Alan
I would be remiss if I failed to let you know that just prior to Jane Spillman and my wife leaving for a tour of Tunisia Jane forwarded an email that CMoG had received from a young man named Gareth, who is member of the Staffordshire Carders in the UK. Gareth included a picture of a gold Aurene bowl that had been in the family for generations for Jane to identify. The scribed 3 numbers on the bottom of the bowl were unreadable, but Jane identified it as probably a sugar bowl.

In the email Gareth identified himself as the Great, Great, Great nephew of Frederick WILLIAM Carder, the maker of the Aurene bowl. Having written an article claiming that Frederick Carder didn’t have a middle name, I immediately asked Gareth the source of the information. The source was his grandfather, Alec James Carder (b 1922), who is the grandson of Frederick Carder’s older brother, William Henry Carder. The family has no documentary evidence to support the middle name William, but Gareth says the family has a photograph somewhere of three men named Frederick William Carder, “our” Frederick being one of them according to his grandfather.

My search of the English censuses, together with Gareth’s help, turned up three family members named Frederick William Carder who could be the subjects of the picture. If the picture is found, Gareth will send me a copy which I will forward to the Gazette.

I think it is unlikely that Caleb Carder would name his first son William Henry and his second son Frederick William. I searched generations of the Staffordshire Carders, and never found a family with two sons with the same name.

My most recent email to Gareth ends as follows: “I realize that you and your family may be annoyed at an outsider intruding on family grounds, but hope we can deal with this as friends searching for the truth. However, we may never agree unless some contemporaneous document appears that will settle the issue once and for all.”

Ed Bush