Croscombe names, 1851

I have been working on the census for Croscombe in 1851 and doing some analysis with a view to gaining a better insight into life in the village. If this analysis proves useful, I might repeat the exercise for successive decades to see how the village has changed over the years.

There were 159 occupied households, 16 unoccupied and one under construction. The total population was 673, made up of 320 males and 353 females. The average number of people per dwelling was 4.23, but I plan to look in more detail at household structure in a later post. Today I want to take a quick look at some of the names on the census.

Starting with the surnames, there are 137 different surnames, but just 5 family names account for 25% of the population:

48 7% BAKER
39 6% FOXWELL
36 5% WEBB
25 4% WOOLLEY
21 3% BLINMAN

This might suggest that these families have been in Croscombe for a long time.

While tabulating the data, I noticed that Mary Ann was cropping up an awful lot as a forename, and although there are 25 people with this name, it is not the most popular by far. Here are the twelve most common names, accounting for 54% of the population:

51 William
40 John
29 George
29 Thomas
28 James
22 Henry
21 Joseph

40 Elizabeth
37 Ann
36 Sarah
35 Mary
25 Mary Ann

In most cases the age range of these popular names seems to be reasonably evenly spread. Henry, William and Mary Ann have perhaps seen a rise in popularity in the previous two decades, while Joseph has declined, but otherwise there are no really discernable spikes such as we might expect if babies were named after a new member of the Royal Family or some such celebrity.

There does seem to be more males than females with these common names, perhaps suggesting that parents are more conservative in naming boys, and more willing to try something different with a girl.

From these numbers it would seem quite likely that there will be more than one person with the same name. And in indeed there are quite a number. If we just look at the BAKER's, we find 4 Charles', 4 Georges and 4 Williams, and many other names repeated two or three times. There are no less than five Ann WEBBs in the village, that's nearly 1% of the population! If we also consider their ages, we see that there is a 4 year old and a 5 year old Charles BAKER; two William BAKERs both 2 years old; two George FOXWELLs both aged 20; and two Ann FOXWELLs aged 58 and 60.

This should serve as a warning that having someone's age, name and place of residence is not always sufficient to identify an ancestor, and that we should be very careful before jumping to any conclusions. We might therefore want to do a more thorough search and eliminate these other possibilities. And just because a name doesn't seem to be very common within our own personal experience (for example, I can't say I have come across any FOXWELLs in my life), it could be that 150 years ago in a small village somewhere in England, that it accounted for 6% of the population.

That's it for today, but do let me know if you find this useful or interesting, and leave any comments you have on this analysis. In the next post in this series I am going to look at occupations in Croscombe in 1851.