Did William Whybrew have a son after all?

This week, 24 October, marks the 100th anniversary of the death of William Whybrew (1884-1918). He died in France as the First World War was coming to an end, only three weeks before the Armistice was signed on 11 November, and just a few days before his 34th birthday.

His body was never recovered from the battlefield. He is honoured at the Vis-en-artois Memorial in Pas de Calais. His military service is also remembered on the Ipswich War Memorial (pictured).


William was the youngest of David and Susan Whybrew's sons (of those who survived infancy). When I last wrote about him I said that he and his wife Adelaide, nee Williams, were childless when he died. Now it seems that wasn't the case.

In 1939, just before the Second World War began, the British Government compiled a register of every civilian in Britain and Northern Ireland. It has been made available online since I last wrote about the family. Adelaide appears on this 1939 register at 7 Rydal Walk in Ipswich, with her second husband John Sanders. Living with them is 27 year old William Whybrew, born 20 August 1912.

Finding his name was a big surprise. One reason I previously believed that Adelaide and William senior were childless was that I couldn't find any births registered in the relevant period, with a father named Whybrew and a mother with the maiden name Williams. And I still can't, even knowing his date of birth. No matter what tricks I use with various search engines to try to find the younger William, I haven't found any evidence of his birth being registered. Perhaps it wasn't. Or possibly he was registered under a completely different name.

It has been suggested to me by the ever-helpful members of the British Genealogy Forum that he might have been adopted, which would mean he could have been registered with a different birth name. That would make sense. Especially since Adelaide and William senior had been childless for seven years by 1912.

So far the only trace I've found of the younger William, besides on the 1939 register, is his death in November 2002, in Colchester. It would be interesting to know if he was in any way related biologically to William or Adelaide. Did they take in a child from some other member of the family, perhaps to help out a single mother or widowed father? If so, I haven't discovered any likely candidate.

Adelaide's other adopted son

As I mentioned in the previous post, Adelaide also seems to have fostered a young soldier named Henry Alan Lawrence. He named her as his mother and gave her address on his military papers. I'm still trying to discover where and how their lives became linked.

Henry was born in Hertfordshire in 1890. His own mother, Martha Lawrence, (nee Archer) died sometime before his twelfth birthday and his family were scattered. He was an inmate of the workhouse at Bishop's Stortford in Hertfordshire at the time of the 1901 census. He joined the army as soon as he was eighteen.

I haven't found any evidence of Adelaide Williams living in Hertfordshire, but that doesn't mean much. I can't find her at all between 1871 and when she married William Whybrew in 1905. She spent time as a motherless child in the Stowmarket workhouse in Suffolk, so wherever she met Henry Alan, she would have had a bond with him. Fortunately for both of them, he survived the war, despite being badly injured.