searching for regular people in history

Unless your family history has important people who merit a mention in some historic text, they leave sometimes nothing, sometimes a small footprint in the records of antiquity. Often there is no way of knowing the who, why and when, it is, and just is.

For me I like to know the why, and the how's, the social aspect of the lives of our relatives, not just the dates.

I doubted I would ever find out who Ben Dad was, but I could speculate, with no archival documentary facts. 
I spent hours trying to locate records on Elizabeth Bodell and her son Benjamin Bodell.
I recall the day I found his birth record on the fische at Stafford records office.

Elizabeth Bodell a child Benjamin Baptised St Editha Tamworth August 1816, illegitimate. There was no doubting the word illegitimate in this record, it was written in full, and very legible.

 

It was a surprise, as all the internet records just show a mother name, I wondered why and presumed he might have been Thomas and Elizabeth child right up till that moment.

Thomas and Elizabeth (nee Fairchild) are in fact his grandparents. Elizabeth is their daughter born 1795 in Tamworth.

I knew enough to search the records around his birth, for Elizabeth’s subsequent possible marriage to his father. These things happened.

Elizabeth married in St Editha in 1819, to a James Conway. Oh cool, I got him, or have I?

James Conway was a Bricklayer, he does not appear to have been baptised in Tamworth or surroundings from what I can find. James Conway being a fairly common name, it’s difficult to find anything on him and his family.

found him!

Marriage to the father, even 3 years hence, can result in the child taking his fathers name. But Benjamin never did, suggesting strongly that they were not kin.

There were no births recorded to James and Elizabeth Conway in Tamworth.

Records show James remaining in Tamworth till his death, and Benjamin remained with his maternal family (after his mothers’ death) in Tamworth and travelled later to Derby, Derbyshire, with the Bodells, when the family moved to Derby.