One element of the research I carried out for my two-part article Analysis: The 1841 census of Waters Upton was further work on my Waters Upton family tree at Ancestry. ‘Forest’ might actually be a better word than ‘tree’ in this situation however, given that what I have established is in fact a collection of numerous separate trees growing in one place. As I traced the roots of those trees more deeply however, some of them began to merge. Quite a few of those trees were not ‘separate’ after all.

In adding people to the Waters Upton ‘forest’ my primary goal was to link other records to them besides the census and so find information vital to establishing who they were – their identities. For example, where and when were they born? This is not always easy to establish even for those enumerated on the more detailed censuses of England and Wales taken from 1851 onwards, due in part to inaccuracies in the information supplied, recorded, and transcribed. In the case of the 1841 census we have different levels of vagueness to contend with too, particularly with regard to places of birth. In most cases however, I have overcome these problems in respect of the Waters Uptonians of 1841. As a result, my analysis of that year’s census includes the geographic origins of the parishioners.

Another important component of each individual’s identity is how they are related – through blood or marriage – to others. So for each person in my Waters Upton ‘forest’ an important task was to find and link them with their parents, any siblings and, where applicable, spouses and children. Again the limitations of the 1841 census adds to the workload here, as relationships between the ‘head’ of each household and other residents were not recorded, and neither was marital status. Thankfully in the course of my research other records have cleared up any doubts, in most cases but certainly not in all.

There remains a sizeable minority of people on the 1841 census of Waters Upton whose full identities are still unknown to me (because I have not so far managed to track them down in other records), some of whom might yet turn out to be related to one or more of their fellow parishioners. These include many of the young servants and also boarders / lodgers (particularly those with high-frequency surnames) who were living away from their immediate families.

In one case even the ‘head’ of a household (household 8) has eluded me: I have yet to discover who 40 (or so) year old farmer John Brown was, and I don’t know whether the younger Elizabeth Brown enumerated with him was his wife or his sister.

Confirmed – and complex – connections

Returning to the people whose identities and families I have established, as my work on them progressed a number of families became larger in size and/or multi-generational and/or connected to other families. Consequently some of those families were split between two or more households, and more and more distant and complex relationships between some of the people present in the parish in 1841 became apparent.

I’ll begin my exploration of all these links with the largest of two extensive groups of connected people, for whom I have prepared family tree charts to make their kinships clearer. In both cases I have picked one person as the centre of the ‘web’, and I have also split the groups down into two further sub-groups to make things a little easier.

Pascall, Matthews, Austin, Woolley and Lloyd connections

Mary Woolley, née Pascall, was enumerated in household 21 on the 1841 census of Waters Upton along with her husband Robert Woolley, her unmarried sister Sarah Pascall, and a servant (Emma Juckes, unrelated as far as I know).

It appears that Robert and Mary had no children, but there were lots of people in the parish to whom they were linked – by blood, marriage, and more tenuous connections. Here is the first sub-group of those people.

This family tree chart (like the others illustrating this article) does not show every member of the families shown, just those connected to Mary Woolley née Pascall (and each other) who were residing in Waters Upton parish in 1841 (names in boxes with a blue background) plus the immediate ancestors from whom those relatives were descended. In addition to Mary, her husband and her sister we can see:

• Mary Woolley’s maternal uncle John Matthews, sharing household 22 with his daughter (Mary’s first cousin) Jane Austin née Matthews, Jane’s husband Edward Austin, and that couple’s children Eliza, John and Elizabeth Austin.
• John Matthew’s son Thomas Matthews in household 20 with his wife Sarah (née Evans) and their children John, Thomas and William.
• John Matthew’s son William Matthews in household 16 with his wife Ann (née Hobson) and their infant daughter Elizabeth.
• Mary Woolley’s maternal uncle Thomas Matthews in household 17 with his wife Sarah (née Davies) and their son William.

The second sub-group of people are connected to Mary Woolley – some quite loosely! – through her husband Robert.

In this tree we have the following:

• Mary Woolley’s sister-in-law Harriet Woolley (née Edge), widow of William Woolley, in household 40 with her children Robert, Thomas and Sarah.
• Harriet Woolley’s 9 year old son Levi in household 11, where he was working for farmer Samuel Allen as a servant.
• Harriet Woolley’s son Samuel (age 14) in household 13, another farmer’s servant who was employed by Thomas Whitfield.
• Harriet Woolley’s son James in household 29, with his wife Elizabeth (née Millington) and their children Jessie Jane and Mary.
• Harriet Woolley’s twice-widowed mother Sarah Lloyd, formerly Edge, née Williams in household 12 with her step-daughter Azillah Lloyd, Zillah’s husband Thomas Lloyd (who may or may not have been related), their children William and Goshen, plus two other Lloyds (Thomas and William, both in their 20s) whose relationship to the others I have yet to determine. Similarly, at this point I don’t know whether, or how, any of these Lloyds were connected to those with that surname in households 4 (Elizabeth, Joseph and Harriet), 23 (Joseph, Elizabeth and William, children of Ann Williams, formerly Lloyd, née Taylor) and 41 (Mary).

In total, that’s 35 people spread across 10 households (11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 29 and 40) who had links to each other.

> On to Part 2.