Case study: Two ancestral lines, different naming patterns

Posted on 1st Nov 2021 by English Ancestors

In theory, we should be able to follow our paternal line with the same surname back through the generations, certain that it will continue beyond the earliest parish registers. If you (or a direct male descendant from your paternal line if you’re female) were to take a Y DNA test, then again in theory – provided there are no unexpected paternity events – you should even find the Y DNA haplogroup keeps step with the surname, right back through history. Our paternal line, though, does not comprise only endless lines of grandfathers. There is an equal number of grandmothers, and in just the same way that our foremothers married into the male surname and refreshed the gene pool, so too she refreshed the family’s traditions, recipes, ways of keeping house and, significantly for the topic of this post, the names given to children.

I wrote in two previous posts about naming patterns: the tradition of naming children in a specific order based on the names of their grandparents, parents and other significant family members. You’ll find those previous posts here (Irish) and here (English).

My last two posts have demonstrated that historically, women are significantly less likely to appear in official records. Their role was within the home, and in general the home was not a matter for public record. As we have seen, we have to get in the habit of reading between the lines regarding information about our female ancestors. For all these reasons their importance within society as a whole can easily be overlooked. Nevertheless they did have influence, even though their primary sphere of influence was domestic.

Today’s post will draw together all these topics. It’s a case study of a puzzle solved by focusing on traditional English naming patterns, and it highlights the importance and potential benefits for us as researchers of the merging of the women into the family.

When I was very young a fairly close member of my family married a lady with the same surname as his own. In more recent decades, as I progressed my genealogical research I found that this surname line on our side could be traced, still in Leeds, all the way back to the 17th century. I wondered if the same would be true for the paternal line of that lady marrying into my family, and if we would turn out to be distant cousins. Since this person is living I have changed the names. I shall refer to her as ‘Rose’, and to the surname we share as ‘Beccles’. Apart from these false names, all other information is accurate.

It was about ten years ago that I first started to work back ‘Rose’s’ paternal line. I knew her father’s name and was able to place him with his family in the 1911 census. From there, the preceding four generations were quite straightforward:

His father, Frank, residing with him in that 1911 census, was also located as a child in 1891;
Frank’s father, Samuel, residing with him in the 1891 census, was located with his own birth family in 1851-71.
Samuel’s father, Francis, was to be found with his birth family including father Samuel in 1841, and a baptism for Francis, son of Samuel was found in Leeds.
Samuel’s marriage a couple of years before that was also located, and his own baptism was in 1795. His father was Thomas.

I had now traced ‘Rose’s’ paternal line back to at least 1795, and I had the name of his father, Thomas. There was so far no connection between this and my own ‘Beccles’ line, but certainly both families were still in Leeds. I now needed a baptism for Thomas, probably around 1770; and this was where my research came to an end: there were too many Thomas ‘Beccles’ baptised in Leeds within a reasonable timeframe for me to be able to decide with certainty which was the correct one.

The solution came from an unexpected source. About five years later I discovered a new record set on Ancestry: the Leeds Township Overseers Records Apprenticeship Register. It seemed to start around 1740 and to continue until the end of the 18th century. I carefully searched the register, looking for any of my ancestors or their siblings, and found two of my ‘Beccles’ boys: my 4x great grandfather and his brother Nathaniel. It was Nathaniel’s entry that intrigued me: he was apprenticed to a master tailor by the name of Francis ‘Beccles’. I immediately started to wonder if there was some family connection between my Beccles line, known to be clothworkers, and this Francis.

Then I had my brainwave: ‘Rose’s’ ancestral ‘Beccles’ line and my own line had completely different forenames. Whereas the boys’ names repeatedly handed down in my line, prior to the 20th century, were Joseph, Nathaniel, Leonard and Benjamin, in ‘Rose’s’ line the naming tradition so far featured Samuel, Thomas and, significantly here, Francis. Could this master tailor, Francis ‘Beccles’, to whom my Nathaniel was apprenticed, be part of ‘Rose’s’ direct line?

I then started to wonder why this situation of two lines with completely different naming traditions might have come about, and the answer, when you think about it, is obvious. A surname is static. What gives it life is those who join it – in other words, the women who come into the family as wives. If we go back to the traditional naming patterns: the first son will take the name of the maternal or paternal grandfather; the second son will take the name of the other grandfather, and so on. What changes is that every wife at each new generation brings into the mix the name of her own father, her own mother and her own name. In my ‘Beccles’ line I knew who brought in Nathaniel, and I knew who brought in Leonard. These were the fathers’ names of my 6 x great grandmother and my 4x great grandmother. So now I needed to see if I could do the same for ‘Rose’s’ line, and if I could use this to help me find the correct baptisms for each generation further back. This would involve:

identifying all potential baptisms for Thomas ‘Beccles’, including the name and abode of the father;
guided by fathers’ names, abodes and dates, identifying baptisms of all other children born to these same men;
placing the children in age order so as to identify first-born and second-born sons (normally named for maternal and paternal grandfathers);
checking also the names of third-born sons (which should be the same as the father’s name, unless that name has already been used);
based on all this, identifying any family/families with strong similarities in children’s names with those given by Thomas and his wife to their children. i.e. In addition to the baptism for Thomas, was there also a Samuel, a Francis, and perhaps also daughters with names Thomas and his wife passed on;
homing in on the most likely family/families, using the date of the first-born child to identify a marriage, likely within two years previously. This would provide Thomas’s mother’s name;
and finally, looking for the baptisms of Thomas’s mother and father to ascertain their own fathers’ names.
And repeat, back through the generations.

Remember here that what we’re looking for is adherence to the traditional naming pattern. It may not hold good, but if it does it’s an extra bit of ‘evidence’ indicating your decisions so far have been valid. Remember also the extra value of finding the mother who brings a new name into the family, particularly if it’s an unusual name. It’s strong evidence that your research is correct.

For the avoidance of doubt, let me tell you – you really have to be ‘in the zone’ to do this!

But I did it! I found Thomas’s baptism. He was the first-born son of Samuel, the name given to Thomas’s own first-born son. Thomas himself was named for his maternal grandfather, Thomas. The master tailor Francis, whose name had started the alarm bells ringing turned out to be the nephew of this Samuel – son of his older brother George. So – our first identifiable ‘connection’ is that my 5x great uncle Nathaniel was apprenticed in 1789 to ‘Rose’s’ 1C6R (first cousin six times removed). I still haven’t found our common ancestor, but I’m working on it.

Using this method I managed to get ‘Rose’s’ paternal line back to the marriage of her 9xG grandparents in Leeds in the year 1627. When I passed all this information to ‘Rose’ she was astonished to see that two significant names still in her family – Frank (originally Francis) and George – had been handed down in her paternal line for several centuries. How amazing is that?!

Genealogical Women’s Lore

Posted on 1st Oct 2021 by English Ancestors

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.

Entry on census return showing presence of 'Monthly Nurse' at residential property. — TNA Class: *RG11*; Piece: *4538*; Folio: 34; Page: 62; GSU roll: *1342092*. Source: Ancestry.com

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.

Extract from 1911 census showing number of children born to female householder. — TNA Class: RG78; Piece: 1548. Source: Ancestry.com

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.

*****

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.

Our female ancestors

Posted on 21st Oct 2019 by English Ancestors

Sometime in the early 1970s my mum decided she wanted a sewing machine. I went with her to one of the big department stores, where a very knowledgeable woman showed us a few models and demonstrated the features. Having decided on a particular machine, my mum went over to the cash desk. She wanted to pay on HP (‘Hire Purchase’) over several months. That was when the fun started. My mum, aged fortysomething and in full-time employment, was not allowed to sign the HP contract. Since she was married, only her husband could sign. I was too young to understand the implications of all this, or of course to know the long history of women’s place in society, but I could tell from the combination of frustration, anger and embarrassment writ large across my mother’s features that it wasn’t a good thing. There was nothing to be done though. We had to go home, and my dad had to go into town later that afternoon to sign the documents and bring home the machine.

Yet only a hundred years earlier the lot of a married woman had been much worse. It was only during the lifetime of my mother’s grandmother that women started to make gains. Before the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 married women were not allowed to keep their own earnings, while prior to the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act all of a woman’s property and possessions passed to her husband when she married. Before the 1882 Act, the only way a woman could retain property and finances was to remain single or, after the death of her husband, to avoid remarriage. Even then she didn’t necessarily have the final say in decisions relating to her children, and of course she didn’t have the right to vote.

I’ve traced approaching 240 direct ancestors in my family tree. Almost half of these are women. And yet I know far less about these grandmothers of mine than I do about their husbands. Even if the mother is named on the baptism record, it’s the father’s occupation that is recorded, while census records list the occupation of most women as ‘Unpaid domestic duties’.

I’d been thinking about this for a while. It seemed the only way I might ever know more about my female lines was to read about social history, and to apply what I learned to my ancestors, based on what I knew of the occupation and social status of their husbands. So I was interested to find two books dedicated to female ancestors:
Margaret Ward’s The Female Line (2003) focuses on women’s lives 1800 to 1950.
Adèle Emm’s Tracing Your Female Ancestors (2019) deals with the period 1815 to 1914.

Both, then, cover the perfect period for the genealogist who has used census and civil registration records to trace their ancestors back to the beginning of the 19th century, and would now like to get to know these ancestors a bit better, before perhaps taking the plunge and learning about the earlier records needed for the Georgian period and beyond.

The Female Line has information arranged over eight chapters, each ending with a ‘finding out more’ section with ideas for further research, including the whereabouts of records, further reading and other ideas. Chapters include photographs and fashion; marriage; widowhood and remaining single; politics and the vote; charitable work; crime; work and war.

Tracing Your Female Ancestors has information arranged over six chapters, including birth, marriage and death; education (for all classes of society); crime; daily life (including housing, recreation, illness); work and emancipation (including the general opening up of options for women). Links to various sources are found throughout the text, and each chapter ends with a bibliography.

Both books end with a very useful timeline of key events impacting on women’s lives.

Clearly there’s a lot of overlap in topics covered, and inevitably much of what is written is about the generalities. For example regarding fashion and dress, even without photos of your ancestor you can still get an idea of what a woman of her time, class and occupation might have worn by looking at books and photos. Similarly, unless your ancestor’s marital relations were recorded in newspapers, court records and the like, then the best you can hope for is an understanding of what being married meant for her in terms of autonomy, finances, etc.

There is also the issue that ‘woman’ is not, and never was, a homogenous group. There was a world of difference between the life and expectations of a wealthy woman, a middle class woman, the wife/daughter of a skilled tradesman and a pauper. Equally, some of the facts of a woman’s life applied equally to her husband, father and male children – living accommodation, the penal process, Education Acts and Factory Acts, for example. So what both writers try to do is to highlight the issues and then to draw out of these the particular impact upon women and their daughters. Some crimes, for example, are more likely to be committed by a woman, whilst others that are more likely to be committed by a man will nevertheless impact greatly on his wife and family if he is imprisoned or transported.

Regarding work, the point is made by both authors that our female ancestors were unlikely to be described in the censuses with reference to any paid employment, even if they were enormously successful, or if the household depended on their contribution. A gentleman ought to be able to provide for his wife and family. Hence Elizabeth Gaskell, by then a successful and accomplished author for two decades, was described in the 1861 census as ‘Wife’. Lower down the social scale, our foremothers may have been written off on successive censuses with the term ‘Unpaid domestic duties’, but unless she was middle class or had a private income, chances are that she would have done some work alongside that, either full or part time, and either within or outside the home. Prior to the industrial revolution, women and children would all have a part to play in supporting the husband-father in his cottage trade. A husband might be a fully trained weaver but his children might card the fleece, and his wife might spin the yarn. Later, women might be employed in the local mill or factory – so location will be an important factor – cotton mills in Lancashire, lace in Nottingham, mining in Wakefield, agricultural work in rural areas, and so on. And of course there is always cleaning to be done in a wealthier person’s house. Sometimes wives whose husbands had a family business, like a draper’s shop or a grocers would be listed on the census as Assistants or ‘Helps out in family business’. Women might take years out to raise children, or work fewer hours when the children went on to school, but the idea that our great grandmothers only ever took care of home and family in the form of ‘Unpaid domestic duties’ is inaccurate. Whatever they did, though, they would never earn as much as men doing the same work. These are the kinds of issues raised in the chapters of these two books.

These are not intended to be books that will answer all our questions. As family researchers, we might find some of the topics irrelevant to our own research. However, both books are a good introduction to a lot of topics, and packed with ideas for general reading and sourcing original documents. Both provide an overview of the various topics, including the kind of records you might want to explore, where to find them, and further reading. It may still be that you won’t find any specific records naming your female ancestors, but you will have a lot more idea about how she lived. In my own case, I have both found and better understood some records as a direct result of reading these two books.

So which of these books might be best for you? In what ways do they differ?

The most obvious differences are in dates of publication, size and price. With a publication date of 2003, Margaret Ward’s book could be considered out of date. Of course, the records and events haven’t changed since then, but certainly the online availability of records has. Published in 2019, Adèle Emm’s work is bang up to date. (In fact it was published as I was reading Margaret Ward’s.) It’s also much longer, with 220 pages including index, as opposed to 112. On the other hand, it costs almost twice as much, with a RRP of £14.99 as compared with £7.95. As a result it contains much more information, both in terms of scope and also in the inclusion of far more examples taken from actual records in various parts of the country.

My recommendation is that, despite the comparative age of The Female Line, if you’re still very much a beginner at family history, you might prefer her shorter, gentler book. If you are confident and enjoy social history then like me, you’ll get a lot more out of Tracing Your Female Ancestors.