In 1891, Thomas Hardy published one of his best known novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which was inspired by the tombs of the real life Turberville family in St John the Baptist church in Bere Regis, Dorset.
The Turbervilles were an ancient and powerful family who were Lords of the Manor of Bere Regis for more than 500 years until around 1704 when they finally ran out of male heirs. The name, and most likely the family, would have been well known to the ancestors of my great great grandmother, Elizabeth Welch, as several generations of her forebears were baptised, married and buried in the church where Hardy found his inspiration.
The Welch family appears in the Bere Regis Parish registers as early as 1619, although the first record I can tie to a direct ancestor is the marriage of my 6x great grandparents, William Welch and Dorothy Hosier, on 13 April February 1708. The last record is the baptism of Elizabeth herself who, for a long time, was one of those annoying brick walls whose life span just misses the crucial documents that would have revealed her identity.
Although her marriage to James Maitland on 24 October 1825, the baptisms of their eight children, and her burial on 24 July 1846 were all recorded in Blandford Forum, none of these documents name her parents. The burial record does, however, provide a useful clue to her birthdate as it states she was 48 years old which, as her age in the 1841 census was given as 41, suggests that she was born around 1799.
Unlike the later returns, the 1841 census does not record the place of birth but simply states whether or not an individual was born in the county where they are living. Elizabeth is recorded as born in Dorset and a search for all the babies baptised Elizabeth Welch in the county between 1795 and 1805 yielded seven. Through a long process of elimination, I traced each one through marriage, census and burial records, which narrowed the list down to two, both of whom were born in Bere Regis, which is 9 miles from Blandford Forum – the first was baptised on 4 March 1798 with parents Bartholomew Welch and Elizabeth Dominey, and the second on 15 December 1799 with parents John Welch and Elizabeth White.
When I received my DNA test results, I thought the mystery was finally solved as I had several matches who are descended from Sarah Welch, who was born in Bere Regis around 1798 and married Thomas Crocker in 1821. All I needed to do was find out which one of my potential Elizabeth’s was her sister, but it turned out that both of them had a sister named Sarah baptised in Bere Regis in 1798 !
In time, I hope that some further DNA matches will emerge who are descended from another of Elizabeth’s siblings, but in the meantime I have had to piece together circumstantial evidence to determine her likely parents. The strongest clue is that the Sarah Welch whose descendants I do not match died in January 1822, and a year later Bartholomew Welch, who had remarried after the death of his first wife, baptised a second daughter named Sarah in Bere Regis.
Although it was common at the time for babies to be named after siblings who had died, I have never found an example where two living children were given the same name, and so it seems that Elizabeth Maitland and Sarah Crocker were most likely the daughters of John Welch and his wife Elizabeth White.
In the great scheme of things, it actually makes little difference as the two Elizabeths are both descendants of William Welch and Dorothy Hosier – their great grandfathers were brothers, making then 3rd cousins.
Sleuthing Notes 