We had traced John Mayhew back to his birthplace in Clare, Suffolk. He was born in 1821 and was the second child of Robert and Anne Mayhew.
Robert married Anne on Christmas Day 1814. Anne's maiden name was Hurrell and they were married in the Market Town of Sudbury in Suffolk, England.
But who were Robert and Anne? Both family names are very common in South Suffolk and we found 4 Ann(e) Hurrells and 3 Robert Mayhews. All were likely candidates (i.e. the right sort of age) to get married in 1814.
How did we progress this?
Sadly Robert Mayhew dies in Clare in 1821, some 6 months before John was born. John's elder sister Mary, died 3 months before that. These facts were determined from the parish records.
Roberts age at death was stated to be 27 years old which gave him a birth year of about 1794.
Mary lived until 1831 when she died - aged 40. Her birth year was therefore about 1791.
With this information we managed to narrow down our candidates to 2 Roberts and 2 Annes. We just had to work out how they met because they lived miles apart from each other. ( I believe that in the late 18th and early 19th century (poor) people were just not mobile. They had no transport. Robert and Anne appeared to be very poor although Robert was trading as a boot maker).
The first clue we had was that in 1831 - after Mary's death, John was subject to a removal order and went to live in London. According to Clare records (from the town museum), John went with a Thomas Mayhew. At this time, we had no record of a Thomas Mayhew.
Further research and we found that the Robert (green) who lived just South of Sudbury had an elder brother called Thomas. This looked like the primary candidate for the Robert we were looking for although he was 3 years older than we expected.
However, which Anne? Neither were local to Sudbury, Yellow Anne was about 10 miles away and violet Anne about 20 miles away. To complicate things, they were equidistant from Clare.
Up to this point we had been researching records from transcripts provided electronically. These are not free from error - we had found several mistakes over the past few years and the information should always be verified using original records if available.
We double checked both Annes using parish records and jackpot, yellow Anne was actually baptised in Sudbury - only 2 miles from where green Robert was baptised.
I was now satisfied that we had the correct Robert and Anne, we had birth, marriage and death records confirmed and we also had circumstantial evidence which provided the link which tied it all together.
