Surname Saturday Scutcher

My Paternal grandfather Frederick George Richer was born to Thomas Richer and Matilda Emma Scutcher in 1883 at Walthamstow Essex.

This post will concentrate on the Scutcher family. The surname of Scutcher has many spellings, consisting of:

• Scutcher,
• Scotcher
• Chutche
• Chutchee
• Scutche
• Scutchey
• Cutcher
• Sutcher
• Scutchy

Matilda Emma Scutcher was born in 1842 Tendring, Great Bentley, Essex.  Her parents were:  Francis Scutcher and Mary Pretty.

Francis and Mary were married at Great Bentley Essex on the 21 July 1818. Francis’s surname on the English Marriages 1538-1973 located on Family Search shows it as being Scutche.

Francis and Mary had 11 children:I note here that all of the christening information on Family Search are shown as Scutche and Scutchey

• MaryAnn             Born 1818
• Sarah                  Born 1821
• John Francis        Born 1824
• Eliza                   Born 1826
• Elizabeth             Born 1829 – Died 1836
• William                Born 1832 – Died 1854
• Susanna              Born 1834
• Hannah                Born 1839
• Matilda Emma      Born 1842 – Died 1925
• Francis                Born 1844

Trying to find the family on the UK census has been difficult as the as the surnames have been transcribed incorrectly. For instance the 1841 census shows the family as:

• Francis Scuther    48
• Mary Souther      40
• William Souther   9
• Susanna Souther  5
• James Souther      4
• Hannah Souther  2

From looking at the image, it clearly shows the name as Scutcher. On the 1851 Census they are indexed as Scotcher and again the image clearly (me anyway) showing Scutcher.

• Francis Scotcher   60
• Mary Scotcher      50
• James Scotcher     14
• Hannah Scotcher  12
• Matilda Scotcher    9
• Francis Scotcher     7
• James Scutcher     96

Moving on, Francis’s parents were James and Susan Scutcher.  I have not as yet been able to find their marriage or what Susan’s maiden name was, but she was born about 1759 and died in 1820 and is buried at the St Mary the Virgin Church at Great Bentley Essex (source: National Burial Index Third Edition

James born about 1755 and a number of trees on ancestry have his father’s name as being Ambrose but as yet I haven’t found any evidence of this though in saying this, James & Susan did have a son named Ambrose born in 1789.

James and Susan had 7 children:

• Susan             Born 1783
• James             Born 1785
• Ambrose         Born 1789
• Francis           Born 1790 – 1869
• Elizabeth         Born 1793
• Anne               Born 1795
• Mary               Born 1797

James Scutcher died in 1851 and is buried at the St Mary the Virgin Church at Great Bentley Essex (source: National Burial Index Third Edition).

What’s up Doc?

Well, firstly not much but did I grab your attention?  If so, keep reading….

I haven’t written a blog since my last entry back in May when I announced that I was going to Gallipoli for Anzac day, well now it’s down to 3 months and 9 days until I fly out.  I’m basically thinking about nothing else.

I didn’t do much research during 2011, just little bits and pieces here and there. I sometimes just wasn’t that interested and haven’t had a lot of time. As I work full time and I only have Sunday’s to research, all I’ve wanted to do is just relax.

I have RSS Google reader so I have been reading lots of blogs. I find I only read the ones that really capture me at the start. In particular News Items and anything that people write about in terms of the research they are doing, what they found and how they went about it. I tend to be reading more Irish & UK blogs more than anything.

This is just a small sample of the blogs that I have read.

• Irish Genealogy News
• World War 11 London Blitz Diaries 1939-1945
• British and Irish Genealogy
• The Tree of Me
• The Wandering Genealogists
• Family History Across the Seas
• Ancestor Search

Research Update

I did do some work between the Christmas and New Year break, where I found myself basically spending a great deal of time on AncestryUK.  I started searching for some information on my paternal RICHER line. As my father never knew his father, (Frederick George Richer)  I wanted to see if I could find some additional information on the service records for his brothers. I already knew that both Fred and his brother Alfred arrived in Australia around 1913. Alfred’s wife and two children arrived in Brisbane in 1915.  By the time war broke out Fred was in Melbourne and he enlisted in the AIF Field Artillery Brigade 2, Battery 4 in August 1914 whereas Alfred was still in Brisbane and went back to England as an Imperial Reservists. (Middlesex Regiment – Number: 457027) and they both returned to Australia in 1919.

From this I then turned my attention to their older brother James.  By fluke I found a photo of James on one of the Ancestry trees. James married Annie Loader in 1915 and immigrated to Canada in 1919. Now I have something that I can show my dad what his father ‘might have looked like’.

I also spent a lot of time doing other searches for both my Richerl Scutcher and Baldwin families, updating events, timelines, adding census records to my Ancestry trees.  I also found my GGG Grandparents marriage on Family Search, which I had not been able to find previously.

I knew their names from the baptism record of my ancestor John Baldwin, which shows:

“John Baldwin son of Samuel and Mary his wife, late Warren, baptised 21st April 1804”

By putting in Samuel Baldwin as the person I was looking for, including the place as Suffolk and a date range, I received no results. It was only when I put Mary Warren in the marriage came up as follows:

Groom’s Name: Samuel Boldwin
Bride’s Name: Mary Warren
Marriage Date: 19 Mar 1804
Marriage Place: Polstead,Suffolk,England
Indexing Project (Batch) Number: M06302-1
System Origin: England-ODM
Source Film Number: 919627

I would have thought that even putting the surname in as Baldwin, the search function would still have been able to pick up the different spellings.  I know for other surnames, it picks it up, but not for this particular instance.

Books that I plan to read in the next couple of months.  I’m interested in reading anything about WW1, particularly, either Gallipoli or the Western Front

I’m currently reading “Over the Top”.

• Over the Top: A Digger’s Story of the Western Front by H. G. Hartnett – the link here is to one of the best reviews I’ve read on this book
• Pozieres: The Anzac story by Scott Bennett
• Both Sides of the Wire by William Cull
• The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front by Peter Hart

Bye for now…

Sandra