Who Exactly are Rachel's Kids? A 1911 Mystery.

Take a look at this pair of census entries lovingly curated for you.

The couple concerned marry in 1908 in Builth, and the 1939 register for Bristol, lately released, reveals a daughter Heddus Rachel born 1919 in Bristol (deceased), who suffered a family tragedy.  We'd prefer not to contact this branch.  Looking at the census we see that two children are listed, but where are they!  They will be gone from the family home by 1939 and we do not have any family wills to help us.  Also - the various obituaries for the Roberts family members in Bristol steadfastedly omit our missing two.

Combing through all the births in Builth Wells from 1908 to 1911 we home in on apparent 'twins' Eira and Melfyn Powell born early in 1911.  Sure enough, neither one appears in the census with alternative parents, and Melfyn goes on to become a baptist minister with a connection to the Bath/Bristol area.  This sounds highly likely as Rachel's brother and nephew were both baptist ministers in Bristol.  Eira is a mystery until we find her marriage under 'Powel' which reveals her date of birth to be different from Melfyn's.  So, not a twin after all.  Coupled with the fact she stayed in Builth, she is eliminated.

So who is the missing (elder) sibling to Melfyn?  We have just two likely years to search, births in 1909 and births in 1910, and this time we home in on BRISTOL.

I count up 27 possible Powell births in Bristol. I can eliminate Maurice Vyvyan Powell (1909) as he is an illegitimate relative on a completely different branch whose son used to live ten doors away from me.  That just leaves 26.  It's time to harness a splash of intuition to speed up the process.

Although many of these Powells in Bristol are likely to be of Welsh origin, mine had so recently left, their hair likely still smelt of Welsh rain. .... My main candidate slid rather than jumped off the page, being Gwenyth Joyce (1910), who it turned out was a full 16 months older than Melfyn despite her birth being registered just a year prior to his.

My weak theory that Gwenyth was the missing Powell gained traction when, like Melfyn, there was no trace of her in 1911.  Finding her marriage in Bristol gave no extra bite as unlike the brother she was already born in Bristol, so the marriage was hardly proof.

Worriting away at Gwenyth and keeping her on the Searchlist eventually paid off.  Whilst Gwenyth's address in 1939 appears to bear no relation to her 'mother''s address at the same time (in Baptist Mills), persistence was about to be rewarded.  By the way, whoever said patience is a virtue was not a family historian - that sounds awfully too much like sitting around on your B-hind, while another's persistence and impatience is about to win through.

I had already gone deep with Gwenyth - finding her marriage, her 1939 entry, her husband's death (not easy given the name of Smith) and now I checked out her husband's probate entry.

Picture my surprise when we get a match.

In both cases, 1939 entry for Gwenyth's mother and 1963 entry for Gwenyth's husband - the same precise address is given: Seymour Road, Bishopston.  Despite the married name of Smith, I have just found family members on Facebook, and there are both Scandinavian and Baptist connections (again) to bolster up the family tree.

All thanks to a couple of squiggles in 1911 indicating Rachel Powell, formerly Roberts, had unknown children born 'somewhere in the world' within a vague timespan.

Now to send a second letter to the Roberts family researcher who lives 5 miles away as I'd like to make contact there, and can only imagine my previous letter got eaten by a hungry hound.

A day of industry

An extraordinary 24 hours in the world of family history...  I found out a whole bunch of stuff.

* I had a reply from JM in Barrow whose wife was the family historian.  I was pretty sure she was the daughter of John Thompson and Mary Taylor - Mary being the one of a handful of Isabella Barton (1830)'s family to have had issue.  And so this proved to be.

* I had a reply from JD in Sherborne whose mother Ivie was born in Durban, South Africa, the child of Cornish parents.  It turns out Ivie had 5 children in the 1930s, all of whom are still living, and that she passed away in Zimbabwe.  I first heard of Ivie in the will of her grandfather, 1923, Bellevue Terrace, Tuckingmill about 15 years ago.  Only now is there this opportunity to find the family.

* I had a reply from AL in Dronfield, Derbyshire with very good information about my Kiveton Park relatives.  It turns out my Grandpa's grandma Shugg had a first cousin Grace Emmerson who lived at Kiveton Park.  This was not a country house but a mining village in the parish of Wales.  Her husband was not only a miner and preacher but builder too, and a son-in-law I understand became the colliery manager.  A granddaughter moved to the Dales immediately north of Harrogate where there are some large farms.  One of the family married in Jerusalem in 1942 when it was under the British Mandate.  The relative was working in the hospital there - it was wartime.

On the bus yesterday to a dear old cousin in the Mendips, the First Great Western bus wiggled its way past THREE of my relatives in the housing estates of south-west Keynsham.   Broad streets and plenty of bungalows with retired people actually sitting outside ('in their front gardens!').  I think K. Pearce is somewhere on Lytes Cary Road, but he didn't get my letter or so it seems.  Then there was Hutton Close which was home to my Mendip cousin's cousin Barbara, and then the very same bungalow became the property of a Mrs G. Alkins from Halesworth in Suffolk.

The thing is, GA is quite a bit more closely related, being descended from my 3xgreat-grandfather Smith's older sister, of whom he was quite fond.  To make it all worse, Smith died it turns out at the childhood home of GA's mother - who lived to 92 and who would certainly have remembered him.  I decided long ago I would no longer pursue contact with Mrs Alkins (now herself 90) because of advancing age.  It was nonetheless galling for the bus to gaily trip past Hutton Close and know that the only human memory of ggggfather Smith was there for the asking inside that bungalow.

In Bristol the same day, I twice jogged past CreedBet, which information online confirms is run by the son and grandson of my Granny's first cousin L G Creed, described at his father's death as 'turf accountant'.  Who would have thought that the betting gene would run through 2 more generations.

Two other short bits of story resolved themselves in the morning: the father and son both named Peter Hill, of Penzance were found, the father having passed away last year at Praze-an-Beeble.  I find it interesting that it was only the Rodda children who moved away from Crowan that had family there - Mary left in 1841 and Thomas the same year, yet the brother who remained has no family in Cornwall whatsoever (one, in Reading, only, and the rest in Australia).

The other puzzle being the deaths of William and Catherine Bell, Methodist minister and his wife, both of which took place in 1925 as per the Methodist records at John Rylands Library, Manchester.  Catherine's took place first a matter of weeks before her ancient aunt Jane; while William (who'd been ill for at least 15 years) struggled on till the end of the year looked after by their daughter Florence Sloss.  Catherine's early death dispels my fancy that she lived on until the war.  It renders impossible that any of the Sloss family in Bangor, Co. Down, would remember the Bells at all.  Florence's next of kin are none other than the Butler-Slosses of judicial fame.  It seems then that both Catherine and her eldest sister Arundel had, despite producing many children and some grandchildren, no heirs to continue - and that both lines are now extinct.  A most unusual situation.  The only grandson in America said he had no family and was buried by the Veterans' Bureau.  I spoke to 2 of Arundel's granddaughters on the telephone, before the line was extinguished.  But it is Catherine's line I'd really like to have known.

I messaged Yvonne F. in Florence, Massachusetts the granddaughter of Judith Marshall from Bodmin.  Judith was brought up by great-uncles and aunts as her parents had gone up to Ashton-under-Lyne with all the other children.  Judith alone remained down in Cornwall and died aged 97 in or near Newton Abbot.  Yvonne would certainly remember her.  On her Facebook page she had Exeter College listed as a previous place of study.  As I ran past this earlier in the week, I thought Yvonne would like to know.

The biggest mystery of the day to crack was the 3 Rose sisters of Decatur, Illinois.  I've been over the data, that I now have, and don't see how I'd have gotten anywhere without the October 2003 Decatur Herald and Review obituary that I located today.  I was at the British Library, renewing my pass (for another 3 years - hurrah!) and had had some success with the British papers.  I had definitely tracked down US papers from the available databases (ProQuest, Gale &c) and was determined to get something out of them again.

I followed the links to British newspapers from Newsgroup and then backtracked out of UK records to the US and was very surprised to find Decatur's Herald and Review on the list of available papers.  It claimed only to cover the last 10 years, but I found records back to 1992 or more.

My first search (under the Rose girls' father's name) yielded a result straightaway and I quickly went to the page (the above obituary in 2003) so I could capture the information before it could disappear.  The obituary (which was for the eldest Rose girl) gave me sufficient information which coupled with Intelius.com, Facebook.com and the Washington State marriage indexes up to 2004, meant I could construct trees down several generations.  The Rose girls were in a strong position to take forward the mitochondrial DNA of their ancestors the Murrows, though only the middle one is known to have granddaughters, but as these are married, the line may well continue.

Looking back over the resources, I definitely could have found this from GenealogyBank's collection (1990-) but would have had to pay a monthly recurring fee, so am kind of pleased I didn't know they had this article.

That just leaves the British newspapers, which gave my some surprising results, see next entry.

Not so fertile

Thomas Henry Craig Stevenson in 1909 postulated that working-class women would have large families than those higher up the income chart.  In 1911, he and Sir Bernard Mallett, the Registrar-General, included the famous fertility question in the census, which now makes us consider the number of Victorian infant deaths (10 or more years earlier) rather than there being 'too many living children' from the poor.

However, as someone for whom those details have been most revealing in conducting my research, I was of course surprised to find Stevenson among my cousins.  Or rather, I wasn't.

As soon as I found my relative had married Miss Catherine De Boudry in Bristol, I was pretty sure we'd be surfing a genteel wave for at least a couple of generations, Stevenson in fact was going to marry Miss De Boudry's grandddaughter.

Just a week ago I despaired of finding out the stories of the 6 Scott children baptised at Ditcheat and environs in the 1780s.  Their cousins set off for Monmouthshire and all sent for each other: though as butchers and factory workers, Chepstow was an odd choice to say the least.  But the 6 Scotts in question didn't go to Chepstow, they went to Britain's second city around the corner, Bristol.  I have no idea why Bristol got routinely ignored by my Somerset farming families.  They were happy to retire to regency, tasteful, Bath; but for a farmer, the true county town of Bristol seemed to offer nothing.

To inhabit Bristol with the same style as a yeoman farmer you needed a much higher income.  When I examined the PCC wills more closely I saw that Benjamin and William Scott were corn factors (as was an unmarried sister), while youngest sister Susanna had married an accountant, Henry Northcote.  William's father-in-law had kept a school at Kingsdown, personally approved by John Wesley.

Northcote stole £10,000 in 1839 and was transported on the Barossa, begging to be given Sunday school duties as he commenced his long sentence.  I haven't checked to see if he survived, but his wife died of shame.  There's a clue in her will 'wife of Henry, LATE of the City of Bristol': she having been given a house in Sidney Place through a marriage settlement, which did not form part of her husband's debts.

Benjamin Scott sailed for America after his mother-in-law had died, leaving his eldest child behind with brother William, presumably to claim her inheritance; and also as his poor wife still had no children.  Matilda rejoined the others 18 years later and was still alive age 90, unmarried, according to my reading of US tax records.  (And in 1880 living with E D Scott, Minneapolis.)

That just leaves William and Miss De Boudry to continue the line in England, and as Stevenson might have guessed (with 3 children and no heirs himself) we are shortly and swiftly led to the single descendant - a fundraising expert in Cheshire.

Small wonder I've not been besieged by enquiries about these Bristolians.  It's yet possible that the oldest sister, Grace Scott, had surviving children by her husband James Hill, but I'm not hopeful!  They just had too much money to be fertile.