Leonard Aubrey Robert Wear

Sixty-three and seventy-two Pix Road 17 Sep 2026

The 1939 Register was searched for Leonard’s aunt and found his grandmother. At 63 Pix Road, Letchworth — TNA R39/1620/1620G/011/28, schedule 305, taken on 29 September 1939:

Emma Hull is Emma Hawkins. Born at Aldenham on 7 February 1859; married Robert Wear at Southwark in 1881 and buried him in 1890; married John Hull and buried him too. She is eighty years old, blind, and twice a widow, living with the daughter who was eight when her father died.

And the address is the thing. Henry Robert Wear and Martha Maud Castle raised six children at 72 Pix Road. His mother and his sister were at 63 Pix Road. The same street — a few doors along, in a town of eight thousand people that had not existed forty years earlier.

Which gives the 1939 emigration a shape it did not have. Leonard sailed in March 1937. His father followed in April 1939 and his mother in August with the four youngest. The register was taken on 29 September, seven weeks after that ship left — and it finds, still in Pix Road, an eighty-year-old blind woman and the daughter who was keeping her. Janette, twenty, was a cinema cashier at 18 Ridge Avenue, half a mile away.

Correction, 29 September 2026. This paragraph used to say Janette was “in lodgings” on Ridge Avenue. She was not. The two passenger lists give the family’s last address in the United Kingdom, and on both of them — in April and again in August — it is 18 Ridge Avenue, Letchworth. It was the family’s own house — and Leonard’s own crossing proves it was already the family house two years before either of them sailed: the Windsor Castle list of 12 March 1937 gives him at “18, Ridge Avenue, Letchworth, Herts.”, written out in full where the 1939 entries abbreviate it. Three departures across twenty-nine months, one address. She had not moved out and taken a room: she was alone in the house her father had left in April and her mother and the four youngest had left in August. The word “lodgings” was this archive’s invention, from an address it had seen only in the register and never in a record that said whose house it was. The two readings.

The record says who was where. It does not say what anybody felt about it, and this archive is not going to guess. But it is no longer true that the family simply left.

Corporal L A R Wear, 141272, prisoner of war 16 Sep 2026

The gap between 1941 and 1950 has a reason in it now. Findmypast attached four military records to Leonard’s 1937 passenger entry. They looked wrong — a man who sailed for the Cape in 1937 and married at Rosebank in 1940 has no business being indexed under Germany — and they were opened expecting a different man. They are not.

The South African connection is what turns initials into a person. He is not in a British regiment. He is in the Union Defence Force — and Leonard sailed from Southampton to the Cape in March 1937, married in Johannesburg in September 1940, and was twenty-five when Tobruk fell in June 1942 and something over ten thousand South Africans went into the bag in a single day.

It also explains the silence. This archive has recorded for weeks that Leonard cannot be placed between 1941 and 1950 — no address, one fact, a daughter born in 1941. A man in a prison camp does not appear in a directory, on a voters’ roll, or in a newspaper. The hole is not an absence of records. It is an absence of liberty.

Held as probable, not documented, and the reason is exact. The POW lists carry initials only and no date of birth. The case rests on the initials, the South African force, an age that fits, and one service number appearing consistently across five records in two separate War Office volumes. What would settle it is the SANDF service record at Pretoria — which this archive has wanted since it began and, until today, could not ask for precisely. It can now be asked for by number.

He went to Letchworth alone, for the printing 16 Sep 2026

The last gap in Henry Robert’s life closes with the 1911 census, and it explains how a boy raised in Watford came to marry a Baldock girl at Hitchin. At twenty-one he is at 9 Ridge Road, Letchworth — RG14/7576/0009 — a boarder, single, and a PRINTER’S ASSISTANT, in the house of a 36-year-old widow named Harriet Reeves along with her brother, her small son and another young boarder, a fitter.

He was not there with family. He was there for work. Letchworth was a new town then, and J. M. Dent & Sons had put the Temple Press there. He followed the trade, boarded where he could, and married locally three years later.

And the trade runs the whole length of his life without a break:

Twenty-eight years at one trade, and he took it to Johannesburg at forty-nine with a wife and five children to follow four months later. Nothing in any of it suggests a man doing anything other than exactly what he had always done, somewhere else.

Harness makers in Jamaica Road, and a niece who gives the game away 16 Sep 2026

Robert Wear’s own parents are found, and the line goes back one more generation. The 1871 census has him at twelve, a scholar, at Jamaica Road, Bermondsey — RG10/641 f.40 sch.40:

A household of harness makers. The father and the three older boys all at the same trade; Robert, the youngest at twelve, still at school. He would be dead at thirty-one.

And the last line of that table is the answer to a question it does not appear to ask. Sarah Wear’s maiden name is not in the census — married women’s never are. But Robert’s birth registration, Q2 1859, Bermondsey, gives the mother’s maiden name as BLOOM — and sitting in the house on census night is a seventeen-year-old niece called Sarah Ann Bloom. The index and the household confirm each other without either being asked to.

Where the line stands at the end of 16 September 2026:
Derrick → Leonard Aubrey Robert Wear → Henry Robert Wear × Martha Maud Castle → Robert Wear × Emma Hawkins → William Wear × Sarah Bloom, of Jamaica Road, Bermondsey, and John Hawkins × Emma Hawkins, of The Red Lion Cottages, Aldenham. Three generations further back than this archive stood yesterday, and the two families could hardly be less alike: London tradesmen on one side, Hertfordshire farm labourers on the other.

Robert died at thirty-one, and the line goes back to a farm labourer’s cottage 16 Sep 2026

The death is found, and it is close enough to the birth to change how you read the whole family. ROBERT WEAR, aged 31, died in the first quarter of 1890 at St Olave Southwark — vol 1D p141, the same registration district in which he had married eight years earlier. His son Henry Robert was born in the third quarter of 1889. The boy was about six months old. He never knew his father, and no one in this family has known his father’s name until today.

And Emma’s own parents are now on the record. The 1871 census finds her at twelve, a scholar, at The Red Lion Cottages, Aldenham — RG10/1380 f.10 p.12 sch.58:

Every one of them born in Aldenham. Two generations of agricultural labourers in one Hertfordshire parish, and a daughter who went to London, married there, buried a husband there, and came back.

It also settles the problem the last panel had to leave open. The 1891 census called Emma Wear the Mother of a head two years her senior, which could not be right. Here is John Hawkins, son, aged 14 in 1871, born Aldenham — the same John Hawkins who in 1891 is thirty-four, a carter, head of the house at 44 Ebury Road, with his widowed sister and her three children under his roof. Brother and sister, confirmed from the household she grew up in. The 1891 relationship is a transcription error and can be treated as one.

The line as it now stands: Derrick → Leonard Aubrey Robert Wear → Henry Robert Wear × Martha Maud Castle → Robert Wear × Emma Hawkins → John Hawkins × Emma Hawkins, of Aldenham. Two generations further back than this archive stood yesterday. Robert Wear’s own parents are still unknown — his death certificate and the 1861 or 1871 census for a Wear household in south London are the next step.

A generation above Henry Robert, and the reason the family was ever in Hertfordshire 16 Sep 2026

Until today this archive had never got above Henry Robert Wear. He was the top of the line: a man who appeared in Hitchin in 1914, married Martha Maud Castle, and died in Johannesburg in 1969. Where he came from, and why the family was in Hertfordshire at all, were open questions.

Four records, found in sequence on 16 September 2026, close both.

On census night 1891 the house held nine people. The head was John Hawkins, 34, a carter, born Aldenham, Hertfordshire. Also there was Emma Wear, 32, a WIDOW, born Aldenham, Hertfordshire — the same small parish, two years apart — with her three children: Louisa S, 8, born Wimbledon; Rosetta E, 5, born Bermondsey; and Henry R, 1, born Bermondsey.

So Robert Wear was dead before his son turned two. He married Emma Hawkins in Southwark in 1881, they had three children in south London across the 1880s, and by April 1891 she is a widow at thirty-two, back in Hertfordshire, living in her brother’s house.

That is why there were Wears in Hertfordshire. Not because the family came from there — Robert’s children were born in Wimbledon and Bermondsey. Because a widow went home to her own people. Henry Robert grew up in Watford among Hawkinses, married at Hitchin in 1914, and enlisted in the Hertfordshire Regiment. The county was his mother’s, not his father’s.

Two things to hold honestly. The census gives Emma’s relationship to the head as Mother, which cannot be right — she is 32 and John Hawkins is 34. Same surname, same birth parish, two years apart: brother and sister is the reading, and the original image should be checked before it is treated as settled. And the service record gives his birth town as Battersea where the birth registration and both censuses say Bermondsey. The two agree on the county, Surrey, and on nothing else. The registration and the census agree with each other, so Battersea is the outlier.

They left England in 1939, and they left in two parties 16 Sep 2026

This archive has asked since the beginning when the Wears emigrated, and has never been able to answer it. The outbound passenger lists — BT 27 at the National Archives, searched on Findmypast on 16 September 2026 — answer it twice over.

Leonard went first, and this archive had it the wrong way round until 16 September. Mr L A R Wear, aged twenty, occupation engineer, sailed from Southampton on 12 March 1937 aboard the Union-Castle liner Windsor Castle, bound for the Cape — TNA/BT27/1490/00/0047, entry 00171. Two years before his father. The index would not give him up on his forename and surrendered him at once to the initial.

Henry Robert followed in 1939. Mr H R Wear, born 1890, aged 49, occupation given as machine minder — the transcriber read it as “machine minister” — sailed from London on 5 April 1939 aboard the Union-Castle liner Durban Castle, bound for the Cape. He is the only Wear on that manifest.

Martha Maud followed four months later with four children. On 10 August 1939 the Dunvegan Castle left London for Durban with 406 passengers aboard, master A Alderson. Five of them were Wears, in five consecutive entries:

So it is not the oldest pattern in emigration after all. It is not the father going ahead to find work and the family following when he has. It is a twenty-year-old going out alone, and his parents, his three sisters and his baby brother coming after him two years later. Whatever Leonard found at the Cape in 1937, the rest of them followed it. What makes the second sailing worth looking at twice is the date. They sailed on 10 August 1939. Britain declared war on 3 September. A woman of forty-four crossed with a two-year-old and three girls, and had she waited a month she would not have gone at all.

The initials are all five of them, and the archive already had the names. Henry Robert and Martha Maud registered six children at Hitchin — Leonard 1917, Janette 1919, Kathleen 1921, Cynthia 1931, Linda 1933 and Bruce Wallace 1936. Four of those six are on this manifest, in birth order, and the two who are missing are the two eldest. Leonard was twenty-two that August and Janette twenty. Martha Maud took the children who were still children.

And the manifest corroborates the sibship this archive built out of the birth index. The reconstruction said Henry Robert and Martha Maud had six children at Hitchin between 1917 and 1936, of whom two were sons — one thirty-one in June 1948 and the other eleven. MAST B Wear, born 1937, is that second son, and he is here in his own right on a government record rather than inferred from a mother’s maiden name in an index. MISS C Wear, born 1931, is Cynthia, whose GRO birth entry at Hitchin is the document the whole Castle chain hangs from.

Neither Leonard nor a Leonard-shaped man is on either ship. He was twenty-two in 1939, he is in Johannesburg by 1940, and he married at Rosebank on 7 September that year — so he travelled separately, as an adult would. A search of BT 27 on the forename Leonard with the surname Wear returns nothing at all, which means he is either indexed under initials or he did not leave from a port these lists cover. That is a live question, not a closed one.

Read this part first Standing

Leonard Aubrey Robert Wear is an inference, not a finding. Everything on this page about his own life is documented and cited. Everything about his relationship to Derrick rests on an argument from shared DNA segments and a sibling list, and on no document whatsoever.

The case against him is set out below at the same length as the case for him, and it is not padding. If you read only one half, read that one.

The last certain sighting 15 September, late

Every other line in that table comes from a marriage register or a court index. This one comes from a cemetery ledger, and it is the only record outside a family tree that puts Leonard and Henry Robert Wear on the same document.

West Park Cemetery, City of Johannesburg — Private Graves Register, folio W 8
Name of purchaser: WEAR, Mr. L. A. R. · Address: 271, Wilson St., Fairlands, J’hb.
Receipt 11484 · purchased 13.9.69 · £60
Buried 13.9.69 · grave 56045 · section E.C. · person buried Henry Robert Wear

Read at five times magnification, the first initial is a cursive L, not a J — the ascender and bowl are unmistakable beside the J forms elsewhere on the page.

What it is not. The register records a purchaser, not a relationship. It proves that an L. A. R. Wear buried Henry Robert Wear and paid sixty pounds to do it. This archive knows of no other L. A. R. Wear — but that is an absence, not a proof, and the page will not call it more than it is.

What it is. A fourth address, and the last certain sighting of him: alive, in Johannesburg, on 13 September 1969. Seventeen years later his mother was buried in that same grave, 56045, section EC — the parents lie together in a plot their elder son paid for.

Correction, 15 September: this archive first published the folio as W58. It is W 8. Re-cropped and read on its own at 4.3×, the pencilled head-margin number is a looped W and a single 8; the flourish on the W had been read as a 5. Three records agree — the purchaser page’s own head margin, the index side of the same folio, and the burial register’s cross-reference “P. Fol. W.8.” Nothing else in the entry changes. But published wrong, it would have sent the next researcher to the wrong sheet.

His father’s own address, and his own, on the same day 15 September, later

The grave register gave the purchaser. The burial register — folio W 56 of the same cemetery’s books, the folio the grave register points to — gives the dead man’s household. Row 4, read at up to five times magnification:

Wear · Henry Robert · buried 13.9.69 · grave 5604/5 · section E.C. · M · aged 80
Address at time of death: General Hospital, Jhb.
Usual residence: 5 Livingstone Ct., 4th St., Parkhurst, Jhb.
Died 11.9.69 of bronchopneumonia · burial order 2894 · undertaker Cooks · R15.00

On the day he bought the grave, Leonard’s address and his father’s were not the same address. Henry Robert Wear’s household was a flat in Parkhurst. Leonard’s was 271 Wilson Street, Fairlands, a mile and a half away.

That is neutral on paternity — a fifty-two-year-old man twice divorced would not be living with his parents. What it does is make the Fairlands address his rather than a borrowed family one, and an address of a man’s own is the kind of thing deeds, voters rolls and street directories can be run against. Next

It also demotes an inference this archive has been leaning on. 64 Greenfield Road, Greenside was never documented as the parents’ house — it was reasoned from an unmarried daughter of twenty-one in 1952. The parents are now documented in Parkhurst in 1969, and the widow still in Parkhurst in 1986, two streets away. Greenside survives as a guess bracketed by two facts, and the page should say so.

The family never took South African citizenship 15 September, later still

The Parkhurst address was one clerk’s handwriting. Run against the Government Gazette it came back twice over, and the second record is worth more than the address it confirms.

Government Gazette 4620, 21 March 1975 — Naturalization Notices
EVANS, Mrs Janette Eileen Maud, formerly Bailey, née Wear, saleslady, 5 Livingstone Court, 28 Fourth Street, Parkhurst, Johannesburg

Government Gazette 5007, 12 March 1976 — certificates issued
R54033 — EVANS, Janette Eileen Maud, 28/10/19, England, Citizen of the U.K. and C., 30/10/75

She is Leonard’s eldest sister — GRO birth index Q4 1919 at Hitchin, mother’s maiden name Castle; the 1921 census at 72 Pix Road; the 1939 Register still at Letchworth — where, it turns out, she was waiting to be married. The naturalisation record gives her birth as 28 October 1919, which falls inside that GRO quarter. The archive did not have to assume the identification.

Two things follow, and the second is the one that matters.

The address is corroborated. A cemetery clerk’s hand in 1969 and the Government Printer’s type in 1975 give the same flat, and the gazette adds the building’s street number. Their mother was still in Parkhurst in 1986, two streets away.

They stayed British. The eldest daughter was still a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies in 1975 — forty years after the household left Hertfordshire. This family did not naturalise on arrival. It explains something this archive had been treating as a mystery: why a man who lived in Johannesburg from the late 1930s until at least 1969 leaves so little in South African government series. A British subject resident in the Union generates fewer of them.

It also opens a record class the archive has never used. A gazette notice is a name and an address; the naturalisation file behind it records birth, previous nationality and parents. The South African civil marriage registers have no parentage field at all — this series does. Next

What this is not. A phrase search of the gazette returns nothing for “Leonard Aubrey Robert”, and no Wear at all in either the 1975 notice list or the 1976 grant list. That is suggestive and no more. The lists are alphabetical, the OCR interleaves two columns badly enough that this entry had to be unpicked from its neighbour, and one surviving name proves only that a name can survive. It is not an exhaustive sweep and this page does not call it one.

One of the two death years has now failed a test 15 September, last

This page has always said died 1973 or 1979, and this archive cannot say which. The family tree gives 1973; GenDatabase gives 1979; nothing has ever separated them. Something does now, and it is not a document — it is the shape of an index.

The National Archives of South Africa index, NAAIRS, was driven directly rather than through a commercial mirror. It holds no deceased estate for Leonard Aubrey Robert Wear. An absence is worth nothing until the index’s reach is known, so the reach was measured:

The estate index runs to the end of 1976 and stops. Which makes the two years asymmetric for the first time.

1973 is inside the index. A death in South Africa in 1973 leaving any estate would be in it. It is not — and there is no Wear deceased estate in the Transvaal at all between 1970 and 1976. The last one is his father’s, MHG 10245/69.

1979 falls three years past the index’s last year and cannot be tested this way at all.

This does not prove 1979. He could have died in 1973 outside South Africa, or left too little to report, or the index could have gaps this archive has not measured. But 1973 is now a claim that has been looked for where it should be and is not there, and 1979 is a claim nobody has been able to look for. They are no longer equal.

A fifth court file, and the woman his second marriage ended over

The same index gave two things the archive did not have.

WLD 978/1960 — Illiquid case. Payment. Mawthane Dabeah Kwele versus L. A. R. Wear.

A new year. Leonard was in Johannesburg in 1960 and somebody sued him for money. The plaintiff’s name is African; a Black plaintiff bringing a payment action against a white defendant in that court in 1960 implies a working or trading relationship rather than a casual one, and the archive will not guess further than that. The file would say.

WLD 2960/1962 — Divorce. Marjorie Eileen Wear (formerly Dunlop, born Walker) v. Leonard Aubrey Robert.
WLD 2961/1962 — Damages. Marjorie Eileen Wear (formerly Dunlop, born Walker) v. a named woman.

Same plaintiff, consecutive numbers, same year. A wife suing her husband for divorce and another woman for damages in the same breath is, in the practice of the period, an action against the co-respondent. His second marriage very probably ended over somebody, and the National Archives index names her. Next

Her name is in the index and not on this page. She would be in her eighties or nineties if she is alive, the archive has no death record for her, and the claim being made about her is an imputation of adultery drawn from two case numbers rather than from the file. This archive does not publish that about someone who may be living. The reference — WLD 2961/1962, Witwatersrand Local Division — is public and complete, and anybody entitled to order the file can.

Stated, too, as the structural inference it is. The index entry does not say adultery and the file has not been opened. But 2960 and 2961 were filed together, and only one reading makes sense of that.

He did not go into the grave he bought 15 September, overnight

The archive reached grave 56045 by following his father, then his mother. It had never asked the flatter question: how many Wears are in Johannesburg’s ground at all? Searched by collection rather than by name-guessing — 517 raw hits on the surname, collapsed to distinct people:

Leonard is not among them. He paid sixty pounds for his father’s grave in September 1969 and he was not buried in it — and he is in no other Johannesburg cemetery register the collection indexes, under any spelling of his forenames.

The bounds. This is the indexed layer of one collection covering 1840–2019. It does not cover images inside it that were never indexed, other Johannesburg cemeteries, or the Chevrah Kadisha — a separate database, and the one that holds Kurt, Pauline and Salkow. A Wear would have no business in a Jewish cemetery, but the exclusion is stated rather than assumed. Every absence this archive relies on is set out with its limits on the bounded negatives page.

Marjorie, and the second line on the Y 16 September

The archive knew his second wife only as a name on a register. She is now documented from 1949 to her death, and she is the best-recorded person in his orbit.

Her divorce and his are two years apart. She came out of the Dunlop marriage in 1949; his own divorce from Phyllis is WLD 2026/1951. Two people leaving two marriages, married to each other in the middle of 1951. The archive’s blank nine years end exactly where her paper trail begins — and 1948 sits immediately before her divorce.

And her estate may end the Y problem. She was married to Leonard for eleven years, the longest documented relationship of his life. An estate’s next-of-kin and heirs schedule lists the deceased’s children. If she had a son by him, that son carries Leonard’s own Y chromosome — and he would be in his seventies, not ninety, which is the age of the brother this archive has been waiting on. Next

Stated carefully, because it would be easy to get ahead of this. Nobody knows whether there were children of that marriage. This archive has never seen a birth, and eleven years without issue is perfectly ordinary. But the schedule is the cheapest place to find out, and until now nobody had a reason to look.

He did not go home to die 16 September

Finding that the family never naturalised raised a possibility this archive had never entertained: that a man still legally British in the 1970s, twice divorced, with no South African estate, went back to England. He did not, and the negative is the cleanest one on this page.

Searched: surname WEAR, deaths, England and Wales, March 1970 to December 1985, no forename given. Two hundred and forty-one entries across fifty-eight consecutive quarters, every one marked more than 99 per cent complete. Sixteen of the 241 were born between 1915 and 1919.

Not one of them is him. The only 1917 birth in the whole range is a Sam Wear of Halifax. Searching the forename instead returns exactly one man — Leonard Rigby Wear, born 10 October 1897, died at Claro in June 1970 — twenty years too old and from the wrong county.

The reason this one is worth trusting is that from 1969 the death index prints the full forenames and the date of birth. He could hide behind neither an initial nor a common surname.

Which sharpens the question rather than answering it. Three instruments have now looked in three different places and found nothing: the South African estate index to 1976, the Johannesburg cemetery registers, and the England and Wales death index. GenDatabase’s 1979 — the record it marks incomplete, with a corrupt birth field — is now the only positive record of his death anywhere, and the family tree’s 1973 has failed three separate tests.

What this does not cover, stated because the bounded negatives page exists for exactly this: deaths abroad, which are registered in the GRO’s consular and overseas series and have not been searched; and Scotland and Northern Ireland, which keep their own registers. The consular registers are where a British subject dying in Johannesburg would be recorded, and they are now the most important untested thing about him. Next

His sister did not stay behind. She stayed to be married. 16 September

The 1939 Register, taken on 29 September 1939, found one Wear still in Hertfordshire — Jeannett (E M) Wear, 1919, 18 Ridge Avenue, Letchworth — while the rest of the household had already gone. They had gone from that address — the passenger lists of April and August 1939 both give 18 Ridge Avenue as the family’s last address in the United Kingdom, so the house the register finds her in is the family house, emptied. This archive read that as a girl of twenty left behind. It has now found what she was doing:

Marriages, December quarter 1939 — HITCHIN, vol 3a, page 4416
WEAR, Jeanette E M — spouse BAILEY
BAILEY, Edward J — spouse WEAR

She married Edward Bailey within three months of that register, and probably less — at Hitchin, the district where all six Wear children were born. She was not abandoned. She was waiting for a wedding.

And it opens a door this archive had given up on. The South African marriage register has no parents’ column at all — that single fact is why the whole Wear sibship rests on a seven-person family tree, and why three separate requests are out chasing estates and naturalisation files. An English marriage certificate names both fathers.

If Hitchin 3a/4416 names Henry Robert Wear, then this archive has an official record — not a tree — that he had a daughter born at Hitchin in 1919. It costs about £14 and arrives by email. It does not prove Leonard was his son. It removes the tree as the only authority for the couple at the head of this line, which is what the slow and expensive requests are for. Next

The nine years that matter are the nine years that are blank

He is at a military camp outside Pretoria in September 1940. He is at a block of flats in Berea in October 1951. Between those two points there is one recorded fact — that a daughter was born in 1941 — and no address whatsoever.

1948 is in the middle of that hole. Nothing places Leonard in Johannesburg in 1948 except the fact that he married there in 1940 and again in 1951. That is an inference from either side of a gap, and this page will not dress it up as anything else.

What would fill it: Johannesburg street and telephone directories, which ran annually and are not online; the Deeds Office property index; and the voters rolls. All three need somebody in Johannesburg or Pretoria. None of them needs a fee worth arguing about. This is the cheapest unworked lead in the archive.

Why a page says this at all

An archive that only ever publishes the evidence for its conclusion is not an archive, it is a case. This one has had to withdraw four published claims in a week — a transcription taken for a document, a gazette snippet taken for a record, an estate notice belonging to another man entirely, and an age read as a contradiction when it was a pattern.

Every one of those was found by opening the source rather than trusting the summary. The list above is the same discipline pointed forward instead of backward.