The Wansdyke & District Forums

A strange one for the genealogists. I have a household in the 1851 census, a family of five, name of Marle, living at a place given only as Candle Cottages in this county. Father, mother, three children, all with ages and birthplaces, all perfectly ordinary. And then nothing. Not in 1841, not in 1861, not in any register I can find, no baptisms, no burials, no marriages, before or after. Five people who exist for one night in 1851 and never again, at an address that is not on any map I own. I have been at this forty years and I have never had a household simply appear and vanish like that. An enumerator's error? But five names, five ages, five birthplaces is a lot to invent.

That is a genuinely odd one, Brenda, and it catches at me. The ordinary explanations: a household passing through on census night, lodgers or travelling workers recorded where they happened to sleep, who properly belong to another parish's registers. Or a mistranscription of the place name that has sent you looking for the wrong thing. Candle Cottages may be a census-taker's version of something else entirely. And yet. A family of five with full details and no trace on either side is the sort of thing that, once seen, will not let you alone. I should like to see the entry, if you can share the reference.

Try the place name first, Brenda. Candle, Candel: it crops up in old spellings of one or two settlements hereabouts that have since gone or changed name. If the cottages stood at a place already dwindling in 1851, they might have been demolished before the next census and the family scattered, which would explain the address vanishing. The family is harder. But people did fall through the records, especially the poor, especially those always on the move. Sometimes the census is the only night of their lives anyone wrote down.

That last line, Col, the only night of their lives anyone wrote down. I shall keep looking for the Marles. It feels owed, somehow, after they let me find them. Forty years and they still do this to me, these people. I will report back if I ever turn them up, though I have a feeling this is one of the ones that stays open.