"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
There are about 40 different ancestral surnames in our current family tree, the most common being Abbott with eight occurences and Jeffries with seven. There are about twenty surnames with just one occurence each.
Wherever there are variations from the usual spelling, I have mentioned them in the notes. Of course, the spellings may need to be amended in the light of further evidence.
If the maiden name of a woman is not known and the couple are known to be married, I have used the husband's name for her, both in the Family Tree and in the alphabetical list.
The National Trust Names site contains maps of surname distributions in 1881 and 1998. The site was previously known as Surname Profiler.
This section contains information on some of the ancestral names taken from the Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames 1901.
Until I received the birth certificate for Clara Ann Scarlett, I had accepted that Charles William Scarlett was her father, based on the the facts that Clara used the name Scarlett up until her marriage and that Charles was named as her father on the marriage certificate. However, the birth certificate throws some doubt on this, as it shows that her birth was registered under her mother's surname of Catlin and there is no father's name shown. Also there is an eighteen month period between the birth of Clara Ann and Emma's marriage to Charles.
The gap between the birth and the marriage and the lack of a father's name does not rule out Charles from being the father, but if Charles wasn't the father, then he may have been more than happy to treat Clara as his own and he and Emma may never have told Clara. Even if she did know, she may have decided to keep using the name.
There is one small hint that Charles may have been the father, in that he had a sister called Clara Anne, although that combination of names was not uncommon.
For the time being I have kept Charles's ancestors in the Family Tree but marked them as doubtful. Perhaps a Bastardy Order might come to light sometime to help clarify this.
