Themes: Family Secret and Siblings.

I am behind with this series of 52 Ancestors but conveniently can combine two weeks’ stories into one!

I nearly missed recording the birth and death of my GGGrandparents’ fourth child, a little girl called Zebra Hunt who was born in November 1831 and died in July 1834 in Reading, Berkshire. As was common at the time, the death of a child was rarely if ever spoken about …. But I am still surprised that Zebra’s elder sister Elizabeth (aged 11 at the time Zebra was born) never spoke about her even much later in life. Elizabeth was a nurse and the Matron on an immigrant ship arriving in Australia in 1864. She would have seen her share of children’s deaths particularly as she later worked as an accoucheuse (midwife) in Sydney.

The name Zebra may have been a form of Ziporah, a popular name in Victorian times. Another form was Zillah. That was the name given to another distant cousin born in 1843, while yet another was Lizzie Zebra born 1863 (yes, Lizzie, not Elizabeth). The latter had several children including Elizabeth Stella born in 1903; she became a dancing teacher who styled herself “Estella Donalda Zebra Eugene Brown-de-Boshier”, Boshier being her mother Lizzie Zebra’s maiden surname.

Little Zebra only came to light when a cousin started to wonder where the name Zillah came from, and also noticed there was an almost five year gap between Zebra’s immediate siblings. Otherwise we would probably never have discovered her (My grateful thanks to Alison P. for her research in this regard).

Curiously, there was also a 4 year gap between the first two children – Elizabeth born in 1820 and Reuben in 1824 (the family moved from Worcestershire to Berkshire during that time, perhaps when father Thomas Hunt was seeking work); then 5 years until Emma appeared in 1829, followed by Zebra in Nov 1831 and then Mary Ann in October 1833 – and finally Edwin in 1937 who must have been quite a surprise as their mother, my namesake Nancy, would have been aged 47 by then.