The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 50 No.2 | Sept 2023

Member’s article

1917 – so George could not have been his child. I subsequently obtained George’s birth certificate which confirmed my suspicions. His father was Alfred - who was also his uncle. With Rosina widowed and Alfred safely back from the war, it appears that they soon set up a relationship and had a child together. I have not found a marriage record for them. As Rosina was already a ‘Hatcher’ by marriage to Sidney, no-one outside of the family need have suspected anything untoward. The child’s birth certificate doesn’t state the parents’ relationship, so the secret - if it was - could be maintained. So how did this arrangement come about and what happened to Alfred’s wife, Ada? Pre war – the 1911 census Without access to the then unpublished 1921 census, I looked to the 1911 census. All four living Hatcher brothers were living and working as boot repairers in their father Charles’s business in Freemantle. (My grandmother Annie May was living there too, but working as a confectionary manageress.) Alfred was 29. He was recorded as being ‘Married’ but neither his wife, Ada, nor his

child, John, are listed with him. After an extensive search, I found baby John Hatcher recorded as a grandson (aged 2) living with the Goodall family in Shirley, Southampton. Ada’s parents and many siblings are also listed - but she is not. Finding Ada proved elusive. There are no FreeBMD death records of an Ada Hatcher around 1908-1911 - but there is one in 1919, aged 39, in Fareham. Could that be her and if so, why? Earlier censuses records show her father was born in Fareham but the family had been in Shirley a long time. I used all sorts of search techniques in the 1911 census until, one momentus day, I found her. Using just the name ‘Ada’ and born in Shirley in 1879 +/- 1 year, Ancestry came up with 11 people. One was for a person whose name was the initials ‘AH’ – living in Fareham. I opened the record to find one poor soul amongst dozens of patients in the Hants County Lunatic Asylum - known as Knowle. At Knowle in 1911, there were an astonishing total of 1181 patients, evenly split between males and females. ‘AH’ was recorded as a married woman, aged 31, born in

91