Back in October 2019 I reviewed two books about researching female ancestors.  Both were useful and interesting.  However, neither was particularly what I had anticipated.  We all know that women are far less likely to feature in records than their husbands, fathers and sons.  Having gone to all the trouble of producing a living human being many mothers were not even given a mention in the parish register; and in some parishes this exclusion of women was so extreme that a married woman was not even really mentioned when she died, her burial record referring merely to ‘Wife of John Smith’ or ‘Widow Brown’.  The whole point of these two books therefore was to highlight specific record sets that might include our women ancestors, together with an understanding of developments in social history and general themes that might be of interest even though we won’t find specific records – like fashion.

What wasn’t included was what we might learn about her life *because* she is a woman, or because ‘this was the way things were done’: things that women ‘know’ and ‘understand’, and might sometimes have been talked about in hushed tones in the kitchen away from the men.

I’ve been thinking about all this for a long time, and have now put together three posts (this one and the next two) to try to read between the lines and ‘decode’ every last bit of information from entries about our foremothers.  There are no guarantees to what follows, but sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures!  So if you have a brick wall and you’re prepared to think outside the box, perhaps one of these ideas might help.

Our foremothers changed their surname on marriage
Okaaay… obvious!  We all know our female ancestors changed their names when they married.  And yet… how many times have you been tripped up by this?  I know I have.  The fact is that even a very young woman could have been widowed already, and an older widow might remarry.  This is easier to trace post-1837, when the civil certificates give more information: marital status plus the bride’s father’s surname.  But prior to that we have to work harder.  So if a baptism doesn’t seem to exist for her, look instead for an earlier marriage, using just her first name and the known surname for the spouse.  If a likely looking marriage shows up, now look for a burial for the husband.  Similarly, if you can’t find a burial for your female ancestor, look for a remarriage, and then a later burial with the new name.

Childbirth as a guide to the mother’s age
According to the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) a woman’s childbearing years are assumed to start at age 15 and end at age 45 (the day before her 46th birthday).  Let’s put that to the test.  Look at women in your tree who had large families and long lives.  How old was each one when she had her last child?

Here’s a random sample from different branches (and time periods) of my tree:

• Annie Elizabeth, b.1850; d.1926. Last child born 1888 when Annie Elizabeth was 38*
• Jane, b.1857; d.1940. Last child born 1900 when Jane was 43
• Mary, b. c.1801; d.1863. Last child born 1846 when Mary was c.45**
• Rachel, b.1828; d.1884. Last child born 1869 when Rachel was 41
• Elizabeth, b.1792; d.1848. Last child born 1833 when Elizabeth was 41.
• Lucy, b.1802; d.1885. Last child born 1846 when Lucy was 44.
• Sarah, b.1784; d.1860. Last child born 1828 when Sarah was 44.
• Dorothy, b.1763; d.1843. Last child born 1803 when Dorothy was 40.

*younger than the others listed, but by this time Annie Elizabeth had already had 13 children, one divorce and one judicial separation with second husband on grounds of domestic violence.
**consistent with two census returns, although the final census gives a younger age.

These examples from my tree suggest the ONS general assumption of childbearing years was as valid 200 years ago as it is today.  For a woman who gave birth regularly throughout her marriage and lived on for some years after this, the end of childbearing is a reasonable guide to her age and therefore for the search of her baptism.  It could help to narrow down the search to within five years.

A named woman is (almost) certainly the mother
Here’s something that becomes important if DNA matches are not adding up: the named father on a child’s birth certificate or on the parish baptismal register might sometimes turn out not to be the biological father, but the named woman is almost certainly the mother.  To recap from my earlier post on unexpected DNA results: FTDNA, one of the main DNA testing companies, assess the NPE (‘Non-Paternity Event’ or ‘Not Parent Expected’) rate at about 1-2% per generation. The International Society of Genetic Genealogy Wiki page on NPEs cites a number of studies, some of which have concluded that historical NPE rates were much higher than more recent times.
There are a few exceptions to this assumption about the mother.  The child may have been given away at birth and brought up as the child of another family – although in the one known example of this in my ancestry (Annie Elizabeth’s firstborn) the baby was originally registered and baptised as the child of the biological parents.  Another possibility is that the mother was very young and the baby was registered as the child of its grandmother. (I can recommend watching re-runs of ‘Call The Midwife’ to encourage lateral thinking on the lengths desperate women might go to.)  Although these possibilities must be borne in mind, though, we might generally assume that the named mother at least is the biological parent.

Untimely deaths
The death of a woman of childbearing years may have been connected to a birth
If a female ancestor of childbearing years dies it’s always worth looking for a baptism or birth record around the same time. Equally, a woman known to have died from childbirth complications has definitely given birth, even if there is no birth certificate: there was definitely a baby but it may not not have survived. Before 1939, if the baby was stillborn there will not be a record.
Example: My 2xG grandfather Marcus’s first wife, Ann, was only twenty when she died. It was only when I bought the death certificate and read the cause of death: ‘Milk Fever’, that I realised I needed to look for a baby. Little Ann was born on 16th January 1850 and was only one week old when her mother died. The baby also died, five days later.

The birth of a baby indicates that the mother was alive on the day the child was born (even if she died shortly afterwards).  By contrast, the best we can conclude for a missing (presumed dead) father is to say he was alive nine months earlier.
Example: After Ann’s death the aforementioned Marcus married Harriet. They had four children, of which the last one is my great grandfather. He was born in September 1859, and Marcus is registered as the father, yet by the time of the 1861 census Harriet is described as a widow. There is no death certificate and no known burial. Did Marcus really die, or did he just move away? All we can really say is that his last known presence was nine months before the baby’s birth (… although I have been desperately seeking a DNA match for Marcus for several years. Without this I can’t even say for sure that he was my great grandfather’s father.)

Other indications of pregnancy: An interesting example came up a couple of weeks ago in Series 4, episode 2 of A House Through Time: Leeds (BBC). In the following household, the presence of the ‘Monthly Nurse’ indicates that Mary H Mellish is in the very last stages of pregnancy, preparing for the birth. However, no birth is ever registered. The only way we have of knowing Mary was pregnant and her baby was stillborn is this entry on the census, and the presence of Margaret Towns, Monthly Nurse. The census is of course a decennial snapshot of the population. There would have been many more Monthly Nurses and mothers whose labours ended in stillbirths, and it would be a significant event in each mother’s life, but there is no official record of them. Even here, we understand it only by joining the dots.

Did she die and did he re-marry? Naming traditions can make distinguishing between generations difficult. How do we know if a marriage record on an old parish register relates to an older man or his adult son of the same name? Here’s an example where I was able to use the wife’s burial record together with DNA as proof that my ancestor is the older man.
Example: My 4xG grandfather George Gamble married my 4xG grandmother (Hannah) in 1790, when she was 20 years old.  I couldn’t find a baptism but working on the assumption he would be about the same age as Hannah, I had been looking for a baptism between around 1760 and 1770.  It was a DNA ThruLine suggestion on Ancestry that alerted me to the true facts.  At first the ‘Common Ancestor’ didn’t seem to be to my George at all: it led to an older George Gamble, born 1749, whose wife was Susanna. Then I noticed that they stopped having children in 1789, the year before my George married Hannah.  Might Susanna have died in that year, perhaps in childbirth?  I checked for a burial for a Susanna Gamble, and there it was, about 14 weeks after the last birth – another case of milk fever perhaps?  I then checked all the occupation references for this other George.  He was a clothier, the same as my George.  The 1790 marriage entry for my 4xG grandparents refers to ‘George Gamble of this parish, clothier, and Hannah Brook of this parish, spinster’, but makes no reference to George’s own widowed marital status.  This was, however, undoubtedly the same person.  It was the final birth combined with Susanna’s untimely death that solved the case.

Regular as clockwork
If records indicate a very regular pattern of childbirth for a woman, such as every 2 to 3 years, but with one longer gap this may point to a stillbirth or miscarriages, an illness, a child being born away from the normal residence or for some other reason an additional child that you haven’t found.
Example: Annie Elizabeth, in the above list of my foremothers, had a good standard of living yet gave birth to a lot of sickly babies, generally with a very short gap between pregnancies – in one case an eleven month gap followed by a nine month gap.  I had already found eleven babies but it wasn’t until I saw her entry on the 1911 census for number of babies born alive and number of babies since died that I realised two more were missing.  I noticed that in the midst of all these pregnancies there were two 3-year gaps – not a long time between pregnancies for most other women, but within the context of Annie Elizabeth’s childbirth patterns, three years was a long gap. I found one of the missing babies born and baptised in a quiet rural area away from Leeds.  I assume that in view of all the infant deaths, Annie Elizabeth had gone there to see through the last months of that pregnancy and the birth in a calmer environment away from the family business.  The final missing baby, however, has never been identified but I suspect may have been born (perhaps stillborn) during the other 3-year gap between babies 2 and 3.  

It’s important to note that this part of the 1911 census was directed at married women, and that the question relates to children born of ‘this marriage’.  Widowed for thirteen years, Annie Elizabeth should have left it blank, and we can see that the enumerator crossed through her responses in red ink – but luckily for us many widows and stepmothers completed this section, and it’s always lucky for us if they did.  I also strongly suspect that some women included stillborn babies in their numbers.  As mentioned above, at this time stillbirths were not even registered.  The apparent inclusion of them by their mothers in this census response is perhaps their way of giving legitimacy to the little ones who were never counted.

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So these are my thoughts on ‘women’s issues’ for genealogists – or gynecology for genealogy. They may just help in untangling a brick wall. If you can add anything along these lines I’d love to know.  Next time I’ll be sticking with our foremothers, and focusing on maiden names.