Dead ends and how to progress

[WeatherwaxOn]

I wonder if anyone has any ideas of how to break through a dead end on an ancestor.

This is all the info I have on my gt-gt-grandfather, and I can't seem to make any further progress.

Born around 1838/1839 in Hertfordshire
Had a son 1875 and his name on the birth certificate, combined with his occupation tally with an entry on the 1871 census.
Is on the 1881 census with wife and son.
In 1882 his wife died and he married a relative of hers. He gives his age on the marriage certificate as 44. The address and occupation tally with census entries for the previous year.
He's on the 1891 census with his second wife.
He died in 1898. The address on the death record + occupation link to the 1891 census.

There is no record of banns or marriage to the mother of his child.
There is no record of any other children.
On the marriage certificate he cites a name for his father that I cannot match to anyone living or dead in Hertfordshire that had a son of the same name.

I've not had any DNA matches to anyone else with this family name*, despite having registered my details/interest over 2 years ago.

*Other than 2 cousins and a sibling who are of my generation.

My thought process is that either
He was illegitimate and the father's name is a red herring
His name isn't what he says it was
He was a bigamist (hence no marriage to first 'wife')
He wasn't from where he said he was from.

I can't find him on the electoral register.
There are a number of people with the same name (it's not uncommon) but so far, I've eliminated all of them by tallying census returns/marriages/births to the information I have - for example, there are several people of the same name who are on the electoral register but when I check those addresses to the census returns that I have, and the spouse I know he had, they can be eliminated.

I thought if I put this out to the hive mind, someone might have some bright ideas, and suggest something I've overlooked.

I find this tricky on the phone as I can't easily flick through lots of open pages!

Anyway. In 1861 there was a 25 yr old Henry Chapman listed in the army, place of birth was given as Henham, Herts. In 1851 there's a 15 ye old Henry Chapman in Henham, which is now in Essex, with his mother Patience and sibling. Have you seen this one? Sorry I can't give more detail ATM! Maybe tomorrow when the computer's on!

Who did Henry name as his father on his marriage cert?

Who were the witnesses?

Separately, how certain are you about Elizabeth's background? I see the family in Repton to whom you've linked her, but Repton is in Derbyshire but not in Derby, and I see that the enumerator has listed E's birthplace as Derby, rather than Derbyshire. So that brings some possibilities to mind - either that your Elizabeth isn't the Repton one, or that the enumerators were a bit sloppy with identifying counties - in which case Hertforshire might also be a bit of sloppy guess, if Henry was born in a parish that was on or near the county border.

Scrap a lot of the above - I've found his marriage cert to Jane online so have those answers. Plus I think the soldier from Henham probably turns up later in Bishops Stortford.

I'm inclining towards the same as you -- that he was bapt in 1840 in Ware, the illegitimate son of Mary Ann.

I'm sure you've seen it, but there's a 1 year old Henry Chapman in Ware in 1841 with Mary Ann (52), Henry (28), William(17), Elizabeth (14) and Daniel (12). These seem to be siblings of Mary Ann who was bapt in 1819, daughter (as you've already said) of Daniel and Mary.

(As an aside, on the facing page there was a family whose name was Newton who bapt their son Sir Isaac!)

That family is the best match/fit I can find . It'd just speculation as I've not picked up any DNA matches to any of the family members.
But it's good to see that my logic isn't totally flawed if you're drawing the same conclusions, so thankyou for the digging you've done.

Are there any bastardy bonds/overseers records available for Ware? I'm just wondering if Mary Ann's name might appear.

Re DNA - as far as you know, Henry was an only child, and he only had one child. So to trace your line further back than Henry, you'd have to look at people descended directly from his parents, ie your 3gt grandparents, so your 4th cousins.

Looking at my DNA matches, the best match I've got with anyone at that level is 65cM, but that's unusual - most are under 30, many are around 10 and I know of a couple of people who are more closely related, who match my matches, but share no measurable DNA with me. So any matches you've got may be wallowing at the bottom of a very long list!

(I suspect you know all this!)

If you're on ancestry, have you checked your significant shared matches?

Of course there may be other non-parents events in your family's history - we all have them! I spent a long time disentangling a lot of names on my great-grandfather's line, only for DNA to eventually show me that I was barking up the wrong family tree. But it wasn't obvious. It wasn't until I looked hard at shared matches that it suddenly became clear.

I'm working my way though my low DNA matches but a lot of those have no public trees, or have 3 people in their trees, or don't have any common names with mine.
I picked up my Barton match through a low DNA % trawl, and was able to reconcile their information to mine sufficiently to find the link.

I had looked some time ago for bastardy bonds with Mary Ann or Henry and both but hadn't turned up anything, although that was some fair time back, so that could be an avenue to pursue.

It does seem strange that Henry and Elizabeth had just one child. It's possible that there were others who did not live long, but I don't find any other baptisms.

In terms of tracing links, I've been looking at Henry's presumed grandparents and their other children, but so far, nothing. If I knew I had the right Mary Ann (there are currently 2 'good' candidates), it would simplify things.
The other potential consideration is that he's a son of the 28 year old Henry Chapman, who is living with the 50-something Mary Ann.
So many variables.....😒

The other potential consideration is that he's a son of the 28 year old Henry Chapman, who is living with the 50-something Mary Ann.

I have a couple of steps in my tree like that - where I'm sure that someone is the offspring of one of a set of siblings, but I don't know which sibling. You can still follow one part of the line back through the grandparents, so that's what I've done. The difference is that my names were more unusual and my instances are back in the 1600s when I'm pleased just to be able to positively identify anything!!

And actually, looking again at censuses, I think that Henry is still in Ware in 1851.He's a maltster, married to Jane (maiden name Chapman!) and his brother Daniel is living with them; but he and Jane have (amongst other children) a 6 month old son called Henry. If your Henry was his child, I don't think I'd expect him to have another Henry when the first one was still living, unless one or other went by a middle name - and there's no proof of that.

Ah thankyou - I hadn't examined him in massive detail, so your very helpful research means I can eliminate him.

@mauvishagain I also discovered that the Henry who's 28 in 1841 had been married before he married Jane. His first wife was a Charlotte Patmore, so the infant Henry shown in 1841 potentially could have a connection to him.
He married Charlotte in 1841 and she died in 1842.
However, given that he then had a son, Henry, with Jane, that would imply that the infant one, if that was his child, didn't live very long.

I wish they'd had unusual names, it would have been so much easier!

Ok ---- I can see the record of a marriage between Henry C and Charlotte Patmore on 18 April 1841at St Giles Cripplegate, with Henry's father as Daniel C,maltster. Henry was living at Stansted, so maybe St Giles was Charlotte's parish.

The census was 7 June 1841, and IIRC (never a given!) baby Henry was a year old, not a month, on the census -- but I'm happy to be corrected on that. And I can't see any registered births for the couple (which doesn't mean that there weren't any children of course). If Charlotte died within a year or two of marriage, I tend to think that childbirth might have been the cause.

Yes, you're right - Henry was 1y in 1841. And I assumed childbirth was probably the cause of Charlotte's death.

It feels as though this may be the right family but it's just out of reach proving it right now.

If Henry's sister, Mary Ann was the mother of the 1 year old Henry, then I suppose I should start trawling again for any marriage and children for her after that.

I've found Mary Ann and Henry in 1851!

Marriage 16 Aug 1841 @ Holy Trinity,Brompton, M'sex
William Matton, bachelor, full age, married
Mary Ann Chapman, spinster, full age, father Daniel Chapman, bricklayer

In 1851 they are at 24, Great Union St, Southwark;
William Matton age 39, b Hertford, occ Turnkey to the Queen's prison
Mary Ann ditto, age 35, b Ware, Hertfordshire
Henry Matton, son, age 11, b Ware, Hertfordshire
Mary Ann ditto, duaghrer, age 5, b Southwark
John ditto, son, age 2, b Southwark. (John was reg with the middle name Daniel).

There are 6 other possible births to this couple up to 1859, all bar one in Southwark.

BUT There is a massive fly in the ointment: a 25 yr old Henry Matton died in Southwark in 1865.
so if this is Mary Ann's son (which seems likely, it's a relatively unusual name, the right age and the right reg district) this would mean that your Henry was NOT this one!

Back to the drawing board?

sorry, Henry's death was 1864. I can't see a burial reg to compare his address with where he was living (still with his family) in 1861.

Wow! I started looking at Mary Ann earlier and got sidetracked with other things.
If this is the same Henry, and it sounds likely, then he's not 'my' Henry.

I'll have to take a look at the other Mary Ann who was born around 1819 in Hertfordshire. I believe her father was Thomas Chapman.

There is definitely a connection to a Mary Ann Chapman though. After Henry died, the 1901 electoral register shows a Mary Ann Chapman resident at the address that the widowed Jane (with son Charles) had lived at on the 1901 census.

Ew, you've lost me a bit with electoral registers. Is there anyone else at the address onthe ER (as opposed to the census)?

There is someone on Ancestry with a tree detailing this family and including all the queries that you've raised - is that you? (I'd have PMd you about this but I cannot find the MN PM buttonand didn'twant to trouble the ancestry person if it's not you!) Well, that ancestry tree has the 1911 census attached with the widowed Jane Chapman in the household of a Henry Chapman aged 34,and his wife and children.Sadly it doesn't tell us their relationship! Is that Jane's son, using his middle name rather than Charles?

I was hoping to find Henry Chapman (born c1839) on electoral registers on/around 1870's so that I could trace him back from there. But he doesn't seem to crop up until a few years before he died. I'm not too clear about who could and couldn't vote, or the actual details of who could or couldn't be on the electoral register.

Henry and Jane were living at Arlington Terrace in the late 1890s, with son Charles. Henry died in an accident not long before 1900 and the 1901 census return has Jane Chapman living at Arlington Terrace with 'son' Charles.
The 1901-2 electoral register for the area shows as Mary Ann Chapman as the person resident at the same address, but she's not on the census return.

In 1911 Charles was married. He used to flip his first and middle names around as the mood took him, so it seems. He is living with his wife, children and step-mother, Jane by then, so I suspect you have picked up either my tree or that of one of my cousins as we've all shared the info we have with each other.

DH has a great great grandfather who has been something of a mystery. We worked it out using a combination of DNA and paperwork.

His marriage certificate stated his father's name was Henry and we spent years looking for a record that has a Henry as a father. I've never found anything. And to this day I've never found a birth certificate for him.

I didn't find DNA matches of his family name. To date, I've still not found a match relating to the family name but I have managed to demonstrate the link with paperwork and finding an ancestor of the GG Grandfather who is a match.

In the end I traced clusters of matches to build a tree of how they were related together and then expanded this tree to find a link.

In the end I found it. A marriage between this family with the name 'Jones' and the GG Grandfather's surname. Right place, right time. Only one catch - his name was George not Henry.

I am sure it's the right person. He was a sailor and it looks like he died at sea around the time of the GG Grandfather's supposed birth. This might also go some way to explaining a lack of birth certificate if it was a traumatic period for the mother who then died relatively early too. AND how he gets his father's name wrong. He simply didn't really know much about his father.

I have still not found any connection to the family surname - the name comes up in searches of matches but I can't link it. I do know from the paper work that all the other closest relatives to this line, have dead ends to their descendants so there are no closer living relatives to find.

I have however found a DNA link which traces back to the GG GFS paternal grandmother, thus proving the DNA link. It's faint but it's there. And there's numerous matches from the GG GFs mother's side.

My point here is, mistakes can and do happen with names as they lost to time in someway and a DNA link can be harder to find than you might anticipate.

Thankyou, this is interesting to hear.
I can see that Gt-Gt Grandfather alternated between Charles and Henry and managed to work out who he was, by looking at places of residence, DNA and other links. There's no reason why his father (alleged 'Henry') wouldn't have done the same thing, but so far, nothing is ticking the boxes.

However, I do have another ancestor in a different family line (although on the same side of the family, IYSWIM), who appears to have changed his name. I find a birth in 1830 for a George, who had older siblings, as well as younger brothers John and Henry. John died before he was 10.
Before George was 15, his father died and his mother remarried. George seems to have been something of a petty thief.
I picked up a DNA match for someone called John (Stepfather's surname) in Australia. He has the same year of birth and place of birth as my George. There's a petition from the stepfather about George's potential transportation except that in that document he's referred to as John. But there is no John.
The petition mentions the mother of "John" and it's sent from the house of another member of George's family. I can track every member of that family on the census returns, marriages, deaths in the public domain except for George who disappears around 1826 after being sent to prison.
"John" appears in prison in 1828 and its this same person who's then transported, allegedly leaving behind a wife and child.

I'm hoping at some point I may find the same sort of thing for my elusive Henry Chapman, but it seems that there are very few DNA matches to him, which makes me think that a different name may have been at play prior to him appearing on the 1871 census.

I worked it out by working out how exactly, all DH's closest matches were related. This left me with a number of clusters I just couldn't work out. This is a time consuming process but its worthwhile. By mapping out how these clusters related it lead me to working it out. (Look up the Leeds method as to how you can go about doing this manually)

Ancestry is about to update their new cluster feature - I think its due early December - which will make this process a lot easier and will effectively do a lot of the Leeds method automatically.

There's also a protools feature which gives greater detail on how your matches relate to your shared matches.This means you can see X is your 3rd cousin but another persons 1st cousin which makes building trees much easier. Its an additional cost per month on top of the subscription, so its really not for everyone but if you really want to crack it, i do recommend it.

Over the years I have come across a sizeable number of people who change names/go by different names who are a massive pain in the bum to work out but I've eventually managed it by looking a range of records AND the DNA and cross referencing.

My advice is to sometimes treat the records with a pinch of salt.

My Great Grandfather date of birth on the 1939 register is a good ten years off and a completely different date to his actual birth certificate. We had family knowledge of his father's name and roughly where he was born and the DNA confirmed we were looking at the right man/birth cert. It is likely he didn't actually know his DOB and he pretended to be younger than he was in order to help him get work.

Another Great Grandfather of DH (different part of his family) has his father recorded as a completely different name and occupation to reality on his marriage certificate and this is also different to his birth certificate. We know he was 'a bastard' and after looking at records we worked out what had happened. His mother had been married to someone named 'Joe' and the marriage had broken down. She had three children with Joe. She then ended up with 'John' who was a close relative of Joe and had the same surname. His mother had lived together with John for a number of years and had another three children with him before becoming astranged as John also went off with another woman. The incorrect information on the GGrandfather's marriage certificate turned out to be something of a mash up of correct information between John and Joe which is actually interesting in its own right.

I've seen variations of both types of error / inconsistency multiple times over the years. The DNA is a useful back up tool to this. What you tend to find is that records contain a grain of truth even if they aren't completely accurate. Traditionally you do family history from the starting point of yourself and work upwards. DNA allows you to approach from a different angle (so you find a cluster and effectively then work downwards). This allows you to find other records which are comtempory with birth. You then look for a fit between your tree and the cluster tree - its not always easy to spot but it is possible - a detail here or there about a father's occupation even if the names are incorrect for example. Or theres completely different spellings of surnames outside of the limits of Ancestry's default broader search terms which you haven't looked at before.

The other really common one is that someone is born out of wedlock and then takes on their father or stepfather's surname - again you get the problem of the wrong details then appearing on marriage certificates (I've seen stepfathers on marriage certificates before). Its always worth trying to work out if this is the case and searching for the individual under the mother's maiden name (if there are younger siblings you know about, what you do is you find their birth certificate and search up on the GRO indexes for mothers maiden name - this is free. Then look for a birth for that person under the mother's maiden name).

Nine times out of ten I find its attention to the tinest details that gives you a breakthrough. Some of this is down to experience and knowledge in researching and you eventually get it. Some of the brickwalls we had in mine and DH's family we'd had for about 10 - 20 years before we managed to crack them as records and DNA have gradually been released so its not always something you can crack straight away - a bit of patience sometimes is the ultimate solution (My mum started doing the research a lot time ago and I've taken it on since). Not everyone has time for this I fully appreciate. I am working on DHs family, my family and a friends family and I have pretty much cracked most of the mysteries and been able to back up the paperwork with DNA confirmation back to 1800 in all but two branches now. In both cases I suspect it will be a question of hoping I get lucky with a new DNA match in future.

The fact you are looking at 1870s is helpful - it increases your chances of being able to eventually cracking it, as theres space to go back a generation or two on records and DNA and find that crucial cluster you need. DH's Mysterious Harry was born in 1867. Good luck.

@WeatherwaxOn , you mention that that only DNA matches you have are with closer cousins.

Have you looked at the names of people with whom they share matches to see if you can spot any trends there? Obviously you can't see all their matches without their login/consent, nor which matches they share with each other. But you can see which matches you share with each cousin, and maybe somewhere in the lower cM matches there will be a name that repeats?

I mentioned before that I'd solved a mystery using DNA matches. I had a clue as to who my great-grandfather really was (not the person to whom my great grandmother was married!) and had done a sketchy tree back from him for a couple of generations. I then used the "search" facility on the DNA matches page to look at specific surnames from his line in my matches' trees. And blow me down, if there weren't a dozen or so who had one of those names in their tree. Encouraged, I looked further back and ended up realising that a big cluster of low level matches, which previously I'd just clustered as "unknown match", shared an ancestor with me back in the 1700s!

This wouldn't have worked as easily if I hadn't had an idea of his possible name, of course. But the principles remain the same - spread that search net and look for patterns.

Just to say, I have started doing LEEDS matches for this family.
I pick up my siblings/cousins but no outliers as yet.
This family is very much a work in progress, and again, it makes me think that Henry Chapman was a chosen name/acquired later rather than a birth name.

You should still be able to find his family when you find the right cluster...

If I follow the Leeds method closely, I simply don't get enough matches for it be meaningful. It suggests that you use matches down to 90cM, IIRC, and I need to go quite a lot lower! Many of my ancestral lines just don't seem to have been that fecund (sometimes I think it's a wonder I'm here!) and I need to go back at least 1 further generation before I start getting matches.

I definitely went a lot lot lower than 90cM.