Family Connections Behind ‘The Lost Fenland Generation’

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FAMILY HISTORIANS QUICKLY become accustomed to following people through the fragments they have left behind.

A baptism places a child in a particular village and identifies the parents; a census records a household on one particular night; a marriage joins two names together; a burial marks the end of a life.

Taken individually, these records can seem little more than dry facts. Follow them across several generations, however, and something much more revealing begins to appear.

People move.

They leave the family home, take employment elsewhere, lodge with strangers, marry and establish households of their own. In doing so, they encounter people whose lives might otherwise never have crossed their own.

In a landscape such as the Lincolnshire fen edge, where villages and farming communities lay only a mile or so apart, these movements could gradually create a remarkable web of family relationships.

The story of my great (x2) grandfather, John Wand, illustrates this particularly well.

JOHN WAS BORN in Rippingale in 1827, the son of James Wand and Anne Brown. To put his birth into context, that was the year the Duke of Wellington was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British Army—a reminder that John was born into a very different Britain from the one we know today.

John’s father was an agricultural labourer, as was his father, and John appears to have followed the familiar pattern of this rural working family. In 1841, when he was fourteen, he was still living with his parents on Rippingale’s Poor Row. Ten years later, however, he had disappeared from the family household.

He had not gone far.

The 1851 Census finds twenty-four-year-old John living as a lodger on High Street in Rippingale. He was still an agricultural labourer, but he was now living in the household of Richard North, a widowed carpenter who possessed four acres of land.

Also in the house was Richard’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Mary Kirkham North, whose occupation was given as housekeeper.

We cannot know precisely why John had left his parents’ home. Perhaps he had found work that made lodging elsewhere convenient; perhaps, as happened to many young agricultural labourers, becoming a wage earner meant establishing a life beyond the parental household.

Whatever the reason, the arrangement placed him in a household where he would meet the woman who was to change the course of his life.

On 17 May, 1852, John Wand and Mary North were married in Rippingale.

It is one of those moments in family history where a census entry suddenly acquires a human dimension. A young labourer, living away from his parents and earning his living, had become a lodger in the home of the North family. A year later he was married to the daughter of the household.

We know nothing of their courtship and should not attempt to invent it. Yet there is something rather pleasing in the thought that John may have left home simply because it was time to find work and make his way in the world, only to discover that his future wife was living under the same roof as his temporary accommodation.

For John, a change of household became the beginning of a new family.

Naming Traditions

MARY BROUGHT ANOTHER family connection into the marriage.

She was not simply Mary North. Her middle name was Kirkham, inherited from her mother, Sarah Kirkham, who came from Sutton St Mary, now known as Long Sutton.

The name survived into the next generation when, in 1867, John and Mary named their youngest daughter Kate Kirkham Wand, preserving her maternal grandmother’s surname long after the Kirkham family itself had ceased to be part of the immediate household.

Such naming traditions are easy to overlook when assembling a family tree. Yet a middle name can sometimes be a small marker to a family that would otherwise disappear from the direct line.

In an age before the widespread keeping of family histories for personal use, names themselves could carry memories across generations.

The Wand family that John and Mary created would eventually comprise six children: John, Sarah, Richard, Ann, Emily and Kate. And as those children grew older, the connections established by their parents began to multiply.

The Ellis Family of Hacconby

THE NEXT STAGE of our story takes us a few miles from Rippingale to nearby Hacconby.

In 1883, John’s daughter Ann Wand married Hacconby’s Robert Ellis. Six years later, in 1889, her brother Richard Wand married Robert’s sister, Rebecca Ellis. Ann’s marriage took place in Rippingale, Richard’s in Hacconby.

This was more than the simple joining of two surnames.

The two families were now connected in two different ways: an Ellis had married a Wand, and a Wand had married an Ellis. The relationship was strengthened further when Sarah Ann Ellis, Rebecca and Robert’s sister, married another member of the Wand family ― Richard Wand, John’s cousin.

It is tempting to draw these relationships on a family tree and regard them simply as lines connecting one box to another. But the people involved would not have experienced their lives that way. These were brothers, sisters, cousins and in-laws living within a familiar rural landscape, where the distinction between one family and another could become increasingly blurred.

The marriage of Richard Wand and Rebecca Ellis is particularly revealing when we follow the census records. By 1891, Richard was established as a gamekeeper, and the couple remained within the same wider community in which both families had their roots.

The occupations might change, and children might leave home, but the geographical world remained familiar.

The movement of a young labourer from one household to another, or of a bride from one village to the next, could involve only a few miles. Yet those few miles were enough to bring people into contact with new households and new families.

And once marriage entered the equation, those relationships could spread rapidly.

Another Ellis, Another Family

THERE IS A further connection which makes this story particularly poignant.

Rebecca Ellis had a younger sister, Sophia. In 1889, the same year in which Rebecca married Richard Wand, Sophia married Thomas William Hutchins.

The following year, Sophia gave birth to a son, Tom.

At this point, the Hutchins name might appear to have little connection with the Wand family. Young Tom was not a Wand descendant, nor was he part of John’s direct line. His connection came through the Ellis family, and specifically through Rebecca’s sister.

Yet Tom would eventually become part of the same story. More on him later.

The significance of this additional link becomes apparent only when the family relationships are viewed together.

John Wand’s daughter Ann had married Robert Ellis. His son Richard had married Robert’s sister, Rebecca, whose younger sister, Sophia, had married Thomas William Hutchins.

What had begun with a young agricultural labourer lodging in another household had, over two generations, spread into several interconnected families.

The Census as a Window into the Family

THIS IS WHERE the successive census returns become so valuable.

The 1841 Census gives us a fourteen-year-old John Wand living with his parents. Ten years later he is a young labourer lodging in another household. By 1861 he is a husband and father. In subsequent censuses we watch his children grow up, marry and establish households of their own.

The census does not tell us everything. It cannot tell us what John thought about leaving home, why he chose to lodge with Richard North, or what passed between him and Mary before their marriage. But it gives us the framework within which those events took place.

More importantly, it shows us that the people who appear in our family trees did not live in isolation.

As we have seen, they were part of households, worked for employers, and occasionally, they lodged with other families. They married neighbours and relatives of neighbours, and they moved between villages.

And in a predominantly agricultural society, where employment itself could determine where a young person lived, work and family were often closely connected.

The movements may have been modest by modern standards, but their consequences could be considerable, and far reaching.

John Wand Senior

By 1911, John Wand was eighty-four years old.

The young agricultural labourer of 1851 was now a retired widower. His wife, Mary, had died two years earlier and was buried in Rippingale cemetery.

The household of 2nd April, recorded by the 1911 Census provides a fitting final glimpse of the family he had created. John was living with his unmarried daughter Kate and his son Richard, now a gamekeeper, together with Richard’s wife, Rebecca, née Ellis.

There is something almost circular about this final household.

More than half a century earlier, John had appeared in the census as a young man living under somebody else’s roof. Now he was the head of the household, an elderly widower surrounded by the family relationships that had accumulated during his lifetime.

And there, beside his son, was Rebecca Ellis.

The Ellis family had entered John’s life through the marriages of his children. By 1911, one of its daughters was living in John’s home.

The census records the arrangement without embellishment. It simply places four names on the page.

But behind those names lies more than sixty years of movement, marriage and family history.

Connections to the Lost Generation

THERE IS ONE further reason why John’s story matters to me.

Several of the men whose lives I have already explored in The Lost Fenland Generation series can be traced back through this same network of families.

We have already seen how Sophia Ellis, through her marriage to Thomas Hutchins, became the mother of a son, Tom.

Born in August 1890, young Tom was working as a horseman by 1914. In November of that year, he enlisted in Kitchener’s Army. The following year, he was killed in action at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli.

Tom Hutchins’ story was the first in my Lost Fenland Generation series.

Three men whose lives would ultimately be claimed by the First World War were therefore connected to the same family network, although through different branches of it.

Their stories are, of course, individual ones. Each man had his own childhood, his own hopes and ambitions, and his own experience of the war. Yet the family relationships that surrounded them had been forming long before any of them became soldiers.

That is perhaps the most poignant aspect of following these connections backwards.

When we encounter a name on a war memorial, it is easy to see only the final event—the date on which a young life ended. Family history allows us to look beyond it.

We can see the marriages that brought families together, the children who followed, and the ordinary lives that preceded the extraordinary circumstances of their deaths.

The Roads Between

JOHN WAND’S STORY began in a very ordinary way.

An agricultural labourer’s son, he left the parental household and found work. In doing so, he became a lodger in another family’s home. There he met Mary North, married her and began a family of his own.

His children then carried the family story into Hacconby, where the Wand and Ellis families became entwined. The Ellis family subsequently connected with the Hutchins family, and from those relationships came descendants whose lives would eventually become part of the sad story of the Great War.

There was no grand design behind any of this. People were simply living their lives within the circumstances available to them. A young man needed work. A family had a room for a lodger. A daughter became a wife. Children grew up and married. Families that had once been separate became related.

And that, perhaps, is what makes these records so fascinating.

The roads between Rippingale and Hacconby were not great distances. Three miles ― half an hour or so by foot.

To the people who lived there, they were simply part of the familiar landscape. Yet along those roads passed generations of labourers, farmers, servants, tradesmen, husbands, wives and children. Each movement created the possibility of another encounter, another marriage and another family connection.

Over time, those connections accumulated.

What appears on a modern family tree as a complicated tangle of surnames was, to the people who lived it, simply life.

John Wand could never have known where his decision to leave his parents’ household would lead. Perhaps, at the time, he was concerned with nothing more than finding work and earning enough to support himself.

Instead, he found Mary.

Together they created a family whose descendants would eventually include men whose names now form part of the story of The Lost Fenland Generation.

For the family historian, that is the real gift of the census. It does not merely tell us where people were. Instead, by following the evidence from one decade to the next, it begins to show us how their lives touched one another.

And sometimes, hidden among the names and occupations recorded by a census enumerator, we can see the first faint outlines of a story that would continue for generations.

And from that one meeting, a remarkable family story began to unfold.