The Dugay Family

They didn't have the money to pay the one shilling fine, so a few weeks later David and his brother Reuben served the six weeks hard labour. It's quite likely that they were caught doing something that everybody did – catching rabbits for the dinner table.

Joining the army would probably have felt like an escape from the hardship. Here again mechanisation was being introduced to farming reducing the opportunities for work. One oddity is that when he signed on he gave his age as 17 years and 10 months, but he was actually about 15 months older than that. He might not have been aware of his real date of birth, or maybe he might just have been trying to disguise his history of prison. He stayed with the Buffs for fifteen years, notably serving in the Crimean War at the siege of Sevastopol, and later in India and China. Here are some soldiers from his regiment in Crimea about 1855.

He was promoted to Serjeant on 1st Nov 1858. Later in China he picked up an infection which left him disfigured and unable to serve any longer. The exact nature of his illness isn't clear but the Army were careful to deny responsibility for it as this Medical Officer's report in Hong Kong on 30th July 1860 testifies:

“Recommended for change of climate for a large ulcer of the nose and impaired health, the result of constitutional predisposition and not aggravated by office or intemperance.”

On 3rd April 1861 David was in the Army Hospital in Chatham Kent, where the Medical Officer reported:

“Having examined Serjeant David Duggay I am of the opinion he is unfit for further service in consequence of disfigurement from loss of nose the result of ulceration.”

So he was out of the Army but he did get a pension for his fifteen years service – one shilling per week, something like five pounds a week today. He was the first Dugay of our family to serve in the Army and many more Dugays followed him into the Army later, very often in Kent regiments. There are frequent connections with Kent in the Dugay family, even though their origins are in Hampshire. 

In spite of his facial disfigurement, about eighteen months after leaving the army, at the age of 37 David got married to Ann Lawes. She was 22, and was in service on a large farm north of Andover. Originally she was from Basingstoke, which in those days was a small country town.

After their marriage David and Ann lived in Longparish and had their first two children, Sarah in 1863 and William in 1865. They lived in the George Inn at Longparish where David was innkeeper with his father William between until 1866. It was situated away from the village in a fairly isolated spot called Cottage End near Longparish railway station. Perhaps the idea was to catch the trade from railway passengers but it wasn't successful. Several publicans of the George became bankrupt including David Dugay in 1866. This staged picture seems to have some railway staff in it.

They moved from Longparish to Dummer after the bankruptcy and David worked from then on as a farm labourer. Their third child Henry was born in Dummer in 1868. And later Kate Agnes Dugay was born in Dummer in May 1870. She was baptised Agnes Kate on 8th May 1870, parents David Dugay and Ann. Her exact date of birth we don't know because her birth seems not to have been registered, and so she never had a birth certificate. Her name appears as Agnes Kate in the 1871 and 1881 census, but as soon as she left home she called herself Kate Agnes.

Sadly Kate's father David became ill with tuberculosis around the time Kate was born and he died on 22nd Feb 1871 when Kate was less than a year old. So she never knew her father.

Kate's mother Ann was then left a widow with four children to bring up, no money and no income. She must have fallen onto the parish for poor relief, at least initially. By 1881 they had moved to North Waltham just a couple of miles from Dummer (picture below). Ann is there, a widow, with all four children, and a lodger called Adolphus Whittick. And in addition there are three more children all bearing the Dugay name, the first born in 1875, four years after David Dugay died. So who is the father of these children? It seems fairly clear that it's the lodger Adolphus Whittick. The last child Ellen is baptised as Ellen Whittick Dugay. It was common for illegitimate children to take the father's surname as a middle name. Later when they marry, the illegitimate children name their father as Adolphus. So Kate was raised in a family unit with seven children with her real mother Ann, and Adolphus Whittick as the father.

When Kate Dugay married William Russell she named Adolphus Whittick as her father. This is probably because she thought of Adolphus as her father, even though her father was actually David Dugay.

At some point during this period Kate left home to work in service. She appears in the 1891 census as a cook aged 22 for the Vernon family in Lewisham, just before her marriage. Her life after marrying William Russell is documented in the Russell Family page.

Earlier Dugay ancestors

All the Dugays in Britain were descended from this family who lived in Wherwell, Hampshire in the late eighteenth century.  In the census of 1841 there are 16 people in the country with the surname Dugay. 

The Dugay families later spread out from Hampshire to London, Kent, Essex and abroad.

The earliest ancestors of our Dugay family in Hampshire are in Amport (near Andover) in 1684. Here we find  the baptism of our 6xGreat Grandfather John Dugoe. We have a copy of his will from Hampshire Archives in Winchester which contains two spellings of his name, Dugoe and Dugey. Perhaps he was known under both names. His parents are Edward and Katheren, who could be Huguenots who fled France in the early 1680s. However there are also some earlier records of the name Dugoe quite close by in Wiltshire, so it's possible we could be connected to those. 

The will of John Dugoe seems to be the last recorded occurrence of the name in that spelling. Why?  One possible explanation is that most of the Dugoe children were girls and would not have carried the name forward. Or possibly by common usage the name evolved to Dugay. Most people were illiterate in the 1700s and when the names were written down by the clergy they would have written what they heard - so maybe pronunciation had something to do with it. There are other spellings of the name - the most common alternative is Dugey. Sometimes Duggay. Some people split the name into two words Du Gay. We have a person in our family who took up the Du Gay spelling in the early 20th century even though they were born as a Dugay.