Documents: Week 17 52 Ancestors

Annie Ashby’s marriage record 1888

After researching one’s ancestors for a couple of years, one learns to treat official records such as birth,  marriage, and death with a pinch of salt.  My maternal birth grandmother’s ancestry is a case in point.  Kate Elizabeth Palmer gave birth to my mother in 1912 with her father’s name left blank and never told her daughter who he was. Seventeen years after my mother’s death, I now know it was the butler in Kent where my grandmother was the parlourmaid.  I only found this through a close DNA match.

Kate herself was born illegitimate with the father’s name left blank although she was known as a Palmer.  It took me a long time to realise that she was registered at birth in 1881 with her mother’s maiden name of Annie Ashby, a field worker in Ightham, Kent.  My mother later told me that her mother Kitty Palmer Pocock’s father was a John Palmer and this appears to be verified by DNA records.  She didn’t know that John Palmer was her mother’s half nephew roughly the same age as Annie.

And Annie herself?  Yes, she too was illegitimate although, like her older full siblings, she had been baptised with Cornelius Palmer listed as her father. Her mother was Elizabeth Ashby, widower Cornelius Palmer’s servant listed in the 1841 census.  They were never married.  He had about 11 children with his first wife Eleanor who died in 1839.  By the 1851 census, Cornelius was 75 and on poor relief, but Elizabeth, now known as Elizabeth Palmer had four children by him and was to have two more!  A labourer, I can imagine that Cornelius was too mobility-impaired to work.  By 1861, the year he died, he was listed as an inmate of the West Malling Union Workhouse.  This was the defacto "nursing home" of the day.

In the 1861 census, Elizabeth and all her children were listed as Ashby.  Then in 1869, she did marry - this time to Reuben Hartrup whom she'd known since childhood.  In 1841 and 1851 he'd been living with her parents, Henry and Elizabeth Ashby.  He may have been regarded as an adopted son since in one census he was noted as Reuben Ashby.  The spellings of his surname were many, as I noted in a previous post.

So with Annie's varied surname history - born illegitimate but with a known father - and having already borne a child known in the village as Kate Elizabeth Palmer but registered as Palmer, what surname did she decide to use when she got married in 1888? Well Palmer was the most convenient.  And she had indeed been baptised in her home village by that surname even if she was registered by the government as Ashby in 1855.  It made sense.

But why didn't she give her father's name as Cornelius Palmer, actually the truth?  Instead, she created a new name for her step-father and named him as Reuben Palmer.  He'd never been known as that.  His name was Hartrup/Hartrop/Aleroupe/Altroup/Holtrop - take your pick.

No wonder family history research is so hard, although fascinating.  One can definitely not trust the officially records to be corrent.