Can anyone help in finding a birth registation please.
It is for a Florence Goddard.
She is on the 1881 Census with her grandparents Charles and Anna Goddard in Thingoe, Troston, Suffolk.
She is given as being aged 9, and born in Croyden Surrey, and is ‘Florence A C” Goddard. (so born about 1872).
Later, on her first marriage in 1894 to Stevenson Macdonald in Acton, Middlesex, she says she is Florence Amy Cousins Goddard, aged 22. (born 1872).
On her second marriage to Alexander James Macdonald (Stevenson’s brother) in New Zealand in 1807, she is ‘aged 38’ and was ‘born at sea’.
On both marriages she says her father was ‘Charles Murray Cousins Goddard’ a naval captain (deceased in 1894).
I can find no trace of her birth, or even a registration, or any trace of a Charles Murray Cousins Goddard, either in the navy or not.
On her second marriage, she gives her mother’s name as Sarah Goddard, nee Canham.
Canham was the maiden name of her GRANDMOTHER Anna, who married her grandfather Charles (of the 1881 Census), in 1839 at Thingoe, Suffolk. They did indeed have a daughter named Sarah (Goddard), who would have been the right age to have a daughter Florence around 1872.
I have Sarah on later Censuses. She married later on and had no children.
I’m thinking Florence was Sarah’s illegitimate daughter, and it would seem this whole story about her father was just that - a made up story.
Having said that, she should still have been registered around 1872, but I can’t find it, even with the ‘maiden names’ given in the gro.gov.uk site.
Any ideas gratefully received! Many thanks.
