Was my grandmother born at sea?
Q
My grandmother was said to have been born ‘on the high seas’ as Elizabeth Heloise Onan Huyhies, but I cannot find a birth record for her. In 1901, she was living in Fleetwood as Elizabeth Hughes – her place of birth “unknown”. The family story is that she was born off the coast of Brittany on 29 March 1881. Her marriage certificate lists her father as Geroud Huyhies. He was supposedly a ship’s surgeon or master mariner.
Peter Mayson
A
Tracking down any birth that took place ‘at sea’ can be difficult, and there are a number of places you could look. A birth at sea may be entered in the ship’s log. If the vessel was British-registered, from the mid-19th century the event should have been reported to the General Register Office (GRO). With ships navigating the globe and perhaps not returning to a home port for months, or even years, such a birth may have gone unrecorded. For a guide to resources, try the research guide available from The National Archives at bit.ly/guideBMDatsea.
If your great grandfather was a master mariner, you may find the guide to tracing merchant seamen from the Maritime Museum at Greenwich useful: bit.ly/RMGTracingMerchantSeamen.
It is also important to evaluate fully the evidence you have available. Your grandmother used a very unusual spelling of her surname, Huyhies. In fact, it’s so unusual I can find no record of it at all in the GRO birth, marriage and death indexes other than her own (and none in Scotland, although there are a few Hughies in Irish records). It could be of foreign origin – perhaps French, given the location she is said to have been born – but conducting a worldwide search in the records available on familysearch.org also draws a blank.
This then raises other possibilities. Is this after all a romanticised version of the name
Hughes, as she is recorded in the census entry you have found, and if so why? Was she perhaps trying to hide humbler origins? A DNA test might help solve the mystery. Antony Marr