I’m currently transcribing Capel St Mary and a baptism on 3 November 1731 for a baby named Mary Capel:

Mary Capel, an infant who was found under the Overseers window at about two a clock in the morning & whose parents are unknown.

Then another note, in the same handwriting, follows:

This infant was afterward found out to be the Daughter of Elizabeth wife of Aaron Dunstal of Brightlandsea in Essex.

This raises so many questions. Why did the mother abandon her baby, and why in Capel St Mary, which is nearly 20 miles away from Brightlingsea? The wording could suggest that Mary wasn’t Aaron’s daughter, which would explain why she was abandoned. The couple had four children baptised in Brightlingsea between 1721 and 1729, then Aaron was died in 1743. Or could Elizabeth have been struggling with post-natal depression, and had abandoned her baby miles from home while her mind was fogged?

And who worked out that Elizabeth Dunstall was her mother? Did Elizabeth have second thoughts and return to Capel to claim her baby? Or had someone given her a lift on their cart, and after hearing about a baby being left in Capel, later realised they’d dropped Elizabeth off with her child, where she was planning to leave her newborn?

Elizabeth is in my family tree, strangely enough, but only as a very distant relative by marriage. I wonder if she had any family in Capel St Mary? She must’ve known the village in order to have left the baby “under the Overseers window” – the Overseer of the Poor would know what to do in order to care for an abandoned child. A sad story all round, really, but an insight into life in England two hundred years ago.

(Strictly speaking, Capel is Capel St Mary, to differentiate it from Capel St Andrew near Woodbridge. But when I was growing up just outside Colchester, it was referred to as Capel, and I was surprised when I realised there were actually two Capels!).