Brighton, 1841–1876 · found 14 September 2026

The Sussex sisters

Three of Robert D'Arcy's daughters, added to this archive yesterday on the authority of other people's web trees, and documented today from the public record.

Three of Major-General Robert D'Arcy's daughters were added to this archive yesterday out of its own family tree, on the authority of nothing but other people's web trees. All three are now documented: three death registrations in the same Sussex district within seven years, a newspaper notice with an address, a probate at Kew, and one census household that holds all three of them under one roof.

JANE, born Barbados December 1787 · CATHERINE, born Barbados December 1789 · CHARLOTTE, born Lyme Regis October 1794. The first two were christened at St Michael, Barbados while their father served there; the youngest was born after the family came home.

The General Register Office

Three registrations, one district, seven years

Name as registered	Age	When	District	Reference
CHARLOTTE DARCY	aged 73	Q2 1869	Brighton, Sussex	vol 2B, page 152
JANE DARCY	aged 87	Q1 1875	Brighton, Sussex	vol 2B, page 203
CATHERINE DARCY	aged 86	Q1 1876	Brighton, Sussex	vol 2B, page 164

These are General Register Office death index entries, and after 1866 that index gives an AGE AT DEATH. Run the ages back and you get births of about 1795, 1787 and 1789. The tree — sourced from web trees and nothing else — gives 19 October 1794, 15 December 1787 and 10 December 1789. TWO OF THE THREE AGREE TO THE YEAR, and Charlotte is out by one, which is what an age stated by a grieving household does. documented

Horsham, Petworth, Midhurst and Steyning Express, Tuesday 8 February 1876, page 2

And Catherine has an obituary with an address in it

On the 23rd ult., at BEDFORD SQUARE, BRIGHTON, MISS CATHARINE D'ARCY, aged 86. documented

The digitised text reads “On the 33rd alt., at vinare, Brighton, Mies Catharine DArcy, aged 86” — “ult.” for the previous month, “Miss” for the title. Read against the register entry it is unambiguous.

Three things at once. THE DATE: “23rd ult.” in a paper of 8 February is 23 JANUARY 1876, exactly the date this archive's tree gives her and could not previously source. THE TITLE: MISS — she never married, which is what the tree says and no record had confirmed. And THE ADDRESS: Bedford Square, a Regency terrace at the western end of Brighton seafront.

The National Archives IR 27/396

She left an estate

CATHERINE D'ARCY of BRIGHTON, Sussex, grant year 1876, COURT OF PROBATE — Index to Death Duty Registers 1796-1903, The National Archives IR 27/396. The register behind that index states what the estate was worth and names the executors and legatees, which for three unmarried sisters is the document most likely to name the rest of the family. indexed, unread

What it would cost to read →

HO107/1122, book 8, folio 37, page 22, schedule 1912 · WESTERN BUILDINGS, BRIGHTON · sub-district The Palace

All three under one roof, 1841

Forename	Surname	Age stated
Jane	D'Arcy	40
Catharine	D'Arcy	39
Charlotte	D'Arcy	35

Enumerated immediately before them, at the same address: SARAH HARMER, 20, born Sussex.

Three unmarried D'Arcy sisters named Jane, Catharine and Charlotte, keeping house together in Brighton with a servant — and three unmarried D'Arcy women named Jane, Catherine and Charlotte dying in the Brighton registration district between 1869 and 1876. There is no serious doubt that these are the same three women.

And the thing that does not fit. EXCEPT FOR THE AGES, AND THIS PAGE IS NOT GOING TO HIDE THEM. In June 1841 Robert's daughters were 53, 51 and 46. The enumerator wrote 40, 39 and 35 — eleven to thirteen years light, and consistently so across all three. The 1841 census instructed enumerators to round adult ages down to the nearest five, which explains none of it: 39 and 35 are not the same rule. The likeliest reading is three genteel unmarried women in a seaside town giving the ages they preferred, which was common enough to be unremarkable. But it is a discrepancy, it is the only thing that does not fit, and it is stated here rather than buried. near-certain, with an age problem

HO107/1646, folio 357, page 59, schedule 172 · 22 WESTERN COTTAGES, BRIGHTON · sub-district The Place, enumeration district 1N

1851: all three, and the census says BARBADOES

Forename	Surname	In the house	Status	Age	Born	Occupation
Jane D	Arcy	Lodger	Unmarried	55	BARBADOES	Fund holder
Catherine	Arcy	Lodger	Unmarried	50	BARBADOES	Fund holder
Charlotte	Arcy	Lodger	Unmarried	40	Lyme, DORSET	Fund holder

This is the best record this archive has found about Robert D'Arcy's West Indies years, and it is not about Robert. TWO OF HIS DAUGHTERS TOLD AN ENGLISH CENSUS ENUMERATOR THEY WERE BORN IN BARBADOES, and the third said Lyme Regis, Dorset. That is exactly the pattern this archive reconstructed yesterday out of two Barbados christenings and a birthplace on a family tree — and it now rests on an English government record instead.documented

“FUND HOLDER” means living on invested capital — the three of them keeping themselves on dividends, which is what unmarried daughters of a major-general did. “LODGER” means they did not keep the house: Western Cottage was somebody else's and they had rooms in it. All three are entered UNMARRIED, which confirms the “Miss” of Catherine's obituary twenty-five years later.

Read from the page, not the index. The enumerator's own hand settles two things the transcript gets wrong. THE ADDRESS: he writes “19 WESTERN COTT” against schedule 168 and dittoes down the run — 20, 21, 22 — so the sisters are at NUMBER 22 WESTERN COTTAGES, a numbered house in a named row. FindMyPast renders that as a house name of “Western Cottage” with the street left blank, losing the plural and the number both. AND THE NAME: he writes “Jane D'Arcy”, clearly, apostrophe and all, with “do” under it for her sisters. The index split it into a forename of “Jane D” and a surname of “Arcy”. read from the original

Schedule 172 holds the three of them and nobody else — three lodgers and no head of house. Next door at schedule 173, folio 358, is JAMES HAYWARD, 61, of Buckinghamshire, “LODGING HOUSE KEEPER”. Western Cottages was a row of lodging houses at the western end of Brighton, and the general's daughters had rooms in one of them.

The Barbados christenings → · The twenty-four-year gap in his career →

Why it took four days

And why four days of searching missed them

The surname is indexed as ARCY. Jane is “Jane D” with a surname of “Arcy”; her sisters are “Catherine Arcy” and “Charlotte Arcy”. THIS IS NOT WHAT THE REGISTER SAYS — the enumerator wrote D'Arcy in a clear hand, and the apostrophe was read as the end of a forename. Every search this archive ran against a surname beginning D and ending ARCY — which is every search it ran — could not reach them.

They came out of a household search instead: JANE, with a CHARLOTTE in the same household, in Brighton. That returns 119 people and the third of them is “Jane D Arcy”. Searching by who somebody lived with, rather than by what they were called, is the move that worked.

Third time in a fortnight. SANIGOR hid a baptism because a spelling was missing from an alias list. A search for Martha in Bristol failed because she died in Queensland. And now a D' read as a forename. THIS ARCHIVE'S OWN SEARCH INDEX ALREADY LISTS “arcy” as a form of D'Arcy — the alias list was right and the queries put to somebody else's index were not. own error, and the same error The other two →

ST ANDREW'S OLD CHURCH, Church Road, HOVE · The National Archives RG 37/65/2 — “Part 2. Burial ground section A”, c.1975 · page 47

All three in one section of one burial ground

Name	Died	What it adds
CHARLOTTE D'ARCY	died 28 MAY 1869	the GRO index gave only the June quarter
JANE D'ARCY	died 10 JANUARY 1875	the GRO index gave only the March quarter
CATHERINE D'ARCY	died 23 JANUARY 1876	which is the date the Horsham paper printed — “on the 23rd ult.” — confirmed from a second direction

This page said, at the bottom, that no burial record had been looked for at all. Three were found in one search, and they sit together in SECTION A of the burial ground — three sisters in adjacent graves, half a mile from Brunswick and a mile from Bedford Square where Catherine died. Adjacent graves in one section is a family plot, which is a better fact than three separate burials would have been.documented

Two exact dates where the archive had quarters, and one independent confirmation. Charlotte's 28 May 1869 and Jane's 10 January 1875 are new. Catherine's 23 January 1876 is not new — it is the date the Horsham, Petworth, Midhurst and Steyning Express printed a fortnight after the event, and a parish register and a newspaper now agree on it without either having seen the other.

What the document actually is

Corrected 15 September 2026. This page called RG 37/65/2 an Anglican parish REGISTER and described the three sisters as “buried out of the same church… their names one under another in the book”. That is not what the series is. RG 37 is “GENERAL REGISTER OFFICE: REMOVAL OF GRAVES AND TOMBSTONES”, 1923–2007, and The National Archives describes it in its own words as “copies of records of local authorities and the Church Commissioners relating to BURIAL GROUND REMOVALS… a number contain a plan of the original place of burial”. Hove's St Andrew's is broken into twenty-three parts, one per burial-ground section, A to X, all dated about 1975.

So the names were recorded when the ground was cleared, roughly a century after the burials, not by a clerk at the graveside in 1869. The dates are not weakened by that — a removal schedule takes them from the stones and the ground's own registers — but the provenance is different and the page was describing the wrong kind of document. What it gains in exchange is the section letter, which is what makes the three graves a plot rather than a coincidence. the data stands; the description was wrong

And what has not been seen. And one limit worth stating: RG 37/65/2 is not digitised, and this archive has not seen the document. What has been corrected here is the CATALOGUE DESCRIPTION of the series, read from The National Archives' own entry — not the three dates, which came from elsewhere and are unchanged.

Coverage

1861, searched eight ways

Surname	D*ARCY across Sussex, and nationally by year of birth. ARCY across Sussex. Nothing.
Street, the right one	WESTERN COTTAGES — no such street in the 1861 index for Brighton at all, as a street or as a house name.
Street, widened	WESTERN* in Brighton returns 718 people in 1861. Filtered for Jane (22), Catherine (11) and Charlotte (6) and read: not one of them fits.
Bedford Square	Where Catherine died in 1876 — searched in 1861 and again in 1871. Not there.
Birthplace, in the county	Thirty-three people born BARBADOES in Sussex in 1861, listed and read one by one.
Birthplace, nationally	Twenty-five Janes and sixteen Catherines born Barbadoes in the whole of England, Wales and Scotland.
Household	Jane with a Charlotte, and Jane with a Catherine, in Brighton; Charlotte with a Catherine across Sussex. This is the search that found them in 1851.
Falmer	The village the tree gives as Jane's place of death. No Jane there in 1861.

Eight approaches, four of them independent of the surname entirely, and the sisters are not in the 1861 census. They are at 22 Western Cottages in 1851 and Catherine is at Bedford Square in 1876, and on 7 April 1861 they are nowhere this index can find. The plain possibilities are that they were away from home that night, that a page of the enumerator's book is lost, or that the surname is mangled past every form tried — and after what the transcriber did to “D'Arcy” in 1851, the last of those is not a remote idea. searched eight ways, and empty

Method

A search that lies, and how it was caught

The first pass of this work reported NO Jane D'Arcy of the right age in Sussex in 1871, from a query combining a year of birth with a place. A control put through the same query — JANE SMITH, born about 1788, Sussex, 1871 — returned ZERO, which is impossible.

Run separately, the same search returns 60 results by year and 136 by place. Combined, FindMyPast's census search returns nothing and reports it as a clean negative. Every null this archive draws from a census query carrying BOTH a year of birth and a place is worthless. the query was broken, not the record

This is the third time in a fortnight that a confident negative has turned out to be an artefact of how the question was asked — after SANIGOR, and after searching Bristol for a woman who died in Queensland. The control test is not a formality. The other two →

What this changes

Three people move from a web tree to the public record. Jane, Catherine and Charlotte were added to this archive yesterday on the authority of the McDougall Web Site, the Darcy Web Site and a MyHeritage SmartCopy. They now have civil death registrations with volume and page, and one of them has an obituary and a probate.
Two of the tree's dates are confirmed to the year, and one to the day. Jane's age of 87 and Catherine's of 86 fit the tree's December 1787 and December 1789 exactly. Catherine's death of 23 January 1876 is confirmed by a newspaper against a date the tree gave without a source.
The family had a Brighton house. Western Buildings in 1841, Bedford Square by 1876, a servant in both directions — the general's unmarried daughters living together on the Sussex coast for at least thirty-five years, which nobody in this archive knew a week ago.
And the Barbados posting stops being an inference. Yesterday the West Indies years rested on two christenings in a Caribbean index and a birthplace on a family tree. Today two of Robert D'Arcy's daughters are recorded in an English census as born in BARBADOES, and the youngest as born at Lyme Regis in Dorset — the same shape, from a different kind of source entirely.

Still open. Where they were on census night 1861 — eight approaches and nothing. What the Death Duty register says Catherine left and to whom. Whether Charlotte and Jane also left probates. And who kept Western Cottages, since the sisters were only lodging there.

Robert and Jean's family → · Where these three came from → · Their brother →