Back in my April 20th blog post, I wrote about my quest to find the parents of my 2 x great grandmother, Mary Maidment. She and her husband, Thomas Rideout, had married in 1833, before civil registration in England, so the record of their marriage didn't include the names of the parents of the happy couple. So I needed to find another way to identify Mary's origins. A major clue that I was following was the entry for Mary and her husband and family in the 1841 census. They were listed with their children and also included in the entry were Harriet Maidment and one month old Henry who had the same last name as his mother. My theory was that Harriet was Mary's sister but the 1841 census didn't list relationships.
I had been digging into this research over the years and, at one point in time, I had found Harriet Maidment marrying a George Roberts. I had even ordered the marriage certificate for this couple which gave the name of Harriet's father as William Maidment. Further digging showed this Harriet also had other children out of wedlock before she married George Roberts. That sounded familiar even if none of the children was named Henry. After all, infants did die, especially male children.
Many hours were spent following up on the descendants of Harriet Maidment/Roberts. Those offspring travelled far afield and I wondered if any of their descendants would show up in my DNA match lists as I gleefully added those branches to my Ancestry family tree. But one day I checked the 1841 census for William Maidment, the father that Harriet named on her marriage certificate. There was one in East Stour, Dorset where Harriet Maidment/Roberts got married in 1844. But following William Maidment's name on the 1841 census was a Harriet Maidment aged 20, the same age as the Harriet Maidment listed with Thomas Rideout and family on the 1841 census for Ashmore, Dorset. Had the same person been listed in two places or had I made a mistake and followed the wrong Harriet Maidment?
Your theory is certainly possible. One of my husband's 2X great grandmothers is enumerated twice in the 1850 U.S. census. She had just married, as a teenager, and she was both at home with her husband and at home with her parents. I think she might have just been at her parents' home for whatever reason when the census taker came be. He asked who she was and how old she was and wrote down the information. The family was illiterate and it's not likely that Annie being enumerated twice was anything they would have cared about!
ReplyDeleteHi Linda, thanks for your comment.
ReplyDeleteI've run across someone being enumerated twice in the same census too. In that case it was a child listed with both the grandparent and with the husband and his new wife. It probably happened for various reasons if the census taker only asked one household member for information.