Issues with Records

It would have been on Sunday 6th June, 1841, when the enumerators made their way down Lordship Road, armed with the forms on which for the very first time in history, the names and details of all household residents in the United Kingdom were to be recorded. For latter day researchers, the census returns can be a trifle frustrating. First of all, the ages of respondents were to be rounded down to the nearest multiple of five, and secondly, they were not asked where they came from, but simply whether or not they came from the county where the census was being taken, in this case, Middlesex.

In those days of course, and in the face of this new and unique intrusion into privacy, in a relatively record-free age, the enumerators were faced with the task of uncovering facts that the respondents may not have wished to advance, or were not even sure of themselves, such as their original year of birth. In such cases, they would have told the enumerators very broadly what they believed or liked to believe to be the case.

Thus Maria West chose not to mention her Downpatrick origins and went down into the census records, as a woman of Middlesex, aged sixty. This was fanciful indeed, since her baptism took place in Downpatrick in 1765. With the help of the 'rounding down' system, Maria thus succeeded in trimming sixteen years of her real age. In short, she lied on two counts, firstly to conceal her Irish origins, possibly out of political caution, and secondly, possibly out of vanity, to appear as young as she could possibly manage. 

Record of burial for Maria West, St. Mary, Stoke Newington, 1846. Note how her age has increased since the 1841 census! Nonetheless, the age given is still an underestimate. She must have been at least eighty.

Other records of the time can be equally problematic. Both surnames and first names change according to the taste of the bearer. As we trawl back into the parish records, we thus find 
‘Wombwell’, ‘Womell’ and even ‘Ummel’ to name just three variations used by the family. Dates also change – birth and baptism dates get confused, and ages at death when provided are more than likely to be mere estimates provided by the parties involved. As noted, in this era, it will have been not uncommon for people not even to have known their own birthdate and age, let alone those of their deceased relatives. 


With the digitilisation of records and the proliferation of family history research, data can easily get further polluted – by mistranscriptions, false turnings, wishful thinking, and the replication of one researcher’s errors by the next. 

All this is very hard to avoid, and in tracing the Wombwell line, no-one need be too surprised if the data that emerges is not entirely factually accurate, or is contradicted by other versions. Due to the fame of the menagerie founder himself, the original George Wombwell, many distant and not-so-distant cousins have sought to establish connections with him, and this also has contributed to a multiplication of not entirely consistent, but nonetheless very lengthy and informative family trees.