LiveTheirStory

This post explores people whose names and other details in the census entries are so fluid that they can be mistaken for multiple people. Their stories are common, and this one is a typical example.

Richard Knott’s story initially began for me in the 1881 census for Bethnal Green, when I was tracing my maternal great-grandmother Emily, his daughter. There he is listed as Nott, working as a railway carman, born in Wales and living with his wife Rachel and three children, all born in different places. The family were living in what we’d now call an HMO at 232 Devonshire Street, Mile End Old Town.

Ridiculously excited to think I might have some Welsh ancestry, I then went down a complete virtual rabbit hole tracking down Richard Notts (and Knotts) from Wales before realising that this information was just wrong. Rachel’s stated place of birth (Horseley Down, Surrey) was sufficiently precise to bring me back to the 1891 census, where a ‘Mr and Mrs Knott’ were recorded at Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, his place of birth now ‘Norwich’, and still working as a carman. This entry had not come up when searching on ‘Richard’ or ‘Rachel’ of course.

Ten years later the family had moved again, to 23 Arundel St, and Richard and two of his grown sons now all worked as carmen, taking advantage of the ever-increasing railway traffic in and around East London to collect and deliver goods from the trains (and possibly the docks), an early manifestation of the gig economy with no guaranteed work. Perhaps this – or simply the growing family – explains the moves.

Working backwards, the 1871 census reveals that Richard was indeed from Norfolk, and his father John (aka William John) was a stableman, dealing in and caring for horses. John and his family lived at 15 Hereford Street Bethnal Green with a variety of others from outside London, including John Maddams 25 from Essex, a carman, Charles Cox. 23, a stableman from Suffolk, Henry Walton, 18, a clerk from Cambridgeshire, and Samuel Asser, age 66, a pocket-book maker. He had moved to the city with his wife and children sometime in the 1850s, no doubt drawn by tales of opportunity, but ending up (like his son) living in one of the poorest parts of London.

The fluidity in these life stories might be down to the census-takers’ lack of care (particularly when recording working people and their large families), or limited literacy on the part of those filling in their own details (and so spelling a name how it sounded – Nott not Knott), or inaccurate transcription as records were prepared for digitisation.

Rarely considered is the possibility that the person recorded distrusted the census-taking process, and so gave incomplete or even inaccurate information. Richard and his family moved around: the baptismal records of Emily and her older sister in the 1870s reveal additional addresses (including 14 Deal Street, pictured below), and Richard and his family shared their first marital home with a horse dealer from Ipswich in Suffolk, another member of the floating economy. Richard said he was from Wales, and in the next census omitted to give his or his wife’s first names. Small acts of resistance against the machinery of the state? It’s tempting to think so, even if it gives the family historian a headache: it will be interesting to see how AI deals with lives like these!