I have come to a road block...
Hi there,
I am looking for the baptism/christening record for my 5th G Grandmother. I've been searching for a couple of years now, to no avail.
Name: Maria Gilbert
Born: Around 1814 (give or take a couple of years as a different date on each census)
Birthplace: Unknown - on each census record she gives a different place of birth. Such as Oxford, London and Malta.
Died: October 1894 in Littlemore Asylum in Oxfordshire.
Census entries:
1841 - St. Thomas, Oxford - Age 20 (1821) - Born: not born in Oxford
1851 - Biggleswade, Bedfordshire - Age 34 (1817) - Born: St Georges in East London
1861 - St Thomas, Oxford - Age 45 (1816) - Born: Oxfordshire
1871 - St Thomas, Oxford - Age 59 (1812) - Born: Malta
1881 - St Clement Oxford - Age 67 (1814) - Born: Malta
1890 - detained at Littlemore Asylum for being of unsound mind.
She had 11 children with a man named Andrew Eskilson, however I can find no marriage record for them. Together they travelled up and down England regularly, lived in lodging houses, having children in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire. Only 3 of the children survived to Adulthood. But always happened to be around Oxford for the census collection.
I know Andrew was born in 1815, and baptised at St Georges in the East Church London 1818. His father Anders Eskilson was from Sweden, his mother Mary Lane from England.
If anyone can help me find anything else that may help me find the baptism of Maria Gilbert, so I can go further back in my ancestry, I would be very grateful.
Comments
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Have you checked to see if there are patient/inmate records available? Found these two websites when I googled Littlemore Asylum. Maybe they asked for birth information when she was admitted.
Kathleen
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When was the first child born?
Do you have birth certificates for any of the children?
Finding a marriage record after 1837 (hopefully with a father's name) would be a good start.
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I had a quick look at this a couple of days ago but am afraid I didn't get very far. I think it is quite likely Maria was born in Malta, in which case surviving records for this period appear to be rather patchy and probably not too easy to lay your hands on. There are a couple of databases to be found - check the FamilySearch Wiki page for Malta and/or enter "Malta baptisms" in a Google search - but I found nothing for Maria Gilbert.
It's strange, but I found a census record earlier, where she appears in the name of Eskilson (or at least a variant), but I can't find it today. All I can find in FamilySearch are the census details of Mary and son Henry and the baptism of Septimus, as shown in screenshots.
As Graham says, a marriage record would have been of some help, but it does seems likely she and Andrew did not marry. With genealogy, anything can suddenly crop up at any time, but I think you will have some difficulty here unless there are, say, military records showing men named GILBERT that were posted to Malta at this period, which could provide some clue. We all get stuck at some time in our searches (I am stuck at a 1822 marriage in Norfolk for one ancestor, being able to find no trace of his baptism), so I think this might be a difficult one to follow through.
Possibly no connection with Maria GILBERTSON, but possibly a connection:
Oh, and I just found this - but, from your original comments, I imagine you know all about later records and it is just that elusive baptism for Maria that you are trying to locate:
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Thank you Kathleen :) yes I have already obtained the records for Maria from Littlemore Asylum. She was taken there by her youngest son Henry in 1890, as he couldn’t cope with her. She was said to be 78yrs old at the time. She was hallucinating and shouting, trying to throw herself out of windows and causing disruption as she was living with him and his wife. They diagnosed her with ‘softening of the brain’. No mention of her place of birth.
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Her first child was John Andrew Gilbert Eskilson, born 1835 in Newark on Trent, Nottinghamshire.
I have found all of the births for her children, and the deaths.
no marriage records found for Maria.
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A user on Ancestry (samg00) has linked the following baptism record.
As the birth place does not match any census and Gilbert is a relatively common name, I am inclined to think this is a shot in the dark. Might be worth following up with her.
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Thanks Graham, that is my account lol. And yes it was a shot in the dark, I’m going to remove it now so as not to cause any confusion.
I am currently going back to my original thought, which is that she was in fact born in Malta. So I am sitting through the Adami Collection of info regarding BMD in Malta.
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