Lady Emily’s children

Lady Emily Peel (neé Hay) was raised in aristocractic style, raced her beloved Borzoi dogs, and was tracked by the paparazzi when she went on holiday. She’s also, in her fictional form, a character in my upcoming book. Here’s the real Lady Emily in a photograph made by Camille Silvy:

Those dogs, Yasva and Ulaloi (I have no idea which is which) are in photographs with her several times. She acquired them on a trip with her husband, Robert Peel, to visit the Tsar in Russia. No, this is not the Robert Peel who founded the Metropolitan Police and lives in legend as well as fact, but rather his son, the 3rd Baronet.

Lady Emily was from a high-ranking family, married the son of a famous man, and was expected to have children. I wanted to have her appear in the story before that particular responsibility. The novel Murder at the Gasworks takes place in 1860.

While it was natural to find her on Wikipedia, the list of her children steered me the wrong way.

It turns out some of this is correct and some isn’t. In fact, Robert, being the only son, is the only one whose birth is verifiable through multiple sources. The more I researched, the more contradictory lists appeared. This is from Geneanet:

Now instead of bearing twin daughters in 1860, she’s got a first-born child in 1860 and the twins, if they were twins, afterward. The Peerage also lists Victoria first.

Interestingly, when you follow the links for Evelyn and Agnes, it says Evelyn was born in Camden, London, and Agnes at Drayton Manor, the manor house they had near Birmingham. If they were twins, that’s a helluva carriage ride.

Geneaology sites are of questionable reliabilty, but sometimes it’s all you have. FamilySearch, it’s true, lists Victoria’s birth incorrectly as 1860. But it has Evelyn born in 1863, and Agnes not until after her brother, in 1870.

So I tried to track Victoria, who’s likely the real problem here. The citation for Lady Emily’s Wikipedia page points to ancestry.co.uk, with a dead link. For Geneanet, it points to Ancestry.com, which on my reliability scale is about equivalent to Geneanet. So I tried searching birth registrations, and found Victoria’s, for 1865, at FreeBMD.

Now, it’s true that not all births are registered right after the birth, but five years is a long time if she was born in 1860. Then I found a notice of her christening. She was named after Victoria, and the Queen was her godmother.

She was an infant. The average time to baptism after birth during this era was 14 days. She was born in 1865.

I don’t want readers worried that Lady Emily is six months pregnant while doing deeds of derring-do (which she does) in the book with social censure.

My conclusion is that she wasn’t.