When it all comes together...

I like to think of this as success story, although I suspect my case wouldn't stand up in a court of law.

I started by looking through the 1814 will of my 4G grandfather Robert Cubitt of Bacton Abbey. (Norfolk Council have made the images of some wills available online). He refers to his 4 sons by name, 3 daughters along with the names of their husbands, he names a nephew, and also his sister Elizabeth Engall. This led to me to the 1758 marriage at Bacton of Elizabeth Cubitt to John Engall, with confidence that this was my 'aunt'. John and Elizabeth had 3 children christened at Bacton, then a further 5 at nearby Ridlington.

I put the combination of 'Cubitt' and 'Engall' into a Google search, just in case there was any reference to the marriage and was rather startled to find mention of a man called Cubitt Engall Bartram within a wikipedia article. (He was the protege of a Richard Bartram (1749 – 1826) who was the English Consul of Civita Vecchia in the early 19th century.) The combination of names made me think he MUST be some connection. I found his christening at Brumstead, Norfolk in 1798, and identified that his parents were James Bartram and Elizabeth Engall, who married in Brumstead in 1785 and had 12 children between then and 1804. My reasoning gets a bit tenuous here, but John and Elizabeth Engall (nee Cubitt) had a daughter Elizabeth who was christened Ridlington in 1767, and thus would have been old enough to marry in 1785 (aged 18 or more) and young enough to have a baby in 1804 (aged 37). Not proof, but very suggestive, particularly combined with the very distinctive Christian names of their 3rd son.

But there's more. I found another interesting baby christened Cubitt, within a few years of Cubitt Bartram - this was Cubitt Oakley, christened Stalham 1801. He was the 6th of 7 children of Thomas Oakley and a Sarah Engall! His mother's name was given on his christening record so there is no doubt about that much, and I feel fairly confident in identifying them as the couple who were married in Ridlington in 1794, with a note that the groom was from Stalham. Their children were christened in Stalham between 1795 and 1804. 'A' Sarah Oakley was buried at Stalham 17 January 1817 aged 51 (i.e. born c 1766), which slight variation in age doesn't rule out her being the Sarah Engall (my 'cousin') who was christened Ridlington in August 1764. Again, the choice of Cubitt as name for a baby (having run through Thomas,William and Robert for his older brothers) looks like a strong indicator.

In case you are wondering about distances, and likelihood of this parish-hopping, Bacton, Brumstead, Ridlington, and Stalham are all about 5 or 6 miles to the E of North Walsham, running in a rough arc from NE to SE.

The Engall women and their husbands were all too early to be pinned down on a census, but I feel pretty convinced that they were the daughters of Elizabeth Cubitt, and the granddaughters of my 5G GF. No definitive proof, but I think the balance of probability runs in my favour. What do you think?

 

Adrienne, Thank you for your very kind offer, but I'm not sure what I could ask you to check there. I am following various tangential leads in the hope of building up the picture.

 

OK, this is just me being pleased with myself.

I had picked up that Cubitt Engall Bartram had a nephew of the same name (son of his brother Charles) who died in Australia. So I did a search on the Australian newspaper database Trove (as recommended in a recent NL) and found his 1908 obituary. So far, so unsurprising, but it mentioned 3 siblings that I had no notion of! (Cubitt Engall Bartram, .... brother of Mrs. W. Symons, Kyneton, Mrs. E. P. Lambrick, North Melbourne, and Mr. A. Bartram, Kensington.) So I set about finding them, via a variety of sources.

Mrs Lambrick was the easiest, because of the name - she was Amelia who married Erasmus Pascoe Lambrick (prompting a thought that the families became acquainted when her husband and brother met at a party for people with slightly silly names). She (like her younger brother Cubitt) was born in Norfolk, but a different registration district. Then I tracked down Mr. A. Bartram, who was Amos -he was born in Hitchin in Hertfordshire, which was not a county I would have expected, but his death certificate gives the right parents. The trickiest one was Mrs. W. Symons. Talk about people becoming invisible - what did I know about her? All I knew was her maiden name, her married name (not very distinctive) , where she was living in 1908, and a possibility that she was older than Amelia and Amos- no Christian name for her or her husband, or clear date of birth. I am happy to say that I found her - Sarah Elizabeth Bartram, born the eldest of the family, in yet another Norfolk RD, and married William Thomas Symons.

[As a by-product of this digging, I feel fairly confident that the parents Charles and Susan emigrated to Australia (which I had not realised), and while their children were young. The window is somewhere between Amos' birth in Herts in 1845 and Sarah's marriage in Melbourne in 1854, and almost certainly before the 1851 census....]

 

Having "slightly silly" given names is such a help with researching family history. I have an Elijah Leary and a Lennie Vant, both second names being derived from the surnames of other family members. These names have been carried down through the generations. Makes a change from trying to trace my husband's great grandfather, John Smith!

 

I am currently working forward on the descendants of my great-great-grandparents, Reuben and Sarah. One of their daughters, Martha, had ten children but sometimes it felt like more as in once census they were called by one name and in the next by another e.g. William in 1871, Charles in 1891 (lost, for a while, in 1881). Turned out, of course, to be be Charles William.

One of these ten children, had three generations of descendants (through different children) who married a person called Smith, bringing my post-1911 research to a screaming halt. I have mentioned in another thread the end of my research when my 5g-grandfather turned out to be Thomas Brown. It must be very difficult to find the "right" ancestors and blood relations when there are lots of Brown, Smith or Jones (yes, I have those in my tree too) -- or other common names in any language -- in previous generations.

 

How easy would it have been if you could have searched the records by the witnesses names Peter.