Chew Magna

Every English document this archive holds agrees on one negative: whatever Hannah Saniger was, she was not born in Gloucestershire. The 1841 census at Drivers Fields says so with a tick, and says the same of the seventy-year-old Lyddya Sinegar living in the house. The reconstitution of all 81 Gloucestershire Saniger households says so by exhaustion. The passenger register dittoed the question instead of answering it.

So the county has to be somewhere else. Here is a Saniger household in Bristol ten years later, and it names one.

Oxford Road, St Philip and Jacob

Address as written: Oxford Road.

And ten years earlier, in the parish itself

Address as written: Battles Lane.

Ten years before Oxford Road, the same woman is in Chew Magna itself — in a spade-maker's house on Battles Lane, spelled SANIGAR. Her age moves from 45 to 60 across the decade, which is what 1841 ages do: that census rounded adults down to the nearest five.

The name is at Chew Magna in more than one form. Besides Elizabeth SANIGAR in 1841, the 1891 census finds a Julia SINEGAR living there — SINEGAR being the exact spelling the 1841 enumerator used for the seventy-year-old widow in the Wakefields' house at Drivers Fields. Lyddya Sinegar →

Four constraints, and a parish that meets all of them

1. The county is right, and it is the only thing the 1841 census will tell us. At Drivers Fields in 1841 the enumerator ticked Hannah Wakefield as NOT born in Gloucestershire, and ticked Lyddya Sinegar, aged seventy, the same way. Somerset is the county on the other side of the river.
2. The parish is next door. St Philip and Jacob adjoins St Paul, where the Wakefields were living in 1841 and where Miriam was born in 1840. These are neighbouring Bristol parishes, not distant towns.
3. The generation is right. Elizabeth Saniger is sixty in 1851, so born about 1791. Lyddya Sinegar is seventy in 1841, so born about 1771. Hannah is thirty-five in 1841, so born about 1806. Three Saniger women of three generations, all in east Bristol, none of them born in Gloucestershire.
4. The trade is right, and it is the thread running through the whole surname. William Saniger is a journeyman smith and James Wakefield a journeyman mason. And Chew Magna, says Collinson, had been “a large clothing town” — the same trade that runs through every Saniger this archive has found at Berkeley, Dursley and Cam, where they are clothiers, weavers, tuckers and curriers.

What the place was

“a large and populous parish, very pleasantly situated at the distance of SIX MILES SOUTH-WEST FROM BRISTOL … containing within its precincts one hundred and seventy houses, and eight hundred and thirty inhabitants.”

Collinson holds no Sanigers at Chew Magna, and that is not evidence of anything: he copies gentry monuments and benefactions, and a journeyman smith's family would not appear in either. read, and empty

The obvious next search cannot be run

No Saniger at Chew Magna in FreeREG's Somerset holdings, in any spelling, between 1780 and 1840. The only Somerset Saniger in that window is a marriage at Walcot: Edmund Liddall and Rachel Saniger, 8 June 1819.

That looks like a null result. It is not, and the rule on this site is to find out which before saying anything. Three forenames of SMITH across Somerset for the twenty-one years 1795–1815.

943 Smith entries across 21 years and 100-odd Somerset parishes. Chew Magna accounts for TWO of them, against a hundred at Walcot and sixty-nine at Bath. Collinson counted 830 people there in 1791 — smaller than Bath, certainly, but not so small that twenty-one years of registers should yield two entries of the commonest surname in England.

What happens next

1. Chew Magna's own register, 1795–1815. The originals are at the Somerset Heritage Centre and filmed on the subscription sites. A baptism for Hannah Saniger, daughter of John and Lydia, would close the oldest open question on this site in one line. On the queue →
2. And it would test the tree at the same time. The family tree says Hannah was born at Berkeley on 23 July 1805, daughter of John Saniger who died there in 1824. The 1841 census says she was not born in Gloucestershire, and Berkeley is in Gloucestershire. Those two statements cannot both be true. What Berkeley holds →
3. The Bristol chapels remain the other half of the answer. Twelve RG 4 volumes can hold a birth in this window. They are listed →

Elizabeth's husband has a name, and this page said he did not exist

On 13 September this archive searched FindMyPast for Sanigers at Chew Magna and published the result as «None, in any spelling». That is false, and it was false the day it was written. Somerset Baptisms holds two of them, and they are Elizabeth's own children.

documented