Leaving no Mead-McCar thy stone unturned
QI wonder whether your experts could advise me on a particularly puzzling brickwall in Westminster? My great-grandmother Louisa Maud Mead, Mrs Baker, was born in Westminster, Middlesex. Her birth certificate shows that her father was John Mead, a labourer in an Iron Foundry, and her mother Mary McCarthy. I cannot find a marriage for them. If they married it would have been c1857. Mary is sometimes listed as Carter, but that surname also draws a blank.
I realise that not all couples married, and not all marriages that did occur actually were registered, but the lack of the marriage is a complete brickwall for tracing both the Mead and McCarthy families, as the names are common in the area.
This is very frustrating as, over the years, I have been able to gather a lot of information about the family of John and Mary and have found the couple in all censuses but the 1861. I have found birth registrations but not baptisms for the younger children. For the oldest two it is the opposite, with only the third child, John junior, having both. I am fairly sure that these elder daughters do belong to the same family as there is an Ann Mead born about 1860 in the family and her place of birth is usually given as Pimlico. The three baptisms are in St Mary’s Roman Catholic church, Chelsea. The two marriages that I have found for the children – Ann and Louisa – are Church of England. Perhaps this change accounts for the lack of baptisms of the younger children.
John and Mary were both from the Westminster area and I would have thought that they were married before the RC parish priest would baptise three of their children. There is no evidence of any links to other areas, and no sign of the marriage in Scotland or Ireland.
I have
