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GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH REMAINS AN ALL TOO often frustrating e People in the past would insist on changing names informally (using middle names or nicknames, switching to the name of a stepfather or another family surname). They might sometimes be baptised years after birth, or in adulthood, or claim to be married when in fact they were not. Lower levels of literacy, a lack of orthographic consistency: these can mean that even individuals who never deliberately altered their names may be difficult to track with any degree of confidence. In Britain, immigration records were not kept with any kind of regularity before the twentieth century, so it can be easy in certain circumstances to end up researching the wrong country. Detailed census returns do not appear in Britain and Ireland before the middle of the nineteenth century and then they are not infallible. Venture back into the 1700s and there is in many cases simply no way of cross-referencing information or of arriving at anything more than tentative conclusions.
It is therefore perhaps not so surprising that there has been relatively little scholarly interest in tracing the ancestry of Charles Dickens back past his grandparents. The name Dickens invites variant spellings, and it is not particularly rare. Ball, the name of his paternal grandmother, is common, as, to a lesser degree, is his maternal grandfathers name, Barrow. The family names which appear more promising routes for research, because more unusual, are Cullliford (the maiden name of his maternal grandmother) and Cassteels, the name of a great-grandmother before her marriage. It is on the last of these, Cassteels, which I wish to concentrate, partly in response to recent suggestions in The Dickensian and elsewhere.
All commentators agree that the parents of Charles Barrow, Charles Dickenss maternal grandfather, were married on 22 May 1758 at the Church of St. Leonard, in Bristol. Their names are given as William Barrow and Anne Cassteells. There were two witnesses: Lewis Cassteels and Rob Collier. The groom was of this parish, the bride of St. Michaels (i.e. the parish of St. Michael on the Mount Without). Looking at the entry in the register online, it appears that the bride (and perhaps the groom) may have signed their own names. The remainder of...