of the parish of St Lawrence in Jewry in London in 1615. Edward Doughtie also appears as a witness in a Chancery action; this is one of the few sources at this period to give a precise age and address.

We still seek the vital piece of evidence linking him with certainty to the Mayflower passenger.

A workhouse childhood
As well as dealing with families who emigrated from Britain to the New World, many cases involve families who arrived in the United Kingdom from continental Europe. In the case of the De Frond family, research had already been carried out, so our starting point was William De Frond, sometimes known as Alfred, who married Mary Ann Flack at Lambourne in rural Essex in 1859. William and Mary had nine children before William died, at the age of only 36, in 1875 in London. In his short life William had a number of occupations: for much of his working life he was a farm labourer but he also worked for a while as a cooper. Towards the end of his life he became involved in church matters and at the time of his death he was working as a City Missionary in London.

William’s origins were obscure, and as research slowly unfolded we discovered that his childhood had been unsettled in the extreme. His parents, William De Frond and Eleanor Frostick, married in Hornchurch in 1829 and had five children born in Essex, including the exotically named Tamar and Selina. William senior was a shoemaker, but by 1835 the entire family was in the workhouse, and the census of 1841 found four of William and Ellen’s children – including the direct ancestor William – living there. Our first thought was that both parents had died, but in fact they had moved away to London, where a further three children were born. One died of scarlet fever as a young child; the other two (both girls) found their way to another workhouse where they were joined by one of the older girls, Ellen, who thus spent most of her childhood in workhouses before being sent into service at the age of about 15. Understandably in the circumstances, William and Ellen were difficult to track down in official documents, but we eventually discovered that they had separated and both entered upon second and bigamous marriages. Eleanor had a further two children born in the City of London’s charitable Lying-in Hospital, who both bore the name De Franti(e)s (one of the many variants of De Frond) before marrying a widower, Richard Astwick (who might have been the father of the two ‘De Frantis’ children). William, in the meantime, had embarked upon a bigamous marriage to Mary Tanner, but the authorities eventually caught up with him and he was sentenced at the Old Bailey to six months’ imprisonment for bigamy in 1848.

According to his second marriage certificate, William was the son of a coppersmith, John de Frond, and we suspect that William was born abroad; no trace has been found of his father, or of William’s baptism or birth.

“If there is a solution, I believe Debrett’s can find it.” (W Dowell, Virginia)

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