Inspired by digging into a long neglected family line last week, I decided that this week’s project was finding Esther. This was a good reminder of the value of returning to old research with new eyes periodically. If I could just find out who the mysterious Esther was, this would open up a whole new family for me and tumble a long-standing brick wall.
Esther Morter…
Esther Morter only appears in one document that I have found over the last couple of decades. She is named as the mother of John and Charles Morter, who were baptised together on 14th October 1796 at St Mary and All Saints, the parish church of Kidderminster in Worcestershire. Worcestershire is a difficult county to research unless you are lucky enough to be close to The Hive, their county archives. Currently, only transcripts of parish registers are available online with no access to digitised images. (A little bird tells me that their records are currently being digitised by Ancestry so watch this space over the next year or so, the situation is changing!). So, that was all I had to say that Esther existed. A transcript of a single document.
There was no record of she and Benjamin marrying. Although he married Elizabeth Cupee in 1798 there was no record of a burial for Esther, which was even more puzzling. To add to that, he described himself as a bachelor at that wedding. Did he not marry Esther at all?
Or is she Esther at all?
Digging back into researching Benjamin I found that he had a daughter Elizabeth with an Elizabeth in 1792, before he left London. Was this the same Elizabeth he’d eventually married? Did he just have an affair with Esther in Kidderminster and leave her behind there? Hypotheses were running thick and fast. It occurred to me that if the two Elizabeths were one and the same, she would have had the first child at the age of only 15. Could it be that her family disapproved of their relationship? Benjamin was ten years older.
Did they run off to Kidderminster together? It was another weaving area where he could easily find work. Was Esther really Elizabeth Cupee? This would account for the family of five being removed from Christ Church to Shoreditch after they returned to London in 1797. It would also mean that he was not lying when he said he was a bachelor, and their marriage coincided with her turning 21 and being able to marry without her parents’ consent. Finding Esther, and unravelling her story became even more of a pressing urge.
Finding Esther
I decided I couldn’t wait for the Worcestershire records to become available online. The key could be in that lone pair of entries in the parish register. I needed to see the vicar’s writing. The transcripts at both FamilySearch and TheGenealogist both said her name was Esther. But could it be a mistranscription, or even a mistake? The first theory could easily be proved or disproved by seeing the document at least.
I contacted The Hive. They responded very quickly to say that for the princely sum of 16 pounds they would photocopy and email it for me. I requested that they send the entire page rather than just the two entries so that I would have plenty of the vicar’s handwriting to compare against. Thank goodness I did.
The next day, I received an email with images of both the entries and the full page as requested. I looked at the entries. Sigh. Her name was clearly written as Esther for both baptism entries. The mistranscription theory was disproved immediately.
Esther is revealed
I looked at the full page. And there was what I believe to be the answer. The vicar made a mistake. Sometimes it happens. Indeed, Benjamin’s brother John had a son in Bethnal Green in 1809. The vicar there recorded him as a son of Benjamin, despite later documents including his will showing he was clearly John’s son. Perhaps this family never made themselves well known to the local clergy except for family occasions.
On October 14th 1796, the Kidderminster vicar baptised four babies, an unusually high number at one time for him. Of the four baptisms, three had the father Benjamin. Two were John and Charles Morter. The third was the child of Benjamin and ESTHER Hemmings. It also appears that one of the entries on the page is in the wrong place, non-chronological. I believe that the vicar may have written down the details on scraps of paper at the time and then neatly transcribed them into the parish register later. Somewhere along the way, all three entries with a Benjamin as father on that day ended up with Esther listed as the mother.
My current working hypothesis
Benjamin and Elizabeth got together in Bethnal Green when he was in his mid-20s and she in her mid teens. Her parents, Huguenots (Benjamin was not), strongly disapproved when she bore his child at the age of 15. The little family left together for Kidderminster, where they had the two boys. They then returned to the Spitalfields area in London by 1797, where they were described as a family of five on removal from the parish. Elizabeth was five months pregnant again in 1798 when they finally married quite truthfully as bachelor and spinster. She was now 21 and able to do so despite any parental objections. There was no finding Esther. Esther did not exist.
Obviously even though this hypothesis fits all documented facts known so far, it could contain a degree of confirmation bias. I am now digging through DNA matches to see if I can find a match with a descendant from the Cupee line. This of course means my new task is to build out her tree as much as possible to help with this. Previously thinking Elizabeth was a second wife I had done very little with her tree. So that’s what I’m doing now. When DNA matches are verified, I will be fully confident that not only do I have a document trail that works logically but that it is backed up by science! Finding Esther has taken a long time, but finding someone who never existed has been well worth the effort.