467 sources examined · 269 yields, 106 nulls, 46 out of scope, 46 blocked
What Has Been Read
Everything this archive has opened, whether or not it gave anything up — because a search that returns nothing is a result, and the next person should not have to run it again.
Every source this archive has opened, whether or not it gave anything up. A search that returns nothing is a result, and the next person should not have to run it again.
And every null carries the control that could have disproved it — or admits it has none. Every null on this page should name a control — a test that could have failed and did not. 94 do. 8 do not, and are marked rather than quietly left to look better-evidenced than they are. An unstated control does not make a row wrong; it makes it untested.
The field is set by the author, not guessed from the prose. It was bootstrapped by pattern on 15 September and that pattern under-read badly — it demanded a digit, so it missed «returns TWO entries», «transcribed in full — 7,967 records» and «loose enough to return SCHONSWAR and SMOOKER». All thirty-nine it had marked unstated were then read one by one, and thirty-one of them turned out to state a control in words.
A null result is not a failure, and it is not the same as a gap. There are
four outcomes on this page and they mean different things.
- found something the source was read and it gave up a fact this archive now publishes.
- found nothing the source was read properly and the thing is not in it. This is knowledge. Four of the nulls below are load-bearing: they are why the Hornby claim is called unevidenced rather than disputed.
- does not cover it the source was examined and does not hold this class of record at all — the wrong denomination, the wrong diocese, the wrong century. Not a null either: nothing was searched, because there was nothing there to search.
- could not be reached the source exists and this archive could not get at it — a bot check, a migration, a login. Not a null result, and it must never be reported as one. Several are jobs for a person →
Every source read, and what it gave up
The four kinds above are the filter. A null is only as good as the test that could have disproved it, so where a control was run the row says so.
467 sources · everything is listed; the filters only narrow it
467 sources. A source that returns nothing is evidence too — it is the difference between «we have not looked» and «it is not there».
| When | What was read | Looked for | What came back |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — National Burial Index, Madeley All Saints found something | William Sneyd of Madeley, the point where this line rests on a web-site citation | EIGHT William Sneyds buried at Madeley across 250 years — 1574, 1640, 1659, 1762, 1780, 1791, and TWO that matter: 1819 AGED 88 (born about 1731) and 13 MAY 1827 AGED 84 (born about 1743). The weaver married about April 1769 and was still fathering children in 1794, so neither 1780 nor 1791 can be him. The 1827 burial fits far better — 26 at marriage, 51 at the last child, and within three years of the tree's 1746 — but TWO CANDIDATES ARE TWO CANDIDATES, and the register names no wife, trade or children. The tree gave him no death at all. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — New South Wales Marriages 1788-1945 found something | What became of Charlotte D'Arcy, christened at Chatham eight days before the England sailed | CHARLOTTE CATHCART D'ARCY married ROBERT MEAD PEARSON at PARRAMATTA in 1859, registration 2618 — the town where her father George Pitt D'Arcy died in 1849. She would have been 34. The index spells the middle name CATHCART in one entry and CATHERINE in another, and the Chatham baptism gives her no second name at all, so this is a strong candidate rather than an identification. The marriage certificate names the father. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Queensland Burials & Memorials found something | A seam this archive has never worked | EIGHTY-ONE D'ARCY burials and memorials in Queensland, including Frederick Robert D'Arcy's Toowong transcription which this archive already holds and has already corrected. The other eighty have not been read. Recorded as reachable ground, with the trial expiring; it is an ordinary subscription set and will still be there. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Sussex Burials (TNA RG 37/65/2) found something | Whether the three sisters are buried together — a question this archive had never once searched | ALL THREE, ON THE SAME PAGE OF THE SAME REGISTER. ST ANDREW'S OLD CHURCH, Church Road, HOVE, Anglican, page 47: CHARLOTTE died 28 MAY 1869, JANE died 10 JANUARY 1875, CATHERINE died 23 JANUARY 1876. Two exact dates where the archive held only GRO quarters — and Catherine's is the date the Horsham paper printed a fortnight after the event, so a parish register and a newspaper now agree without either having seen the other. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — British India Office Marriages found something | Captain Robert D'Arcy of the India Company's Army | ROBERT WEST D'ARCY, married at BOMBAY in 1846 — and the middle name is the find. WEST is Lady Catherine Georgiana's family name, so Joseph's son carried his mother's peerage surname to India. The index entry is visible; the transcript is PAYWALLED EVEN ON A PAID TRIAL — “Subscribe to unlock exclusive records”, the same gate as the Royal Artillery officers. Indexed, not read. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — the sourcecategory filter could not be reached | A control, after two more suspicious zeros | Adding sourcecategory=life events (bmds) to a search returns ZERO whatever else is asked — D'Arcy births 1817-1825, D'Arcy life events in India, both nothing, while the same searches without it return results. The URL shows the value mangled to life-events-bmds. Any null this archive has drawn from a query carrying that filter is worthless. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Cambridgeshire Burials found something | When Lady Catherine died, and where | CATHERINE GEORGIANA DARCY, AGED 36, “OF BATH”, buried 22 MARCH 1824 at BOURN, CAMBRIDGESHIRE. The age gives a birth about 1788 and makes her twenty-nine at the Bath marriage of November 1817; the residence is the town she married in; and the date measures the gap between Joseph D'Arcy's two families, since he remarried in November 1830. Her third son Richard was born about 1824, the year she died at thirty-six — an inference, and stated as one. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FreeBMD could not be reached | English civil registration for the Brisbane line's English generations | OPENS WITHOUT A LOGIN AND RETURNS NOTHING. The search page accepts a POST and answers with the results-page furniture and no result rows, for every query. Control: SMITH BIRTHS IN BRISTOL IN 1840 returns zero, which is impossible — as does Wakefield, whose 1840 Bristol registration this archive already holds at vol 11 p.183. Nothing was searched; no null from it is recorded. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | RootsChat could not be reached | The Hornby claim and the Keele graft, put to forum specialists | “You are not allowed to search for posts in this forum. Please login below or register.” The forum requires an account to SEARCH, let alone to post. No account was created and no credentials entered. The two questions are drafted and are now errand 47 for somebody with a login. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Geneanet — Italy, Marriages 1809-1900 found something | FALCO at ARIENZO, the Italian side of the marriage that joins two archives | 26 RECORDS, readable WITHOUT signing in and with no bot check. Falco brides and grooms at Arienzo with both parties named — Loffredo, Abatiello, Di Lucia, Librera, Perrotta — and FALCO GIOVANNA married to CRISCI ANIELLO, Crisci being one of the Falco archive's own surnames. Recorded as reachable ground for that archive rather than imported into this one. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Antenati — Portale Antenati, Archivio di Stato di Caserta found something | The Arienzo registers, for the Italian side of the marriage that joins this archive to the Falco one | 422 REGISTERS FOR ARIENZO, digitised and free: Matrimoni processetti 63, Matrimoni 62, Nati 59, Morti 57, Diversi 45, from 1809. NOT NAME-INDEXED — a search for FALCO returns nothing and so does RUSSO, the commonest surname in Campania, which is the control proving the index is missing rather than the family. They must be read page by page, and the processetti carry birth extracts and parental consents for both parties. This is the FALCO archive's subject, not this one's; recorded here as reachable ground rather than imported. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | National Library of Ireland — Catholic Parish Registers does not cover it | The Limerick Atkinson, Cole, Creech, Kent, Bowen and Peevers line | STRUCTURALLY OUT OF SCOPE, and worth stating rather than searching. The NLI collection is CATHOLIC ONLY. Paul Cole Atkinson is recorded born at ST MARY'S, LIMERICK — the Church of Ireland cathedral parish — and Atkinson, Cole, Creech, Kent, Bowen and Peevers are Protestant settler names. The same shape as the Wicklow problem on /george-pitt: the records this family needs are the ones this source does not hold. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | irishgenealogy.ie could not be reached | The Creech, Atkinson and Mulcahy lines — errand 14 | A Cloudflare bot check — “Performing security verification” — for the third time in this archive's life. Not defeated, and will not be. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | RootsIreland could not be reached | Limerick and Tipperary parish transcriptions | Reachable, and behind Login / Register / Subscribe. Co. Limerick and both Tipperarys are among its counties. A subscription, so an errand rather than a search. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | ScotlandsPeople could not be reached | The South Leith originals behind Jean Ward's baptism | The old-parish-register search area answers ACCESS DENIED without an account. No account was created and no credentials entered. The 1754 baptism and the 1747 marriage are already held here from FamilySearch; what this source would add is the register image. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | BillionGraves could not be reached | Queensland burials, as a second opinion on Find a Grave | The page loads and its own search API answers 403 and 400; the country list never finishes and the page sits on “Please wait”. NOTHING WAS SEARCHED, so nothing is known. A blocked source, not an empty one. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Find a Grave — Centenary Memorial Gardens, Brisbane (cemetery 2483416) found something | The Brisbane graves, from a source this archive had never used | THREE D'ARCY MEMORIALS, where the archive had none. KENNETH LINDSAY D'ARCY, 17 Aug 1927 – 3 Mar 2010, aged 82, plot SECRET GARDEN (memorial 286540042). AUDREY DELL D'ARCY, 1 Nov 1929 – 1 Aug 2022, aged 92, Garden of Reflection Section E Site 20 (242573098) — the Audrey “Dell” Murdoch the tree marries to Kenneth at Toowoomba in 1952. And CHRISTINE HILDA D'ARCY-EVANS, 15 Jan 1930 – 10 Aug 2017, Garden of Reflection Section C Site 41 (229072083), a name this archive has never held. The cemetery carries 8,387 memorials at 353 Wacol Station Road. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Find a Grave — the location filter could not be reached | A control test, before believing three zeros | Searching the surname with location=Queensland, Australia&locationId=state_2118 returns NO MATCHES for D'Arcy, for Darcy and for Sneyd. It also returns NO MATCHES FOR SMITH, which is impossible — while Darcy searched worldwide returns 10,654. That locationId is not Queensland. Every Find a Grave null taken through it is worthless; searching WITHIN a named cemetery works and is what found the three memorials above. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | This archive's own places file, through tools/atlas.py found something | The seventeen places with no coordinate | THIRTEEN REMAIN, and the approximates fell from 67 to 64. The export carried three kinds of damage that stop a gazetteer: HTML escapes never unescaped (“<Ehrstaedt”), nineteenth-century abbreviation (“Butcombe Som Eng”, “of St Quivox, Ayr, Sctl”), and editorial prose in a place field (“Christened in Berkeley”, “Portsmouth, Hampshire, England or West Indies”). A tidy() step now normalises what is handed to the geocoder and NEVER what is printed — the page still shows the place exactly as recorded. Butcombe, Aller, St Quivox, Ehrstaedt, Portsmouth, Santa Maria a Vico and Dürnau are on the map; Buckwall, Deinschwang, Neuhaus, Himley Hall, “Parish of Elmore” and “?” are not, and will not be guessed at. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast newspapers — Saint James's Chronicle 23 May 1857; London Evening Standard and Morning Herald 25 June 1862 found something | The two Richard D'Arcy deaths in the civil index, chased to their notices | Neither is the Richard of Priestlands — but one of them opened a whole family. “At St Helier's, JERSEY, RICHARD, THIRD SON of the late LIEUT. COL. D'ARCY, ROYAL ARTILLERY, and LADY CATHERINE, SISTER OF THE PRESENT EARL DE LA WARR, aged 33.” And five years later: “CAPTAIN ROBERT D'ARCY, late of the INDIA COMPANY'S ARMY, son of the late COLONEL D'ARCY of the ROYAL ARTILLERY and LADY CATHERINE, DAUGHTER OF THE LATE AND SISTER OF THE PRESENT EARL DE LA WARR”, died Bangor 14 June 1862. Joseph D'Arcy had a family by a first wife who was a peer's daughter — the CATHERINE GEORGIANA WEST the tree has always given him, married at Bath in 1817 and never looked at. WEST is the family name of the Earls De La Warr. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales Deaths 1837-2007, Lymington district found nothing | Whether Richard D'Arcy of Priestlands died there | FIVE D'Arcy deaths ever registered at Lymington: JOSEPH 1848, KATHERINE LUCY ELIZABETH 1863, and three in the twentieth century. No Richard. He is in the house in 1841 and is not in the district's register at all — and no Richard D'Arcy or ARCY appears in the 1851 census anywhere in Britain. The two Richard Darcy deaths in the index for 1836-1856 are Liverpool 1848 and West London 1856, neither with an age. 21 September: asked again with the parameter that works, and now controlled. This set is addressed by district, not by place — both place=lymington and registrationdistrict=lymington return a silent zero, and district=lymington returns the district. Asked that way, the whole index holds two D'Arcy deaths registered at Lymington: Joseph, first quarter of 1848, and Katherine Lucy Elizabeth, second quarter of 1863 — his widow, both of them already here. Control in the same shape: 21 PITT deaths in the same district, 1820-1900. So the district is indexed and Richard D'Arcy did not die in it. Whatever became of the man aged 57 at Priestlands in 1841, it was not a death registered where he was living. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast newspapers — Oxford University and City Herald, 1 Nov 1806; Chester Courant, 11 Nov 1806 found something | Any contemporary notice of Margarett Maria Isabella D'Arcy's marriage | “At Chatham, CAPTAIN J. M. JONES, of the ROYAL DENBIGH MILITIA, to MISS D'ARCY, ELDEST DAUGHTER OF COL. D'ARCY, OF THE ROYAL ENGINEERS.” The Chester Courant adds the church and the officiant — Chatham Church, by the Rev. I. T. Jones. This is the EARLIEST record found anywhere naming Robert D'Arcy's corps, thirty-seven years earlier than the notice this archive announced as the first, and it was in the report of that very marriage. It also fixes Margaret as the ELDEST DAUGHTER of the ten children. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast newspapers — the London Gazette of 30 June 1818, in five papers found something | Joseph D'Arcy's Persian service, which this archive refused to assert from three letters | “The Prince Regent has given permission to LIEUT.-COL. D'ARCY to wear the insignia of the SECOND CLASS OF THE IMPERIAL ORDER OF THE LION AND SUN, conferred on him by the KING OF PERSIA; but not to assume any style, appellation, rank, precedence …” Carried by the London Moderator, Mirror of the Times, Englishman, Johnson's Sunday Monitor and Maidstone Journal within a week. The K.L.S. is a Crown grant in the official gazette, and it dates the Persian service to before mid-1818. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Hampshire Baptisms, Milford found something | The five children Joseph D'Arcy's will left his property to | All five, named at last: CATHERINE LUCY JANE (23 Jan 1832), JOHN HYDE (30 May 1833), JOSEPHINE (1836), FRANK HYDE (22 Jun 1839) and JOSEPH WILLIAM (6 Jul 1841) — father JOSEPH, mother KATHERINE LUCY ELIZA, the register calling him “Lt Col RA of MILFORD HOUSE”. And Frank's entry carries four words that open a country: “bn 14 Dec 1838 in MADEIRA”. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Hampshire Burials, Surrey Baptisms, school registers and newspapers found something | What became of Joseph's sons | JOHN HYDE went to HARROW and died at Southampton on 28 June 1852, AGED NINETEEN — carried as far as the Catholic Telegraph in Dublin. FRANK HYDE married at Lymington in 1863, died at Worcester on 15 June 1868 AGED TWENTY-NINE, and was brought home to be buried at Pennington. His son FRANK HAMILTON HYDE D'ARCY was baptised at Croydon on 26 November 1868 — five months after his father died — and died at Chelmsford in 1910. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Hampshire Chronicle, 24 March 1823 found something | Any notice of Jean Ward's death | “At Chatham, MRS. D'ARCY, THE WIFE OF MAJOR-GEN. D'ARCY, OF THE ROYAL ENGINEERS.” Jean Ward's death notice — and the EARLIEST record found anywhere that gives Robert D'Arcy his corps, twenty years before the 1843 notice this archive had announced as the first. It also corroborates Connolly's major-generalcy of 1819 from a contemporary source. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — the 1851 census IMAGE, HO107/1646 f.357 p.59 found something | What the enumerator actually wrote | Two transcription errors, read off the page. THE NAME: the enumerator writes “Jane D'Arcy” in a clear hand, apostrophe and all; the index split it into a forename “Jane D” and a surname “Arcy”, which is why no D*ARCY search could ever reach them. THE ADDRESS: he writes “19 Western Cott” against schedule 168 and dittoes down to 22, so the sisters are at 22 WESTERN COTTAGES — a numbered house in a named row, which the index renders as a house name of “Western Cottage” with no street. Schedule 172 holds the three of them and no head; next door at schedule 173 is James Hayward, 61, lodging house keeper. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1851 England, Wales & Scotland Census found something | The Sussex sisters by ADDRESS and by HOUSEHOLD rather than by surname | ALL THREE, at WESTERN COTTAGE, BRIGHTON — HO107/1646 f.357 p.59 sch.172. JANE D ARCY 55, CATHERINE ARCY 50, CHARLOTTE ARCY 40; all three LODGERS, all UNMARRIED, all “Fund holder”. And the birthplaces: JANE and CATHERINE born BARBADOES, CHARLOTTE born LYME, DORSET. An English census confirming the West Indies posting that rested yesterday on two Caribbean christenings and a family tree. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast census — the household search found something | Why four days of surname searches had missed them | The surname is indexed as ARCY: the enumerator's D' was read as part of the forename or dropped. No search for a surname beginning D and ending ARCY could reach them. They surfaced from a HOUSEHOLD search — Jane, with a Charlotte in the same house, in Brighton — which returns 119 people, the third of whom is “Jane D Arcy”. This archive's own alias list already carries “arcy” as a form of D'Arcy; the queries put to somebody else's index did not. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1861 census, eight independent approaches does not cover it | The sisters in 1861 | Not found by surname (DARCY across Sussex and nationally by year; ARCY across Sussex), by the right street (WESTERN COTTAGES does not exist in the 1861 Brighton index at all), by the widened street (WESTERN returns 718 people, filtered for all three forenames and read), by Bedford Square in 1861 or 1871, by birthplace in Sussex (33 born Barbadoes, read one by one), by birthplace nationally (25 Janes, 16 Catherines), by household fingerprint (the search that found them in 1851), or at Falmer. A null that has earned the name. control named |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales Deaths 1837-2007 (GRO index) found something | Deaths of Robert D'Arcy's three surviving daughters in Sussex | All three. CHARLOTTE aged 73, Brighton Q2 1869, vol 2B p.152; JANE aged 87, Brighton Q1 1875, vol 2B p.203; CATHERINE aged 86, Brighton Q1 1876, vol 2B p.164. The ages run back to births of about 1795, 1787 and 1789 against the tree's 1794, 1787 and 1789 — two exact, one a year out. Added to this archive the previous day on the authority of web trees alone, now in the public record. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Horsham, Petworth, Midhurst and Steyning Express, 8 Feb 1876 found something | Any notice of Catherine D'Arcy's death | “On the 23rd ult., at BEDFORD SQUARE, BRIGHTON, MISS CATHARINE D'ARCY, aged 86.” Confirms the exact date the tree gave without a source, confirms she never married, and gives an address the archive did not have. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Index to Death Duty Registers 1796-1903 found something | Whether any of the sisters left an estate | CATHERINE D'ARCY of Brighton, grant year 1876, Court of Probate, TNA IR 27/396. The register behind it names executors and legatees — the likeliest document to name this family's English descendants after 1850. Charlotte and Jane produce no entry. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1841 England, Wales & Scotland Census found something | The sisters in a household | JANE 40, CATHARINE 39 and CHARLOTTE 35 D'ARCY, one household, WESTERN BUILDINGS, BRIGHTON, schedule 1912, HO107/1122 bk8 f.37 p.22, with SARAH HARMER, 20, servant. The ages are eleven to thirteen years light against their real ages of 53, 51 and 46 — stated, not hidden, on the page. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1851, 1861 and 1871 censuses does not cover it | The sisters between 1841 and their deaths | Not in Brighton in any of the three, and not anywhere in England, Wales or Scotland under a wildcard D*ARCY born 1783–1795. Searched by year alone after discovering that combining year and place breaks the query. A real gap: they are in Brighton in 1841 and dying there from 1869. control named |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast census search — a control test could not be reached | Whether a zero result meant anything | IT DID NOT. Jane Smith, born about 1788, Sussex, 1871 census returns ZERO — impossible. The same search returns 60 by year alone and 136 by place alone. Combining YEAROFBIRTH and KEYWORDSPLACE on a census set silently returns nothing and presents it as a clean negative. Every census null this archive has drawn from a query carrying both is worthless. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | This archive's own 719 data files and pages — tools/crossread.py found something | Every open question, checked against what this site had already published | Six of them were answerable or half-answerable from material already here. Robert and Jean had TEN children on the tree, not the five this site listed. Jane D'Arcy, opened as a question the day before, died at Falmer in Sussex in 1875 aged 88. Three children born in Barbados and one at Lyme Regis bracket the West Indies posting to 1786–1792. Robert has a BROTHER on the tree nobody here had mentioned. Lydia has a birthplace, two parents and a death date. Catherine Cotton has four fields. No subscription and no archive were involved. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Queensland historical death index — free found something | Martha Wakefield, whom this site said might never have existed | MARTHA HURFORD died 23 April 1899 (1899/C/3288) — the tree's date to the day — and the index names her parents as JOHN WAKEFIELD and a HUGHES. MARTHA MILLINGEN, died 1898 (1898/B/30782), is Henry Wakefield's by Catherine Duncan. No Martha Wakefield dies in Queensland at all, 1855–1960, and no Wakefield death names James Wakefield and Hannah Saniger as a Martha's parents — though the index carries Ephraim 1868, Aaron 1896, Zillah 1900, Hiram 1905 and Miriam 1909 correctly. Another man's daughter had been grafted onto this family. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Kentish Gazette, 14 May 1805 found something | Any contemporary notice of Constantine D'Arcy's death at Chatham | “After a few weeks illness, THE SON OF COL. D'ARCY, CHIEF ENGINEER OF CHATHAM LINES; his remains were interred with military honours.” It documents the relationship a printed roll of 1898 had only asserted, and it gives Robert D'Arcy a POST — the first record to do so. The Kent Herald used the same phrase of the father in 1827. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — British Army Officer Promotions 1800-1815 found something | Constantine D'Arcy's commissions, cited to the Gazette | Gentleman Cadet to Second Lieutenant, Corps of Royal Engineers, 1 February 1804 (Gazette 15707 p.690, vice Harding); Second to First Lieutenant, 1 March 1805 (Gazette 15789 p.351, vice Dyson). The second is the SAME PAGE as his father's promotion to Lieutenant-Colonel, which this archive published in July without noticing the son nine lines below. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Caribbean Birth & Baptism Index 1590-1928 found something | All D'Arcy christenings in the Caribbean | Two, both St Michael, Barbados, both to Robert and Jane: CONSTANTINE 18 February 1786 and JANE 17 March 1788. The first was already on /hornby; the second had never been counted as a child of this family. Barbados Births & Baptisms 1637-1891, a larger and separate index of the same island, holds neither. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Gloucestershire Wills & Administrations 1801-1858 does not cover it | A will for John Saniger of Berkeley, or any Saniger of the direct line | Two Saniger-variant entries in 14,195: Abraham Synegar, cardmaker of Dursley, administration 1813/8; John Sanigar, carpenter of Oldbury-on-Severn, will 1822/194. NEITHER IS BERKELEY. Searched under wildcards SAN, SIN, SYN, SWA, so no spelling can hide inside the result. Control: SMITH returns 277. John Saniger left no proved will in the diocesan court. control named |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Ireland Diocesan and Prerogative Marriage Licence Bonds 1623-1866 does not cover it | A marriage licence bond for George Pitt D'Arcy and Maria White, Wicklow about 1819 | No George D'Arcy in the set at all, and none of its six Maria Whites married a D'Arcy. More to the point, the DUBLIN DIOCESE ENTRIES EFFECTIVELY END IN 1741 — sorted by year the latest are one 1813, one 1752, then a wall of 1741. The catalogue's 1866 is the whole set's range, not the diocese's. Betham's abstracts end 1810. Neither collection can hold an 1819 marriage. control named |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — record-set catalogue does not cover it | Whether FindMyPast carries Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills after 1800, or any consular registers | PCC holdings are a wills index 1750-1800 and an administrations index 1660-1700, and nothing later. Searching the catalogue for “consular” and for “abroad” returns no record sets at all. Three wills and two Le Havre deaths this archive wants are therefore outside it — which is worth knowing before spending a trial on them rather than after. control named |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales marriages and newspaper notices, Lymington found something | What became of Joseph D'Arcy's five children | FRANK HYDE D'ARCY — the Frank aged two at Priestlands in 1841 — married ANNA MARIA SIMPSON at Lymington on 29 September 1863, daughter of R. Salisbury Simpson, her residence given as Bengal; announced in Thacker's Overland News for India and the Colonies, 3 October 1863. Fifty-two D'Arcy records at Lymington run from 1848 to an electoral roll of 2021. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Index to Death Duty Registers 1796-1903 found something | Anything further on Joseph D'Arcy's estate | JOSEPH D'ARCY of Lymington, Hampshire, grant year 1848, court “PCC and Country Courts”, TNA IR 27/284. The register behind that index states what the estate was worth and names legatees and executors — a second Kew document, and often a better one than the will. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | British Newspaper Archive — Morning Herald, 13 February 1843 found something | Whether any record calls Robert D'Arcy a father and says which D'Arcy he was | One does. “At Havre, MARGARET, wife of MAJOR JONES, DENBIGH MILITIA, and DAUGHTER OF THE LATE MAJOR-GENERAL D'ARCY, R.E.” Major-General, Royal Engineers, late — a description with exactly one referent, and this archive holds his 1776 commission, his 1779 marriage, five gazetted promotions and a funeral at Chatham with military honours. It also confirms from thirty-seven years later the Chatham marriage of 1806 that the parish register gave. Three of Robert's five children are now documented as his: Joseph by baptism, George Pitt by a marriage notice, Margaret by this. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | British Newspaper Archive — Argus and Caernarvon & Denbigh Herald, 1 April 1843 found something | John Maddock Jones of Ruabon | “21st, at Ingonville, near Havre, MAJOR MADDOCK JONES, late of the ROYAL DENBIGH MILITIA, and PEN-Y-BRYN, RUABON.” He and Margaret died within weeks of each other in Normandy in the early months of 1843 — she in February, he in March. His will was proved on 24 January 1844 and is at Kew as PROB 11/1991/312, still unopened. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Hampshire civil registration and the British Newspaper Archive found nothing | Elizabeth Pitt, and what she was to the D'Arcys | Still open. Her death was registered at LYMINGTON in 1851, so she stayed in the district after Joseph died in 1848 — she was a member of that household, not a visitor on census night. But no death notice for her survives to state a relationship, and the 1841 census records none. The Pitt question has one more fact around it and no answer. 21 September: controlled, and the one fact it had turns out to prove less than it was made to prove. Asked again with the parameter that works on this index — district, not place — Elizabeth Pitt's death is confirmed at Lymington in the first quarter of 1851. The control is the surname rather than the woman: 21 PITT deaths were registered in that district between 1820 and 1900, among them Catherine 1883, Catherine Maria 1843, James, John, John Daniel, Martha and Mary. Pitt is an ordinary name in that corner of Hampshire. That she died where she had been living is therefore unremarkable and is not evidence of kinship, which is what this row had quietly started to treat it as. The question is where it was on 14 September, with one fact around it and that fact now weighed. control named |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Hampshire Advertiser, 21 February 1852 found something | What became of Joseph D'Arcy's widow | She stayed. “Mrs. D'Arcy … 5 0” appears in a Lymington public subscription got up by the Mayor, among the local clergy and gentry, four years after her husband's death. She is absent from the 1851 census under every Darcy spelling in Hampshire, which the subscription list shows to be a gap in the index rather than a departure. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Hampshire, all record types found nothing | Joseph D'Arcy's marriage, and Richard Darcy of 1784 | Neither found. No Joseph D'Arcy marries in Hampshire between 1825 and 1835 though his eldest child was born there in 1832 — he was a serving officer and may have married anywhere. And Richard Darcy, aged 57 at Priestlands in 1841, leaves no other Hampshire record at all: he is a name, an age and an address in his brother's house. 21 September: half of this is withdrawn, and the reason is the set. No Joseph D'Arcy marries in Hampshire between 1825 and 1835 was read off England Marriages 1538-1973, and that set has no Hampshire in it at all: SMITH returns 0 marriages in the county across 435 years and 14,056 in Gloucestershire, asked the same way in the same session. The sentence described a transcription, not a county. Joseph's Hampshire marriage is now an open question again, and it has to be asked of the Hampshire Genealogical Society's county sets. Richard Darcy of 1784 is untouched by this — that search ran across record types, not only the national one. Asked properly the same hour, and the answer holds. Hampshire Marriages (Hampshire Genealogical Society) — the county set, not the national one — returns 22 D'Arcy entries from 1748 to 1880 and no Joseph. Controlled by the set's own hold on this family: Robert Darcy and Jean Ward, Portsea St Mary, 21 June 1779, their own marriage, is in it — an entry this archive confirmed at transcript level on 17 September, so the control is one whose answer was already known before the query was run. So the finding survives the correction; only its authority changed. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1841 census, Priestlands, Milford, Lymington found something | Joseph D'Arcy's household | Twenty people. JOSEPH DARCY, 61, BORN HAMPSHIRE — corroborating the Portsea baptism of 1780 from sixty-one years later. CATHERINE his wife, 42. RICHARD DARCY, 57, born about 1784, of Joseph's own generation and unknown to this archive. Five children: Catherine 9, John 8, Josephine 6, Frank 2, Joseph an infant. And an ELIZABETH PITT, 55 — in the household of Robert D'Arcy's son, while Robert D'Arcy's other son had carried PITT as a middle name since 1783. Then eleven servants. HO107/393 bk4 f.3 p.1 sch.352. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages — historical index, searched by DATE rather than by name found something | Every person in this archive with a Queensland death and an exact date — twenty-six of them, from 1856 to 1989 | Twenty-six of twenty-six found, eighteen of them new. The method is the finding: the two earlier sweeps went surname by surname, which finds a man and loses his wife, because she is registered under the name she died with and not the one this archive files her under. Searching the DEATH DATE ALONE, with no name at all, and then matching on the parents' fields, recovered every married woman the surname sweeps had missed — Maria D'Arcy née White (1856/B/50), Catherine Sneyd née Mulcahy, Jane Atkinson née Creech, Maria Atwell née Rossiter, Catherine Jane Murdoch née Matson, Eliza D'Arcy née Keeling, Mary Ann Blume née O'Brien, Sarah Atwell née Wright, Ida Kathleen Darcy née Atkinson, Ivy Miriam D'Arcy née Sneyd and Barbara Murdoch née Atwell. The best single row is GEORGE LINDESAY D'ARCY, died 13 July 1901, registration 1901/B/1510, whose father is entered as GEORGE PITT D'ARCY — a generation of the direct line named by a document rather than by the tree. Every identification rests on the parent fields agreeing, never on a name and a date; read the list on the register page and the couples chain into one another. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages — historical index found nothing | Carminantonio Falco's death, given here as 27 April 1988 | Nothing — and the null is the point. Queensland registers no death of that name on 27 April 1988. He died on 27 APRIL 1985, registration 1985/3063, which is what both Nudgee Cemetery and the registry say. The wrong year is in this archive for the same reason it was in the Falco archive: both took it from the shared family tree. It is the only one of the twenty-six that did not answer, and it did not answer because the date was wrong. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | British Newspaper Archive — three papers, February–April 1848 found something | Joseph D'Arcy's obituary, and what he did with his life | A career nobody in this family knew about. “He commenced his military career at THE TAKING OF ST DOMINGO IN 1793; he served also IN SICILY and at THE TAKING OF WALCHEREN; he was FIVE YEARS IN PERSIA IN THE SERVICE OF PRINCE ABBAS MIRZA, son [of the] King of Persia…” Abbas Mirza was the Qajar crown prince rebuilding the Persian army with British help in the 1810s and 1820s, which is why a separate notice gives Joseph as K.L.S. — Knight of the Royal Order of the Lion and the Sun. The Lady's Newspaper of 8 April adds that he left his property to his wife KATHERINE. Three papers carried the notice and the scan breaks in a different place in each; the text is assembled from all three. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | British Newspaper Archive — London Evening Standard and Morning Post, February–April 1848 found something | What became of Joseph D'Arcy after the Army Lists stop in 1844 | He died a lieutenant-colonel with a Persian knighthood. “On the 7th inst., at Homestead, Lymington, Hants, LIEUTENANT COLONEL D'ARCY, LATE ROYAL ARTILLERY, K.L.S., in the 69th year of his age.” The Morning Post of 3 April adds: “Lieutenant-Colonel JOSEPH D'ARCY, [late] of the Royal Artillery, formerly of PRIESTLANDS, near Lymington, but late of HOME MEAD, Southampton, who died on the 7th of February, at the age of 69, had EXECUTED HIS WILL IN THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY, 1844, leaving …” — and the digitised text stops there. Death registered Lymington, March quarter 1848, volume 8 page 159. A D'Arcy marrying at Lymington in 1863 is described as “son of the late Colonel D'Arcy, R.A.” |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Irish marriage collections, control-tested found nothing | The marriage of George Pitt D'Arcy and Maria White, County Wicklow, about 1819 | Not findable, and the reason is 1922. A control — SMITH marrying in County Wicklow 1813–1825 — returns twenty-five results from exactly two collections: Ireland Roman Catholic Parish Marriages and Betham's Genealogical Abstracts. There is NO Church of Ireland marriage register for Wicklow in this index. The same holds across Dublin diocese: seventy D'Arcy marriages 1814–1824 and every one Roman Catholic. An officer of the 39th Foot would have married in the Church of Ireland, and those registers are the ones destroyed in the Public Record Office of Ireland fire of June 1922. One candidate was tested and rejected: a Maria White does marry at BRAY, Co. Wicklow on 13 November 1825, but the groom is THOMAS BARRY and Charlotte D'Arcy was six months old by then. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | British Newspaper Archive — Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 23 September 1805 found something | George Pitt D'Arcy's first marriage, and whose son he was | FOUND, and it is the first record in this archive to make him anyone's son. “Lately, Captain GEORGE D'ARCY, [of] the [—] foot, SON [of] LIEUT. COLONEL D'ARCY, [to] MISS LUDLAM, OF GUERNSEY.” The same London report of 16 September ran in the Hampshire Telegraph the same day. ROBERT D'ARCY WAS GAZETTED LIEUTENANT-COLONEL ON 1 MARCH 1805, six months earlier — so the rank in the notice is his, to the month. The scan is damaged and the regiment's number is lost; the notice never gives the father's forename; and no cheap way exists to enumerate every Lieut.-Colonel D'Arcy serving in 1805. A very strong identification, not a proof. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | British and Irish newspapers, 1820 and 1822 found something | Where George Pitt D'Arcy was between the Peninsula and the convict ship | IRELAND, with the 39th. The British Press of 6 March 1820 has “a party of the 39th regiment, under the command of Major D'Arcy” going to the assistance of the yeomanry alongside Dominick Browne Esq.; the Weekly Freeman's Journal of 2 February 1822 has “the detachment of the 39th regiment quartered in that town, under the command of Major D'Arcy” near Cork. The right country at nearly the right time for the Wicklow marriage the tree claims. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | British and Irish newspapers, 1816–1823 found nothing | His second marriage, to Maria White in County Wicklow | Not found. Eleven articles match D'Arcy and Wicklow in that window and none is a marriage notice for him. The press announced his first marriage promptly in two papers, which makes the silence around the second worth noting rather than explaining away — though a second marriage in Ireland, a captain now a major, is far less likely to reach an English paper. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FamilySearch Full-Text Search (free) — England, Gloucestershire, Marriages 1538-1989 found nothing | The Berkeley marriage of John Saniger, about 1797, without waiting for the archives | Not surfaced. FamilySearch's full-text search runs handwriting OCR over images that were never indexed, and it does cover Gloucestershire — its collections include Parish Records 1499-1858 and a Marriages set of 444 Berkeley-area hits. Searching that Marriages collection for SANIGER returns three results: a marriage bond of 1767 and two marriage record indexes of 1751-1775. Nothing from 1797. The collection is built from diocesan BONDS and licence indexes, and a labouring family marrying by banns leaves no bond — so this is probably the wrong shelf rather than an absent marriage. The enquiry to Gloucestershire Archives stands. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Australia, Marriages and Queensland Burials found something | Frederick Robert D'Arcy, the surveyor | Baptised at Chatham in 1811 to George and Mary, he married in NEW SOUTH WALES in 1834 and is in the Queensland burial registers at TOOWONG in 1875. The half-brother of the Australian children had a whole colonial life this archive had only the first line of. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FamilySearch (free) — England Marriages 1538-1973, and the same index served by FindMyPast found something | Thomas Saniger's marriage, without paying for Ancestry | THOMAS SANIGRE married MARTHA GOLDING at BRISTOL on 24 AUGUST 1828 — the date and place the FamilySearch tree gave without a source, now a record. It was hidden by the spelling SANIGRE, the eighteenth form of this surname and the second in one hour to defeat every search that used the others. The index names no fathers, so the entry that would prove Thomas is John Saniger's son is still unseen. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Ancestry.com.au, signed in without a subscription could not be reached | The Berkeley marriage of John Saniger and Lydia, about 1797 | Visible but masked. Ancestry holds GLOUCESTERSHIRE, ENGLAND, CHURCH OF ENGLAND BAPTISMS, MARRIAGES AND BURIALS 1538-1813 — the collection that would contain a Berkeley marriage of 1797 — and returns John Saniger entries in it. Without a subscription every date, place and spouse renders as xxxx. It also holds FIVE John Saniger entries in GLOUCESTERSHIRE WILLS AND INVENTORIES 1541-1858, and Gloucestershire Land Tax Records 1713-1833, neither of which this archive has ever searched. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FamilySearch (free, and signed in) — England Births & Baptisms, and the same index served by FindMyPast found something | Hannah Saniger's baptism | FOUND. HANNAH SANIGOR, baptised at BERKELEY on 18 AUGUST 1804, father JNO SANIGOR. This archive declared the record missing twice, on two separate days, having established by control test that no index reached it. It was indexed the whole time under SANIGOR — one of the very few spellings this site's own alias list did not carry, and one the subscription site's variant matching also missed. The list has been widened from eleven forms to sixteen. The tree gives her birth as 23 July 1805, eleven months later; there is no second Hannah and no burial between, so the likeliest reading is a slipped year. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FamilySearch Family Tree found something | Hannah's mother, and Thomas Sinegar's marriage | Two answers and one warning. The shared tree gives John Saniger a wife LYDIA JONES, 1770–1851, married at Berkeley in 1797 — which would name the Lyddya Sinegar living in Hannah's house in 1841. It also gives THOMAS SANIGER (1808–1881) a marriage to MARTHA GOLDING at Bristol St James on 24 AUGUST 1828, eleven children including a Lydia, a Hannah and two sons named John, and a death at Waterloo Lane, Bristol on 1 October 1881. THE WARNING: John Saniger's profile there carries fourteen sources and every one is a baptism. Neither marriage has a record attached. Both are leads to verify, not facts to publish. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Ancestry.com.au could not be reached | The Gloucestershire parish registers FindMyPast does not hold | Not used. Ancestry is not signed in on this machine, in either browser, and entering somebody's password is not something this archive will do. FamilySearch was already signed in, is free, and turned out to hold the record anyway. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1841 census and Bristol parish registers found something | Thomas Sinegar of St Philip and Jacob — Hannah's brother? | Very probably. Thomas Saniger was baptised at Berkeley on 3 JULY 1808, son of JOHN — so at the census of 30 March 1851 he is FORTY-TWO, which is exactly the age given for the Thomas Sinegar at 7 Oxford Road who says he was born at BERKLEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE. In 1841 he is at Sion Road, Johns Place, with Martha and four children, one of them a LYDIA aged nine (HO107/378 bk5 f.40 p.26). In 1866 his eldest son James christens a daughter LYDIA at St Philip and Jacob. The tree says Hannah's mother was Lydia, and a Lyddya Sinegar aged seventy was living in Hannah's house in 1841. Three generations of the name, in two households a mile apart. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Gloucestershire, all spellings found something | The marriage of Thomas Sinegar and Martha, about 1829 | Not found, in any spelling, anywhere in Gloucestershire between 1822 and 1838. It is the document that would turn a strong inference into a proved one, because a Gloucestershire marriage entry names the father — as his son's did in 1871. 21 September: this row was wrong on the day it was written, and stayed wrong for eight days. The marriage is in England Marriages 1538-1973 and it is indexed SANIGRE — Thomas Sanigre and Martha, Bristol, 1828, one result in the whole of England. /thomas-sinegar has carried it since the afternoon of 13 September; this row was written the same morning and never withdrawn. Re-run today with a control: SANIGER returns 8 marriages in Gloucestershire between 1820 and 1840 and SANIGAR returns 3, and Thomas is in neither — so the query shape, the county and the window were all sound, and the surname was not. Own error 38. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Bristol baptisms and burials found something | Eliza Wakefield, the eldest daughter | Baptised at Bristol 14 OCTOBER 1832, father JAMES WAKEFIELD, mother HANNAH — and BURIED there on 4 MAY 1834, AGED 19 MONTHS. With Ellen, who died at five in 1840, that is two of the three daughters this archive believed had been left behind when the family sailed. Neither was left behind. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Bristol, every record type and spelling found nothing | Martha Wakefield, born about 1836 | Nothing. No birth registration, no baptism, no burial for a Martha Wakefield born at Bristol between 1831 and 1842. Her sisters Eliza and Ellen both produce baptisms naming James and Hannah; Martha produces nothing. She is not in the family tree either, which gives the couple only Miriam. She has been named on five pages of this site and on present evidence she entered it from my own earlier work with no record behind her. 21 September: re-run with a control, and the null holds. England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, WAKEFIELD at Bristol baptised 1831-1841: 54 entries, all of them read. They include Eliza, 1832, father James and Ellen, 1834, father James — the two sisters this row already named — so the set covers the parish, the decade and this very household. Read in forename order the list runs Louisa, Mary, Mary Ann; Martha would fall between Louisa and Mary and is not there. Adding her forename to the same query returns nought. This is now a controlled null rather than an uncontrolled one, and it agrees with the Queensland death index, which makes her Martha Hurford, another man's daughter. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1871 and 1881 censuses, Hanley found something | What became of the Sneyds who stayed | They stayed in the same street. JAMES SNEYD, engraver, is at WELL STREET in 1871 aged 53 with his son James A, also an engraver; and at 20 WELL STREET in 1881 aged 63, entered as ENGRAVER (POTTER), with a granddaughter Mary Elizabeth MULLOCK (Sneyd). His father Samuel kept the grocer's shop in the same road in 1851 and was buried from No. 91 in 1855. Sixty years, one street — while his brother Samuel Charles was in Queensland. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Scotland, Parish Marriages & Banns 1561-1893 found something | Jean Ward's parents | JOSEPH WARD married MARTH[A] GAIRDEN at SOUTH LEITH on 27 OCTOBER 1747, and the entry names her father: WILLIAM GAIRDEN. Seven years before Jean was christened in the same parish. It confirms the mother's surname in the Scots spelling and adds a further generation — the oldest Scot this archive holds. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Gloucestershire, all collections found nothing | Catherine Cotton's origins | Nothing. Searched across the whole county for a birth between 1733 and 1757: she appears only to marry Thomas Saniger at Berkeley in April 1769, and again in the duplicate index entry for the same event. Two women married into this family within two years of each other — one has now yielded three generations and the other none. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Scotland, Parish Births & Baptisms 1564-1929 found something | Jean Ward's baptism at South Leith | Found, with both parents. JEAN WARD, baptised SOUTH LEITH, MIDLOTHIAN, 19 JULY 1754 — father JOSEPH WARD, mother MARTHA GARDEN. This archive has said repeatedly that South Leith is not transcribed and her baptism cannot be reached. It is, and it took one search. The tree gives her birth as 1754; her Chatham burial in 1823 makes it about 1756, which is an ordinary stated-age error. And her eldest son, baptised at Portsea in 1780, was called JOSEPH. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Peninsular War, British Army Officers 1808-1814 (RUSI) found something | George Pitt D'Arcy's war service | GEORGE D'ARCY, 39th FOOT, 1808 — the same regiment whose detachment he commanded aboard the convict ship England in 1826, and the rank the Chatham baptism register gives him that March. Sixteen years earlier, and a war this archive did not know he had fought. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — British Army Lists, Commission Registers and Officer Promotions found something | Robert D'Arcy's career, from primary notices rather than Connolly's 1898 book | The whole of it, with Gazette citations. 1778: PRACTITIONER ENGINEER AND SECOND LIEUTENANT, the Corps of Engineers — recorded here at the time as his first commission. CORRECTED 15 September 2026: the printed Army Lists of 1778 and 1781 give his seniority as 17 January 1776, and Connolly agrees. 8 May 1802: Captain to Major in the Army (Gazette 15478 p.468). 1 March 1805: Brevet Major to Lieutenant-Colonel, vice Nepean (15789 p.351). 4 June 1813: Lieutenant-Colonel to Colonel by Brevet, by the Prince Regent (16737 p.1100). 19 July 1813: Colonel, vice Evelegh (16755 p.1431). Forty-nine years to a major-general's grave. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — British Army Royal Artillery Officers 1716-1899, and the Army Lists found something | What became of Joseph D'Arcy after his baptism in 1780 | He went to the guns, not his father's sappers. Joseph D'Arcy is in the Royal Artillery officers' list from 1795, the Army List of 1798, the commission registers of 1802, 1803 and 1826, the promotions of 1803, 1804 and 1806, and the Army Lists of 1840, 1841, 1843 and 1844 — commissioned at about fifteen and still listed at sixty-four. The transcripts are behind a further paywall even on a trial, so this is a career sketched from an index rather than read. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — British Army Officer Promotions 1800-1815 found something | A Robert D'Arcy gazetted Cornet in the 17th Light Dragoons, 1804 | Discarded, and recorded so it is not found again. He is “Gent”, buying a cornetcy by purchase vice Harris in May 1804 — while this family's Robert D'Arcy had been a major since 1802 and was a lieutenant-colonel by the following March. Same name, different man. 21 September: this row was mislabelled. It was recorded as a null with no control, and it is not a null — the search returned the record and the record was read and rejected. A search that finds a man and proves he is the wrong man is a result, and needs no control to say the parish was covered. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Berkeley St Mary the Virgin found something | The two generations above Thomas Saniger of 1744 | Both found, and both match the tree to the day. THOMAS SANIGER baptised at Berkeley 12 DECEMBER 1711, father WILLIAM — the tree gives his birth as 11 December 1711. WILLIAM SANIGER baptised at Berkeley 12 OCTOBER 1679, father WILLIAM — the tree gives 12 October 1679. That makes six generations of this line on parish record, three of them matching the tree's dates exactly across a hundred and thirty years. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Berkeley St Mary the Virgin found nothing | Catherine Cotton's origins | No baptism for her at Berkeley. She appears in the parish only to marry Thomas Saniger there on 10 April 1769, and where she came from is the one new question this work has opened rather than closed. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Queensland Marriages and Burials found something | What became of Jabez and Zillah Wakefield | They emigrated with their parents and lived. JABEZ WAKEFIELD, born Bristol 1843, married in Queensland in 1863 and was buried there in 1903. ZILLAH WAKEFIELD, born Bristol 1845, married in Queensland in 1871. Both are on the General Hewitt register this archive published in July — a fact I failed to check before calling them new. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | British Newspaper Archive, via FindMyPast found something | Robert D'Arcy's death notices, and whether they name his family | SEVENTEEN notices in England, Ireland and Scotland — London, Canterbury, Windsor, Oxford, Perth, Dublin, Limerick, Clonmel, Drogheda, Boyle. Four give the death as 13 MAY 1827 at Chatham, two of them within four days, which replaces Connolly's printed roll of 1898 with the contemporary press. The Kent Herald of 17 May adds “AT AN ADVANCED AGE”, and the same paper on 24 May reports that he “was interred at Chatham WITH MILITARY HONOURS” on the Saturday — 19 May 1827, the exact date of entry 1571 in Chatham's burial register. A local paper and a parish clerk, independently. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | British Newspaper Archive, via FindMyPast found nothing | Whether the press names Robert D'Arcy's parents | It does not, and this is a real answer rather than a failed search. Every one of the seventeen reads “Major-General D'Arcy” and stops — no forename, no father, no seat, no county. On the very same pages other men are “only son of Mr. John Blades, of Ludgate-hill” and “fourth daughter of Charles Coleman, Esq.”; the papers of 1827 were fluent in that grammar and used none of it on him. The most promising unopened door to his parentage is now open and empty. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Gloucestershire Burials, Bristol found something | What became of the three Wakefield daughters | ELLEN WAKEFIELD was buried at BRISTOL, ST PAUL, PORTLAND SQUARE on 12 JULY 1840, AGED 5 — Bristol Archives P/St P/R/3/3. She had been baptised there on 26 October 1834, father James, mother Hannah. This archive framed her absence from the 1854 passenger list as a question about emigration; she died fourteen years before the ship, in her parents' own parish. An Eliza Wakefield appears in the same index in 1834, to be confirmed. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Berkeley baptisms, control-tested found nothing | Why Hannah Saniger's baptism still cannot be found | Because only one partial index reaches it. A control — HANNAH SMITH at Berkeley 1795–1815 — returns nineteen results, and the ONLY baptism collection producing anything for Berkeley is England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, the FamilySearch index. FindMyPast's own Gloucestershire Baptisms covers Bristol parishes and does not reach Berkeley. That index holds John Saniger's children of 1801, 1803 and 1808 and not his daughter of 1805. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Berkeley marriages found nothing | The marriage of John Saniger and Lydia | No John Saniger marries at Berkeley between 1792 and 1804, though his children are baptised there from 1801. Lydia — whom the tree names as Hannah's mother, and who is very probably the seventy-year-old Lyddya Sinegar in Hannah's house in 1841 — is still joined to this family by nothing but a surname and a household. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — British and Irish Newspapers could not be reached | Robert D'Arcy's death notice, 1827 | Not reached. The newspaper archive holds 107 million pages and returns 3,886 articles for “Robert D'Arcy”, but its date filters could not be driven from a URL and narrowing needs the interface by hand. A death notice for a Major-General in May 1827 is exactly the kind of thing that names a family, and it remains the most promising unopened door to his parentage. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1851 census, Well Street, Hanley found something | Samuel Sneyd alive, and his wife's birthplace | HO107/2004 f.138 p.13: SAMUEL SNEYD, 72, GROCER, of WELL STREET, born MADELEY, STAFFORDSHIRE; ELIZABETH his wife, 71, born OSWESTRY, SHROPSHIRE; JAMES their son, 33, engraver. Every element of the tree's claim and of this archive's 1861 identification, confirmed by one page — and it settles the unreadable “Staly Cladwin” of 1861 as OSWESTRY. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Shropshire Baptisms, Oswestry St Oswald's found something | Elizabeth Oliver's baptism | Born 17 MAY 1782, baptised 19 May, father DAVID OLIVER, mother MARY — Shropshire Archives P214/A/2/1 p.18. The tree says 7 May 1787: one digit out in the day and one in the year, and both censuses put her nearer 1780. She is the only Elizabeth Oliver baptised at Oswestry in the window the censuses point to. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Cheshire, Diocese of Chester, control-tested found nothing | The Audlem marriage of 22 October 1809 | Not there. Audlem is indexed twice — parish marriages AND bishop's transcripts — and a control for SMITH marrying there 1804–1814 returns twenty entries. No Sneyd marries at Audlem in that window, and widening to every Sneyd record at Audlem of any date returns thirty-six results, every one a civil registration after 1837. Not one Sneyd is in Audlem's parish registers. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms, Stroud found something | James Wakefield's own baptism | Baptised at STROUD 6 April 1806, father RICHARD WAKEFIELD, mother ELIZABETH WEBB — matching the birthplace the 1851 census gives him. It also explains the two-year-old MATILDA WEBB living in his house at Drivers Fields in 1841: his mother was a Webb. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Hampshire Marriages (Hampshire Genealogical Society) found something | The marriage of Robert D'Arcy and Jean Ward | PORTSEA ST MARY, 21 JUNE 1779. The archive has carried this marriage on a family tree since it began, with nothing behind it. Their son Joseph was baptised in the same church nine months later, on 19 March 1780. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Hampshire Baptisms, control-tested found nothing | Whether Joseph D'Arcy had brothers and sisters at Portsea | He did not, and this is now a real null. John Smith at Portsea returns St Mary baptisms continuously for 1770, 1771, 1772, 1774, 1775, 1779, 1782, 1785, 1786, 1788, 1789, 1790, 1791 and 1792 — where FreeREG holds twenty-two months. Searching that window for every D'Arcy spelling returns Joseph and nobody else. Robert and Jean baptised one child at this parish; children born while the regiment was elsewhere are a separate question. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Berkeley St Mary the Virgin, after 1677 found something | The five Saniger generations this archive called untestable | All testable, and all confirmed. Thomas Saniger baptised 23 August 1744, father Thomas — the tree's exact day. Thomas married CATHERINE COTTON at Berkeley 10 April 1769, a name never held here. John baptised 18 May 1769, father Thomas — the tree gives his birth as 15 May. Thomas buried 24 January 1819 aged 75; John buried 16 January 1825 aged 55. And John's children appear at Berkeley in 1801, 1803 and 1808, with the tree putting Hannah's birth in July 1805 exactly between them. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms, Berkeley found nothing | Hannah Saniger's own baptism | Not in the index, and this is a gap rather than an absence. Her father's other children are there — William 1801, John 1803, Thomas 1808 — so the register was being kept and he was using it. FamilySearch's transcription of Berkeley is not complete, and the original book is what will settle her. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1851 England, Wales & Scotland Census found something | Where Hannah Saniger was born | BERKELEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE. The 1851 census at Drivers Fields, St Paul, Bristol — the same house as the 1841 one — states her birth town and county outright, and they are the ones the family tree gave at the start. The archive's entire “not born in Gloucestershire” thesis rested on a single yes/no tick in 1841 and is wrong. The same page gives James Wakefield's birthplace as STROUD and adds two children nobody here knew of, Jabez and Zillah. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973 found something | The marriage of James Wakefield and Hannah Saniger | Bristol, 17 OCTOBER 1831. The first English record of this marriage, and the first English record of any kind to give Hannah the surname Saniger — which until today rested entirely on five Queensland death registrations written a world away and decades later. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975 found something | Whether Berkeley's register can be searched after 1677 | It can, and with parents named. Saniger baptisms at Berkeley run Jos 1792, Ann 1798, Jno 1803, Jno and Edwd 1804, Edward 1805, Thos 1808, Victoria 1817, Eliza and Hesther 1819, Daniel 1821 — and Daniel's entry gives his father as Edward Saniger and his mother as Kitura. The five untestable Saniger generations were behind a subscription, not behind a gap in the record. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Somerset Marriages found something | Sanigers on the Somerset side of the Avon | WILLIAM SANIGER married MILLE SMITH at Bedminster St John the Baptist on 29 January 1815, by banns, both of Bedminster; witnesses Wm Smith and Benjn John Room. Bishop's transcripts, Somerset Archives D/D/RR 39-40A. Real, interesting, and — now that Hannah turns out to be a Berkeley woman — not connected to this family by anything. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — all Life Events, control-tested found something | Sanigers at Chew Magna | None, in any spelling. The control passes: the same query with “berkeley” returns 252 and Chew Magna itself is covered — a Smith search there returns Somerset Burials and Somerset Baptisms. So the zero is real. Together with the 1851 census this closes the Chew Magna hypothesis, which was mine and which was wrong. 21 September: this row was false, and the wildcard found it out in one query. SNGR at Chew Magna across every parish and BMD set returns four records, and two of them are this name — Charles Sinagar, baptised 1816, and William Sinegar, baptised 1822, both in Somerset Baptisms, both children of SIMON and ELIZABETH. Worse, it was never a spelling problem: a plain search for SINEGAR at Chew Magna, one of the eight forms this archive had been using since the 13th, returns the 1822 baptism on its own.** The control quoted above passed because it was a different query at a different place, which tests that the site works and not that this page rendered. Own error 40. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — Somerset, 1841 found something | Whether the Sanigers were at Chew Magna before Bristol | They were. ELIZABETH SANIGAR, 45, born Somerset, is enumerated at BATTLES LANE, CHEW MAGNA in 1841 — in the house of Thomas Veale, SPADE MAKER, which is exactly the trade Collinson said the parish still had in 1791 (“a few edge-tools and stockings”). She is the same woman who appears at Oxford Road, Bristol in 1851 as a widow of 60. A Bristol clerk writing “Chew Magna” in 1851 was not mishearing anything. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — record details for all twelve RG 4 pieces found nothing | Whether the Bristol chapel registers can actually be read online | No. Every one of the twelve comes back DIGITISED: FALSE. RG 4 is filmed and published through commercial partners rather than free on TNA's own site. This archive said the opposite the same morning and the overclaim is filed as an error. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — Portsmouth does not cover it | A route to Portsea St Mary's register beyond FreeREG's two years | None found. Portsmouth History Centre's parish register holdings are not reachable through Discovery in any usable form — searching for Portsea registers returns Admiralty pension papers and Royal Artillery brigade registers instead. The volumes exist; the catalogue route to them does not run through here. Reclassified 15 September 2026 from a null: the source does not cover the question, which is a different fact from the record not being there. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — Gloucestershire and Somerset, 1851, re-run found nothing | James and Hannah Wakefield, and the three daughters left behind | Still nothing. Hannah Wakefield appears once — “Out of County”, aged 35, Bristol, 1841 — and not at all in 1851; the three Jameses of the right age are all 1841 entries. No Ellen Wakefield of the right age exists in either county. Given that FreeCEN's Bristol 1851 holding is real but unmeasured in depth, this remains an absence from a partial transcript. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Hanley St John the Evangelist, burial register (FreeREG) found something | Samuel Sneyd's burial | Entry 2330: SAMUEL SNEYD, buried 23 SEPTEMBER 1855, aged 77, of 91 WELL ST. The tree says he died on 20 September 1856 at No 3 Well St. The street is right, the three-day interval between a death on the 20th and a burial on the 23rd is ordinary — and the year is wrong. The age of 77 puts his birth about 1778, which fits the Madeley baptism of 1781 this archive had already corrected to, and not the tree's 1769. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | General Register Office death index (FreeBMD) found something | Whether Samuel Sneyd died in 1855 or 1856 | 1855. Every Samuel Sneyd death registered anywhere in England and Wales between March 1854 and December 1858 was searched: there is EXACTLY ONE, September quarter 1855, Stoke upon Trent, volume 6b page 75. And his widow is there too — Elizabeth Sneyd, December quarter 1861, Stoke, 6b 66, confirming the tree's 1 December 1861 to the quarter. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Collinson, History and Antiquities of the County of Somerset (1791) found something | What Chew Magna was, and whether it holds Sanigers | “A large and populous parish … six miles south-west from Bristol … one hundred and seventy houses, and eight hundred and thirty inhabitants” — and, crucially, “in former days this was a borough, a market, and a LARGE CLOTHING TOWN”. Cloth is the trade that runs through every Saniger this archive has found. No Sanigers in Collinson himself, which means nothing: he copies gentry monuments, and a journeyman smith's family would not be in them. Two figures on /chew-magna were corrected against him. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Cheshire, control test does not cover it | The marriage of Samuel Sneyd and Elizabeth Oliver at Audlem, 22 October 1809 | Untestable. John Smith across the WHOLE OF CHESHIRE for 1800–1820 returns TWO entries, one at Whitegate and one at Wrenbury. It is the emptiest county holding this archive has measured, and Audlem is not in it at all. Reclassified 15 September 2026 from a null: the source does not cover the question, which is a different fact from the record not being there. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Shropshire, control test does not cover it | Elizabeth Margaret Oliver's baptism at Oswestry, 7 May 1787 | Untestable. Smith across Shropshire 1783–1792 returns 167 entries — Shrewsbury 70, Hodnet 15, Ludlow 10 — and NONE at Oswestry. The town is not transcribed. Reclassified 15 September 2026 from a null: the source does not cover the question, which is a different fact from the record not being there. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Gloucestershire, control test on the city of Bristol found nothing | Whether Bristol's parish registers can be searched at all for 1800–1820 | They cannot. William and Mary Smith across Gloucestershire for 1800–1820 return 289 entries from 75 parishes, and exactly ONE is inside Bristol — a single entry at Stapleton, on the city's edge. St Paul, St Philip and Jacob, St James, Clifton, Bedminster, Temple, St Mary Redcliffe: none of them appears at any size. Every Bristol search this archive has ever run has been searching a city that is not in the index. The emptiness belonged to the index, not to the family. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — Gloucestershire and Somerset, 1851 found something | Where the Sanigers of Bristol came from | A Saniger household at OXFORD ROAD, St Philip and Jacob — the parish next to St Paul, where the Wakefields lived. William Saniger, 27, journeyman smith, born SOMERSET, CHEW MAGNA; his wife Caroline, born Fishponds; and his mother ELIZABETH SANIGER, widow, 60, born SOMERSET, CHEW MAGNA. A Somerset parish, a neighbouring street, the right generation and the right trade — the first answer that meets every constraint the 1841 census imposes. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Somerset, control test on Chew Magna found nothing | Whether Chew Magna can be searched for Sanigers at all | It cannot. Three forenames of Smith across Somerset 1795–1815 return 943 entries from over a hundred parishes, and exactly TWO of them are Chew Magna — against a hundred at Walcot and sixty-nine at Bath, in a parish of some 1,800 people. The transcript is a fragment, so the absence of Sanigers there is not evidence of anything. The only Somerset Saniger in the window is a marriage at Walcot, Edmund Liddall and Rachel Saniger, 8 June 1819. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — Gloucestershire and Somerset, 1851 found nothing | The three Wakefield daughters who did not sail in 1854 | Eliza, Ellen and Martha Wakefield, born Bristol 1832–1836, are not identifiable in the 1851 census, and neither is their father. FreeCEN does hold 1851 Bristol — a control on William Smith returns twelve Bristol entries for that year — but the depth of that holding is unmeasured, so this is an absence from a partial transcript rather than a finding. No Ellen Wakefield of the right age appears in either county. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — the whole catalogue, not one collection found something | Everything filed under the name Saniger, in any archive | Seventy-one records across Kew, Gloucestershire, Berkeley Castle, Bristol, Birmingham and Wiltshire. Among them the estate deeds D2957/41 that follow Edward Saniger from CLOTHIER in 1692 to GENT in 1709; a fine naming Maurice Saniger and Jane his wife in 1731; and — searching the same catalogue under Sanigear and Sanigar — two wills and a defamation suit that nobody here had ever looked for. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Birmingham Archives MS 3549, against the Berkeley Castle Muniments found something | Whether Saniger and Swanhanger are the same place | They are, and one document proves it. The deed of 11 April 1377 between Elias de Swonhongre and William Panyter is catalogued by Berkeley under the man's name and by Birmingham as land “in SWANHANGER, co. Glouc.”. Gloucestershire Archives then glosses it outright in D654/III/9: “Oldminsters in Swanhanger … [Saniger in Hinton]”. Saniger is a worn-down Swanhanger — the wooded slope where the swans were. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Ralph Bigland, Collections … County of Gloucester (1791), volumes I and II found something | Monumental inscriptions for Saniger, Wakefield and Sneyd beyond Berkeley | Volume II holds no Sanigers at all. Volume I holds fourteen, and six more than were extracted the first time: William Saniger of FROGPITT yeoman d. 17 Jan 1704; Edward Saniger of PEDINGTON and Mary his wife; and six neighbouring households styled “of Saniger” — Hallix, Smyth, Hyett, Pick, Bishop — none of whom is called Saniger. Twenty miles off at Minchinhampton, a second family under the -gear spelling. And in the Berkeley burial list, a William Wakefield buried 1732 aged 32. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery, series RG 4 (Non-Parochial Registers) found something | Which Bristol chapel registers could hold a birth about 1805–1815 | Thirty-six Bristol registers, not the five this archive's errand list had assumed. Twelve of them are births or baptisms covering 1805–1815 and the other twenty-four can be struck off without being opened. Nearly all are catalogued under SOMERSET rather than Gloucestershire, which bears directly on the 1841 census tick that says Hannah was not born in Gloucestershire. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — Staffordshire found something | Samuel Sneyd's household at Hanley | The 1861 census at WELL ST, HANLEY — “Grocers Shop” — holds James Sneyd, engraver, his wife, three children, and his MOTHER: Elizabeth Sneyd, widow, aged 82, born Shropshire. The tree says Samuel Sneyd, a grocer of Hanley, died at No 3 Well Street in 1856 leaving a widow Elizabeth Margaret Oliver of Oswestry, Shropshire, who died on 1 December 1861 — eight months after the enumerator called. Five agreements; one age eight years out. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — Staffordshire, control test found nothing | Whether 1841 or 1851 could be searched at all | They cannot. John Smith, born Staffordshire 1800–1805, returns thirty-one people and every single one is 1861. FreeCEN's Staffordshire holding is 1861 and nothing else, so Samuel Sneyd — who died in 1856 — was never findable, however hard he was looked for. A null that says nothing about the family and everything about the index. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Portsea St Mary, Hampshire, control test found something | How much of the register stands behind Joseph D'Arcy's 1780 baptism | Twenty-two months of it. Five common surnames across Hampshire 1778–1783 return forty-six Portsea entries: all baptisms, twenty in 1780, twenty-five in 1781, one in 1782, and NONE in 1778, 1779 or 1783. A separate control — John Smith across 1770–1800 — returns not one Portsea entry at all. The earliest English record of this family survives because it falls inside a two-year transcript, and the absence of Joseph's brothers and sisters proves nothing whatever. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | The London Gazette found something | Robert D'Arcy's commissions, printed at the time rather than in Connolly's book | Issue 16755, 19 July 1813, Office of Ordnance: “Brevet Colonel Robert D'Arcy to be Colonel, vice Evelegh.” One line, but it is the first primary notice of his career this archive holds, and it replaces a nineteenth-century printed roll with the Gazette that roll was compiled from. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | archive.org, HathiTrust found nothing | Smyth of Nibley's Men and Armour for Gloucestershire, 1608 | Not found in any scanned copy reachable from here; archive.org's search returns nothing under that title and the catalogue probes came back empty. The muster would name every able-bodied man in the Berkeley hundred by tithing, with trade — the single best source for Sanigers before the parish register helps. Recorded as not-yet-reached rather than not-there. no control stated |
| 13 Sep 2026 | The Berkeley Castle Muniments, via TNA Discovery found something | How far back the place-name Saniger goes | To the thirteenth century, and it settles the direction of the naming. Nine deeds name people “of Saniger” between about 1272 and 1473 — Robert Gamel, Martin Waleys, Geoffrey Nel, Philip son of Richard Couthulf, John Smyth, Richard de Egton, Walter Hevyner, Richard Webbe. NOT ONE OF THEM IS CALLED SANIGER. The place exists for two hundred years before anyone takes the name off it, and BCM/A/1/30/2 says plainly “Geoffrey Nel of Saniger IN THE PARISH OF BERKELEY”. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Ralph Bigland, Collections relative to the County of Gloucester (1791) found something | Berkeley parish — the monumental inscriptions and the freeholders | Bigland states it outright: “SANIGER, LONG HELD BY AN OLD FAMILY OF THE SAME NAME.” And he copied the stones — Esther wife of Edward Sanger of Saniger, Gent., died 13 June 1693; Edward Saniger of Saniger, Gent., buried 3 December 1739 aged 48; Susanna his relict, 1744, aged 58; Jane his daughter, 1750, aged 24. Edward Saniger stands as the freeholder for Hinton tithing at the 1776 election. This is the post-1677 Berkeley material the parish transcript does not have, and an antiquary copied it in 1791. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — Berkeley manorial court rolls found something | Where a landholding family appears when the parish register does not hold it | They survive in quantity: Ham manor 1515–1577, Alkington 1565–1603, Canonbury 1282–1463, and — the relevant one, since Saniger lies in Hinton tithing — HINTON MANOR, GCR/231 and 258, 1523–1528. Court rolls name tenants, which is exactly how a family that holds land and rarely appears in a register is found. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — Wakefield of Bristol, Sneyd of Madeley, D'Arcy wills in Kent found nothing | The other three British lines, through the same catalogue | Nothing usable. 232 Wakefield-and-Bristol hits and not one is this family; no Sneyd deed for Madeley at all; and no D'Arcy will for Kent between 1820 and 1860. The catalogue that gave up a hamlet and a Welsh will has nothing for these three. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — the name Saniger in Gloucestershire records found something | Any deed, will or suit naming a Saniger at Berkeley | THE NAME IS A PLACE. Nine catalogue entries put it beyond doubt: “Deeds of Panthurst Farm, SANIGER, BERKELEY” (1716–1814); “Edward Saniger OF SANIGER, Berkeley, clothier” (1692) and “gent” (1709 and 1716); “lands in Saniger and Hamfallow, Berkeley” (1671/2); and, earliest of all, “John Saniger of Berkeley, YEOMAN” in a release of 2 November 1601. The surname is toponymic, taken from a hamlet in Berkeley parish, and the family is documented holding land there for two centuries before this archive's story begins. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — PROB 11 for the Welsh and Gloucestershire lines found something | Wills for John Maddock Jones of Ruabon and for any Saniger | PROB 11/1991/312 — the will of JOHN MADDOCK JONES OF RUABON, DENBIGHSHIRE, proved 24 January 1844. That is the man who married Robert D'Arcy's daughter in 1806, and his will would name his wife and children — a branch this archive has never had. Also PROB 11/1825/326, the will of Elizabeth Saniger, widow, of Thornbury, 1833; and at Shropshire Archives SRO 2847/7/173, a 1829 deed naming “John Maddock Jones of Penybryn esq”, the exact address on the marriage entry. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | archive.org — the Army List of 1778 found something | Robert D'Arcy in a printed establishment list rather than a nineteenth-century roll | He is there, among the Second Lieutenants and Practitioner Engineers of the Corps of Engineers, beside Charles Holloway, Thomas Whelpdale, James Fiddes and Robert Beatson — two years after the commission of 17 January 1776 that Connolly gives him. And in a separate half-pay section of the same volume, a FRANCIS D'ARCY: independent support for this archive's decision to treat Francis D'Arcey of Galway, of the 39th and 45th Foot, as a different man. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Welsh Newspapers Online and irishgenealogy.ie could not be reached | The 1806 Ruabon marriage, and the Cork and Limerick registers | Both behind Cloudflare. That is four free British and Irish databases shut to this archive in one day — irishgenealogy.ie, NSW BDM, newspapers.library.wales and, earlier, CWGC. Each is open to a person with a browser and closed to an automated one. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | archive.org — The Gentleman's Magazine, 1806 could not be reached | A marriage notice for a general's daughter married by licence | The 1806 volumes are held in the Internet Archive's lending collection and their full text is not public. The Google-digitised public-domain runs do not cover that year in a form this archive could reach. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — the 1851 census, every Saniger spelling in Bristol found something | The Sinegar households again, in the year that records relationships and exact birthplaces | THE BEST LEAD THIS ARCHIVE HAS. Thomas Sinegar, head, 42, labourer, of 7 Oxford Road, St Philip and Jacob Out — BORN AT BERKLEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE. His wife Martha, 42, a cordwainer, born at BERKLEY too. Of 28 Saniger-variant people in Bristol in 1851 they are the only two from Berkeley, and “Berkley” is the exact unusual spelling the family tree uses for Hannah Saniger's birthplace. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — Sanigers still in the Vale, 1841 found something | Whether the family had wholly left Berkeley by the census years | They had not. Samuel Saniger, 50, a shoemaker, and his son Samuel, 15, a butcher, are at Berkeley in 1841, with fifteen more of the name at Cam. The family is demonstrably in the parish through the nineteenth century — and FreeREG's Berkeley transcript stops in 1677, which is the coverage gap in its sharpest possible form. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — RG 4, the Non-Parochial Registers found something | Which Bristol nonconformist register would hold a baptism of about 1805 | Named at last. The National Archives holds 36 RG 4 registers for Bristol, and FIVE of them cover 1805: RG 4/2697 (Broad Mead, Baptist, 1787–1817), RG 4/1830 (Lewins Mead, Presbyterian, 1718–1840), RG 4/388 (Bridge Street, Congregational, 1714–1837), RG 4/913 (Ebenezer Chapel King Street, Wesleyan, 1793–1819) and RG 4/1792 (Castle Green, Independent, 1784–1816). Only the Moravian register is transcribed in FreeREG. “Write to Bristol” is now five named documents. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — the other Bristol Sanigers of 1841 found something | Whether any of the 29 is kin to Hannah | One household is worth naming. At St Philip and St Jacob, a mile from Drivers Fields: THOMAS SINEGAR, 30, a BREWER, with Martha 31 and children James 11, LYDIA 9, Thomas 7 and Martha 2. A Saniger of the right generation, in the right city, who named a daughter Lydia. But he is entered as born in Gloucestershire and Hannah is not, and the 1841 census records no relationships. Candidate kin, and nothing more. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Denbighshire found nothing | John Maddock Jones, Esq., of Penybryn in Ruabon, who married Robert D'Arcy's daughter in 1806 | Not there, and the conclusion survives a better control than the one first used. FreeREG CAPS ITS RESULTS AT 500, so the original control — “more than 500 Smiths for 1780–1830” across the county — was a ceiling that could not go up and measured nothing. Re-tested on 15 September 2026 at the right granularity, the parish: RUABON is in FreeREG's Denbighshire list, and for 1780–1830 it returns 500 for JONES (capped) and 39 for SMITH (not capped, and therefore informative). The parish is genuinely transcribed for the window and holds no John Maddock Jones at all. A Welsh gentry family joined to this one by marriage, and the transcribed registers of his own parish do not have him. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — every William Sneyd in Staffordshire, 1735–1760 found nothing | Where William the weaver was baptised, since it is not Madeley | There are exactly TWO William Sneyd records in the whole county for those twenty-five years, and both are Madeley: the baptism of 12 September 1742 and the burial of 29 September 1744. His baptism is not in Staffordshire's transcribed registers under any parish — not Wolstanton, not Betley, not Whitmore, not Keele. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Bishop's Transcripts for Madeley could not be reached | The diocesan second copy, which often survives where a parish book fails | FreeREG holds none. Madeley's 78 records are 72 “Other Transcript” and 6 “Parish Register”; Staffordshire as a whole has only seven Bishop's Transcript records and not one is Madeley's. The Lichfield diocesan transcripts exist — they are simply not here. That is a named errand, not a null. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | The London Gazette — Joseph, Constantine and George Pitt D'Arcy found nothing | Whether the other D'Arcy men were gazetted | No Joseph D'Arcy between 1795 and 1850 — the six apparent hits are Joseph Darby and Joseph Dyas. No “Pitt D'Arcy” at all, and no D'Arcy tied to the 39th Regiment. Worth a caveat: an apostrophe in a name is exactly what nineteenth-century OCR loses, so a silent absence here is weaker evidence than the ten positive hits for Robert. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | irishgenealogy.ie — Cork and Limerick church records could not be reached | The Creech–Atkinson marriage at Carrigaline in 1853, and the Atkinson and Mulcahy lines | Cloudflare bot verification, which this archive will not attempt to defeat. This is the third such block today and by far the most costly: it is free, it needs no login, it covers Cork and Limerick, and this archive has THREE Irish lines and has never searched an Irish record. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | The London Gazette, 1770–1840 found something | Robert D'Arcy's career, from the government's own notices rather than a printed roll | Ten notices name him between 1793 and 1819, each citable by issue and page. The one read in full: 19 July 1813, issue 16755, page 1431 — “Brevet Colonel Robert D'Arcy to be Colonel, vice Evelegh”, in an Office of Ordnance list of Royal Engineers promotions. The archive has cited Connolly's Roll for this career since it was built; the Gazette is the source Connolly was compiled from. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Queensland BDM — the Birch sisters found something | Who Hiram and Aaron Wakefield married four months apart in 1861 | Margaret Birch's own death registration, 1898/B/30356, names her parents as JOHN BIRCH and ANNIE REEVES — so the two brothers married two daughters of one household. Nine of their children are traceable in the same index: four to Hiram and Margaret, five to Aaron and Elizabeth Ann. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages could not be reached | The whole D'Arcy side, who were New South Welshmen and not Queenslanders | Cloudflare bot verification, which this archive will not attempt to defeat. It is the single largest untouched index for this family: George Pitt D'Arcy died at Parramatta in 1849, George Lindsay was born there in 1829, and Charlotte crossed as an infant. Queensland's equivalent index gave this archive sixty registrations and five spellings of Saniger. A person with a browser can run it in ten minutes. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Museums of History NSW — a blocked entry corrected found something | Whether NSW State Archives is still unreachable | It is not. This archive recorded NSW State Archives as “migrated to mhnsw.au, old URLs dead”. mhnsw.au is live and the State Archives catalogue is at search.records.nsw.gov.au, a Primo instance. Its API needs a session so it could not be queried here, but the institution is no longer between houses and the entry was out of date. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Trove — the General Hewitt could not be reached | Newspaper coverage of the voyage the family arrived on | Trove's search will not render in this environment — a limitation already recorded in the method notes. The arrival date was confirmed independently from other sources, and the Moreton Bay Courier's shipping column for 23 December 1854 was read directly by rendition: it lists arrivals from 19 to 22 December and does not reach back to the 16th. The issue that would carry it has not been located. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Hampshire and Kent, every D'Arcy found nothing | The other eight children the tree gives Robert D'Arcy and Jean Ward | They are not there. Hampshire holds exactly one D'Arcy record in sixty years — Joseph's baptism of 1780 — and Kent holds thirteen, of which six are this family. Of ten children the tree claims, the registers of the two counties they are supposed to have lived in yield two. The Corps moved them: a son was christened at Bridgetown in Barbados in 1786, and wherever else the Board of Ordnance sent them is where the rest will be. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Somerset parishes south of the Avon found nothing | Bedminster, Long Ashton, Temple, St Mary Redcliffe and Brislington — the Bristol parishes that lay in Somerset | Bedminster and Long Ashton ARE transcribed — a control search returns Hannah Smiths in both — and neither holds a Hannah Saniger. Temple, St Mary Redcliffe and Brislington return nothing at all and appear not to be transcribed. So the Somerset-side hypothesis survives only in the parishes nobody can search. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Queensland BDM — the three eldest Wakefield daughters found nothing | Eliza (b.1832), Ellen (1834) and Martha (1836), who are not on the passenger list | No trace of any of them in Queensland, in deaths or marriages, under Wakefield or as a mother's maiden name. Twenty-two, twenty and eighteen when the General Hewitt sailed, they did not go and they do not appear to have followed. The family split at the quayside and three adult daughters stayed in England. no control stated |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Richard Wakefield in Gloucestershire found nothing | The generation above James Wakefield, named on his 1857 Queensland death registration | One candidate in the whole county: Richard Wakefield, baptised Chedworth 21 December 1770. Chedworth is in the Cotswolds, forty miles from Bristol, and nothing connects him to this family but a name and a plausible date. Recorded as a candidate and nothing more. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Bristol's four transcribed registers found nothing | Any Wakefield or Saniger of this family in the fraction of Bristol that is transcribed | One Wakefield baptism only — Louisa, 25 November 1832, Countess of Huntingdon's Chapel, Lodge Street — and her father is James CUBIT Wakefield of St Augustine's parish, with a wife Mary. Not this family. No Saniger appears in any Bristol register at all. The transcribed fraction of Bristol has now been exhausted. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Queensland assisted immigration index — every other family in this archive found nothing | Sneyd, Atkinson, Atwell, Murdoch, Matson, Creech, Keeling and Blum arrivals | Only the Wakefields came assisted. Sneyd returns nothing — correctly, since Samuel Charles arrived with the 4th (King's Own) in 1832. Paul Cole Atkinson and Jane Creech, who emigrated in 1862, are not in it; nor Eliza Keeling, nor John Blum, nor any Murdoch of the right age. The index covers assisted passages only, so the finding is that this family's other lines PAID — and the Wakefields, a mason's family of eight, took the free passage. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Staffordshire, all 551 Sneyd records, reconstituted found something | The Sneyd households of the Potteries, assembled rather than searched | THE CHAIN CLOSES. William Sneyd, WEAVER — the man who married Mary Blackbourne at Madeley on 27 March 1769 — baptises thirteen children there between July 1769 and December 1794, and the 1779 entry names the mother MARY. Their SAMUEL is baptised 4 June 1781. The tree puts Samuel in 1769; the register puts him in 1781, and 1769 is the year his eldest brother William was baptised, three months after the wedding. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Wiltshire, Monmouthshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire, Oxfordshire found nothing | Hannah Saniger, born about 1805, in the counties around Bristol | Nothing. One Hannah SENGAR buried at Chaddesley Corbett in 1801, and she is a burial. Control-tested: both county groups return more than 500 Smiths for the same twenty years, and Wiltshire alone holds 358 Saniger-variant records around Salisbury and the Knoyles. Eight counties have now been searched for this woman and she is in none of them. Note on the control, added 15 September 2026: the “more than 500 Smiths” figure is FreeREG's display cap and carries no information. The load-bearing control in this row is the other one — 358 Saniger-variant records in Wiltshire, a name-specific count well under the cap. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Chatham St Mary the Virgin, Kent found something | The parish Robert D'Arcy served in for decades and died in, never searched | Seven D'Arcy records, and they are the best material this archive has ever had on the line. Robert D'Arcy buried 19 May 1827, AGE 76. Jane D'Arcy — Jean Ward — buried 21 March 1823, AGE 66. Constantine D'Arcy buried 9 May 1805, entered as “Lt in the Royal Engineers”. Margarett Maria Isabella D'Arcy married by licence in 1806, witnessed by her brother Joseph. And Charlotte, daughter of “George Pitt D'Arcy, Bt: Major 39th Foot”, born 29 April 1825 and baptised eight days before the England sailed. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Hanley St John the Evangelist, Staffordshire found something | The parish the tree names as Samuel Charles Sneyd's birthplace, never searched before today | FOUND. Samuel Sneyd, born 13 March 1811, baptised 28 April 1811 — father Samuel, mother Elizabeth, abode Hanley. The tree names exactly those parents. A sister, Mary, follows in 1814 with the father's occupation recorded: SERVANT. Every previous search had gone to Madeley because that is where the disproved Keele graft pointed. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Madeley All Saints, the 1769 marriage found something | William Sneyd and Mary Blackbourne, whom the tree names as Samuel's parents | Found, and it had been in the results list all along. Madeley All Saints, 27 March 1769, entry 68: William SNEYD, WEAVER, and Mary BLACKBOURNE, witnessed by Robert Sneyd and John Kidd. This archive reported the line unevidenced this morning without following it up. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Queensland open data — Assisted immigration 1848–1912 found something | How and when the Wakefields reached Australia, and whether the passenger register gives Hannah's native place | FOUND, with the register scan. The ship GENERAL HEWITT, Brisbane, 16 December 1854, 394 souls. James Wakefield 48, a MASON — matching the 1841 census's “Mason Journeyman” — with Hannah 48, Jabez 11, Zillah 8 and Ephraim 5; Hiram 16 a plumber and Aaron 14 entered separately among the single men, both native place BRISTOL; and Marion Wakefield 14, a domestic, among the single women, also Bristol. Marion is Miriam. The emigration is now dated to the day. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | QSA digital image DR38490 — the passenger register itself found nothing | Whether the register gives Hannah Wakefield's own county | It does not. Her county is a ditto mark under her husband's “Gloucester”, which is the household head's county and not a statement about her. The register plainly distinguishes the two — it enters her three eldest children as Bristol on the same day — so the ditto cannot be read as her birthplace. Hannah's origin remains the open question. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — every Saniger record in Gloucestershire, opened individually found nothing | All 556 records read one by one and reconstituted into households, rather than searched by name | 81 households assembled from 196 baptisms naming a father. Not one has a mother called Lydia; not one is a John and Lydia; there is a single Hannah baptised in the whole county, at Stinchcombe in 1730; and only three households bear children between 1795 and 1815. Hannah is not in Gloucestershire — which the 1841 census had already said by entering her as born out of the county. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeBMD — deaths, Lydia Saniger and every spelling, 1841–1875 found nothing | Lyddya Sinegar of the 1841 census, who should have died in England | Not there. A deliberately loose phonetic search — loose enough to return SCHONSWAR and SMOOKER — finds no Lydia Saniger, Sanigar or Sinegar death in Bristol in those thirty-four years. The nearest are an infant Lydia Ann Sanigear at Islington in 1847 and an unnamed SANIGAR at Thornbury in 1851. Either she died under a married surname, or under a spelling the index does not reach. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — 1861 and 1871 censuses does not cover it | Hannah Wakefield's exact birthplace, which 1841 does not give | Not applicable, and worth recording as such: the family had emigrated. James Wakefield died at Brisbane in July 1857, so by 1861 there was nobody in England to enumerate. The plan to get Hannah's birthplace from a later English census was sound and the family had left before it could work. Reclassified 15 September 2026 from a null: the source does not cover the question, which is a different fact from the record not being there. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — the marriage of John Saniger and Lydia Jones could not be reached | About 1795–1804, wherever Hannah was born | Cannot be attempted usefully. Hannah was born outside Gloucestershire and the archive does not know where, so there is no parish to search; and if the marriage was at Berkeley the transcript ends in 1677 regardless. This one needs Hannah's birthplace first, and that now depends on a certificate. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Madeley All Saints, the two baptisms the tree asks for found nothing | William Sneyd bapt. 1746 and Samuel Sneyd bapt. 1769, both said by the tree to be at Madeley | Neither exists. Madeley holds Samuel 1745, Joseph 1746, John 1748, Simeon 1751 and no William; and its only Samuel is baptised 1781. The parish is transcribed continuously — 110 Sneyd records from 1699 — so both are real absences. This archive had been using a 1742 William instead, four years off the tree's date, and that child may be the one buried in 1744. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Queensland historical BDM index — deaths, searched by MOTHER's name found something | Every Queensland death registration whose mother is recorded as a Saniger | THE ANSWER. Five of Hannah's children died in Queensland and every registration names her: Ephraim 1868 “Anna Sanniger”, Aaron 1896 “Hannah Sanegar”, Zillah 1900 “Hannah Saniger”, Hiram 1905 “Hannah Sanigar”, Miriam 1909 “Hannah Saniger”. Five clerks, forty-one years, four spellings — and the father given as James Wakefield on all five. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Queensland historical BDM index — Hannah Wakefield's own death found something | Her parents, from her own registration | Registration 1873/C/603, died 4 July 1873 — matching the tree to the day. Her father is entered as “John JENNIGER”. The tree says John Saniger. A capital S read as a J is one of the commonest misreadings in nineteenth-century clerking, and the forename and the rest of the surname agree exactly. Her mother is not given. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Queensland historical BDM index — James Wakefield's death found something | The father of the family, died Brisbane 8 July 1857 | Registration 1857/B/135, and it names HIS father: RICHARD WAKEFIELD. A generation the archive did not have, and the first Wakefield above James anywhere. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Queensland historical BDM index — marriages found something | Miriam Wakefield's marriage, and her siblings' | Miriam Wakefield married WILLIAM HARTLEY SNEYD on 15 November 1859 at Brisbane, registration 1859/B/255 — the marriage that joins the Wakefields to the Sneyds, and she was nineteen, not twenty-one as this archive had said. Her brothers Hiram and Aaron married Margaret and Elizabeth Ann BIRCH four months apart in 1861; Jabez married Margaret Fraser in 1863; Zillah married John Ludwig Frederick in 1871. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | Queensland historical BDM index — Lydia Saniger found nothing | Whether Lyddya Sinegar of the 1841 census followed her family to Queensland | No Lydia Saniger death is registered in Queensland under any spelling. She was seventy in 1841; the family did not emigrate until after 1849. She stayed, and died, in England. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Hampshire, D'Arcy, 1775–1810 found something | Any trace of Robert D'Arcy and Jean Ward at Portsea, where the tree says they married on 21 June 1779 | FOUND, and it is the first record of Robert D'Arcy in an English parish register this archive has ever had. Joseph D'ARCY, baptised Portsea St Mary 19 March 1780 — father ROBERT, mother JEAN. Nine months after the marriage the tree asserts, at the same church. It is the only D'Arcy record in the whole county. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Staffordshire, Sneyd at Madeley found something | The real Sneyd line under the disproved Keele graft | 110 Sneyd records at Madeley All Saints. The 1742 baptism that killed the Keele claim reads: William Sneyd, 12 September 1742, father William Sneyd. And two years later: “William, son of William SNEYD”, buried 29 September 1744. If that is the same child — and in one small parish it is the obvious reading — the archive's Sneyd line is anchored to a boy who died at two. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Ayrshire, Murdoch could not be reached | The generation above Francis Murdoch of St Quivox | 128 Murdoch records in Ayrshire, across Galston, Tarbolton, Ayr, Kirkoswald, Loudoun, Dailly, Beith and Dunlop — and St Quivox is not among the parishes with data. The county is thinly covered (202 Smiths for the whole of the eighteenth century) and the one parish this archive needs is not in it. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Midlothian, Ward could not be reached | Jean Ward, born South Leith 1754 | Midlothian's holding is Edinburgh, Canongate, Restalrig and Dalry. South Leith is not transcribed. Not a null result — the parish is simply not there. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — County Limerick could not be reached | Richard Atkinson and Anne, and anything else in the county | Zero records for the entire county. A control search for SMITH across the whole of the eighteenth century returns nothing at all. FreeREG lists County Limerick in its search form and holds no data for it. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — 1841 census, Gloucestershire found something | Surname Wakefield, whole county; then the household page itself | THE FIND. HO107/374, enumeration district 13, page 10, dwelling 1615, Drivers Fields, civil parish of St Paul, Bristol: James Wakefield 35 a mason journeyman, Hannah 35, Hiram 4, Aaron 1, Miriam 1 — and Lyddya SINEGAR, 70, Independent. The tree records Hannah's mother as Lydia and her brother Jabez born at “Drivers Field”; neither was copied from this record, which nobody in the family had read. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — 1851 census, Gloucestershire could not be reached | The same household ten years on, for the relationships and exact birthplaces 1841 does not give | 221 Gloucestershire Wakefields are transcribed for 1851 and 31 of them in Bristol, but not this family. Nationally only 36% of the 1851 pieces are online and the piece covering Drivers Fields is not among them. A coverage gap, not an absence — and the record that would turn the Lyddya Sinegar inference into a fact. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Berkley St Mary, Somerset found nothing | Whether the tree's “Berkley, Gloucester” is really Berkley in Somerset, which would explain Hannah being born out of county | It is not. Berkley Somerset is transcribed in full — 7,967 records, 1545–1903 — and the family there is spelled SINGER in every one of 58 entries, with no Hannah baptised near 1805. A clean answer to a good question. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — 1841 census, Saniger spellings, Bristol found something | Where the Vale of Berkeley Sanigers went | 97 across Gloucestershire, 29 of them in Bristol, spelled SINEGAR, SUNIGAR, SENGEIR, SANGER and SINGER. The family did leave the Vale, and Bristol is where a good part of it went. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — coverage tool, Bristol could not be reached | Every register FreeREG holds for Bristol, checked before searching rather than after | Four registers and 1,551 records for a city of 120,000: Countess of Huntingdon's Chapel (81, 1820–1837), Methodist Bishopston (98, 1891–1915), Moravian Maudlin Street (1,016, 1755–1865) and Temple of Holy Cross (356, 1834–1849). St Paul, Bristol — where the tree says Miriam Wakefield was baptised — is not among them. The Wakefield–Saniger join cannot be tested here, and any “not found” would have been a lie. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — coverage tool, the Vale of Berkeley found something | Dursley, Cam, Thornbury, Stinchcombe, Coaley, Slimbridge, Uley, North Nibley, Wotton-under-Edge | Dursley St James runs 1577–1951 with 30,784 records and Cam St George 1568–1939 with 17,150. Both cover the whole of the archive's Saniger chain. The /berkeley page had implied those generations were untestable because Berkeley stops in 1677; they were testable all along, three miles away. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Gloucestershire, every Saniger spelling, 1670–1830 found something | Fuzzy surname search, all record types, whole county | 494 records. Cam 184, Dursley 156, Thornbury 55, Berkeley 18. Three baptisms match the tree's dates almost exactly: Thomas at Dursley 17 Mar 1711/12, William at Dursley 6 Nov 1743, William at Dursley 27 Sep 1770. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — the three Dursley baptisms, opened found nothing | The full transcription of each, to read the fathers | The chain fails. Thomas 1711/12 is the son of ABRAHAM; William 1743 the son of JOHN; William 1770 the son of SAMUEL. Three men who happen to be baptised in the right parish in the right years, and no two of them are father and son. The date-match was a coincidence. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Gloucestershire, Saniger baptisms 1801–1809 found nothing | The generation the tree puts at 1805 | None. Not a coverage gap: Dursley runs to 1951 and Cam to 1939, so the window is well covered. The tree's 1805 Saniger does not exist in Gloucestershire. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Gloucestershire, every Saniger 1790–1900 found something | Where the family goes after the chain is supposed to leave Berkeley | 139 records, continuous through the whole century, centred on Cam (67), Dursley (28) and Thornbury (17). The family never leaves the Vale — and in 139 records it never once marries a Wakefield. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Hannah Saniger, GLS, SOM and WIL, 1780–1880 found nothing | The one Saniger the archive actually needs: Miriam Wakefield's mother | 35 fuzzy matches and not one of them in Gloucestershire. All are Somerset and Wiltshire SINGER or SANGER — different families the phonetic match swept up. Hannah Saniger is not in the Gloucestershire registers. control named |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeBMD — civil registration, births found something | Miriam Wakefield, born Bristol 11 April 1840 | FOUND. Birth registered June quarter 1840, Bristol district, volume 11, page 183 — the only Miriam Wakefield registered anywhere in England between 1839 and 1843. A birth on 11 April falls in the June quarter exactly as it should. Her GRO certificate names her mother with her maiden surname, which would test “Saniger” directly. |
| 13 Sep 2026 | FreeBMD — civil registration, marriages found nothing | A Wakefield–Saniger marriage, every spelling, 1837–1870 | None. The earliest Saniger or Sanigar marriage registered in the Bristol district is John Sanigar in the March quarter of 1846 — six years after Miriam was born. Control-tested: the same harness returns 21,248 Wakefield marriages for 1838–1842, so the search works and the absence is real. James Wakefield and Hannah Saniger did not marry in Bristol after civil registration began on 1 July 1837. control named |
| 9 Sep 2026 | Trove (National Library of Australia) found something | Every spelling of D'Arcy and Sneyd against Brisbane and Queensland papers, 1840–1950; obituaries, funeral notices, insolvency reports, memorial notices | Lindesay D'Arcy's 1936 obituary, confirming five details of a eulogy delivered 74 years later and restoring one the family had lost — that he served in France. George Pitt D'Arcy's 1849 obituary and the verdict “gout which had flown to the head”. The 1926 insolvency and the 1927 fraudulent-preference action against the bank. Arthur Sneyd's memorial notices and “Ruby”. Vivian Claude Sneyd at Gallipoli. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | Queensland State Archives — ArchivesSearch found something | “Sneyd” and “D'Arcy” across every series; then item-level fetches through the JSON API | Forty-one items under Sneyd. The find of the day: coronial file ITM2736504 (DR103140), an inquest nobody in the family knew existed. Also the 1873 insolvency of William Hartley Sneyd, Arthur's 1916 intestacy, four wills, two police staff files and nine land dealings. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | Queensland historical BDM index found something | Every Sneyd, D'Arcy, Blum, Wakefield and Murdoch death registration, 1856–1996 | Sixty registrations, eighteen of them published. Queensland death registrations name the deceased's parents, which is why this one free index carries more proved relationships than every other source on this page combined. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | National Archives of Australia — RecordSearch, series B2455 found something | Three AIF service dossiers, read page by page at native resolution | Arthur Hartley Sneyd 5050 (30 pp.), Vivian Claude Sneyd 1696 (21 pp.), Ernest Vivian William Sneyd 3891 (92 pp.). Arthur's corrected his trade from clerk to typist and his burial from “France” to no known grave. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | Australian War Memorial — AWM 1DRL/0428 found something | The Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau file for 5050 Sneyd | Twenty-three pages, six witness statements, six different answers. A friend still searching thirteen months later from a lecture room at New College, Oxford. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | Australian War Memorial — AWM 28 found something | Honours and awards recommendation files for Sneyd | The Bar to Vivian Claude Sneyd's Military Medal, in full: Westhoek, 4 October 1917, signed by Lieut-Col A. Graham Butler and endorsed “Awarded”. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | The National Archives (UK) — Discovery found something | D'Arcy wills in PROB 11; WO 97 discharge papers; ADM 101 surgeons' journals; Ordnance series | PROB 11/1728/64 — Robert D'Arcy's own will, proved 4 July 1827, digitised and unordered. ADM 101/26/1, the surgeon's journal of the convict ship England, which names Major George Pitt D'Arcy four times and closes a 23-year loop on how he died. |
| 10 Sep 2026 | Queensland Blue Books, 1870–1916 (archive.org) found something | Full-text sweep of the colony's civil establishment lists for every family surname | Thirty-seven years of Sneyds on the Queensland payroll. William Hartley Sneyd, Fount-room Overseer at the Government Printing Office on £225, in the public service from 1 February 1862 — matching his widow's sworn “about 12 years” to the year. |
| 10 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Berkeley St Mary, Gloucestershire found something | Every spelling of Saniger, 1600–1677, plus a county-wide fuzzy sweep | Forty-four Sainger entries at Berkeley and 238 across the county. One candidate baptism, 24 May 1655, giving a father the archive never had — Edward Sainger of Wanswell. And the unexpected result: the surname's centre is Dursley and Cam, not Berkeley. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | Connolly, Roll of Officers of the Corps of Royal Engineers found something | Robert D'Arcy and Constantine D'Arcy | Entry 203 — Robert's whole career, 2nd Lt 1776 to Major-General 1819, C.B., died Chatham 13 May 1827. Entry 335 — Constantine, died Chatham 6 May 1805. Neither entry records a parent, which is itself the finding. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | Scotland's statutory registers found something | Murdoch of St Quivox, Ayrshire | A generation documented. Also the reason the DNA points here: this is a quarter of the tested descendant and the archive has half its ancestor slots empty. |
| 10 Sep 2026 | MyHeritage — autosomal ethnicity estimate v2.5 found something | One living descendant's result, against the tree's own prediction | Agreement, not contradiction: British Isles 80.1% measured against 93.4% predicted. And the test that matters — cutting both grafts moves the prediction by 0.39 of a percentage point. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | National Archives of Australia — B2455, D'Arcy found nothing | Lindesay Atkinson D'Arcy's AIF dossier, under every spelling of the name | Nothing. The method was then control-tested by running the same query for his brother-in-law Arthur Sneyd, which returned his dossier at once — so the absence is real and not a bad search. The archive had previously claimed a fourteen-page dossier “is known to exist”; that claim was withdrawn. control named |
| 9 Sep 2026 | The National Archives (UK) — PROB 11 found nothing | The will of the 4th Earl of Holderness | No PCC will that can be found. This was the single best hope of testing whether the Earl acknowledged a natural son, and it is not there to test. no control stated |
| 9 Sep 2026 | The Gentleman's Magazine, 1827 found nothing | An obituary or death notice for Major-General Robert D'Arcy, C.B. — RE-TESTED by reading the whole year | Still empty, and now properly established. The first search recorded this; on 15 September 2026 all TWELVE monthly issues of 1827 and BOTH annual indexes were downloaded and read in full. Two D'Arcys appear in the entire year and neither is him: “Offord D'Arcy, Huntingdonshire”, a place name inside a marriage notice, and D'Arcy Wentworth of Sydney, a different man entirely. The only Chatham death reported that June is “Newham, esq. late of Basil-street”. Controls: the Deaths and Obituary sections are present in every issue, Chatham appears three times in June and Engineers five times in May. A Companion of the Bath and a colonel of Engineers died at Chatham and the magazine of record did not notice. That silence is load-bearing on /hornby and it has now been earned rather than assumed. control named |
| 9 Sep 2026 | Every indexed English baptism collection found nothing | A baptism for Robert D'Arcy, c.1750–1758 | Nothing, under any spelling. Combined with Connolly recording no parentage and the Gentleman's Magazine recording no death, the parentage question is not disputed — it is unknown. control named |
| 9 Sep 2026 | WO 149 — Royal Military Academy Woolwich cadet registers does not cover it | A cadet of the early 1770s | The wrong record set entirely: WO 149 begins in 1790 and is held at Sandhurst. The archive had recommended it without checking its date range, and said so. Reclassified 15 September 2026 from a null: the source does not cover the question, which is a different fact from the record not being there. control named |
| 10 Sep 2026 | The London Gazette found nothing | The citation for Vivian Claude Sneyd's first Military Medal | The Gazette records the award but does not name him in a citation. The Bar was found instead, at the AWM. control named |
| 9 Sep 2026 | Queensland State Archives found nothing | A service record for Samuel Charles Sneyd, Governor of Brisbane Gaol | Searched twice. He appears exactly once in the whole QSA catalogue and it is not a service record. A man who ran a colonial gaol for over a decade has left no staff file that survives. control named |
| 10 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Berkeley St Mary, 1678 onwards could not be reached | Five generations of the Saniger chain, 1679 to 1805 | Not a null result and must not be reported as one: the Berkeley transcript stops in 1677. The records may well exist in the parish books; they are absent from the transcription, which is a different thing. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | Commonwealth War Graves Commission could not be reached | Where Arthur Hartley Sneyd is commemorated | Bot-blocked, twice. A free two-minute search that a person can run and this archive cannot. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | NSW State Archives could not be reached | Mounted Police and convict-era records for Samuel Charles Sneyd | The catalogue migrated to mhnsw.au and the old URLs are dead. Between houses. |
| 9 Sep 2026 | Australian War Memorial — collection search could not be reached | General searching beyond the two files reached by direct URL | Mid-migration. Two documents were reached by constructing S3 URLs directly; the search itself would not answer. |
| 10 Sep 2026 | Trove — the 1873 insolvency could not be reached | Newspaper coverage of William Hartley Sneyd's insolvency | The QSA file proves the insolvency exists. Trove's search interface would not surface the notice, repeatedly. The file itself is not digitised. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Smyth's Men and Armour for Gloucestershire, 1608 found something | The whole county, for the Saniger surname — all seventeen spellings this archive holds, plus every surname in Gloucestershire ending -gar, -gear, -ger, -gor and -gre | Eleven men in four spellings — Saniger (5), Sanyger (3), Syniger (2), Sainger (1). One, John Sainger, weaver, is living in the hamlet of Saniger in Hinton parish, Berkeley. SANYGER and SYNIGER were not among the seventeen spellings held here. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Smyth's Men and Armour for Gloucestershire, 1608 found nothing | Thirteen spellings of the surname that returned nothing: Sanigar, Sanigear, Sanegar, Saneger, Sannigar, Sanniger, Sannegar, Sanger, Sinegar, Sinnegar, Siniger, Sinigar, Sinager, Sineger | All genuinely absent, control-tested: the same interface returned 676 men for Dursley and 42 for Halmore. Every form ending -GAR is missing from 1608, which dates the -GAR spellings as later than the -GER ones rather than older. control named |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Smyth's Men and Armour for Gloucestershire, 1608 found nothing | SWANHANGER, as both a surname and a place name | Nothing under either. The tithing is written 'Saniger [in Hinton parish, Berkeley]' by 1608, so the older form had already gone out of written use — consistent with the deeds, which carry Swanhanger to 1741 only as an antiquarian spelling. control named |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Internet Archive — Men & Armour, 1980 facsimile could not be reached | The scanned text of the 1980 reprint (menarmourforglou0000smyt) | A lending item: the full text returns HTTP 401 and the search-inside endpoints are retired. Reading it would need an Archive.org account and a loan. The 1902 edition's transcript at coaley.net answered instead. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Gloucestershire Archives — direct enquiry could not be reached | A register lookup: the marriage of John Saniger and Lydia at Berkeley St Mary the Virgin, c.1795–1800, and confirmation of Hannah Sanigor's baptism of 18 August 1804 | Answered in one day and declined: the office does not offer a research service of any kind. It named two routes instead — the Gloucestershire Family History Society, whose volunteers do lookups, and Ancestry, which holds the filmed county registers with marriages and banns to 1938. The record is not unreachable; this door is. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Smyth, A Description of the Hundred of Berkeley (c.1639, printed 1885) found something | The full text of volume 3 of The Berkeley Manuscripts, for Saniger, Sanyger, Swanhanger, Swonhungre and every OCR-plausible variant | Fourteen occurrences of Saniger, three of Sanyger, eight of Swonhungre. Smyth heads the hamlet “Swonhunger; corruptly called Saniger”, describes it as thirteen dwelling houses in the manor of Hame, and gives its owner in 1639 with four generations of male ancestors — John, son of John, son of Maurice, son of Robert, son of William. Also Robert Saniger buying a manor in 1541 and John Saniger of Saniger acting as a trustee. Control: Berkeley 1,497 hits, Hinton 53, Nibley 73 in the same file. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | The National Archives — Discovery catalogue found something | All spellings of the surname across every repository Discovery indexes: Saniger, Sanigar, Sanyger, Sainger, Syniger, Swanhanger, Swonhunger | Seventy-one records under Saniger, forty-four under Sanigar, three under Swanhanger, two under Swonhunger, none under Syniger. Six that were new here — a fine of 1731 naming Maurice Saniger and Jane his wife, a consistory-court defamation of 1768, the 1617 trustee deed Smyth describes without dating, John Saniger yeoman in 1601, a coroner's inquest on Elizabeth Saniger aged 3 of Cam in 1856, and an inquisition post mortem of 1626 — plus twelve Berkeley Castle deeds naming people “of Saniger” between before 1291 and 1473. Sanyger and Sainger returned only Devon, Norfolk, Sussex and Reading records belonging to other families. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Commonwealth War Graves Commission found something | All 26 Sneyd war dead, and the casualty record for Arthur Hartley Sneyd | Casualty 1451888 confirms the Villers-Bretonneux MEMORIAL — not the military cemetery of the same name, which holds a different Sneyd, Rex, 49th Bn, died 14 June 1918. Service number 5050, 9th Bn A.I.F., died 20 August 1916 aged 22, son of Arthur and Martha Sneyd of James St., Wooloowin, born at Rockhampton. Nothing here was new; everything here was already published, and is now sourced to the authority instead of inferred. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | FreeREG — Gloucestershire does not cover it | The baptism of LYDIA JONES at Wotton-under-Edge, about 1770, to William Jones and Sarah | Not a null — the parish is not transcribed. Lydia Jones, Gloucestershire baptisms 1760–1785: nil. But JONES of any forename at WOTTON-UNDER-EDGE, all record types, 1740–1800: also nil — nought entries for the commonest surname in England across sixty years. The same search across the county returns 164 Jones baptisms in a narrower window, so the engine works and the county is covered. Wotton-under-Edge appears in FreeREG's place list and has effectively no eighteenth-century transcription behind it, which is the coverage-tool-versus-search disagreement this archive has already recorded once. control named |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Gloucestershire Registration Service Index (with the Gloucestershire FHS) found something | All deaths registered under the stem SANIG across Gloucestershire, 1837–1899, sweeping in five-year steps | Twenty-four deaths, each with the registrar's own register and entry number rather than a GRO quarterly reference — including LYDIA SANIGAR, 1851, register 3, entry 265, who this archive has wanted since it began. Coverage was checked before searching: Thornbury/Berkeley deaths complete 1837–1948, Dursley 1837–1937, Wotton-under-Edge 1837–1937. A free index nobody here had used. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Staffordshire Name Indexes — Diocese of Lichfield and Coventry Wills, 1550–1810 found something | SNEYD, all 36 records, and SNEYD of MADELEY | Thirty-six Sneyd wills, ten of them at Keele — and the tenth is RICHARD SNEYD, LABOURER, of Keele, 1772, in the same parish and the same court as four Ralph Sneyds, esquires and gentlemen. Sneyd of MADELEY returns nothing; control is the same search without a place, which returns all thirty-six. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Staffordshire Name Indexes — the site as a whole does not cover it | The Madeley burials of the 1740s, and Lichfield bishop's transcripts generally | Structurally out of scope. The site indexes twenty-six Staffordshire collections — wills, apprentices, asylums, gaol calendars, tithe awards, workhouse admissions — and no parish registers or bishop's transcripts of any kind. It cannot answer errand 19 and never could. control named |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Smyth, The Berkeley Manuscripts, volumes 1 and 3 (1883–85) found something | Every occurrence of Swonhunger, Swanhunger, Saniger and Sanyger across both volumes — the twenty-five page references in Smyth's own index | Forty-four distinct passages. A pedigree of the hamlet's owners from Thomas de Stone (died 1315–16) to John Swonhungre, who died without issue in 1401–2 leaving two sisters; the place in the free-warren charters of Henry II to Edward I; a grant of a yard land at Swonhunger dated 1189; Nigell of Swonhunger temp. Richard I; John de Swonhongre, esquire, in Lord Berkeley's retinue in 1326; and the hinge for the later branch — William Swonhunger, Crown lessee under Henry VIII, father of Robert, father of John. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | The National Archives — PROB 11 digitised wills could not be reached | Whether PROB 11/1825/326 (Elizabeth Saniger), PROB 11/1728/64 (Major-General Robert D'Arcy) and PROB 11/1991/312 can be downloaded | All three are digitised and open, and all three read “£3.50 - sign in to get this free”. The charge is waived for any registered user and registration is free, so these are not paid records — they are free records behind a free account. This archive creates no accounts, so they stay on the errand queue, but at nil cost rather than £10.50. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | The National Archives — Discovery, the other surnames found something | SINEGAR, SANIGRE, COTTON of Berkeley, WAKEFIELD with Saniger, and D'Arcy with the Royal Engineers at Chatham | COTTON of Berkeley gives the first document from Catherine Cotton's side of the family: PROB 11/1056/294, the will of Benjamin Cotton, cordwainer of Berkeley, proved 16 September 1779, eleven months after her burial in the same parish. D'ARCY with Chatham returns Robert D'Arcy's own will and twenty plans of the Chatham Lines from 1804 to 1821 — MR 1/553/3, and the MFQ 1/1280 and MFQ 1/1315 series — drawn across the years this archive says he was chief engineer there. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | The National Archives — Discovery found nothing | SINEGAR and SANIGRE as surnames | Sanigre: nothing at all. Sinegar: three records and not one is a person — a Bisley police station called Sinegar House in 1950 and 1984, and an unrelated Sussex account of 1705. Both spellings are productive in the Bristol and Berkeley registers and neither has left a catalogued document anywhere. control named |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Gloucestershire Registration Service Index — births and marriages found something | All births and all marriages under the stem SANIG, 1837–1893, swept in five-year steps | Twenty-seven births and ten marriages, each with a local register and entry number, and the marriage index giving both partners — Ford, White, Stephens, Stockwell, Watts, Dore, Sinnett, Young, Powell. Read against the twenty-four deaths already taken, seven names appear as both a birth and a death at intervals of one to nine years. The birth form also accepts a MOTHER'S MAIDEN NAME as a search term, which makes a guessed maiden name testable. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Whitworth Porter, History of the Corps of Royal Engineers (1889) found something | Robert D'Arcy, and the Corps' own account of the stations and sieges he served at | Five mentions, indexed by Porter as one man: Lieutenant Robert D'Arcy at the siege of Fort St Philip's, Minorca, 1781; “Robert D'Arcy, Barbados” in a station list, confirming from the Corps what this archive had inferred from two christenings; Lieutenant-Colonel R. D'Arcy as COMMANDING ENGINEER of the Copenhagen expedition of 1807; and as Commanding Royal Engineer at Walcheren in 1809, where — “an old man beyond sixty” — he refused to write a report for a wounded superior he claimed to outrank, was put under arrest, and apologised only after the court-martial was arranged. Free, out of copyright, and never opened here before. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Staffordshire BMD (UKBMD local index) found something | All SNEYD deaths in Staffordshire, 1837 onward — a free local index nobody here had used | 276 Sneyd deaths, each with AN AGE AT DEATH, a sub-district and a local register reference — none of which the GRO quarterly index gives. Errand 10's target is there and independently confirms what this archive already had: SNEYD, Samuel, aged 77, 1855, HANLEY sub-district, registers at Stoke-on-Trent, reference HAN/011/023, matching the Hanley burial of 23 September 1855 aged 77 of 91 Well Street. The certificate can now be ordered against the local reference. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | UKBMD — the local BMD project does not cover it | Whether Bristol and Somerset have local registrars' indexes like Gloucestershire's and Staffordshire's | They do not. The project lists Gloucestershire and Staffordshire — both used today, both productive — but neither Bristol nor Somerset has a dedicated local index. For the Bristol Wakefields and the Chew Magna Smiths there is no equivalent of the reference that found Lydia Sanigar. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Internet Archive — Rudder, A New History of Gloucestershire (1779) could not be reached | Saniger, Swanhanger and the Berkeley hundred parishes in the full text | The text download returns HTTP 503 and an error page. Control: the file contains nought occurrences of BERKELEY, DURSLEY and HINTON, which is impossible for this book — so the download failed rather than the book being silent. Recorded as unreachable, not as a null. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Internet Archive — Collections for a History of Staffordshire (William Salt Society) found nothing | Sneyd of Keele pedigrees, and any Madeley branch, in two volumes of the series | Nothing genealogical in the two volumes reachable: one has no Sneyd at all, the other has exactly one — in the society's own list of subscribers, “Sneyd, Rev. Walter, Keele Hall, Newcastle”, a living member in the 1880s. The series runs to dozens of volumes and the pedigree material is in ones not identified here. Control: Staffordshire itself appears 90 and 49 times, so the files are sound. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The National Archives — research guides and Discovery API found something | Which series holds a Board of Ordnance engineer's commission of 1776; the piece-level arrangement of IR 26 for 1876; and the right series for a British death at Le Havre in 1843 | WO 54/240, Engineers 1755–1780, is the only Board of Ordnance commission book covering the 1770s, with WO 47/87–88 as the minutes that would date the appointment. IR 26 runs to 1903, not 1857, and the 1876 C–D will registers are IR 26/2941–2947, chosen by the folio number in IR 27/396/3. RG 35/8–13 is the France run for foreign death returns, gated by the digitised index RG 43/4. None of the three is name-indexed free. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The National Archives — IR 26 after 1857 found something | Whether the Death Duty registers stop in 1857, which would make the Catherine D'Arcy errand impossible | They do not. 1857 is where the MICROFILMING stops — the registers themselves run 1796–1903 and the 1876 pieces are open, catalogued and held at Kew, merely unfilmed and offline. A widely repeated access boundary mistaken for a records boundary, and the errand survives it. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Calendars of Inquisitions Post Mortem, volumes 5–8 (Edward II – Edward III) found nothing | SWONHUNGER in every spelling, and THOMAS DE STONE, whose two daughters carry Smyth's pedigree | Neither family is in four volumes of the printed Calendars. Controlled twice: Gloucester appears 230–334 times per volume and Berkeley 15–17, so the county is covered; and a fragment search on “hungr”/“hunge”, tolerant of the volumes' poor OCR, returns Gravenhunger, Clehungre and Trewonhan — names of exactly that shape — so the search reaches them. The explanation is structural: a royal inquisition was taken only for a tenant-in-chief, and the Swonhungers held of Lord Berkeley, not of the king. The absence is what the record type predicts. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | British History Online could not be reached | Swonhunger, Swanhunger, Swonhungre and Saniger across its published series | A CAPTCHA on every search URL, in curl and in a real browser alike. This archive does not complete CAPTCHAs, so the site is unreachable from here. It publishes the Victoria County History and the calendars of Close, Fine and Patent Rolls, all of which would be worth a human's ten minutes. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Printed Army Lists, 1778 and 1781 found something | ROBERT D'ARCY in the establishment of the Corps of Engineers | There by name, in the junior grade: “Practitioner Engineer and Second Lieutenant … Robert Beatson, ROBERT D'ARCY, Benjamin Slack, James Lees…”. It also corroborates Porter independently: all six engineers Porter names at the siege of Fort St Philip's in 1781 — Townshend, D'Arcy, Johnston, Douglas, Shipley, Fiddes — are in the 1778 establishment, in the ranks Porter gives them. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Printed Army Lists, 1775 and 1776 does not cover it | Whether Robert D'Arcy appears before 1778, to settle Connolly's 1776 against the commission registers' 1778 | Not there — and it settles nothing. The control kills it: FIDDES, HOCKINGS, HUMFREY and SLACK, all printed beside him in 1778, return nought occurrences in both earlier volumes. Those lists do not carry the Practitioner Engineer grade at all, so the absence is the book's and not the man's. The two dates stand unreconciled and the document that would reconcile them is WO 54/240 at Kew. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Printed Army List, 1781 found something | The seniority date behind Robert D'Arcy's first commission, to reconcile 1776 against 1778 | 17 JANUARY 1776, settled. The 1781 list interleaves each engineer with his date and D'Arcy's is a ditto inside a block headed “17 Jan. 76”, with the men after him breaking the ditto with their own later dates. The 1778 list carries the same run and Connolly's Roll agrees on the year. This archive had 1776 on five pages and 1778 on one; the outlier was the page that named a record series and claimed a superlative. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — Sussex, 1861 does not cover it | Jane, Catherine and Charlotte D'Arcy in the 1861 census — and then whether FreeCEN's Sussex could have held them at all | A null on 15 September, corrected the same day to an EMPTY, because the control was wrong. D'ARCY, ARCY, D ARCY and DARCEY return nothing; DARCY returns six people, all one Sussex-born household at Kemp Town, Brighton — Eliza b. Newhaven 1816, Daniel b. Bishopstone 1818, four children b. Brighton 1847–57. None can be a sister. THE FIRST CONTROL WAS SMITH, which returns the display cap of 1,000, and I read that as the county and the town being covered. It is not. The real control is a record known to be there: the three sisters ARE in the 1851 Sussex census under the surname ARCY, at HO107/1646 folio 357 page 59 schedule 172, 22 Western Cottages, Brighton — and FreeCEN returns NOUGHT for Arcy in Sussex in 1851. It does not hold that piece. A capped surname count measures volume, not coverage. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Royal Military Calendar, 3rd edition (1820) found something | Every D'Arcy in the army's own published record of its serving officers | Three, and all three are this family. Entry 607, MAJOR-GENERAL ROBERT DARCY, C.B. — his whole service in one paragraph, eight ranks from 17 January 1776 to 12 August 1819, including a First Lieutenancy of 1784 and a Captaincy of 1793 this archive did not have. Entry 1667, LIEUT.-COL. JOSEPH D'ARCY — seven ranks from 1795 to 1816, and the Persian order given “for his conduct, while in the actual service of the King of Persia”. Entry 2098, MAJOR GEORGE D'ARCY — Ensign 39th Foot 1794 to Brevet Major 1813, “Served in the Peninsula, and has received a medal for the battle of Orthes”. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Royal Military Calendar, 3rd edition (1820) found nothing | Robert D'Arcy's parentage, birthplace or schooling — the oldest open question in this archive | Not there, and the silence is worth something because of where it comes from. The Calendar prints schooling and origins when it has them: the very next entry, Major-General George Bridges, opens “After the usual course of instruction at Woolwich Academy”. For Robert D'Arcy it prints service and nothing else. The army's own book, compiled while he was alive and a Companion of the Bath, did not record where he came from. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Gentleman's Magazine, 1848 found something | A death notice for Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph D'Arcy | There, in the March issue at page 328, among the Hampshire deaths: “Feb. 7. At Homestead, Lymington, aged 68, Lieut.-Col. Joseph D'Arcy, late of the Royal Art. K.L.S.”, with his three commission dates and the Persian order “conferred for his conduct when in the actual service of the Shah of Persia”. A fourth independent notice of a death this archive already held from three newspapers — and the one that breaks the tie on his age, since two of the four now agree he was 68. The contrast with his father is the point: the same magazine, twenty-one years earlier, said nothing at all about a major-general. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The National Archives — Discovery, series RG 37 found something | What RG 37/65/2 actually is, the reference this archive cites for the three sisters' burials at Hove | Not a parish register. RG 37 is “General Register Office: Removal of Graves and Tombstones”, 1923–2007, described by TNA as “copies of records of local authorities and the Church Commissioners relating to burial ground removals”. RG 37/65/2 is “Hove: St Andrew's Old Church: Part 2. BURIAL GROUND SECTION A”, c.1975, one of twenty-three parts lettered A to X. The three dates stand; the page's description of the document did not, and is corrected. The gain is the section letter: three sisters in one section is a family plot. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Gloucestershire Registration Service Index — coverage for Bristol does not cover it | Whether the free county index that found Lydia Sanigar could also reach the Bristol Wakefields — errand 12, Miriam Wakefield 1840 | It cannot. The index's districts are Cheltenham, Cirencester, Forest of Dean, Gloucester, North Cotswolds, Stroud and Warwick South, with Berkeley, Dursley, Uley and Wotton-under-Edge beneath them. Bristol is a registration county of its own and is not in it — which matches the UKBMD finding that Bristol has no local index at all. The Berkeley Sanigers are reachable this way and the Bristol Wakefields are not. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FreeCEN — Sussex, 1851 and 1871 does not cover it | The sisters in the two censuses either side of 1861, and a coverage test against a household known to exist | Neither year holds them, and neither year can be trusted to. 1871: D'ARCY returns one man, John D'Arcy born Liverpool 1847 at Withyham; ARCY and DARCY nothing. 1851: DARCY returns one woman, Mary Darcy born Essex 1798 at Ore; ARCY nothing at all — although this archive has the three sisters in the 1851 Sussex census under precisely that surname, at 22 Western Cottages, Brighton. So FreeCEN's Sussex is partial in a way its result counts conceal: Smith hits the 1,000 cap in 1851, 1861 and 1871 alike, while a piece containing a known household is simply absent. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Staffordshire BMD — births and marriages found something | All SNEYD births and marriages in Staffordshire from 1837, a free local index never used here | 391 births and 322 marriages. The births carry the MOTHER'S MAIDEN NAME and the marriages name both partners AND THE CHURCH, neither of which the GRO index gives. It names a woman this archive knew only as “Ann”: JAMES SNEYD married ANN BIDDULPH in 1842 at STOKE, ST PETER, reference 31/03/214. Four Sneyd births carry Biddulph as the mother — Elizabeth Ann 1839 Shelton, Mary Julia 1842 Hanley, Catherine 1845 Hanley, James Arthur 1850 Hanley — and three match the Well Street household exactly, supplying full forenames for the “Mary J” and “James A” the censuses gave as initials. Catherine is new here. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Staffordshire BMD — the archive's own Sneyd marriages does not cover it | Whether the index could reach this family's own marriages | Mostly not, and for a structural reason worth stating. The index begins in 1837. Samuel Sneyd married Elizabeth Margaret Oliver at AUDLEM, CHESHIRE in 1809 — wrong county and twenty-eight years too early. His son Samuel Charles married at Camden, NEW SOUTH WALES in February 1837, the very year the index opens, and every later Sneyd marriage this archive holds is in Queensland. The parents stayed and the sons emigrated, so the only marriage the index can reach is the one that stayed: James the engraver, at Stoke in 1842. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — the MEDIEVAL spellings found something | Swonhungre, Swonhongre, Swonhunger, Swonhangre, Swanhanger, Swanhunger — the forms the clerks actually used, as opposed to the modern Saniger searched on 14 September | 195 unique records across thirteen spellings — 178 at Berkeley Castle, 5 at Gloucestershire Archives, 5 at Kew, 3 at Birmingham, and one each at Bristol, Hertford and the National Library of Wales. SWONHUNGRE alone returns 126 against 71 for Saniger. Seventeen of the twenty-five read closely were new to this archive, including three carrying genealogical statements. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — spellings that return nothing found nothing | Sanigre, Sannigar, Synigar, Swonhanger, Swanhangar — control on the alias list itself | Nought for all five, against the same catalogue that returns 126 for Swonhungre in the same query shape. The control that could have failed did not: the search works, these forms simply were not used. Five of this site's alias spellings are therefore modern conjecture rather than attested variants. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Berkeley Castle Muniments, via Discovery found something | Whether the muniments Jeayes calendared in 1892 are catalogued in more detail now | They are, item by item, and free to search without an account. 178 records under the medieval spellings, each with a calendar description naming parties, land, rent and witnesses, and each quoting the GC number to cite when requesting the document at Berkeley. Errand 51 asked for exactly this and can be closed. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The London Gazette found nothing | ROBERT and JOSEPH D'ARCY, both spellings, 1770–1830 — free, full-text, no account | Neither man appears. All twenty-two notices naming a Darcy or D'Arcy between 1770 and 1789 are other people — Darcy Tancred, Darcy Burnell of Winkburn, Darcy Molineux, Sir Robert Darcy Hildyard, Darcy Linton, John Pomeroy Darcy, Arthur Darcy, and Darcy Lever, which is a place in Lancashire. Controlled first: the decade holds 1,057 notices mentioning Lieutenant and 245 mentioning Ordnance, so the corpus is present and searchable. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The London Gazette — why the null is structural does not cover it | Whether the Ordnance gazetted Corps of Engineers commissions at all in 1776 | It did not yet. Notices mentioning Corps of Engineers: 1774 none, 1775 none, 1776 three — one for the Chief Engineer in Ireland and two reprints of a Bengal notice. The practice appears during the American war (Shewbridge, May 1778) and is routine by the mid-1780s (promotions 1783; Office of Ordnance… James Glenie, February 1787). Robert D'Arcy's commission of 17 January 1776 predates the Ordnance's habit of publishing, which is why the Army List seniority column and not the Gazette is what settles the date. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The London Gazette — what it did give found something | When the Corps of Engineers became the ROYAL Engineers | Issue 12850, page 197, 23 April 1787: His Majesty, by Warrant of this Day's Date, has been pleased to direct, that the Corps of Engineers shall in future take the Name of the Corps of Royal Engineers, and be so stiled and called. Robert D'Arcy was commissioned into the Corps of Engineers in 1776 and the corps was renamed under him, eleven years in. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Protestation Returns, 1641–42 does not cover it | Whether Gloucestershire's returns survive — the oath taken by nearly every adult male, parish by parish | They do not. The surviving returns are a single alphabetical series of county bundles at the Parliamentary Archives, listed in Discovery as YHL/PO/JO/10/1/77 to /109: Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumberland, Denbighshire, Devon, Dorset, Durham, Essex, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Middlesex, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Somerset, Staffordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Warwickshire, Westmorland, Wiltshire, Worcestershire and Yorkshire. GLOUCESTERSHIRE IS ABSENT FROM A RUN THAT GOES STRAIGHT THROUGH WHERE IT BELONGS — the piece that would hold it holds Essex and Hampshire instead. The alphabet is the control, and it could have failed. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Protestation Returns — what DOES survive found something | Staffordshire, for the Sneyds | YHL/PO/JO/10/1/105, Staffordshire, Surrey. The returns survive for the Sneyd county and not for the Saniger one. Of no immediate use — this archive's Sneyds are documented from 1809, a hundred and seventy years later — but recorded so the next reader does not re-test it. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | E 179 and Gloucestershire Archives — the hearth tax found something | Whether a 1671–72 Gloucestershire hearth tax survives, and whether it is readable from here | It survives twice over and neither copy is online. Gloucestershire Archives D383/1, Negative photostat of Gloucs. Hearth Tax enrolment + part transcript, 1671–1672. At Kew, E 179/329, 1670–1674, a bundle of 400 folios that includes names of individuals — about four hundred paper exemption certificates. Both are errands, not reads. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Gloucestershire Archives D5555/2/9 found something | A single bundle transcribing the three sources this archive most wants | Transcriptions of entries in MEN AND ARMOUR, 1608; in HEARTH TAX RETURNS, 1664, 1672; POLL TAX RETURNS, 1678. One reference covering the muster this archive has already read, the hearth tax it wants, and a poll tax it did not know existed — all transcribed, all in one place, and all in Gloucester. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The poll tax of 1381, Gloucestershire does not cover it | Whether it reaches Berkeley hundred, where the Swonhungres were | It does not. Gloucestershire Archives D 1874/1 photostats the surviving originals and lists every membrane: Salmonsbury, Holford and Greston, Kiftsgate, Tibblestone, Rapsgate, Bradley, Crowthorne, Brightwells Barrow, Longtree, Cirencester, Bisley, and St Briavels. BERKELEY HUNDRED IS NOT AMONG THEM. The surviving membranes are Cotswold and Forest; the Vale is lost. A named list of what survives is a better null than a search that returns nothing. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The printed Army Lists, 1783, 1802, 1803, 1821 found something | ROBERT D'ARCY read year by year instead of at three points — free full text on the Internet Archive | Four editions, four positions. 1783: SECOND LIEUTENANT of the Corps of Engineers, seven years after commissioning, in an intact ditto-chain — John Humfrey 17 Jan. 1776 · James Fiddes do. · Richard Hockings do. · Robert Beatfon do. · Robert D'Arcey do. · Benjamin Slack 4 Mar. 1802: CAPTAIN, Corps of Royal Engineers, p.409. 1803: Captain of the corps at p.288 and MAJOR in the army's own list at p.36. 1821: D'Arcy, Lt. Col. Joseph, Royal Art. A third printed confirmation of 17 January 1776, after the lists of 1778 and 1781. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Army List of 1783 — a spelling, not a silence found something | Why outside catalogues do not return him | The 1783 compositor sets the name ROBERT D'ARCEY, with an E. This site's own alias list has folded d'arcey and darcey into the D'Arcy group for weeks; the searches run against the London Gazette and the Internet Archive had not used it. The same fault as the Swonhungre sweep on the same day: a good alias list, never spent on somebody else's index. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Whitworth Porter, History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, VOLUME 2 does not cover it | Robert D'Arcy and Joseph D'Arcy, full text, free | Neither appears in 1.5 million characters. Controlled by subject rather than by name: the volume mentions the Peninsula 48 times, Waterloo 11 and THE CRIMEA 43. It is the post-1815 volume, and Robert D'Arcy's service ran 1776 to about 1809 — volume 1's territory, which this archive has already read. Joseph was Royal Artillery, not Engineers, so no volume of Porter is the right book for him. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | John Smyth, Description of the Hundred of Berkeley (Berkeley MSS vol. 3) found something | Re-read for the hamlet rather than for the pedigree | Forty-nine mentions of Swonhunger. Three more alias statements beyond the famous one — Swonhunger ats Saniger in the formal list of the hamlets of Hamfallow, and Sanyger ats Swonhunger in a fine of Henry VII's reign. Ats is alias, not corruption. And a named freehold, OLDMINSTER, with its own tithe barn, which reappears as Messuage called Oldminsters in Swanhanger [Saniger in Hinton] in Gloucestershire Archives D654/III/9 of 1690–1741. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FreeREG, at PARISH level — the control first found something | SMITH in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, all years — to find what FreeREG's Berkeley transcript actually covers before reading any absence | 3 exact and 36 uncertain results, and every one of them falls between 1653 and 1677 — Berkeley St Mary, Other Transcript. So FreeREG's Berkeley holding is a SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRAGMENT of about thirty years, not a parish register run. The control could have failed — a common surname over two centuries of Berkeley would have returned hundreds — and instead it drew the window. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FreeREG, Berkeley parish found nothing | SANIGER, against that measured window | 0 exact results. The 38 uncertain are records whose characters are illegible in the transcript, the same set the Smith control returned. The null is real but NARROW: it covers about 1653–1680 and nothing else. This archive's Sanigers at Berkeley are documented in 1601 and then from 1692, so the gap FreeREG could speak to is thirty years wide and it is silent across them. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FreeREG, Gloucestershire place list does not cover it | Whether Awre and Blakeney — the Forest parishes — are covered at all | They are not. FreeREG has data for 189 Gloucestershire places and the list includes Berkeley, Dursley, North Nibley, Slimbridge, Thornbury, Uley and Woodmancote — but neither Awre nor Blakeney. Any Awre search would have returned nothing for a reason that has nothing to do with the family. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Gloucestershire Archives, via Discovery found something | SANIGER and its variants across the whole county catalogue | 127 unique records across six spellings, 33 of them at Gloucestershire Archives, spread from 1601 to the 1990s. Seven were new, and the shape of them is the finding: D2957/41/38, /39, /47, /48, /179, /187 and /190 are Berkeley estate deeds in which SANIGER IS THE LAND, not the party — Abevan, Hathway, Morse, Smith, Plomer and Vizard holding at Saniger. One may be a person: D2078/BOX 23/4 of 1649, Huntley, Saniger & Smyth. The catalogue confirms what Bigland and Smyth both say — a hamlet that far more people lived in than were named for. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Manorial Documents Register and Gloucestershire Archives found something | Court rolls for AWRE, the Forest parish this archive cannot otherwise reach | They survive in an almost unbroken run, and nobody here had looked. D2156/1 is a surrender of 1387, 10 Richard II; D2156/2 of 1439; D2156/3 of 1573; D2156/4 of 1577/8. D421/M7 holds the court rolls 1588–91 and the Hundred of Bledisloe for 1591. D3270/362 runs 1671, 1688–93, 1695–1745, 1747–66, 1768–1835, 1837–46, 1848–75, 1877, 1880–1. D3270/363 covers Awre and Etloe 1760–1886. Court rolls name tenants generation on generation, and this run spans the whole gap between the muster of 1608 and John Saniger's marriage about 1797. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Manorial Documents Register — the other two manors does not cover it | Hamfallow and Hinton, where the Berkeley-side Sanigers held | Nothing separate survives. Hamfallow returns five hits and four are nineteenth-century gamekeeper registers; manor of Hinton Berkeley returns nought. Both were parts of the manor of Ham within the Berkeley estate rather than manors in their own right — which is why their records are inside the Berkeley Castle Muniments and not in a separate manorial series, and it is the same structural reason the Swonhungers generate no royal inquisition. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Samuel Rudder, A New History of Gloucestershire (1779) found nothing | SANIGER and SWONHUNGER, full text, free — 5.7 million characters | Not there, under any spelling, and the null is informative because the control holds: Rudder mentions Berkeley 804 times and his index carries Wanfwell in Berkeley 280, Hamfallow, Halmore and Alkington. At page 280 he enumerates the tithing — 6. Hamfallow, in which are Wanſwell, Wanniſwell, or Wanſel; part of Halmore; and Hamfallow — and SANIGER IS NOT IN IT. Smyth listed it under Hamfallow in 1639 and Bigland under Hinton in 1791. Rudder, between them, lists it nowhere. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Rudder, 1779 — what the same paragraph did give found something | The Thorps, who inherited the Swonhunger estate | Thorp of Wanſwell held his lands to guard a tower in Berkeley-caſtle, called THORP'S-TOWER, which was built in the reign of king Edward the Third. Thomas Thorp died ſeized of the manor of Wanſwell, 17 H. 8. Thomas his ſon had livery thereof 29 H. 8. Smyth's pedigree ends in 1401 with the estate passing through Isabel Swonhunger to John Thorpe of Bristol; Rudder carries that family to 1525 and says how they held — by castle-guard, at a named tower. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Gloucestershire Notes and Queries found something | SANIGER and every variant, across the digitised volumes | One hit, and it corrects this archive. The serial reviewed Maclean's 1902 edition of Smyth's MEN AND ARMOUR FOR GLOUCESTERSHIRE — the very muster /saniger-1608 is built from — and listed its misreadings: Thus SAINGER SHOULD READ SANIGER. So the eleventh man, the one living in the hamlet the surname came from, is JOHN SANIGER OF SANIGER, and the muster holds three spellings in 1608, not four. Now correction 31. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Gloucestershire Notes and Queries — the rest of the run found nothing | Whether the serial carries anything else on this family | Three further volumes read in full text — 2.5, 1.8 and 1.7 million characters — and not one mention of any spelling of the name. Controlled: the same volumes mention Berkeley 234, 91 and 51 times, so the parish is well within the serial's range. The family was too small for an antiquarian serial to notice, which is consistent with Rudder omitting the hamlet altogether in 1779. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FreeBMD — the control first found something | CHARLOTTE DARCY, died Brighton 1869, whose GRO reference this archive already holds | Darcy Charlotte 73 Brighton 2b 152 — age, district, volume and page, matching what /sussex-sisters already published. A control that could have failed and did not, and it was needed: FreeBMD SILENTLY REFUSES a date range of more than a few years, redisplaying its own search form, which is indistinguishable from an empty result. Three searches were recorded as nought before the control showed they had never run. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | FreeBMD — the Thornbury Sanigars found something | SANIGAR deaths, 1850–1852, against a range narrow enough to execute | All three. JOHN SANIGAR, March quarter 1850, Thornbury, vol 11 page 401. LYDIA SANIGAR, September quarter 1851, Thornbury, vol 11 page 329. MARY ANN SANIGAR, December quarter 1851, Thornbury, vol 11 page 369. Each quarter is marked by FreeBMD as more than 99 per cent transcribed. This archive already had all three from the Gloucestershire Registration Service's LOCAL register — 3/146, 3/265, 3/282 — so two independent indexes now agree, and Lydia's certificate can be ordered from the GRO as well as from Gloucester. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Berkeley Castle Muniments — all 200 records, not the 25 read first found something | Every catalogue description under every spelling, read for relationship language | Twenty-five phrases tie the surname to a relationship and six were new: John son of Thomas (1311); Thomas son of John (early 14th cent.); THOMAS SON OF WILLIAM, MAUD HIS WIFE AND JOHN THE YOUNGER THEIR SON in one Hinton lease (mid 14th cent.); John son of John and Alice his wife (15th cent.); John Swonhongre and Edith his wife (1377); and the wardship of 1390. The other 175 are largely witness lists — Thomas de Swonhungre witnesses Berkeley charters from the mid-13th century to about 1311 beside the same circle of Berkeley officials. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | BCM/A/4/2/22, 5 December 1390 found something | Whether the tenure this archive inferred can be documented | It can, in the lord's own words: Thomas has granted to John the marriage of John Swonhongre, son and heir of Elias Swonhongre, WHICH CAME TO THOMAS BECAUSE ELIAS HELD OF THOMAS BY KNIGHT SERVICE. The archive had reasoned from silence that the Swonhungers generate no royal inquisition because they were mesne tenants of Berkeley. The reasoning was right and can now be retired in favour of the deed. It also confirms Smyth's statement that this John was in ward to Thomas lord Berkeley, and shows why. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Berkeley deeds, read for topography rather than people found something | How the hamlet was approached, and whether any field name survives | Five deeds map the approach without a map: the king's highway from Longebrugge to Swonhunger (mid 13th cent.); Alagrene street in the west part of Berkeley towards Swonhungre (1287); the field called Stodfold near Swonhungre (1317); the path from Berkel' to Swonhungre through LE WESTFELD in the furlong of Kyngakre (1322); and le Muleweye, the road from Berckel' to Swonhungre at Lokedonne (1324). LE WESTFELD is the same field named in D2957/41/18 of 1601 — 3 acres of arrable in WESTFIELD, SANIGER, Berkeley — 279 years later. A continuity of place, not of blood. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Library of Birmingham, MS 3549 found something | What the series is, after three hits came out of one shelfmark | MS 3549 · 1200–1704 · SMYTH, JOHN (1567–1641), ANTIQUARY — MISCELLANEOUS DEEDS AND MANORIAL RECORDS COLLECTED BY JOHN SMYTH. It is the steward's own working collection, gathered while writing the books this archive has spent a week testing. It explains the duplicate: the 1377 grant is BCM/A/1/24/185 at Berkeley Castle and MS 3549/20 here because Smyth kept a copy. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | MS 3549 — the court rolls inside it found something | Whether Smyth's collection reaches the manors this family held in | It does, on both sides of the gap. MS 3549/89 is the court roll of the MANOR OF HAM AND HYNTON, Courts Baron of 12 September 1587 to 15 March 1587/8 — the manor containing Hamfallow, and the tithing Bigland places Saniger in, fourteen years before this archive's earliest Saniger deed. MS 3549/182 is a copy court roll of ALKINGTON, 1624, where Edward Sanniger held in 1694. Twenty-two court rolls in the series in total. Neither is digitised, and both are at Birmingham, not Gloucester. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Hertfordshire Archives, DE/M/95 — read in full found something | Why a Gloucestershire deed sits in a Hertfordshire collection, and what the deed actually says | DE/M is Personal and family papers of the CAPELLS, EARLS OF ESSEX… title deeds of their Essex and Hertfordshire estates, and John Capel is the first party — so the deed left Gloucestershire in his family's muniments. The full description is far richer than the search snippet: a purparty of THE INHERITANCE IN HAMME OF JOHN DE WYKE divided between JOAN CAPEL, ALICE DE SWONHONGRE and AGNES DE LOREWYNGE, each named as the ancestor through whom her heir holds. Alice was one of three coheirs of John de Wyke — the land came into this family through a woman. Wyke is the hamlet next to Swonhunger in Smyth's list. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Edward Sanniger, mariner of Chepstow — the two references found something | Whether his will can be read from here | Both references confirmed and described. IR 26/352/152 at Kew is the ESTATE DUTY ABSTRACT — Abstract of Will of Edward Sanniger, Mariner of Chepstow, Monmouthshire. Proved in the Llandaff, 28 November 1806. LL/1806/24 at the National Library of Wales is the will itself, Diocese: Llandaf, Parish: Chepstow. Neither catalogue entry names a relative, so nothing yet connects him to this family — Chepstow is across the Severn from the Saniger fisheries and that is the whole of the case so far. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | National Library of Wales probate images could not be reached | Reading LL/1806/24 directly | archives.library.wales serves a bot check — Performing security verification… protect against malicious bots. This archive does not complete bot checks, so the will stays unread rather than being recorded as absent. The catalogue reference is firm and the document is digitised; only the route is closed. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Thomas Sanniger, Able Seaman of HMS Eurydice found something | The seaman's will of 1794, ADM 48/84/222 | Confirmed and no more: Will of Sanniger, Thomas. Rank/Rating: Able Seaman. Ship Name: Eurydice. Ship's Pay Book number: 193, 24 February 1794. The catalogue gives rank, ship and pay-book number and no kin. Seamen's wills name next of kin in the document, which is the reason to order it — and the reason a catalogue search cannot settle whether he belongs here. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society found something | All 67 digitised volumes, every spelling, with each volume's Berkeley mention count as its own control | Five volumes carry the name and two are substantial. VOLUME 22 (1899) prints Berkeley-area deeds in FULL ENGLISH TRANSLATION rather than calendar summary, including the indenture of 1 May 1329 and the partition of 22 July 1353. VOLUME 10 prints a Daubeney pedigree carrying the Swonhungers as a branch, sourced to two royal inquisitions and to Smyth. Volume 21 has Katherine, daughter of John Harris of Sanigar; volumes 45 and 46 list W. Sanigar of Barton Hill, Bristol, as a member in 1923. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | TBGAS volume 22 — the 1329 indenture in full found something | Who Alice was, and where Wanswell came from | ELYANORA DE STONE, MOTHER OF THE AFORESAID ALICE AND JOAN — so Alice, wife of John son of John de Swonhungre, and Joan, wife of John le Serjeant, are SISTERS and coheirs of Thomas de Stone, and their mother is named for the first time anywhere this archive has read. The Serjeants released to the Swonhungres everything in WANSWELL of the heritage of the aforesaid Thomas de Stone, which is why a man is Thomas Swonhungre of Wanswell in 1356. Smyth said Alice was younger daughter and coheir of Thomas de Stone; the deed confirms him and adds her mother. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | TBGAS volume 22 — the partition of 1353 found something | Smyth's third partition of the family lands in 27 Edward III | Printed entire: William brother and heir of Thomas de Swonhunger and John Serjeant the younger divide all they hold in common in Ham, Cam, Stinchcombe, Kingscote and Haselcote, EXCEPT THE FISHERY IN SEVERN WHICH IS EXCEPTED FROM THIS PARTITION, AND WILL REMAIN IN CO[MMON]. The archive had Smyth's one-line description; this is the document, and it keeps the Severn fishery undivided — the same fishery Jeayes's charters reserve on Wednesdays and Fridays. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | TBGAS volume 10 — the Daubeney pedigree found something | Whether the last generations can be dated from record rather than from Smyth | They can. Isabel Daubeney (ob. before 1393) married Elias Swonhonger; Elias died 13 Richard II (1389/90), having married Jone daughter of John Bill; JOHN SWONHONGER WAS AGED 18 IN 1393 and died 3 Henry IV (1401/2) without issue; Isabel Swonhonger married John Thorp. Sourced to the inquisition post mortem of John Wauton (16 Ric. II pt 1 no. 16), the inquisition melius scire on the heirs of Elizabeth Wauton (18 Ric. II no. 81), and Smyth p.370. An age of 18 in 1393 fits the sale of his marriage in December 1390 exactly. And Smyth's John de Albiniaco alias Albeny is DAUBENEY. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | TBGAS volume 10 — and a correction to this archive's own reasoning found something | Whether no royal inquisition is true without qualification | It is not. In 1394 a royal commission, by writ of 21 November 18 Richard II, went to the escheator of Gloucestershire to enquire whether JOHN SWONHONGRE and others had become the heirs general of John and Cecilia Daubeney, whose Kingsholme and Hinton Daubeney lands had fallen in. The Swonhungers hold of Berkeley by knight service and so generate no Crown inquisition FOR THE BERKELEY LAND — now documented by BCM/A/4/2/22 — but through the Daubeney marriage they are named in royal inquisitions after all. The claim was right about Berkeley and too broad about everything else. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | J. H. Cooke, Wanswell Court, and its Occupants for seven centuries, TBGAS vol. VI (1881–82) found something | Whether anybody had already joined the medieval Swanhungers to the later Sanigers | Somebody had, a hundred and forty years ago: They were an old Berkeley family, whose patrimonial house and estate in the neighbourhood is still called SANIGER FARM, AND WAS SOLD BY EDWARD SANIGER TO THE EARL OF BERKELEY IN 1774. The article also gives the descent from Thomas de Stone (d. 1316) through his younger daughter ALICE, who married John Swanhunger, or Saniger, to the John who died without issue in 1402 and his sister Isabel who married John Thorpe, burgess of Bristol. Graded INFERRED: it is a careful scholar's conclusion in a footnoted article, not a chain of deeds set out, and this archive's rule is that a conclusion is evidence of reasoning rather than of fact. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Cooke on Thorpe's Tower found something | Whether the castle-guard story Rudder repeats has a document behind it | It has one, and Cooke refused to accept it without: The only documentary evidence of this Castle-guard tenure which I have met with is in a COURT ROLL FOR THE MANOR OF HAM, holden on the 26th May, 42 Eliz. (A.D. 1600), when the Homage presented the death of NICHOLAS THORPE, who died seised of the manor of Wanswell, holden by the sixteenth part of a knight's fee, the yearly rent of £4 8s. 8d., and by keeping one tower in the Castle of Berkeley called Thorpe's Tower. The chief rent was regularly paid until 1818, when it was extinguished by Earl Fitzhardinge's purchase of the estate. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | My own sweep of TBGAS volume 6, first attempt does not cover it | A control failure caught by the broader sweep | Volume 6 was probed by hand earlier the same day for Swonhung and Swonhong and returned NOUGHT — so it was nearly set aside. Cooke's article spells the name SWANHUNGER and SANIGER throughout, neither of which those two patterns can match. The wider sweep, which carried ten spellings, found it immediately. The same fault as the D'Arcey one: a good alias list, not spent on the search actually being run. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Feet of fines for Gloucestershire does not cover it | Whether a fine naming this family can be found without going to Kew | It cannot. CP 25/1 survives at Kew but is catalogued ONLY AT PIECE LEVEL — GLOUCESTERSHIRE: Feet of fines for 14-24 Hen VII: 38-77 membranes is a typical entry, naming a county and a span of regnal years and not one party. No free, name-indexed published abstract exists for the county: searches for feet of fines and pedes finium with Gloucestershire return nothing on the Internet Archive, and Discovery returns only the piece descriptions. A fine naming a Swonhungre is therefore unfindable by search and would require reading membranes. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | BCM/A/1/24/189 and /190 — the Stone side found something | Where the Wanswell estate came from, before Alice carried it in | Four generations and two women. THOMAS DE STONE, SON AND HEIR OF ROBERT SON OF ROBERT DE STONE surrenders a holding he cannot pay £11 a year for, on the advice of Master William de Kyngescote, Robert de Bradeston, JULIANA HIS MOTHER, Robert Wyther and his other friends, and takes instead a smaller one at £4 10s — a villein virgate with Hugh and his issue and chattels, half-virgates, a field called WYNTMELLEFELD with an enclosed pasture called OLDEFISCHWERE, 2 acres at Stone and 4 at Woodford. That smaller holding IS Wanswell. Cooke, in 1882, says of this deed that it seems to be the only foundation of the tenure of any part of the Wanswell estate from Berkeley Castle — he was reading it, and this archive now has its reference. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | PSO 1/61/2, Privy Seal Office found something | The Wauton and Daubeney chain behind the Swonhunger inheritance | Andrew Wauton, husband of Elizabeth Gifford, reversioner after ELIAS DAUBENAY, 28 June 1383. It confirms the chain the TBGAS pedigree sets out, and supplies a small suggestive detail: the forename ELIAS runs in the Daubeney family as well as the Swonhunger one, which is what naming after a maternal line looks like. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Ralph Bigland, Collections for Gloucestershire, volume 1 — read entire found something | Every Saniger mention, not just the two already quoted here | Twenty mentions. The Berkeley monuments record one household across four generations WITH AGES: Esther daughter of Edward Saniger buried 16 August 1692; Esther wife of Edward Saniger died 13 June 1693; EDWARD SANIGER OF SANIGER, GENT, buried 3 December 1739 AGED 48; SUSANNA his relict died 14 May 1744 AGED 58; JANE their daughter died 15 June 1750 AGED 24; and an EDWARD SANIGER SENIOR whose year is broken in the scan. Also EDWARD SANIGER, OF PEDINGTON IN THIS PARISH and Mary his wife — Peddington being one of the places named beside Swanhanger in the 1626 inquisition of Henry Mallett. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Samuel Rudder (1779) — the FOREST parishes found nothing | Awre and Blakeney, the half of this family FreeREG cannot reach | Nothing, and the null was already established at book level: Rudder contains NO Saniger under any spelling in 5.7 million characters, against a control of 804 Berkeley mentions and an index carrying Wanswell, Hamfallow, Halmore and Alkington. He mentions Awre 194 times and Blakeney 20, so the parishes are well covered — they simply hold nobody of this name in his account. Bigland, by contrast, gives twenty. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | TBGAS — the sweep completed found something | All 67 digitised volumes, twelve spellings, each volume controlled by its own Berkeley mention count | Sixty-seven attempted, ONE UNFETCHABLE and recorded as unread rather than empty, TWELVE carrying the name. The substantial ones are volume 6 (Cooke's Wanswell Court), volume 22 (the deeds in full translation), volume 10 (the Daubeney pedigree) and a fourth printing the chantry licence of 1356. The rest are membership lists and one unrelated pedigree using Sanigar as an address. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | TBGAS — the chantry of Our Lady at Stone, 1356 found something | Whether any Crown record of this date names the family | One does, and it is a licence rather than an inquisition. John Sergeant of Stone endowed a chantry for a priest to pray for the good estate of himself and of John Sergeunt his father and of Thomas Lord Berkeley and of Maurice Berkeley his son, AND OF WILLIAM SON OF WILLIAM SWANHANGRE, AND ALIENOR HIS MOTHER — authorities Letters Patent 30 Edw. III pt 3 m.22, Fine Roll m.3, and the inquisition ad quod damnum. ALIENOR is a woman of this family named nowhere else read here. The Serjeants took the other half of the Stone inheritance and were still praying for the Swanhangres a generation after the partition. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | William son of William Swanhangre — an unresolved conflict found nothing | Whether the chantry licence can be fitted to the line the Berkeley deeds give | It cannot, not yet. BCM/A/1/24/184 of the same year, 1356, makes William the son of JOHN — a charter of John Swonhungre, his father, son and heir of John Swonhungre. The chantry licence makes a William the son of a William, by a mother called Alienor. Either two Williams were living at once, which other deeds make plausible, or one source is wrong. Recorded as unresolved rather than reconciled. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | E 179 — the Tudor subsidies for BERKELEY hundred found something | Whether named taxpayers survive between the medieval deeds and the parish registers | Six pieces, all described as ASSESSMENT (INDIVIDUALS) — meaning named taxpayers, not just totals. E 179/114/240 (8 Nov 1543); E 179/114/235 and E 179/114/296/5 (both 1544–46); E 179/114/272 (6 March 1546, with Henbury and Barton Regis); E 179/114/295 (1549, the relief); E 179/115/307 (1549, county-wide). None digitised. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | E 179 — the Tudor subsidies for BLEDISLOE hundred found something | The Forest side — Awre and Blakeney, which no other source reaches | They survive, and they matter more than the Berkeley ones because nothing else covers these parishes. E 179/114/287/1, [1523–1525], Assessment (individuals); E 179/114/252, [1524], St Briavels and Bledisloe, assessment of individuals; E 179/114/230, [1524]; E 179/113/204, 20 Dec 1524, certificate; E 179/114/287/2, [1544], assessment of individuals; E 179/114/246, 10 Oct 1544. This archive has no Sanigers at Awre — see correction 32 — so the Bledisloe pieces matter far less than the Berkeley ones. The point stands for BERKELEY hundred, where the muster found three men of the name. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | A published edition of the Gloucestershire subsidies does not cover it | Whether any of it can be read without going to Kew | Not freely. Searches of the Internet Archive for military survey Gloucestershire 1522, for a published 1524 subsidy roll, and for a separate edition of Men and Armour all return nothing. The Gloucestershire Record Series editions of this material are modern and in copyright. The catalogue descriptions are free; the names are not. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | agree.py, rewritten found something | Whether the archive's own contradiction detector could be made worth reading | 31 flagged pairs became 14, and none of the three changes was tighten the window. A year is now attributed to ONE event rather than to every event nearby; of those, the event word BEFORE the year wins, because English writes married 21 June 1779 and baptised 19 March 1780; and married now matches the abbreviation m. , which born and died already matched and which was why the archive's own pedigree tables read as contradictions. The meta-registers — /worklist, /open-questions, /coverage, /errands, /corrections — joined the skip list, because a sentence EXPLAINING a false positive is indistinguishable from the false positive. That was noticed when the note written to explain the Joseph D'Arcy case became a fresh source for it. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | My own control audit, corrected found something | Whether 59 of 89 nulls name no control was true | It was not; it was too harsh, and the fault was in my detector rather than in the rows. It required a DIGIT, so it missed John Smith across the WHOLE OF CHESHIRE for 1800–1820 returns TWO entries, transcribed in full — 7,967 records, 1545–1903 and Dursley runs to 1951 and Cam to 1939, so the window is well covered — all of them controls, stated in words. Widening it then introduced the opposite fault: it accepted 1841 entries, where the number is a YEAR. The real count is 55 named and 39 unstated of 94. The lesson is that the detector was the wrong shape: ctl is now a FIELD the author sets, and the pattern survives only as the bootstrap that set it once. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | White's History, Gazetteer and Directory of Staffordshire, 1834 and 1851 found nothing | The Sneyds of Well Street, Hanley, in the years between censuses | Neither man is there, and the reason is worth more than the search. SNEYD IS A STAFFORDSHIRE GENTRY NAME: of 63 mentions in the 1834 volume the overwhelming majority are the landed family — Basford Hall, Belmont, Ashcombe, Sneyd Green, the Rev. John Sneyd M.A., Thomas Sneyd Esq., the Misses Elizabeth and Harriot. A search on this surname in this county returns the gentry by default. Two TRADESMEN Sneyds do appear in 1834 with street addresses, SETH SNEYD of Oxford Street and RICHARD SNEYD of New Market Street, and neither is this archive's Samuel the grocer or James the engraver. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | White's Staffordshire — how far the control goes does not cover it | Whether the null is worth anything | Only partly, and the limit is stated rather than hidden. The books are the right books — Hanley 51 mentions, Shelton 36, Piccadilly (a Hanley street) 45, grocer 86 — but Well street appears NOWHERE in either scan, and the 1851 volume's engraver entries are from the Birmingham end of the county, around Soho. The OCR of these two-and-a-half-megabyte directories is poor. So this is a null against a book whose street-by-street sections cannot be shown to be fully readable, which is weaker than the FreeREG nulls and is recorded as such. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Gloucestershire trade directories does not cover it | A digitised county directory that would carry Saniger clothiers and weavers | None found free. The Internet Archive has White's for Staffordshire in two editions and Slater's and Pigot's national directories for Scotland, Manchester and 1878–86, but searches for a Gloucestershire or Bristol county directory of the right period return NOTHING. The Gloucestershire volumes are on subscription sites and at the University of Leicester's Special Collections. The Staffordshire half of this question could be asked; the Gloucestershire half could not. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The atlas gazetteer, for the medieval hamlets does not cover it | Whether Saniger, Wanswell, Hinton, Awre and Blakeney can be put on the map | Only two of the five honestly can. All five geocoded — but WANSWELL, HINTON and SANIGER returned the SAME coordinate, Berkeley's, and BLAKENEY returned AWRE's, every one of them stamped exact by a gazetteer that has simply never heard of the hamlets. Three pins on one point claiming exactness is worse than an omission, so only Saniger and Awre are shown, each saying in its own caption that the point is the PARISH and which neighbours share it. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | agree.py's PLACE half, read for the first time found something | Whether the half of the tool nobody had triaged was saying anything | It was, and the fault was structural. 11 (person, event) pairs carried more than one place, and /sneyd supplied most of them — a SURNAME AGGREGATION PAGE listing every Sneyd in the archive, so a proximity test read four men born in four places as one man born in four. It also put KEELE, seat of the Staffordshire gentry Sneyds, beside a Hanley grocer. Adding the surname pages to SKIP took it to 4, and all four are explicable: Samuel Sneyd born Madeley and living at Hanley, and a George Pitt D'Arcy born at Brisbane in 1864 who is the fourth man of that name, as the archive's own text says. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | crossread.py, run against the rewritten open questions found nothing | Whether it finds anything the archive does not already know | No finding, and the shape is the reason. It reads 903 files and prints, for each open question, every file that mentions the question's terms — a CONCORDANCE, not a detector. It reaches no verdict and flags no conflict, so its output is 900 files of co-occurrence for a reader to triage by hand. Controlled in the sense that it plainly ran and plainly matched: the parentage question returns families.json, register.json, ancestors.json and twenty more. It needs the treatment agree.py had today, or retirement. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The coverage verdicts, read against the template that renders them found something | Whether any verdict displays as something other than what it means | Two did. The template was a FALLTHROUGH CHAIN — good, partial, absent, and everything else cannot answer — so BLOCKED (a source nobody has asked, because it wants an account this archive will not make) rendered as a source that had been asked and could not answer. And one row carried the freehand verdict unusable as a control, which fell through the same way. The vocabulary is now declared in the data, the template looks it up instead of falling through, and a check refuses any verdict outside it. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | J. H. Cooke, Wanswell Court — read entire found something | What the pages nobody had read do to the 1774 sentence | They weaken it as independent testimony and strengthen it as a fact. Cooke names his source: William Thorpe… married URSULA second daughter of JOHN SMYTH OF NIBLEY… TO WHOSE MS. HISTORY OF THE HUNDRED OF BERKELEY, STILL PRESERVED AT THE CASTLE, I AM INDEBTED FOR MOST OF THE FOREGOING PARTICULARS. So the medieval descent is SMYTH'S, and this archive has partly been hearing Smyth twice. But Smyth died in 1641, so the 1774 sale cannot be his — it rests on the Wanswell title deeds Cooke cites elsewhere, or on the Lysons pamphlet. The footnote marker after 1774 survives in the scan; the note does not. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Cooke on the descent of the MANOR, as against the hamlet found something | Whether Saniger Farm and Wanswell are the same property | They are not, and the archive had been asking the question badly. Wanswell went Thorpe (from 1402, ten generations) → Daniel Lysons of Gloucester in 1672 for £3,500 → Colonel Berkeley, afterwards EARL FITZHARDINGE, in 1818 for £25,769, and has ever since formed an integral portion of the Berkeley Castle estate. Saniger was OUTLYING LAND of that manor, sold off in parcels: Cooke prints a summons of 1638 to William Jones, Esq., of Nasse, near Lydney, who had purchased of George Thorpe some outlying land AT SANIGER, part of the manor of Wanswell. So the 1774 sale is a separate, smaller transaction — and more plausible for it. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Rev. D. Lysons, Brief Historical Account of the Manor of Wanswell (1817) found something | A source named by Cooke and unknown to this archive | A quarto pamphlet of 6 pages, published in 1817, now very scarce, written by the family that had owned Wanswell since 1672, a year before they sold it, and quoting the abstract of title. Cooke uses it for the 1672 purchase price. It has not been sought. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Cooke's date for George Thorpe's death does not cover it | Whether went to Virginia, where he died in 1662 can be repeated | It cannot. The George Thorpe of the Virginia Company was killed in the massacre of 1622, and Cooke's own narrative gives the 1672 sale of Wanswell to that man's SON, also George — a man who died in 1662 cannot be succeeded by a son selling ten years later while his father's widow still holds a life interest. 1662 is a misprint or misreading of 1622 and this archive will not repeat it. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Berkeley deeds, for ESSHELESWORTH found something | Where the family came from before it was named from Saniger | Esshelesworth is ASHLEWORTH, a Gloucestershire parish on the Severn north of Gloucester, Domesday's Escelesworde — and the deeds hold the transaction that made the surname. BCM/A/1/24/67, late Henry III: Maurice de Berkel' and THOMAS DE ASSHELWORTH… 7 acres of land in the MANOR OF HAMME, next to the road between the new ditch and Bradeflet; rent 2s. 11d. a year, and Thomas has given him one bezant. The manor of Ham contains Swonhungre, and in the next reign a Thomas de Swonhungre, son of Thomas de Esshelesworth is dealing in the same parish. Graded inferred: nothing says the two Thomases are one man. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The printed Calendars of Inquisitions Post Mortem, for RICHARD II does not cover it | Converting the regnal citations in the TBGAS pedigree to modern references | Not possible from free sources. The digitised run on the Internet Archive is the 1898–1904 series covering Henry III to Edward III, plus one Henry VII volume; the Richard II volumes were published in the twentieth century and are in copyright. Discovery's C 136 series IS name-indexed — C 136/82/12, 17 Rich II, William Wauton, knight: Essex — but no Gloucestershire Wauton or Giffard inquisition surfaces under a plain search. So 16 Richard II part 1 no. 16 and 18 Richard II no. 81 cannot be converted to a modern piece reference from here. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Discovery, for JOHN DE WYKE and the Kingsholm interest found something | Alice's probable father, and the manor the Daubeney marriage brought in | OVERTURNED 17 September. The query had been de Wyke beside Berkeley and Hamme; the phrase John de Wyke in quotation marks returns 78 records, and one of them is BCM/A/1/24/297: Partition of the inheritance of JOHN DE WYKE in HAMME between John, Thomas and John as the sons and heirs of Joan Capel, ALICE DE SWONHONGRE and Agnes de Lorewyng, 14 March 1346. It is the Berkeley copy of DE/M/95 at Hertford, and unlike the Hertford copy it names whose inheritance was divided. Nothing was wrong with the catalogue or the reasoning — the phrase was wrong. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Every external URL this archive cites found something | Whether the sources it points at still resolve | 566 distinct external URLs across the data files. 97 resolve, 429 redirect, 19 refuse a robot (401/403/429) and 21 did not answer — and only those 21 are candidates for a dead citation. The first run of the tool reported 457 of 566 did not return 200 by counting redirects and door policies as losses, which is the cry-wolf shape that makes a report stop being read. A 3xx is a move and a 403 is a site refusing a machine, not a citation that has died. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The medieval people, and whether they belong in the register found something | A decision, not a search | They belong, and /who settles it in its own words: the people this archive met in documents and never had anywhere to put… They are in the record, and LEAVING THEM OUT WOULD BE EDITING IT. Twenty-one are now in build_register.py with the deed that names each — Thomas de Asshelworth, four Stones including Juliana and Elyanora, Alice and Joan, John de Wyke, five wives, and the last John who died in 1401/2. The register rose to 381 record lines and the site to 875 pages. None is claimed as a relative, and /swonhungre still says in terms that no descent joins them to the Sanigers of the registers — that is a question about the tree, not about whether the archive admits what it read. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Discovery, for Gloucestershire poor-law records does not cover it | Settlement examinations and removal orders for Berkeley — the record that names a labourer's parents and birthplace | Not searchable by name, and the reason is structural. Discovery catalogues the Gloucestershire Quarter Sessions as a single series — Q, 1660–2007 — and its item-level entries for the period are Memoranda of convictions, general, bundle by bundle. Parish overseers' records sit in the P series at Gloucestershire Archives and are catalogued at bundle level too. A control shows what itemisation looks like when it exists: the same catalogue lists 195 records for this surname and describes every Berkeley Castle DEED individually. The poor-law records are not indexed by name anywhere reachable, so this is a visit, not a search. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Berkeley Castle Muniments — the COURT ROLLS, as against the deeds does not cover it | The Ham manor court roll of 26 May 1600 that Cooke cites | Not itemised. Discovery describes the BCM deeds one by one — that is where this archive's 195 records came from — but returns only the collection-level BCM, 1153–17th cent for court rolls, and nothing at all for a Ham or Hinton manor roll. Cooke read the roll of 26 May 42 Elizabeth in the 1880s and quoted the homage presenting Nicholas Thorpe's death; the document exists and the catalogue does not reach it. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Discovery, for the partition of 1347 found something | The earlier of the two partitions Cooke names | ANSWERED 17 September, by API rather than by search box. It is DE/M/95 at Hertfordshire Archives, dated 14 March 1346, among the title deeds of the Capells, Earls of Essex — an agreement reciting the purparty between Joan Capel, ALICE DE SWONHONGRE and Agnes de Lorewynge, and naming Thomas de Swonhongre as Alice's heir. The null was not wrong about the box it was typed into. It was wrong about the catalogue. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Bigland, volume 2 — the Forest parishes found nothing | Whether this family is in Awre and Blakeney at all | It is not, and the premise was mine. Volume 2 mentions Awre 172 times and Blakeney 4 across 4.4 million characters, and names no Saniger under any spelling — while volume 1 gives twenty at Berkeley. Rudder mentions Awre 194 times and names none in the whole book. And the 1608 muster puts all eleven men at Halmore, Hinton and Saniger in Berkeley, at Wotton-under-Edge, Woodmancote, Dursley, Paganhill and three Stonehouse hamlets. There is no Forest side of this family. I wrote the phrase into a work-list note this morning and read it back all day as though a source had said it. Now correction 32. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | TBGAS volume 22 — whose deeds they are found something | The numbered series printed in full translation | Documents relating to the Monastery of St Mary Kingswood, belonging to Mr. F. F. FOX. Transcribed by Mr. V. R. PERKINS. Forty-six numbered deeds, in a private collection — a third body of muniments, separate from Berkeley Castle and from Smyth's own papers at Birmingham. Eleven mention this surname. Kingswood Abbey held land in the same parishes, which is why a Swonhungre partition is among them. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Smyth's survey, read for BELLAMY'S PLACE found something | The property whose two halves descended through both sisters until 1605 | Smyth gives the Stone descent independently, and it matches the deeds exactly: Bellamy's Place at Southend in Nibley was anciently… the land of ROBERT DE STONE, FATHER OF ROBERT DE STONE, FATHER OF THOMAS DE STONE, who in the begininge of the raigne of kinge Edward the second was in ward for the same to Thomas then lord Berkeley. Three generations from a survey of about 1639, matching BCM/A/1/24/190 of about 1304, neither depending on the other. Smyth adds that Thomas was a MINOR IN WARD. And the tenure repeats: the xvj[th] part of a knights fee, sute to his hundred Court of Berkeley from 3. weekes to 3. weekes — the same sixteenth Cooke found for Wanswell in the court roll of 1600. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Smyth's survey, for the Great Berkeley Law-suit found nothing | The 15th-century dispute Cooke invokes to explain the Thorpes' castle-guard | Not in volume 3 under that name: law-suit and lawsuit return nought across 1.29 million characters, against a volume mentioning Nibley 73 times and Thorpe 108. The Description of the Hundred is a survey of properties, not a narrative of the family's litigation — that belongs to the LIVES, which are volumes 1 and 2. Cooke's sentence remains this archive's only account of it. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Gentleman's Magazine, 1849 found nothing | GEORGE PITT D'ARCY, died at Parramatta 22 July 1849 | Not there. The volume is 3.5 million characters with 122 obituary sections, and it carries three D'Arcys — Samuel Darcy Dickson of Ballyma[curragh], at an advanced age, D'Arcy Mahon, esq., and an index entry D'Arcy, J. S. 446 — so the magazine does print the name. It simply does not print his. A colonial death in July would in any case sit near the edge of the year's reporting. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Gentleman's Magazine — what can be reached at all does not cover it | Whether the 1805 and 1848 volumes can be opened for Constantine and Joseph | Not from the Internet Archive. 120 identifiers were checked, one metadata record at a time, because the search index stamps every volume 1731 — the series start — and only the per-item year field is true. Of the 120, the years present run 1738, 1748, 1780, 1789, 1795, 1807, 1812, 1816, 1817, 1819, 1823, 1827, 1828, 1829, 1830, 1832, 1834, 1838, 1840, 1841, 1847, 1849, 1850 and onward. Neither 1805 nor 1848 is among them. Constantine died in May 1805 and Joseph in 1848, and the volumes that would carry them are not in this holding. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Bristol Archives, P/St.P and J/D/2(j) — read in full found something | The Swonhungre with two shops in Bristol Market, 1443 | 1. Thomas Dodde of Stapulton', Glos. 2. Richard Venables and JOHN SWONHUNGRE. Premises: two shops with gardens in the Market, between a garden which John Hoper now holds to east, and tenement of Thomas Parkehous to west, extending from the market to Bastelane behind. Three deeds attached. He is a grantee, with a partner, of urban property — and the reference is a PARISH one, St Peter and St James, so the deeds reached the church as endowment. The family's only known Bristol connection is by marriage: Isabel Swonhunger married John Thorpe, a burgess of Bristol, in 1402. Forty years is one generation. No document states any relationship and this archive claims none. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Discovery, for the SERJEANTS of Old Court and for PEDDINGTON found something | The family that took the other half of the Stone inheritance, and the second Saniger household | PEDDINGTON ANSWERED 17 September. E 40/12147 (TNA, 1339) is a release of land in Swonhongre and Weneswelle by Richard Adames of Pedynton; MS 3549/187 (Birmingham, 1626) is an inquisition proving Henry Mallett held in Peddington, Matford and Swanhingne in the manor of Ham. The Serjeants of Old Court are still not found. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | William son of William Swanhangre — resolved, probably found something | Whether the chantry licence of 1356 contradicts the Berkeley deeds of the same year | Probably not: they are probably two men. BCM/A/1/36/24 leases Hinton land to THOMAS SON OF WILLIAM DE SWONHONGRE, Maud his wife and John the younger their son, so a William had a son Thomas; the chantry gives that William a son William and a wife Alienor. The William of BCM/A/1/24/184 is a different household — son of John, brother and heir of Thomas of Wanswell. Two men of one name living at once is this family's commonest pattern: a Thomas in every generation and four Johns. Recorded as a resolution, not a proof — no deed says they are two, and nothing rules out one. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Monthly Army List, January 1815 found something | Robert and Joseph D'Arcy in the last January of the war | Both. ROBERT D'ARCY, R. ENG. appears three times in the brevet and seniority lists, each time beside the men he had been commissioned and promoted with — GEORGE BRIDGES and SAMUEL T. DICKENS, both entered do., and George W. Dixon of the Royal Artillery. The same volume carries JOSEPH DARCY, ROY. ART. and a Lt. Col. D'Arcy, h.p. the OCR will not let anyone attribute. Thirty D'Arcy hits in 1.8 million characters, in a scan bad enough that his exact rank cannot be read. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The annual Army Lists, 1776–1815, on the Internet Archive does not cover it | Whether the run can be walked year by year at all | It cannot. 120 Army List identifiers were checked one metadata record at a time — the search index is unusable for years, the same fault as the Gentleman's Magazine — and exactly ONE falls between 1776 and 1815: the Monthly Army List for January 1815. The 1778, 1781, 1783, 1802, 1803 and 1821 editions this archive holds came from separate searches under different titles. There is no digitised annual run to walk. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | MS 3549 browsed by place instead of by surname found something | What else is in John Smyth's own collection | 114 distinct items surfaced, and the shape is clear: it is overwhelmingly Smyth's own Nibley estate and Berkeley-hundred business — leases, bonds, wills and letters addressed to him at North Nibley, fifteenth to seventeenth century. Two matter here. MS 3549/167, 20 February 1618: Bond from GEORGE THORPE of Wandeswell (Wanswell), co. Glouc., esq., and Arnold Oldisworth of Brad[ley] — the Thorpe who sold the outlying Saniger land and went to Virginia, bound with an Oldisworth, and Cooke gives William Thorpe's second wife as Bridget Oldisworth of Bradley. And MS 3549/154, 1612/13: Certified copy of extracts from LE BLACKE BOOKE in Berkeley Castle — Smyth's own working extracts from a castle register. Browsing by place finds what a surname search cannot. |
| 15 Sep 2026 | The Berkeley estate deeds, for Cooke's conveyance of 1774 found nothing | Whether the deed behind sold by Edward Saniger to the Earl of Berkeley in 1774 is catalogued | Not found. Of 56 catalogued records naming Saniger and Berkeley, exactly one falls between 1760 and 1800 — D2957/41/190 of 4 January 1791, the Plomer-to-Vizard conveyance of the Great and Little Horse Marsh. There is no 1774 conveyance in the catalogue. Cooke was writing in 1882 with the Wanswell title deeds and Berkeley's muniments in front of him; whatever he saw is in neither of the two catalogues reachable from here. The claim stays inferred and the errand stands. control named |
| 15 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — WO 46/10, Board of Ordnance found something | Constantine D'Arcy, the second D'Arcy in Connolly's Roll | A record that names an Ordnance D'Arcy's PARENT — the first this archive has found. CONSTANTINE D'ARCY. Appointed 25 March 1775. Profession of parent: LIEUTENANT IN THE 95TH REGIMENT. The list gives each military surveyor's appointment date and his father's trade; the neighbours are a butler to the Earl of Albemarle, a vintner and a publican. It is not Robert's son, who was christened at Barbados on 18 February 1786 — so there were at least two Constantine D'Arcys in Ordnance service, a generation apart. Whether the 1775 man is Robert's brother, cousin, father or no relation is NOT CLAIMED: the inference would run on a forename, a service and a decade, which is the shape of every identification this archive has had to retract. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1851 census, Sneyd at Hanley found something | The Well Street household, and what became of Catherine Sneyd | Seven Sneyds in the Stoke upon Trent district, in two households, and Catherine is in neither. WELL STREET: Samuel 72 grocer b. Madeley; Elizabeth 71 b. Oswestry; James 33 ENGRAVER b. Hanley, Son, Married; Elizabeth Ann 11; and Harvey Bradbury, a visiting shoemaker. QUEEN STREET, a mile off: Ann 31 dressmaker with Mary 8 and James A, aged 0. Every child of James and Ann is accounted for except Catherine, born Hanley 1845 (HAN/007/057). She is five or six years old in March 1851 and she is not in either house. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1851 census, Queen Street, Stoke upon Trent found something | Who Ann Biddulph's parents were | Named outright. Ann is enumerated as DAUGHTER, Married, a dressmaker of 31 born at Shelton, in the household of JOHN BIDDULPH, Head, 53, COAL DEALER, born BERMONDSEY, SURREY and JULIA his wife, 52, born Shelton, with two unmarried daughters — Mary, 21, a paintress, and Eliza, 19, a servant — and two of Ann's own children entered as grandchildren. This archive said in the morning that Ann's parents were a generation this archive has never had. It has them by lunchtime, and the naming falls into place: their second daughter was Mary JULIA. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales Deaths 1837-2007 found something | Catherine Sneyd, born Hanley 1845 and absent from the 1851 census | She died as a child. Catherine Sneyd · death quarter 4 · 1849 · Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire, GRO index volume 17, page 114. Searched across the whole of England and Wales for every Catherine Sneyd death registered between 1845 and 1852 — eight years, exactly one result — and it is in the right district and the right window. She was born at Hanley in 1845, HAN/007/057, mother's maiden name Biddulph, and she had been dead sixteen months when the census of March 1851 was taken. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — the Prerogative Court of Canterbury does not cover it | Whether the subscription reaches PROB 11/1728/64, Robert D'Arcy's own will | It does not. FindMyPast has no PCC wills set. Controlled two ways: a search for Robert D'Arcy dying 1825–29 returns 125 records across nine categories and not one probate set — the sets are Kent Burials, Westminster Baptisms, British Army Lists, Army Officer Promotions, Royal and Imperial Calendars, Irish Chancery and Exchequer bill books, and the Edinburgh Gazette. And a search for Elizabeth Saniger, whose will is PROB 11/1825/326, returns 17 records of which the death is the National Burial Index, not a will. The four PCC wills stay where they were: digitised at Kew, free, behind a sign-in this archive will not make. control named |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — British Army Lists & Commission Registers 1661-1826 found something | The annual run this archive concluded could not be walked | It exists as a searchable set, and it corrects yesterday's conclusion. Robert D'Arcy appears in it at 1778, 1802 and 1803, and in British Army Officer Promotions 1800-1815 at 1802, 1804, 1805 and 1813, and in Britain, Royal and Imperial Calendars 1767-1973 at 1805 and 1808. Yesterday this archive checked 120 Internet Archive identifiers one metadata record at a time, found exactly one volume between 1776 and 1815, and concluded there is no digitised annual run to walk. There is — it is indexed rather than page-image, and it is behind this subscription. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973 found nothing | The marriage of John Saniger and Lydia, about 1797 | Not there. The set holds 66 Saniger marriages in all, including Berkeley ones in 1746 and 1748, and not one between 1782 and 1812 under that spelling. So the set covers the parish and the surname and does not hold this marriage in a thirty-year window around the date the tree gives. Either it happened elsewhere, or under a spelling not yet tried, or the set's Berkeley coverage thins after the 1740s — which is the next thing to establish. control named |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975 found nothing | Hannah Saniger's baptism — she was about 35 in 1841, so born about 1806 | Not found, and the set names fathers, which is what makes the null worth having. Three Hannah SANIGER baptisms, all at Berkeley: 1746 father Thomas, and 1772 father William (entered twice). Two Hannah SANIGAR baptisms, both Bristol 1831, father William. None is hers — 1772 would make her 69 in 1841 and 1831 would make her ten. The spellings SINNEGAR, SINEGAR and SYNEGAR, which dominate the Berkeley registers, have not yet been tried. control named |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Kent Marriages and Banns, and Westminster Baptisms found something | Two D'Arcy records at the edge of this family, noted and not claimed | A D'ARCY marriage at CHATHAM ST MARY in 1806, with no forenames given in the index — the parish where Robert D'Arcy was buried in 1827 and where his son Constantine was commissioned. And a ROBERT D'ARCY baptised 1770 at ST GEORGE, HANOVER SQUARE, Westminster — almost certainly a different man, since this archive's Robert was buried aged 76 in 1827 and so born about 1751. Both are recorded because they will be found again; neither is claimed. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, the whole Saniger run found something | Whether an index exists that names the FATHER | It does, and this archive has never had one. 158 Saniger baptisms with a Father's first name(s) column, 1625 to the 1820s, across Berkeley, Thornbury, Dursley, Stone and King's Stanley. The find in the first page: ANN SANIGER, baptised Berkeley 1798, father JOHN — a sister this archive's tree asserts and for whom it had no baptism, three years before William's of 1801. The remaining seven pages have not been read. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Hannah under the register spellings found nothing | SINNEGAR, the commonest form in the Berkeley registers | No Hannah Sinnegar baptism in England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975 — against a set that returns 158 for SANIGER and five for SANIGAR including two at Bristol. So the null is about the spelling rather than the set. SINEGAR and SYNEGAR, the other two dominant register forms, have not yet been tried. control named |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, complete SANIGER pass found something | All 158 SANIGER baptisms read in baptism-year order, eight pages, 1571 to 1909 | 156 of the 158 name a father. The Berkeley children of John Saniger stand documented with their father named in the index — Ann 1798, William 1801, John 1803, Thomas 1808, beside Hannah Sanigor 1804. No Hannah under SANIGER between 1777 and 1817, which is now a read null rather than a guess. 33 of the 158 are duplicate entries (125 distinct name-year-place). No Awre, no Blakeney, nothing west of the Severn in 268 years. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, fifteen spellings found something | SANIGER, SANIGAR, SAINGER, SINEGAR, SINNEGAR, SYNAGER, SANNIGER, SANEGAR, SINNEGER, SYNIGAR, SANIGOR, SINAGER, SYNEGAR, SANIGAER, SENIGAR | 340 baptisms, 1565 to 1909, every entry of every spelling read. SYNEGAR, SANIGAER and SENIGAR returned nothing. Three results: SANIGOR, the form Hannah was baptised under, returns 4 in 437 years — one entry in eighty-five; the 44-year hole in SANIGER at Berkeley, 1632-1676, is filled by 26 SAINGER entries and is a spelling rather than a gap; and the -ANIG- forms sit in the Severn Vale while the -INEG- forms sit on the Cotswold scarp eight miles east, with different patriarchs. Written up at /spellings. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales Deaths 1837-2007 found something | Lydia, died 1851, Gloucestershire | LYDIA SANIGAR, September quarter 1851, Thornbury district, GRO vol 11 p 329 — one of 21 Lydias dying in the county that year. Confirms the tree's died 7 July 1851 at Berkeley for Hannah's mother, and confirms she died under a Saniger surname. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973 found nothing | A Saniger marrying a Lydia at Berkeley, 1793-1803, under eight spellings | None. Berkeley has 272 marriages indexed for those eleven years, so the parish is covered. The only Lydia marrying at Berkeley between 1790 and 1810 is LYDIA JONES, 8 January 1798, and the transcript gives her husband as JOHN SAWYER. The FamilySearch tree's John Saniger married Lydia Jones at Berkeley in 1797 does not survive the spouse's surname. 21 September: asked again with no spelling list at all, and the null holds. SNG across Gloucestershire for 1793-1803 returns 122 rows, every one read. Six are genuinely this surname and none of them is a John, and none marries a Lydia.** The eight spellings were not the limitation; the record is not in this set. control named |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975 found nothing | Lydia Jones baptised in Gloucestershire, 1765-1775 | No Lydia Jones at all, against 939 Jones baptisms in the county in the same eleven years. The tree's born 13 March 1770 at Wotton-under-Edge is not in this index. Wotton-under-Edge could not be isolated as a place string, so the control is county-wide rather than parish-level. SUPERSEDED IN PART the same day: the 1851 census gives her birthplace as Wooton under Edge and her age as 81, so the place and the year are documented from a record even though the baptism is not in this index. control named |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973, eight spellings found something | SANIGER, SAINGER, SANIGAR, SINEGAR, SANEGAR, SINNEGAR, SANIGOR, SANNIGER | 135 marriages, 1588 to 1907. Berkeley dominates the -ANIG- forms and Dursley, North Nibley and Stinchcombe the -INEG- forms, exactly as the baptisms do. No Saniger marriage of any spelling at Berkeley between 1784 and 1805. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1851 England, Wales & Scotland Census found something | Lydia Sanigar | One result, and it is hers: Lydia Sanigar, 81, widow, formly labourers wife, born Wooton under Edge, living at the Village of Ham in Berkeley as MOTHER IN LAW to the widowed Ann Sanigar. HO107/1957 f.561 p.13 sch.46. Confirms the birthplace and age the tree gives, and places Hannah's mother's family at Ham. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1841 England, Wales & Scotland Census found something | Sanigar in Gloucestershire | 24 entries. Four are one household at Clapton, Ham, Berkeley: John 35, Anne 40, and William 6, John 6 and Mary 3 — which proves the two 1835 Berkeley baptisms to a father John are TWINS and not an index duplicate. HO107/347 bk 6 f.3 p.1 sch.761. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales Deaths 1837-2007 found something | John Sanigar / Saniger, 1835-1855 | John Sanigar, first quarter of 1850, Thornbury district — which is why Ann Sanigar is a widow at Ham in the March of 1851. Under SANIGER the same window returns nothing, so the spelling carried the record. |
| 16 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Deaths & Burials 1538-1991 found nothing | Saniger and Sanigar burials in Gloucestershire; John Saniger at Berkeley, 1815-1830 | 23 SANIGER burials, every one at Berkeley, the last in 1787; 3 SANIGAR, all Bristol; SANIGOR none. Nothing at Berkeley between 1810 and 1830. The control kills the null: Berkeley burials of any surname return 442 for 1735-1765 and 2 for 1800-1830, so the set simply stops there. John Saniger's burial at Berkeley in January 1825 is documented elsewhere and is not in this index. control named |
| 16 Sep 2026 | RCB Library, Dublin — Representative Church Body found something | Which Church of Ireland registers survive for Co. Wicklow, 1815-1825, and in whose custody | Replied in three days. The holdings are published — the List of Church of Ireland Parish Registers marks the parishes the Library holds and links to each one's registers and dates. Nothing of theirs is online: All of our registers must be searched manually and in person. They will search for a fee on request. So the Wicklow question is not closed by loss — it is closed by distance, and it opens again the moment a parish can be named. |
| 17 Sep 2026 | Church of Ireland — List of Church of Ireland Parish Registers (PDF) could not be reached | The holdings list the RCB Library linked, to read the Wicklow parishes and their dates | churchofireland.org is behind a Cloudflare bot check — This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots — on both a direct fetch and the browser, and this archive does not pass bot checks. The librarian also attached the Wicklow parish list as an image, which the mail tools here cannot download. The list is public and free and this archive still cannot read it, which is the same wall that already closed irishgenealogy.ie — her own first recommendation. |
| 17 Sep 2026 | Church of Ireland — List of Church of Ireland Parish Registers (PDF) found something | Which Wicklow parishes have MARRIAGE registers covering 1819 | READ AT LAST, and it overturns this archive's premise. At least 25 Wicklow parishes hold marriage registers covering 1819 — Arklow 1798-1861, Bray 1670-1956, Wicklow town 1729-1998, Baltinglass 1815-1836, Rathdrum 1706-2006 and twenty more. The county's Anglican marriage registers did not all burn in 1922. The site's Cloudflare interstitial cleared by itself in an ordinary browser; nothing was solved. |
| 17 Sep 2026 | irishgenealogy.ie — church records found nothing | D'Arcy marriages in Co. Wicklow, 1810-1830 | None, and the null is worthless: SMITH marrying in Wicklow church records 1810-1830 also returns nothing, while the identical query against Dublin returns page after page. The site's church records do not cover Co. Wicklow at all. Recorded as blocked here since 15 September; it opened on 17 September in an ordinary browser, and the answer was a coverage gap rather than a wall. control named |
| 17 Sep 2026 | irishgenealogy.ie — church records found something | Every D'Arcy marriage in Ireland, 1810-1830 | 132 results across the counties the site covers, none of them Wicklow. One is noted and not claimed: JOHN D'ARCY married LOUISA BAGOTT SNEYD at St George's, Dublin, 3 March 1820 — this archive's two principal surnames in one entry, almost certainly a coincidence, written down so it is not rediscovered later and mistaken for a finding. |
| 17 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — transcripts of every marriage this archive cites from an index found something | All 51 marriage entries in the register, of which 5 came from FindMyPast index sets | Four re-opened at transcript level and all four hold: Robert Darcy m. Jean WARD (Portsea 1779), Hannah Saniger m. James WAKEFIELD (Bristol 1831), Thomas Saniger m. Catherine COTTON (Berkeley 1769), Thomas Sanigre m. Martha GOLDING (Bristol 1828). The fifth, Joseph Ward and Marth Gairden at South Leith 1747, could not be re-opened because the record set would not resolve — named rather than counted clean. Also established: Hampshire Marriages, a different collection with a different owner, has the same result-row columns and the same missing spouse surname, so the defect is FindMyPast's rather than one dataset's. |
| 17 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — the JSON API, all 15 surname spellings found something | Every Discovery record for SANIGER and its variants, asked identically | 134 distinct catalogue records in 12 repositories — Berkeley Castle Muniments 41, Gloucestershire Archives 35, TNA Kew 33, Bristol Archives 14. New here: IR 26/352/152, the will abstract of Edward Sanniger, mariner of Chepstow, 1806, with the will itself at the National Library of Wales (LL/1806/24); ADM 139/739/33888, Frederick Charles Sanegar born Bristol; WO 416/319/166, Dennis Sanigar of Bristol, a German record card of a British prisoner of war. |
| 17 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — the JSON API, the medieval spellings found something | Swonhungre and its eight variants, asked identically | 193 distinct records; 183 are Berkeley Castle Muniments. (First published as 170 and 160 — the tool was truncating at a hundred records per query; corrected 20 September, and the ten non-Berkeley records below are unchanged.) The ten that are not include C 241/174/26 and C 131/202/27, a statute-staple debt of £400 in 1385 naming WILLIAM SWANNANGER OF SWANNANGER, ESQUIRE, and the writ on which the Sheriff of Surrey could not find him; MS 3549/20, Elias de Swonhangre granting in the hamlet in 1377; MS 3549/4, William Swonhungre and Isabella his wife holding Wanswell and Nibley; and P/St.P and J/D/2(j), John Swonhungre with two shops in the Old Market, Bristol, in 1443. |
| 17 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — nonsense terms, as a control on the instrument found nothing | SANIGAAER, ZANIGAR, XQVWPLT, SANIGRE, SANNIGAR | All five return nothing, while SANIGER returns 71 and SANIGAR 44. Run because SANIGAER returns exactly the same 44 as SANIGAR, which looked like loose matching and is in fact one normalisation rule. The counts on this page can therefore be set beside each other. SANIGRE and SANNIGAR returning nothing also reproduces what this archive found by hand on 15 September. control named |
| 17 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — every published null of this archive's, re-run through the API found something | Sneyd of Madeley · Wakefield of Bristol · D'Arcy wills in Kent · John de Wyke · Berkeley poor law · Portsea registers | Six re-run. One overturned: John de Wyke, where the earlier query used the wrong phrase and missed the 1346 partition. Three confirmed, and confirmed for the reason they gave: Sneyd AND Madeley returns 15 and every one is Ralph Sneyd of Keele or Poor Law Union correspondence, not this family's deeds; Berkeley poor law returns only Quarter Sessions bundle-level descriptions of the shape Q/SR/1811/C, which is exactly the structural answer already published; and Portsea returns a hospital chapel register of 1919 and two Royal Artillery brigade registers, but no parish register for 1770-1800. Two others — Wakefield of Bristol and D'Arcy wills in Kent — cannot be re-tested by counting, because the original claim was that 232 hits contain nothing of this family, and that is a reading rather than a query. |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973, eight spellings, whole country found nothing | Any Saniger marrying anywhere in England, 1790-1802 | None. The last before the gap is John Saniger to Elizabeth at Thornbury in 1790; the next after it is William Saniger to Mary at Thornbury in 1803. Controlled twice on the parishes that matter: Berkeley has 272 marriages indexed for 1793-1803, and Wotton-under-Edge — Lydia's birthplace — has ten full pages for 1792-1802. Both are well covered and neither holds this marriage. control named |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973 found nothing | A Lydia marrying a John at Wotton-under-Edge, her own parish, 1792-1802 | One candidate in eleven years — Lydia Howell, 2 April 1794, spouse Jno. — and the transcript gives his surname as COSSENS. Not this family. Found and dismissed by opening the transcript, which is the habit this archive adopted on 16 September after the same result row produced a false marriage for Lydia Jones. control named |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1851 census, the Village of Ham read as a street found nothing | Any relative of Lydia Sanigar among her neighbours | None. Household transcript identifiers run in sequence, so the neighbours either side can be read off: Samuel and Mary Ann Nelmes with their infant daughter on one side, Stephen Smith, farmer, 57, born Berkeley, with his wife and three servants on the other. No stated relationship to Lydia and no Jones in the village. The method works — it simply did not answer this. control named |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — 1861 and 1871 censuses could not be reached | Jane, Catherine and Charlotte D'Arcy at Brighton | NOT ANSWERED, and the reason is the instrument. Nothing returns under DARCY, D'ARCY, ARCY, DARCEY or DACRY in Sussex in 1861 — but a control run for CATHERINE SMITH born about 1789 in Sussex also returns zero, which cannot be true of any English county in 1861. The yearofbirth filter combined with county silently returns nothing on FindMyPast's census sets, so every null built that way is an artefact. Recorded as blocked rather than null: the question was never actually asked. In 1851 Catherine was indexed as ARCY, so the route is an address search on Bedford Square and Western Cottages, which FindMyPast's URL parameters do not expose. |
| 20 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery — Wakefield of Bristol, re-read rather than counted found nothing | Whether any of the 232 Wakefield-and-Bristol records is this family | The original null said 232 hits and not one is this family, which was a reading and not a query. A hundred of the 232 have now been read by machine against every forename in this household — James, Hannah, Ephraim, Zillah, Jabez, Hiram, Miriam — and the Saniger spellings. Three name-matches, all Chancery causes of 1869 (C 16/612/W239, W256, W233), fifteen years after this family sailed for Queensland and none of them naming a person in it. The reading stands so far as it has gone; 132 records remain unread. control named |
| 20 Sep 2026 | TNA Discovery and the National Library of Wales found something | Edward Sanniger, mariner of Chepstow, died 1806 | Both records confirmed by reference. IR 26/352/152 at Kew: Abstract of Will of Edward Sanniger, Mariner of Chepstow, Monmouthshire. Proved in the Llandaff., 28 November 1806. LL/1806/24 at the National Library of Wales is the will itself — Diocese of Llandaf, parish and township of Chepstow. Chepstow is across the Severn from Berkeley and a mariner is how a Vale surname crosses water. Nothing joins him to this family, and he is recorded as a lead rather than a relative. |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms, the Cotswold scarp found something | The -INEG- family of Dursley, Cam, Stinchcombe and North Nibley | Six patriarchs and their children pulled out of the fifteen-spelling sweep and written up: Abraham of Dursley (1698-1720), Daniel of Cam (twelve children, 1729-1760), John of Cam (1677-1680), Thomas of Cam (1770-1788), Benjamin of Stinchcombe and North Nibley, and William of King's Stanley (1591-96, the oldest register entries the surname produces). Daniel's twelve are the largest sibling group the name yields anywhere. Two repeated forenames — two Solomons, two Deborahs — each imply a burial not yet looked for. |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — British Army Lists & Commission Registers 1661-1826 found something | Robert D'Arcy, and every officer of the surname | Three entries for Robert: 1778, Practitioner Engineer and Second Lieutenant, The Corps of Engineers; 1802, Captain, Corps of Royal Engineers; and 1803, the same. Rank at both ends of the twenty-four-year gap this archive once wrongly called a blank. Also George D'Arcy, 1826, 39th or Dorsetshire, and a cohort of unrelated officers — Francis of the 48th across seventeen years, John Pomeroy of the 64th in America, Hyacinth of the 83rd, and a John D'Arcy in the Royal Veteran Companies, New South Wales, 1826, the year this family arrived there. |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — British Army Lists, the yearofrecord filter found nothing | Whether this record set can be narrowed to a year | It cannot, and the filter fails silently. Asking for SMITH in 1790 returns twenty rows dated 1673, 1678, 1689, 1690, 1692, 1693, 1704, 1707, 1709, 1781, 1802, 1803 and 1826 — and no 1790 at all. The parameter is thrown away. Recorded so that no future session builds a null on it, and so that the absence of Robert between 1784 and 1802 is not mistaken for the absence of Robert. control named |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms, the two transcripts found something | Whether the 1804 Jno Saniger at Berkeley is a duplicate of the 1803 one | It is not. The 1803 entry (18 September) names a father, JNO SANIGER, and no mother; the 1804 entry (11 February) names a mother, MARY SANIGER, and no father. Consecutive index numbers five months apart, which is what made a duplicate look likely from the result rows — and the mother is on the transcript only. A named mother beside an empty father's column is how a register records a base-born child. Not Hannah's family: her mother was Lydia. |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Scotland, Parish Marriages & Banns 1561-1893 found something | Joseph Ward and Marth Gairden, South Leith, 1747 — the fifth marriage of the audit | Confirmed, and the audit is now complete at five of five. The set would not resolve under any datasetname on 17 September; it resolves through a cross-set search with place=south+leith and no dataset. The transcript gives spouse's last name GAIRDEN and a field the result row never shows — spouse's father, WILLIAM GAIRDEN. The argument made for this record three days ago, that somebody must have read past the row because a row never carries a father, was right; it is now checked instead. |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975 found nothing | Catherine Cotton's baptism — she married Thomas Saniger at Berkeley in 1769 | No Catherine Cotton baptised in Gloucestershire in the decades she must belong to. She married Thomas Saniger at Berkeley on 10 April 1769, so a birth about 1745 is expected. Controlled in the same session: COTTON in Gloucestershire between 1735 and 1755 returns 27 baptisms, of Edvardus, Thomas, Frances, Mary, Lydia, Isaac, Robert, Betty, Sarah, George, John, Elizabeth and Charles — and no Catherine at all. The only two Catherine Cottons in the county are Newnham 1701 and Clifton 1836. She was baptised somewhere else, or under something other than COTTON, or in a register this set does not transcribe. This row was published as inconclusive earlier the same day, when the identical control returned zero because the page was read before it had rendered. Re-run with a longer wait it returned twenty rows, which is the whole reason the control rule now requires one that comes back with something. control named |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — three ways the site returns a meaningless zero found something | A control on the instrument itself, after three suspicious nulls in one day | One. A year filter combined with county returns zero on the census sets — Catherine Smith born about 1789 in Sussex returns nothing, which cannot be true. Two. yearofrecord is thrown away by the Army Lists: asking for 1790 returns rows from 1673 to 1826 and no 1790. Three. Results render asynchronously, so a page read a moment early gives a zero indistinguishable from a real one. The rule here tightens: a control must be run in the same session and return rows, not merely exist. Re-tested the same evening: the census control still returns zero on a fifteen-second wait while the baptism control returns twenty, so faults one and three are genuinely different things — one is a parameter the search discards, the other is a page read too early. |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973, Chatham 1806 found something | The unattributed D'Arcy marriage at Chatham St Mary in 1806 | It is not unattributed and it is not new. One result: Margaret Maria Isabella D'Arcy to John Maddock, Chatham, 1806 — the marriage this archive already holds in full from FreeREG and from two newspapers, to John Maddock Jones of Penybryn, Ruabon. The record at the edge of the family was this family's own record appearing in a second index under a shorter form of the groom's name. One loose end closed by de-duplication rather than discovery. |
| 20 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975 could not be reached | A Robert D'Arcy baptised about 1770, said to be at St George, Hanover Square | Could not be re-found, and the reason is the index rather than the man. D'ARCY returns nothing in this set; DARCY returns rows — but their Baptism year column is empty and they carry a birth year instead, so yearofbaptism filters them all out whatever the years. Switching to yearofbirth returns nothing either, for any DARCY born between 1755 and 1785. Recorded as blocked: this set cannot be asked the question in the shape the question needs. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, the complete spelling recount found something | Every form in this archive's own spelling table, asked the same way on one basis | 24 spellings tried, 19 productive, 371 baptisms 1565-1909. Nine forms from this archive's own table had never been swept: SINIGER 7, SINEGER 6, SANEGER 8, SANNEGAR 4, SANIGEAR 3, SINIGAR 2, SANNIGAR 1, and SANYGER and SYNIGER nought — which is the finding that survived the change of basis, since they are the 1608 muster's forms and appear in no register anywhere. Controlled in the same session: SANIGER returned 158, reproducing the count published on 17 September exactly. SINGER and SANGER excluded — 127 and 40 in Gloucestershire alone, because they are ordinary surnames rather than forms of this one. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, Hampshire found nothing | Whether the national baptism set can answer anything about Portsea | It cannot. No DARCY at Portsea — and no SMITH either, which is the control that matters: 3 Smith baptisms in the whole of Hampshire against 41,098 in Kent, asked the same way in the same session. Hampshire is not in this set. Every Hampshire question this archive has answered used the Hampshire Genealogical Society's county sets instead, which is why none of its Portsea findings are affected. control named |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Hampshire Baptisms (Hampshire Genealogical Society) found nothing | Every D'Arcy baptism in the county, read end to end — the eight other children the tree gives Robert and Jean | 44 entries, all read. Exactly one is theirs: Joseph, 1780, father Robert, mother Jean, Portsea St Mary. The tree gives them nine children and the county holds one. The control is the set's own Portsea coverage: seven other D'Arcy children were baptised in that parish between 1802 and 1836 to four different fathers — Chrytophori, Thomas, John, and Christophori. The parish is plainly in the book. It does not follow that the eight did not exist; Robert was an engineer officer and two of his children were christened at St Michael, Barbados. It follows that Portsea is finished as a question. control named |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973, SANIGRE found something | Thomas Sinegar's marriage, under the one spelling this archive's table did not hold | Found, and it is the only SANIGRE in the set. Thomas Sanigre, 1828, spouse Martha, Bristol, Gloucestershire — one result asked nationally with no filters at all, and the same one result when the county and a twenty-year window are added, so the filters are not hiding anything. This settles a null row this archive had carried since 13 September. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, SANIGRE found nothing | Whether the spelling that carries the marriage carries any baptism at all | Nought, nationally, with no other filter. Control in the same session and the same shape: SANIGER returns 158, which is the figure the spelling table already held, so the zero is the surname and not the search. SANIGRE is therefore a real form of this name that appears in no baptism register the set transcribes — which is why a spelling table built from baptisms could not see it, and why it is now in that table at nought. control named |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973, Gloucestershire 1820-1840 found something | A control for the SANIGRE find: do the principal spellings return marriages in that window? | They do, and neither returns Thomas. SANIGER gives 8 — including Hannah's own to James in 1831, indexed four times over — and SANIGAR gives 3, all three being one marriage, Margaret Ann to Daniel in 1837. The window, the county filter and the set are all working. The only thing that was wrong with the original search was the list of spellings put to it. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, the five largest spellings read row by row found something | Whether the spelling table's 371 is a count of baptisms or a count of index entries | Entries. All 298 rows of SANIGER, SANIGAR, SAINGER, SINEGAR and SINNEGAR were read and counted as events: 121, 45, 29, 27 and 26 — 248, and 246 once two baptisms indexed under two spellings are counted once. Fifty repeats in 298 rows. The repetition is concentrated: SANIGER and SANIGAR carry 48 of the 50 and SINNEGAR carries none, because those are the forms whose parishes the set transcribes twice over. Page counts matched the stated totals exactly at every form, which is how the read was checked. Own error 39. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973, county coverage found something | Whether the national marriage set holds Hampshire at all | It holds none of it. SMITH in Hampshire, no other filter, whole span: 0 results. SMITH in Gloucestershire, same shape, same minute: 14,056. A zero that large against a control that large is a statement about the transcription. Asked because a D'Arcy marriage search in Hampshire returned nothing and the archive was about to record it as a fact about the family. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales Deaths 1837-2007, the district parameter found something | Why a death index that plainly holds a district returns nothing for it | district works; place and registrationdistrict return a silent zero. The results table prints a District column, so both wrong names look right. Proved by narrowing a query that returns 128 Joseph Smiths dying in 1848 down to the one at Reading with district=reading, while place=lymington returned nought for SMITH — which cannot be true of any English district. One more way this site answers a question nobody asked. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales Deaths 1837-2007, PITT at Lymington found something | Elizabeth Pitt, and whether her registration there points at the D'Arcys | Her death is confirmed — Elizabeth Pitt, first quarter of 1851, Lymington — and the inference built on it is weaker than it looked. PITT is an ordinary surname in that district: 21 Pitt deaths registered there between 1820 and 1900, among them Catherine 1883, Catherine Maria 1843, James, John, John Daniel, Martha, Mary. That she died in the district where she had been living in 1841 is therefore unremarkable, and is not on its own evidence of kinship with the family she was living with. What she was to the D'Arcys still needs the certificate or a will. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Hampshire Marriages (Hampshire Genealogical Society) found something | Every D'Arcy marriage in the county, read end to end — and Joseph's, which the national set could not answer | 22 entries between 1748 and 1880, all read; 17 marriages once the duplicates are removed. Robert Darcy and Jean Ward, Portsea St Mary, 21 June 1779 is in it — and this archive already had it. It is the first row of the marriage audit, opened at transcript level on 17 September. Re-reading the transcript today confirms it again and adds nothing; the row is recorded because the search was nearly written up as a discovery, which is the mistake this archive made on 13 September with Ann Saniger's baptism. What is new is the absence around it. In the whole county set the family has that one marriage and Joseph's 1780 baptism and nothing else — no second child, no burial, and no marriage for Joseph at any date under either spelling. That last is a finding that had to be re-made today: the version published on 14 September came from England Marriages 1538-1973, which holds no Hampshire at all. The county set does, and its own hold on this family is the control. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales Non-Conformist Births and Baptisms, Bristol found nothing | Errand 18: the Bristol chapel registers, every spelling at once | Nought, and this time every spelling really was asked. The surname box takes wildcards, so SNGR at Bristol puts one query where a list of twenty-five would have gone — and it returns no entry of any form. Three controls in the same session and the same shape: SMITH at Bristol returns 133 chapel baptisms, Congregational and Presbyterian, 1724 to 1831; the same wildcard without a place returns 808; and SANIGAR returns 8**, so the surname is in the set. The Bristol chapels are indexed, this name is indexed, and the two do not meet. control named |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales Non-Conformist Burials, Bristol found nothing | The same question asked of burials rather than baptisms | Nine rows at Bristol and not one of them is the name. SNGR returns Singer five times, Springer, Stringer twice and Swearenger — Baptist and Presbyterian burials between 1704 and 1812. A control cannot do better than this**: the query returned rows, at the right place, in the right register series, and the surname is not among them. The whole set holds 409 under the same wildcard. control named |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales Non-Conformist Births and Baptisms, SANIGAR found something | Where this surname does appear in the chapel registers | Eight entries and all eight are at one chapel: Dursley, Corn Meeting, Congregational. Rose, daughter of Willm, 1781; then Thomas Browning Sanigar's children — Emily Sophia 1851, Fanny 1852, Rachel Harris 1854, Edward Thomas 1856 — and Thomas Sanigar's — Susanna 1861, Albert Thomas 1863, Hester Jane 1866. The scarp branch of this family was Congregational, which no page of this archive has said. And the same entries appear in England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, so that set is not purely Anglican: it ingests RG 4 as well, and some of the duplication counted on /spellings is one register reaching the index by two routes. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — the surname box takes wildcards found something | Whether one query can replace a list of spellings | It can, and it finds what the list missed. SNG in Gloucestershire, marriages 1827-1829, returns 53 rows — among them Thomas Sanigre, 1828, Martha, Bristol, the entry eight named spellings failed to find and which this archive recorded as not existing. It also turns up John Saniger, 1827, Ann, Rodborough AND John Sanigor, 1827, Ann, Rodborough — one marriage under two spellings, one of them the rare form that had already hidden Hannah's baptism. The cost is strangers**: the same 53 rows include Sanger, Shearing and Sheering. So the wildcard is not a shortcut, it is a different trade — a wider net read row by row, inside a narrow place and a narrow window, instead of a narrow net cast wide. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — an unknown record set found something | What the site does when datasetname names a set that does not exist | It returns a 500 error, not a zero. Asked for England & Wales Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial Registers 1567-1970, which is not a set here, the page fails outright; asked for England & Wales Non-Conformist Births and Baptisms, which is, it returns results or an honest nought. That is worth knowing because it makes a whole class of false null impossible: a zero from this site is always a zero from a set that exists. It does not rescue the other four faults, where the set is real and the filter is the liar. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973, SNG* in Gloucestershire 1793-1803 found nothing | Every marriage of this surname in the county in the eleven years around John and Lydia's, with no spelling assumed | 122 rows read end to end, and the answer is no John and no Lydia. Six of the 122 are genuinely this surname: Mary Sannigar 1794 Stroud, James Senigar 1795 Bristol, Daniel Sinigar 1800 Gloucester, Sarah Sinigor — also indexed Sinniger — 1801 Stinchcombe, William Saniger 1803 Thornbury. Not one is a John, and not one marries a Lydia. This is the strongest form this null can take, because nothing in it depends on a list of spellings. The wildcard demonstrably reaches the rare forms: it returned SENIGAR, SINIGAR, SANNIGAR, and two forms this archive's own table did not contain at all — SINIGOR and SINNIGER. 116 strangers came with them, which is the price. control named |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973, a John marrying a Lydia anywhere in England found nothing | The last shape of the question: no county, no spelling, just the two names | Sixteen rows in the whole country between 1780 and 1820, and none of them is this couple. John Sanger and Lydia at Salisbury, Wiltshire, 1788 is the only one whose surname is even arguable — and SANGER is the form this archive excludes on purpose as an ordinary English surname, sixty miles away, ten years before their first known child. The other twelve are Showing, Singleton, Singley, Snelling, Spearing, Springall, Springer, Strangroom and Swanhinbergh. So this index has been exhausted. The marriage of John Saniger and Lydia is not in England Marriages 1538-1973 under any spelling, in any county, in the four decades that could hold it. The set does not transcribe every parish, so that is not the same as saying they did not marry — but no further search of this index can help, and the question now belongs to the Berkeley register itself. control named |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973, SNIG and the forename John found something | Any John of this surname marrying anywhere in England, 1786-1806 | One result in the country: JOHN SANIGER married ELIZABETH at THORNBURY in 1790 — and this archive already had it, on /hannah-baptism, where it is named as the last Saniger marriage before the gap. The row is kept because it is what the wildcard returns where a list of eight spellings returned the same thing, which is the useful part: on this question the two instruments agree, and that is worth knowing before the wildcard is trusted on questions where they do not. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — every parish and BMD set, Barbados found nothing | Errand 33: whether the St Michael register of the 1780s can be reached from a desk | It cannot, and now that is measured rather than assumed. Asked across the whole Birth, Marriage, Death & Parish category at once instead of set by set: D'ARCY at Barbados returns four records, all between 1850 and 1876, every one from the British armed forces overseas registers. Control in the same shape: SMITH at Barbados returns eight, and the oldest is 1811. The site's Barbados holdings begin in the nineteenth century. Constantine's christening of 18 February 1786 and Jane's of 17 March 1788 are outside them by a generation, so the index entries this archive holds are all the index will ever give. The register itself, which would name Robert's rank and station, needs Barbados. control named |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — the newspaper family-notice sets found nothing | Errand 91: Robert D'Arcy's death at Chatham in May 1827, and Joseph's at Lymington in 1848 | Neither, and the reason is the index rather than the newspapers. What FindMyPast calls Newspapers & Publications is not the British Newspaper Archive's full text: it is a name index to birth, marriage and death notices, and most of its fields are empty. D'ARCY returns 4,459 rows of which the great majority carry no forename, no year and no place at all. Robert D'Arcy: 42 notices, every one read. The earliest dated entry is 1857. Joseph D'Arcy: 84 notices, earliest dated 1914. The index is weighted to the twentieth century and holds nothing near 1827 or 1848 for either name. Full text for those years lives on britishnewspaperarchive.com, which is a separate site with its own sign-in, and this archive does not create accounts or enter credentials. control named |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — a year filter on the newspaper notices found something | Why every dated newspaper search here has come back empty | Because the year field is mostly empty, and filtering on it discards everything that lacks one. SMITH in the newspaper-notice category returns 674,001 rows with no filter and 0 with yearofdeath=1827 ± 2. A surname held by six hundred thousand notices does not vanish from a five-year window; the filter is simply throwing away every row whose year was never transcribed. Forename filtering does work — Robert D'Arcy narrows 4,459 to 42 — so the fault is the sparseness of one column, not the search. One more way this site returns a zero that means nothing, and the only one of the five where the parameter is doing exactly what it was asked. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — every parish and BMD set, Chew Magna found something | Re-running the Chew Magna null with a wildcard instead of a spelling list | Two baptisms this archive had published as not existing, and a father it did not have. SNGR at Chew Magna returns four: Charles Sinagar 1816 and William Sinegar 1822, both Somerset Baptisms, father SIMON, mother ELIZABETH — plus a Stringer of 1635 and a Stranggar burial of 1710, which is the price of the wider net. Widened to SNG the parish returns 37 records and the Shearings and Sheerings come with them; the two that matter are the same two. They close the household this archive already had. Elizabeth Saniger, widow, 60, born Chew Magna, is living with her son William Saniger, 27, born Chew Magna, at Oxford Road in Bristol in 1851. The register names her husband. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — the _offset parameter, measured found something | Whether a give-or-take window does what it says at every value | It does, up to 40, and above 40 it silently becomes an exact-year search. One query, SANIGER baptised 1792 in England Births & Baptisms, varying nothing but the offset: 0 → 5 results, 3 → 7, 40 → 58, 45 → 5. Forty-five returns the offset-zero count exactly. The dropdown's 0/1/2/5/10/20/40 are presets rather than a whitelist — 3 is honoured and gives a genuine window — but there is a ceiling above which the parameter is discarded and the search narrows to the year itself. Nothing here needs re-checking: every offset this archive has used is 0, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 or 40. The row exists so that the next session does not reach for 50 to be thorough and get the narrowest possible answer wearing the widest possible label. Passed on by the Defranceski session, which found it on an Italian surname, published a wrong account of it first, measured it, and corrected itself; re-measured here on this archive's own surname and set before being written down. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | The Falco archive, asked directly found nothing | Whether another archive in this estate has already been into fifteenth-century Bristol | A clean no, grepped rather than remembered. Asked because John Swonhungre held two shops in Bristol Market in 1443 and this estate has more than one archive with Bristol connections; it would have been foolish to start from nothing if somebody had already been there. The Falco session searched its own data and reported Bristol 0, Gloucester 0, Swonhungre 0, St Peter 0, St James 0, medieval 0. That archive is one maternal line from Arienzo in Caserta, 1703 to 1901, and its earliest document anywhere is a 1637 baptism at San Felice a Cancello. Its entire UK holding is four rows and none is parochial. The overlap is nil, and this archive starts fifteenth-century Bristol from nothing — which is at least a clean start rather than a duplicated one. control named |
| 22 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, father's forename found something | Joseph D'Arcy's first family, which two death notices proved existed and never named | Both missing sons, with baptisms, in one query. Asking the set for DARCY children whose father is JOSEPH returns nine, and two are at Westminster: GEORGE ABBAS KOOLY D'ARCY, baptised 31 August 1818, and ROBERT WEST D'ARCY, baptised 16 October 1820 — both to Joseph D'Arcy and Katharine/Catherine Georgiana. That completes the order the 1857 notice implied: married at Bath November 1817, George 1818, Robert 1820, Richard about 1824 and called third son. George was never named anywhere in this archive before today.** |
| 22 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — the transcripts for both Westminster baptisms found something | Whether the mother's name in the register matches the tree's CATHERINE GEORGIANA WEST | It does, twice, and the second son carries her surname. The 1818 transcript gives the mother as Katharine Georgiana, the 1820 as Catherine Georgiana — one woman, two ordinary spellings. The tree's Catherine Georgiana West, married at Bath in November 1817 had never been checked against a record; the forenames are now confirmed from parish registers, and Robert WEST D'Arcy carries the maiden surname as a middle name. WEST is the family name of the Earls De La Warr, which is what both death notices call her family. |
| 22 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, DRC and the forename Robert found nothing | Robert D'Arcy the elder — whether his own baptism is anywhere in England | It is not, and this is now measured rather than assumed. A wildcard on the surname, so no spelling is guessed at: 47 Robert DRC baptisms in the whole set across four centuries, and among them exactly two true Darcys before 1800 — 1651 at Norton, Derbyshire, and 1706 at Stepney — then nothing until 1812 at Lincoln. No Robert Darcy is baptised anywhere in England between 1706 and 1800. Control: the set holds 749 Darcy baptisms, so the surname is richly present and the eighteenth-century gap is the man, not the index. The Hornby claim gains nothing and loses nothing; what it loses is the possibility that he was simply filed under a spelling nobody tried. control named |
| 22 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — Hampshire Marriages, the 1779 image could not be reached | Whether Robert D'Arcy and Jean Ward's marriage can be read beyond the transcript | No image on this record. The record set's own description promises a transcript and image of the original register entry, and the entry for 21 June 1779 offers a transcript only — no image control on the page. So the parishes of both parties, banns or licence, the witnesses and the signatures are not reachable from here. That needs the register at Portsmouth History Centre, which holds the Church of England parishes of the Portsmouth, Gosport, Fareham and Havant deaneries. |
| 22 Sep 2026 | Bristol Archives — St James Bristol marriage register, 24 August 1828, read by staff found something | The fathers' names, abodes, ages, conditions, occupations and witnesses on Thomas and Martha's entry, and banns or licence | By banns, witnesses James Hall and Thomas Davey, and the surname spelt SANIGAR. The five other questions have no answer and never did: records from this time do not list fathers' names, nor abodes, ages, conditions or occupations — English marriage registers began naming fathers at civil registration in 1837. The archivist adds that these two witnesses appear to witness multiple marriages in this church so are probably church officials, which is a caveat this archive would not have known to apply and which empties the one answer that looked like a lead. Free; no research fee charged. Own error 44. |
| 22 Sep 2026 | England Marriages 1538-1973 (FamilySearch), and the same index served by FindMyPast found nothing | Whether SANIGRE is the register's spelling or the transcriber's | The transcriber's. Both sites read SANIGRE because both serve one FamilySearch transcription — so this archive's confirmed on FindMyPast was one reading seen twice. Bristol Archives, reading the book, reads SANIGAR. Neither is asserted here: the image is on Ancestry, which wants an account this archive will not open, and nobody here has seen it. Control: SANIGAR is already the second commonest form in this archive's table, 56 entries, so the register reading is one this search would have found. control named |
| 22 Sep 2026 | This archive's own pages and data — grep for a Sinegar/Sanigar marriage of 1852 does not cover it | Whether the James marriage Bristol Archives mentions is already held here | Nothing. James Sinegar appears aged eleven in the 1841 household and again in 1866 as Lydia's father, with no record between. Control: the same search returns the 1871 marriage of his brother Thomas and the 1828 marriage of their father, so it finds marriages when they are there. The 1852 entry is new to this archive. control named |
| 27 Sep 2026 | FreeBMD — GRO marriage index, Bristol district, 1852, SANIGER phonetic found something | The 1852 marriage of James, which Bristol Archives named and did not reference | SANIGAR, James — Bristol — 6a — 155 — December quarter 1852. One entry, and it is the right one. Spelt SANIGAR, the form Bristol Archives read off the 1828 register, not the SANIGRE this archive published from the index. Control: SMITH marriages in the same district and year return 31, so the district and year filters work together, and every quarter is marked >99% transcribed. |
| 27 Sep 2026 | FreeBMD — every party registered on Bristol 6a 155, December quarter 1852 found something | Who James married | Four names: Sarah Godfrey, James Sanigar, LAURA SAYER, Henry Small. Two men, two women, two marriages. Lydia Sinegar's baptism of 1866 names her mother as LAURA and gives no surname. This is the first surname this archive has for her, and it is an inference from a shared page rather than a pairing the index states — the GRO does not pair spouses before 1912. |
| 27 Sep 2026 | FreeBMD — SANIGER phonetic, marriages, 1871, Bristol and then the whole of England found nothing | A control: does this instrument find a marriage this archive already holds from a register? | IT DOES NOT, AND THE REASON MATTERS MORE THAN THE SEARCH. Thomas Sinegar married Julia Marsh on 28 May 1871; no Saniger form appears in the June quarter of 1871 in Bristol or anywhere in England. Asking instead for the bride — MARSH, Julia, 1871 — returns Bristol 6a 131, and the men on that page are John Offer and Thomas LINEGAR. The surname was transcribed with an L for an S. Soundex L526, not S526: no wildcard on SNG* and no phonetic search on any S-form could ever have reached it. control named |
| 27 Sep 2026 | FreeBMD — LINEGAR phonetic, marriages, Bristol, 1852 does not cover it | Whether the first-letter blind spot hides anything in the year just searched | Nothing of this family — Harriet Emma Lamacroft and John Langridge, and no more. So the 1852 finding is not incomplete on the L side. Control: the same query shape on the same set returned Thomas Linegar for 1871, so it reaches an L-form when there is one. control named |
| 27 Sep 2026 | FindMyPast — England & Wales Marriages 1837-2005 could not be reached | The same 1852 question, asked of the subscription index | Eleven results for SNG in the Bristol district in 1852, and not one of them readable: the count appears on the search form and the results page redirects to Sign up for free to see them. This archive does not make accounts. The count is recorded because it is information; the rows are not. FreeBMD answered the same question for nothing.** |
| 27 Sep 2026 | Trove API — newspaper and gazette titles endpoints found something | What is digitised for the places and years this archive makes Australian claims about | 2,052 titles. Published at the place, then anywhere in the colony: Parramatta 1849 — 0 and 9; Sydney 1826 — 3 and 3; Brisbane 1856 — 2 and 3; Brisbane 1902 — 11 and 37; Brisbane 1936 — 15 and 55. This is what makes an Australian absence quotable, and it is the only thing the key was asked for. |
| 27 Sep 2026 | Trove API — the gazette titles endpoint found nothing | Whether the 38 gazettes came back, or whether a zero was this archive's own | The gazette list is returned under the key newspaper. Asking for a gazette key returns nothing, and the first run of this script reported 0 gazettes — one commit from publishing that as an open file. The endpoint's own total is now compared with what the parser found, and a disagreement refuses. Control: newspaper 2,014 = total 2,014; gazette 38 = total 38. control named |
| 27 Sep 2026 | Trove API — per-title holdings, Queensland and New South Wales, 1826-1940 found something | Whether the papers whose RANGE covers this family's years actually hold those years | 725 titles of 728, and the answer changes what is worth searching. Parramatta 1849: nothing published there, but 8 NSW papers hold the year and 675 issues survive, 312 of them THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD — so George Pitt D'Arcy's death is searchable after all. Brisbane 1856: 3 papers, 154 issues. Brisbane 1902: 36 of 37 in-range papers actually hold it; 1936: 54 of 55. Three titles are recorded UNKNOWN because the request failed, which is not the same as holding nothing. |
| 07 Oct 2026 | FreeBMD — GRO death index, DARCY, 1885 could not be reached | George Abbas Kooli D'Arcy's death registration — he died 22 October 1885 | The December quarter of 1885 is not in FreeBMD. The search returns DARCY deaths for March and June 1885 and stops. He died on 22 October, which registers in the December quarter, so this index cannot hold him and a null from it would have meant nothing. Control: SMITH deaths in the Penzance district across 1885 return March, June and September, each marked >99% transcribed, and no December at all — so the gap is the quarter and not the surname. The route from here is the GRO's own index, which wants an account. |
| 07 Oct 2026 | FreeBMD — GRO death index, DARCY, 1862, and a Bangor control could not be reached | Robert West D'Arcy's death registration — he died at Bangor on 14 June 1862 | Bangor's 1862 deaths are not transcribed at all. DARCY deaths for 1862 return March, September and December and no June, which on its own could mean either no D'Arcy died that quarter or that quarter is missing. The control settles it: SMITH deaths in the Bangor district across the whole of 1862 return ZERO rows and not one quarter header — impossible for a real result in a district that size, so the district-year is simply not in the index. He died on 14 June 1862. Again the GRO's own index, or the Honourable East India Company officer papers at the British Library, which this archive has never opened. |
| 09 Oct 2026 | BillionGraves — SANIGER, read in a browser at two page sizes found something | Whether the site recorded as blocked is actually blocked, and whether it holds an English Saniger burial | Four English Sanigars, and the first reading of this missed them. At size=25 the query returned 25 rows and no United Kingdom at all; at size=50 it returns ANDREW SANIGAR (d. 31 March 1980), BARBARA SANIGAR (d. December 2008) and DENNIS SANIGAR (d. 29 August 2003), all three at HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, KINGSWOOD, and MAISIE SANIGAR (d. 29 May 1964) at Scartho Road Cemetery, Grimsby. Twentieth-century burials, so not evidence for the eighteenth-century questions — but three of one surname in one churchyard at Kingswood is the surname still standing where this archive works, and the Kingswood is settled: the cemetery page gives 51.4616, -2.5033, which is KINGSWOOD IN BRISTOL, about six kilometres east of the city centre — not the Kingswood near Wotton-under-Edge, which lies twenty kilometres north at 51.63, -2.36. Both were in Gloucestershire, so the county alone could not have decided it. |
| 09 Oct 2026 | BillionGraves — whether its URL parameters apply at all could not be reached | Whether a country filter or a page number can be used to search it systematically | Neither applies, and both are accepted silently. cemetery_country=United+Kingdom returns rows identical to the unfiltered query, French, American and Australian among them. page=7 returns the same first three records as page=1, and the footer reads Page 1 of 200 whatever page is requested — so about ten thousand D'Arcy records exist and the first fifty are all that a URL can reach. This is the fourth search parameter this archive has found accepted and ignored, after FindMyPast's place, its sourcecategory, and yearofbirth combined with keywordsplace. A positive from this site is worth having; an absence is not, until the search is driven through its own interface. |
| 09 Oct 2026 | BillionGraves — Holy Trinity Church, Kingswood, the cemetery page itself found something | Which of the two Gloucestershire Kingswoods holds the three Sanigar burials | Bristol, by coordinate. The cemetery page gives 51.4616, -2.5033 — Kingswood in Bristol, six kilometres east of the centre. Kingswood near Wotton-under-Edge is twenty kilometres north at 51.63, -2.36. The county could not have decided it: both were Gloucestershire, the Bristol one until 1974. So Andrew (d. 1980), Dennis (d. 2003) and Barbara Sanigar (d. 2008) are buried in the city this family lived in, not in the Vale it came from — the surname persisting in Bristol, where Thomas Sinegar, Hannah Saniger and the Wakefields were. And the churchyard is worth knowing on its own: 571 records and 402 headstone images, photographed and free. A Bristol burial ground this archive can read end to end, which is not true of any other it has tried. |
| 09 Oct 2026 | Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime — état civil, Ingouville, décès, 1843 found something | Whether the French civil register holds the death this archive has only chased at Kew | Five results, and one of them is the whole year. Havre (Le) — 01/01/1843-31/12/1843 · ancienne commune INGOUVILLE · Registre d'état civil · Type d'acte: DÉCÈS · cote 4 E 9077 · 310 vues — the complete 1843 deaths register for the commune where Major John Maddock Jones died in March 1843, digitised, free, no account. Beside it: the Ingouville register 1843-1846 (4 E 6984, 145 views) and two TABLES DÉCENNALES covering the year — 4 E 10127 (1833-1862) and 4 E 9933 (1843-1852) — which are ten-year indexes and would find the act without reading 310 images. This archive has pursued these two deaths only through British consular returns at Kew. A French death act is not a consular return: it gives the age, the birthplace, the parents where known and the surviving spouse, which is more than RG 35 would. |
| 09 Oct 2026 | Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime — état civil, Le Havre, décès, 1843 found something | The same for Margaret Jones née D'Arcy, who died at Havre in February 1843 | Twelve results. Le Havre's own 1843 deaths register, and separately the registers of the communes it later absorbed — Rouelles, Bléville, Sanvic and Ingouville — each with its own cote and its own tables décennales. Margaret Jones née D'Arcy died at Havre in February 1843, and which of those communes that means is not yet settled, so the tables are the place to start rather than any single register. |
| 09 Oct 2026 | Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime — 4 E 10127, tables décennales 1833–1862 found nothing | The J section of the 1843–1852 décès table, for Major John Maddock Jones, died at Ingouville 21 March 1843 | Nine J entries across two pages — Jean, Jouette, Junais — and no JONES. The verdict is worthless, because this is the wrong Ingouville. The cote was chosen for being the smallest index, 48 views. Two things said so and were not read. The image URL files it under ingouville-sur-mer, the village near Saint-Valery-en-Caux, sixty kilometres up the coast. And forty-eight views cannot hold thirty years of births, marriages and deaths for a town of fifteen thousand: the right volume, 4 E 9933, spends 309 views on one decade. The surnames on the page — Jouette, Blanquet, Barthélemy, Brument — are a Caux village's, not a port's. A register is not identified by its title; it is identified by its size and its provenance. control named |
| 09 Oct 2026 | Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime — 4 E 9077, Le Havre, ancienne commune d'Ingouville, décès 1843 found something | The death of Major John Maddock Jones, at Ingonville, near Havre, 21 March 1843 | Act N° 113, view 58. Du vingt-unième jour du mois de Mars… Acte de Décès de John Maddack Jones (Major), vivant de son revenu, décédé de ce jour sur les huit heures du matin en son domicile situé en cette ville rue du Champ de Foire… âgé de soixante-huit ans, né — le lieu de sa naissance inconnu — fils de — les noms et prénoms de ses père et mère sont inconnus — veuf de Marguéritta Maria Elisabella Darcy. Declared the same afternoon by a police appariteur of twenty-two and a farmer of forty-eight, tous deux d'Ingouville et non parents du défunt. Sixty-eight in March 1843 puts his birth about 1774. The register is chronological, so the act was reached by date and not by index: act 116 is 23 March, act 85 is 1 March. |
| 09 Oct 2026 | Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime — 4 E 9077, Le Havre, ancienne commune d'Ingouville, décès 1843 found something | The death of Margaret Jones née D'Arcy, at Havre, February 1843 | Act N° 43, view 23 — 1 February 1843, the first day of the month. Acte de Décès de Marguéritta Maria Elisabella Darcy, sans profession, décédée de ce jour sur les six heures du matin en son domicile situé en cette ville, rue de l'Hôpital, maison Lechevalier, âgée de soixante-un ans, née — le lieu de sa naissance est inconnu — épouse de John Maddack Jones. Declared that afternoon by two rentiers of Ingouville, fifty-nine and fifty-eight and a half, neither a relative. Sixty-one on 1 February 1843 puts her birth about 1781 — the nearest thing this archive has to a birth date for a child of Robert D'Arcy. The Morning Herald printed the notice on the 13th; the death was twelve days before it. |
| 09 Oct 2026 | FreeREG — Ruabon St Mary, Denbighshire, register contents does not cover it | Whether a baptism of John Maddock Jones about 1774 is reachable in the parish his marriage, a 1829 deed and his obituary all give him | The register is there and the baptisms are not. Ruabon St Mary holds 30,976 transcriptions, 1599–1936 — and its decade table shows the baptism column blank for 1770–1779, 1780–1789, 1790–1799 and 1800–1809, with baptisms beginning at 1,078 in 1810–1819. The same 1770s carry 253 marriages and 722 burials, so the gap is baptisms specifically and not the parish. The church note records the original as Bap 1559-1945, so the register exists; it is the transcription that stops. A baptism about 1774 cannot be found here by anybody, and the next person should not spend an evening confirming it. The Welsh form of the name, Rhiwabon, is a separate place entry in the same county list and is an empty stub — no church, no register — so it is not a second chance. control named |
| 09 Oct 2026 | FreeREG — Denbighshire, surname Maddock, 1750–1785 found nothing | Whether MADDOCK is a Ruabon name — his middle name, on the Welsh custom, would most likely be his mother's maiden surname | Eighty-seven Maddock and Maddocks records across Denbighshire in thirty-five years, and NOT ONE OF THEM AT RUABON. The 87 break down as 38 baptisms, 29 burials and 20 marriages, at Holt, Gresford, Ruthin and Wrexham. The control is in the same result set: the search ran loose and returned ten Ruabon rows under Matthews and Mathews, which proves Ruabon was in scope and simply holds no Maddocks. Three Jones–Maddock marriages turn up in the county — Thomas Jones and Barbara Maddock at Gresford in 1761, Joseph Jones and Ann Maddocks at Gresford on 8 January 1772, and Edward Maddocks and Hannah Jones at Ruthin in 1783. The 1772 one sits two years before an estimated birth and this archive is not going to pretend that is evidence. It is a different parish, and Jones and Maddocks are two of the commonest surnames in the county. It is written down as a resemblance so that nobody has to find it twice, and it is not attached to anyone. control named |
| 09 Oct 2026 | FreeREG — baptisms, all counties, surname Jones with the forename Maddock, 1760–1795 found nothing | The distinctive half of his name, searched nationally rather than by parish | Two results in everything FreeREG holds, and neither is him. A Barbra Jones baptised at Llantwit Major, Glamorgan, in 1762, matched through a relative; and a Maddock Jones baptised at Glasbury St Peter, Brecknockshire, on 14 April 1782 — eight years late and sixty miles from Ruabon. The null is honest but weak on its own, because FreeREG's baptism coverage is uneven county by county; it is worth having only because the Ruabon row above explains exactly why the parish itself could not answer. control named |
| 09 Oct 2026 | Welsh Newspapers Online (National Library of Wales), newspapers.library.wales could not be reached | A free copy of the Caernarvon & Denbigh Herald obituary of 1 April 1843, which this archive currently cites from a paid site | A Cloudflare Performing security verification interstitial that did not clear, on the search URL and again on the bare homepage, over about forty seconds in a browser. That is a bot check and this archive does not work around bot checks, so it stopped there. This is a verdict on one attempt from one browser today and not on the source — the same interstitial clears for most people, and the National Library's main site at library.wales loaded normally in the same session. Worth retrying, because the prize is real: this archive cites the Caernarvon & Denbigh Herald of 1 April 1843 through a subscription site, and Welsh Newspapers Online covers 1804–1919 for nothing. |
| 09 Oct 2026 | FreeREG — baptisms, all counties, surname Darcy, 1775–1790 found nothing | A baptism for the D'Arcy daughter the French act now dates to about 1781 | Eighteen exact D'Arcy and Darcy baptisms in everything FreeREG holds for those sixteen years, and no Margaret among them. The girls are Hannah at Wellingore 1783, Ann at Norwich 1789, Dinah Leman at Kea 1789 and Lydia at Grantham 1789, all Lincolnshire, Norfolk or Cornwall; the one Margaret Darcy is at Happisburgh, Norfolk, on 1 January 1775, which would make her sixty-eight at death and not sixty-one. Running the same search loose rather than exact returns more than five hundred and is refused by the display cap, so the eighteen is the exact-spelling figure and the loose one is not a number this archive can quote. control named |
| 09 Oct 2026 | FreeREG — Portsmouth and Portsea, Hampshire, register contents does not cover it | Whether any Portsmouth parish could hold her baptism of September 1781 — the tree puts her birth there | One parish in the whole town can answer for 1781, and she is not in it. PORTSEA ST MARY holds 992 transcriptions, every one a baptism, and the whole run is 1780–1782 — so a baptism of September 1781 would fall inside it, and a search of Hampshire for Darcy returns Joseph in March 1780 and nobody else, exact or loose. PORTSMOUTH (St Thomas) holds 9,079 transcriptions, every one a MARRIAGE, 1651–1776 — no baptisms at all, and nothing after 1776. OLD PORTSMOUTH has no entries whatever. This corroborates from a second, free provider what this archive already had from FindMyPast's Hampshire collection, which covers Portsea 1770–1792 and also returns Joseph alone. It does not establish that she was not baptised at Portsmouth — it establishes that FreeREG cannot be asked, except about Portsea. control named |
| 09 Oct 2026 | The Gazette (London and Edinburgh), official notices, 1830–1900 found something | Anything on George Abbas Kooli D'Arcy, eldest son of Joseph — the archive had military records for 1840 and 1841 and nothing else | Ten notices, and they run from Ensign to the government of a colony. Ensign in the 94th Regiment of Foot by April 1837 — a memorandum that exists only to correct him: The Christian names of Ensign D'Arcy, of the 94th Regiment of Foot, are George Abbas Kooli. Lieutenant 26 September 1839, Captain 12 November 1846, Major of the 3rd West India Regiment 6 July 1852 from the 94th Foot, Lieutenant-Colonel 7 July 1854, and on 17 June 1859: Colonel George Abbas Kooli D'Arcy to be Governor and Commander-in-Chief in and over Her Majesty's Settlements in the River Gambia — in the same sentence as the new Governor of Hong Kong. The search is on the middle name, which is why it worked: the Gazette's OCR mangles the surname into D'Aroy and the forename into Qeorge and Greorge, but Kooli survives. Ten is therefore a floor and not a ceiling — an OCR slip could hide a later notice, and nothing after 1859 was found. |
| 10 Oct 2026 | FIBIS — Families in British India Society database found something | Robert West D'Arcy, late of the Honourable East India Company's Army — the India Office material this archive had never opened | The bride this archive could not afford to see, named twice for nothing. The 1846 Bombay marriage has sat here as a bare indexed fact with the words transcript paywalled even on a paid trial. FIBIS has it from two separate indexes: the Gentleman's Magazine marriage announcements give Robert West D'Arcy × Annie Adams, 20 January 1846, Bombay, and the Index of Ecclesiastical returns, IOR Bombay Marriages gives Husband ROBT WEST D'ARCY · Wife ANNE H ADAMS, 1846. Two indexes, one marriage, her name spelled two ways and neither of them guessed. And the Anglo-Indian press followed him home. Allen's Indian Mail printed the Bombay marriage twice in 1846 — once as Robert W., once as Robert West — and then D'ARCY, Robert · BANGOR, N.WALES · 1862. A man who left for India came back to north Wales to die and the Indian papers still noticed. What is NOT there: no service record, no medal, no child. The military sets that looked promising were all false. |
| 10 Oct 2026 | FIBIS — soundex behaviour on the surname D'Arcy found nothing | Whether the 12 sources a default search returned for Robert D'Arcy were 12 sources about a D'Arcy | Ten of the twelve were not D'Arcy at all. FIBIS's default search is soundex, and on this surname it matches TRACY, TRACEY, TRAISE, DRUCE and D'ROSE. The Gentleman's Magazine death announcement for Robert D'Arcy is Robert Alexander DRUCE, 28 June 1829. The Register of European Soldiers, Bengal Army entry is Robert TRACY, gunner. Both Indian Mutiny Medal Roll entries are Tracey and Traise. The five CMB entries are a D'Rose family at Lucknow in the 1920s. A result count from this database is not a count of anything until the rows are opened — and the two that survive are the two recorded above. The same search set to EXACT MATCH returns 29 sources for D'Arcy across the whole database, which is the honest figure for its holdings on the name. control named |
| 10 Oct 2026 | FreeREG — Gloucestershire, the Vale parishes, marriages 1790–1805 does not cover it | Lydia's marriage to John Saniger about 1797 — asked of a transcription project this archive had never tried for her | FreeREG cannot be asked this question, and the three parishes that matter say so in three different ways. BERKELEY holds 2,916 transcriptions and the whole run is 1600–1677 — it stops a hundred and twenty years before the marriage. WOTTON-UNDER-EDGE, where she was born, holds 16,105 and starts at 1813. THORNBURY, where she died, holds 26,898 across 1550–1874 and looked like the way in. It was not. A search of Thornbury and up to a hundred nearby parishes for any LYDIA marrying between 1790 and 1805 returns nothing — and so does the same search for any MARY, which is the control and is decisive: zero Marys marrying across a hundred Gloucestershire parishes in sixteen years is not a fact about the Vale, it is the absence of transcribed marriages for that window. The zero is coverage, not evidence, and nobody should read it as the marriage not existing. This closes a route rather than answering the question. The register itself and the Gloucester diocesan licence bonds remain where they were. control named |
| 10 Oct 2026 | FreeBMD — marriages, surname D'Arcy, forename George, 1837–1890 found nothing | Whether George Abbas Kooli D'Arcy, Governor of the Gambia, ever married in England | Four George D'Arcy marriages in fifty-three years of the English index, and not one of them carries his name. Sep 1864 Norwich 4b 235; Sep 1884 Westminster 1a 961; Sep 1888 Hackney 1b 815; Sep 1889 West Ham 4a 114 as George William. FreeBMD prints its own coverage beside each, and all four quarters are >99% transcribed, so the index is not thin where it answered. The GRO index gives every forename a man was registered under, and a George Abbas Kooli would not hide as a plain George. Two reasons this is a weak null and is written down as one. All four results fall in SEPTEMBER quarters, which across four records is odd enough to be worth somebody's second look rather than treated as a clean sample. And he spent most of his adult life outside English registration — the 94th Foot, then the 3rd West India Regiment from 1852, then the government of the Gambia from 1859. A marriage in the West Indies or at Bathurst would not be in this index at all, and that is the likelier place to look. control named |
| 10 Oct 2026 | Welsh Newspapers Online (National Library of Wales) — second and third attempts could not be reached | The Caernarvon & Denbigh Herald obituary of Major Maddock Jones, 1 April 1843, and any Welsh notice of the Penybryn family | Three attempts across two days, all stopped by the same Cloudflare Performing security verification interstitial — on the bare homepage and on two different search URLs, each given twenty seconds or more. Not worked around. The National Library's own site at library.wales loads normally in the same browser in the same session, so this is one bot check and not a library that has closed its doors. The row is a verdict on three attempts, not on the source, and the prize is unchanged: this archive cites the Caernarvon & Denbigh Herald of 1843 through a subscription site, and that paper sits inside a free 1804–1919 run. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Internet Archive — full-text search, Abbas Kooli found something | Anything in print on George Abbas Kooli D'Arcy, whose name is unique enough to survive OCR | 329 hits, and the first is a book about this family that nobody here knew existed. Ancestral Voices, by the novelist BERTA RUCK (1878–1978), London, Hutchinson, 1972. Its list of illustrations — visible on the item page without borrowing — is a roll-call of this archive: Major-General Robert D'Arcy, R.E., C.B., Jean D'Arcy, née Ward, Colonel Joseph D'Arcy, R.A., Lady Catherine D'Arcy, née West, The Three Aunts D'Arcy, Jane, Kate and Charlotte, one of those aunts in Persian dress brought home by her brother Joseph, George Abbas Kooli D'Arcy, Robert West D'Arcy, Annie Hewish D'Arcy, née Adams — and then Amy Darwin, née Ruck and Charles Darwin. PORTRAITS OF NINE OF THESE PEOPLE WERE PRINTED IN 1972 and this archive had never cited the book. It is catalogued under the subject Dorsey family, which is a cataloguer's mangling of D'Arcy and is why no search for the surname has ever surfaced it. The GEDCOM notes quote by Berta Ruck and nobody had asked who she was. The text is in copyright and lending-restricted, so only the plate list was read. Borrowing needs an account and none was made. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | FreeBMD — marriages, Ruck and D'Arcy, 1840–1900 found something | Why a 1972 novelist had this family's photographs — whether a D'Arcy married a Ruck | One marriage, and it is the answer. RUCK, Arthur Ashley · Penzance · 5c 381 with spouse surname D'Arcy, and the reverse search returns D'ARCY, Elizabeth Eleanor · Penzance · 5c 381 — same volume, same page, September quarter 1877, in a quarter FreeBMD marks >99% transcribed. Berta Ruck was born the following year. The family tree asserted a Ruck connection; this is the first record of it. FIBIS supplies the rest of the shape: Arthur Ashley Ruck, Lieutenant promoted to Captain, 2nd Battalion 8th (The King's) Regiment, in the Afghan war of 1878–1881, and a Ruck child Amy R., born in India in 1879, in Lancashire at the 1881 census. A soldier marries at Penzance in 1877, goes out to India, and his children are born there. What is NOT established is whose daughter Elizabeth Eleanor was. That she is Berta's mother is an inference from the date and her father's name, not a record, and it is not asserted here. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | FreeBMD — births, surname Ruck, mother's surname D'Arcy, 1878–1900 does not cover it | Whether Berta Ruck's birth registration names her mother as a D'Arcy | A question the index cannot answer, and it was asked before that was checked. The GRO birth index does not carry the mother's maiden name until the September quarter of 1911, so a mother's-surname search across 1878–1900 could only ever return nothing, whatever the truth. The zero is the shape of the index, not a fact about the family. It is recorded so that nobody runs it again, and because this archive has spent two days finding instruments that answer a different question from the one asked. Berta Ruck was in any case born in India, where an English registration would not exist at all. control named |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Internet Archive full text — Notes and Queries, 3rd Series, Vol. X (1866) found something | Where the Yorkshire and Holderness descent came from, and whether anyone ever proved it | The oldest version of the claim this archive disputes, and the family admitting in 1866 that they could not prove it. A query on page 432 of 1 December 1866 asks who was the grandfather of Major-General Robert d'Arcy, R.E., who died Commandant of Chatham in 1827? and prints what it calls FAMILY TRADITION: Colonel d'Arcy, a branch of the Holderness family from Yorkshire, commanded a regiment during the American War. He was killed in action, leaving two sons: 1. Robert, Major-General R.E. 2. Constantine, Lieut. R.A., died s.p. On his voyage to America Colonel d'Arcy and his family were wrecked. They lost all their baggage and papers, which, it is believed, would have proved their noble descent. Three things make this worth more than the tradition it carries. It is 159 years older than the family tree that states Yorkshire as fact. The man printing it was asking, not asserting — he wanted the grandfather and did not have him. And the excuse for the missing evidence is inside the story, which is the shape a pedigree takes when it cannot be documented. NOBODY ANSWERED. A full-text search for Commandant of Chatham across everything the Internet Archive holds returns 144 hits, and the only one in Notes and Queries is this query. The question has been open in print since 1866. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Internet Archive full text — colonial governor lists and a Falklands bibliography found something | What became of George Abbas Kooli D'Arcy after the Gambia appointment of 1859 | He governed a second colony and this archive knew of neither. A Falkland Islands bibliography carries Colonel George Abbas Kooli D'Arcy: Governor of the Falkland Islands 1870–1876, and Henige's Colonial Governors from the Fifteenth Century to the Present lists him among the Gambia governors after Luke Smythe O'Connor. The Gambia from 1859, the Falklands from 1870. The same search identified the military records for 1840 and 1841 this archive had as a bare mention: the monthly Army Lists of 1840, which print Adj. Geo. Abbas Kooli [D']Arcy — he was Adjutant of the 94th, which is what the Gazette meant by Ensign and Adjutant. The Military Magazine of December 1846 prints his captaincy independently of the Gazette. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | The Gazette — Arcy, 1775–1790 and 1814–1830 found nothing | Two things the 1866 tradition and the 1972 plate list assert — a Colonel D'Arcy killed in the American War, and a C.B. for Robert | Neither found, and neither disproved, and the difference matters. For the American War: the Gazette returns nine notices mentioning Arcy across 1775–1790, and the officers in them are a Brevet Major Francis D'Arcy and an Ensign John Pomeroy D'Arcy — no colonel commanding a regiment. For the C.B.: Arcy across 1815–1830 returns 46 notices and Darcy across 1814–1828 returns 23, and none of the ones read names Robert D'Arcy of the Engineers or any Order of the Bath award to him. Both are weak tests and are filed as weak. This archive has watched the Gazette's OCR turn this surname into D'Aroy and the forename into Qeorge and Greorge within the same career, so a surname search is a sieve; and paging past the first ten results by URL does not work on that site, so only the first page of each was read. A Colonel D'Arcy who commanded a regiment and died in action would be an easy man to find in the Army Lists, and that is the test worth running. control named |
| 11 Oct 2026 | The Army Lists of 1775, 1776, 1778 and 1783 — read in full text found something | The 1866 tradition's first checkable claim: a Colonel D'Arcy who commanded a regiment in the American War and was killed in action | The two sons are there. The colonel is not. Four official lists of general and field officers were downloaded and searched entire. WHAT IS THERE. The 1783 list puts ROBERT D'ARCEY in the Corps of Engineers, among the lieutenants, in a block of officers all dated 17 January 1776 — the very date this archive already held for his first commission, from the Army Lists of 1778 and 1781, now reached again independently. And it puts CONSTANT[INE] D'ARCEY, 12 July, among the FIRST LIEUTENANTS OF THE ROYAL REGIMENT OF ARTILLERY. The tradition said Constantine, Lieut. R.A. It was right. WHAT IS NOT THERE. No Colonel D'Arcy, in any of the four. The only others of the surname are Francis D'Arcy, John Pomeroy D'Arcy, and a George and a John in the indexes. The control is the volumes themselves: they use the word Colonel 230, 235, 245 and 312 times, so they are in no way silent about colonels. THREE GAPS KEEP THIS SHORT OF A DISPROOF, and they are the honest ones: a colonel of a provincial or loyalist corps need not be in these lists, nor one on the Irish establishment, and Colonel may have been a local or courtesy rank. But the shape of the result is hard to miss. The tradition is corroborated precisely where it names two men who can be found, and unsupported precisely where it would prove the noble descent. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | The Colonial Office List for 1877 — biographical notices found something | George Abbas Kooli D'Arcy's career, from the department that appointed him | A full official biography, free, in a 2.2 MB text file. Adjutant of the 94th regiment for three years, in which corps he served 16 years; author of a work on 'Light Infantry Drill'; commanded the 3rd West India regiment for several years; served in the Southern Mahratta and Sawant-Warree campaign, E.I., 1845–6, under Brigadier Outram; was aide-de-camp and assistant private secretary to five successive governors of Bombay, and also to General Sir Willoughby Cotton when he commanded the Bombay army; sold out in 1858; appointed governor and commander-in-chief of the Gambia, June 1859; organised a successful expedition against the robber-king of Baddiboo, receiving the thanks of the Secretary of State; commanded the Gambia militia artillery in the field and was present at the battle of Sabba, 21 February 1861. And then Tubabecolong. In 1866 he embarked at 48 hours' notice to meet a Marabout invasion and carried their entrenched position. Two officers were killed at his side — Lieutenants Kelly and Jenkins of the 4th West India Regiment — with four soldiers, two volunteers, four of the native contingent and 61 of all ranks badly wounded. Private Samuel Hodge, who followed Colonel D'Arcy through the stockade, received the Victoria Cross. Hodge was among the first black soldiers awarded it. Leaving in January 1867 he was given a sword of honour worth £120. Governor of the Falkland Islands 1870, retired 1876. One editorial note: the 1877 entry describes the invaders in the racial language of its period, which is not reproduced here because nothing in this family's history turns on it. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | The Colonial Office List for 1883 and 1889 does not cover it | A death or retirement notice for George Abbas Kooli D'Arcy, who died in Devon in 1885 | He is in neither, and that is what retirement should look like. Both volumes were downloaded entire — 2.4 MB and 3.0 MB of text — and searched for Kooli. Nothing in either. He retired in 1876 and the Colonial Office List carries serving officers and the recently retired, so by 1883 he had dropped out of it. The 1877 volume caught him in the last year it could. No death notice is to be had from this source, and his death in Devon in 1885 still rests on the GRO index alone. control named |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Whitworth Porter, History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, vol. I (1889) found something | Robert D'Arcy's service — this archive has cited Porter's station list for months and never read the book | The index alone gives him three campaigns. D'ARCY, Robert, at second siege of Minorca, 209, 216; Copenhagen, 243; Walcheren, 248. MINORCA, 1781–82. The Duc de Crillon landed on 19 August 1781 to besiege Fort St Philip's. Lieutenant-Colonel Brewse was Chief Engineer in the island, and under him were Captain Gilbert Townshend, and Lieutenants Robert D'Arcy, W. Johnston, J. R. Douglas, C. Shipley, and J. Fiddes — one of six Engineer officers in a garrison of about 3,000 that was besieged for six months. WALCHEREN, 1809. Of the five corps of an army of nearly 40,000 under the Earl of Chatham, the largest and most important was Sir Eyre Coote's, sent against Flushing. The Commanding Royal Engineer with this corps was Lieutenant-Colonel R. D'Arcy. His son Joseph's obituary, long held here, says Joseph was at the taking of Walcheren too — father commanding the Engineers, son a Royal Artillery officer of twenty-nine, and neither record mentions the other. AND HE WAS ARRESTED THERE. Colonel Fyers, shot in the chest, ordered a written report each morning from the senior engineer in the trenches. The Brigade-Major's account: The first morning, Colonel D., an old man beyond sixty, refused compliance, saying he had other things to do; the third morning he declined again, saying it was all nonsense, and denied his superior's right to ask, because some thirty or forty years previously he had been senior to Colonel F. Arrested, and after the preliminaries of a court-martial he thought better of it, made his apologies, was released, and ever after furnished his report. Porter names him only in a footnote. An old man beyond sixty in August 1809 puts his birth before about 1749. The tree says 1751, which would make him fifty-eight. An eyewitness impression, not a register — but the second thing to sit badly with 1751. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Phillimore, Gloucestershire Parish Registers: Marriages — six volumes, read entire does not cover it | Lydia's marriage to John Saniger about 1797, asked of PRINTED TRANSCRIPTS of the registers rather than of an index | A printed transcript is the register, and this is the closest this archive has got to one — but Berkeley is not in the series. Six volumes were downloaded whole and searched: they print Ampney Crucis, Naunton, Prestbury, Sevenhampton, Thornbury, Kingscote, Painswick, Batsford, Beverston, Ebrington, Elkstone, Standish, Stinchcombe, Weston Birt, Willersey, Stone and Nether Swell among others. BERKELEY IS NOT AMONG THEM; every Berkeley in the text is a bride or groom described as of Berkeley in somebody else's parish. No John Saniger marries any Lydia in any of the six. The control is good: the series prints thirty-six Sanigar and Saniger marriages, so the surname is in no way invisible to it — Morice, Samuell, William, Edward, Thomas, Benjamin, John and Rose among them. One useful thing falls out of it. The surname concentrates at STONE, the parish next to Berkeley, which alone yields twenty entries in the 1670s–90s, with more at Thornbury, Cam and Dursley. This archive's Sanigars are at Berkeley and Ham; Stone is where the name is thickest, and no page here has said so before. control named |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Shropshire Parish Registers, Diocese of St Asaph — eight printed volumes, read entire found something | The Oliver family of Oswestry, and the marriage of Samuel Sneyd to Elizabeth Oliver about 1809 | Oswestry's own registers are in print, and they hand over a family. DAVID OLIVER, COOPER, OF CROSS STREET — an occupation and an address this archive did not have — buried at Oswestry 21 June 1808, aged 59, which puts his birth about 1749. With Mary he baptises DIANNA on 23 March 1777, ELIZABETH on 19 May 1782 and DAVID on 12 July 1789. Elizabeth is this archive's Elizabeth Margaret Oliver, who married Samuel Sneyd; these are the first siblings she has ever had here. And a one-digit disagreement worth keeping. The printed transcript reads Elizabeth, d. of David Oliver, Cross St., & Mary, b. 7; FindMyPast's index of the same entry says born 17 May. Two transcriptions of one register line, agreeing on the baptism, the parents and the year, differing on the day of birth. Neither can settle it; only the register can. The Sneyd marriage is NOT there, and that proves nothing. The eight volumes print 581 Oswestry marriages and the only Sneyds in any of them are the gentry Sneyds of Bishton. But the printed marriage run ends in 1808, and the marriage is placed about 1809 — the transcript stops one year short of the question. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Slater's and Pugh's Queensland Almanacs, and the Aldine History of Queensland found something | The Wakefield brothers, Hiram and Jabez, in the Queensland printed record | Two brothers with public lives this archive had not recorded. JABEZ WAKEFIELD is in the obituary list of Slater's Queensland Almanac for 1904, under 7 February, as an old resident and ex-Mayor of Rockhampton. The archive already held his death as 8 February 1903 from the Queensland register, so the two agree to a day — what is new is that he had been Mayor. HIRAM WAKEFIELD turns out to be a Brisbane figure. The Aldine History of Queensland (1888) twice describes men who entered the employ of Hiram Wakefield, timber merchant; in 1868 Slater's has him running a two-horse coach between Brisbane and Sandgate; and from 1882 to 1891 he stands as a trustee and then director — Hiram Wakefield, Esq., J.P. — beside Hon. James Swan M.L.C. and James R. Dickson, later Premier of Queensland. One reading is refused. The 1888 volume prints him M.L.A. where every other year prints J.P.. One against eight is a compositor's slip, not a seat in the Assembly, and it is recorded as a discrepancy. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Internet Archive full text — Hannah Saniger found nothing | Hannah Saniger, who married James Wakefield — the direct English line | Four hits and all four are one sentence about somebody else. A Toronto history of 1923 says a Mr Dale is a son of George and Hannah (Saniger) Dale, natives of England, but long residents of Canada. A different Hannah Saniger entirely — this archive's married James Wakefield and went to Queensland — and the four hits are four scans of the same book. It is written down because the name is rare enough that the next person will find it too, and should not spend an evening on it. control named |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Staffordshire Parish Register Society — the printed Madeley register could not be reached | The family of William Sneyd, weaver of Madeley — father of Samuel, and the start of this archive's Staffordshire line | The register is printed, the volume is found, and it will not open. The Staffordshire Parish Register Society printed Madeley; the volume sits on the Internet Archive as staffordshirepar0000mrnw (1960) and is lending-restricted — its text returns HTTP 401 and a borrow needs an account this archive will not make. Its public search snippets still gave something. One reads 13 MARGARET d. of WILLIAM SNEYD, WEAVER . 26 John Bourne 1 Margaret d. of William Sneyd 6 Thomas s. of…, another bapt. July 19 THOMAS s. of WILLIAM SNEYD of GT. MADELEY. The word weaver is the match: this archive already holds Samuel Sneyd baptised at Madeley All Saints on 4 June 1781, father William Sneyd, weaver. What this does NOT establish. The snippets carry no years. A Margaret and a Thomas cannot be placed as Samuel's siblings on that basis — only as children of a William Sneyd, weaver, in the same parish. It is a located source, not a read one. And one thing it settles for free: MADELEY HAS TWO HALVES. The register distinguishes Gt. Madeley from L. Madeley. This archive has recorded Madeley All Saints and never asked which township — the same shape as the two Ingouvilles and the two Kingswoods. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Shropshire Parish Registers, Diocese of St Asaph — every David Oliver marriage in eight volumes found something | The mother of Elizabeth Margaret Oliver, who married Samuel Sneyd — the Oswestry baptisms give her only as Mary | One candidate, and the shortlist is one long. The printed Llanyblodwel register has 1772, June 12. DAVID OLIVER OF OSWESTRY P: BAC: & MARY OWENS SP: … lic: mar. What fits. He is of Oswestry parish, where the Oliver baptisms are. The forename pair matches the David Oliver & Mary of those baptisms. A marriage in 1772 sits properly before Dianna in 1777, Elizabeth in 1782 and David in 1789. And a David Oliver, cooper, buried at Oswestry in 1808 aged 59 was about twenty-three in 1772. What does not. Nothing links this entry to those baptisms except those fits. David Oliver and Mary are two of the commonest names on this border, and the same eight volumes hold David Olivers at Blodwell, Trefyrclawdd, Pentreshanel, Sweeney and Willow Street across a century. The control is that the shortlist is one long. All eight volumes were searched for every marriage of a David Oliver: between 1765 and 1782 there is exactly one, and the only other in the series is 1799, May 10. David Oliver, bac: & Anne Morris, sp: — wrong wife, wrong decade. If it is the right marriage, Elizabeth Margaret Oliver's mother was MARY OWENS and the Sneyd line gains a surname. It is not yet the right marriage. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | The Wayback Machine — a permanent copy of every source this archive chose found something | If a citation stops resolving tomorrow, can the reader still see what this archive saw? | It started at 15 of 83, and the figure is now counted by the tool on the sources page instead of typed into a sentence — because within a week of writing this, the sentence said 70 of 84 while the instrument said 73 of 87. check_cites.py asks whether a citation still resolves TODAY; it does not ask whether anyone could still read it if it stopped. A footnote to a page that has gone is a footnote to nothing, and the reader cannot tell it from a good one. tools/snapshot.py now asks the second question, counts only the citations this archive chose, reads a committed cache in the build, and has captures requested for the rest twenty at a time with a pause between. One early figure was wrong and running the tool caught it. It asked the Wayback Machine to capture twelve archive.org URLs and got twelve 523s — the Internet Archive declining to snapshot itself. A citation to archive.org IS a permanent copy. Counting those as unprotected both flattered the problem and would have sent the next person chasing a capture that cannot exist. And the ones that remain are not a job undone. Every one resolves perfectly and simply refuses to be archived: nla.gov.au (6) — Trove's permalinks — findagrave.com (3), FamilySearch's tree, the Anubis-gated Seine-Maritime viewer, FIBIS, and two dynamic endpoints. A host that declines to be archived is a fact about the host, and the tool now prints them by host so that nobody reads the gap as laziness. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | FIBIS — Elizabeth Eleanor D'Arcy, who married Arthur Ashley Ruck in 1877 found nothing | Whose daughter she was — the one question the Berta Ruck discovery left open | Not answered, and a tempting piece of reasoning is refused along the way. Allen's Indian Mail carried the marriage: Groom RUCK, Arthur Ashley · Bride D'ARCY, Elizabeth Eleanor · 1877. That is a second, independent record of the Penzance marriage FreeBMD gives as 5c 381, reported from the India side. It is NOT evidence that she was one of the Indian D'Arcys, and it would have been easy to say it was. Arthur Ashley Ruck was himself an India-serving officer — Lieutenant promoted to Captain, 2nd Battalion 8th (The King's) Regiment, in the Afghan war of 1878–81 — so the Anglo-Indian paper had every reason to print his marriage whoever he married. The notice is explained by the groom alone. No baptism for her exists in FIBIS, exact search, across two million names. The only other Elizabeth D'Arcys there are an Elizabeth D'Arcy who died in India on 23 September 1861 (a BACSA memorial — not the 1877 bride, who was alive, and not attachable to anybody here) and an Elizabeth Boyle who married a John D'Arcy in Bengal in 1856. So whose daughter she was is exactly as open as it was, and the inference that she was Robert West's is still an inference from a surname and a decade. control named |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Porter, History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, vol. I — the Copenhagen page found something | The third campaign Porter's index gives Robert D'Arcy, which a full-text search had said was not there | Commanding Engineer of the Copenhagen expedition of 1807, under the future Duke of Wellington. The force sailed from Yarmouth Roads on 27 July with 20,000 men under the command of Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley, and the Engineers consisted of Lieutenant-Colonel R. D'Arcy, Commanding Engineer; Captains R. Fletcher, J. F. Birch and S. R. Chapman; Second Captains C. W. Pasley, H. Goldfinch and C. S. Rhodes; First Lieutenant G. Collyer. Copenhagen was bombarded from 2 September and the Danish fleet seized. Two of the men under him became famous: Richard Fletcher was Wellington's chief engineer in the Peninsula and died at San Sebastian, and Charles Pasley founded the school of military engineering at Chatham — where D'Arcy himself died as Commandant twenty years later. And the book's own index is what found it. A first pass over the full text matched seven instances of the surname and missed this one, because the scanner had set it D‘Arcy with a left single quotation mark where every other instance uses a right one. The search was wrong and the index was right: Porter's entry says Copenhagen, 243, which is the only reason anybody went looking for a page the text search had already declared absent. An index is a control on a full-text search, and this archive will carry that into every book it reads this way. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | James Morier, A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor, 1810–1816 (1818) found something | Joseph D'Arcy's five years in Persia, which this archive has had only from his own obituary of 1848 | An eyewitness, and he names him three times. Morier was Secretary of the Embassy and sailed with him. The voyage out. Of Sir Gore Ouseley's embassy: On board the Chichester store-ship, which accompanied us, were Major (now Colonel) d'Arcy, and Major Stone, of the artillery, who died in Persia; and ten privates of the artillery. Sent to record antiquities. The Ambassador dispatched his suite across Persia — Sir William Ouseley to Fasa for the tomb of Cyrus, the Hon. Mr Gordon to Shouster for ancient Susa, Morier to Persepolis — and Colonel d'Arcy proceeded to Firouzabad, where we had heard of some remarkable sculptures. An artillery officer sent to draw rock reliefs. And he commanded an action. Abbas Mirza marched on Mogan; 800 Russians with two guns held the village of Sultanboot. The attack, under the command of Colonel d'Arcy, took place in the morning. The Russians, in negligent confidence, were surprised to see a well-directed fire of grape open upon them, which in a short time killed 300 of their men… they capitulated. One of the articles of capitulation was, that their heads were not to be cut off. The Persians first claimed 2,000 killed and 5,000 taken, and told Morier they had inflated it because this is the first time our troops have made any stand at all against the Russians. No year is put on it here. The passage carries none, thirty thousand characters before it hold no date, and the book spans 1810 to 1816. The index found him, for the second time today. A full-text search matched one instance of the surname — the index entry D'Arcy, Colonel, 2. 68. 186. All three body passages were missed because the book sets his name lower case, d'Arcy. Earlier the same day Porter's Copenhagen page was missed over a left versus right quotation mark. Two different characters, two missed pages, and the index right both times. |
| 11 Oct 2026 | Sir William Ouseley, Travels in Various Countries of the East, more particularly Persia — three volumes found something | Joseph D'Arcy in Persia, asked of the Ambassador's own brother, who shared a house with him at Tabriz | Thirty-four mentions across three volumes, and they turn a line in an obituary into a man. He was the embassy's artist. Ouseley's preface: The plates which contribute most highly to the embellishment of this volume have been engraved from drawings made by my accomplished and amiable friend… mentioned in the second volume under the title of Colonel D'Arcy. Those plates are numbered II. IV. V. XI. XVIII, and XX. The engravings are signed Colonel D'Arcy del. — the Ambassador's house at Rio, a nautch dance, the cave temples at Elephanta, a well near Bushehr, the great Sasanian sculpture at Shapur, a mountain pass. At Pasargadae Ouseley sketched the same view and then preferred D'Arcy's to his own: he having favoured me with his drawing, the reader will no doubt be pleased that I have preferred it to my own. He did fieldwork. Assisted by Major D'Arcy in impressing every form of the letters on paper slightly wetted for the purpose, and applied to the very stone — taking squeezes of a Pahlavi inscription. At Isfahan he drew the poet Kazem Waleh, eighty years old and composing his own epitaph, who refused until flattered, then tried them all on his head, and when satisfied with one as sufficiently becoming, sat most complacently while Colonel D'Arcy finished an admirable likeness. And here is the day he entered Abbas Mirza's service — the reason his son was called Abbas Kooly. November 1811, Tehran: the Prince asked for British officers, but the king would not consent that any of those officers should leave Tehran without khelaats, or dresses of honour. They were duly honoured by the king with khelaats… and proceeded to join the army of Abbas Mirza, the prince royal, at Tabriz. At Tabriz he was in charge. I was accommodated with a room at the house of my friend Major D'Arcy, who, as senior officer, commanded in the military department. Two Russian envoys lodged in his house; so did a French officer. Ouseley was writing at a table there when the earthquake of 23 June 1812 shook it, and left for Constantinople from D'Arcy's house on 1 July 1812. One date does not add up and is not being smoothed. A footnote in volume I dates the Firuzabad excursion to the summer of 1814, but the narrative places that dispersal in 1811 and Ouseley left Persia in July 1812. Either the year is a slip for 1811 or it records a later visit. This archive does not pick one. |
Nothing matches that.
Checked before searching, every time
What each database actually holds
What each database actually holds for the parishes this archive needs. Checked before searching, every time — because a search of a source that does not cover your parish returns nothing, and nothing looks exactly like a negative result.
| Database | Parish or series | Holds | Span | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FreeREG | Bristol (all parishes) Countess of Huntingdon's Chapel, Methodist Bishopston, Moravian Maudlin Street, Temple of Holy Cross. St Paul — the parish this archive needs — is not among them. → | 4 registers, 1,551 records | 1755–1915 | cannot answer |
| FreeREG | Berkeley St Mary, Gloucestershire Stops 128 years before Hannah Saniger was born. Her baptism is untranscribed, not missing. → | 2,916 records | 1600–1677 | partly |
| FreeREG | Dursley St James, Gloucestershire Covers the whole Saniger chain. This is where the chain was tested and failed. → | 30,784 records | 1577–1951 | covers it |
| FreeREG | Cam St George, Gloucestershire With Dursley, holds 340 of the 494 Saniger records in the county. → | 17,150 records | 1568–1939 | covers it |
| FreeREG | Berkley St Mary, Somerset Tested as the alternative reading of the tree's “Berkley”. The family there is SINGER throughout and holds no Hannah near 1805. → | 7,967 records + 2,132 bishop's transcripts | 1545–1903 | covers it |
| FreeREG | Portsea St Mary, Hampshire That one record is Joseph D'Arcy's baptism, 19 March 1780, naming Robert and Jean. The 1779 marriage itself is not in the transcription. → | one D'Arcy record in the whole county | — | partly |
| FreeREG | Madeley All Saints, Staffordshire Holds both the 1742 baptism that killed the Keele graft and the 1744 burial that may undo it. → | 110 Sneyd records | 1699–1790+ | covers it |
| FreeREG | St Quivox, Ayrshire 128 Murdoch records exist for Ayrshire — Galston, Tarbolton, Ayr, Kirkoswald, Loudoun, Dailly, Beith, Dunlop — and not one for St Quivox. The county itself is thin: 202 Smiths for the whole eighteenth century. → | nothing | — | holds nothing |
| FreeREG | South Leith, Midlothian Midlothian's holding is Edinburgh, Canongate, Restalrig and Dalry. Jean Ward's birth parish is not transcribed. → | nothing | — | holds nothing |
| FreeREG | County Limerick Zero records for the entire county. A control search for SMITH across the eighteenth century returns nothing. The county is offered in the search form and has no data behind it. → | nothing at all | — | holds nothing |
| FreeCEN | 1841, Bristol HO107/374 — this is where James and Hannah Wakefield were found, with Miriam aged one. → | the household | 1841 | covers it |
| FreeCEN | 1851, Bristol Nationally only 36% of the 1851 pieces are transcribed. The piece covering Drivers Fields is not among them — which is why the Lyddya Sinegar identification is still an inference. → | 221 Gloucestershire Wakefields, 31 in Bristol — but not this family | 1851 | partly |
| FreeBMD | England and Wales, civil registration Control-tested at 21,248 Wakefield marriages for 1838–1842 before any absence was reported from it. This is where Miriam's birth registration was found. → | complete index from 1 July 1837 | 1837– | covers it |
| FindMyPast | Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills, England NOTHING AFTER 1800. Three wills this archive needs — Robert D'Arcy's of 1827, Joseph D'Arcy's of 1848 and John Maddock Jones's of 1844 — are all beyond it. A paid trial does not help; the records are not there to unlock. → | a wills index 1750–1800 and an administrations index 1660–1700 | 1660–1800 | cannot answer |
| FindMyPast | Gloucestershire probate, Consistory Court of Gloucester Covers Berkeley and the whole Vale in the right years. Searched under wildcards for every form of the Saniger name and returns two entries, neither of them at Berkeley. A real negative, control-tested at 277 Smiths. → | 14,195 entries | 1801–1858 | covers it |
| FindMyPast | Ireland Diocesan and Prerogative Marriage Licence Bonds, DUBLIN diocese Sorted by year, the latest Dublin-diocese entries in the entire set are a single 1813, a single 1752, and then a wall of 1741. The catalogue date range is the set's range, not the diocese's. An 1819 Wicklow marriage cannot be in it. → | 218,433 records across all Ireland | 1623–1866 nominally; DUBLIN effectively ends 1741 | cannot answer |
| FindMyPast | Betham Prerogative Marriage Licences Abstracts, Ireland Ends nine years before the marriage this archive wants. Twenty-two Darcy entries, all necessarily too early. → | 21,639 records | 1629–1810 | cannot answer |
| FindMyPast | British consular and overseas registers (deaths abroad) Searched the whole record-set catalogue for “consular” and for “abroad” and both return no record sets at all. The Le Havre deaths of 1843 are not reachable here; they are on Ancestry and at Kew in RG 35. → | nothing | — | cannot answer |
| FindMyPast | Caribbean Birth & Baptism Index — St Michael, Barbados Holds the two christenings of Robert D'Arcy's children at St Michael in 1786 and 1788. Barbados Births & Baptisms 1637-1891, a separate and larger set, holds neither — two indexes of the same island disagreeing about what is in them, which is its own warning. → | 451,104 records across the Caribbean | 1590–1928 | covers it |
| FindMyPast | British Army, Royal Artillery Officers 1716-1899 The index is searchable on a paid trial and the transcripts are not — “Subscribe to unlock exclusive records”. Joseph D'Arcy's whole artillery career and a Constantine D'Arcy entry of 1777-79 are visible as dates and unreadable as records. → | indexed | 1716–1899 | partly |
| FindMyPast census search (1841–1911) | any census set, when a YEAR OF BIRTH and a PLACE are combined A query carrying both yearofbirth and keywordsplace returns ZERO on census sets and presents it as a clean negative. Control: JANE SMITH born about 1788 in Sussex, 1871 — zero. The same search returns 60 by year alone and 136 by place alone. Search on one or the other and filter by hand. → | everything — but returns nothing | — | cannot answer |
| Find a Grave | a NAMED CEMETERY — Centenary Memorial Gardens, Brisbane Searching inside a named cemetery works and produced three D'Arcy memorials with plots and dates. This archive had never used the source. → | 8,387 memorials | modern | covers it |
| Find a Grave | by SURNAME AND STATE — location=Queensland, locationId=state_2118 Returns NO MATCHES for D'Arcy, Darcy, Sneyd — and for SMITH, which is impossible, while Darcy worldwide returns 10,654. The locationId is wrong. Search within a cemetery instead. → | nothing, whatever you ask it | — | cannot answer |
| BillionGraves | any surname search CORRECTED TWICE ON 9 OCTOBER 2026. It is not blocked, and the first correction was also wrong. It was recorded blocked when its own search API returned 403 and 400. Re-tested in a browser at another archive's prompting and it answers at once, so «blocked» was a fact about the request. Then the correction overclaimed. It said SANIGER returns 25 burials and none in the United Kingdom. Asking the same query with AND THE SEARCH CANNOT BE DRIVEN BY URL AT ALL, which is what makes any absence here unquotable. Usable for a positive, useless for a negative until the search is driven through the site's own interface. [Own error 54](/corrections/). → | unknown | — | partly |
| Antenati (Archivio di Stato di Caserta) | ARIENZO, Caserta — the parish this family married into Digitised in full and free to read — AND NOT NAME-INDEXED. A search for FALCO at Arienzo returns nothing, and so does a search for RUSSO, the commonest surname in Campania, which is the control that proves the index rather than the family is missing. Antenati says so itself: only part of its registers are indexed. These 422 must be read page by page. The marriage PROCESSETTI are the prize, because they carry birth extracts and parental consents for both parties. → | 422 REGISTERS: Matrimoni processetti 63, Matrimoni 62, Nati 59, Morti 57, Diversi 45, and more | from 1809 | partly |
| National Library of Ireland parish registers | the Limerick line — Atkinson, Cole, Creech, Kent, Bowen, Peevers The NLI collection is Catholic by definition, and this line is not. Paul Cole Atkinson is recorded as born at ST MARY'S, LIMERICK — the Church of Ireland cathedral parish — and the surnames around him are Protestant settler names. The same shape as the Wicklow problem: the right records are the ones the NLI does not hold. → | CATHOLIC registers only | to 1880 | cannot answer |
| irishgenealogy.ie | the Creech, Atkinson and Mulcahy lines A Cloudflare bot check, for the third time in this archive's life. Not defeated, and will not be. The free official Irish index remains unreachable from here and stays on the errand list for a person with a browser. → | unknown | — | not asked |
| RootsIreland | Co. Limerick and Co. Tipperary Reachable, and behind Login / Register / Subscribe. Limerick and both Tipperarys are among its counties. It is a subscription, so it is an errand and not a search. → | county-by-county transcriptions | — | partly |
| ScotlandsPeople | South Leith — Jean Ward's parish The old-parish-register search area answers ACCESS DENIED without an account. No account was created and no credentials were entered. Jean Ward's 1754 baptism and her parents' 1747 marriage are already held here from FamilySearch; what ScotlandsPeople would add is the register image itself. → | the original OPR images | 1553–1855 | not asked |
| FreeBMD | England and Wales civil registration CORRECTED 27 September 2026. This row said the search returns no rows for every query. It does not; the search was never run. FreeBMD's Find control is an image button carrying no text — <input type="image" name="find" src="/btnFindLg.gif">. The only submits that carry text are «Find Additional» and «View Saved», which belong to the saved-search box, and pressing one returns a results-shaped page reading «You must supply the name of a file containing a saved search». Control on the real button: SMITH marriages, Bristol district, 1852 returns a full table, volume 6a with page numbers, every quarter marked >99% transcribed. [Own error 46](/corrections/). → | unknown from here | 1837 onward | covers it |
| RootsChat | the Hornby claim and the Keele graft “You are not allowed to search for posts in this forum. Please login below or register.” Searching needs an account, let alone posting. No account was created. Putting the Hornby evidence to the forum is a job for a person with a login, and is now an errand. → | unknown | — | not asked |
| Geneanet | FALCO at ARIENZO, Caserta Readable WITHOUT signing in, and no bot check appeared. Falco brides and grooms at Arienzo with their spouses — Loffredo, Abatiello, Di Lucia, Librera, Perrotta — and FALCO GIOVANNA married to CRISCI ANIELLO, Crisci being one of the Falco archive's own surnames. This is that archive's ground; the coverage is recorded here, not the records. → | 26 records in Italy, Marriages 1809-1900, with both spouses named | 1809–1900 | covers it |
| FindMyPast | any search carrying `sourcecategory` The category filter mangles to life-events-bmds in the URL and the search then returns zero whatever else is asked, while the same query without it returns results. The third broken FindMyPast parameter found in two days, after yearofbirth+keywordsplace on the census and the Find a Grave locationId. → | everything — and returns nothing | — | cannot answer |
| Men & Armour, 1608 (coaley.net transcript) | the whole of Gloucestershire, by hundred, manor and tithing Searched 14 September 2026 for all seventeen spellings this archive held, then exhaustively by word-ending (-gar, -gear, -ger, -gor, -gre). Eleven men of the surname, in four spellings, two of them new. Control: 676 men returned for Dursley, 42 for Halmore. → | nearly every man aged 16–60 in the county, with trade, age-decade and stature | 1608 | covers it |
| Men & Armour, 1608 (coaley.net transcript) | any surname search ending in an asterisk A wildcard at the END of a term silently matches nothing: Sanige* returns no matches while Saniger returns five. A wildcard at the START works — *niger returns seven. The fourth broken search parameter this archive has caught by control test, after two on FindMyPast and Find a Grave's locationId. → | everything — and returns nothing | — | cannot answer |
| Men & Armour, 1608 (coaley.net transcript) | any search returning exactly one record A single hit is reported as “There is one match”, spelling the number as a word; two or more are reported in digits. A reader or script looking for a numeral sees nothing and files a zero. This hid JOHN SANIGER — the one man living inside the hamlet the surname comes from — on the first pass of the search that found him, and he was recovered only because a search by PLACE returned him and contradicted the null. → | the record — but not in digits | — | cannot answer |
| Gloucestershire Registration Service Index | Berkeley, Dursley, Wotton-under-Edge and Uley registration districts Free, and it gives the LOCAL reference a certificate is ordered against, which the GRO index does not. Its surname box does prefix matching when Exact Match is unticked, so the stem SANIG finds every form at once — searched as SANIGER alone it misses Lydia Sanigar entirely. → | the registrars' own books, indexed to register and entry number | 1837–1948 | covers it |
| FreeCEN — Sussex | Brighton, 1851 to 1871 SMITH returns the 1,000-row display cap for 1851, 1861 and 1871, which looks like full coverage and is not. The three D'Arcy sisters are enumerated in the 1851 Sussex census under the surname ARCY at HO107/1646 folio 357 — and FreeCEN returns nought for Arcy in Sussex in 1851. Test a free census index with a record you already know is in it, never with a common surname. → | a great deal, and not the piece this archive needs | 1841–1891 | partly |
| FreeREG — any county | any search returning a large number FreeREG stops counting at 500. Any control reported as “more than 500” is a ceiling, not a measurement: it reads identically whether a county is half transcribed or whole. Two nulls in this archive were justified that way and have been re-controlled — at PARISH level, with a surname whose count comes in UNDER the cap. Ruabon returns 500 Joneses and 39 Smiths for 1780–1830; the 39 is the number that means something. (Recorded as UNUSABLE: it is unusable specifically as a control.) → | up to 500 rows, and says so | — | cannot answer |
| TNA Discovery — the whole catalogue | Every repository in England, not only Kew Searching Discovery needs no sign-in; only downloading images does. Under the MEDIEVAL spellings it returns 195 records for this surname against 71 for the modern one — 178 of them at Berkeley Castle, and the rest at Gloucestershire, Kew, Birmingham, Bristol, Hertford and Aberystwyth. Tested 15 September 2026. → | a great deal, and it is free to search without any account | 1189 to the present | covers it |
| Berkeley Castle Muniments, inside Discovery | The Berkeley estate, Gloucestershire The modern catalogue this archive had been asking for as errand 51 turns out to be free and already open. 178 records under the medieval spellings. → | the deeds themselves, calendared item by item — party, land, rent, witnesses, and the GC number to quote when ordering | 1153 to the 17th century | covers it |
| FreeREG — Berkeley parish, measured | Berkeley St Mary, Gloucestershire Controlled at PARISH level on 15 September with SMITH: 3 exact and 36 uncertain results, every one between 1653 and 1677. County-level queries here are meaningless — FreeREG caps at 500, so a common surname returns the cap whether a parish is fully transcribed or absent. → | a thirty-year fragment and nothing else | about 1653 to 1677 | partly |
| FreeREG — the Forest parishes | Awre and Blakeney FreeREG has data for 189 Gloucestershire places, including Berkeley, Dursley, North Nibley, Slimbridge, Thornbury, Uley and Woodmancote. NEITHER AWRE NOR BLAKENEY IS ONE OF THEM. Any Awre search would have returned nothing for a reason that has nothing to do with the family. AND THE PREMISE WAS WRONG: this archive has no Sanigers at Awre or Blakeney at all — correction 32. The absence of coverage there is real and irrelevant. → | nothing at all | — | holds nothing |
| FreeBMD | England and Wales, the GRO index IT SILENTLY REFUSES a range of more than a few years and redisplays its own search form, which is indistinguishable from an empty result. Three searches were recorded as nought on 15 September before a control — Charlotte Darcy, 1869, Brighton 2b 152 — showed they had never run. Narrowed to three years it works perfectly. → | the registrations, and it will lie to you about a wide date range | 1837 onwards, 99%+ for the quarters that matter here | partly |
| The London Gazette | England and Wales, official notices Free, no account, richly digitised — 1,057 notices mention «Lieutenant» in the 1770s alone. But notices mentioning «Corps of Engineers» number NONE in 1774, NONE in 1775, and three in 1776 of which one is Irish and two are a Bengal reprint. The Ordnance began gazetting engineer commissions during the American war. A silence here about 1776 is about the Gazette, not about the man. → | commissions and promotions — but not Ordnance ones before the American war | 1665 onwards | partly |
| The Protestation Returns, 1641–42 | The Parliamentary Archives, YHL/PO/JO/10/1/77–109 For Gloucestershire, nothing. The series is one alphabetical run of county bundles and GLOUCESTERSHIRE IS MISSING FROM WHERE IT BELONGS — the piece that would hold it holds Essex, Hampshire, Hertfordshire and Huntingdonshire instead. The alphabet is the control. Staffordshire, for the Sneyds, does survive. → | nearly every adult male in England, for the counties that survive | 1641–42 | holds nothing |
| The poll tax of 1381, Gloucestershire | Gloucestershire Archives D 1874/1, photostats of the surviving originals The catalogue lists every surviving membrane: Salmonsbury, Holford and Greston, Kiftsgate, Tibblestone, Rapsgate, Bradley, Crowthorne, Brightwells Barrow, Longtree, Cirencester, Bisley, St Briavels. BERKELEY HUNDRED IS NOT AMONG THEM. What survives is Cotswold and Forest; the Vale is lost. → | named adults, for the hundreds whose membranes survive | 1381 | holds nothing |
| Rudder, A New History of Gloucestershire (1779) | Every parish in the county 5.7 million characters, Berkeley mentioned 804 times, and NOT ONE mention of Saniger under any spelling. The control holds: his index carries «Wanfwell in Berkeley 280», Hamfallow, Halmore and Alkington. At page 280 the whole tithing is «Hamfallow, in which are Wanſwell… part of Halmore; and Hamfallow». Smyth names the hamlet in 1639 and Bigland in 1791; Rudder, between them, does not. → | the tithings, hamlet by hamlet — but not this hamlet | to 1779 | partly |
| Gloucestershire Notes and Queries | The county's antiquarian serial One hit in four volumes read, and it corrects this archive: reviewing Maclean's 1902 edition of the 1608 muster it says «Sainger should read Saniger». Three further volumes are a clean null against a Berkeley control of 234, 91 and 51 mentions. Too small a family for an antiquarian serial — but the right place to check an edition. → | reviews of the editions this archive relies on | 1881 onwards | covers it |
| The manorial court rolls of Awre | Gloucestershire Archives — D2156/1–4, D421/M7, D3270/362, D3270/363 Not digitised; the catalogue is free and the documents are a visit. They are also not about this family. This row was added on the strength of an invented «Forest side» — correction 32 — and is kept, corrected, because the rolls are genuinely a model of what a surviving manorial run looks like. → | tenants by name, generation after generation, with the customary heir of each who died | 1387, 1439, 1573, 1577/8, 1588–91, then 1671 to 1881 | covers it |
| E 179 — Tudor lay subsidies | Berkeley and Bledisloe hundreds, Gloucestershire Catalogued individually and described as «Assessment (individuals)», so the names are known to be there. NOT DIGITISED and no free published edition exists. For BLEDISLOE — Awre and Blakeney — this matters more than anywhere else: that hundred has no FreeREG coverage, no surviving Protestation return and no surviving 1381 poll tax membrane. → | named taxpayers, hundred by hundred, in the century this archive cannot otherwise cross | 1523–25, 1543–46, 1549 | covers it |
| The Gentleman's Magazine, on the Internet Archive | 120 digitised volumes The search index stamps EVERY volume «1731», the series start, so year-targeted retrieval needs the per-item metadata record fetched one at a time. Checked that way on 15 September: the 120 volumes include 1827, 1829, 1847 and 1849 — and neither 1805 nor 1848, which are the years Constantine and Joseph D'Arcy died. The 1849 volume was read: 122 obituary sections, three D'Arcys, none of them this family's. → | officers' deaths and obituaries — for the years it happens to hold | 1738 to 1907, with gaps | partly |
| FindMyPast — England Deaths & Burials 1538-1991 | Berkeley, Gloucestershire Measured on 16 September by asking for every burial at Berkeley, any surname, in two equal thirty-year windows. 1735-1765 returns 442. 1800-1830 returns 2. The surname series behaves the same way: 23 SANIGER burials at Berkeley, the last of them in 1787. Any «not buried at Berkeley» this archive states from this set after about 1790 is a statement about the index and not about the churchyard — including John Saniger, whose burial there in January 1825 is documented from elsewhere and is not in this set. → | parish burials | to about 1790, and then effectively nothing | partly |
| FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973 | Berkeley, Gloucestershire 272 marriages at Berkeley for 1793-1803, any surname. That is what makes the absence of a Saniger marriage there in that decade — under eight spellings — a real null rather than a gap, and it is why the tree's «John Saniger married Lydia Jones at Berkeley in 1797» could be disproved rather than merely doubted. The result rows do not show the spouse's surname; the transcript does. → | parish marriages | covered through the 1790s and 1800s | covers it |
| FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975 | Berkeley and the Vale 158 SANIGER entries read in full, 115 of them Berkeley, 156 of the 158 naming a father. The apparent hole at Berkeley from 1632 to 1676 is a spelling and not a gap — SAINGER supplies 26 entries inside it. About one entry in five is a duplicate: 125 distinct name-year-place combinations in 158 rows. → | parish baptisms, with the father's first name | 1571 to 1839 for this surname | covers it |
| TNA Discovery — the JSON API | every repository Discovery indexes, not Kew aloneGET /API/search/records?sps.searchQuery=… returns JSON with a count and a paged records array, and needs no account, no key and no bot check — which is the whole difference between a question and a measurement. Wrapped as tools/discovery.py on 17 September and control-tested against nonsense terms before its counts were used. It returns the CATALOGUE, not the documents: every description is a modern cataloguer's reading, and two of the best ones here carry the cataloguer's own «[Saniger?]» in brackets. → | catalogue descriptions | 1100 to the present | covers it |
| FindMyPast — England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975 | Hampshire Measured on 21 September by asking the same question of two counties. SMITH returns 3 baptisms in Hampshire and 41,098 in Kent. The set is a FamilySearch transcription and Hampshire is simply not in it. This archive has never built a Hampshire finding on it — Joseph D'Arcy's baptism, his siblings and his parents' marriage all come from the Hampshire Genealogical Society's own county sets, which are separate record sets on the same site. Recorded so that nobody reaches for the national set and reports Portsea empty. → | almost nothing for this county | 1538-1975 nominally | holds nothing |
| FindMyPast — England Marriages 1538-1973 | Hampshire Measured on 21 September, one surname, one query shape, one session. SMITH returns 0 marriages in Hampshire across the whole 435-year span and 14,056 in Gloucestershire. Not few — none. Nothing about a search box produces that: the same page, the same afternoon, returns fourteen thousand for the county next door. This voids every Hampshire marriage null this archive has recorded against the national set, including «no Joseph D'Arcy marries in Hampshire between 1825 and 1835», which was a statement about the transcription and not about Joseph. The county sets on the same site are unaffected. → | nothing whatever for this county | 1538-1973 nominally | holds nothing |
| FindMyPast — England Deaths & Burials 1538-1991 | Hampshire The third of the three FamilySearch national sets, asked the same way on 21 September: SMITH returns 23 in Hampshire and 4,600 in Gloucestershire. And the 23 do not survive reading — the first two are at Easton-Maudit and Paulersbury, which are Northamptonshire villages filed under the wrong county. All three national sets are therefore unusable for Hampshire, and a Hampshire question must go to the Hampshire Genealogical Society's county sets or to civil registration. → | twenty-three entries, and some of them are not Hampshire | 1538-1991 nominally | holds nothing |
| FindMyPast — England & Wales Deaths 1837-2007 | the Lymington registration district 21 PITT deaths registered at Lymington between 1820 and 1900, and two D'Arcy deaths in the whole run of the index — Joseph in the first quarter of 1848 and Katherine Lucy Elizabeth in the second of 1863, both of whom this archive already holds. The district is plainly indexed, so the absence of any other D'Arcy there is a fact about the family and not about the set. → | the GRO death index, addressable by district | 1837 onwards | covers it |
| FindMyPast — England & Wales Non-Conformist Births and Baptisms (RG 4) | Bristol SMITH returns 133 chapel baptisms at Bristol, Congregational and Presbyterian. The series this archive spent a week planning to order volume by volume from The National Archives is transcribed here and answerable in one query. S*N*G*R at Bristol returns nought, against 808 for the same wildcard nationally and 8 for SANIGAR — all eight at Dursley, Corn Meeting. The set also feeds England Births & Baptisms 1538-1975, so that set is not purely Anglican. → | the Bristol chapel registers, indexed and searchable by place | 1724 to 1831 for the control surname | covers it |
| FindMyPast — England & Wales Non-Conformist Burials (RG 4) | BristolS*N*G*R at Bristol returns nine — Singer, Springer, Stringer, Swearenger — and none of them is this surname. 409 under the same wildcard across the whole set. A null against a query that returns nine near misses at the right place is a null worth having. → | chapel burials | 1704 to 1812 in the rows returned | covers it |
| FindMyPast — every Birth, Marriage, Death & Parish record set | Barbados Asked across the whole category on 21 September rather than set by set. D'ARCY at Barbados returns four records, all between 1850 and 1876, every one of them from British Armed Forces And Overseas Births And Baptisms or the matching deaths set. Control: SMITH at Barbados returns eight, and the oldest is 1811 — a Royal Regiment of Foot deaths register. There is nothing here from the eighteenth century at all. Constantine's christening at St Michael in February 1786 and Jane's in March 1788 are not on this site and cannot be, which settles how errand 33 has to be answered: from the Barbados originals or a repository copy, not from another index search. → | the British armed forces overseas registers, and nothing earlier | 1811 at the earliest | holds nothing |
| FindMyPast — Newspapers & Publications (the family-notice index) | England, before about 1850 It is not the British Newspaper Archive. It indexes birth, marriage and death notices by name; the Year and Location columns are empty for most rows, so any year filter silently returns zero — SMITH gives 674,001 unfiltered and 0 for 1827 ± 2. Read whole rather than filtered, Robert D'Arcy returns 42 notices with nothing dated before 1857 and Joseph D'Arcy 84 with nothing before 1914. Useful for the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; useless for this archive's Georgian questions, which need the full-text site and its own sign-in. → | a name index to BMD notices, weighted to the twentieth century | thin before 1850 | partly |
| English marriage registers, 1754–1837 (the record class itself) | every English parish, Hardwicke's Act to civil registration No fathers, abodes, ages, conditions or occupations. Bristol Archives stated it in those words on 22 September, reading the 1828 entry this archive had waited nine days for. Fathers arrive with civil registration in 1837, which is why the 1871 marriage in this family names one and the 1828 marriage cannot. This row exists because three errands here were written on the opposite assumption. Before asking a marriage entry for a father, check its date. One qualifier, so this row does not create the opposite error. A father can still appear on a pre-1837 entry incidentally — most often as consent for a party under twenty-one — and banns books sometimes carry more than the register does. What does not exist before 1837 is a father's column. And consent was recorded for marriages by licence: under Hardwicke's Act a marriage by banns stood unless a parent publicly dissented while they were read, so nothing was written down. Thomas and Martha married by banns, which is the one detail that decides it. → | the two names, the parish, banns or licence, the signatures and the witnesses — and NOTHING ELSE | 1754–1837 | partly |
| Bristol Archives — enquiry service | Bristol Church of England parishes, including St James Answered a seven-part enquiry in nine days, free, having viewed the record — their research service is quoted at £13 for up to half an hour and nothing was charged. The reply corrected this archive's spelling of the surname from the index reading and volunteered a record nobody had asked for. Images of the registers are on Ancestry, which this archive will not use because it wants an account. → | the original registers, read by staff on request | from 1754 for marriages | covers it |
| The GRO index of marriages, before 1912 (the record class) | England and Wales, civil registration Spouses are not paired in the index until 1912. What the volume and page give you is everyone registered on the same page — typically four names, two marriages — so a couple is an inference from a shared page unless something outside the index settles it. Tested against a marriage this archive holds from the register: Thomas Sinegar and Julia Marsh, 28 May 1871, appear on Bristol 6a 131 beside John Offer and Matilda Frances Crump, exactly as the method predicts and with the true pairing knowable only from the register. Before 1912, read the page and then say «inferred». → | surname, forename, district, volume and page — and NO indication of who married whom | 1837–1911 | partly |
| Trove (National Library of Australia) — newspaper and gazette TITLES, via the API | Australia, by place of publication 2,052 digitised titles, measured 27 September 2026 through the API, and then the holdings asked for title by title across Queensland and New South Wales, 1826-1940 — 725 of 728, with three recorded UNKNOWN because the request failed rather than because they hold nothing. A title's range is not its holdings, and only the holdings make an absence mean anything. Papers actually holding issues for the year, and how many: · Parramatta 1849 — nothing published at Parramatta, but 8 New South Wales papers hold that year, 675 issues between them, of which THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD supplies 312. This archive already holds his obituary — The Sydney Morning Herald of 1849, The one-title gaps in 1902 and 1936 are the reason this was worth asking: a paper can be in range and hold nothing. 90 titles also have a break in their run that the API's own startDate and endDate flatten. The open table at [/trove-titles.json](/trove-titles.json) keeps both apart. Titles and dates only. The key was granted on an undertaking that no article full text would be retrieved, and this archive keeps it: Trove is cited here as the source of a title and a date range and nothing more. → | 2,052 titles with their places and date ranges, and for 725 of them the issue count held per year | 1803–1995 | covers it |
| FreeBMD — the GRO death index, by quarter and district | England and Wales, civil registration FreeBMD is transcribed unevenly BY QUARTER AND BY DISTRICT, and the gaps are invisible until controlled. A quarter with nothing transcribed simply does not appear in the results; it prints no header and no warning, so it reads exactly like a quarter in which nobody of that name died. Measured 7 October 2026 against two deaths this archive is looking for: · December 1885, deaths — absent. SMITH in the Penzance district returns March, June and September 1885, each marked >99%, and no December. George Abbas Kooli D'Arcy died on 22 October 1885. · Bangor district, 1862, deaths — absent entirely. SMITH across all four quarters of 1862 returns zero rows and no quarter headers, which cannot be a real result for a district that size. Robert West D'Arcy died at Bangor on 14 June 1862. So the rule for this source is: before quoting an absence, run a common surname at the same district and quarter. Where the quarter is transcribed FreeBMD prints its completeness beside the heading — «(>99%)» — and where it is not, it prints nothing at all, which is the one case that looks like evidence. → | what volunteers have transcribed so far, which is uneven and silent about its own gaps | 1837 onwards | partly |
| BillionGraves — Holy Trinity Church, Kingswood (Bristol) | Kingswood, Bristol — 51.4616, -2.5033 One Bristol burial ground this archive can read end to end. Found on 9 October while checking whether BillionGraves was blocked at all. It carries 571 records and 402 headstone images, free and without an account, and it holds three SANIGAR burials — Andrew 1980, Dennis 2003, Barbara 2008. Twentieth-century, so not evidence for the eighteenth-century questions. What it is good for is the surname's survival and its place: Kingswood is in Bristol, not the Vale — where this family moved to rather than where it came from. The same caveat as the parent site applies to any absence — the search cannot be narrowed or paged from a URL — but a named cemetery page is a positive and can be read whole. → | 571 headstone records and 402 photographs of one Bristol churchyard | not stated; the Sanigar stones run 1964–2008 | covers it |
| Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime — état civil | Le Havre, Ingouville and the communes it absorbed Free, no account, and never tried by this archive until 9 October 2026. Two D'Arcy deaths of 1843 sit in this department — Margaret Jones née D'Arcy at Havre in February and her husband Major John Maddock Jones at Ingouville in March — and the archive had pursued both ONLY through British consular returns at Kew, which are «miscellaneous» by their own title and incomplete by their own description. The French état civil is not miscellaneous. Searched on 9 October: Ingouville, décès, 1843 returns five results including the complete year's deaths register, cote 4 E 9077, 310 views, with two tables décennales over it. Le Havre, décès, 1843 returns twelve, covering the town and the communes it absorbed. It answers a browser and refuses a script, which is the whole reason it was worth trying: the first response was a “Making sure you're not a bot!” interstitial that resolved by itself. The Record Atlas session had just found eight French departmental archives behaving exactly this way and said so. → | digitised civil registers and tables décennales, by commune and year | to 1843 and well beyond | covers it |
| The National Archives, Discovery | Feet of fines, Gloucestershire — CP 25/1 Catalogued at piece level only. «GLOUCESTERSHIRE: Feet of fines for 14-24 Hen VII: 38-77 membranes» is a typical entry — it names a county and a span of regnal years, and not one party to one fine. No free, name-indexed abstract exists for this county: «feet of fines» and «pedes finium» with Gloucestershire return nothing on the Internet Archive, and Discovery returns only the piece descriptions it is quoted above. So a fine naming a Swonhungre cannot be found by searching; it would be found by reading membranes at Kew, which is an errand and not a search. Checked 15 September 2026. → | piece descriptions, and no party names | 12th to 16th century | cannot answer |
| Internet Archive | Gloucestershire subsidies and musters, in print The catalogue descriptions are free and the names are not. Searches for «military survey Gloucestershire 1522», for a published 1524 subsidy roll, and for a separate edition of Men and Armour all return nothing. The Gloucestershire Record Series editions of this material are modern and in copyright, so the transcripts that would make these rolls searchable by name are the one part of them that cannot be read freely. Checked 15 September 2026. → | none of this county's editions | 1522 to 1608 | holds nothing |
Three of this archive's oldest dead ends turn out to be dead ends in a database.
County Limerick, South Leith and St Quivox have each been called an open question for months.
None of them has been searched and found empty — none of them has any data to
search. That is a completely different kind of not-knowing, and it points at a
different fix: an archive, not another query. The queue →
Method, for whoever does this next
What these two sites do that will waste your afternoon
- FreeREG caps results at 500 and says so only in the body text. A county-wide surname search will silently hit it. Narrow by parish using the place selector, which only populates after the county is chosen and a moment has passed.
- FreeREG allows at most three counties per search, and rejects a fourth with a validation error rather than ignoring it.
- Phonetic matching is a trap on this surname. A soundex search for Saniger on FreeBMD returns 14,300 matches, because it sweeps in every SINGER and SANGER in England. It is the right setting for Berkeley and the wrong one for Bristol.
- FreeBMD returns its results in a JavaScript array, not an HTML table — searchData = new Array(...), with a " ;0;quarter;year" line before each block. Parsing the page's tables finds nothing and looks exactly like a null result.
- FreeREG's own coverage tool and its search disagree. The contents page answers “Non existent County has been selected” for Ayrshire; the search returns 128 Murdochs. Trust the search.
- Control-test before believing a zero. Every null on this page was checked by running a query through the same harness that had to return something — 21,248 Wakefield marriages, 202 Ayrshire Smiths — so that an empty result means an empty record and not a broken form.
Why this page exists
Because the alternative wastes somebody's afternoon. An archive that publishes only its successes is telling you half the truth, and the half it leaves out is the half that would stop the next person repeating three days of work.
If you have read a source that is not here, or read one that is here and got a different answer, that is the most useful thing you can send. What changed → · Errands → · What is still open →