Monday 28 April 2008

The missing Winchester and Aylesbury Fitz-Henrys

I've been piecing together two Fitz-Henry families over the past few months, one based in Winchester, Hampshire and the other in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.
The common link is William Fitz-Henry, a soldier born in Dublin in 1830 whose father was a lawyer called Hester Fitz-Henry.
William came to the Winchester Peninsular barracks sometime around 1859, when his regiment the 60th Rifles was stationed there. His wife Barbara was a Scottish woman whose maiden name was Morrison, and had previously been married to a man called Le Sautair (or so it looks on the birth certificate - it would fit as this is a French sounding name and William and Barbara's first child was born on the island of Jersey so they might have met there).
They had seven children but only four survived
Henrietta b. 1855 on Jersey
George b. November 1859 and d.1st quarter 1860
Alexander b. 1st quarter 1861 and d. 2nd quarter 1862
William George b. May 1862 - became a surgeon
Charles Robert b. 1st quarter 1864 and d. 4th quarter 1865
Norman b. June 1865 and still alive in 1881
Annie Eliza not registered but christened in October 1867. At least that's what I thought until this evening when I was scouring the fantastic facility that is FreeBMD, and having put Annie, Winchester and 4th quarter into the search engine it turns out that she had been registered as Annie Eliza HENRY.

Barbara died in 1877 and by the end of the year, William had married again to the splendidly named Martha Eagles from an old monied family in Aylesbury Buckinghamshire. I'll do more about the Eagles family and their legacy to the Fitz-Henry family with regard to their names in another post.
William and Martha had another 4 children, and then seemed to disappear off the face of the earth after the 1881 census.
The children were
Hester Cordelia b. 1878
Rowley Steavens b.1879
Harry Duncombe b.1882
Woodfield Duncombe Thomas b.1883

However, having persuaded myself that William had been posted abroad and died overseas, tonight I've found both him and Martha safely ending their days in the south of England via the FreeBMD search engine. William died in 1885 in Epsom and Martha in 1889 in Wycombe. Somehow I had missed them both when I was hand transcribing the indexes at the Family Records Centre in London. Their certificates have been ordered!

5 comments:

  1. There is a long service medal to Wm Fitzhenry (regt no 26) of the 60th Rifles.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Welcome to the blog STeve, and thanks for this information. Can I ask where you found out this information and are you related to this family?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jo: No relation, but have seen the medal and badge.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Can you please let me know where you saw it? I would like to see it as well if possible. Thank you

      Delete
  4. Tnanks to who-ever left that last comment (it published anonymously). I'd be very pleased if you would contact me at fitz-Henry@one-name.org if you can remember where you saw the medal and badge.

    ReplyDelete