The Sneyds

The baptism this line rests on, and a burial two years later

When the descent from Ralph Sneyd of Keele Hall was disproved, what survived was the baptism that disproved it: William Sneyd, baptised at Madeley All Saints on 12 September 1742, father William Sneyd. Ralph was eighteen that year, so the graft failed — and this archive has rested the Sneyd line on that entry ever since. The graft →

The Madeley register has now been read properly. There are 110 Sneyd records in it. And two years after that baptism it carries this:

Two of the four links are documented, and I said none were

Earlier today this page said the English origin of these Sneyds was "not currently evidenced by anything". That was an overstatement and it was mine. I searched for two baptisms, did not find them, and stopped — without following up a marriage sitting in the same results list, or trying the parish the family actually lived in.

Hanley, and a servant's family in the Potteries

Every previous search had gone to Madeley, because that is where the disproved Keele graft pointed. Hanley had never been searched — and Hanley is where the tree plainly says Samuel Charles was born.

It holds his baptism, and a sister: Mary Sneyd, baptised 18 February 1814, the same father Samuel and mother Elizabeth, and this time the clerk recorded the father's occupation — Servant.

And a correction to the family tree. The tree gives Samuel Charles's birth as 15 March 1810. The Bishop's Transcript records the birth date outright as 13 March 1811 — two days and one year out. The archive publishes the register's date. registered

Ivy Miriam Sneyd married Lindesay Atkinson D'Arcy at Albion Church in March 1916. Her family is the biggest in this archive — 116 people in the tree — and the one that pushed furthest into the Queensland interior.

Arthur Hartley Sneyd, killed at Pozières

Ivy's younger brother, born at Rockhampton on 11 October 1893, schooled at Eagle Junction State School, and a typist by trade — his own attestation paper says so, where this page used to say "clerk". He was killed in action on 20 August 1916, aged twenty-two. He has no grave. This page used to say he was "buried in France"; the report of death gives his burial place as "Not yet to hand", and it never came to hand.

Five months earlier his sister had married Lindesay Atkinson D'Arcy at Albion; three months earlier Lindesay had sailed for the war from Sydney aboard HMAT Demosthenes. Lindesay came home. Arthur did not.

He was Private 5050 of the 9th Infantry Battalion, 16th reinforcements, who sailed on HMAT Star of Victoria A16 on 31 March 1916. He had been made a sergeant in Australia and gave up the rank to get to France. He joined the battalion in the line on 29 July 1916 and was killed twenty-two days later. He has no known grave. His service record →

The Sneyds were not of Keele Hall

This archive flagged the risk and then acted on it. The tree ran this family back to Ralph Sneyd, Esq., of Keele Hall (1723–1793) and on into Warwickshire gentry of the 1530s — eleven generations. The join is false. The Madeley baptism of 1742 names the child's father as William Sneyd, not Ralph; Ralph was eighteen in 1742; and Ralph's own recorded children, baptised at Keele and Stone by a wife named Barbara, include no William at all. The evidence, in full →

What the family actually is turns out to be better: Sneyds — often written Snead — of Madeley, who produced a grocer at Hanley, whose son Samuel Charles Sneyd came out to New South Wales in 1832 with the 4th (King's Own) Regiment, shot a bushranger dead near the Vale of Clwydd as a sergeant of Mounted Police in 1839, and ended as Governor of Brisbane Gaol. His story →

The Australian generations are solid. William Hartley Sneyd was born at Kempsey, New South Wales, on 30 September 1837 — his Queensland death registration (1902/B/2776) records the date outright — died 11 September 1902, nineteen days short of his sixty-fifth birthday, and was buried at Lutwyche Cemetery, Kedron, where his wife Miriam Wakefield and his daughter-in-law Martha Blum lie too. This archive briefly published 1838 and was wrong →

The real line, out of the Madeley registers

Taking away Keele Hall did not leave a hole. The parish registers of All Saints, Madeley carry the family's own line, and it reaches nearly as far back in time as the false one did at its lower end:

The 1769 marriage is the keystone: the tree named Mary Blackbourne as this William's wife and it was right, but carried no source. The Madeley register has her, with banns, on 27 March 1769. Their children were baptised there from 1776 to 1794 — Sarah, James, Samuel, Lydia, Mary, Ann, Fletcher and Margaret.

One correction this produced: the tree gives Samuel the grocer as born 1769, which is where its absurd twelve-year gap between birth and christening came from. He was baptised in 1781; the 1851 census gives his birth as about 1779 at Madeley; he was buried at Hanley in 1855, not 1856.

The inquest of 1902

William Hartley Sneyd died on 11 September 1902, and a coroner investigated it. The family tree records a date and nothing else. Queensland State Archives holds the file, it has been downloaded and read in full, and it is published here:

He was found in Victoria Park, Brisbane, on the morning of 12 September, between two stacks of railway rails about two hundred yards in from Gregory Terrace. The Government Analyst found an ounce and a quarter of crude carbolic acid in his stomach, against a fatal dose of an eighth of an ounce. The magisterial inquiry entered the cause of death as "Poisoning (suicide)". He was sixty-four, had had asthma for a dozen years, and had not been able to work for a dozen years after an injury to his arm.

The same search turned up an intestacy file for Arthur Hartley Sneyd — the man killed at Pozières — opened by the Public Curator in 1916 and closed in 1917; land dealings for William Hartley Sneyd from 1863 and 1864; a selection file for Joseph Samuel Sneyd at Bundaberg; and a "dead farm file" for Arthur William Hartley Sneyd at Aramac, 1892–95 — which is the missing middle of the western Queensland decade in which he married at Muttaburra and his daughter Ivy was born at Boulia.

The people