Sir Walter Scott once wrote: "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!" and I believe that sumarises this entire search for the immediate ancestors of Joseph Henry Marsh, said to have been fathered by the solicitor John Henry Marsh in Chichester in 1853.
Joesph Henry Marsh, who certainly must have been a relative innocent party in this entire matter, inherited such an unusal and shall we say 'colourful' family background, in an effort to return to some sort of normality, he could only compound what was already a highly complex situation. Despite declarions made to the contrary by him and those that cared for him in his infancy, it was highly unlikely his father was a local solicitor called John Henry Marsh, Marsh did not seem to be the surname that he was given at birth, and it is a matter of conjecture whether Chichester was where he was born and brought up. We only hope the year of birth he gave is roughly correct otherwise even our own speculations about his family origins can be thrown out with the bathwater.
So where to now? Do we look at the rogueish activities of John Henry Pakenham Marsh in more detail in the hope a link emerges from the archives, or will this be one of those unfotunate family lines that just stops in mid air, and never progresses further back into the past?
Roy G