Theme: What the Census Suggests.

My Great Great Aunt Emma Hunt, born 1829 in Reading, Berkshire, was the fourth child and only daughter who stayed in England – three of her siblings emigrated to Australia and one brother is thought to have gone to America.

The 1851 England & Wales Census shows Emma, aged just 21 and head of the household, a milliner and dressmaker, living at Ing Court, Reading, with her younger brother Edwin aged 14, a ‘teacher at a charity school’ and a very young Helena E Hunt aged 1, her ‘daughter’. (A surprise!). Her father had died in 1848 and her mother Ann (Nancy) was living with a family with 4 young children on Census night in 1851. She is listed as a Nurse; there was also a Governess and a servant. An older sister was also working as a Nurse with another family.

The child Helena enabled me to identify Emma’s family – she married Joseph Waugh on November 18 1855 in Reading. Joseph, a gas fitter, was still living with his parents and younger siblings in 1851, at an address in St Marys, Reading – very close to Emma. By 1861 they were living together; by now Joseph was a shoeing smith, and besides their listed daughter Ellen aged 11 (thus born in 1851) there were two younger children. They were to go on to have nine children, including another daughter before their marriage. Subsequent Censuses gave Helena’s middle name as Ellen, which fits with the one-year-old Helena E. Hunt.