Chew Magna
The one open question in this archive's English line is where Hannah Saniger was born. A census two streets from her door names a Somerset parish, and it is the first answer that fits every constraint at once.
Every English document this archive holds agrees on one negative: whatever Hannah Saniger was, she was not born in Gloucestershire. The 1841 census at Drivers Fields says so with a tick, and says the same of the seventy-year-old Lyddya Sinegar living in the house. The reconstitution of all 81 Gloucestershire Saniger households says so by exhaustion. The passenger register dittoed the question instead of answering it.
So the county has to be somewhere else. Here is a Saniger household in Bristol ten years later, and it names one.
Oxford Road, St Philip and Jacob
| Name | Relation | Cond. | Age | Occupation | Born |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| William SANIGER | Head | Married | 27 | Smith Journeyman | Somerset, CHEW MAGNA |
| Caroline SANIGER | Wife | Married | 28 | — | Gloucestershire, Fishponds |
| Elizabeth SANIGER | Mother | Widow | 60 | — | Somerset, CHEW MAGNA |
Address as written: Oxford Road.
Four constraints, and a parish that meets all of them
- The county is right, and it is the only thing the 1841 census will tell us. At Drivers Fields in 1841 the enumerator ticked Hannah Wakefield as NOT born in Gloucestershire, and ticked Lyddya Sinegar, aged seventy, the same way. Somerset is the county on the other side of the river.
- The parish is next door. St Philip and Jacob adjoins St Paul, where the Wakefields were living in 1841 and where Miriam was born in 1840. These are neighbouring Bristol parishes, not distant towns.
- The generation is right. Elizabeth Saniger is sixty in 1851, so born about 1791. Lyddya Sinegar is seventy in 1841, so born about 1771. Hannah is thirty-five in 1841, so born about 1806. Three Saniger women of three generations, all in east Bristol, none of them born in Gloucestershire.
- The class is right. William Saniger is a journeyman smith. James Wakefield is a journeyman mason. These are the same kind of household in the same kind of street.
- Nothing yet joins Elizabeth Saniger of Chew Magna to Hannah Saniger of Drivers Fields. They are not shown to be sisters, cousins or anything else.
- Saniger is not a rare name in the Bristol region, and the reconstitution already found 81 Gloucestershire households of it.
- Chew Magna is eight miles from Bristol, and eight miles is a long way to assume.
The obvious next search cannot be run
No Saniger at Chew Magna in FreeREG's Somerset holdings, in any spelling, between 1780 and 1840. The only Somerset Saniger in that window is a marriage at Walcot: Edmund Liddall and Rachel Saniger, 8 June 1819.
That looks like a null result. It is not, and the rule on this site is to find out which before saying anything. Three forenames of SMITH across Somerset for the twenty-one years 1795–1815.
| Control | Somerset entries | Parishes | At Chew Magna |
|---|---|---|---|
| William Smith | 271 | 85 | 1 |
| Mary Smith | 371 | 115 | 1 |
| John Smith | 301 | 97 | 0 |
943 Smith entries across 21 years and 100-odd Somerset parishes. Chew Magna accounts for TWO of them. Walcot has a hundred; Bath sixty-nine; Midsomer Norton thirty-eight. Chew Magna had roughly 1,800 people in 1801 and should be producing dozens.
What happens next
- Chew Magna's own register, 1795–1815. The originals are at the Somerset Heritage Centre and filmed on the subscription sites. A baptism for Hannah Saniger, daughter of John and Lydia, would close the oldest open question on this site in one line. On the queue →
- And it would test the tree at the same time. The family tree says Hannah was born at Berkeley on 23 July 1805, daughter of John Saniger who died there in 1824. The 1841 census says she was not born in Gloucestershire, and Berkeley is in Gloucestershire. Those two statements cannot both be true. What Berkeley holds →
- The Bristol chapels remain the other half of the answer. Twelve RG 4 volumes can hold a birth in this window. They are listed →