The Chambers Family: Appendices
Written by Ian Davis. Started 17 December 2025. Last updated 10 March 2026.
Appendix I: Chambers Family Tree
Appendix II: The Problem with Frances Brundish
On 17th January 1787, a Joseph Chambers, a widower, married Frances Brundish, a widow, in Fressingfield. The question is: which Joseph was this?
Frances’s background is reasonably clear. She was born Frances Meen, probably around 1714. There is a baptism of a Frances Meen that year in Redenhall, just over the Norfolk border, though I can’t prove this is the same woman. She married Daniel Morley in 1753, and after his death married William Brundish in 1766. William Brundish died on 2nd March 1785, leaving Frances a widow again and free to remarry in 1787.
When I look at the Joseph Chambers men alive and active at this time, none of them fits without creating a contradiction somewhere else.
Joseph (I) was baptised in 1649, making him around 138 years old in 1787. Joseph (III) married Sarah Meen in 1785 and went on to have five children with her through the 1780s and 1790s. He cannot simultaneously have been married to Frances Brundish. Joseph (IV) married Susanna Botwright in October 1788, and his marriage record describes him specifically as a singleman; if he had married Frances Brundish in January 1787 he would have been a widower twelve months later, not a single man.
That leaves Joseph (II) as the most plausible candidate on circumstantial grounds. He and Frances were apparently of the same generation, both born around 1714. There is also a social connection: Frances had previously been married to William Brundish the elder, whose son William Brundish the younger had married Sarah Chambers, a daughter of Joseph (II). Frances had therefore been the stepmother-in-law of Joseph (II)’s own daughter — exactly the kind of overlapping family network that often brought people together in a small village community.
But my attribution of the 1810 burial to Elizabeth Stigold creates a direct contradiction. If Elizabeth Stigold was still alive in 1810, then Joseph (II) was married to her from 1737 until his death in 1807 and could not have married Frances Brundish in 1787.
In short, the burial I’ve assigned to Elizabeth Stigold in 1810 rules out the only Joseph who seems a plausible match for Frances Brundish in 1787.
There is one further complication. On 6th June 1784, banns of marriage were published in Fressingfield for a Joseph Chambers, described as a widower, and a Sarah Robinson, described as a widow. The marriage never appears to have taken place, and I can find no trace of who Sarah Robinson was. But the episode confirms that a widowed Joseph Chambers was actively seeking to remarry in Fressingfield in 1784, just a year before Joseph (III) married Sarah Meen and three years before someone called Joseph married Frances Brundish.
What This Leaves Open
The core difficulty is that I have no burial record for Frances Chambers, née Meen, after the 1787 marriage. Without knowing when she died I can’t close off any of the possibilities. Four hypotheses remain open.
The first is that Elizabeth Stigold died before 1787, perhaps she is one of the earlier unidentified Elizabeth burials, and Joseph (II) then married Frances Brundish. The 1810 burial of “Elizabeth Chambers, relict of Joseph” would in that case refer to someone else, perhaps from a marriage of a Joseph Chambers and an Elizabeth that I haven’t yet found.
The second is a variant: the 1810 burial does refer to Frances herself, and the minister made an error, writing Elizabeth when he meant Frances. Clerical mistakes in parish registers do occur, but this would be an unusual one.
The third is that Joseph (IV) married Frances in 1787, she died before October 1788, and he was then incorrectly described as a singleman when he married Susanna Botwright. The absence of a burial record for Frances in that narrow window makes this difficult to sustain.
The fourth is that an entirely unknown Joseph Chambers arrived in Fressingfield, married Frances Brundish, and left no other trace in the records I’ve searched. This would leave my existing reconstruction of the family line undisturbed, but it requires me to hypothesise a person for whom I have no direct evidence.
The fifth, and more unsettling possibility, is one that cuts to the heart of the whole problem. If an unknown Joseph Chambers was active in Fressingfield in the 1780s, there is no way to be certain he didn’t marry Sarah Meen rather than Frances Brundish — which would mean that Joseph (III) as I’ve identified him is not my ancestor at all, and the line I’ve traced back through the Chambers family would need to be rebuilt from the ground up. DNA evidence connecting living descendants might eventually resolve that question, but for now it remains open.
Appendix III: DNA Evidence
DNA testing, principally through Ancestry, has added another way of confirming the family connections in this account of the Chambers. The service flags potential matches between people who share segments of DNA, but a match on its own doesn’t tell you much. To make sense of it the other person’s tree has to be traced back until it meets ours, which can be quick when the match is close and the other person has done their research, but gets much harder when the shared ancestor is five or six generations back and neither side has a complete tree.
As of March 2026 I have confirmed twenty-three matches with descendants of four generations of the Chambers family beyond my grandparents. Seven are descendants of George Henry Chambers and Louisa Hemmings: two through their daughter Rebecca, one through Eileen, two through their daughter Helen, one through their son George Henry, and one through their son Francis. Ten are descendants of William Chambers and Rebecca Brooks: two through their daughter Anna Maria, four through their daughter Rebecca, three through their son John, and one through their son James. A further five are descendants of James Chambers and Mary Ann Martin: two through their daughter Emma Maria and three through their son John. There is one match confirmed with Joseph Chambers (III) and his first wife Elizabeth Gooch, via their son Joseph. The matches with descendants of Joseph and James are the most distant and the hardest to confirm, requiring the tracing of family lines back through four or five generations before the connection became clear.
Autosomal DNA testing of the kind used by Ancestry can reliably detect shared ancestry back about six to eight generations. The matches with descendants of James and Mary Ann, my third great-grandparents, are approaching that limit, and it is unlikely that DNA alone would confirm connections further back into the Fressingfield generations.
