Today is Winnie the Pooh’s 85th birthday and to commemorate his author AA Milne, we’ve been investigating Milne’s family history.

Educational ancestors

We discovered that Milne came from a family of school teachers. Our first stop was the census records on findmypast.co.uk where we found Milne in the 1891 census. He is recorded at Henley House School, Mortimer Road, Hampstead, aged nine. He is listed as a scholar with his father, John Milne, the schoolmaster. John was born in Jamaica and was married to Sarah Heginbotham. See the record here:

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Ten years later, the 1901 census tells us that Milne’s father had moved on from Henley House School and was the schoolmaster at Streete Court School, Westgate-on-Sea, Kent. Milne was living with his aunt and uncle as a Cambridge undergraduate at this time.

Milne’s uncle, Alexander Milne, was the principal of the Boys’ Private School, University School, Holmesdale Gardens, Hastings. Alexander is listed in the Teachers’ Registration Council Registers 1914-1948 on findmypast.co.uk. He registered on 1 July 1919 and his career in education spanned 1871 to 1932. View Alexander’s record here:

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Our research revealed further evidence of teaching in Milne’s family. Milne’s mother and maternal grandmother, both named Sarah Heginbotham, were school mistresses at Brooklyn House, Wellington, Shropshire at the time of the 1871 census.

Milne’s paternal grandfather, William Milne, was recorded as being an inspector of schools in the 1861 census, which made us wonder whether he was the catalyst for the family’s teaching tradition.

At the time of the 1911 census, Milne was living at Broadgates, Steeple Bumpstead in Essex with his parents. Milne was recorded as being a journalist, working on his ‘own account and Punch‘. By this time, his father was a retired schoolmaster.

Milne on the move

We were intrigued to find Milne 20 years later in the passenger lists on findmypast.co.uk travelling as a first class passenger to the USA with his wife, Dorothy.

The couple were aboard the Aquitania, which departed Southampton for New York on 21 October 1931. In the detailed log, Milne is described as an author and his address is recorded as being 13 Mallord Street SW3. View the record here:

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As Milne’s ancestry demonstrates, you can glean huge amounts of detail when you find your ancestors in the Teachers’ Registration Council Registers 1914-1948 on findmypast.co.uk. We are working in partnership with the Society of Genealogists to bring you these rich records.

Our resident expert Stephen Rigden, pictured below, answers your queries.

From Marilyn Ellis from Aberdeenshire:

‘For the last 40 years, I and my aunt before me have been trying to trace details of the life of my great grandfather. The elusive William Basterfield was supposedly born in Stourbridge Workhouse around 1858, the illegitimate son of Elizabeth ? Basterfield and a shoemaker by the name of Adrian Mountfield.

I cannot trace my Basterfield line because I cannot find my great great grandmother. All I know for certain is that her last name was Basterfield. I have researched every William Basterfield born from about 1855 onwards but I’ve had no luck finding his birth record.

The records for Stourbridge Workhouse for this period are missing. There are no entries on the 1861 census and a possible entry on the 1871 census showing him living alone in Halesowen and his profession as ‘shoemaker’.

My first real evidence of William is a marriage certificate dated 1880, which gives details of his marriage to my great grandmother Elizabeth Faulkner.

The strange thing is that his name is stated as William Mountfield, profession shoemaker, son of Aid Mountfield. By the following year, however, he is shown on the 1881 census as William Basterfield. He appears again on the 1891 census but that’s the last census entry for him.

My grandfather Joseph Arthur Basterfield was born in 1895, the seventh child of the marriage. By 1900, however, my great grandmother was living with a Stephen Price by whom she had two further children. The story in the family was that she had thrown William out of the house because of his hard drinking and he had gone to live in Worcester.

There is no record of him, however, after his name appears on my grandfather’s birth certificate in 1895. I have searched every available record but I can’t find anything! I am not sure when my great grandmother’s relationship started with Stephen Price but she never married him. His name does appear, however, on my great aunt and uncle’s birth certificates.

The unusual thing is that although I cannot trace my maternal great great grandmother or her son William, I have been able to trace the life of Adrian Mountfield. It seems that Adrian lived life to the full, drinking and womanising, never marrying and he finally died in Sedgley Workhouse in 1885. I have even traced the Mountfield line back to the 18th century.

My father is now 91 and it would be great if I could tell him what happened to his grandfather, a man whose name was never mentioned in the family.’

Stephen says:

‘I do not think this problem can be easily solved, but I would like to give a few thoughts and suggestions, just in case you have not already considered them, and just in case they might assist other family historians confronting similar problems in their own research.

Firstly, you do not identify in your email the source of the information that William’s mother was Elizabeth, so I am assuming this has come down to you as family legend. Assuming for now that the mother did bear this name and proceeding upon the basis that her child was born illegitimately, we need to consider the three possible scenarios:

1. The mother was a spinster
2. The mother was a married woman, perhaps but not necessarily separated from her husband
3. The mother was a widow

These scenarios give very different potential profiles for Elizabeth. She may have been, say, a 15 year old girl living at home with her parents, or she may have been a mature 45 year old with a number of children by her late husband and now having a final child out of wedlock, or she could have been somewhere on the spectrum of age and experience between these two points.

Note that age and experience do not necessarily tie up simplistically. It is quite possible to play with these ages and come up with Elizabeth either as a young widow of 21 or as a spinster in her 40s at the time of birth of her child.

Now let us assume that the son William was indeed born in 1858. If so, our imaginary scenarios give a possible year of birth for Elizabeth ranging from 1813 (if aged 45 years at his birth) to 1843 (if aged 15 years at his birth). We would wish to extend this by a year or two on either side, not least because the year of birth of William is unproven.

I looked up the death of the putative father Adrian Mountfield and see that he was aged 55 at his death in March 1885, suggesting that he was born circa 1829/30. If so, he would have been aged 28 or 29 years when William was born in 1858.

A typical male/female relationship of that time would be where the parties were of similar age or the man being up to maybe eight years older. Of course we are dealing with degrees of probability only, but this would place Elizabeth’s birth most likely within the period 1828 to 1838, which would make her aged 20 to 30 at the birth of William.

Do not get carried away with trying to pin down anything more exact, as this will not be possible. I am trying only to outline the various possibilities and permutations, as it is important to consider them all as theoretical possibilities and then to decide what lines of enquiry are appropriate to examine each of these. In practical terms, this means looking for the mother in, for example, the 1861 census not just as a spinster, but also as a married woman with husband and children, or as a widow with children.

Actuality may also be disguised in the records available to us. For example, were Elizabeth a 15 year old girl living at home when she had her baby in 1858, in the 1861 census her by then three year old child might be shown as if he were the son not of Elizabeth but of Elizabeth’s parents (his own maternal grandparents). This is a quite common occurrence: when their ages do not make it too improbable, i.e., the grandmother under aged 50 at the time, the grandparents bring up their unmarried daughter’s illegitimate child as one of their own.

Such a child can conceivably pass through life believing he is his grandparents’ child and, therefore, perpetuating this misapprehension on his subsequent marriage certificate and other official documents.

I appreciate that everything I have written complicates rather than simplifies, but that is the multiplicity of human experience and most researchers will need to grapple will these issues at one point or another - as I am sure you have done already when pondering the way forward on your research.

If this is a problem that you really need and want to crack, you will need to identify every possible candidate for the mother Elizabeth, using census returns, civil and parish registers, and then descend their line to positively eliminate them or leave them in contention. Ultimately, the careful and painstaking process of elimination may be the only way forward.

My other advice would be to include the usual variants in everything you do. Think of the various spellings and misspellings of Basterfield, such as Bastefield or even Baskerfield. Be generous in your expectations of the accuracy of recorded ages in the censuses and on certificates.

It is common to track a single individual through four, five or more consecutive census returns and find that his or her age goes up or down by irregular amounts between censuses - in the 10 years between the 1851 and 1861 census a person may be shown as aging an impossible 12 years, only to then age by a mere 7 years in the decade to the next census.

When William was a shoemaker’s assistant in the Chatwin household at the time of the 1871 census, his recorded age of 16 years (which gives a year of birth circa 1854/55) may not have been accurate.

Finally, remember that the Stourbridge Union was an administrative district as well as shorthand for the poorhouse or workhouse. I know you believe that the child may have been born in the Workhouse and this may well have been the fact of the matter, but I mention the other meaning of union just in case.’

If you’d like to send your question to our experts, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account. Unfortunately our experts only have time to answer a few queries each month. If yours wasn’t answered this time, you could be lucky next month!

This week it was actor Rupert Everett’s turn to trace his family history. The programme focused mainly on Rupert’s grandfather, Cyril Frederick Cunningham Everett.

Rupert Everett (copyright Vicki Neave)

Cyril was born on 12 June 1886 at 20 Porchester Terrace, Hyde Park, to Georgina Teague and Frederick William Cunningham Everett. Here we can see Cyril Everett, aged 4, living as an ‘inmate’ in The Home For Little Boys in Horton Kirby, Kent on the 1891 census:

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The 1901 census reveals that Cyril Frederick still lived in the Home For Little Boys in Kent.

In 1908 Cyril went to Nigeria, where he worked on Lagos port. He travelled to and from Nigeria many times in the following years - we counted 15 separate journeys from the UK to Nigeria in our passenger lists. Here you can see one of the many journeys Cyril made:

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This records Cyril as a Civil Servant and also informs us that his last address in the United Kingdom was Browning Avenue in Boscombe.

Our passenger lists show that Cyril’s wife, Marcella, visited him several times in Nigeria. The journey she made in 1923 is recorded here - she’s recorded as Mrs C F C Everett:

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Cyril’s mother (Rupert’s great-grandmother), Georgina Everett nee Teague, appears on the 1871 census with her parents, Rupert’s great-great-grandparents, George and Esther Teague. George was a Railway Porter, Esther a Housekeeper and the family was living in Marylebone:

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The 1881 census shows Georgina living with her widowed mother Esther. Georgina was a Dressmaker while her mother was a Housekeeper. They were living at a ‘home for old ladies’ in Marylebone:

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Georgina Teague is a bit of a mystery: she literally disappears after the 1881 census and her marriage to Frederick William Cunningham Everett in 1883. Can you find out what happened to her? If you have any luck, post your findings underneath this blog post.

Our expert Stephen Rigden, pictured right, answers your questions.

From Debbie Dixon (nee Munday) in Australia:

‘Perhaps you may have some suggestions for finding my Munday family.

My grandfather was Charles William Munday born in 1904 in St Pancras to Charles Thomas Munday and Margaret Elizabeth Fitzgibbon. The family eventually emigrated to Australia.

I have found Charles Thomas Munday born c1875 in St Pancras to James Munday and Jemima Howard whose first married name was Spankhurst. On James and Jemima’s marriage certificate James’ father is listed as Richard Munday (labourer) and James is listed as a bachelor. Both James and Jemima’s ages are recorded as ‘of age’. This gives me no idea where or when James Munday was born. I have found both a Richard and James Munday but have no way of proving if these are my ancestors.

James and Jemima had a son in 1871 but did not marry until 1872. On the 1871 census Jemima is living with her father William Howard. By 1881 James Munday was dead so I have no way to find out any information about him. Can you help?’

Steve says:

‘Thanks for your email, Debbie, which I have selected to answer as it highlights a question that I believe many researchers come up against.

You have a James Munday who married in 1872, had some children, and then died at some date before 1881. Furthermore, on his marriage certificate he is described as being of full age, which should indicate that he was born at some date in or before 1851 (i.e., at least 21 years earlier).

What this combination of circumstances means is that currently you have him on neither the 1871 nor the 1881 census returns. Furthermore, you feel that you cannot positively identify him on earlier census returns as you do not know when he was born and you will be faced will several candidate entries.

However, all is not lost.

Firstly, his wife Jemima was alive at the time of the 1881 census, upon which her recorded age is 39 years. She is on the 1871 census (as a young widow, not yet married to James Munday) as 29. This seems to reliably place her birth circa 1841/42. This is not necessarily a guide to the age of James but it provides a starting point.

Secondly, you have the approximate parameters within which the death of James occurred, i.e., from the date of birth of his last known child to the date of the census in April 1881. The death indexes for this period give the age of death, so you can calculate the approximate year of birth. Eliminating all the deaths for men of the same name born after 1851, you will be left with a list of candidate entries of death. I took a look and there would appear to be about 10 entries which meet the available criteria.

One is in Pancras but he was aged 63 years at his death in June quarter 1876, which would mean that he was born in 1812/13, making this person considerably older than the husband of Jemima (who was born circa 1841/42). I don’t believe this eliminates this individual: a widow with young children might marry an older man and, certainly, although ‘of full age’ is a very common formula, it was definitely used on occasion to disguise a disparity in age.

There are at least two possible next steps.

One is simply to apply for the candidate death certificates, one at a time, starting with those you consider most probable. Of course, this will cost money, as the General Register Office has to charge you the statutory fee. However, hopefully, on one of the first certificates the informant at the death will be Jemima Munday. You would then know James’ age at death, be able to calculate his approximate year of birth, and be able to start looking for him more confidently in the 1871 and earlier censuses.

An alternative is to use family reconstruction techniques to begin to identify the other candidates from the list of deaths with individuals enumerated on the 1871 (and earlier) census, trying to match them with census returns with a father Richard. You may find that you can confidently eliminate some candidates, and you may find a favoured candidate for ‘your’ James. Assuming you have a subscription rather than PayAsYouGo access, this will not cost you money, just time.

A variation on this second family reconstruction approach would be simply to search each of the four census years from 1841 to 1871 for a Richard Munday with a son James Munday born before 1851. However, note that this approach runs the risk of the father and son already living in separate households (or the father Richard being dead) by 1841.

In summary, you are unlikely to find a quick and easy answer but I believe that you should be able to resolve this particular problem through careful lateral thinking and a systematic approach to the available resources.’

If you’d like to send your question to Steve, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account.

We’ve researched the political party leaders’ family histories, using our family history records and other public records, and found some fascinating details.

The Tory and Labour party leaders are commonly thought to have wildly opposing backgrounds. Genealogical research, however, has found that the family histories of David Cameron and Gordon Brown are not so different after all.

David Cameron - blue blood, ‘White Mischief’ and Scottish lineage

David William Donald Cameron was born in 1966 in London to Ian Cameron and Mary Mount. The well-heeled Tory leader is a fifth cousin twice removed of the Queen and a seventh cousin of Princes William and Harry, and a descendant of William IV.

David’s paternal great-great-great-grandmother, Lady Agnes Hay and her parents, the Earl and Countess of Erroll can be found in the 1841 census. Here you can see Lady Agnes Hay’s 1841 census return:

The Countess is David’s royal link - Lady Elizabeth FitzClarence, the illegitimate daughter of William IV.

Through Elizabeth, he is also related to Josslyn Victor Hay, 22nd Earl of Errol whose dramatic murder in Kenya in 1941 was depicted in the film ‘White Mischief’.

Perhaps the least known element of Cameron’s background, however, is that he is also a distant cousin of Boris Johnson, the Tory Mayor of London. Both descend from King George II (1683-1760) - albeit by illegitimate lines.

The Scottish Cameron side of the family has also not been commonly explored. While Gordon Brown’s ancestors were farming in Fife in the early 1800s, the Camerons were also tilling the land around Inverness. William Cameron, David’s great-great-great-grandfather was recorded in the 1851 census as a farmer at Upper Muckovy, just outside Inverness. William’s son Ewen then went into finance, and beginning a tradition of financiers that continued until David Cameron entered politics.

Gordon Brown - Scottish farmers and a family secret

The current Labour leader’s background is well-known and often discussed; he descends from a line of hard-working and upwardly mobile Scottish farmers and stonemasons. The prime minister was born James Gordon Brown in 1951 in Renfrewshire, the son of a Minister in the Church of Scotland, John Brown. Before that, the Browns were farmers in Fife for three traceable generations.

There is, however, a little-known family secret in Gordon Brown’s family’s past, discovered by extensive searches through online records. One of Brown’s great-grandfathers was born illegitimate in the late 1840s as a result of a relationship between a farmer’s teenage daughter and a man 20 years her senior - a doctor of medicine who became a wealthy GP.

Francis Troup Manson, a great-grandfather of Gordon Brown on his maternal line, was born illegitimate to Jessie Cruickshank, a farmer’s daughter of about 16 years old. It is quite probable that the affair would have caused people to gossip in their small Highland village.

Gordon’s paternal grandfather was called Ebenezer Brown and his parents, Brown’s great-grandparents, John and Mary Brown are recorded in the 1891 Scottish census living at Brigghills Farm House in Auchterderran, where John was a farmer. Here is Ebenezer Brown’s 1891 census return:

Nick Clegg - an intriguing multi-cultural family

Nicholas William Peter Clegg is the youngest of the three leaders and was born in 1967 at Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire to a Dutch mother and a half-English, half-Russian father. He speaks five languages and has by far the most cosmopolitan background of the three, with a Russian baroness as a grandmother and a Dutch mother who was once a Japanese prisoner of war in WWII. He is also currently married to a Spanish lawyer.

Nick Clegg’s paternal grandfather is Hugh Clegg, whose 1911 census return you can see here:

Hugh Clegg married a baroness who was the granddaughter of the Russian nobleman Ignaty Zakrevsky. This nobleman had a daughter called Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya, born in St Petersburg in 1891, and Nick Clegg’s great-great-aunt. She became a countess through her first marriage and then a baroness through her second.

She was suspected of being a double agent, spying for both the Soviet Union and British Intelligence, leading to her being called the Russian Mata Hari. She was known to be a heavy drinker, and also had affairs with the writer HG Wells and the Russian literary giant, Maxim Gorky. She also wrote books and film scripts, including ‘Three Sisters’ directed by Laurence Olivier in 1970.

Like both Brown and Cameron, Clegg also has a more ordinary side to his family tree. In his direct paternal line, his great-grandfather was a schoolteacher and clergyman from Leeds who married a master mariner’s daughter from Hull called Gertrude. John Clegg ran schools in Suffolk and Huntingdonshire.

Nick’s paternal great-great-grandparents, Simeon and Mary Clegg, can also be found in the 1871 census. The couple were living at 3 Grange Street in Leeds and Simeon was employed as a butcher.

This month a guest expert answers your questions. John Hanson is a lecturer and teacher on family history, census fanatic and author of How To Get The Best From The 1911 Census.

From Lesley:

‘I have been tracing various lines of my family for the past 40 years, and I have found perseverance generally solves most problems. My grandmother’s family, however, have tested my expertise and I really am stuck.

The family just seem to ‘appear’ on the 1881 census which shows the following people living at 41a Gordon Street, Everton:

• Mary McDonald, widow, aged 48, born Fermanagh
• daughter Emily aged 22 born Liverpool
• son Albert (my great grandfather) aged 17 born Liverpool
• Robert aged 1 who could be son or grandson

I have obtained Albert’s marriage certificate. On that he gives his name as James Albert McDonald and names his father as James McDonald.

Because James McDonald is a fairly common name, I have tried tracing Emily’s birth (in the hope of finding her mother’s maiden name) without any success.

I would have expected the family to appear in both the 1861 and 1871 census, but I cannot find any trace of them. Albert continues to appear in all the census returns after 1881 with his family, but I cannot find Mary again. I suspect Emily may have married in 1882, so would need to check her married name before following her through.

Can you offer any assistance/suggestions as to how I might trace my McDonald family further back?’

John says:

‘Irish ancestors are never easy, due partly to the lack of Irish returns prior to 1901, but the name starting with Mc makes it even harder. The problem is that it could of course have been put down as Mac rather than Mc.

There is another problem with surnames that start with Mc and unfortunately one that crops up all too often in census transcripts. It is caused by the c in the Mc appearing in superscript and looking like ‘Mc’ and often appearing to be separated from the rest of the surname. This can lead to the surname in this case going down as Donald with Mc appearing as part of the “given names”. It would be worth checking the previous and later censuses that way.

Bear in mind that many entries for Liverpool will appear in the West Derby registration district. The 1881 census shows Mary as a ‘shopkeeper’ and as such she should appear in a trade directory. Assuming that you find her in one then you need to check each of the subsequent trade directories for the area until she disappears. At that point start looking for death entries or a possible second marriage.

You need to ensure that the marriage that you have for James Albert McDonald is in fact the same as your James by ensuring that you can’t find him anywhere else. The marriage of Emily should be checked and I suspect that Robert is in fact her son and if she did marry then he is likely to appear on a later census under her married name, rather than McDonald.’

We hope this is useful to your research. If you would like to pose a question for our expert, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account.

Our expert Stephen Rigden answers your questions:

‘Is it possible for a person to appear in more than one census return? In other words, does a census recorder check that all the people named on a census are actually present in the house?

My problem is that I have just recently obtained a copy of a marriage certificate for Norton Dryden Hutchinson showing that he married Maria Cook aged 20 in Southwark in 1870, and her father was Edward Cook, a stationer. Fine, there is a Maria Jane Cook born in 1850, father Edward who in the 1861 census is shown to be a stationer. I cannot find any other Maria Cook with father Edward who is a stationer. The trouble is that the 1871 census has a Maria Cook living with Norton Hutchinson but also a Maria Cook living with her father Edward the stationer.

The situation is not helped by Norton Hutchinson claiming to be a widower in 1881, but I cannot find any death of Maria Hutchinson, nor any 1881 census for father Edward and his wife.’ Mike

Steve says:”Yes! Many family historians come across the situation during their research. As alluded to in your question, each census is a snapshot in time intended to record not who was customarily resident in a given property, but who was actually resident overnight on census night. However, this objective will not have been entirely achieved in any census.

There are many reasons for this. The first is simply that people are not very good at filling in forms. If you are familiar with the 1911 census for England and Wales, you will have seen for the first time the household schedules completed by householders themselves (these were destroyed for the earlier censuses). And you will almost certainly have seen mistakes in filling out the form – for example, the so-called fertility information entered against the man and not the woman, or Nationality completed by English and Welsh natives even though it clearly says that this is to be filled in only by persons born overseas. I have also seen several 1911 census returns where the householder has dutifully but erroneously entered the names and details of all their deceased children: usually, struck out in angry red ink by a Census Office clerk.

So we can expect householders to have made many errors of other types on the household schedules for earlier census years from 1841 to 1901 and for many of these to have been copied across by enumerators into the census returns we see today.

Secondly, the form may have been completed a day or two before the actual census night and then a person usually resident turns out to be away temporarily on census night and is recorded elsewhere as well.

In short, I believe there are reasonable grounds for you to accept that both 1871 census returns refer to the same Maria Cook. The fact that she is recorded under her maiden name Cook rather than her married name Hutchinson in the parental home is not unprecedented and may simply be householder or enumerator error. However, before proceeding further, I would strongly recommend that you conduct further searches and obtain supporting documents, especially the 1850 birth certificate of Maria (to check the name of her mother). Bear in mind that the surname Cook is of course common, London is a populous city, and the occupation of stationer may be expressed in other ways, or may change over time (for instance, between 1871 and 1881), so you do need to proceed with caution so as not to accidentally attach an incorrect but coincidentally similar-looking branch to your family tree.

Finally, although it is premature to leap to any conclusions, it would not have been unheard of for a man to claim to be widowed, and to re-marry, after separation from his first wife. In the mid- and late 19th century, divorce was an expensive and intimidating process and there are many known instances of men, and women, dispensing with the formality of divorce and re-marrying bigamously.”

We hope this is useful to your research. If you would like to pose a question for Steve, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account.

Our expert Stephen Rigden answers your questions:

‘The 1911 census shows that my wife’s great grandmother was born in Peking, China in 1875. Is there any way we can find out why her parents might have been in China at that time, when they went and when they returned to England. They were all English citizens.’ Derrick George

Steve says: “Peking, or Pekin as it was often spelt in the Victorian era, would have had a small but thriving British community in the 1870s, following the trading and other concessions granted by the Chinese in 1860. As well as diplomats at the British Legation (with their staff of professionals such as translators and physicians), this is likely to have comprised customs officials, merchants and a small but growing number of what today we would call NGOs (both educational and medical) and church missionaries. With the exception of the evangelists, in some cases these residents may have taken with them trusted British domestic staff. It is quite likely that there was also a small entrepreneurial community servicing the official one – for instance, running a club or restaurant, a hairdresser’s or a fashion store.

Only you are in a position to judge how your wife’s ancestor fits into this social landscape. Perhaps you will be able to estimate how long her family stayed in Peking from their presence or absence on the 1871, 1881 and 1891 English & Welsh census returns. The census and family birth, marriage and death certificates may also shed light on this. However, I have to say that it is very unlikely that you will be able to establish when the family travelled out to China, as this was before the government started to systematically require and retain passenger lists in 1890. They could have taken a number of routes, for instance the long way by ship round the Cape, or the short cut through the Suez Canal if they travelled after it opened in 1869, or the combined land and sea route which predated the opening of the Canal.

There is a limited collection of Peking registers at The National Archives in Kew and you may be in luck. The piece FO681/1 covers births registered with the British Legation 1869-76, so your wife’s ancestor born in 1875 might just be included in those records.

Perhaps other researchers have family history in Peking and can add to my general comments?”

We hope this is useful to your research. If you would like to pose a question for Steve, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account.

With the launch of the complete 1851 census today, we are proud to be the only website to offer the complete census picture for our customers. Only the 1841-1911 censuses are available and we have them all here.

Browse the complete census records 1841-1911

The gruesome ‘Jack the Ripper’ slayings of 1888 sparked a pandemic of panic and fear, unlike any London had seen before. The identity of the killer still perplexes and fascinates history buffs today. But despite a wealth of conspiracy theories and numerous investigative books, it seems we’re still no closer to discovering who was responsible.

To mark the 121-year anniversary of the murders, and to separate the myths from the facts, findmypast.com has turned to the newly-completed 1881 census, which offers a snapshot of the victims’ lives just seven years before they met their tragic end.   

Modern cinema has portrayed the victims as young, lifelong prostitutes, struck down in the prime of their lives. But the 1881 census shows that by the time of their deaths they were mostly in their 40s, and had previously been living – at least on paper – respectable family lives.

Catherine Eddowes, who appears on the 1881 census as ‘Kate Conway’, is listed as a ‘charwoman’ and was living in Chelsea with her common-law husband, Thomas Conway (a ‘hawker’), plus their two children:

Elizabeth Stride, who is believed to be the third victim, had worked as a prostitute in her 20s. But by 1881 (then aged 37), it seems she had escaped that life, and was living in Bow with her husband John stride, a carpenter:   

Annie Chapman – whose story is perhaps the most tragic – was staying with her parents on the night of the 1881 census with her three children. She is listed as a ‘stud groom’s wife’. (Her husband, John Chapman, was living above stables in Berkshire, where Annie and the children later joined him):

Annie and John Chapman’s eldest child, Emily Ruth Chapman, died in 1882 of meningitis, aged just 12. In the wake of the tragedy, both parents took to drink, which probably precipitated their separation, and started Annie Chapman’s descent into prostitution.

Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols, and Mary Jane Kelly (the only victim in her 20s), are not found on the 1881 census, so they may have been walking the streets on the night it was taken. But Nichols, at any rate, was married with three children at the time of the 1871 census, so the reality, once again, has not been faithfully depicted by Hollywood.

According to contemporary newspapers, by the time of their deaths, none of the three victims we found on the 1881 census were living with their husbands. Poverty was rife in the East End of London, so it’s likely, following the breakup of their marriages, that these women turned to prostitution simply to survive – a decision which, ironically, led to their untimely deaths.