Can you help me track down my forebear’s birth record, and tell me whether she was married before her wedding of 1808?
Q I’m trying to solve the mystery surrounding one of my ancestors, Jane Addington. She married William Birdsall in Tadcaster in December 1830. The 1851 census says she was born in 1808 in Tadcaster. She died in 1893 in Kirk Fenton aged 86.
I cannot find her birth anywhere, and wonder if she was previously married before marrying William Birdsall. But I can find no confirmation of this. Julie Wilkinson
A Jane appears with her husband William on the 1851 and 1861 censuses, which both state that she was born in Tadcaster around 1808. The marriage entry for William and Jane doesn’t mention if they are single or widowed. It is possible that Jane was previously married, but a quick search for the burial of a male Addington in the years previous to William and Jane’s marriage didn’t come up with anything.
The parish registers for Tadcaster are included in the Yorkshire Collection on findmy
past.co.uk. I searched for a baptism in c1809 but could find no Jane Addington. A wider search revealed that there were no Addington baptisms in Tadcaster until the 1820s.
However, the name Addington lends itself to several variations: Haddington, Adlington and so on. It would be worth searching the registers for any Jane whose name ended in ‘ton’ – the search parameters on Findmypast allow for a wildcard search at the beginning of names, eg ‘*ton’.
I used this to search for Jane, and found that a Jane Harrington was baptised on 27 November 1808 to parents Joseph Harrington and Mary Garnett.
Although it’s a bit of a stretch from Addington to Harrington, it was definitely worth following up. I carried out a search for a Joseph and Mary Harrington/ Addington in the early censuses for 1841 and 1851, and found that in 1841 a Joseph Addington aged 65 was a labourer in
‘The name Addington lends itself to several variations’
Tadcaster with his wife Mary aged 60 and a two-year-old Thomas Addington all born in the county. However, by the time of the following census, Mary Addington was a widow aged 70 and living in Tadcaster with her grandson Thomas now aged 12, and Mary was recorded as having been born in Aberford, Yorkshire.
There were no census entries for either a Joseph or Mary Harrington in or around Tadcaster.
Parish registers in Tadcaster in the early 1800s used the Dade system of recording baptisms, which included more information about the family than regular baptism entries of this period. They were named after William Dade, a clergyman in Yorkshire in the late 1700s, and were employed in many of the parishes in the county. Jane’s entry reads: “Jane Harrington daughter of Joseph Harrington of Tadcaster Labr, son of James Harrington of Appleby in the county of Westmorland by Catherine, and Mary daughter of William Garnett of Aberford by Mary.”
Both sets of grandparents are named, with the addition of where the parents were born. Joseph was born in Appleby in Westmorland, son of Joseph and Catherine, while Mary was born in Aberford, daughter of William and Mary. The 1851 census for Mary Addington states that she was born in Aberford, Yorkshire; unfortunately Joseph died before the 1851 census.
It would seem that Jane Addington and Jane Harrington are one and the same. You should investigate siblings born in Ryther with name variations of Haddington, Hirrington and Hirinton. Carol Kerry-Green