I only got to hear first-hand stories from one of my grandparents: my maternal grandmother, Mildred Howe, who was born in 1896. My father’s parents were both long dead by the time I was born and my paternal grandfather, Jack Cullingford, died when I was a small child.
I always loved listening to my grandmother talk about her life, particularly the Victorian childhood in rural Suffolk that was so different to my own. My favourite story was always George and the milk bottle – she had almost married poor George but had been so horrified that his family put the milk bottle on the table when she visited them for tea that she changed her mind !
The oldest story she told, however, related to my grandfather’s Cullingford ancestors rather than her own as, according to family legend, they were wreckers who had fled to Suffolk from the West Country after murdering an Excise Officer. Wreckers, who stripped ships that had foundered of their valuable cargo, are now generally considered to have been opportunists rather than murderous criminals, but they were smugglers in the eyes of the law as import duty was due on the shipments they plundered.
When I began researching the Cullingfords, it seemed that this story could not possibly be true as it is an uncommon name that clearly originates in Suffolk. At the time of the 1841 census there are just 209 recorded in England, with 125 living in Suffolk and 36 in Norfolk, almost all living within a narrow coastal strip. The returns for London list 31, mostly members of four families, and the furthest that any have travelled is an intrepid couple who have made it all the way to Hampshire.
For a long time, the earliest record I had related to my 3x great grandfather, Samuel Cullingford, who in the 1851 census is listed as an agricultural labourer who claimed to have been born around 1783 in Benhall, Suffolk. He didn’t appear in the 1841 census, and there was no trace of his birth.
Eventually I asked a researcher in the Suffolk Records Office for help, and she worked out that in the 1841 census the family was named Cull, not Cullingford – Samuel Cull and his wife Hannah are recorded in Wantisden living with their three youngest children, and four other sons are also listed elsewhere in the same Parish under the same name.
I might have put this down to a spelling error by the enumerator if it weren’t for the fact that Samuel and Hannah’s first four sons were all baptised as Cull in the neighbouring parish of Butley between 1812 – 1820. I have also since found a potential marriage for Samuel’s parents as a Samuel Cull from Great Glemham married Ann Welton in Marlesford in 1783, and Great Glemham is less than 2 miles from Benhall.
Cull is such a rare name in Suffolk that the 1841 census lists just ten, all but one of them members of my 3x great grandfather’s family, and by 1851 there are none. It is, of course, possible that the switch between names is simply the result of the less literate times before spelling became standardised, but I wonder how likely it is that a census enumerator and two Parish Clerks would all have made the same mistake and recorded a name that would clearly not have been familiar to them ?
I will never know whether my ancestors deliberately changed their name from Cull to Cullingford in an attempt to hide their past misdemeanours, but it does leave open the tantalising possibility that my oldest story may just be true …
Sleuthing Notes 