The search for my 4th great grandmother Elizabeth Harris has gradually evolved from what appeared to be an entirely ordinary piece of family history research into something resembling a Regency detective novel. What began with a straightforward baptism in Wymering quickly unravelled into a web of missing marriages, suspiciously timed deaths, an exciseman called John Hardwicke, and the intriguing possibility that Elizabeth may have been born into a long-running, unconventional relationship that only became legal years later. If you’ve missed the story so far, this is Part 3 of the investigation. You can catch up with Part 1, where the mystery first emerged, and Part 2, which followed my first expedition to The National Archives at Kew.
My first visit to Kew was supposed to answer a few simple questions about John Hardwicke’s career in the Excise. Instead, I came home with more questions than answers, a booking for another visit, and a healthy appreciation for just how much information can be hidden inside an eighteenth-century government ledger. Yesterday, I went back.
The second visit felt very different. There was no uncertainty about where to go this time. I got off at the correct station, found the Archives without wandering off in entirely the wrong direction, knew exactly where the lockers were, and even remembered to use the foam supports for the documents without needing a member of staff to gently remind me. It turns out that archive research, much like genealogy itself, improves considerably with practice. This time I wasn’t hoping for one spectacular discovery. Instead, I wanted something far more useful. I wanted to understand John’s life.
One small victory emerged almost immediately. When I began this investigation, John Hardwicke’s lifespan sat rather optimistically at 1760 to 1826. By the time I left Kew yesterday, it had quietly expanded to around 1755 to 1826. It isn’t often that a day at the archives results in an ancestor becoming five years older, but family history has a habit of moving the goalposts when you’re not looking.
The clue came from one of the earliest references to John in the Excise minute books. Tucked away amongst the entries for the spring of 1776 was a record that appears to relate to his appointment to the Excise. At first glance it didn’t seem especially remarkable, and I haven’t yet reviewed this entry in detail (that’s an excuse for another visit to Kew!). Then I stopped to think about it. The Excise didn’t recruit boys. Prospective officers were generally between 21 and 30 years of age, needed a recommendation from someone of influence, completed a period of instruction in what the Board described as “the art of Excise”, and only then joined the List of Expectants until a vacancy became available.
If this really was John entering the service in 1776, he couldn’t possibly have been born in 1760. He would only have been sixteen. That single realisation pushed John’s birth back by around five years to c.1755. It isn’t proof, of course, and I’ll continue looking for direct evidence, but it is one of those satisfying moments where the wider historical context quietly tells you that your timeline no longer works. Sometimes the records don’t need to say an ancestor was born earlier. They simply make it impossible for him not to have been.
That one adjustment had an unexpected knock-on effect. Suddenly the rest of John’s early career began to look rather more plausible, and I found myself reading the remaining records through entirely different eyes. Almost immediately, I realised I had been asking the wrong questions. I had spent weeks trying to work out where John was at particular moments in his life, when what I should really have been asking was how his career in the Excise actually worked. Once I started looking at the records through that lens, they began to make a great deal more sense.
Today we have HM Revenue & Customs, but during John’s lifetime Customs and Excise were entirely separate organisations. Customs officers worked in ports and at the country’s points of entry. Excise officers operated inland, collecting duties on goods produced within Britain. Beer, spirits, malt, candles, leather, soap and dozens of other everyday products all attracted Excise duty. Every brewery, every maltster and every candle maker represented income for the Crown. Far from being little more than tax collectors, Excise officers were highly trained civil servants. They were instructed in learning how to calculate duties, inspect manufacturers’ premises and maintain meticulous journals before eventually being appointed to their own Ride.
That word fascinated me. A Ride was precisely what it sounds like: the area one officer could reasonably cover on horseback while carrying out his duties. Suddenly, John’s career became much easier to picture. He wasn’t sitting behind a desk in an office. His workplace was the Wiltshire countryside. Day after day he would have ridden between breweries, malt houses, distilleries and candle makers, measuring production, calculating duty, updating his journals and moving on to the next premises. One thing, at least, is now beyond dispute. John could certainly ride a horse.
That understanding transformed the timeline I had been building. The earliest references I have found to John in the Excise minute books appear during the spring of 1776, although earlier indexes remain on my ever-growing list of documents to review properly during yet another trip to Kew.
By September 1777 he had married Mary Herring in Swindon. Later that same year their daughter, Ellinor, was baptised in nearby Hilmarton before dying in infancy. Five years later another child, John, was born in Calne. His baptism records John’s occupation simply as “Exciseman”, quietly confirming that he had become firmly established within the service. Tragically, this son also died young. It is easy to skim past those entries because they occupy so little space on the page, but for John and Mary, they represented years of hope and heartbreak.
While John spent his working life riding the roads of Wiltshire collecting revenue for the Crown, home must have looked much like that of countless other Georgian families. Children were born. Children died. Life continued. The Excise, however, was changing around him. One of the most interesting things to emerge from the timeline wasn’t where John went. It was where he didn’t.
When I first plotted his career, I imagined an officer being transferred all over southern England. Many Excise officers were. Moving experienced staff between Collections reduced opportunities for corruption and ensured vacancies could be filled wherever they arose. John’s career appears to have been rather different. Instead of travelling across Britain, he spent almost thirty years within the Marlborough Collection. He certainly changed Rides, but the moves were surprisingly local.
In January 1789, the Excise Board transferred John to Calne First Ride during the great reorganisation of the service, when hundreds of officers lost their posts and the remaining Rides were enlarged. A month later, another vacancy set off a chain reaction. Samuel Cadwallader was discharged for misconduct from Wootton Bassett. William Humberstone moved to replace him. John stepped into Humberstone’s former Ride at Hungerford. Reading the minute books, you can almost watch the Board moving names around a map. It is bureaucracy at its most efficient and, if I’m honest, surprisingly satisfying.
However, that same month, a parish record entry shows Mary Hardwicke was buried in Calne. The Excise Board had no idea that one of its routine administrative transfers coincided with one of the most difficult months of John’s life.
The records are silent on whether John was present at her funeral. They tell us nothing of his grief or how he coped with the loss of a wife after more than a decade of marriage. They simply record a transfer, a burial, and then move on to the next piece of business. Like so much of family history, the emotional story has to be inferred from the administrative one.
During my first visit to Kew, I discovered that on 3 August 1789 a John Hardwicke [sic.] appears in the Sussex Excise minute books, appointed to the annual hop collections “in the room of Harrold Thody”. Four days later, Joseph Handcock was appointed to the Sussex Collection “in the room of John Hardwick”. My immediate reaction was the same one most family historians would have. Had I found my John, or had I stumbled across an entirely different Excise officer with an inconveniently similar name? Yesterday’s research has made me rather more confident that this probably was my John. The brief appearance in Sussex now looks like a temporary deployment rather than a permanent transfer.
The hop harvest presented a unique challenge for the Excise. For a few hectic weeks each summer, huge quantities of taxable produce had to be measured and assessed before it disappeared into breweries across the country. Additional officers were drafted into the hop-growing counties to cope with the increased workload before returning to their ordinary Rides once the harvest was complete. Viewed in isolation, Sussex had looked like an anomaly. Viewed as part of the wider timeline, it suddenly made perfect sense. That was one of those wonderfully satisfying moments that family historians live for. Nothing about the Sussex record had changed. I hadn’t discovered a new document or corrected a transcription. All that had changed was my understanding. Once I appreciated how the Excise deployed officers during the hop harvest, an entry that had looked completely inexplicable suddenly became exactly what I should have expected to find.
There was, however, one question that continued to nag away at me. Where had Harrold Thody gone? It sounds almost theatrical, with officers stepping on and off stage while somebody at the Excise Board quietly rearranged the cast list. I suspect there is another story hiding in those records, and one day I may find myself following Harrold’s career as enthusiastically as I have John’s.
After 1789, the records become noticeably quieter. That isn’t to say John’s life became uneventful. Quite the opposite. Rather, it suggests that he had become what every government department values most: an experienced officer who quietly got on with his work.
In October 1791 he was still serving at Hungerford, now appearing in connection with paper collections, before a move that month to Marlborough 1st Ride in a sequence of office moves triggered by another officer being rendered incapable of carrying out his duties.
Three years after Mary’s death, life also appears to have begun again. In July 1792 John married Phebe Ettry in Calne, his residence recorded as West Overton. The marriage hints at a period of relative stability. The Excise minute books become less dramatic, his postings remain within the Marlborough Collection, and for a few years the records settle into the reassuring rhythm of routine administration.
That rhythm was interrupted again in 1796 when John returned to the Swindon Ride.
Two years later another parish register quietly records another loss. In February 1798, Phebe was buried at Christ Church, Swindon. By now, a pattern was beginning to emerge. John’s career can be followed through orderly government records recording transfers, appointments and changes of Ride. His personal life, meanwhile, is glimpsed only through brief parish register entries marking marriages, baptisms and, all too often, burials. Between those two sets of records lies the life we are left trying to reconstruct.
Later that same year, the Land Tax Redemption records place John living in the town, offering one of the rare occasions where we glimpse not simply the Ride he worked, but the place he called home. It is one of those moments where two entirely different record sets unexpectedly overlap, anchoring an Excise officer to both his professional and domestic life. Then, almost exactly a year after Phebe’s burial, came the record that started this whole investigation.
In February 1799, John Hardwicke, described simply as “Exciseman”, married Honor Harris in Wroughton. When I first found that marriage licence, John existed for one reason only. He was a possible husband for Honor Harris and, by extension, a possible father for my 4th great grandmother, Elizabeth Harris. Everything else about him felt incidental. Three visits to Kew have changed that completely.
The timeline has revealed something I wasn’t expecting to find. Not a dramatic scandal or an extraordinary career, but the steady, dependable working life of an eighteenth-century civil servant. A man who survived the largest reorganisation in the history of the Excise, who spent almost three decades serving within the Marlborough Collection, who moved between neighbouring Rides as the Board required, and whose professional life continued regardless of the joys and sorrows recorded in the parish registers.
His career did not end with his marriage to Honor. In 1801 he transferred from the Swindon Ride to Leachlade. Five years later he exchanged postings with William Holmes and took over the Northleach Ride. The routine exchange of officers quietly reminds us how the Excise operated. Even after decades of service, the machinery of government never stood still. Vacancies arose, officers moved, and the work carried on.
The irony, of course, is that I still haven’t answered the question that took me to Kew in the first place. I cannot yet prove that John Hardwicke was Elizabeth Harris’s father. In fact, I now have more questions than I did at the beginning. Strangely, that doesn’t feel like failure. If anything, it feels like progress. Because somewhere between the parish registers, the Excise minute books and a timeline that finally began to make sense, John Hardwicke stopped being a clue and became a person.
And somehow, I have a feeling that John still has a few more surprises in store.
Lastly, just some nice images from the rest of the day in London….
Fancy another mystery?
Not every investigation ends with a neat conclusion. If you’d like to see how historical research really unfolds, have a look at some of my other case studies, browse the free research resources, or explore the methods I use to piece together ordinary lives from extraordinary records.
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