On Finding Dinah... or Dinah Might!

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...

Hang on isn't that the iconic opening shot of Daphne Du Maurier's novel Rebecca (set in the true residence of beautiful Menabilly, Cornwall?)

What's that got to do with my mother's unexpected grrrrrreat auntie Dinah, born perhaps in 1712? Well everything, as we shall see.

~~~

In the days of Christmas 1998 the newly installed Lady Rashleigh of Menabilly is setting out the enormous tables in the orangery for an intimate but international dining party. 

I, Writer, am galloping down a railway side path in an ugly part of Taunton, bearing extraordinary news from the 17th century, lately just in.

I arriving panting at the station and board it hoping I will not lose my discoveries. Were they real, or just a phantom dream brought on by too much Christmas treats?

The Internet has just reached England. It boarded our shores and one of the first e-mails I fielded from it informed me that my ancestors were James and Miriam who married at Ditcheat Somerset in 1777. Thankyou, internet! I wish I could have managed without you, but we'll accept this one electronic support in our quest to conquer the 1700s unaided. 

Stepping back through the pages of the IGI, in an ancient format called "microfiche", by good fortune Miriam's birthplace had been well catalogued. Her mother's and grandmother's names were found but the trail went cold. We simply couldn't tease out any more on Elizabeth....., mother of Sarah Speed (1722), grandmother of Miriam.

At this point I favoured the open cast mining method of research. Boarding the train I proceeded to empty every single reference to the Speed family onto the metaphorical floor. 

The record office were aghast at someone using their surfaces during the traditionally quiet Betwixtmas season, and I had to wait about three Mars bars before the pile of ribbony papers and parchment emerged from the Strong Room. 

Time had been a faithful guardian and I was now deep in the 1700s. No turning back now. The Speeds of Ansford, Somerset were at my purview.

Like a rocket I was instantly thrust back two further generations. I could feel the G- Force as I struggled to hang on to 1998. I was being pushed deep underwater. 1898..  1798... 1758... the parchment opened at the year 1733.

Edward Murrow, my new ancestor, was dying and he wanted his many scattered lands given to all his female descendants. Not one was to be forgotten. 

His fondness for youngest daughter - due a-childbed any day now- was apparent. He wouldn't live to see her die in that childbed in a matter of a few weeks time. 

He had already lost his middle daughter and the granddaughters he listed made for quite a list. I reached for my pencil: Sarah Speed (tick!), Elizabeth Speed, Dinah Widdows, Martha Widdows, Elizabeth Widdows, Mary Widdows and Grace - daughter of George Dyke.

I could find baptisms for all bar Dinah who OBVIOUSLY was the eldest sibling of those Widdows girls and NOTHING to do with my Sarah or the Dykes, right? Right?

I wasn't getting much of a reply from the papers. The ribbon wrapped around the parchment and I was back in the reading room with moments to go before legging it for the train.

Dinah got forgotten. There was no birth, marriage or death for her, so it stands to reason she basically didn't exist. A genealogical fluke. A flick of the pen made in error, a misunderstanding, mishearing a dying man, forgetful of details, just another inaccurate name in the records?

Undaunted I crossed the to the local library which housed Parson Woodforde's Diaries, 30 years after our man's death. He lived in my ancestral Ansford. Time to opencast  his writings. The young parson was forever doing battle with my forebears it seemed. Sarah, now a widow,  accosted him for a headstone for her late husband. Cousin Martha had been his school mistress and was later murdered by his close friend. Small wonder the parson took his leave of the district and began a new life in Norfolk. 

But before he left he cryptically wrote a note for me. "Ned Dick the carrier is the nephew of Edward Speed."

Ned is Edward Dyke son of our George Dyke and his mysterious wife  Dinah - no marriage found. 

Of course when I sit down with the evidence, our Dinah emerges. She was not the older sister of the 3 Widdows girls. 

She must instead be the child of Elizabeth Murrow 1692 from her unknown marriage to Mr Withers. It's as Mrs Withers that Elizabeth marries at Wells Cathedral in 1719 according to a volume of licences by Jewers.

So she's Dinah Withers, and born 1712 if we work backwards from her age at death. Aged 21 when her aunt dies in childbirth, she is quickly on the scene and marries the grieving widower George Dyke. For many years I'd assumed this was scandalous but now realise it was merely the family looking to resolve a difficult episode. 

(Decades later I find the marriage as Mary Withers in the unexpected parish of Batcombe, thanks, belatedly to the Internet, which arrived very late to this party.)

So she's an aunt, and through her son Ned the carrier (Amazon delivery driver of his day), she creeps socially back up the stations little by little. George apprenticed to a tailor, Charles has his own drapers shop in Lyme Regis, Charles junior runs a military outfitters in Marylebone. Then we thunder ever closer to the aristocracy and to Menabilly. We have a colonel, an ambassadress to Reagan and at last, the Châtelaine of "Manderley", the beloved fictional home of Rebecca, lived in by its author. 

Dinah has taken us here by sheer Genealogical brute force. Is it possible that Dinah has any more surprises? Dinah Might. Dinah does. 

Postscript:

Dinah's other descendants had the Cock at Hemel Hempstead and from them, there is an archdeacon or canon in Leicestershire. 

I never could find Sarah Speed's son John born about 1742, where on earth was he? Turns out,  baptised in nearby Castle Cary with the poor priest - doubtless mesmerised by Sarah's sister - unfortunately recording the infant's mother as Dinah. (Not our diaretic parson who was fending off the rest of the family across the river Brue.)

A woman who we nearly forgot about, but who has reasserted herself onto the family tree.

Thanks for the memories auntie Dinah x

Are you sitting comfortably? These are your new aunties from Somerset, 1856.

In 1992, the retired bursar of Wells Cathedral School read out the will of Priscilla Creed (1856) to me down the phone. I was in for some shocks. The bell tolled for Priscilla at Pilton church and after the actuary had calculated how many years her children might live for, and paid off the Tasmanian son, we get down to business:

There were six daughters and their names were spellbinding: Ann Tabor widow, Mary wife of Thomas Dauncey, Elizabeth wife of William Creed, Sarah wife of Edward Indoe, Priscilla, Jane wife of James Chappell.

Tabor, Dauncey, Indoe, Chappell.  And these were close relatives. My great-grandpa would be Elizabeth's grandson: it looked like there was no getting away from that. I was a bit puzzled that Elizabeth was a Creed who married a Creed, but I needed to get over it, and fast. There were all these aunties to explore...

By the good offices of Aubrey Brown, founding member of Somerset & Dorset Family History Society, I received in the mail, print-outs of the 1881 census entries for Ann Tabor's sons. Through the probate indexes I could easily find the Tabors still living and farming in Somerset. (Though not for long: when I visited them unannounced in 1994 they were sadly just selling their dairy farm.) I even saw the portrait of 'battle-axe' daughter Mary Ann while carousing through Somerset in my motor car in winter 1994.

Mary Dauncey, Sarah Indoe and Priscilla would have to wait a bit, and there was no rush. Each of them had just one or two children whom nobody could quite recall: just being outside of living memory.

But the youngest auntie, Jane Chappell is still unresolved right now in 2025. Born in 1830, she was just two when her brother chose to sail for Tasmania, she lived to see her grandson die in World War One, and was a widow nearly 58 years. I was sat in the library in Winchester in 1996 when her death date flashed up on the screen. Exactly 100 years ago in 1925. She was 95, and had survived into the modern epoch.

I had caught a glimpse of her in the old reels of census at the basement record office of Chancery Lane, aged 40 a widow with many of her brood, residing with the Indoes. She had many twists and turns yet, another fifty years of finding a home for herself, outliving almost everyone.

In 2018 I walked from Castle Cary to the little hamlet of Henley, with its own chapel, under Turn Hill, High Ham. I was able to meet a relative but not to solve the real quest: to find a photo of Jane Chappell (1830-1925). I think it will eventually turn up, but who knows where? On my walk I thought I saw the old schoolhouse where her grandchildren would have been taught the three Rs.

I also recently discovered that one of these grandchildren Albert Wilkins (1895-1986), farm worker, was interviewed age 87. But when the Heritage Lottery Fund came knocking in 2005, his voice did not make the online pages. (He was in disk format, so perhaps could not easily be converted to MP3.) The bursar's brother DOES make an appearance in these pages - now at Somerset Voices.

Priscilla perhaps has the last laugh. Most of her descendants are from her great-granddaughter Gladys (1911) who worked at Langport Glove Factory and married Ebbie Cook. They have a large family in the Seend area. They are never going to outnumber Jane's massive descendants (who have conquered Walthamstow, Havant, Decatur Illinois, Evercreech, Wells...) but Seend is one area that Priscilla's line have claimed for their own. And Jane's cannot get a foothold. It is not too far away, so hopefully I can get to the Barge Inn on the canal there one day and see if there's any cousins to say hello to.