Open Questions

Swept on FindMyPast across all English record sets with variants on. NOT FOUND. His burial is confirmed — St Mary, Chatham, 19 May 1827, aged 76 — which is where the famous «1751» comes from, and it names no father.

Entry 203, «D'Arcy, Robert, C.B.» — the full career and «Died at Chatham, 13 5 1827». Only two D'Arcys in the whole Roll, 1660–1898. IT RECORDS NO PARENTAGE: the Roll does not carry fathers.

RULED OUT. WO 149 begins in 1790 and is at Sandhurst, so it cannot hold a cadet of the early 1770s. The printed Records of the Royal Military Academy of 1851 and 1892 are institutional histories, not registers, and have been read in full.

Read 15 September 2026. They give rank, seniority and station year by year — Second Lieutenant in 1783, Captain by 1802, Major in the army by 1803 — AND NOT ONE NAMES A PARENT.

Silent, and structurally so: the Ordnance gazetted no British engineer commission in 1774, 1775 or 1776. All twenty-two Darcy notices of 1770–89 are other men.

STILL THE BEST HOPE, and not reachable from here. Until 1855 the Royal Engineers answered to the Board of Ordnance and kept separate records; a cadet warrant or commission entry of 17 January 1776 would be in the Ordnance minutes. Errand 28 established the series is WO 54/240. A letter to the Royal Engineers Museum at Chatham is drafted and unsent.

A LEAD, and the first of its kind. The catalogue's sample names «CONSTANTINE D'ARCY, appointed 25 March 1775, PROFESSION OF PARENT: LIEUTENANT IN THE 95TH REGIMENT» — not Robert's son, who was born at Barbados in 1786, so a second and earlier man of that name in the same service Robert entered ten months later. The full list is in the document, not the catalogue. If it names Robert with a parent beside him, this question closes.

BERKELEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, stated in the 1851 census at Drivers Fields and matching the tree exactly. That question is answered; this one replaces it.

Spelt SANIGOR, which is why six weeks of searching missed it twice. She sits in a family of five baptised at Berkeley to JNO SANIGER: Ann 1798, William 1801, Jno 1803, Hannah 18 August 1804, Thos 1808 — the last almost certainly the Thomas Sinegar who lived a mile from her in Bristol. All 158 SANIGER baptisms in the set have since been read one by one, so this is coverage rather than a lucky hit.

Measured at parish level on 15 September 2026 with a SMITH control: 3 exact and 36 uncertain results, EVERY ONE BETWEEN 1653 AND 1677. It is a thirty-year seventeenth-century fragment, so it can test one Saniger generation of six and no more.

The father is documented: JNO SANIGOR on the 1804 entry, and JNO SANIGER on his other four children's. The mother is not, and not for want of looking — this register names no mothers. She is still the tree's LYDIA, with the tree's Lydia Jones born 13 March 1770 at Wotton-under-Edge untested because FreeREG does not list the parish. The 1797 marriage would name her; question 3.

ANSWERED, and they do not do lookups. Andrew Parry, Senior Archives Assistant, 14 September 2026: «I'm afraid we don't offer any kind of research service.» He named the Family History Society instead.

Drafted and sitting in notes/letters/. Mail from David's address is his to send.

195 records found on 15 September under the medieval spellings. They carry the family in the Vale from the 1270s to 1428, with filiations, an heirship and a named female ancestor — and Smyth's main line ends in 1401 with a John who died without issue.

Appear at Berkeley from 1601 — John Saniger, yeoman, in D2957/41/18.

TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF SILENCE. No descent has been shown and none is claimed. The name and the place are documented as one thing; the people are not joined.

Give her as «Ann» and nothing else — Ann 41 in 1861, Ann 52 in 1871, Anne 61 in 1881.

Named her. The marriage is 1842 at Stoke St Peter, and four Sneyd births carry Biddulph as the mother's maiden name.

ANSWERED. JOHN BIDDULPH, coal dealer, born Bermondsey, Surrey, about 1798, and JULIA his wife, born Shelton about 1799. Ann is in their house as «Daughter, Married», a dressmaker of 31, with her own children Mary and James A entered as grandchildren. Two sisters as well: Mary, a paintress, and Eliza, a servant.

HAN/007/057 — Catherine Sneyd, 1845, Hanley, mother's maiden name Biddulph. Three of her four siblings match the Well Street household exactly.

She appears in none of them. She either did not reach 1851, or was elsewhere on both nights.

She is in neither. Well Street holds Samuel, Elizabeth, James and Elizabeth Ann; Queen Street holds Ann with Mary and James A. Every other child of the marriage is accounted for at one of the two addresses, and Catherine — five or six years old — is at neither. The remaining explanations are a death before 1851, or a child living away from both her parents and both sets of grandparents.

ANSWERED. Catherine Sneyd, death registered December quarter 1849, Stoke on Trent — GRO volume 17, page 114. Exactly one Catherine Sneyd death in England and Wales across those eight years. She was four. That is why she is in neither household in March 1851.

All three found: Charlotte 1869 Brighton 2b 152, Jane 1875 2b 203, Catherine 1876 2b 164 — and Charlotte re-confirmed in FreeBMD on 15 September as the control for that index.

HO107/1646 f.357 p.59 sch.172, 22 Western Cottages, Brighton.

Has refused automated access twice.

Mid-migration; its search returns nothing for any query. Its documents were reached by direct URL instead.

Now Museums of History NSW, at a new domain, with the old index addresses dead — which is what stopped the search for George Pitt D'Arcy's 1849 probate.

17 JANUARY 1776. The lists of 1778, 1781 and 1783 all carry him in an intact ditto-chain — and the 1783 edition sets his name ROBERT D'ARCEY, with an e, which is why outside catalogues had never returned him.

Five pages said 1776 and a sixth said 1778, for weeks, and the page that was wrong was the one that sounded most authoritative. Correction 29; agree.py then found six more stale copies.

THREE, not four. Reviewing Maclean's 1902 edition — the edition this archive read — the reviewer listed its misreadings: «Thus SAINGER SHOULD READ SANIGER.» So the man living in the hamlet the surname came from is John Saniger of Saniger, his name and his address the same word.

SAINGER is a real form of the name, 44 times in the Berkeley registers. It is simply not a 1608 one. Correction 31.

Yes, and better. BCM/A/1/56/29 of 1354 is the partition Smyth describes; BCM/A/1/24/184 of 1356 is the deed he transcribed, and the catalogue says so — «[Transcript: Smyth, iii. 380-1.]»; MS 3549/4 at Birmingham names William's wife Isabella, as Smyth does.

The 1356 inspeximus calls John Swonhungre «his father, son and heir of John Swonhungre» — so there is a John above the John the printed pedigree begins with.