Hannah was a Berkeley woman
The oldest open question in this archive is closed, and the answer is the one the family tree gave at the start. Everything built on top of the opposite answer is wrong, and it is all still on the site.
For as long as this archive has existed, one sentence has organised its English research: Hannah Saniger was not born in Gloucestershire. It came from a tick in a column of the 1841 census. It sent the search to Bristol's chapels, to the Somerset side of the Avon, and finally to a parish called Chew Magna.
The 1851 census was taken in the same house, about the same woman, ten years later. It did not ask whether she was born in this county. It asked where.
Which is what the family tree said before any of this began. documented
The household, complete
| Name | Relation | Age | Occupation | Born |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| James Wakefield | Head | 45 | Mason | Stroud, Gloucestershire, England |
| Hannah Wakefield | Wife | 45 | — | BERKELEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, ENGLAND |
| Hiram Wakefield | Son | 13 | Errand boy | — |
| Aaron Wakefield | Son | 10 | Errand boy | — |
| Miriam Wakefield | Daughter | 10 | Servant | — |
| Jabez Wakefield | Son | 8 | — | — |
| Zillah Wakefield | Daughter | 5 | Scholar | — |
And the marriage, at last
HANNAH SANIGER married JAMES WAKEFIELD at Bristol on 17 OCTOBER 1831.
Residence: Bristol, Gloucester, England.
An edifice on a tick
The claim was: Hannah Saniger was not born in Gloucestershire. On it this archive built:
- That all 81 Gloucestershire Saniger households could be excluded, because she was in none of them.
- That her baptism lay in a Bristol nonconformist chapel — thirty-six registers catalogued, twelve named as candidates.
- That Bristol's position astride the Avon mattered, and she might be a Somerset-side woman.
- That a Saniger household at Oxford Road, born at CHEW MAGNA in Somerset, was the best lead this archive had ever had — a page built for it, and the parish register put first on the errand list.
The 1851 census asked a different question. It asked WHERE, and the enumerator wrote BERKELEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE — the same parish the family tree had said all along, in the same house, ten years later, about the same woman.
A binary tick is the weakest statement a census makes, and this archive treated it as the strongest thing it had — because it was the only thing it had, and because nobody tested it against the next census. Filed as the largest error here →
The pages built on the wrong answer are still up, marked wrong rather than deleted, because how an archive goes wrong is part of what it knows. Chew Magna → · The Bristol chapels →
What else the page gives
- James Wakefield was born at STROUD. The archive has only ever had “Gloucestershire”. Stroud is a clothing town in the same Vale as Berkeley, Dursley and Cam.
- Two more children. JABEZ, born about 1843, and ZILLAH, born about 1846. Neither has ever appeared in this archive, and neither is on the General Hewitt in 1854.
- Miriam is a servant at ten. In the 1851 census she is already entered with an occupation. Three years later she boarded the ship as a domestic servant aged fourteen.
- And the three eldest daughters are gone. Eliza, Ellen and Martha, born 1832–1836, are not in the house in 1851. They were 19, 17 and 15.
And a whole family nobody here had a name for
JAMES WAKEFIELD, baptised at STROUD 6 April 1806 · father RICHARD WAKEFIELD, mother ELIZABETH WEBB.
The 1851 census gave his birthplace as Stroud. Here is the baptism, in the right parish and the right year, and it opens a family this archive has never had a single name for.
Richard Wakefield and Elizabeth Webb are given by a FamilySearch-derived index, not yet by the parish book, and there is more than one James Wakefield in Gloucestershire. The birthplace, the year and the county all agree, which is why it is here; it is an identification, not a proof.
Jabez Wakefield's birth is registered at Bristol in 1843, which confirms the census. Neither he nor Zillah is aboard the General Hewitt in 1854, and what became of them is not yet known.
Ellen was not left behind
ELLEN WAKEFIELD, baptised at Bristol 26 OCTOBER 1834 · father JAMES WAKEFIELD, mother HANNAH — the first baptism of any of their children this archive has found.
ELLEN WAKEFIELD, buried at BRISTOL, ST PAUL, PORTLAND SQUARE, 12 JULY 1840, AGED 5 · Bristol Archives, burials 1836–1855, P/St P/R/3/3.
And the same index holds an Eliza Wakefield among Bristol deaths and burials in 1834 — the year of Ellen's baptism. The transcript would not load, so it is reported here as an index entry to be confirmed rather than a fact.
The archive framed three absences as a mystery about emigration. At least one of them was a child's grave in St Paul's. The page that framed it →
Why Hannah's own baptism is still missing
The test. HANNAH SMITH at Berkeley, 1795–1815 — the same query that finds Hannah Saniger nothing. The result. Nineteen results, and the ONLY baptism collection that returns anything for Berkeley is England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, the FamilySearch index. FindMyPast's own GLOUCESTERSHIRE BAPTISMS collection covers Bristol parishes but does not reach Berkeley at all.
Which makes the original Berkeley parish book, at Gloucestershire Archives, the one document left standing between this family and a fully evidenced English line.
And Lydia is still nobody's wife on paper. No John Saniger marries at Berkeley between 1792 and 1804, though his children are baptised there from 1801. The woman the tree calls Hannah's mother, and the seventy-year-old Lyddya Sinegar living in Hannah's house in 1841, remain joined by nothing but a surname and a household. Lyddya Sinegar →
And the gap that was never a gap
The consequence runs the other way too. /berkeley has spent months explaining that FreeREG's Berkeley transcript stops in 1677 and therefore five of the tree's six Saniger generations could not be tested. FindMyPast holds Berkeley baptisms straight through the gap, with parents named — Jos 1792, Ann 1798, Jno 1803, Jno 1804, Edwd 1804, Edward 1805, Thos 1808, Victoria 1817, Eliza and Hesther 1819, Daniel 1821 — and Daniel's entry, to take one, gives his father as Edward Saniger and his mother as Kitura. The generations are testable after all. They were behind a paywall, not behind a gap in the record.