The Whitehead family

The Whitehead family sits in both my maternal and paternal family trees, with both of the most recent ancestors being my 5x Great Grandmothers. However, I am yet to connect them, despite them both being in the fenland village of Haddenham, Cambridgeshire, England.

Researching this branch has been difficult, due to the large number of John, William, Mary, and Elizabeth, Whitehead children in the village parish registers and censuses. This has made it almost impossible to identify parentage.

Maternal Whitehead family

The most recent maternal Whitehead ancestor was Esther Whitehead, who was born in the village circa 1783.

Esther was the oldest of the children of John Whitehead and Susannah Stevens, who had at least four more children, including one son, after they had Elizabeth.

Esther married William Moden in 1804, but after six children, she died in July 1815 aged just 37 years.

William re-married in 1823 to her recently widowed sister-in-law Elizabeth Howard (the widow of her late-brother John Whitehead), adding four more children to the Moden family, and naming their first child, which happened to be a daughter, Esther - clearly in her memory.

My paternal Whitehead family

There is just one Whitehead entry in my paternal tree, and that is Elizabeth Whitehead, who married my 5x Great Grandfather, miller, Philip Newman.

After marrying in 1785, the couple remained in Haddenham to have six children, until Philip's untimely death after being killed by the windmill in which he was working in 1809.

Their daughter Rebecca Newman, in her own brief life, would in turn become my 4x Great Grandmother, whilst most of her siblings remained in Haddenham, and are buried in the now-closed Church Lane Cemetery, with some in the Chewells Lane Cemetery.

Whitehead family connections

With the limited research that I've been able to do, due to the multiple identically named Whitehead children, I've only identified three different ancestral families that are connected. They are: