I’m stuck on my 5x great grandmother – can you help?
QMy 5x great grandparents, John Latham and Esther Peace, were married in 1804 in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Esther was described as “of this parish”. John died in 1815, and shortly afterwards Esther married Daniel Hending. She died in 1823 and the burial register notes her age as 37, so she was born somewhere around 1786.
Some ancestry.co.uk trees identify her as the Esther Peace baptised in Church Gresley, Derbyshire, in February 1783, daughter of Francis and Elizabeth. But that Esther was buried in May 1784 in that parish. I can’t find another baptism for an Esther Peace in the area. My dad has DNA connections on Ancestry who link to this family, but not strongly enough to prove that our Esther was another daughter of Francis and Elizabeth. I would be very grateful for any ideas about what to try next.
Siân Smith
AIf you have correctly identified Esther Peace’s death record and are right about her age at death, then she would have been only 18 at the time of her marriage. While this is indeed possible, it is perhaps unlikely.
There are no other likely candidates for your Esther Peace in the records on findmypast.co.uk. So it would seem sensible to try a common variant of the first name, Hester. Wikipedia notes that “the modified form Hester has seemingly co-existed with the original Esther throughout the name’s usage in the English-speaking world”, and that “Esther and Hester were long largely – perhaps totally – interchangeable”.
A likely candidate for your 5x great grandmother might be Hester Peace, born to George Peace (son of George Peace, labourer) and Elizabeth (née Booth, daughter of George Booth of Mosborough, Sheffield) and baptised in Harthill, the West Riding of Yorkshire, on 15 July 1779. If this lady is your ancestor, she would have been 25 at the time of her marriage to John Latham in 1804 – a more typical age at matrimony. Our ancestors only had to have lived in a parish for three weeks preceding their marriage to be able to use the phrase “of this parish”. Esther/ Hester may have moved the 47 miles from the rural village of Harthill to the town of Burton-on-Trent for work at any point.
Puzzlingly, Findmypast has no record of a widowed Esther/Hester Latham marrying a Daniel Hending c1815. A search for an Esther Latham marrying a Daniel (with no surname entered) in 1815 turns up an Esther Latham marrying a Daniel Hindin on 6 November 1815 at St Michael and All Saints, Tatenhill, Derbyshire – three miles from Burton-on-Trent.
There is a record of what could be Hester/Esther’s first husband, John Latham (son of Luke and Ann Latham), baptised in the same church in Tatenhill, on 30 November 1783. He would have been 21 at the time of his marriage to Hester/Esther. A John Latham was buried on 16 March 1815 (aged 31), again in the same church. This predates Esther/Hester’s second marriage by eight months. Surely the Esther ‘Hendon’ who died in Tatenhill in 1823 is the woman we are interested in. I suggest she died at the age of 47, rather than 37.
Ruth Symes