CONSIDER THE BIGGER PICTURE
Improve your family history search skills with the Family Tree Academy. This issue, David Annal invites you to research your ancillary branches
Family Tree Academy tutor David Annal urges us to research the wider branches of our family trees and demonstrates the valuable clues this approach can result in
The Family Tree Academy is here to help you grow your genealogy skills. The aim is to help teach more about the search skills and source know-how needed to step up your family history research.
In this issue, Family Tree Academy tutor David Annal discusses the huge boon that researching the wider branches of your family can represent, and how very much you will be making your life harder if you only stick to researching your direct lines.
Make your life easier...
Every now and then, I come across a family historian telling me that they’re only interested in their direct ancestors. I’m never quite sure how to respond while maintaining my professional decorum! Not only are they missing out on a whole host of potentially fascinating stories, they’re also making their job as a researcher that much harder. So often the answers to our trickiest genealogical problems are to be found in records relating to our ancestors’ siblings,
aunts, uncles and cousins. To ignore these records is to shut off countless invaluable research opportunities.
This month’s case study
This month’s case study is an example of how important it is that we consider the bigger picture and also illustrates a number of other crucial points.
The subject of our search
The subject of our search is a man called William Dudley. William’s life from his marriage to Mary Rogers at the east London parish church of St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney on 15 September 1824 is well documented, but finding a record of his birth was proving difficult.
He and Mary went on to have at least eight children, baptised in various east London churches between 1826 and 1844. The records of the baptisms give William’s occupation as a haberdasher/draper while the entries in the 1841 and 1851 Censuses describe him as a ‘Traveller’ (i.e. a commercial traveller or travelling salesman) and the 1861 census gives his ‘Rank, Profession or Occupation’ as ‘Unable to work – Draper’.
What do the records reveal so far?
As far as addresses are concerned, the family’s abode was said to be Commercial Road, Whitechapel in 1828, 1830 and 1832 while later records find them living at various addresses in Stepney.
• We also have some listings for William in a variety of trade directories; at least there are some which probably relate to him. The entry in Robson’s 1830 London Commercial Directory recording ‘Dudley, Wm. Haberdasher, 38 Commercial rd clearly relates to our man but what about the entry in the 1820 Post Office London Directory listing ‘Dudley Wm. Haberdasher, 45, Gt. Surry Str. Blackfriars road? Is this the same William, prior to his marriage to Mary Rogers?
• Of course, when we’re trying to find a record of someone’s birth, what we really need to know is when and where they were born and this is where the census comes into its own. The following details are recorded about William:
Taking note of discrepancies
We can see straight away that there are some problems here.
Even allowing for the rounding down of ages in the 1841 census to the nearest five years, we have a wide range of possible dates of birth, stretching from 1787 to 1796. And as William was said to be 80 when he died in March 1866, we could be looking at a birth as early as 1785.
And then we come to the place of birth. It’s always difficult to understand exactly what’s going in a case like this. Why, would William claim (in 1851) to have been born in London if he was actually born some 40 miles away in Bedfordshire?
There are a number of factors to consider.
Thinking how mistakes might occur
Firstly, the method used to compile the census which involved the enumerator copying the details from the householders’ schedules into their summary books. It’s easy to see how mistakes can creep in during this process.
Conflation of the birth place name
We also need to be aware of two phenomena
which can frequently be observed in the records that we use in our research. One is the tendency of people to conflate the place they were born in with the place that they grew up in; sometimes they may not even have been aware that the latter was not the same as the former. The second, which we will see the relevance of shortly, is the habit that people had of giving an imprecise place of birth when filling in their census forms. The formula seems to be that the further you were from the place you were born in, the more likely you were to give the name of the nearest market town rather than that of the small village or hamlet in which you were actually born. Perhaps there was a feeling that the name of the actual place of birth would mean nothing to the census officials.
A summary so far
The wide range of possible birthdates is always going to make a search like this challenging but when we throw in the confusion about William’s birthplace, we really are up against it. Particularly when a search for a record of William’s birth/baptism in the Leighton Buzzard area fails to turn up anything.
So what can we do in this situation?
I decided to see if I could find any evidence of Dudley activity in the area and this led me to the discovery of a very interesting marriage record. But, before looking at that record, there’s something else we need to consider.
Think boundaries
A quick glance at a historical map of the area tells us that although Leighton Buzzard was (and indeed still is) in Bedfordshire, it’s also right on the border with Buckinghamshire, and when we bear in mind the tendency mentioned above for people to be imprecise with birthplaces, we mustn’t forget that our area of interest might well cross county boundaries.
The marriage that I found took place in the parish of Linslade in the county of Buckinghamshire on 1 February 1786. Linslade sits right next to Leighton Buzzard on the opposite side of the River Ouzel. The two settlements are now also divided by the Grand Union Canal but they are in effect one settlement, forming the civil parish of Leighton-linslade. Leighton Buzzard’s railway station is actually located in Linslade.
The groom on the 1786 marriage was William Dudley of St Clements, Middlesex (i.e. St Clement Danes) and the bride was Mary Gurney of Linslade. My theory was that William and Mary were our William’s parents and I quickly found the baptism of William Dudley, son of William and Mary at St Clement Danes on 20 February 1788. I found another child of William and Mary’s, Rebecca, baptised at St Clement Danes on 23 November 1786. Intriguingly, there was also a later baptism of a Joseph Dudley, son of William and Mary at Linslade in 1796.
Looking at the extended families
A strong theory was developing and it seemed to tick all the boxes but what I had so far was a long way from constituting proof that this was the family we were looking for. I wanted to see what I could find out about William and Mary and their extended families.
I couldn’t see any obvious references to the Dudley family in the immediate area but I did find several references to the Gurneys. Of particular interest was a succession of baptisms of children of Thomas and Mary Gurney between 1758 and 1773, including that of a daughter called Mary in 1759. Could this be the Mary who married William Dudley in 1786?
I was quickly able to prove that this was indeed the case. The will of Thomas Gurney of Linslade, gentleman, was proved in the
Prerogative Court of Canterbury in 1797 and amongst a number of bequests to his children I found a reference to ‘my daughter Mary the wife of Dudley’.
The will of Thomas’s widow, Mary, was proved in 1806 and by this time, it’s clear that her son-in-law, William Dudley, had died. The only names mentioned in the will are those of her daughter ‘Mary Dudley of Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, widow’ and her two grandsons, William Dudley and Joseph Dudley.
A helpful marginal note...
The two wills served to prove the identity of the Mary Gurney who married William Dudley but we were no closer to establishing a link to ‘our’ William, the east London haberdasher. But a marginal note attached to Mary Gurney’s will pointed us in an interesting direction.
Mary had named her daughter, Mary Dudley, as the executor of her will but it seems that the younger Mary had died in 1809, leaving part of her mother’s estate unadministered. The burial of Mary Dudley, widow, is recorded in the Linslade parish registers on 3 February 1809. The court then appointed Mary Gurney’s youngest daughter, Hannah in Mary’s place.
William’s Aunt Hannah
The focus of the research now turned to Hannah. Hannah never married but sometime between 1809 and 1832 she moved from the Linslade/leighton Buzzard area to London and settled in Islington. We know this because on 4 January 1832, ‘Hannah Gurney formerly of Leighton Buzzard in the County of Bedford but now residing at No.14 Shepperton Place Islington in the County of Middlesex Spinster’ sat down and wrote her will.
It’s quite a short will, naming just a handful of beneficiaries, including, ‘my nephew Joseph Dudley of 14 Shepperton Place, draper son of my sister Mary Dudley’. No mention is made of William Dudley but the proof that we’re on the right track here comes when Hannah mentions, ‘all my estate term and interest in a leasehold messuage or tenement Shop and Premises situate and being No. 45 Great Surry Street Blackfriars Road in the County of Surry’. This, you will
remember is the address found for William Dudley the haberdasher, in the 1820 trade directory.
Incontrovertible proof
This in itself doesn’t constitute absolute proof linking these people with our William but the final link in the chain comes with the discovery of a simple two-line entry in Pigot & Co.’s 1825/26 London Directory. Under the heading ‘Linnen Drapers – Retail’ we find the following: Dudley & Gurney, 29 Commercial road, St George’s.
This provides incontrovertible proof of the link between our William and the family of William Dudley and Mary Gurney. There can be no doubt that our William Dudley is the one who was baptised at St Clement Danes in 1788. He may well have spent a considerable amount of his childhood in Linslade/leighton Buzzard and since his father probably died when William was in his teens and his mother just a few years later, he may well have been quite hazy about where he was actually born. It’s also worth noting that, even though he was baptised at St Clement Danes, he could have been born in the Linslade/leighton Buzzard area.
That’s why it’s called a family tree
Researching our family histories is not a lateral process. We don’t simply move back through time in a simple series of generational steps. Our direct ancestors’ siblings are an important part of their stories, much as our direct ancestors play an important role in their siblings’ stories. We need to follow up leads, investigate the lives of the wider family and most important of all we always need to look at the bigger picture. After all, there’s a reason why it’s called a family tree and not a family twig.