Transforming Joseph Henry into Henry Joseph

I had two DNA matches who had Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox in their trees. After viewing our shared matches and my tree, they believed that Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox were my great-grandfather's parents. But I questioned why a couple would have two children named Joseph born 12 years apart when the first Joseph had not died (the reason I'd eliminated that couple as his parents years ago).

But one of my newly found cousins reminded me of the fallibility of names in old records. Name variations in documentation is one of the biggest issues in genealogy research, and variations and mistakes happened so frequently that names are considered unreliable. Which made me question if I was really sure that my great-grandfather was named Joseph Henry. After all, he'd appeared as Henry without the Joseph in numerous records.

Here's a sampling of how his name appeared in records:

1875 marriage: Joseph Henry

1876 birth of child: Henry

1881 census: Henry

1889 death of child: Henry

1891 census: Henry

1894 birth of child: Joseph Henry

1901 census: Henry

1911 census: Joseph Henry

I'd always taken his marriage record to be the definitive authority for his name, because I'd assumed that people wouldn't make a mistake with their own names when filling out a marriage register. So my hypothesis was that his proper named was Joseph Henry, but that he went by his middle name, Henry, some (or most) of the time. But maybe that wasn't the case. And maybe he didn't fill out the marriage register. Maybe his bride filled it out and reversed the names. And maybe she reversed his names at other times, such as on the birth record for their son in 1894 or during the census in 1911.

After considering the above and the other evidence, I began to believe that Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox could be my great-great grandparents. Here are the reasons.

I have been unable find a birth record for Joseph Henry Lowe, so at this point I can’t be 100% sure that Joseph Henry is what his birth name was. In more than half the records I have for him (births, deaths and marriages of his children plus censuses), he is listed as Henry Lowe. Maybe Joseph Henry was actually Henry Joseph? Or maybe he had been named Joseph Henry but if he went by Henry, his parents may have decided to give another child the name Joseph if they wanted that name carried forward. So the issue of having two children named Joseph in the same family fizzled away.
I was unable to find birth registrations for any and baptism records for several of the children of Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox. Ancestors of the other children born to Henry & Bridget had connected with the family via other records such as marriage registrations later in their lives and then via DNA to each other. This fit exactly with the situation I found myself in with Joseph Henry. My theory is that Henry & Bridget were either lax on having their children christened or baptised or the records have disappeared.
Joseph Henry showed that he’d been born in Bury Lancashire, but the children connected to Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox were born in Ireland and Scotland. However, Henry Lowe was a private in the 3rd Dragoon Guards from 1842 until 1861 and was stationed in various locations in Ireland, Scotland and England. A timeline for the Guards' deployment matches up with the births of several of the children, and in fact, during the period when my great-grandfather would have been born, the regiment was stationed in England. If his wife followed him throughout the United Kingdom, it is conceivable that Joseph Henry was born In Bury Lancashire, especially since there is an army base there.
Henry Lowe was a private in the 3rd Dragoon Guards when he married in 1846. My great-grandfather was a private in the 3rd Dragoon Guards when he married in 1875. Many sons followed in their father’s footsteps in military service and chose the same regiment. Recruitment information for the 3rd Dragoon Guards indicates that they recruited tall me who would ride large horses. My great-grandfather was about 6 feet tall, and likely inherited that height from his father, which connects them physically.
My great-grandfather showed on his 1875 marriage registration that his father, Henry Lowe, was a tailor. The Henry who married Bridget Fox had been a tailor before he joined the army and returned to that occupation when he left the army in 1861. He remained a tailor until his death in 1892, so he would have been a tailor in 1875.
After more research, I discovered that I have at least three DNA matches who have connected themselves to Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox through research (and that research looks good to me). I know that I am related to them (how many times can I say DNA doesn't lie), and the relationship distances are such that it would put our connection at the generation of Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox.

The evidence isn’t proof, but it is convincing.

To accept Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox as my great-great grandparents, I’d also need to accept the possibility that my great-grandfather could have been named Henry or Henry Joseph instead of Joseph Henry. His first and middle name may have occasionally been reversed in documents. Without a birth or baptism record there is no way to know for sure what my great-grandfather Lowe was named at birth, but name reversal, especially if documentation was completed by others, is as likely a scenario as any other. I've checked for parish baptism records for the Bury area and there are only records available for one parish and he doesn't appear in those. Records for other parishes seem to have been lost. But I will continue to search.

So, has the wall that Joseph Henry built really come down? Maybe I'm still looking for the 'smoking gun' in documentation. And I'm hoping that DNA tests by other family members will confirm the evidence and provide a stronger link to Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox.

But in acknowledgement of the evidence to date, I've changed Joseph Henry Lowe to Henry (Joseph Henry) Lowe in my tree.