Just like a magic trick, our ancestors sometimes have the habit of disappearing into thin air. In this article, I am sharing how I discovered what happened to my third great grandparents, James Rudman, a labourer, and his wife Hannah, née Shepperd. They initially had me flummoxed when I couldn’t find any trace of them after the 1851 census. In order to work out what happened to them, I needed to examine all available evidence, challenge a previously held belief and accept that some information was false.

James and Hannah Rudman, née Shepperd, were the parents of my second great grandmother, Catherine Rudman, who was born on April 14th 1843 in Atworth, Wiltshire, a tithing and chapelry of the town of Bradford-on-Avon:

Atworth is a sprawling village strung out on the main road between Melksham and Bath:

James Rudman and Hannah Shepperd/Shepherd had married in Atworth on 16 February 1835:

The church had been constructed just three years earlier in 1832, replacing an earlier building. As you can see from the photograph below, it has a light and airy interior and it is easy to imagine James and Hannah, standing before the altar, as they made their vows on their wedding day.

When the 1841 census was taken, James and Hannah were living in Atworth with their children, Mary aged 5, Elizabeth aged 3 and two month old John. James was an agricultural labourer and both he and Hannah said that they were born in Wiltshire:

In the 1790s, Atworth Independent Chapel was built and in the early years of their marriage, James and Hannah must have attended the chapel, as this is where their eldest child, Mary, was baptised on 29 October 1835. Far more information was recorded in her nonconformist baptismal entry than in a comparable Anglican register:

James Redman (Rudman) was described as a labourer of Whitley, in the parish of Melksham. Whitley was a settlement to the north-east of Atworth on the road to Lacock. No information was given on his parentage but Hannah was described as the daughter of Thomas and Hester Shepheard.

When the 1851 census was taken, the Rudman family were still living in Atworth:

James Rudman had been born in Melksham ca. 1811 and Ann (Hannah), his wife, had been born in Turley, (Turleigh), a hamlet just outside of Bradford upon Avon. Ann’s age was recorded as 28 but since she had married in 1835, she was probably a few years older. The couple’s eldest daughters, Mary Ann and Elizabeth had already left home by this time and were in service. Mary, aged fifteen, was working as a servant in Kington St Michael and Elizabeth, aged thirteen, was a servant in Atworth.

The 1851 census was my last sighting of James and Hannah/Ann Rudman in census returns. When someone disappears from a census, it is often due to a transcription error or their name being spelt under a variant that one has not considered. However, despite searching under all sorts of iterations of Rudman/Redman, there was no sign of James and Hannah anywhere, even outside of Wiltshire. Their children were somewhat scattered when the 1861 census was taken. Elizabeth was now a servant in Cavendish, Suffolk, John was lodging in Corsham, working as a quarry labourer, and Catherine, my ancestor, was a dairy maid at Shaw Farm, Melksham. Mary Ann, the eldest in the family, had settled down locally, after marrying John Keene in Atworth in 1854.

It appeared probable that James and Hannah had died some time between 1851 and 1861, so the next step was to search for their deaths. Due to ease of searching, I initially, used the indexes of FreeBMD (https://www.freebmd.org.uk/) and after finding candidates in the Wiltshire area, I then consulted the indexes on the GRO website to determine their ages. Variants of Rudman were considered, as were variants of Hannah, which is commonly recorded as Ann(e). Rudman is a rare name but it is most prevalent in Wiltshire, specifically in Melksham and the surrounding area. Not surprisingly, it is sometimes recorded as Redman, though this surname is distributed more widely, especially in Lancashire, as it is a variant of the Irish name of Redmond.

Name	Registration District	Reference	Date	Age
James Redman	Axbridge	5c 426	Jun 1852	0
James Rudman	Bradford upon Avon	5a 87	Jun 1852	6
James Rudman	Bristol	6a 48	Dec 1853	30
James Rudman	Bradford upon Avon	5a 83	Jun 1857	34

Name	Registration District	Reference	Date	Age
Ann Redman	Bath	5c 437	Dec 1853	70
Ann Redman	Melksham	5a 81	Mar 1854	55
Ann Redman	Axbridge	5c 391	Jun 1854	46
Ann Redman	Axbridge	5c 379	Dec 1854	48
Ann Rudman	Bradford upon Avon	5a 1	Dec 1855	38
Ann Rudman	Bradford upon Avon	5a 84	Dec 1855	38
Ann Redman	Melksham	5a 82	Mar 1857	72
Ann Rudman	Chippenham	5a 35	Mar 1857	70
Ann Redman	Clifton	6a 63	Sep 1857	68
Ann Redman	Axbridge	5c 407	Jun 1861	78

The death indexes did not reveal any likely candidates for the deaths of James and Hannah Rudman. Changing tact, I instead searched Wiltshire burial registers, which are available on Ancestry in the collection “Wiltshire, England, Church of England Deaths and Burials 1813-1822” (https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/61190/ ). However, I found no potential entries for the burials of James and Hannah between 1851 and 1861.

I also checked to see if there was a marriage for Hannah/Ann Rudman/Redman for this period. If James had predeceased her and she had married again, she would appear in census records under a different surname. However, I could find no evidence that she had married again.

Probate records, monumental inscriptions and newspaper records were all examined to see if I could find a mention of James and Hannah Rudman but I had no success. I even wondered if they had emigrated, but it seemed unlikely that they would have gone overseas and left their young children behind. My breakthrough came when I discovered that James and Hannah had had additional children that I hadn’t been aware of. I decided to check for all Rudman/Redman births with the mother’s maiden name of Shepperd (and its variants) from the September quarter of 1837 to the March quarter of 1851. I was unable to find a reference to the birth of Elizabeth Rudman, who was baptised in Atworth on 14 January 1838 and that of John Rudman, her brother, who was baptised in Atworth on April 25th 1841 in the GRO birth indexes. The eldest daughter, Mary Ann, had been baptised on 29 October 1835 just prior to the advent of civil registration. However, I found the birth registrations of three younger siblings in the GRO indexes:

Name	Mother’s Name	Registration District	Reference	Date
Catherine Rudman	Shepperd	Bradford upon Avon	8 264	Jun 1843
George Rudman	Shepperd	Bradford upon Avon	8 275	Dec 1846
Ruth Rudman	Shepherd	Bradford upon Avon	8 275	Dec 1846

I already had the birth record of my ancestor, Catherine Rudman, but I had found the births of two younger siblings, George and Ruth, registered in the December quarter of 1846. A search for their baptisms revealed that they had both been baptised on Christmas Day 1846, their baptisms recorded on consecutive pages in the Atworth registers:

Given that George and Ruth were not recorded in the 1851 census with the rest of the family, it was probable that the twins had died in infancy. A search of the burial registers of Atworth revealed that not only had this happened, but their mother, Hannah, had also died shortly after their birth. Hannah was buried on New Year’s Day 1847 aged thirty, a week after her babies had been baptised. George and Ruth were buried just eleven days later, unable to survive after the death of their mother:

I obtained a copy of the GRO death record of Hannah Rudman/Redman. This confirmed that she was indeed the wife of James Rudman and revealed that she had died of pleurisy on December 27th 1846. Pleurisy could sometimes be a complication after childbirth and as she had suffered from this for fifteen days, the twins were probably born around December 12th.

The informant was Ann Wright who had probably been nursing her in her final illness. According to her death certificate, Hannah was thirty four years old, a little older than the age given in the Atworth burial registers. From the baptism record of her daughter, Mary Ann, recorded in the registers of the Independent Church in Atworth, I knew that Hannah was the daughter of Thomas Shepperd and his wife Hester, née Little. I found that Hannah’s baptism had taken place in Atworth on 14th April 1816 so the burial register had her correct age.

Since Hannah had died in 1846, she could not have been Ann, the wife of James, recorded in the 1851 census. This Ann was stated to be twenty eight years old and had been born in Turley (Turleigh). She was obviously a different lady. When looking for James and Hannah in later cenuses, I had previously found an agricultural labourer named James Redman in the 1861 census of Atworth who was aged fifty. This information matched the age and occupation of James Rudman, the husband of Hannah Shepperd, but crucially, his place of birth was Ireland and his wife was named Mary Ann. I had therefore thought that he must be a different person but now I paid closer attention.

James Redman, a fifty year old agricultural labourer, born in Ireland, was living with his wife, Mary Ann, aged thirty, who had been born in Bradford, Wiltshire. With them were their children, Sarah Ann, aged nine, James William aged five, Mary Jane aged three and Jeremiah, aged seven months. To discover Mary Ann’s maiden name, I searched for a reference to the birth of her youngest child, seven month old Jeremiah Redman. This was found in the December quarter of 1860 in the GRO birth indexes and his mother’s maiden name was recorded as Powell. With this information, I searched for the marriage of James Redman and Mary Ann Powell and found that this had taken place in 1850:

James Redman, a widower married Mary Ann Powell, on September 29th 1850. Both parties were of full age and residing in Atworth. James Redman was the son of Thomas Redman, a labourer and Mary Ann was the daughter of Jeremiah Powell, a labourer. The bride and groom signed by mark and the marriage was witnessed by Jeramah Powell and Benjamin Jones.

At the time of the 1851 census, Mary Ann was recorded as Ann and she was the stepmother of her husband’s children from his first marriage. As a further check, I searched the 1871 census for James and Mary Ann Redman. This proved a challenge but searching under the unusual name of Jeremiah, I eventually found the family living in Atworth but their surname had been indexed under Kidman. Strangely, the birthplace of James Redman was again recorded as Ireland and he was sixty four years old. James and Mary Ann had added a further two children to their family between 1861 and 1871: William aged eight and Caroline aged six:

Mary Ann had bee widowed when the 1881 census was taken and this time, was recorded as plain Anne Redman. A search for the death of her husband, James, between 1871 and 1881 in the GRO death indexes, revealed a likely entry in the December quarter of 1879 in the registration district of Bradford upon Avon. This James Redman was seventy two years old at the time of his death, giving a year of birth around 1807, which matched with his age of sixty four that had been recorded in the 1871 census. The death certificate revealed that James Redman had died of chronic asthma on 28th November 1879 in the workhouse in Avoncliff, Westwood, Wiltshire:

James Redman was then buried back in Atworth on 3rd December 1879.

According to the 1851 and 1861 censuses, James Rudman had been born in Melksham ca. 1811 and when he married Mary Ann Powell, he said his father was Thomas Rudman, a labourer. This corresponded well with the following baptism in the Melksham registers:

James Rudman was the son of Thomas Rudman and his wife Catherine and had been baptised on 13th October 1811 in Melksham. Evidently, Catherine, his daughter, had been named after her paternal grandmother.

My research proved that my third great grandfather, James Rudman/Redman, had been living in Atworth all the time with his second wife, Mary Ann, née Powell, after the death of his first wife, Hannah in 1846. At first, this had not been apparent because of the mistaken identification of Hannah in the 1851 census and the inconsistent birthplace of James, which had been recorded as Ireland in subsequent censuses even though he had been baptised in Melksham, Wiltshire. Other complications include the fact that Mary Ann had dropped her first name of Mary and was recorded as Ann in the 1851 census. She and James had only just got married the previous year and had no children of their own and James and Hannah’s twins, George and Ruth, were unknown, as they had died as infants four years previously. Some thorough research was needed to find out just what had happened to this family.

It’s tragic that Hannah Rudman died from the complications of childbirth, followed shortly afterwards by her twin babies who had no chance of life. However, at least James Rudman was able to create a new life with his second wife Mary Ann, fathering a further six children. Why his birthplace was then recorded as Ireland is unknown. Was it a running joke between him and his wife? This is one conundrum that I haven’t been able to solve.

© Judith Batchelor 2025

Postscript

Two readers have informed me that there are hamlets called Ireland and Scotland in the parish of North Bradley, just south of Southwick Road. Apparently, there was a lot of common land in this area and some cottages had been built here by squatters. These individuals may have been from Scotland or Ireland or perhaps, they were given these names locally because of their geographic isolation. Melksham, where James Rudman was baptised, is around seven miles to the north of North Bradley but it does seem a possibility that he may have been born or grown up in the hamlet of Ireland.