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Showing posts with label parish-registers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parish-registers. Show all posts

1 Jan 2016

1600s handwriting: I predict a baptism

I wrestled with the name William Robert Jenkin Morton, born 1611.  Welsh patronymics told me that he was William son of Robert, son of Jenkin.  This Jenkin was born maybe in the 1570s and I didn't think he could become a grandfather that quickly.  And there was no evidence of this Robert or this William anywhere in the registers.

So I scoured the tree for another Jenkin who I knew did already have a son Robert, and found the guy at the top of the tree fitted.  But Robert was born eighty years before 1611 so couldn't be the father.  He did have an alleged grandson William, who would be William DAVID Robert Jenkin Morton that a baptism didn't seem to exist for.

Did I misread the baptism after all?  If I was right, then the two mysteries, a missing baptism, and an unknown family, could be replaced with one baptism that fitted a known individual?

So, I was in the strange position of going to read a baptism from 1611 knowing that I was going to spot an extra word between the 'William' and the 'Robert'.  And there it was..... 'dd' which is the shortened form of David that I'd completed ignored on the first reading.

William Robert Jenkin Morton was William David Robert Jenkin Morton which made much more sense, turning an impossible person on the family tree into someone who fitted perfectly.

It was very strange going to a baptism registers from the 1600s with open mind knowing what I was going to see, however.  Here is the entry courtesy of Carmarthenshire Archives.

17 Aug 2014

What a difference a decade makes

Censuses can baffle.  A happy family all living together in 1871 in Kyo, Durham were topsy-turvy in-between times and all squeezed up together with barely any shared constituents in 1881.  The surviving thread was Sarah Ann Southern.

1871 Kyo, Durham
William Southern, wife Ann, child Sarah Ann

1881 County Durham
Ann Southern (widow), daughters Sarah Ann, Elizabeth Ann

It appears the two Anns were the same, but no!  The ages nor the birthplace, neither match.  Ann was the *second* wife of William.  So in the space of ten years - a child had been born, the first wife died, a second wife arrived and the father died.  Whew - good going Southerns!

~~
In Norfolk, Maria Haythorpe's long-awaited death fails to appear, she marries John Brown moments before her death and he remarries, it seems even as the clock chimes the census enumerator's visit.  Not a clue left of that brief relationship.

~~
In Cornwall, Elizabeth Davies of Hayle helpfully lived with her aunt Sally the entire time, who had a rare name and made pinning them down pretty easy.  One of her daughters married in Dorset, and we're still hunting the other one (Mary).  Elizabeth herself doesn't reveal her death easily - till we find that she too made a deathbed marriage, and is buried under this name - without passing a census year on the way through.
~~
Picture my surprise at learning our respected uncle Joseph Carline was at the centre of a bitter custody battle over a deceased infant when he was very definitely a grandfather and a widower - or so I thought! Kindly Joseph was a widower in 1861 and on 1871, but not in-between. He'd raced up the aisle of crooked spire Chesterfield church knowing that any child he produced would inherit the sickly bride's lands, even apparently if it later died. He got to work and by 1871 the whole episode had gone, wife, son, land, Chancery case. Until I hauled the surprising paperwork out from the Cheshire mine some time last year. Curiously, his actual grandson a Ford worker at Dagenham was given the infant heir's name and died fairly recently.
~~
In Somerset, widow Ann Brown was happily living with her children Frecia and Effie and others in 1871.  Ring - bong - all change.  In 1881 the family have apparently reconstituted as:
1881 Ditcheat: William Stride, wife Rachel, stepchildren Annie and Ellen Brown!

What exactly has happened in between!  Only three events have happened this time 'tween the enumerators' call, though we have apparent name changes to deal with. Can you tell what's gone on?

5 Apr 2014

Tidal wave

Whoomph - the wave comes in and smashes into the defences.  Soak!  The deluge from Cornwall hits us on the chin and we stagger back.  Bash!  Another wave comes in from Wales.

This has been the last week of news from the Western portions of my tree.  Cousin Ray wrote in with surprising news - that distant uncle David Francis (1805) who was known to have gone to New York with his family from Wales, had sired a child by his second marriage aged around 70.  It took him about a moment to find that line, kinda thriving, in San Diego, California.  This is somewhat poignant for us - as months earlier Ray had found the last of the original line (from first marriage) dying with no known relatives in that exact same neighbourhood.

When Thomas Hitchens married Miss Thomas at St Blazey in 1838 we could see his sister was witnessing the marriage under her married name.  Three more sisters appeared out of the rubble, marrying at Blazey or in Tywardreath.  The last time we'd seen this family was in 1820 at Gwennap.  One of the sisters left a will, in 1879, naming a bunch of relatives and identifying for certain sure, that Sarah Hitchens wife of Martin Verran was Thomas's sister.  The whole lot are now the family, reunited, of my Sarah Hunter of Redruth (1782) by her first marriage to miner Hitchens.  It was only by sitting down and looking at this tree, that I got it sorted.  Somewhat embarrassing that it took me 15 years to get around to it.  So far we've only found family from the Verrans, in Shiraz- and olive- growing Clare, South Australia.

I've been lucky enough to hear from the Verran's great-great-grandson John Symonds in New South Wales, now 90, with one or two stories and photographs to help bridge that gap since 1820.

Then came a surprise email out of the blue from Henry Hunter, of the Goldrush towns out in British Columbia.  He left Cornwall age 12 in 1837 and for a while we thought he might be a missing sibling who would just slot right in to the tree.  Not to mention explaining the rumour of the uncle who disappeared and never said where he'd been.  But it's now thought he's the son of Henry senior a mariner from Mylor, near Falmouth, which would have given him plenty more opportunity to jump on a ship.

These Western districts of the UK sure have the capacity to surprise, and laugh at our supposed grip of events from the 1800s era.

Additional surprises came in the form of William Rapson Oates's life story (from a researcher who I spotted on my website) and in contact from the family of the centenarian on my Pearce side, Elizabeth Moss Bray.  (And on the same branch, Arthur Gordon Bartlett's wife finally becoming known - grew up, possibly on Robben Island and daughter settled in Zimbabwe.)  And how could I forget - finding my missing John Rodda, not in Africa or America, but in a pub on the Acton road.

19 Feb 2014

Jamestown Pearls

Main Street, Jamestown NY 1914, from Wikipedia
The full story is now pieced together so tight I can nearly tell what great-uncle William had for breakfast.  The day he set sail with new wife Anna for a new home in the States.

We know he was 70 years 4 months and 2 days old*, when he died, on 1 August* in the year 1921.  Had he lived a mite longer, he would have overlapped with his niece's baby, my grandmother, born in October.  It mightn't've made any difference, as he only appears once on our family's tree and in other places is just a question-mark, or not even mentioned at all.  In this family, by the time the 1920s rolled around, the sisters only had each other.

I had a strong genealogical certainty that the boy married at Garboldisham, Norfolk, was our missing William, just 21, even though none of the family were there - his father's occupation was wrong, and we'd never heard of his wife.  And neither had the family history databases - the couple clean got away.

After eliminating a tonne of William and Annas in England, I turned to the States, to find there was only ONE couple that fitted - in Jamestown, New York.  Everything fitted, except for Anna's age - but after her husband's death she regained the lost 8 years, perhaps she'd never told him?  Some years later Michael Crick of Salamanca, NY, contacted me through his cousin and it turned out had done a shed-load of work on this family - certificates, burial records, newspaper cuttings, the lot.  Anna was not the first in the US - her uncle Josiah* had come out thirty or more years before.

William's mother died in March 1869 and his father remarried later that same year.  His father's wife was unpopular and he himself was also deaf, so in my view was squeezed out of the picture.  The eldest girl married at 18 the next year, and William days after turning 21.  His bride being some seven years older would have upset the family, though it was an exact mirror of his parents' situation 20 years earlier.  His uncle John Lain had left the Smiths a lot of money - specifically with instructions that William's father couldn't touch it.

It's my belief that William's determination, Anna's bravery, his mother's money and his father's indifference brewed the cocktail to 'push' the Smiths out of the UK.  In addition Jamestown was crying out for carpenters - it becoming furniture capital of the world, and Anna's uncle was there with family ready to welcome the young couple.

I knew none of this when I started reading the letters of William's sister Ellen.  Not a mention is there of this brother, to whom she must once have been close.  More emerges - his only son died a year before him; he was one of the 800 passengers all rescued when their steamer the SS Oregon sank off Island, New York in 1886 on a mild March morning, on its way BACK from Liverpool.  Had he made his final visit back home?  Who did he see?  I presume this event put him off further travel and contact with him.  This gem must have made its way to us from the Jamestown newspapers.

I can compare the photo of smiling Victoria Smith (looking more like an Alice) with that of her non-smiling aunt Ellen - who terrified her young granddaughter, and who presided over family events despite her supposedly lowly status as a widow.

Ellen may never have mentioned her brother, but she did mention her almost royal birth at Mulbarton Old Hall in Norfolk, which kept generations of family wowed about her roots.  But Ellen's brother did mention her.  In his obituary (1921) his wife makes plain that he had a brother and 3 sisters in England, and as that was the truth, there was not a thing Ellen or the others could do to unprint it.

For those struggling to place Jamestown NY, I append a link with great description of its somewhat isolated location, its weather and its cultural burden.

8 Feb 2014

The exclusion of the sisterhood

When Ellen Smith married at the pretty, remote, church of St Lawrence in 1874, it was pretty final.  She kept in touch with her sisters, who fled the area around the same time, and whose holiday snap at Clacton ten years earlier tells of the closeness between them.



But the address book slammed shut on the others.  The death of Mrs Smith in 1867 had been followed by an unpopular marriage of the father.  One-by-one the three girls left their former home and for them it never became their home again.  The eldest girl made rapid vows at 18 as did the boy a year later, who not only married an older lady but apparently emigrated too.  There remains a shadow over the character of the father, Henry, and his role within the family.

The dust had long settled by the 1920s when Ellen was living in some comfort in North London and penning a letter to her very pregnant daughter and musing on old times.  From now on, all that mattered were her husband children and family plus of course those dear sisters.  The editing pen had been viciously active over the Smith family and we didn't get the full picture for many years.
*

1986 and I get a Smith family tree through the post - well it was for Ellen's family by marriage but the Smiths got a mention.  I can't figure out the hand - my uncle, his mother?  On it the sisters feature of course but not so much the brothers.  One version has an enigmatic '?' while another puts the boy's name down, William.

This family were great at deleting people they didn't want to remember, or claimed not to remember.  Yes let's remember the happy 1920s Christmases at the house in Muswell Hill with nice tidy children and Edwardian elegance.  But what about a few miles down the road?

Arthur Smith, the brother-who-never-was, had produced 12 children and now grandchildren who weren't bank managers and couldn't always find work and were not so well-off but did alright - in Bermondsey.

Did Ellen fear a door-knock and her ancient Suffolk past catching up with her.  Not one brother, but TWO elided from the tree.  And then her nephew's children going into care as well.  No wonder she repressed a gasp in 1921 when she opened the door and out stood her niece, Miss Daisy Skinner looking quite confident in the autumn cool.  For a moment Ellen wondered what the lady wanted.  She was ready to close the door.  But Miss Daisy had done alright.  She was getting herself together.  While Daisy may genuinely have been fond of this uptight old aunt, there was a business perspective to her visit.  Who knows how she'd spent her twenties - dancing, clerical work, or dressmaking - but she was now about to buy a little hotel by the sea, and family members would be useful income for her.

Whew.  Ellen allowed her grip to unravel from the newel post of the staircase at the house in Hornsey.  It hadn't been her brothers' family.  It was only Sophy's girl.  She'd been married over 40 years and still the inconvenience of her brothers and father bothered her.  What had William been doing in America, was he going to come back?  Arthur had broken a gasworks strike and subsequently done a runner.  He wouldn't be back, but his family - could find her at any time.

~

Suspicion clouded her mind but not a whisper of this reached her daughter.  The ability to compartmentalise the story is extraordinary.  Ellen remained fond of her sisters, and even went down to Bexhill to see them at Daisy's hotel, exactly as Miss Skinner had forecast.  She loved the place of her birth - the Old Hall at Mulbarton and several times she would speak of it, in the happy years before she lost her mother.  Even my own grandfather knew the family only as 'blue-blooded' and 'from the Hall'.

This is a peculiarly Victorian story.  The rise from solid working-class to middle-class was a precarious one for the rider.  Whilst the wife of a Methodist minister's position was fairly secure, she had duties to educate her children and ensure they made the right choices in life.  Knowledge of close family members who were not known to have made this rise would have been most alarming to her.  The advent of opportunities for wide travel - leaving not only the county (Norfolk) but the country (England) could split up even the closest of familial bonds.  Add into the mix, a disrupted childhood (death of mother, move to another isolated rural community, growing deafness of father and finally his remarriage), the importance of status or money over family and increasing mobility and the ground was set for divorce.

Ellen protected herself and her family and ironically was similar to her runaway brother in prizing everything more highly than her family of origin.  I feel she could have been closer as a mature married woman, to her brother in America, but the opportunity wouldn't have arisen.

The father Henry's paralysing deafness was the lynchpin that failed to link the family together.  His siblings were close - Richard, Harriet and the children of Sarah were still in touch into the twentieth century and did what they could for Henry.  Can anything sinister be read into his daughters' turning their back on him?  The uncle at Mulbarton had been quite specific that his wealth should go to Henry's *wife* and not to him, but this was standard practice for clued-up testators.

Another mystery is the photograph of Clacton-on-sea from, I thought, 1860, when the town wasn't founded till 1871 and railway line didn't get there till late 1860s.

23 Jan 2012

Somerset to New York: and did it rain

This posts follows on from Great Scott!

Jimmy also wanted to know if our forebears Thomas and Martha Creed (nee Scott) had gone out to the States in 1822 as per the vicar's note of that effect. Well, thanks to the Butleigh website, FamilySearch, and our Scott tree, it is now a simple matter to see that the following neighbours and relatives DID go out to the States at about the time we mention:

Benjamin Clarke (married to Martha's cousin), his sister Priscilla Lamport, James Scott and his nephews the Downs, plus the Swantons, all went out about 1823 to Delaware County, New York.  This was it seems the place to go for our Somerset farming community; just a generation later, the woods of Ohio were next for our Somerset man's plough.  The Ohio option created immense ripples in the Somerset community, and perhaps the New York passages caused similar hubbub.

This small discovery rehabilitates Thomas Creed, who we had thought was given to whimsy, with talk of going to America.  But of this trip his wife would certainly have approved, and perhaps joined him. We have only very odd testimonies to examine. Miriam, their daughter, was forever terrified of thunderstorms.  Had she witnessed a great one in the US or on board ship?  It is pretty marvellous to hypothesise about a storm in the Atlantic 1823, just from a few parish register and census entries.  Again, it is just possible that incoming shipping records may provide an answer.

The last grandchild, James Creed (1809) is widely thought by me to have died as a boy in the States, with his father.

Twenty-three days

The Windsor Castle in 1873 sailed from London to Cape Town in a miraculous 23 days, the subject of this post.  Sarah Carr turned 18 in 1876 and the following January had herself baptised at Eyam parish church, her ancestral home.  I was suspicious of this event: there being too much significance for this to be a casual adult baptism, ‘oops I forgot’.  All the more so as she thereafter disappears entirely from English records!  So I decided to see the Eyam parish record at Kew, to learn where she was then living.  What I saw there excited me, opening as it does so many possibilities and hard questions:

Sarah Carr was indeed baptised at Eyam in January 1877, her address given as Glossop.  The priest notes that she left Eyam the following day, 22 January, for Griqualand West, South Africa!

This was not what I had expected.  It's a very helpful entry for which I am so grateful. But what next? And indeed what before: with whom had Sarah been engaged since her birthday which led to this turn of events?  Unfortunately it's not yet possible to interrogate FamilySearch and find out who else was baptised as Sarah was, on 21 January 1877.

Griqualand West is a diamond-shaped territory, later to be subsumed in with the Cape Colony, and diamonds were the main reason this territory drew such interest.  It was also the Griqua people's homeland, with Griqualand East across the Drakensburg mountains.  1877 was a very significant year in the region, only six years into the ‘New Rush’ of miners.  The Tantallon Castle carried the first group of Scottish farm workers to Cape Town in the very month that Sarah set sail.  A census was held revealing there were 12,374 people of European descent resident, just over a quarter of the whole, a mixture of chancers, farmers, miners, preachers, shopkeepers, and the Griqua people, all competing with each to reside in this rainless place.  The Annexation Act was passed in July, the ninth frontier war took place and stamps were first issued in this year.  Ships of the Union-Castle line were investing in getting people here quickly.  So we imagine Sarah made the trip to Cape Town, and then on by cart on muddy poor roads, to Kimberley, Griqualand West's largest settlement, not yet a town, and surely, her destination, if she made it.  – Although it seems the region had more than mines: ‘most Griqua [1870s] were forced to sell their farms to whites’, records Encyclopaedia Britannica.

After those 23 days, or more, Sarah enters a land of few records, where disease, the fast transient nature of the place and the passage of time could wipe out all memory of a person.  To me this is deeply ironic.  She was a young lady, with a considerable amount of fire to execute such a brave plan, of which we do not yet know the details.

Yet a niece came to my grandparents' wedding in 1930.  And another niece lived in old age with our cousin Edna in Southampton.  I was too busy to contact Edna before she died in 2005, but she would certainly have said if there’d been talk of an aunt in South Africa, had I known to ask.  Two of Sarah's siblings have grandchildren who are alive, but if we expect a story to somehow make up for 130 years of lost history, we are perhaps clutching at straws.

I have though, some hope.  I have tried some clever searches of the South African records, to see which infants were given the name 'Carr', 'Hannah' 'Millicent, in Kimberley or environs, names significant to Sarah, though I lack the dates.  Right now Dermot Carr McClure interests me, I have ruled out the Carr Furnesses.  There are also 50 pages of Methodist baptisms live at familysearch, which one can browse.  In a very real way one can feel the bravery of those mission folk, of whom William Woodman Treleaven and Samuel Morambo: had Sarah married one of them?  Nolene Lossau's terrific transcripts of Kimberley Methodist baptisms supplement this resource, and I am interested in Robert Brooker and others who are listed with a partner named Sarah.

I found reference to several families from Derbyshire settling in the Cape, if not in Kimberley, the Fletchers and Bundys.  I also browsed those listed as born in Cape Colony or Kimberley who appear in British censuses back home.

Let’s face it the shipping lists are unlikely to survive.  However we have the Eyam vicar telling us she left almost immediately.  There was no time for a marriage in England or Scotland (but Belfast has one), so she boarded the vessel a single woman.  I have followed the ships as best I can through the British Newspapers: we read of the Walmer Castle allowing its passengers to disembark at distant St Helena.  Did Sarah leave the vessel at St Helena one wonders?  She would have had two weeks on board to change her mind about where she was going, but we imagine she had connections in the Cape waiting for her.

At 18, she could not have been a nurse, nor did the Cape yet require trained nurses in large numbers.  Could she have been a missionary, and who in Derbyshire had been stirring up such foment that Sarah chose to leave?  She was, surprisingly, Anglican, and hers is the only entry where the Eyam vicar records such an impulsive decision.  Was she engaged to a Derbyshire man, already abroad, who’d written for her to come?  This is a plain explanation with just two people in the picture rather than a host of missionaries or preachers.  Was she going to travel with a family as housekeeper or maidservant, and, if so, we wonder who!

None of her immediate family were abroad, though there remain her father's family yet to be fully searched.  Hugh Carr had a report in the paper at his death in Cheshire 1880.  It would be nice to see that record, though I am afraid should South Africa not be mentioned, I might infer that Sarah had died there.  This absence of information would be a pretty mournful way of learning of the failure of Sarah's plan, which we trust, succeeded, whatever it was.