In this month’s Family Tree Academy, David Annal responds to a reader query about a Bristol man who had at least five children, but left little in the way of baptism records, or proof of marriage…
Most family history brickwalls can be assigned to one of two categories. Sometimes we’re struggling to discover where they came from and who their parents were and on other occasions we can’t find out what happened to them after a particular point in time. Essentially, our more troublesome ancestors either appeared out of thin air as fully formed adults or they disappeared without trace. But if you’re particularly unlucky, you end up with an ancestor like George Fry, who falls into both pots.
In this case, we have a fairly complete picture of George Fry’s life over the 20 years between the 1841 and 1861 Censuses, but the years before 1841 and after 1861 are a closed book.
What do we know about George’s children?
Five children were born to George and his wife Mary Ann between 1843 and 1854 (William, Mary, George, Robert and Jane) and I’ve been able to discover that two other children were born before 1843; William, who was born and died in 1840, and Eliza, who died in 1848, aged seven. The births and deaths of the these two were both registered, as was William’s birth in 1843, but I can find no evidence of birth registrations for the four youngest children. I have also been unable to find baptismal records for any of George and Mary Ann’s children.
The surnames: ‘A sign that something's not right...’
From the General Register Office’s birth indexes we can see that the birth of the first of the children (the older William) was registered with the mother’s surname recorded as Burcher, while the next two (Eliza and the second William) were registered with Mary Ann’s maiden surname given as Saysell.
This, in itself, is a sign that something’s not quite right and the fact that the family are recorded under the surname Fry in the 1841 and 1861 Censuses but that Mary Ann and the children were listed as Burcher in 1851 (with their ‘lodger’ George Fry) should definitely set alarm bells ringing.
When we dig a bit deeper, we can find the marriage of William Burcher and Mary Ann Saysell at the parish church of St Mary, Redcliffe, on 20 January
