Berkeley, Gloucestershire

For as long as this archive has existed it has said its deepest documented person is William Sanigar, born 1654, of Berkeley in Gloucestershire — twelve generations back. An audit found that claim rested on other people's family trees and nothing else. The audit → This page is what happened when the registers were searched properly.

It said these generations could not be tested. They could.

The first version of this page reported that five of the six Saniger generations were untestable, because Berkeley St Mary's transcript stops in 1677. That was true of Berkeley and it was the wrong conclusion, because it treated one parish as the whole question.

Dursley runs to 1951 and Cam to 1939. Both sit three to six miles from Berkeley in the same Vale, and between them they hold 340 of the 494 Saniger records this archive found for 1670–1830. The generations were testable all along, in the next parish. Recorded with the other errors →

Three baptisms, three fathers, no chain

Searched across the whole county, every spelling, all record types: 494 Saniger records between 1670 and 1830. Three of them land on the tree's dates.

And the generation below them does not exist at all. The tree carries a Saniger born about 1805. There is no Saniger baptism anywhere in Gloucestershire between 1801 and 1809 — and that is a real null, not a coverage gap, because Dursley and Cam are transcribed straight through it. searched and empty

Everything rests on one line in a Queensland death register

The whole Saniger claim hangs on a single fact: when Miriam Wakefield died in Brisbane in 1909, the registrar wrote her parents down as James Wakefield and Hannah Saniger. Remove that line and the archive has no connection to Gloucestershire whatever.

So the obvious thing is to find Hannah Saniger in England. She is not there.

• No Hannah Saniger in Gloucestershire, 1780–1880. A fuzzy search across Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire returns 35 women and not one of them is in Gloucestershire — they are all Somerset and Wiltshire SINGERs and SANGERs that the phonetic match swept up. searched and empty
• No Saniger ever marries a Wakefield. In 139 Gloucestershire records spanning 1790 to 1900 — the family is continuously there, at Cam, Dursley and Thornbury — the name Wakefield never appears. searched and empty
• And no such marriage was registered. Civil registration begins on 1 July 1837. The earliest Saniger or Sanigar marriage in the Bristol district is John Sanigar, March quarter 1846 — six years after Miriam was born. If her parents married, they married before July 1837, or somewhere else. searched and empty

Bristol is not in the database

Before reporting any of those absences, the coverage was checked. It is as well it was. FreeREG's entire holding for the city of Bristol is four registers and 1,551 records — for a city of well over a hundred thousand people.

Found: Miriam Wakefield, June quarter 1840

She is the only Miriam Wakefield registered anywhere in England between 1839 and 1843. The tree says she was born on 11 April 1840 in Bristol; a birth on 11 April falls in the June quarter exactly as it should. documented

The story that wasn't

Reading the Berkeley list, an obvious and affecting sequence appeared: Agnies Sainger buried at Berkeley in late May 1655; William baptised on the 24th of that month; Edward Sainger married Mary Smyth that July. A mother dead in childbirth and a widower remarried within ten weeks.

It is not true. Opening the burial record shows Agnies entered as "wife of" with the surname Tyler — not a Sainger at all. It took one click to destroy, and it is the same click that destroyed the Dursley chain further up this page.

They are not really a Berkeley family

Of 494 Saniger records in the county between 1670 and 1830:

Cam and Dursley hold 340 between them; Berkeley holds 18. The archive should stop calling this a Berkeley family. On the evidence it is a Dursley and Cam family, and "of Berkeley" looks like a label somebody applied to the whole Vale.

The spellings, all of them one family: SAINGER · SANIGER · SANIGAR · SANIGAER · SINAGER · SINNEGER · SINNEGAR · SINEGAR · SYNEGAR · SYNAGER · SINGER. A search for "Saniger" alone finds a fraction of them — which is why this site's own search folds them together. Reading all 556 records individually raises the count to seventeen, and the commonest form in the registers is not Saniger at all but SINNEGAR. All seventeen, counted → Why spelling is not identity →

Where this leaves the oldest claim

1. The family is real and it is in the right Vale. 494 records between 1670 and 1830, continuing unbroken to 1900.
2. The middle of the chain is now actively contradicted, not merely untested. The three baptisms that fit the tree's dates have three different fathers. the chain, as the tree draws it, fails
3. The 1805 generation is not there at all, in a window that is thoroughly transcribed. searched and empty
4. The 1654 Berkeley candidate still stands, and still cannot be identified. William Sainger, baptised 24 May 1655, son of Edward Sainger of Wanswell — one of three Williams, each the son of an Edward. candidate, not identification
5. The join to this family is untested and now has a price. Hannah Saniger cannot be found in England; Bristol is not transcribed; and one £2.50 certificate would settle whether she existed under that name at all.