Considering Clarinda

At Rotherfield Greys, in Oxfordshire, the daughter of a Traveller was baptised on 13th March 1743 with the name ‘Clarenda.’ The following year, at the Midsummer Quarter Sessions in Winchester, Hampshire, there is a removal record listing Peter Stanley, Richard and Millicent Stanley, their daughter Clarinda, together with James Scamp, Thomas and Elgina Scamp, and daughter Mary. Surely this Clarinda Stanley is the little girl baptised a year before, with a name that was popular with the Scamps, suggesting her mother may have been a Scamp, and that this is a family group.

Richard Stanley had been baptised at Bosham, Sussex in 1719, the son of Hercules and Parthenia, and he and Milly/Millicent had seven known children: Richard, baptised in Surrey in 1738; Mary, baptised in 1740/1; followed by Clarinda; Hercules, baptised in Hampshire in 1745; Vanlo (Vandelow), also in Hampshire, in 1747; Thomas in Dorset in 1754; Joseph back in Hampshire in 1757. Millicent died in 1758 and was buried in Froyle, Hampshire on 13th September, ‘the wife of Richard.’

It is worth noting that the unusual name of Vanlo/Vandelow that Richard and Milly gave a son of theirs had appeared in the family as early as 1708, when Peter and Kezia Stanley had baptised their son on 27th June in the parish of Rotherfield Peppard, Oxfordshire, just down the road from where little Clarinda had been baptised in 1743. Peter and Kezia also baptised a daughter, Susanna, at Micheldever, Hampshire, on 24th January 1702/3 and another little girl Keturah at Chideock, in Dorset, on 24th July 1711.

Clarinda Stanley married a William Barber at Crayford, in Kent, on 20th June 1768, and he, too, appears to have been a Traveller, since their children are baptised variously in Kent and Sussex. In 1771, on 14th July, the couple baptised their daughter, Elizabeth, in Crayford, Kent and a son, Richard, named after Clarinda’s father, at West Dean, in Sussex, on 31st January 1773. Another son, William, was baptised on 16th April 1775 at Henfield, Sussex, and a daughter, Martha, at Boxley, Kent, on 8th June 1777. Their last known child, a son, John, was baptised at Bosham, in Sussex, where Clarinda’s father had been baptised, on 24th August 1783.

What happened to Clarinda? It is likely that hers is the burial at St. Peter the Great, Chichester, Sussex on 7th September 1786, of Clarinda Barlow (sic), a Traveller from the poor house. If so, she was only 43 years old at the time of her death.

Did Clarinda remain in touch with her Stanley family? Perhaps, for an intriguing marriage at St. Clement’s, Hastings, Sussex is that between an Elizabeth Barber and a Thomas Stanley on 21st March 1793, when Clarinda’s daughter would have been in her early twenties.