Two years of Portsea
The first record of this family ever found in England survives because it falls inside a transcript twenty-two months long. Nobody had checked how long the transcript was.
On 19 March 1780, at Portsea St Mary in Hampshire, a child called Joseph D'Arcy was baptised, son of Robert and Jean. It is the earliest English record this archive holds of the family, and it is the only document anywhere that names Major-General Robert D'Arcy as somebody's father. How it was found →
This page is not about that entry. It is about how much of Portsea's register stands behind it, which is a question that should have been asked first.
Five common surnames, six years, one parish
Five of the commonest surnames in England, searched across Hampshire for the six years 1778–1783, and every Portsea St Mary hit counted.
| Surname | Hampshire, 1778–1783 | Of those, Portsea St Mary |
|---|---|---|
| Smith | 243 | 12 |
| Brown | 95 | 9 |
| Jones | 39 | 4 |
| Taylor | 83 | 6 |
| White | 106 | 15 |
That is 46 Portsea entries. Here is when they fall.
| Year | Entries | |
|---|---|---|
| 1778 | 0 | |
| 1779 | 0 | |
| 1780 | 20 | |
| 1781 | 25 | |
| 1782 | 1 | |
| 1783 | 0 |
All 46 are baptisms. Not one burial. Not one marriage.
A separate control — John Smith, Hampshire, across the thirty years 1770 to 1800 — returns 137 entries from twenty-odd parishes and NOT ONE from Portsea.
What that means
- Joseph's baptism survives by two years. Had Robert and Jean christened him in 1779 or 1782, this archive would have no English record of the family at all, and the Hornby claim would still be the only thing on the page.
- The absence of his brothers and sisters means nothing. This archive has twice implied that Portsea produced one child and no others. It produced one child because the transcript covers twenty-two months. Any sibling born before 1780 or after 1781 is not missing; it was never transcribed.
- It is not a null result, and it was never tested as one. The rule on this site is that you establish coverage before you report an absence. That rule was applied to Berkeley, to Dursley, to Hanley and to eight counties of Sanigers. It was not applied here.
- The register itself is intact. Portsea St Mary's original books survive at Portsmouth History Centre and are filmed. The question is not whether the evidence exists. It is that nobody has read the volume — and a volume covering, say, 1770 to 1800 would test the whole household in an afternoon.
The find is not weakened. The silence around it is. Joseph D'Arcy was baptised at Portsea on 19 March 1780 to Robert and Jean, and that remains as solid as it was this morning — it is a parish register entry and it says what it says. What has changed is that this archive can no longer treat Portsea as a parish it has searched. It has searched twenty-two months of it. The volume to read → · Filed as an error →
The county set, read end to end
This archive has tested Portsea twice before — FreeREG, which transcribes only two years of the register, and a control on the national baptism index. The Hampshire Genealogical Society's own county set has now been read in full for this surname: 44 entries, every one of them.
| Child | Year | Father | Mother | Parish |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joseph D'Arcy | 1780 | Robert | Jean | Portsea, St Mary — the direct line |
| Sarah Darcy | 1802 | Chrytophori | Sarah | Portsea |
| Gulielmus Darcy | 1803 | Christophori | Sarae | Portsea |
| Bridgeta Darcy | 1810 | Christophori | Sarrae | Portsea |
| Christophorus Darcy | 1815 | Thomae | Catharinae | Portsea |
| Ann Done D'Arcy | 1832 | Thomas | Elizabeth | Portsea, St Mary |
| Joseph Langston D'Arcy | 1836 | John | Elizabeth | Portsea, St Mary |
| Valentine Darcy | 1764 | John | Ann | Portsmouth |
| Margaret D'Arcy | 1807 | Patrick | Mary | Portsmouth, St Thomas |
Nine of the 44; the rest are Southampton, Milford, Pennington, Winchester, Gosport, Aldershot and the Isle of Wight.
This is the second independent source to say so: FreeREG said it first, from a much thinner transcription. What is new is that the set saying it now is one that plainly does cover Portsea — seven other D'Arcy children were baptised in that parish between 1802 and 1836, to four different fathers. The parish is in the book. Robert and Jean's other eight children are not.
documentedThat entry is not news here and this page nearly said it was. It is the first line of the [marriage audit](/behind-the-paywall/), opened at transcript level on 17 September, where WARD is recorded as confirmed — the bride's surname being the field the result row never shows. What is new today is the list around it, and the list is what answers Portsea.
Robert and Jean married at Portsea St Mary in 1779 and christened Joseph there the following year, and in the whole county set there is nothing more of them — not a second child, not a burial, not a marriage for any of the other eight children the tree gives them. The set is not thin about this family: it has them at the beginning and then it stops, which is what a posting abroad looks like in a county register.
And there is no marriage for Joseph anywhere in it. All 22 entries were read: John 1748, John 1754, David 1758, Alice 1766, Robert 1779, Elizabeth 1793, Christopher 1798, Lawrence 1813, Thomas 1818, George 1830, Christopher 1842, James 1846, John Henry 1855, Caroline 1859, Mary Jane and Miles 1878, George Frederick 1880. His eldest child was born in Hampshire in 1832 and he did not marry in the county — a finding that had to be re-made today, because the version of it published on 14 September came from a national set with no Hampshire in it at all.
documented