James and Jane Corby of Duddenhoe End

James and Jane Corby were working class people from rural Essex. They were my 4th great-grandparents and lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Like the couple I wrote about in my last post, they probably lived a life very similar to many generations of their ancestors who almost certainly lived in the same district. 

I was not able to track down the details of James' birth, but it was around 1770, probably in one of the parishes around Elmdon.  Jane Deane was born in Elmdon in 1773.

James and Jane were married in Elmdon in 1792. They had at least ten children born between 1792 and 1820. Some were baptised in Elmdon and some in Wendon Lofts, a village a few miles south of Elmdon. 

James and Jane's surnames are a good example of the variation that can occur with the spelling of names. Jane's family are variously recorded as Dean, Deane, and Dane.Three of James and Jane's children are baptised as ‘Corby’ and seven as ‘Corbey’. Very few working class people could write and their names in the records were a phonetic spelling of how the vicar heard their name. The spelling of names becomes much more standardised as more people learned to write their own name and by 1840, surnames become a lot more consistent.

Piecing together various records it looks like Jane and James lived in the hamlet of Duddenhoe End. The hamlet is about four kilometres south of Elmdon, close to the boundary of the parish. There was no church in the hamlet and family used several churches in the wider district, including St Nicolas in Elmdon, St Mary the Virgin in Arkesden and St Dunstan at Wendon Lofts (now a ruin).

Four of James and Jane's children died young. Hannah aged two and Daniel aged four died within a few weeks of each other in 1800. Fifteen-year-old Mary died in 1816 and their youngest child, Rebecca died in 1820, aged 18 months.

James died in 1825 aged 55 and is buried in Arkesden. Jane died in 1834, aged 61. She was also buried in Arkesden.

James and Jane lived through the beginnings of the industrial revolution but were perhaps the last generation to be spared the displacement of families as farm labourers were replaced by machines.  Their children and grandchildren were not so lucky and over the following two generations, several of their descendants were among those to seek a better life overseas when they emigrated to Australia in the 1850s.