One of the peculiarities of family history, in particular genealogy, is that it reduces people to paper trails. I’m fortunate that many of my ancestors had unusual names so I’m more likely to be on the right lines but even then problems arise. I know quite a lot about Nottingham City Council because people @ me in tweets meant for another Helen Blackman. Once I get back to Thomas Thompson, born 1781 in Northamptonshire, frankly I could end up finding out about any one of hundreds of individuals. Does this record of baptism relate to my Thomas, or another Thomas altogether? Am I recovering the records of my third-great grandfather? Do these pieces of paper describe a relative of mine, or simply someone with the same name? What are they even telling me? If I wander further along that branch, it may not be my family tree at all.
I use Ancestry.co.uk when investigating family history. I don’t wish to sound like an advert for it since that isn’t the point of this post, but I mention it because the way it is set up is key to this story. Ancestry.co.uk offers you hints, including links to other researchers’ trees, so long as they are publicly available. It also has a search facility which is good, although like any other it has its quirks.
For some time I have been investigating the family tree of Exmoor artist and author Hope Bourne (1918-2010). Bourne lived on her own on Exmoor in a series of dilapidated cottages and caravans. She seemed isolated from family and I was curious to find out why. I had got to the stage where I had worked out that her mother, Lilian Bourne nee Dudman, was one of seven children. The 1911 census is very useful for finding this out, because it records how many children a couple had, both living and dead. Lilian was the youngest child and I was trying to trace the lives of her brothers and sisters, Augustus, Ernest, Laura, May, Georgina, Annie and Ella Rosa. Bourne herself had no siblings but I wanted to know if any aunts and uncles outlived her mother, and if there were any cousins around after 1953, when Lilian died, apparently leaving Hope on her own.
Dudman is a fairly unusual name and I was ticking along nicely. Looking at other people’s family trees, as suggested by the website, it seemed that Laura (b. 1874) had married a Thomas Cheeseman. Thomas appeared in the 1901 census as a police constable resident in Camberwell. This fitted since George Dudman, father of Laura and Lilian, was in the police. Maybe he had introduced his daughter to a colleague.
Then things got exciting, well for me anyway. I found a record of a Laura Cheeseman, born around 1875 sailing from Kenya and arriving in London on 2 March 1937. This was intriguing because she gave her proposed address in England as Skerryvore, Fremington, Barnstaple. The Bourne’s used “Skerryvore” as an address on multiple occasions and Lilian was registered as living at the Barnstaple Skerryvore as a widowed schoolmistress in 1939. So it seemed as if Laura had married Thomas and they had had several children, meaning Hope had many cousins. Then Laura had travelled to Kenya, returning to stay with Hope and Lilian near Barnstaple.
Which is when it turned peculiar. I checked the 1911 census because it is so informative, and I noticed something odd. In the Cheesemans' census return Laura was born in 1867, some seven years before the Laura recorded as Lilian’s sister in earlier censuses. She had begun to have children in 1890. I found a record of the marriage, well a marriage, in 1888. If this was Laura Dudman, Laura was married at the age of 14 and having children at 16. It’s not impossible but seemed highly unlikely for the daughter of a police officer who had been training to be a teacher. So were these two separate Lauras? How come I had a Laura Cheeseman (b. 1874) staying with Lilian at Skerryvore, a Laura Cheeseman (b. 1867) married to a police officer and living a few miles from the Dudmans in Greenwich, and a Laura Dudman (b.1874) existing in the earlier records? Were they two separate people? One person sometimes being dishonest about dates? And if so, why?
Skerryvore is Scotland’s tallest lighthouse and an island located off the west coast of Scotland. It was also a cottage in Bournemouth belonging to Robert Louis Stevenson and his residence when he wrote the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The two, the lighthouse and the Bournemouth residence, are deliberately connected. Stevenson’s uncle Alan Stevenson designed the lighthouse and so the cottage was named in his honour. It is an unusual name, unusual enough that I was almost certain that Laura Cheeseman in the passenger lists was connected to the Bourne family. But was this case of dual identity actually one person or two?
I went back to the sources. One thing this was teaching me was the importance of being systematic in investigating family history and making sure you can trace how an error has arisen. I had in part relied on the family trees of other researchers, but I could not be sure they were right. Several of them seemed to be saying the same thing, but this is how errors multiply. I checked the marriage record for Laura – that gave her maiden name as Lewington, not Dudman.
I spent some time unpacking the records of Laura Lewington. It seemed increasingly likely that she was not Laura Dudman but a separate Laura who had somehow got caught up in this story. I double checked the censuses. In 1901 Laura Dudman had been at her parents’ house in Greenwich. Meanwhile Laura Cheeseman was with her husband and children in Camberwell. The census was a snapshot which recorded where people were at midnight on 31 March, so unless something highly unusual was going on, these were two separate people.
In 1903 Laura Cheeseman had a daughter named Lillian Dorothy May. So was she a close family friend, close enough to name her daughter after Lilian Bourne and her sister May? Were the family familiar with an “Aunt Laura” who as it turned out was an honorary aunt and had family lore confused “aunt” Laura with the biological aunt Laura? This seems quite likely but it does still raise questions about Laura Cheeseman (b. 1874) and travelling in 1937. I think Laura Cheeseman (b. 1867) in fact died in 1933. I could be wrong. That death might be another Laura altogether. The date of birth could be a lie, people lie about when they were born. I will keep trying to unravel the mystery and work out the strange case of Mrs Cheeseman and Miss Dudman. The answer may turn out to be mundane, or it may be stranger than fiction.
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