The Search for the Elusive Slowbohms

My great, great grandfather and his father had the middle name 'Slobourn', but where had this name come from? In 1994 I purchased the marriage certificate of my 3 x great grandparents, Joseph Slobourn Williams and Harriett Barnett who were married in Beechworth in 1860. On this certificate Joseph stated his mother was Ann Slobourn. Joseph, it appeared, had been given this middle name as it was his mother's maiden name, a quite common tradition and he had then carried it on to his son. Joseph signed his full name on his marriage certificate, with his middle name spelt 'Slobourn' and this was one of many spelling variations I have come across.

It is often assumed the less common the surname the easier it will be to trace the family. Even Ancestry advertisements imply all you need to do is type in a name and all will be revealed! This certainly didn't happen in this case. Joseph had also stated that he was born in Wales. A Williams in Wales is going to the other extreme, but at least his father had married a Slobourn, so I thought I might have some hope of finding their marriage. No such luck! Census records drew a blank, I just had too little information with such a common name as Williams. Then one day in 2009 as a last resort I typed Slobourn in Google and up came the name Mabel Sloburn Williams in a family group sheet on the Ballarat Genealogy site. She was a daughter of a Thomas Williams, a carpenter, born in London. It was a reasonable assumption to think that Thomas and Joseph were brothers. I now had that little extra information to try the census records again and finally found the family living in St Pancras in 1841. It also showed Ann and the children had not been born in the county, so perhaps Joseph had been born in Wales.

Another few years passed until I received an email from a second cousin, who after much patience had found the marriage of Ann Slowbohm and Joseph Williams in St Pancras in 1821 on Pallot's Marriage Index. Ann's surname had been written and transcribed as 'Horobohm' despite the index having (?Slowbohm) next to the name. Finally the marriage and the first appearance of this spelling of the name. I then went searching for Slowbohms and found a few living in Whitechapel and although I could not link them to the family I felt there must be a connection. A few years later I did eventually find Ann's baptism in St Pancras in 1824 (three years after her marriage) which gave both her year of birth and her parents names, Ann and John. That is where I had left the research until this week.

 Pallot's Marriage Index Entry

A trip to England in late 2018 made me determined to find as much as I could before I went. Several long afternoons trawling Ancestry, Find My Past and Family Search as well as rereading collected information proved a worthwhile exercise. However it was not before learning that Ancestry gave a few names that matched and then proceeded to throw up the name Sullivan as the next best variation. Very unhelpful! It was a long list, however when using various wildcards, the lists were a manageable number around 2000! What amazed me was the variation on both how the name was spelt and how differently it was transcribed. A few of the variations included: Slowbohn, Slobohm, Slowboahm, Slowbome, Slowbottom. Slowbhom, Slowthbom, Slobin, Slogan, Slobourn, Sloburn, and Horobohm.

Now after all these years through perseverance and the availability of more online records, I have linked most of the Slowbohms in London to my family back to John Henry and Susannah Slowbohm, my 7 x great grandparents, born in 1726 and 1732. John Henry died in 1790 and left a will, which now provides a challenge to try to decipher it. Slowbohm seems the most common spelling of the name in England, but once the brothers came to Australia, the name became more anglicized. It has been a great research journey that hasn't finished yet.