My paternal great-grandfather was Frederick Ephgrave – or was he? Tracing his birth posed a big puzzle. I thought I knew his name from my grandmother Jessie Ephgrave’s vital records, his marriage certificate and censuses. Apparently born in Luton 1872-3, son of ‘Jessie’ Ephgrave, he had various jobs in the dairy industry, but in earlier records he had a different career … and a different name.

Sifting the evidence

Frederick Ephgrave registered his daughter’s birth six weeks after the event, which took place on 27 December 1901 at 176 Stamford Hill, North Hackney, London.

Extract from GRO birth certificate of Jessie Ephgrave.

He gives his occupation as Stationary Engine Driver, and records her mother’s maiden name as Phoebe Caroline Gibson. The couple had married five years earlier, on 7 June 1896, at the Church of St Andrew, Canal Street, Hoxton, in Shoreditch, North of the Thames in London.

Extract from parish marriage register of St Andrew’s, Hoxton (Ancestry.co.uk)

The parish marriage register entry (above) shows that he was working as a Cowman at the time, the son of ‘Jessie’ Ephgrave, a Baker, and was five years older than his 19 year old bride, the daughter of a Cabinet Maker.

They made their census debut as a married couple in 1901, a few months before my grandmother, Jessie Ephgrave, was born. They are listed at 174 Culford Road, Islington, with their three young children; he is working as a Milk Sterilizer. This also gives the first clue to his origins. Frederick Ephgrave was not a London lad; his birthplace is shown as Luton, Bedfordshire. His wife is from Hornsey, as is her 14 year old sister, Caroline Gibson, who is living or staying with the family. 23 year old Boarder William Ephgrave, from St Alban’s, is also in the household; I believe he was Fred’s younger brother.

So how did he come to be in East London working as a Cowman at the time of his marriage? What was his family life like before then?

It seems that initially he followed in his baker father’s footsteps. The 1891 census finds him aged 18 (b. 1873) working as a baker’s assistant, lodging at The Swan Inn in London Colney, near St Alban’s, Hertfordshire. The baker in question was Edwin Parsons. As well as the publican Benjamin Looker, the Inn houses a butcher, a machinist, a builder and their families.

Hertfordshire Genealogy: The Swan, London Colney, Herts (hertfordshire-genealogy.co.uk) offers a history and photographs of the Swan Inn, which is said to have originally been a coaching inn, first mentioned in 1657! It apparently had stabling for 70 horses. Benjamin Looker had been the publican since at least 1886, although had moved on by 1904. The Inn was demolished in the 1960s.

The plot thickens

Fred’s appearance in the 1881 census posed a number of questions. Aged eight, the young Frederick Ephgrave is at school and is described as ‘grandson’ of Edward Dexter, a 43 year old baker from Market Harborough. Dexter’s wife Mary Dexter is somewhat older, at 54, and from Redbourn, Hertfordshire. Their address is simply ‘Common, Redbourn’. They have a 19 year old son, also called Edward Dexter. Was Fred simply visiting his grandparents, or was he living with them? They have a different surname, so how are they related, and where were the boy’s parents?

As records so far suggested he was born around 1872-73, I knew Fred would not appear in the 1871 census, but there seemed to be enough clues to be able to track down his birth record. Not so. It took me many months of detective work and lateral thinking until I finally found him, his birth registered under the name Frederick Hipgrave Scrivener.

Extract from GRO birth certificate for Frederick Hipgrave Scrivener

The certificate shows that he was illegitimate; there is no detail recorded for father’s name, nor occupation, and the birth was registered by his mother Harriet Scrivener. He was born at Stuart Street, Luton, his mother’s home address, on 19 April 1872.

I had found the record by a convoluted route, searching the censuses for his father ‘Jessie’ Ephgrave, a baker, who was probably in Bedfordshire or, like his Dexter grandparents, in Hertfordshire. He was actually Jesse Ephgrave who, on the 1881 census, was recorded as a Master Baker at Albert Street, St Alban’s, born in Redbourn, Herts, with his wife Harriet Ephgrave from Luton, and four children aged from seven months to eight years. The couple did not marry until 21 August 1873, in Luton, 16 months after my great grandfather’s birth and only three months before their second son Edward Thomas Ephgrave was born. Her maiden name was Scrivener.

So why was the young Frederick Ephgrave living with a man called Edward Dexter, supposedly his grandfather, if his mother’s maiden name was Scrivener? After further research, I found that Jesse Ephgrave’s father Frederick Ephgrave died young, leaving his widow Mary Ephgrave with four children under five years old, and another on the way. She married Edward Thomas Dexter three years later, in 1861. Jesse Ephgrave is recorded living with them in Redbourn in the 1861 census, aged nine.

Just over a year before Fred’s birth, at the time of the 1871 census, Harriet Scrivener was living at 23 Stuart Street, Luton. Aged 20, she is described as a Hat Sewer, like her two sisters and mother. Their father William Scrivener was a Groom. I wonder if she already knew Jesse Ephgrave. In 1871, he was a Boarder in nearby Bute Street, Luton, working as a Journeyman Baker.

It is possible that Harriet Scrivener was unable to look after her illegitimate son at home in Luton, while she continued to work as a Hat Sewer, and that he went to live with his paternal grandmother and her husband at a fairly early age. Did he ever live with his parents and siblings? I doubt we will ever know for sure. We do know that, by the time he was 18 months old, his mother had married (probably) his father and given birth to another son, possibly named after her husband’s stepfather Edward Thomas Dexter.

While his birth certificate shows no father’s name, it seems probable that Fred was the son of Jesse Ephgrave. He bore the Ephgrave surname throughout his life, he named one of his daughters Jessie, and his middle name on his birth registration – Hipgrave – was probably the Registrar’s attempt at recording how the child’s mother said ‘Ephgrave’, with an initial ‘H’.

According to the Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland (University of the West of England, 2016), the Ephgrave surname has its origins as: “locative name from an early and alternative name for Weston Park in Weston (Herts), recorded as park of Yppegrave in 1307.” It is also sometimes written Ipgrave or Hipgrave.

I still don’t know what led him to change tack from baking to the dairy industry, nor why this took him to East London. But that’s another story.