Thrissell Dew continues

Playing about with names is one way to find ancestors in censuses and records; in the past when documents were hand written, spelling mistakes could be made, the equivalent of typos. Sometimes the person giving the information to the census enumerator, or the recorder, did not know the spelling of their own name or sometimes the year they had been born. Sometimes there was an unusual spelling to a name which the recorder ‘corrected’. Sometimes the modern transcriber misreads the handwriting from the scribed records… so it might seem an ancestor is missing, and maybe you begin to wonder if he or she has gone abroad or is in prison or somehow just missed the census for whatever reason, or maybe the records were destroyed, perhaps during the war.

I have mentioned that I came across the unusual name of Edward Thrisselldew in our local churchyard and tried to find who this gentleman might be. Eventually I found that in former records he had been ‘Dew’ and only on the 1911 census was he recorded as Thrissell Dew; it’s only on his gravestone that he and his wife become the Thrisselldews.

I wondered if maybe his wife had been a Miss Thrissell and they joined the name… they would have been married in the 1860’s I guessed from their ages and the age of their oldest child. I searched in vain through the marriage records, and then by just reducing him to Mr Dew with date of birth I came across a marriage record for Edward Thripell Dew. I have a vague memory that in old writing a double ‘s’ was written differently; was this the case here?

Although it does not give me the surname of his wife, at least I now know that she was not Miss Thrissell! Off to parish records and straight away I find that young Edward was born In Bishop’s Tachbrook, near Warwick, to James Coster and Anna Sophia Dew and was named as Edward Thrissell Dew (he later gave his own son the middle name of Coster, sadly his father had died when Edward was only three) I can now find out that Edward had two sisters, Frances and Eliza, and a brother Henry, and that his father was born in 1806 and his mother in 1811. With a little more research I find that James and Anna, known as Sophia, were  married in 1833, and her maiden name was Robbins – no Thrissell!

Intriguingly I do come across another James Dew, who married in 1794, so he could possibly be James’s father, and he married a woman called Sarah Thrissell…