Samuel Chittock is the most illusive fellow. We cannot even be sure of his correct surname! Sometimes, he is a Chittock, other times he is a Chiddock. Being illiterate, it was hardly his fault. He and his family were at the mercy of the hearing of clerics and the such like who may have misheard the double t for a double d and vice versa.

Exhaustive research (i.e. looking at lots of lists) suggests that the Chiddock name is simply a common mishearing. But in some families, it stuck. More on that another time.

The reason I go into this double t double d thing is simply because it has prevented several researchers from stumbling across the marriage of Chittock (as I shall call him) to Rachel Watts. Once you accept the fact that the Chittocks and Chiddocks of East Anglia are the same family group, things become easier for you.

This is all rather typical of the man we call Samuel Chittock. We just don't know where he was baptised. According to the census of 1851 and 1861, he puts down Norwich. Nice and simple. A parish would have been nice for him to add which some district renumerators insisted on but he doesn't. The 1841 census does not list the birth place, simply a little box to put whether you were born in this county or not. Guess what. That's one of the things I haven't checked recently.

1871 things are different. He has left the snugness and no doubt squalor of Thoroughfare Yard, just off Norwich's Magdalen Street. He was listed as being there when a list was compiled of voters in the early 70s as an occupier but that could have been a mistake. However, there is a Samuel Chittock in residence at the Great Hospital in St Helen's parish, in the shadow of the lands of the Cathedral. It is a charitable institution for the poor. Norwich City Council used to decide who goes in to replace a recently departed. This Samuel Chittock is a cordswainer - as is ours, 72, - which clashes slightly with the nice round numbers of previous census entries (but that's nothing - look at the ages his son James William Chittock gives over the decades...) but here the place of birth is LODDON. In fact, there are Chittocks who lived and worked in Norwich who were born and eventually buried here! One of them is a man called Charles Chittock, a wig maker who died in 1790. He had a cousin called Robert who was a SHOE MAKER! That Robert had a family in Norwich and is buried in a parish called St John Timberhill which seemed to be the burial ground for Chittocks including our Samuel's wife and the children who did not make it! And our Sam did not live in this parish at the time of these unhappy events. His own parish graveyard was not full. Therefore, a connection? Oh come on, of course there must be. And I hate saying things like that.

For those of you who don't know Norfolk that well, it is a small town between Norwich and the Suffolk border. And there be other Chittocks in that far off land than the ones I described. Lots of Chittocks. And lots of strange coincidences and connections! It's frustrating and annoying. 'Cos our Samuel Chittock, and I am sure the Great Hospitol man is our Sam, seeing his end of days near to the church where he married his asthmatic wife, was not baptised at Loddon nor the surrounding parishes. He may well have been born there and baptised elesewhere. He might not even have been dunked into a Church of England font at all, or even a non-conformist one.

A Samuel Chittock - and note I am not trying to be dogmatic or make that fatal mistake of absolute certainty - is buried in 1875 in Norwich's largest Victorian cemetary at Earlham Road.

The register for the place says:

"On May 13th, Samuel Chittock, 75, a weaver from St. Helens is buried at Earlham Cemetery in the Common Area. Section 12. No. 43."

A weaver and a cordswainer? Shoe makers were sometimes thought of or described as weavers. Sam's wife worked in starch, it seems. Tis all connected. And the Hospital is in St Helen's parish. And a beautiful place it is too from the outside. You can see pictures of it on the Internet.

Frankly, I'm feeling positive that the facts above point to the Sam at the Hospital being our Sam. Hopefully, one day, I'll dig out some records from the place and see if there is anything on him. Date of entry, that sort of thing. I have not yet ordered his death certificate. If you have, what does it say?

Anyway the whole point of all this is just to say two things: that our Sam's ancestry may lie in the southern reaches of Norfolk where there are a lot of Chittock connections spreading over into the Suffolk border, and secondly, beware of the spelling.

I'll be posting more on this wonderful man's life. Then I must turn to the Loddon Chittocks and the Norwich Chittocks of the late 18th century.