My maternal great grandmother’s maiden name was Alice Cade, her father named as Jonathan Cade on her certificate of marriage to William John Fage in 1893. On later censuses, her birthplace is shown as Gamlingay, Cambs, but she married in Sandy, Bedfordshire. So what was the story of her move away from her birthplace?

A peripatetic childhood from Gamlingay to Fenstanton and back again

From her marriage certificate of 3 November 1893 (below), I knew that, at the time, Alice Cade was at least 21 years old, the daughter of Jonathan Cade, a Labourer, and was living in Sandy, Bedfordshire. Both she and her husband William John Fage were able to sign the marriage register, so had had some education.

Extract from marriage certificate of William John Fage and Alice Cade (GRO)

The 1901 census, the first after their marriage, records her birthplace as Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire, and her age as 28, ie born in 1872-73. A search for her birth certificate at the General Record Office’s indexes online found a registration for Alice Cade, mother’s maiden name Head, in the Caxton district in the final quarter of 1872. Caxton covers the village of Gamlingay. The resulting certificate (below) is hard to read, but shows (believe me) she was born on 3 September 1872 at Gamlingay, the daughter of Farm Labourer Jonathan Cade and his wife, formerly Ann Head. She registered the birth by making her mark, as she couldn’t read or write.

Extract from birth certificate of Alice Cade (GRO)

It should, therefore, have been easy to find her and her family in the censuses following her birth, but this proved not to be as straightforward as I expected.

At the time of the 1881 census, Jonathan Cade, Labourer, was living at Everton Road Heath, Gamlingay, with four children: Arthur (18), Susan (15), Harry (11) and Walter (6). Jonathan is described as a widower. A FreeBMD search showed that his wife Ann had died in May the previous year. So where was their daughter Alice? I tracked her down to a family living in Fenstanton in Huntingdonshire, who had her mother’s maiden name:

Extract from 1881 census (Ancestry.co.uk)

She is described as the eight year old niece to the head of household, Samuel Head, a General Labourer, who was also born in Gamlingay. Further research showed that he was her mother’s younger brother. With the rest of her siblings living with her father, was she perhaps just staying in Hunstanton with her uncle and aunt on census night?

The Huntingdonshire villages of Fenstanton and Fendrayton lie about 20 miles North of Gamlingay – the equivalent of a four hour ride by horse and cart, although the Great North Railway line passed fairly close by at St Ives; but there was no direct rail route to Fenstanton from Gamlingay as far as I can tell, so she may have had quite a journey for a short stay.

For most, this was not a wealthy community; Brief History – Gamlingay History Society notes that by the mid-1800s, with the coming of the railway,

“Mid-Victorian Gamlingay had become two villages: on one side were the poor, mainly labourers dependent on the vagaries of farming and living in what were little better than hovels; and on the other, the middle class and the gentry.”

Ten years later, when she was 19, Alice has returned to Gamlingay, but is once again living away from her immediate family. At Heath, Gamlingay, she is enumerated as the granddaughter of Agricultural Labourer John Westrope, 69, from Potton in Bedfordshire, and his wife Matilda Westrope, 71, from Sutton, who is classed as blind. Neither has a surname related to her parents Jonathan Cade nor Ann Head. So who were they, and where were the rest of the family?

It didn’t take too long to work out the puzzle. In 1891, her father, Jonathan Cade, is shown elsewhere in the census as a 52 year old Labourer at Biggleswade End, Potton, part of Sandy. Living with him is his married daughter Susan Hills, 24, her husband William Hills and their two children aged five years, and seven months. Her eldest brother Arthur William Cade had by then married and moved to South Ockenden in Essex with his wife and son Bertie Cade, aged one, where Arthur was working as a Bricklayer’s Labourer. His younger brother Walter Cade is staying with them, aged 15, working as a Farm Labourer. Their other brother, Henry (Harry) Cade, aged 21, was in a military hospital in Stoke Demeral, Devon, having joined the Bedfordshire Regiment of the Territorial Army in 1888 when he was 17. So Alice Cade was the only one of the family still living in Gamlingay. But who were the couple described as her grandparents?

Her mother, Ann Head, was the daughter of Samuel Head and his wife Matilda Gilbert, both born in 1819. Samuel Head died in 1857 and a year later, her mother, by then aged 38, married John Westrope. They settled in Gamlingay, and were living next door to Jonathan Cade and his other children at the time of the 1881 census, when Alice was enumerated with her uncle. With the rest of the family moving away to Bedfordshire and Essex, it probably made sense for Alice Cade to move in with her elderly grandmother and stepgrandfather, particularly as the former was blind. However, as her father and sister had by 1891 moved to Potton, near Sandy, perhaps she was just visiting her grandparents on census night, and usually lived with her father – and that is how she came to meet her husband-to-be, William John Fage, and settle down to married life with him in Sandy.