Yorkshire short-arse nails Chinatown gunslinger

Son of West Pennard, Somerset and Reeth, Yorkshire delivers a thunderclap to Chinatown

The witness to the prosecturion of 'Big Jim' (Chew Wing Gow) was born at Abersychan, Monmouthshire in 1874 the eldest child of the mythical 'third sister' of my great-grandpa Bert Creed's father William, that I had hitherto not known about.  The Creeds were tall, and this man being a short-arse, is surely testimony to his Yorkshire father?

 

"It was after 4 oclock when the name of Percy Hammond-Bell was called by the attorneys for the prosecution, and a short, slender young Englishman, wearing eyeglasses and having a very decided accent took the stand. Mr. Hammond-Bell said that he had come to Southern California from England last January, and is at present stopping with an English family named Sheldon, at 616 West Sixth street. He is not employed at any profession or calling, but is a medical student and journalist. In this city he was devoting his time to acquiring the Chinese language and studying their customs and life, with a view to writing a series of magazine articles when he went back to England. He had been employing a Chinese tutor at No. 220 Marchessault street, and was often in and about Chinatown. On the night of the shooting of Wong Chee he left his residence about 8 oclock and walked to Chinatown, stopping at one or two places on the way. He was on his way to the Marchessault street store and was crossing Alameda on the former thoronghfare when Chee was shot, not thirty feet from him. The witness said he had not yet reached the railroad tracks in crossing the street, when he heard the report of the revolver and immediately turned to see whence it had come. He saw the murderers run away, three men in all, and followed two of them with his eyes. They both ran across Alameda street diagonally to the; corner of Marchessault, one to one side of the street and the second to the other.

"Asked as to the size of the three men, Mr. Hammond-Bell said they were all different, that is, three heights. One was very large, one medium and one small. He did not see what became of the third man, but noticed the other two particularly. Confronted with Big Jim. the witness unhesitatingly pronounced him to be one of the men—the big one —whom he had seen running away from Chee's body, and the one who did the shooting. When the three murderers had escaped from sight, Mr. Hammond-Bell ran to where Chee had fallen, being the first one to reach his side. He bent down and placed his hand to Chee's face and felt the terrible wounds made by the ball. Having a considerable knowledge of medicine and being desirous of rendering such assistance as possible, Mr. Bell made a quick examination of Chee's wound, but saw that he could do nothing. Just as he laid the wounded man's head down. Officer Lennon came running up, and immediately a crowd closed in upon the body. He asked Lennon If he could do anything to assist him, but the officer said no, to wait for the arrival of the patrol wagon. When it came he saw the body placed in it and then mingled with the crowd for a time, finally going home. The testimony given by the witness came like a thunderclap to the defense, as they had no intimation that such a person existed, much less had seen the whole affair. Messrs. Appel and Phibbs, for the prosecution, were almost equally surprised, as the witness had been found by Detective Bradish and been served with a subpoena, being merely called in the regular routine, They knew nothing of what he would testify to before he took his place in the chair. For the defense Mr. Ling took the crossexamination of the witness, and began with a snap. He had not proceeded far, however, when the hour for adjournment arrived and the hearing was continued, to be taken up again Monday morning at 9:30."

(Los Angeles Herald, 1896)

 

I had to make a cranial leap to conclude that Percy H Bell (shown in the US censuses) was the Percy Creed Bell on my tree.  His sister I'd found was known as Alys Hammond Bell, so when I substituted 'Hammond' for 'H', I got the full story.

(Whilst Percy was pretending to be a doctor, his brother Lee was pretending to be a Methodist minister in Edgewater, Denver among the Rockies.  That didn't last long.  Their sister Alys was a Baptist missionary and nurse from age 27 in Gombe Lutete, at the foot of the Congo's Livingstone Falls, living out a boring retirement in Worthing).

Newspapers: Shock and Ordinary

I found two of my relatives were at pivotal points in history.  In 1880, one saw Ned Kelly hang in a Melbourne gaol.  He more than saw him hang, he legitimised it.  In 1970, one (actually a relative on the same branch) re-enacted aspects of the Vietnam war in some quiet Quebec suburb.  His purpose presumably to encourage people not to kill each other.  Both generated plenty of copy for newspapers along the way.

It is the third article that is the most interesting to me.  It is not about young men fighting to get the truth or not to fight, but an older man realising he wants to give even more back to the community.  As I put in the snip - the Washburns have become part of the town life of Jamestown; but when their progenitor, William Smith arrived from England in 1872, he could so easily have disappeared on the vast continent.  Thanks to him sending a photograph, from a Jamestown studio, many years later, we do know he is the same man.  We wish the Washburns well and enjoy reading about the homely nature of our cousins' lives there.  Thanks to the newspaper.

Newspapers

Following from my day of industry, that just leaves the British newspapers, which gave my some surprising results.

I couldn't store any of the researches I'd found onto memory stick.  The full-text articles I quickly pasted into a textbox on my website to get it back easily later.  I memorised the rest, and will at some point go back and get hold of the snippets.

* Joseph Barnett's death notice 1856 described him as a man of industry and integrity
* Henry Smith posts a notice in the local paper about his wife Ann, two years after marrying her, that he is not responsible for any additional debts she incurs
* William Giles Collins is shown to have had considerable financial support (£800) from his father-in-law James Compton of Kingston Deverill (whose eighth daughter he had married) and, his latest enterprise having failed, and not having a job, he was allegedly living in Bath with a married woman.  The wife arranged to have him found and for maintenance for his family.  He said he had a mind to 'hook it to America' - indeed he married a Bristolian girl out there the very next year (1873).  He was back in Somerset by 1881 and staying with his mother; his two wives were elsewhere!
* Cornelius Collins, his brother, by contrast, was a denizen of virtue.  It may be he that was considered for funding to go to Bruton Boys' School in 1846 (then age 10).  He's described as the son of a widowed farmer's wife; but he lost out on this occasion to a Master Peacock.
* Charles Carline, my forebear who was a policeman in and around Ilkeston, Derbyshire.  He was on the edge of arresting fisticuffs, with criminals telling him that 'no policeman in Derbyshire can arrest me!'.  He was still very young (21) and faintly noble, but likely turned to drink which probably cost him his job and then he got a girl in Eyam pregnant (unclear what he was doing there - possibly estate managing) and came to Salford.
* Joseph Carline, Charles's uncle, is confirmed as having had a brief second marriage in 1861, in between the censuses so quite easily missed.  (His marital status remains widower by 1871 and there were no surviving children.)  He married at Chesterfield parish church and the issue of the marriage was subject to a Court of Chancery action, which I have already seen.  The Chancery index said it was a Yorkshire case, but I recognised the surnames involved and knew that not to be true.
* John Johnson, farmer of Old Town, Catton, Allendale gets several mentions in the Newcastle Courant.  At his death (1885) and also as the official who people wrote to: for example, he was told that cattle plague was coming and he should close his show, but the advice turned out to be incorrect.
* Mrs Mary Collins Tayler, the saddler's wife from Catherine Street, Salisbury has a fairly lengthy obituary in a Hampshire paper at her death 'on New Kent Road', London in 1835.  She was a granddaughter of the murdered Martha Tucker and her seven affectionate children went a good way to strengthening the female line of this family, perhaps because of their determination to respect their womenfolk.
* The South African papers courtesy of the Readex portion of NewsBank.com let me see the two soccer-playing Cotty brothers (Syd and Victor) one of whom was injured in a mining accident around 1907; the marriage of Charles Commins Haine was reported at length in 1907 at Germiston, his brother L. P. being best man.  I'm more convinced than ever that the assault of a young white girl in Kimberley 1913 led to the assailant assuming his mother's name, and also of the family likely moving away to Pretoria.
* Properties were sold - Mr William Lain's estate in 1832 was subdivided: including his public house The Three Boars at Spooner Row, and one heir was Samuel Flowers; Giles Grist's property at Faulkland was sold about 1845 (he'd been suffering from ill-health in 1840).  Flowers's daughter was confirmed as dying at the Boar i.e. Blue Boar, Walsham-le-Willows, which had been saved from fire and now serves Thai food.

These are just the highlights - there will be other discoveries that I didn't note down but which will prove to be useful.  All found from the Newspaper eresources page of the British library.

The other snips were the bootlegging of alcohol in 1907 by Charles and Jose Dunkerton (his wife I believe) in Fort Scott, Bourbon, Kansas.  Also the appearance of the enigmatic Miss Melisande Bell as a child in 1910 in Tanglin, Singapore dressed as a red pierrette.  Her father was the Postmaster-General.  She would later be thanked by Philip Ziegler for her information about the Duchess of Windsor in his biography.  The Straits Times archives are online.

The sixteenth letter of the alphabet

I met Joan and Diana, Muriel Haine’s daughters in 1996 in Devon, then in their 80s or approaching that age.  But Muriel was one of 15 Haine children baptised at Churcham, Gloucestershire (one in the ruins) who scattered across the Empire as they buried their parents.  Sure, I don’t expect a huge amount of detail about the boys in South Africa, but I would like to find their children.  We met Ernest Haine’s grandson at Belgo Centraale in London with his charming wife.  But what about Fred Haine’s daughters? I had to wait for the shipping records (below) to confirm their birth years.

As you can see I was lucky to find Doreen’s birth (in England) in 1914 but I moved on and missed an important clue.  I jigged around with the name of Dyment, looking for more but that was a dead end.

Coming back to this record I realised the clue lay in the middle initial.  I had literally worked all other avenues.  When I zoomed in on the middle initial, I knew exactly what that name would be: PR_ _ _ Y, an old family name.

I punched those first two names, Doreen P_____,  into Ancestry Death Indexes (as firstnames) and up came the result I needed – the lady had died in England in the last few years despite living almost everywhere else in between.  I then googled for more information and traced her last address to Sturminster Newton in Dorset, plus an obituary in the Daily Telegraph.  I was then able to check the address on 192.com, find the property on a local plan, and photograph the property with Google Streetview.  An email from family took a week to come trundling in with all the missing news. I went from knowing absolutely nothing to full information in just a moment.  Guessing the 16th letter.

Old news travels slowly

My secondary title could read: but it arrives eventually.
In the initial rush to document all the new entries of the family tree, we google, we cut, paste, punch the same data into the same search engines in the hope it'll give us different results.  (Er - which it might...)

Only afterwards is there time for us to question the data supplied, to consider the original sources and to turn a jumble of facts into a coherent story.

This particular story takes in a huge number of really quite disparate places.  I shovelled them all onto the tree and never really expected to get an explanation of what was going on.

Bayford, England

Joe Feltham was born at the main street of Bayford, England in 1823.  I'd known that for years, as soon as I'd ventured into the parish of Stoke Trister's baptismal pages.  3 of his sisters I'd resolved but not him, nor the fourth one, Anna.  Plugging his details into familysearch showed him living with Anna, by now married, in Springfield Illinois - rumoured to be home of the Simpsons.  He later leaves Springfield for the Black Hills of Dakota where he dies.  Here's the gravestone, put up by a granddaughter:

So what on earth was Grandma (and Grandpa) Feltham doing in Buffalo Gap in this tufty-grassed cemetery? Surely moving to the Prairie State met their needs, without moving to some actual prairies, a view of Mount Rushmore - and little else.

(And here is the information from GenealogyBank):

I'd been ignoring the Historical Encyclopaedia of Illinois.  Possibly a worthy enterprise.  I have been speculating that these treasure troves of genealogical information may not have served a wider purpose - and this article on American County Histories does refer to these volumes at times as 'mug books'.  You had better stump up the publishing costs as a subscriber if you want your family's flattering biography to make it into print.

I then had to play a game of cat-and-mouse with Google, having decided after all I did want to play with its Books collection.  The rules of snippet view are - if Google has 30 million books, then a whole page of information about your family is definitely way less than a snippet.

We've already seen elsewhere in this article how GenealogyBank's excellent newspaper collection can render up short articles in full with a little neat typing.  Google Books is less predictable.  However, to figure out how Joe Feltham went from pretty Bayford to opportunistic Springfield to windswept Buffalo Gap, we needed to have a go.  Here is our snip.  Initially the snippet view served me up this:


Pretty useful - we're looking only at the right-hand column here.  But we want more!  We plug the left-hand column biography into Google Books search and it kindly spits it all back out again, with the extra few words 'prevented by ill health'.  Great - new text.  Let's search for that inside the book, and hey presto the next episode of the Feltham saga is revealed!

I indeed ended up with the whole page, which is reproduced on Richard W. Feltham's page.  Feltham drove cattle across the plains to Flintstone's Bedrock (Custer County, S.D.) - but his wife missed home.  Though his father by contrast thrived out there in the drier air.  All this is to be found.

The Daily Alaska Dispatch (29 Apr 1915), adds a little more: R. W. Feltham, one of the pioneers of the interior of Alaska, passed through Juneau last night on the Admiral Evans.  Mr. Feltham came to Alaska in 1907, but left a few years ago for the flesh pots of the south.  He is representing the Seattle Grocery company and will return to Juneau in about two months.

We can add that the journey from Seattle to Juneau was a week, and that the steamship Admiral Evans ran aground 3 years later off Juneau with 91 passengers on board (taken to safety).

Admiral Evans steamship (c) State of Alaska

The saga is by no means complete.  Despite the rosy glow portrayed in the paid-for biography of Sangamon County, all was not well.  The eldest daughter had died 1907 from typhoid fever.  Mrs Feltham used her husband's letter from him being frozen in the Klondike 1898, as evidence for desertion and divorced Richard in 1909.  In 1910 as only child of Rebecca Van Deren, Mrs Feltham was entitled to sell her mother's estate.  She had some small private income as a nurse, and two young girls at home.  When she fell ill, Richard (by now in Seattle), received word and returned to Springfield and remarried Mrs Feltham.  The whole family moved to Seattle to run Feltham Groceries on the corner of 700th and 7th Ave NW, and Richard was within easier reach of Alaska.  Many years later Margaret died at Bremerton Hospital across Puget Sound from Seattle, and was sent for burial back in Illinois.  But Richard, to no-one's great surprise, lies at anchorage in Alaska, two years after the cemetery was opened.

Richard Welch Feltham

To find his girls, I searched for all women born in Illinois living west of Puget Sound, finding one, who worked in the Navy Yard at the time of her marriage.  He does leave family, still in the Bremerton area of Washington State.  But they may not know of this relentless travel and betterment and of the pleasant places found along the way.  It's old news, and it's taken awhile to get here.

The best things in life are free

It was great to resolve a long standing puzzle concerning my Scotts.  The whole family unit had disappeared and the fairly distinctive names of Edith Maria and Martha Gertrude were yielding absolutely nothing.  I knew that various in the family had gone out to Australia, and decided to test the Australian Death Index 1787-1985 to see who would appear.  Although it's initially off-putting that you get a 'deny' screen and lots of blank details, it's amazing what you can get.
I reconsidered my information and realised Edith Maria born in Kensington was actually Edith Mary Ann born in Kennington.  I looked for Edith Mary Ann's death in Australia with parents' details as given (yellow-underlined).  The maiden name of Scott isn't shown on-screen but is hidden information in the database.

Fresh from this success, I then thought - well, why not take it to the next level?  What about Edith's own children?

I then was able to get a tiny bit more information from the Trove newspapers, from the companion Australian Births Index 1788-1922 but this was certainly a Great Leap Forward.  For some data (such as the marriage of Edith Mary Ann's youngest daughter, 1924) I had to use the Electoral Roll to make an educated guess, and then check the details for sure on the very tight-lipped Victorian BMD index.

I then solved a year-long mystery about the identify of 'Casie B'.  She had been driving me crazy- was she Charlotte, Catherine, Caroline, Cassie, Cassandra.  Step up, the extremely useful Victoria Passenger Lists 1852-1923.

As you may be able to see from this, the two records broadly match.  The shipping records has Jessie B (alleluia), while the 1881 census entry written 18 months earlier has 'Casie B', where I think the C is intended to be pronounced 'Ch' (though I can't think of a single English word that uses this form but the Italian cinto).

It's then an easy matter to find the girl as Jessie Beatrice in freebmd, and then to go in whichever direction (Trove, the deaths index), to find her death at 43 as Mrs Dunlop widowed mother of two deceased children.

The father of all these children is possibly in Kings Cross England age '35' in 1891, though this smacks of coincidence.  He and Mary Ann had another child together after arriving in Australia (who died).  He lived to see all three daughters marry before dying at 53 in Melbourne.

Conversely, his father, Thomas Scott senior was still very much alive back in England and about to move house.  Senior's will makes no mention of these Australian shenanigans; instead earmarking all the £600 estate for his relative in England, S T Bennell - child of a deceased daughter.  In fact all of senior's 3 children predeceased him.

So, if anyone is researching Walter Addison Block or Herbert Graves Harrison, Alexander Leonard Turner, Stanley Watson Wray, Hugh Fred Williams Coulter, their wives and families, thank you to those large websites for the free data, and do get in touch.

Faith, Hope and Ancestry

I'm just so glad to have solved this puzzle, and found a title for the post which really does fit the facts, as you'll see.

I don't care if it seems I'm singing the praises of Ancestry.com. Because perhaps I am! Much as I'm annoyed with the cynical moneymakers at an extraordinary url in itself,
The proprietors of mf.com (that's Ancestry) have run a pretty effective dragnet over the 19th century. Your ancestor was living in a cave with no roads nearby to escape any entry in their database.

My three Welch sisters ran the water mill at Alhampton maybe 15miles south-west of Bath after their widowed father's death (1880), then they drop right off the radar in 1884. It was all change. Eldest girl gets married and kind of retires, dying with no clues. One girl marries (age 31) and my guess is emigrates somewhere although with the other sister.

I was beginning to wonder which uninhabited island they'd colonised when the answer came from searching All Names on Ancestry . . . New Zealand!

Middle girl Jane (thank goodness) pops up on the newly released electoral rolls down there, as, on closer inspection does her married sister Louisa Ann Smith. Yeh - I'd not have spotted her so easy.

But Louisa was my real target. Just 31 when she married there was a real hope that she might have family. Considering her backstory, I really needed her to have family.

(Her own mother, a lifelong family servant was never supposed to get married but at pushing 40 'stepped in' to help her sister's widowed husband out and ended up married, but also ostracised. Louisa the youngest was taught her letters and helped run a school in Stroud before taking on the watermill.  Atta girl.  But where were they?  Was this the end of the road)

Meanwhile in New Zealand,...
Hope arrived. What an apposite name for the Smiths's eldest child. We now see that Jane, Louisa and Mr Smith sailed almost immediately the minister closed the wedding service. Paperspast tells us they arrived in Christchurch 1884 only to jump on board another vessel going along the coast to Lyttleton. Mr Smith was I believe a grocer.

The NZ birth indexes to my joy listed Hope and Faith as the names of the first two Smith babies. Then followed Ruby and a fourth daughter - with a somewhat less exciting name, sadly.

The trail limped on (I'm not sure how) to Sydney, where I finally arrived at the door (via Facebook) of a descendant.... Huzzah.

Update: I'm meeting one in England in six weeks [August 2015], who was held as a baby by her great grandfather, the very Mr Smith who emigrated with Louisa in 1884.

Note: Ann Feltham (1810-1862) is a Cinderella story. Whilst her daughter Louisa must have had it tough losing mother age 8, going on to school in distant Stroud, and then running a watermill with her sisters, now orphans, in her 20s, she was a true Victorian - setting out for New Zealand in 1884. The story nearly never began. Ann Feltham (her mother) witnessed almost every single marriage going - cousins, aunt, younger sister. She's shown in old letters as caring for her aged uncle. But when her sister dies, suddenly in 1844 marriage comes a-knocking. She settles at Broadfield Down as a farmer's wife, where Louisa arrives in 1853. But Ann was almost certainly banned from returning to Ditcheat, where she had buried a child, and where her own mother had wobbled up the aisle just 8 days before her own birth. Visiting another big farmhouse, this time in Kent, as a guest, not as a servant, she likely had too much cream and died. Ironically it was a 15 year-old domestic servant girl who found her, the rest of the family being out.

Mines of Solomon

for years clues have been waiting for me to run and catch up. Rev'd Thomas Martin my ancestor left no trace of his family but did write a fat load of poetry. In his 1833 book, the Stranger at Home he writes about his brother Edward now passed away - at sea - and Mr Solomon Martin is one of the subscribers who promised to buy a volume. I fretted over these details for a decade or two but the answers have just broken through the cloud of poor deduction. Solomon lived in Devonport near Thomas and gave his two daughters exactly the same fanciful names as Thomas's: Maria Thanetta Martin, Caroline Matilda Martin.  He also confessed to being born in Penryn which is just a splash from the mouth of the Fal and Thomas's declared natal place. This data is being mined further. As a fan of Ned Kelly, the Australian Irish outlaw and scourge of law enforcers, or at least the Carey version, I was appalled to learn that Solomon's grandson Edward Castidine Martin of the Age newspaper had elbowed his way to Kelly's execution and thus an exclusive for his paper. He witnesses the death as do a lot of happy lawmen and compounds the ghoulishness by putting on a sellout play. But I'm glad this long pending mystery is now resolved thanks to the mines of data about Solomon.