Hi pamthomas
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
As far as enumerator error is concerned, that's been our opinion for over thirty years now but sometimes you make decisions like that at your peril. Another ancestor quoted her birthplace as Norton, Yorks when her children were born in Norton, Derbyshire (now part of Sheffield) and we disregarded that for five or six years, took her seriously (as we should have done to start with - she signed the marriage register with a confident hand in the 1800s) and found her birth in Norton, Yorks.
You have correctly identified the ancestor in question. We have noted the confusion over Charlotte's birthplace too in the Census returns though have managed to research her roots from the relatively settled past of her ancestors.
The direct line in later Census returns definitely points to County Durham but it seems impossible to find him. An ideal candidate emerges in the registers in 1835 but dies in infancy.
So, back to Helen Wells and searching through the haystack! Idly yesterday we put Helen Wells into the Bing (
http://www.bing.com/maps/?cp=~&lvl=15&FORM=MMREDR) search engine. It didn't deliver a precise place but indicated that a search around Coningsby might prove useful - John and Charlotte were married there in 1858. A witness at the wedding lived at Hawthorn Hill nearby. So perhaps what we attributed to the enumerator in 1861, in North Yorkshire, not being able to understand, perhaps, Charlotte's Lincolnshire accent, may not be the truth of the case at all.
If we can get to the bottom of this Helen Wells there may be a bucketful of useful historical treasure!
