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I tend to think that elbowin has hit the nail on the head! Bear in mind that in the 18th and 19th centuries some English girls were recorded in baptismal registers as Easter, a misspelled or dialect rendering of Esther (although it's surely surprising that the clergymen who carried out the baptisms would have been more au fait with the biblical spelling). Presumably it happened more in certain regions, where he himself had a strong local accent, and especially among Nonconformists (non-Anglicans), whose clergy were not highly learned upper-class products of Oxbridge owing to discrimination against Nonconformists until 1829, and thus possibly more likely to misspell Esther. If you have access to the ancestry website, or to Find My Past, you could search under Easter to see whether any girls were being baptised as such in the late 19th century, especially in north-east England. That might give you a clue! Good luck.

I'm thinking of Esther here, when the registrar was Dutch or Afrikaans speaking, he probably didn't get the the ending -er right. In Dutch and Afrikaans, the r's need to be trilled, and not just to colour the preceeding vowel.

This message was edited 10/19/2023, 8:31 AM

The most obvious possibility is that it's a mistake for Easter.

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My Oxford surname dictionary also has Eastaugh, Easto, Eastoe, and Estaugh as English surnames meaning "dweller at the east enclosure". Perhaps it's a mistake for one of those, or for Eastes, which is another surname just meaning "dweller to the east".