Pass’d Home: Victorian Heir Hunters

Pass’d home: Victorian heir hunters 

Staff were fascinated by the story revealed while cataloguing a miscellaneous collection recently.  When a Reading solicitor was finding the heirs of one James Hibbert of Reading in 1844, one turned out to be a young woman who had had a hard start in life.  It is a story which shows us how the poor law affected real people. 

Some spell it one way and some the other 

Ann Pearcey, nee Hibberd or Hibbert, wrote to the lawyers on 9 August 1844 regarding her claim to a share of her distant relative’s estate.  She was unable to provide her baptism certificate or any other proof of her birth, but suggested they ask a certain Mr Duck, one of the overseers of the poor of Egham, Surrey.  As a child, she said, she had been ‘Pass’d home’ to Egham.  This is an unusual contemporary reference to the passes which were sometimes issued to paupers travelling between parishes.  She said she had later worked for Mr Duck as a servant.  She added ‘I did not know whether it was Hibberd or Hibbert for some spell it one way and some the other for I was quite young when my parents died and I did not know the proper way to spell it’.  Her letter is badly spelt and not very grammatical, but her italic handwriting is surprisingly neat. 

A shotgun wedding 

On application, this Mr Duck was able to provide some fascinating details of the Hibbert family background – an extremely rare chance survival.  Luckily, he had not only kept all the parish records himself, but he remembered the case well personally, and was happy to provide an accurate answer.  Ann’s father James Hibbert (whose name he spelled with yet another variant, Hibburd) was a ‘yearley hiered plow boy’ at Nettlebed, Oxfordshire, for two years, before moving back to Waltham St Lawrence (where he had been born in 1795).  There he ‘got connected with’ a woman named Hester Biggs.  When, as a result, Hester ‘was in the family way’, the overseers arrested James and forced him to marry her, the wedding expenses being paid by the parish.  Duck clearly disapproved of this, and when the family later suffered financial disaster and the overseers of Egham became involved, he had tried to get the Waltham St Lawrence overseers punished for having kept James in prison until the wedding.  However, despite its inauspicious start, the marriage seems to have been happy enough, and the couple had several more children, including Ann, who was born in 1818. 

Tragedy strikes 

When James and one of the little boys caught smallpox in the mid 1820s they were all ‘removed’ (sent) by the overseers back to Egham, where the father and his little son William both died in the parish workhouse.  Ann and her surviving brothers (one of whom was born posthumously in the workhouse) remained there until they were each old enough to work or be apprenticed.  Hester, meanwhile, two years after being widowed, managed to get pregnant with another (illegitimate) child by the appropriately named George Trash; Ann’s young half-brother from this liaison was still housed in the workhouse in 1844.   

The Ducks to the rescue 

Mr Duck and his wife apparently wanted to get Ann away from what they saw as Hester’s bad influence, as this was before the new Poor Law separated women from all but their youngest children as a matter of course.  The Ducks took her ‘out of the House [the workhouse] from the protection of the mother’ and gave her a home and work as a domestic servant.  Ann lived with the Ducks ‘for several years till I suppose she thought she co[u]ld do better’, Duck wrote disapprovingly. 

Unexpected inheritance 

Ann then moved to work in London, where in 1840 she married George Pearcey, a labourer.  Perhaps the inheritance she and her one surviving brother James now received from their distant relative would help their families out and prevent them ever suffering the difficult childhood they had experienced themselves.  Other heirs of James Hibbert were getting over a hundred pounds each, and we can assume Ann got a similar potentially life changing amount.  (Online calculators suggest it is equivalent to almost £16,000 today.)