3 Feb 2026

I made an important new discovery today. A couple of weeks ago I discovered that Ancestry had added images and an index of the Suffolk Parish Registers. This was big news because I have never been able to look at the Suffolk registers, yet that county is the heartland of my maternal grandfather’s family. Up until now I’ve been relying on the excellent transcripts and indexes provided by the Suffolk Family History Society, and I’ve probably spent over £250 buying them over the past 10 years.

As soon as I learned the register images were available I extracted a list of all Suffolk baptisms, marriages and burials in my family tree (thanks Gramps for making this easy!) and set about taking copies of the images for each. That process only took a few days but since then I’ve been painstakingly reviewing them and adding citations for each in Gramps.

I reached the Brooks/Brighten part of the family and added all the various baptisms, marriages and burials around Eliza Brooks who married John Booty. Eliza was my ancestor Rebecca’s sister. Rebecca herself has always been a mystery. For many years, more than three decades in fact, all I knew about her was her name and that she was the unmarried mother of my ancestor George Brooks, baptised in 1819 in Weybread. After much searching back in 2021 I found her baptism as Rebecca Brighten just over the border in Norfolk as well as a number of siblings. Still, that was all I found, after 1819 she seemed to just disappear. I had always suspected that she may have married later on and I couldn’t find any records simply because didn’t know her married name.

That appears to be true. Ancestry turned up the Banns of Marriage between a Rebecca Brighten and James Rose in Weybread in 1820. This is due to the new Suffolk records being added. It didn’t suggest the marriage but I soon found that by browsing the register images:

I am pretty sure this is my ancestor. She is marrying as Rebecca Brighten, although at the time the family were generally known as Brooks. She had been baptised Brighten, and her son was named Brooks, so it’s surprising that a year later she was calling herself Brighten again. Her father by this time was calling himself James Brighton Brooks.

The piece that convinces me is the first witness: Eliza Brooks. This is almost certainly her sister Eliza, who had been baptised Eliza Brooks, even though they shared the same parents.

Luckily both Rebecca and Eliza could sign their names so I can compare Eliza’s signature on Rebecca’s marriage entry and on her own three years later. They look very similar:

The first witness on Eliza’s marriage signed James B Brooks, which is Eliza and Rebecca’s father James Brighton Brooks.

One thing that gave me pause was Eliza’s age. She was born on 9th February 1808 which would make her twelve and a half at the time of Rebecca’s marriage (and nearly fifteen and a half when she married John Booty). I did some research and I learned that there was no legal age limit to be a witness to a wedding, the person just had to be capable of witnessing it (from Barbara Dixon’s incredibly detailed guide to civil registration in England and Wales, sadly offline but available via the Internet Archive)

I do wonder why Eliza was the witness and not Rebecca’s father, James. I also wonder what became of my ancestor and her son, George. From a cursory glance at the records it looks like Rebecca moved to the Chediston and Halesworth area about eight miles to the south-east of Weybread. The first mention of George after his baptism is his marriage in 1839 in Fressingfield, which neighbours Weybread. Did George live with his mother and her husband or did he stay with his grandfather on the farm in Weybread?

I found the burial of a Rebecca Rose on 8 Jul 1850 in Halesworth,which led to her death certificate. She died on 5 Jul 1850 of heart failure, survived by her husband James.