Genealogy Forum UK

Well, a few at least.

How usual is it for someone to give two sons (born 7 years apart) the same name?

How usual is it to find an elderly gentleman living with a younger female servant and her 6 (illegitimate?) kids?

How high up, status wise, would be a lady's maid to a proper titled Victorian Lady. This one's mainly to try to find her husband pre-marriage. I have many choices, but I'd have thought the labourers would be less likely.

I've been finding it very difficult to find registered birth/marriage details for some families in the 1800s (even to quite late in the century). I'm just assuming they didn't register, particularly for kids that look like they're probably illegitimate. This includes manually trawling through the indexes as well as searching. Do you think this is the case?

Hmm, that's it for now.

Anna

I can answer your first question.

Very common especially when they had lost a child.
I have a family line where they had 2 Andrews, Anne and John. It turned out they had lost 4 children over a few years, an then name subsequent children after their siblings who died before they were born. This proved to be very confusing for me for a while, but got there in the end. I was quite shocked about this at first, but it was actually quite a common thing to do.

Re your elderly gentleman...... was he rich??