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The Duddleston Family – Another Brick Wall Is Demolished!

brick wall demolished Duddleston family

Edward and Ann Eginton (also Egginton) are my 4th great-grandparents and have been a bit of a nightmare, to be honest! No matter where I looked, I could not find the record of their marriage. Ann stubbornly remained ‘just’ Ann. This week, I uncovered her maiden name. She was born into the Duddleston family, and I now have a whole new family to explore.

Edward and Ann Eginton

So how did this brick wall tumble? Like the Vaughan story, it’s a long tale. Strap yourself in. I knew Edward was from Birmingham, baptised as the son of William and Mary (nee Holt) at St Martin in 1778. Edward and Ann had baptised their first known child William at the same church in 1802. Immediately above this entry in the register is the baptism of his brother Francis’s daughter Ann on the same day. There were no more children baptised to Edward and Ann in Birmingham until 1818, when three more were baptised over the next four years. How odd.

Building the tree forward to the era of censuses, I found links between William and some other Egintons born in Yorkshire. This led to me to travel north (in a virtual sense!) and do some more digging there. Edward and Ann had settled in Sheffield for several years where he worked as a silver plater in the cutlery industry. Many children had been baptised and some buried there before they returned to Birmingham. I now had a beautiful timeline of their offspring, with no overlap between the two places or unexplained gaps, that covered Ann’s entire expected fertile years.

But I still had no wedding to give me her maiden name. There was nothing for an Edward Eginton and an Ann in or around Birmingham, and nothing in Yorkshire either. I now knew that it had likely taken place around 1800/1801, given their ages and when their family together had commenced.

Grasping at straws

The other day, on a whim, I decided to check out FreeReg.co.uk for this marriage. This site can be useful as it contains transcriptions of parish registers from all across the country, including many places which don’t yet have good coverage at other sites. There are no images, it contains purely derivative sources, but it’s a starting point. Bingo! There was an entry that was in the right timeframe, just 10 miles from Birmingham in Walsall, Staffordshire. It was, however, between an Edward Egerton (not Eginton) and Ann Duddeston.

It wouldn’t have even turned up on the search if it weren’t for the eagle eye of the transcriber, Dale Braden, who made a note that the vicar had entered it as Egerton, but the groom had signed clearly as Eginton. The transcriber entered the transcription under both surnames. THANK YOU DALE! I’m not surprised the vicar got it wrong. The couple were clearly not really of the parish, as claimed. It had been almost forty years since any Eginton had appeared in the register and would be more than twenty years until an Egerton turned up. There were no Duddestons at all.

Egerton Eginton note on marriage transcript Duddleston family
The note added by the transcriber at FreeReg which set me on the right path.

Now I needed the image. Reminder: always get back to the original source if possible! FindMyPast holds many but not all of the images for Staffordshire parish registers. Unfortunately, their Walsall, St Matthew coverage was only transcriptions, and they had indexed it only under Egerton, not Eginton. FamilySearch had similarly indexed the entry, but I knew they would have an image available on request. So I used their free lookup service to get the original parish register image.

I already knew Edward’s signature looked like this:

Duddleston - Edward Eginton signature 1836 Duddleston family
Edward Eginton’s signature at the marriage of his son Thomas Eginton to Mary Locke, 14 March 1836, at Aston, St Peter and St Paul.

He had been a witness to his son Thomas’ marriage in 1836. So, seeing a matching signature on his own marriage document would be great supporting evidence.

When the ‘Egerton/Duddeston’ marriage image arrived though it was clearly not the original entry, but a Bishop’s Transcript. Everything, including all the signatures, was written out neatly in the same hand, and they’d written ‘Egerton’. I would have to take Dale’s word for it for now and find some other sources of evidence until I could track down the actual parish register.

Finding Ann Duddeston [sic]

Yes, this was an error as well. The Duddeston surname quickly turned out to be a dead end. However, there was an Ann Duddleston of the right age who was baptised in 1780 by Hugh and Ann Duddleston in Birmingham where she was known to be from. Could this be her Duddleston family?

I turned back to Edward and Ann’s marriage entry. The witnesses were John Webster and Elizabeth Yeomans. I decided to see if they were related. By now I knew most of Edward’s family and nothing jumped out at me from there. But Elizabeth turned out to have been Elizabeth Duddleston, who married William Yeomans in 1795 in Harborne, just outside Birmingham at that time. Elizabeth was a member of Hugh and Ann’s Duddleston family…Ann’s elder sister!

Hugh Howard Duddleston and Ann (nee Hilton) were really beginning to firm up as Edward’s wife’s Duddleston family. So I began to build their family tree down and peruse their associated documents. It wasn’t long till I found Edward Eginton again signing his name with his distinctive flourish on his initials when he witnessed the 1818 marriage of Ann’s brother Thomas. His signature had matured over the years but it was clearly the same man. The other witness was Elizabeth Yeomans, Ann’s sister.

Duddleston - Edward Eginton signature 1818 Duddleston family
Edward Eginton’s signature at the marriage of his brother-in-law Thomas Duddlestone to Deborah Foster, 21 April 1818, at Birmingham, St Martin.

So now I had the same Edward Eginton witnessing a Duddleston marriage of another child of Hugh and Ann, his hypothesised parents-in-law, alongside the woman who had witnessed his own marriage. I’m happy with that!

Does DNA support the hypothesis?

Now I decided to turn to the DNA…it was stretching the limits of autosomal testing but would I find matches who descended from the same Duddleston family? I sure did. Since I’d built the tree down as far as I could on all lines and attached it to Ann over the course of several days, Ancestry had had a chance to do its magic, and I had four matches who connected with the common ancestors being Hugh Howard Duddleston and Ann Hilton. Three had public trees, and they were from different lines of the same Duddleston family. My brother had six matches, four of whom were unique to him, tying him to this Duddleston family through still other lines. So far there are DNA matches who descend from three of Hugh and Ann’s children. My half-sister (on the ‘other’ side!) had no Duddleston relatives amongst her matches at all.

One further match even extended a further generation back. I had already come to the conclusion that Hugh Howard Duddleston was the son of Ralph of Wolverhampton. There are not many Duddleston families. In fact, Ralph’s was pretty much the lone Duddleston family in the area at the time.

Rather conveniently so far, at least two of his sons emigrated to the US. This is always a bit of a bonanza when it comes to DNA. More people in the US have had their DNA tested, and those early immigrants often had large families with most of the children surviving compared to England. Therefore, the chances of a DNA match with a descendant are good.

The match that was from this generation was a descendant of Hugh’s brother Thomas Duddleston who as it turns out was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. I’ve been able to find a swathe of documents on him and will be building his line of the Duddleston family out too. Sigh, I feel yet another one-name study emerging out of this find. I just can’t help myself.

So, in conclusion…

We know that original sources are better than derivative sources. However, sometimes we need to start somewhere. Without that note on the transcription of the ‘Edward Egerton’ and ‘Ann Duddeston’ marriage in Walsall, I perhaps would never have found the Duddleston family branch. Do not dismiss transcripts and indexes when you are having trouble finding an elusive ancestor.

Remember to look at collateral branches, check witnesses, use the ‘FAN club’. It may make your tree big and unwieldy to include all these other people, but it’s often a great source of pieces of evidence that may not lie with your direct ancestors. And that big tree also helps with identifying DNA matches in that family line.

Good luck with breaking down your next brick wall. The Duddleston family look like keeping me busy for a good while now!

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