Accessing old police reports?

[MissScarletInTheBallroom]

I recently found the attached story in various newspaper archives from 1893. The story was originally published in London newspapers and then made some of the regional papers a day or two later. The reporting in all of them is more or less the same. I have not been able to find any later reports on the same story indicating what the outcome was. Does anyone know whether there might be police records about historic cases like this so I could find out what happened?

The abducted child was my great grandmother, so I know she was found and returned to her mother, but I don't know how long she was missing or how they found her. Nobody in the family has ever mentioned this, even though her older sister talked a lot about her childhood and would have been about 14 when her little sister was abducted. My oldest living family member is completely astonished by this story and can't believe nobody in the family ever talked about it.

Her father was from Germany and had recently separated from her mother, so it seems fairly clear to me that he was the one who attempted to abduct her. I find it quite curious that none of the newspaper reports make this clear.

I am trying to find out what happened to her father because he disappears from records after about 1900 and nobody in the family ever saw or heard from him again. I have a suspicion that he might have remained in London and changed his name, but can't prove it.

If anyone has any bright ideas, I'd love to find out more about this.

You may have this newspaper clipping already, but I had a look, and it was reported that "probably no further action will be taken," suggesting the police found the child, returned her to the family, and let the man go.

I had a similar case of a husband disappearing at around that time. He didn't change his name, but went to a different city to avoid child maintenance - all revealed in the later census records. However, if your man changed his name, it's more difficult. If you are a genetic relation, you could see if you get any DNA matches - he might have had subsequent children under a new identity.

It seems like they found out that it was the child's father who had taken her, and in those days they probably considered a child to be the father's property. Poor little kid.

She was returned to her mother though and we don't think she ever saw her father again after quite a young age. We aren't even 100% sure whether she remembered that her stepfather wasn't her real father.

Thanks, I hadn't seen the version with that last sentence. It's a shame it doesn't say whether she was returned to her mother at that point or the police just decided not to take any further action because they considered that her father had the right to take her.

I'm starting to think I might have to do the DNA option.

To complicate matters further, I found someone I believe is him on the 1901 census in London, living with another woman and a child who was unrelated to him, under an Anglicised name. If that was him it didn't look like he had any other children of his own at that point.

I would contact a police historian.

I'm sure they wouldn't have thought the father had a right to take her, judging by the case in my family. I would think the police would have returned her to the mother. Was she their only child? If the family didn't move away, yet Mr Sandkuhl didn't see his child again, I wonder whether he took her as part of a dispute over maintenance, to be as difficult as possible.

Have you found any descendants of the child living with the possible Mr Sandkuhl? They might have some answers.

I thought I read somewhere that in those days fathers were automatically granted custody of any children if a married couple separated. Is that incorrect?

Anna was their only living child. They had a son before her but he died in infancy. Mrs Sandkuhl's other children were from her first marriage. Mr Sandkuhl was her second husband. Then at some point in the 8 years between the attempted abduction and the 1901 census she moved to Wales and was living with Mr Davies as his common law wife. Anna is listed on that census as Anna Davies and the daughter (not stepdaughter) of Mr Davies. But her mother and Mr Davies didn't actually get married until 1908, although they pretended they had been married for over 20 years and that Anna was their daughter together.

I am now wondering whether the attempted abduction was a catalyst for her moving her whole family to Wales.

Oh @PreFabBroadBean, the child who was living with the man I think was Mr Sandkuhl in 1901 married twice, once in Prague in 1913 and once in Berlin in 1935 but so far as I can tell she didn't have any children. I've found no trace of any children so far anyway. Her first husband was more than 30 years older than her and died when he was in his late 60s and she was in her mid 30s, and she was 43 when she married her second husband, so very unlikely there were any children from that marriage.

I am trying to trace her ancestry in case I find a connection to the Sandkuhl family which could explain why she might have been living with him in London but so far I haven't found any explanation.

Yes, I'm not sure what the law was then re custody (I think it had changed by 1893), but this isn't a custody case. We know the girl ended up with the mother. This suggests the policeman finds the young child, has a word with the man involved, and returns the child. Perhaps that led the mother to go to Wales, where she met Mr Davies. Or perhaps she met him in London. Have you traced him back?

And who was the woman with Mr Sandkuhl? Did he leave Mrs Sandkuhl for her? Did he die in 1908? So many unanswered questions! 😀

How annoying re descendants of the child!

Apparently she met Mr Davies in London and moved with him to Wales, but I have no documentary evidence of that. That's just what I was told by my grandmother, Anna's daughter, who died a few years ago now.

Unfortunately looking for a William Davies in either London or Wales is rather like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Looking for Sandkuhls is way easier and I have been able to trace his ancestors way back and some of his siblings into the early 20th century in Germany, but he seems to just disappear off the face of the earth. I don't even know for sure that he is the person on the 1901 census (who is listed as Hugh Sinclair), I just have a strong suspicion. So I could be barking up the wrong tree altogether.

Basically I found a document on Ancestry called school admissions and discharges, which lists Hugo Sandkuhl as the father of a child named Johanna Sandkuhl, and gives the child's date of birth as 9th May 1892. For a long time I thought that this must have been a younger sibling of my great grandmother who nobody talked about. But then I found marriage records for a Johanna Bischoff, born on 9th May 1892 in Königsberg, and then on the 1901 census I found a Johanna Bischoff, aged 8, living with a Hugh Sinclair and his wife Erna, in London. Hugh Sinclair is the same age as Hugo Sandkuhl and all three of them have Germany as their place of birth. Johanna Bischoff is described as the niece of the head of the household. So between these three documents I am fairly sure that Hugh Sinclair was actually Hugo Sandkuhl and that Johanna Bischoff aka Johanna Sandkuhl on the school admissions list was not his child. But I don't think she was his niece either. As yet I have found no confirmed connection between her family and the Sandkuhls in Germany, and nobody called Erna in her family tree.

Hugo Sandkuhl also had a brother, Ernst Sandkuhl, and the two of them travelled to London together in the early 1880s. Ernst Sandkuhl also married an English woman in 1886 and then he returned to Germany in 1892 and his wife never saw him again. She married another man in 1897 and then handed herself in at Bow police station for bigamy. I suspect they may also have had a child together who was then raised by her next husband as his own, but that's unconfirmed. I do know that he ended up in Berlin where he married again and had a child with someone else.

My working theory at the moment is that they both left London in 1892 but Hugo came back the following year and tried to abduct his daughter and take her to live in Germany (but obviously failed).

Sorry, that was very long!

So Hugo Sandkuhl is a dealer in surgical instruments.
William Thomas Davies goes to London to study medicine, and in 1891 is a lodger with the Musgroves in St Peter St, Mile End Old Town - down as being born in S Wales, Carmarthenshire.
So that link is perhaps how William and Sarah met. Maybe William is the father! 😁

I'm not sure whether Hugo Sandkuhl was a dealer in surgical instruments or not. He appears to have written down something completely random as his profession on every official document! It's a nice theory though!

I would be very surprised if Hugo Sandkuhl was not Anna's real father but maybe I will have to do the DNA thing and find out whether I have any relatives in Germany!

William Davies' place of birth was Ammanford.

Yes, I know Ammanford well 😀It's in Carmarthenshire, so that must be him lodging with a couple of other medical students. Mile End Old Town is near Stepney.

Looking at the medical registers on Ancestry, it looks like he graduates in 1893, and is working in Enfield in 1895, Hertford in 1899, then Radnorshire in the 1903 entry. The 1893/4 registers aren't on Ancestry. So presumably Mrs Sandkuhl must have been with him then?

Your Sinclair theory seems convincing. Have you found a will for him?

Thank you, I will have to check the medical registers, I didn't know those were on Ancestry.

I think I might have to do a deep dive on all the Hugh Sinclairs.

Do you know whether there's a way of finding out whether they actually divorced? I always assumed they didn't and she just waited a really long time before marrying again, but maybe they did it officially.

If he did remain in the UK he might have run into trouble during WWI/WWII if he was still alive and a German citizen then.

One of his other brothers also married an English woman, in Germany (they must have had a real thing for English women in that family) and she and her son were both in the UK in 1939 and appear on enemy alien lists. I think she had to re-acquire British citizenship (having lost it upon her marriage) and her son acquired it for the first time after the war. He was a Catholic priest and from what I can tell they considered sending him to an internment camp but decided not to. If you're searching and spot a Mary or Francis Sandkuhl, that's them.

Unfortunately, given that Francis Sandkuhl was an only child and became a Catholic priest, I'm unlikely to find any DNA matches there! He would have been my great grandmother's first cousin but I don't suppose they ever knew each other. I wonder whether they ever passed each other in the street without knowing.

The National Archives has a sheet re divorce records
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/divorce/

But if they didn't marry until 1908, it suggests one or other of them were already married. Something must have triggered the marriage - perhaps discovering that Mr Sandkuhl (or Sinclair!) had died. I wonder if she kept in touch with any relatives.

Yes, my mum almost married a German man in 1946, and she was livid about the citizenship issue! I think it changed not long after that, but by then they'd split up...

It's a bit frustrating that there are so few descendants, but you might still find out some useful information from a DNA test.

Have you looked on Genes Reunited to see if there are any other people researching that surname?