Not the child we expected to see in the census
A few days ago, I wrote about some of the people enumerated in the 1841 census of Blakeney. One of the families was that of Henry & Naomi Cozens Bond:
| Page | Place | Name | Sex | Age | Profession |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | High St | Henry Bond | M | 45 | Painter |
| Naomi | F | 45 | |||
| Susan | F | 19 | |||
| Thos | M | 8 |
As mentioned in our introductory page, one of the reasons for doing this blog is to help us with the upkeep of our genealogy file. While compiling that post, I realised that we did not have Henry & Naomi's son, Thomas, recorded in our file. We also had a record of another daughter, Anna, who was not enumerated with the family in 1841.
Anna was baptised in Blakeney in 1833. If she was baptised shortly after her birth, she would have been around the same age as Thomas. We don't have a copy of the burial register for that time period yet, so we don't know if Anna died* before June of 1841. It's very possible that she did.
But the puzzle is Thomas's baptism - where and when was it? I went back through the film of the baptism register to see if I missed Thomas's baptism. I couldn't find it. I could only find Anna's, on Aug. 24th 1833. (That's not to say I haven't overlooked Thomas's, but I have checked up to the end of that register in 1840.)
We know Anna was baptised around eight years before the 1841 census. Thomas's age in that census was recorded as eight years, so by my reckoning, Anna was baptised around the time Thomas was born. If she was baptised in Blakeney, I'd have thought he would have been, too, although he could have been baptised in Cley or some other nearby village. As a note of possible relevance, Henry Bond's occupation as listed in Anna's baptism record was "Glazier."
So, Thomas's baptism date and location is a mystery. I'll update here if & when we find out the answer.
Source:
Blakeney Parish Registers: Baptisms 1813-1840 PD619/6 MF691/30
*There is what appears to be a mark next to the date of Anna's baptism. I thought maybe it meant she had been deceased, so I went back to the front of the register to look at the legend of marks used. It didn't match any of them. Ah hah! thought I, a mystery mark! Perfect fodder for a blog post!
So I grabbed my handy-dandy iPhone and took pictures of the legend and the mark as they appeared on the film reader screen. Then I went into Photoshop and highlighted the mark and cropped the images. Not wanting to run afoul of the NRO's usage policy on their microfilms, I emailed the enquiry office with copies of the images and asked permission to post the images. They kindly responded with permission to do so as long as the source information was kept intact.
As I was typing this post, I thought I'd best go back and check one last time to see if I could make sense of the mark. Good thing, because I realised that although it's distorted slightly, it's similar to a couple of others in the same handwriting further down the same page. I hadn't noticed this before because of the distorted size and thickness of the strokes, especially since the other marks on the page are much lighter. But on closer study, I'm fairly sure it's the same. It's a "th" ... indicating August 24th.
Just goes to show; don't make assumptions when looking at images of old records.
Related Posts
- A look at the 1841 Blakeney Census
- The children of Thomas and Ann (Stirges) Newbegin
- More on the 1841 Blakeney Census – Susan Starling
- Probate: William Cozens 1813
- Children of Edmund and Jane (Cozens) Dew
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