I spent yesterday morning puzzling over the records on
Ancestry.com. After lunch I decided to go for a swim, and as I was walking
across the fields on my way to the pool, an audacious idea hit me. Returning to
the relevant documents, I am now more or less certain it was correct.
Bay Edgar wrote thus about his uncle Frederick Johnson Edgar:
Fred did various jobs
and lived at home.
Let's follow him through the records so we can assess this
statement.
In 1891, aged 5 months,
he was not surprisingly living with his parents (and five of his older
siblings) at Great Bealings. As far as I can make out, the village was so small
that their address was just '10, Great Bealings' - no road name needed! Even in
2011 there were only 302 inhabitants.[1]
In 1901, aged 10, he's moved with the family to Stapleford Abbots
- again it seems that all you needed to write on the envelope was '66'. But the
village had expanded to a massive 959 inhabitants by the start of the twenty first
century.[2]
Like his older brother Wilfred (12) he's at school. He's got
a younger brother, Thomas John now, and at the age of 6 he's probably at school
but that's not certain because the relevant entry is illegible. The school was
built in 1887 and the claim that it was an important part of village life from the
start is no doubt true.[3]
But then Frederick
disappears. There's no sign of him in the 1911 Census, and, more surprisingly,
no trace of any service in WW1. Conscription for single men began to take
effect on March 2, 1916, and as a youth of 25 and presumably unmarried Frederick would have been
among the first to be drafted.
Of course, I might have missed him in the 1911 Census (I
thought for a long time my grandmother Alice Stephenson was absent until I
found her hidden by a wildly wrong age). And he might have been excused war
service on medical grounds.
But the idea that came to me as I walked to the pool was
different: what if Bay had confused FREDerick and his slightly older brother
WilFRED? This is what he tells us about the latter:
Wilfred emigrated to America and was believed to have been killed in
the San Francisco earthquake (he later
reappeared in Australia
In my post on Wilfred I pointed out that when an earthquake
destroyed San Francisco in 1906 he was almost
certainly safe in Essex . And he's documented
right through to 1918. But, as we've seen, Frederick 's pattern fits much better with
Bay's claim: in April 1906 he was only 15 years old, but he wouldn't have been
the first enterprising young man to have lied about his age. But I wonder if he
went to sea rather than emigrated? A 15 year-old would have much less difficulty
signing up on a ship than convincing the American authorities to give him
citizenship, and San Francisco
was an important port.
Although I can find to trace of him in Australia , he does show up again in Essex :
So, although it's not yet certain, I strongly suspect that
it was Frederick who wasn't killed in the 1906 earthquake (and all the other
Edgars, obviously).
Update: Frederick J. Edgar, born on the same day, was a 'cowman' at Banstead, Surrey at the time of the 1939 Register.
Update: Frederick J. Edgar, born on the same day, was a 'cowman' at Banstead, Surrey at the time of the 1939 Register.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bealings
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stapleford_Abbotts
[3] http://www.essexschoolsjobs.co.uk/School/Directory/Details.aspx?SchoolId=196
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