I have been poking into the ancestry of an acquaintance who is stuck at a birth c1790 in an unknown place (the person was born "out of county" where he resided in 1841, and died before 1851). I'm curious whether he might be connected with this clan of Barnards in Cheshire. So this post here is just speculative, in the hope that a descendant may see it one day.
Children of
Thomas Barnard 1761 and
Betty (Elizabeth) Lea, who married in 1785 in Sandbach, Cheshire -- quite likely no one has put together the complete list until now, and this took me quite a bit of slogging to do from records at FamilySearch. (There are online trees showing children from Daniel 1800 forward only, and I will contact any tree owners who seem to be descendants -- all of the children listed below clearly belong to the same parents, since the births begin the year after the marriage, and the surname Lea occurs in names before Daniel's birth.) Some children were baptised Bernard; this is common in Barnard families.
baptised in Swettenham:Ellen, 1786
Ann, 1788
Samuel, 1789
Mary, 1790
William, 1791
Thomas, 1793 (Bernard)
Joseph, 1794
Betty, 1795 (must have died, see 1804)
Martha, 1796 (Bernard)
baptised in Church Hulme:Jonas, 1798 (mother Elizabeth) (Jonas Lea Barnard buried 1798 Church Hulme)
Sarah, 1799 (mother Elizabeth)
baptised in Goostrey-cum-Barnshaw:Daniel, 1800
John, Jan 1802
Jonas, Dec 1802 (buried 1804 Church Hulme?)
Betty, 1804
Lea, 1805 (buried 18 Feb 1806 Church Hulme also shown as Twemlow)
James, 1806 (buried 14 Feb 1806 Church Hulme)
Theophilus, 1807
mother Betty Barnard aged 68 buried 25 Feb 1834, Church Hulme, Cheshire
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/F3R5-Q6Rfather Thomas Barnard aged 77 buried 10 Feb 1838, Church Hulme, Cheshire
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/F3R5-QP6My interest is in Thomas 1793.
Daniel and John are in censuses with wives and children; William, Martha and Sarah are in censuses unmarried; Betty #2 married (Ankers).
Places of birth shown in censuses include Goostrey, Swettenham, Hulme Chapel and Twemlow, all usually mistranscribed (at Ancestry).
There are a couple of women (Ellen, Rebecca ...) who could be widows of brothers.
Can't tell whether other children, specifically Thomas, survived childhood.
There is a burial of a Thomas Bernard aged 5 in August 1798 at Holy Trinity, Chester, Cheshire.
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/F3CR-B22That corresponds to a birth there in August 1793 so is not "my" Thomas.
(My own relation's Thomas was born 1790 and died 1793 in a different county. It's a strange phenomenon how given names run through unrelated clans with the same surname: Thomas and Richard, not the most common names in the deck, are found in Barnard clans all over England.)
It does appear that the parents didn't recycle the name (as they did with Jonas -- and one might think they would have recycled an earlier born son's name first).
So I'm looking for anyone with any knowledge of
Thomas Bernard/Barnard 1793 Swettenham, or a male-line descendant of one of the sons of Thomas Barnard and Betty Lea who married in 1785 in Sandbach.
This Thomas is probably completely irrelevant to my acquaintance's search, but you can never have too many people in a YDNA surname project. Who knows, I might even find somebody related to my own relation, the total outlier in the crowd.
