One vowel

This archive has spent weeks looking for Hannah Saniger's baptism, and on two separate days concluded it was missing from every index money could buy. It is not missing. It is spelled SANIGOR, and that is one of the very few spellings this site's own alias list did not carry.

The search index here knows eleven forms of this surname — Sainger, Sanigar, Sanigaer, Sinager, Sinneger, Sinnegar, Sinegar, Synegar, Synager, Singer. It did not know Sanigor. Neither did the variant matching on the subscription site, which returned her marriage and nothing else however the query was phrased. One vowel.

John Saniger's children at Berkeley

John Saniger's children, all baptised at Berkeley, all naming him as father:

It also closes the Thomas Sinegar question. He and Hannah are both baptised at Berkeley to John Saniger — she in 1804, he on 3 July 1808 — and he spent his life in the Bristol parish next to hers, naming a daughter Lydia, a daughter Hannah, and two sons John. Thomas →

One thing does not fit, and it is the year.

The family tree gives Hannah's birth as 23 July 1805. This baptism is 18 August 1804 — eleven months earlier. There is no second Hannah baptised to John Saniger at Berkeley, and no burial for a Hannah between the two dates, so the ordinary reading is that the tree's day and month were carried from somewhere reliable and the year slipped by one. The alternative — two daughters of the same name, the first dying unrecorded — is possible and has no evidence at all.

her baptism, very probably; the year unresolved

Her mother is named, and the name is not evidenced.

FamilySearch's shared tree gives John Saniger a wife LYDIA JONES, 1770–1851, married at Berkeley in 1797. That would name the seventy-year-old Lyddya Sinegar living in Hannah's house in 1841 and settle the oldest small mystery on this site.

And there is no will to ask.

A will names children, and that is the shortest route from John Saniger of Berkeley to his daughter Hannah. The Gloucestershire probate index for the right period — Gloucestershire Wills & Administrations 1801-1858, the Consistory Court of Gloucester, 14,195 entries — was read this fortnight under every opening this surname takes. It holds exactly TWO of them.

Searched with wildcards rather than spellings — SAN*, SIN*, SYN* and SWA* return every form the name takes and 27 surrounding families besides, so no spelling can hide inside this result the way SANIGOR hid a baptism. Control: SMITH in the same index returns 277.

The 1804 entry, and what was in the column nobody reads

The complete Saniger pass left one entry it could not place: Jno Saniger, Berkeley, 1804, with the father's column empty — the only Berkeley baptism of the 158 without a father named. Three readings were offered: a second son born the same year as Hannah, a mis-indexed copy of the 1803 entry, or a different family. It is none of them.

And on the map she was twenty kilometres from Berkeley

The spelling that hid her baptism hid her again, in a place nobody was looking. This archive's own atlas had her birthplace recorded as «Berkley, Gloucester, England» — the family tree's idiosyncratic spelling, the one the 1851 census also uses, and the one [/thomas-sinegar](/thomas-sinegar/) has named since 13 September. It never reached the map as Berkeley.

So she sat alone on 51.865 -2.246, a coordinate a gazetteer returns when it cannot resolve «X, Gloucester, England» — the county written as its county town. Two other villages were on the same point, Brimpsfield and Ashton Underhill, which have nothing to do with her or with each other. That is how the pin was caught: not by anyone checking Hannah, but by three unrelated places being in one spot.

She is on Berkeley now, with the rest of them. John Saniger, Lydia, Catherine Cotton, Margaret Richards, William and Thomas Saniger — eleven people on the parish the whole English line comes out of. It changes no finding on this page. It changes where the archive was drawing the woman the findings are about.

documented The map →

Her mother, tested

The block above was written on 13 September and ended by saying that four fields about Lydia were «testable and none has been tested». All four have now been tested, in one afternoon, on the subscription this archive already had. Two are confirmed from record, one is wrong, and one has nothing behind it.

Where Lydia did not marry

JONES was disputed on 16 September, when the marriage the whole internet cites turned out to belong to a Sawyer. That left a question rather than an answer: where did John Saniger marry, and to whom? Three days of the obvious tests have not found it, and the shape of the failure is now worth as much as a find would have been.

Clapton, in the village of Ham

Following Lydia into the census does something the baptism registers could not: it puts this family at an address. Both censuses place them in Ham, one of the three hamlets of Berkeley parish that the 1608 muster names — and the manor whose court roll of 1587 sits in John Smyth's own collection, MS 3549, as «Ham and Hinton». The family this archive has been tracing through spellings turns out to have been living, in living memory, in the place the archive has been reading fourteenth-century deeds about.

Her mother, tested

The block above was written on 13 September and ended by saying that four fields about Lydia were «testable and none has been tested». All four have now been tested, in one afternoon, on the subscription this archive already had. Two are confirmed from record, one is wrong, and one has nothing behind it.

All one hundred and fifty-eight, read

FindMyPast's England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975 carries a column this archive has never had from an index: the father's first name. For SANIGER it holds 158 baptisms, and 156 of them name a father. All eight pages have now been read in baptism-year order, 1571 to 1909. 115 of the 158 are Berkeley — the rest are Bristol (9), Thornbury (7), Stone and Tidenham (4 each), Dursley and St Botolph Aldgate (3 each), King's Stanley and Stonehouse (2 each), and one apiece at Frampton on Severn, Slimbridge, North Nibley, Wheatenhurst and Newent. Two strays sit far outside all of it, both in 1688: Nether Whitacre in Warwickshire and Stoke Prior in Worcestershire.

Two notes on method

1. An alias list is a research instrument, and mine had a hole in it. Every "not found" this archive published for Hannah was really "not found under ten of the eleven spellings I happened to think of". The list now carries sixteen, including Sanigor, Sanigear, Sinigar and Swanhanger. Where the other holes were →
2. And on Ancestry. Asked to look on Ancestry, which holds the Gloucestershire registers FindMyPast does not. It is not signed in on this machine and I will not enter anyone's password, so it was not used. FamilySearch was signed in, is free, and had the record.

Six generations at Berkeley → · The surname in 1608 → · Why I thought she was not from there → · The errors →