The Sanigers, reconstituted

This archive's oldest claim is a Gloucestershire family. Its only link to that family is one line in a Queensland death register naming Miriam Wakefield's mother as Hannah Saniger. Searching for Hannah by name had failed. Repeatedly →

So instead of searching for her, the county was reconstituted: all 556 Saniger records opened one by one, the father and mother read off each baptism, and the children assembled back into the households they came from. 81 families. Then ask which of them could be hers.

What was actually done

Grouped by parish, father's forename and mother's forename, and split wherever more than twenty-five years separates one baptism from the next — otherwise a grandfather and a grandson of the same name merge into one impossible household spanning a century. Duplicate transcriptions of the same event, which are everywhere in this county because several parishes are transcribed twice, are counted once.

Three tests, three negatives

Where else she is not

Gloucestershire was the obvious county and it is now exhausted. So were the others within reach of Bristol: Somerset, Wiltshire, Monmouthshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire and Oxfordshire. No Hannah Saniger born about 1805 in any of them — and the searches were control-tested, with more than five hundred Smiths returned for the same twenty years in each county group, and 358 Saniger-variant records in Wiltshire alone. eight counties, searched and empty

A cloth-trade family of the Stroud valleys

Since the records were all opened anyway, they describe a family this archive had never looked at properly. The occupations are unmistakable:

Weavers, tuckers, curriers, blacksmiths and shoemakers, living at Cam, Lower Cam and Dursley. A tucker finishes woollen cloth; a currier dresses leather. These are the trades of the Stroudwater cloth district in its working century, and they are what this family did. Two Clerks in Holy Orders and three yeomen are the whole of the gentility.

Every family of three children or more

Where the families are

Dursley and Cam hold fifty-three of the eighty-one. Berkeley — the parish this archive has named in every account of itself since it was built — holds five, and cannot hold more, because its transcript stops in 1677.

How this name is actually spelled

The Berkeley page lists eleven spellings. Reading all 556 records gives seventeen with three or more occurrences, and the commonest is not the one the family uses.

All seventeen are now folded together by this site's own search, so any one of them finds the rest. Try it →

Twenty-nine Sanigers in Bristol, 1841

The Vale families did not stay in the Vale. On census night in 1841 there are 29 of them in Bristol alone, under five spellings — and one of them is Lyddya Sinegar, aged 70, living in the Wakefield house.

The chain that failed → · The household, 1841 → · The certificate that would settle it →