Robert and Jean's family
Five children, four of them now documented, and a household that was invisible to this archive a fortnight ago.
A fortnight ago Robert D'Arcy was a rank, a burial and a rumour of Yorkshire, and his family was a list of names on a tree. He now has a marriage, a career in five gazetted steps, a funeral reported in seventeen newspapers — and a household. This page assembles it.
Portsea St Mary, 21 June 1779
| ROBERT D'ARCY | First commissioned 17 January 1776 as Practitioner Engineer and Second Lieutenant, Corps of Engineers · Major 1802 · Lieutenant-Colonel 1 March 1805 · Colonel 1813 · Major-General by 1827 · died Chatham 13 May 1827, buried there with military honours on the 19th, aged 76 | documented |
| JEAN WARD | Baptised SOUTH LEITH, Midlothian, 19 July 1754, daughter of JOSEPH WARD and MARTHA GAIRDEN · buried Chatham 1823, aged 66 | documented |
| Married | PORTSEA ST MARY, 21 JUNE 1779 | documented |
Ten, and five of them found in this archive's own tree
born 14 March 1780 · baptised Portsea St Mary, 19 March 1780
Royal Artillery from about 1795. St Domingo 1793, Sicily, Walcheren, and five years in Persia in the service of Prince Abbas Mirza. Lieutenant-Colonel, K.L.S. Died at Home Mead, Lymington, 7 February 1848, leaving his property to his wife Catherine and five children. →
born 26 September 1781, Portsmouth
Married JOHN MADDOCK JONES of Pen-y-bryn, Ruabon, Major of the Royal Denbigh Militia, at Chatham in 1806, her brother JOSEPH signing as witness. She died at Le Havre in February 1843 and he at Ingouville near Havre the following month. Her death notice calls her “daughter of the late MAJOR-GENERAL D'ARCY, R.E.” — the only record anywhere that gives Robert a corps as well as a rank. →
born 18 February 1783 — the tree says “Portsmouth, Hampshire, England OR WEST INDIES”, and hedges for a reason
39th Foot. Married MISS LUDLAM OF GUERNSEY, announced September 1805 in a notice calling him “son of Lieut. Colonel D'Arcy”. Peninsular War 1808. In Ireland with the regiment 1820 and 1822. Married secondly Maria, and sailed for New South Wales on the convict ship England in April 1826. THE LINE THIS ARCHIVE DESCENDS FROM. →
born about 1784, Portsmouth
Aged 57 and living in Joseph's house at Priestlands in 1841. Of exactly the right generation, in exactly the right household — and no other record of him has been found anywhere in Hampshire. Portsea's transcript stops in 1782, so a baptism of 1784 could never have been found in it. →
born February 1786 · christened ST MICHAEL, BARBADOS, 18 February 1786
Son of Robert and Jane, christened in Barbados while his father served there. Gentleman Cadet to Second Lieutenant, Corps of Royal Engineers, 1 February 1804; First Lieutenant 1 March 1805, in the same Ordnance Office announcement that made his father a Lieutenant-Colonel. Buried Chatham St Mary, 9 May 1805, aged nineteen. The Kentish Gazette of 14 May calls him “the son of Col. D'Arcy, chief engineer of Chatham lines” and says he was interred with military honours — the same words used of his father twenty-two years later. →
born 15 December 1787, BARBADOS · christened St Michael, 17 March 1788
Christened in the same Barbados parish as Constantine, to the same parents. DOCUMENTED 14 September 2026: died in the BRIGHTON registration district in the first quarter of 1875, AGED 87 — which matches her recorded birth of 15 December 1787 exactly. In 1841 she was keeping house in Brighton with her two sisters. →
born 10 December 1789, BARBADOS
The third of the Barbados children. DOCUMENTED 14 September 2026: “On the 23rd ult., at BEDFORD SQUARE, BRIGHTON, MISS CATHARINE D'ARCY, aged 86” — Horsham, Petworth, Midhurst and Steyning Express, 8 February 1876. Her death is registered at Brighton in the first quarter of 1876 and she left an estate: Death Duty Register, TNA IR 27/396. →
born 16 May 1791
Died 24 October 1791, aged five months. The first Anna Maria. →
born 10 October 1792, Portsmouth
Named for the sister who had died the previous autumn, and dead herself in 1800 aged seven. Her birthplace matters beyond her short life: by October 1792 the family is back in Portsmouth, which brackets the West Indies posting at the far end. →
born 19 October 1794, LYME REGIS, DORSET
The youngest, and the only one born in the West Country. DOCUMENTED 14 September 2026: died in the BRIGHTON district in the second quarter of 1869, aged 73. NOT to be confused with the CHARLOTTE D'ARCY christened at Chatham in 1826 — that one is her niece, George Pitt's daughter, who sailed for New South Wales eight days later. →
Only one of them was baptised at Portsea
Only one of them was baptised at Portsea, and this archive spent months reading that as meaningful. It is not: FindMyPast's Hampshire collection covers Portsea St Mary continuously from 1770 to 1792 and returns Joseph and nobody else — so the others were christened wherever the Corps had posted him. A regiment moves; a parish register does not follow it. AND THIS ARCHIVE HAD ALREADY FOUND WHERE TWO OF THEM WERE, AND HAD NOT PUT IT HERE. Constantine was christened at St Michael, Barbados in 1786 and Jane in the same parish in 1788 — inside the twenty-four-year gap between Robert's first commission and his next gazetted promotion. That has been on the Hornby page since the summer while this page called Constantine unplaced.
The shape of it
Ten children in fourteen years, born in three places on two sides of the Atlantic: four at Portsmouth, three in Barbados, one at Lyme Regis. Two died small and were both called Anna Maria. Two sons went into the artillery and the infantry and a third into his father's Corps of Engineers, where he died at nineteen. Three daughters ended their lives in and around Brighton, one of them at eighty-eight. It is the ordinary shape of a service family, scattered by the postings that made it.
- Robert's own parentage — and whether the CONSTANTINE D'ARCY of 1759–1778, whom the tree makes his brother by the same two parents, is a real sibling or this family's own Constantine duplicated and back-dated.
- Whether Richard was his son, which needs a baptism from a parish this archive has not yet identified.
- What became of the two ANNA MARIAS beyond the tree's dates — both died as children. Their three surviving sisters are now documented: JANE, CATHERINE and CHARLOTTE lived together in Brighton and died there between 1869 and 1876.
- When exactly Robert went to Barbados. His children's birthplaces put him there by 1786 and home by 1792; the Board of Ordnance papers would say.
- And who ELIZABETH PITT was — living in Joseph's house in 1841, dying at Lymington in 1851, and sharing a surname that ran through four generations of this family. This is the one question the archive's own material could not help with.
- Where Jane, Catherine and Charlotte were in 1851, 1861 and 1871 — they are in the Brighton census in 1841 and in none of the three that follow, under any spelling.