Fergus Lefever & Sarah Bailey

Fergus O’Connor Lefever was born about 1842 in Bishopsgate, London the 5th of the 7 children of Frederick Lefever and Jane Chipman. He married Sarah Ann Bailey born about 1840 in Spitalfields, London. According to a tree on Ancestry I am distantly related to Fergus, but that is research for another day.

Fergus and Sarah married on 26th August 1860 at St Matthias Church in Bethnal Green.

Between 1861 and 1888 when Sarah was 48 years old they had a total of 17 children. Unfortunately, as was fairly common at this time, 8 of the children died before the age of 3 and all except one dies before their second birthdays. I have found that six of their children survived until adulthood and married. The remaining 3 children I have yet to find any additional records for other than birth or baptism records and so I suspect that they also may have died in childhood.

Sarah died in 1909 in Shoreditch and so I have been unable to confirm the number of her children who actually died as she did not feature in the 1911 census and Fergus did not complete the appropriate columns in his census entry.

Fergus died in 1914 in Bethnal Green and even though he is variously described in the records as a Shoe Maker or a Slipper Maker he was unable to write as all the records for him, up until 1911, just have his mark.

It currently looks like this family had the tragedy of 11 of their children dying in childhood. I will update this post later should I find any further details on the 3 children who had an uncertain life.