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).

Arundel and Alexander: grand names on Somerset soil

My great-grandfather Bert Creed was a boy of very fair complexion, requiring much washing to keep it clean, who grew up on a smallholding in West Pennard, Somerset.

I first came across many of the names in his family tree as a young boy, and thought nothing of them.  I had always thought that Arundel was an unusual name for my Bert's aunt, a farmer's wife in rural Somerset, but didn't get too enervated about it.

Bert had a great-uncle Alexander Creed, a ponderous-looking farmer of three-cornered Steart Farm at Babcary.  I thought nothing of his name either - except this time one of his large tribe of single female descendants said he was named after one of the Hoods of Butleigh, presumably Admiral Alexander, who died eleven years before our Alexander's birth.  During Hood's long retirement he likely returned to his childhood home (2 miles from the Creeds) and sufficiently impressed our forebear to take on the name.

Back to Arundel, I was looking at the 1940 wills registers, a century after the birth of my gt-gt-gt-aunt, and noticed that the Napier family not only had Arundels within it but also had a connection with West Pennard, Somerset.

After some investigation, I found that Julia Arundel Napier (1821-1847) had lived at East Pennard House in the 1820s.  She was an unmarried lady known as Arundel born a few months after her high-rolling father fell off a horse at 25.  Then in her teens her mother left East Pennard and came to 217-218 The Strand, London with a husband (and likely cousin) Sir John Dean Paul, a wealthy banker.

It was here that Arundel Napier was living in 1841, not entirely happily, having lost her sister and close companion Lettice two years earlier, in the calming climes of Weston-super-Mare.  You can see the property still houses a bank.  Arundel's mother died the next year, and she returned to Somerset, being buried at East Pennard church in 1847.

My theory is that Elizabeth Creed, sister of Alexander, and thus no stranger to grabbing names from the ether, had a personal connection with either Arundel Napier or her sister Lettice, perhaps being in service at Pennard House; and after her marriage, 1840, gave that distinctive name Arundel to her eldest child, a girl (whose family finally died out in 2004).

Just a word of the wild Napiers and Pennard House courtesy of Priscilla Napier (1908-98), author and chronicler.  She writes: "East Pennard House, a solid Georgian mansion looking westward across the vale of Avalon.  Here, rooted like comfortable oaks in this smiling country that seems forever bathed in autumnal light ...the Napier parents dearly hoped that the Napiers would solidly remain.  But sons do not stay quiet on rich acres, in snug little businesses, or with safe hereditary manual skills, they go to Australia or Arkanas, open boutiques in the Seychelles or restaurants in the Andes... Sometimes, aware that life is short, they live it up while the going is good, especially in times of piping peace."

Forgotten Times: Are They Gone?

Ethel Robinson was an unmarried cousin.  I needed to find her death record, and ideally some biographical content.  Maybe this is her after all?

Nearly 70 years after this family left Somerset for Australia, the property names still evoked hamlets and villages within their ancestral county.  Interesting too, that they wended their way to Adelaide's grandest of its many churches.  But small chance the generation today will be able to so neatly integrate themselves with their past.

To my shame I have not yet purchased this book.  It writes in a readable and relevant way about a WW2 hero, an intelligent perhaps awkward young man, whom so many 20th century figures managed to get to know.  He was doomed to be my cousin from the very moment his grandfather downed tools as a grocer in Cumberland and began his long journey to be a minister in India.

Conradi's book wakes up the memories of three of Thompson's cousins: two died in Italy, and the third might have lost part of her reason for living there too.  Here is her peaceful stone in a lovely English setting.  In the book these people are animated again briefly.  In this quiet spot, perhaps it will be possible to remember them once more, far from the mad rushing of nearby towns.

It feels a very long, cold, time since 1855.  A very long time indeed, especially in Ireland, where anything prior to 1865 really is the dark ages.  Somehow this record from donkey-drawn cart days peopled by sons of Cromwell, has trickled down to us.  It is a pretty thin streak of trickle, but as nearly as we can be sure - is my great-grandfather's aunt marrying Mr Brodie.   Ballyporeen is on the road out of Mitchelstown to Waterford, crossing a couple of county borders along the way.

The Brodies were one of the first of our family out in Boston: they had plenty of time to get out there before the Civil War, although I think they did not take advantage of this.  Despite all this, Miss Loretta Brodie features in our family journal from before the war, and was still alive not so long ago.

Rejoicing comes as I finally press the right buttons on Google, and out comes tumbling one of the Brodies' granddaughters, Annie Dwyer Amico, whose obituary shows she has plenty of real children that are a direct link back to the marriage on the Waterford road.

Sketches of rural Somerset 1860s by James West

T

There are more like this. This may be in Butleigh or Glastonbury.

Split lines: finding half-kin in the family tree

My grandfather having three male half-cousins complicated the tree. Where did they sit? Their grandchildren were somewhere between 3rd cousins and 4th cousins.  Though as is always the way with these special relationships, they were reasonably close: closer than my grandmother was to most of her cousins, that's for sure.

The presence of half-kin in the tree turned out to be exceptionally rare.

Padfield: the love match of Joseph and Mary, 1794, produced all the Padfield family that we knew about, and even more besides once we'd learnt beloved Joe had a posthumous son with plentiful offspring. Both the couple brought shady daughters to the marriage, from previous spouses, who were never mentioned, and whose innumerable descendants were either miners or impoverished printers. Half-kin to be ignored.

Rapson: Margaret Trewhella had such an incredible name that her mother's, Miss Thomas, disappointed. That was until we learnt the young widow had had nine further children with a second husband. Somehow these seemed even more exotic and cohesive than Margaret's own full brother. One was associated with a poisoned Cornish pasty and with a male wizard; another had a boy Jack Rapson whose distinctive likeness reminded us strongly of Grandpa. Another may have been the wool sempstress whose mill provided the workings of Eliza's tapestry, 1820s. And a branch of these came to settled in my rural mid-Devon where I spent a few seasons 'on the land', away from the tedious seaside. Half-kin to be explored.

Dinah: this time round a previous marriage netted us only one half-sibling, Dinah. Listed as a grandchild of seventeenth-century farmer Ed: Murrow, it took some skilful weaving of documents to establish she was Elizabeth's eldest child, and thus half-sister to all four Speed children. She had only one child, too, and having succeeded her aunt in her husband's affections was liable to be cast out of the family unit. History atones for put-upon Dinah, numbering among her descendants, a canon in Leicestershire, a gloving hero, the late châtelaine of du Maurier's Menabilly and the wife of Thatcher's Ambassador in Washington. Half-kin to be fêted.

Mary Lane: I spent a holiday wrapping up the last of Thomas Creed's nine children, two of whom married in London.  We always knew he'd had an illegitimate daughter born just after marriage. He had wisely not married the mother, who went on to have another child by his cousin, a few years later. The baby girl was pinned down, despite having the wrong name listed on her marriage, by the modern-day parish clerk of Butleigh, Somerset at butleigh.org.  Predictably we are immediately in a realm of farm labourers, shoe workers, painters and sometime publicans. Half-kin by whom to be bored.

Gorran Churchtown: like roses in winter, a new branch was made known to us on the Lowry side. Our Henry Lowry died in 1861 leaving no siblings, just a stepmother. His father had recently died, leaving the widow and also two half-sisters. These half-sisters were the children of Henry's grandfather, also lately deceased, by his wife a woman from Gorran. With the birth and death of Henry's half-sister when he was 35, these Gorran-women were the only other family from our branch of the Lowrys. The elder girl was sent to her mother's people at Gorran where she married her uncle's heir, William Williams Richards, no direct relation, blacksmith, also, in Gorran churchtown. Only one child continues the line, a third Henry. His children went to Barry in Wales, to Liverpool and there is still a remnant in Cornwall. We never knew them, and they don't know their Lowry lineage. Half-kin to be educated.

Jennet: gift from rural Wales. My Welsh side is dominated by towns; and the danger of leaving these  nineteenth-century monoliths is you are then plunged into a pre-surname obscurity with no leads or clues at all. Jennet saves us from this fate, and provides us with the liminal limberland of rural Wales waking up to its potential.  A single will knives through the impassable chronology: Elizabeth Morgan (Pengilly) in 1825. A devout Methodist and family lady she reveals the presence of half-kin eventually proven to be children of her mother, Jennet. It was while basking in Bat'umi on the Black Sea coast that I finally found a descendant of his kinnagery, who told me she was the fourteenth Jennet. A line from half-sister Gwenllian dies out in the 1990s. And half-brother Rees loses his exciting granddaughter another Jennet to disease in the 1840s, leaving no heirs.  Half-kin needing to be located.

Eleanor: another great half-sister. Her vibrant genes kept her going long after her brothers had all died. She was listed as matriarch in the 1861 census with a Gibson grandson, a Gibson nephew and apparently a Gibson stepfather. It was all most puzzling. It seems the son took the name Gibson so he could inherit property from his half-uncle, who had a smallholding nearby.  The mists above the Tyne cleared and we learnt that Ellen was the child of Ann Charlton before her marriage to Lancelot Gibson. Thus Ellen, through her census entries, was revealing the place of origin of her mother, who had died long before the censuses came out. So we are glad of the extra characters, the south Northumberland ancestral line and the help she provided. Half-kin to be venerated.

Bohemia: this fantastic name is surely connected to Behenna, and unlikely to be any connection at all to the ancient province in Germany. We decided our ancestor Jane Bohemia would be a hardy perennial if she were planted in a family allotment. Little did we know that she too hid a split-line family of descendants.  Way back in the 1990s I corresponded with a Colonel Morley in the US, and suggested from the naming pattern that Jane might have remarried to a second Hambly and produced a number of offspring including Morley's forebear. This was strongly refuted and a marriage in far-off Duloe posited as the correct one for the pair.  It is sometimes nice to outlive wrong-headedness. For two years ago I became aware of the will of Jane Hambly junior which would shed light on this story from 250 years earlier. Indeed Jane Bohemia must have married secondly to William Hambly, brother of relative of her first, Hugh, and gone on to have children with him, including a Hugh and Jane. When Jane died she referred to her Hunter niece, a relationship which fits only with this explanation. So Jane Bohemia's place and story in the garden is now ready to be told. Half-kin belatedly.

Barton: unexpected fruit of my sudden determining of James Carline's parents was the will of his grandfather, available dead easily at Kew. This grandfather's estate duty abstract was sufficiently detailed to list my forebear Mary and her half-kin John Barton of Stapleford and Sarah Henderson? of Matlock. I am not quite sure how I stumbled on tumble-down James and Mary Carline (sr)'s relationship and inferred they'd not baptised a second son, James. Naming patterns fitted as did the later discovery that James had married his first cousin, whose siblings twice performed the same feat.  The half-kin like the curate's egg had family who were digestible in small doses. One line found in England dies out leaving its money to a cousin's son, Arthur Greasley whose connection goes back to pre-1837. This Arthur is found on his bicycle in an online photographic archive, and his son's cruel treatment of a housekeeper also survives on the pages of the web. There are doubtless other tales to be told. We end where we began. Half-kin: unexpectedly.

Moses: to borrow from a spiritual, way up in Cumberland, let my Moseses go! One of this family became Duchess of St Albans. The old patriarch Joseph Moses of Morland Hall Farm eclipsed his wives and it would be unapparent to an observer which one was the mother of his children. In fact my line is from the Scottish Margaret, while two half-sisters were produced from a union with his cousin, Mary Moses. Hannah the elder daughter was known to plant pear trees. Mary the younger daughter was finally proven to have married a Dickinson after a number of circumstantial clues were collected together.  She married very wisely and slowly, unlike the sister who rushed into servitude. From this line come rather slowly, the Thompsons, like tortoises peeking out of their shell, of whom E P is best known. With the death of old Moses, my people were free to escape to western Northumberland, to the exact centre of Britain's landmass, to begin a new chapter in their lives. There remain half-kin, to be counted.

In the catalogue of forebears of mine who had issue by more than one person, I should acknowledge the fact the following male menfolk had had first wives who either died childless or had infant children which died, or who came along for a pivotal role later on: William Bond, William Bagshaw, William Francis, John Airey, James Lowry, Lancelot Gibson. And best stepfather award goes to John Johnson of Old Town. Henry Smith and Samuel Flowers provided stepmothers of greater or lesser degree.  I ought to acknowledge the support and enthusiasm of my own half-kin in compiling this research.

Dibben my toes in Guernsey; fresh fish sustains marathon record hunt

The 3 Dibben sisters are daughters of Mary Speed born 1770 in Ansford, Somerset. I'd assumed they'd all died young, and even found some possible atrocious marriages in the Dorset parish registers or a death which seemed to fit of one of the girls in Shaftesbury, possibly in service. I had a nice tidy date of death for the father, too, at a modest 35. Wrong on all counts!

The Dibben girls were mostly born and all were brought up at, Tarrant Gunville, shortened to Gunville in the censuses I found out (eventually) somewhere in the area known as the Cranborne Chase. Much prettier than the Blackmore Vale, and somewhere my grandfather used to like taking us. There's a pretty airfield at Compton Abbas which we visited.

There was actually a fourth sister but she wasn't as interesting - for starters, her marriage is actually right there in the registers at Sturminster Newton, in plain sight. Ha - that was *not* the case for her three sisters, none of whom stayed in Dorset.

~~~~
To begin at the beginning....

Does combing an entire island's records for Joneses sound completely bonkers? That is what I found myself doing after popping into Kew for 'an hour' to read two wills. Seven hours later I staggered into Kew Fish and Kebab Bar (somehow managing its two separate identities) for deep refuelling after a marathon hunt. It all started with: 'I give £50 to my niece Mary Jones of Guernsey'...

I quickly pinned down Mary, and her mother (born 1791 in Henstridge) to the island, and found aunt Elizabeth (missing from the 1851 census elsewhere) living with some of the family. I was annoyed, having searched for Elizabeth and the Henstridge lady on Ancestry, but neither entry showed up as they were in the Channel Islands. Ancestry doesn't always give you the answers first time round... I still feel the Guernsey leap is beyond most researchers, so feel proud of cementing the link.

(To put the hunt into perspective Guernsey has a similar population to Guernsey County, Ohio, a county which I must confess I'd never heard of!)

So, I had fun discovering that my Mary Dibben, who'd sat on my tree ignored by me for decades, had married a Mr Jones (no record found) and gone to live in Guernsey. All thanks to that will snippet.

I feared the whole island would be a black hole, as the census grabbed by Ancestry seems to be the only window on its world, and even that 'stops talking' after 1911. But incredibly, the whole island's civil registration records are on 3 tidy, titchy, microfilms in the LDS corner at Kew. I paid attention for a bit to the indexes then decided to fly solo. That's when I combed 13 years of deaths from 1891-1904 for any Jones mentions whatsoever. And boy did that pay off!

Jane Janes (widow) is listed in the English probate indexes with her heir as Salvator Leone. Oooh! Did she, I wonder, step out to Naples as a young woman, and rear a family in Italy? Are there still cousins swinging on the vines who own a nice bit of the south? Of course not: it was an autumnal marriage, perhaps in the US. Salvator was a charming and much-loved stepson, and a leading member of a crime gang in the (fictional) Grand Theft Auto series.

Neither Jane nor her mother, or 2 Dibben sisters of her mother, have marriages which turn up anywhere.

Aunt Jane Dibben said she was a spinster when she snared a Barrister of Chancery aged 38, so either she never married her first husband (a soldier) or she was 'keeping things simple' when she remarried. Aunt Rebecca Dibben was with her second husband for 3 weeks in total, but out of her 4 marriages, it was the only one that produced offspring. Possibly the long trip to the groom's home town of Cockermouth finished him off, while the tough bride gave birth and returned to Dorset simultaneously. Her son Abraham was later cuckolded by the Marquis of Bath's young cousin; the Baths cranked into action pretty swiftly. They talked young Thynne out of marrying the upstart Exeter girl; having the lady and her infant chaperoned out to sunny sweaty Australia for a nice life and at least a thousand pounds in the kitty. She would keep her mouth shut and just please to notify the solicitors when she was dead. Thynne bounced back though from his troubles, marrying the playwright Sheridan's twiglet and producing a bunch more Carteret Thynnes. Poor Abraham, whose birth was confusing enough, is found at the same hotel as his mother, in Brighton, stated as 'unmarried' and finally marries his housekeeper after news reaches England that he is at last a widower.

(There is just a chance that the father was Thynne's younger brother, who was spookily despatched to India six months later, on the very same boat that took care of the mother-and-baby! He was described as 'very good-looking' which sounds dangerous. He was dead within the year, and for good measure so was the boat, catching fire in Liverpool docks.)

Poshly-named Sophia Henrietta Carteret Thynne, born in London and technically the legitimate grandchild of Rebecca Dibben, became Sophia Henrietta Cartwright Goodfellow, a labourer's wife in colonial Australia. (No other births fit: I'll need the certificate to prove it.)

Contrastingly, Jane Dibben's illegitimate daughter Ellen Williams from the sticks became a very wealthy woman, still a catch age 40, with a £2000 marriage settlement, a lovely wedding in Cheshunt's flint-faced church, a cook, governess and housemaid and a husband working right on Covent Garden piazza. Life's not fair, is it?

(Her household gets an unexpected mention in a website about Gorran in Cornwall where her cook E Liddicoat hailed from. Very interesting diaries there by Mr Sanders, including by coincidence details of a fight where my Blacksmith Richards at Gorran twists someone's 'harm'.)

As to the Guernsey mob from Mary Dibben, I've set my sights on her daughter Mrs Tau-de-vin, a lovely Channel Islands name. I wrote to the Greffler of Guernsey who is passing me on to the Ecclesiastical Court, who like a bit of French in their work. I am hoping for a will to explain where the Taudevins disappeared to: they maybe became Toadvins. One son died in Queensland the same year as Jane Dibben's boy (who was actually a victim of foul play). I suspect coincidence, but all is not yet revealed.

I realise now why I failed to find Mary Dibben's death: it would have been indexed under her maiden name. Very confusing this island business of women keeping their maiden name: the Scots have a similar custom.

The elder Jones boy, another cabinet maker (like his cousin Robert Dowding), sailed for Tasmania in 1857 with his growing tribe and wife Emma Mary Ann Dale. Two junior Jones girls went out to Australia: Rebecca responded to extensive advertising and emigration agency work in the island to sail in 1854 on the government ship as a servant-maid knocking a few years off her age. Families with a preponderance of girls like the Joneses had priority. The clear motive from the Bishop of Adelaide was to curb crime and immorality resulting from large numbers of single men and unsuitable women! Rebecca arrived in October on an alcohol-free vessel which only saw one death. There would be poor harvest that summer, and it took her 6 years to find the promised husband - a shoemaker from Devon. Her younger sister went out later and married the widower of the Mount Barker Inn in the Adelaide Hills, age 36. The whole family were fertile fairly late, so this was not an obstacle.

The two lucky Guernsey girls attained very good ages in Adelaide and in Surrey Hills.

Here endeth the saga!
But not quite - Rebecca, who was first out the gate to Adelaide, chose to give her first boy the middle name of Welford...

I, Miss Dinah Widdows

As told to...

I, Miss Dinah Widdows do note the pitiful number of descendants which I have left. You can find many in family from my husband’s daughter Grace. Her poor mother died at 27 but she still has more in family than I.   I have lately been spending a month or more getting acquainted with them, and golly me, it took me by surprise to meet them all. I did not think they expected to see me, a lady born in 1712, one hundred years before Waterloo.  I also took a moment to look at my sister Sarah's family but I didn’t keep up with them. No sooner I contacted them then had another infant been born. They do say as one of her descendants is born every single week that passes. I don’t know. I can’t imagine looking at the girl why nature works so.  Now you will probably all be thinking that I am own sister to Martha Widdows, and you may know all about how she died, done in by her rotten husband.  Ha!  Well you would be wrong and mighty awkward it is navigating around the tree, I must say. Why I could barely find a record my even having been alive. Which I surely was, an I brought up that ungrateful Sarah and the silly brothers the Lord cursed me with. You would have to be a magician to know that I married George Dyke but even guesswork won’t tell you my father’s name. Oh no that is one secret which is very well kept. And if you find out where I was born well I wish you’d tell me. But no, I must grudgingly admit I am not of any genealogical consequence whatsoever.  I had 2 or 3 very good grandchildren, I let them disappear from the records without trace. I tried asking the earth but I’m not getting any answers, even my other sister who never fussed about getting married, even she managed to produce grandchildren who stayed in the records. Oh well tut tut. You see there are matriarchs or fat old queen bees as I call ’em! Even among Sarah’s offspring.  But what’s this I see.  A GenesReunited message saying my grandson George got off his hindquarters and sired a massive breed?  And now here’s FindMyPast trying to tell me granddaughter Martha went off and kept an inn in Emeld Empsty.  And Google shouting that the US Ambassador’s wife was a Miss Dyke, one of George’s lot.  That’s something little Miss Sarah can’t boast about.  Well now I can sleep in peace.

~~
Dinah and Sarah named in the will of Edward Murrow, Almesforde, Somerset 1732.  Lots of information about Sarah, but nothing on Dinah.

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?

Matrimonial mischief in Somerset

Tusk and tusk - what a to-do!

Thomas Creed the farmer set his friends and went after information concerning the servants.  The servants were paid handsomely one supposes for their hard work, and this is what they found:

Catherine Clement, Catherine Lane and John Ludwell were the servants.

Lane pretended to be asleep on the chair.  After her mistress had ensured the servant was asleep (what kind of house is this?), she and her paramour Webb went to a back door, unlocking and unbarring it. There was a way through to the Oxstall. The mistress returned a quarter of an hour later, Webb having made his way home. This had happened often in the past, Clement had
noticed straw on Mrs Creed's back several times...

The full story is available here: Creed contra Creed

For more examples see: Marriage Capers

Ann, 18, not in South Africa (1858)

Excuse me google, have you seen my relative.  She's about 18, she used to live in England, and I think she went to live in South Africa?  It's just gone 1861 and I haven't seen her anywhere in the census so I think she must have left home.  Can you help me?

Google couldn't help me.  But FamilySearch did.

The story starts with William Frampton Cotty who disappears with his wife and children somewhere between 1851 - when he's at South Street, South Petherton, Somerset - and 1861, when he's not in the country at all.  No website had any records on him, but by googling I found references to the family in South Africa, and by checking their National Archives 'NAAIRS' catalogue, I slightly bulked out what I knew on him and his boys.  The youngest girl by a fluke marries in Bristol, has a baby in Lancashire and returns to South Africa (odd).   But of the oldest girl Ann, there was nothing.

A new site, South African Settlers, popped up in my internet browser with extra info on W. F. Cotty.  His entry had been indexed from the Cape Death Notices and was modestly informative.  By this time, I already knew or had surmised that his cousin the housekeeper had become his partner and later his wife, but I didn't know this:

That Ann had a middle name of Martha.  In 1851 she's down as Ann M, but her birth shows her as Anne.  I'd even signed up to the Crewkerne Yahoo Groups which has since deluged my mailbox in the hopes of getting the baptism at Hinton St George and finding that possibly useful middle name.

A few days after finding this, having fruitlessly combed South Africa for Annie Marthas who had children in the 1860s, I thought of putting her name into FamilySearch.  It's worked before.  I now have a claim to the firstborn male of Mount Vernon, NY, as a relative because I put a married couple's name into FamilySearch.

So off do I try it again.  And, no!   Can this be?

Not expecting to find anything, I pick up Ann as mother of a girl born around 1865 in Springfield Illinois.  Well for a girl born 1840, that's about right.  It's more than about right, it's spot on - Ann's aunt and uncle lived in Springfield, and of all the places in the US, this is one it makes all the sense in the world for her to have gone to.

She lies buried at Boone, Des Moines, where she'd gone to live with her husband Gus.  She had 5 children, not the 2 stated in 1910, and 4 were living in 1900 (as correctly stated there) - Anna, Mae, Lotta and Earle but only the eldest has family - children Genevieve Eichenberger and Ashley Bowers.  Ashley's grandson is in England not far from his roots; while Genevieve's are still in Glen Ellyn or retired elsewhere in the States.

Ann is not the first relative I've come across who's balked at the chance to go overseas with her widowed father or mother.  Elizabeth Swanton and her cousin Sarah Mullins both said 'no thank you' to the chance to go to Australia (in 1852) and Ohio (in 1836).  Sarah was already married, so the decision wasn't hers.

Ann was only 17 and had the perfect opportunity to emigrate while single, just as her aunt Hannah had 17 years earlier:

It's no coincidence that Anna was the name of her first child.  Had she waited any longer she would have been rushed off to Cape Province, before you can say 'gold'.

Ironically, maybe her life was harder in America than it would have been in Africa.  The Cottys did well and money was flowing in.  Whereas Ann had to return to Chicago after years out in Des Moines - was she happy about that I wonder.  Her aunt and cousins were around, and hopefully stayed in touch: newspaper articles would confirm.

No feet in Africa

.. but it's still possible to unravel the family's story.  My relative Rob Haine left England around 1900 for a new life in South Africa with his brothers. They ended up in Jo'burg, but he found a farm on the east coast.  He was leaving a land with plenty of fairly accessible records, for a land that until recently, had none.

We saw glimpses of him again - in 1960 his cousin died intestate in Somerset and in the ensuing document, 6 of his 7 kids were named.  In 2009 his wife's niece died in Somerset and her family gave me an old address in Durban, but that didn't lead me anywhere.

I published a book on the family in 2000 and we still didn't know their whereabouts, then.

Last year FamilySearch released some protestant church records for Natal, and I eagerly set to combing through for Haine's.  It wasn't hard to find the family, as the records were mostly indexed.  Although it said marriages for the town weren't listed after 1955, I found the index went up to 1970.  I combed through this looking for the bride, as the dot-matrix index from 1992 listed the marriage in groom order.  Bingo - I found of Rob's granddaughters marrying in 1958 and the other in 1966.

But it was the youngest granddaughter, Mandy, born 1959 I was due to find next.  And it wasn't through googling, through the phone book, but through another resource that I found her.

Thank you FamilySearch for great Natal records and unblocking a 15-year puzzle; without, sadly, me having to set a foot on the continent.

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.

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.

Jumping the gap

To me, one of the excitements about family history is finding a person in one record and then spotting that person in another record.  This may seem pretty prosaic!  For a long time I believed I needed to find that person in another country, but actually, that proved to be excitement mixed with disappointment.  I can never do as much justice to a family tree overseas as when the family ends up in England: should the line go off to America or Australia it gets a little dull after a couple of generations, being further removed from 'the jump-off'.

Probably the exceptions to 'boring Aust-america' are when we are following the female line, following a story, where there is a strong family connection or where they lived in an evocative place, such as early 1870s Utah or the Wisconsin big woods.  Should the family come BACK to England that can make for a good tale, particularly as British records may be even better than corresponding ones overseas.  (For example Mullins Symes and siblings were born in Ohio according to the British censuses, but there isn't a single American record confirming this.)

In contrast, if someone migrates to Lincolnshire or Brecknockshire I'm transported with delight: a whole new county and area to explore; new settlements to see through the eyes of my relatives.

I particularly find it wonderful where an ancestor has you weaving through a sea of records like a Turkish bazaar chase , only to have them quietly sipping tea at home by the time you do finally catch up with them.  A case in point is Ann Hooper who marries twice in quick succession, on one occasion in Bristol, and then is away abroad in the next census, before finally, in 1881 letting us in to her Wiltshire farmhouse, twenty years after we'd last seen her with her parents.  Unfortunately she leaves no family now, but it was still important to resolve her, and to have the enjoyable hunt.

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.

Great Scott!

It is nearly 100 years since my good friend Cornelius James 'Jimmy' was born, and twenty years since we first made contact. He gave me many recollections of bygone times, supplemented by those of his grandfather, also Cornelius, going back to the Crimean War.  I regret it took a century for us to learn that the Scott patriarch was in fact, Cornelius, a gentleman who lived to a very good age (97), like his namesakes.  In fact he died only a few years before a great-granddaughter met her end in Port Antonio, Jamaica.

My two descents from the Scotts would have lain undiscovered were it not for the will of James Scott, Cornelius’s son, whom he actually outlived.  Fortunately his second wife had died before James, otherwise we really would be will-less (I have only just deduced that my Susanna was named after this lady).  James names three married daughters, two being my ancestors, and a brother, Francis, for whom a baptism has yet to emerge.

But who can ignore the powerful evidence of the registers! Here is a series of burials in Ditcheat

and here are the baptisms in Chewton Mendip

There is even a Francis-sized gap around 1760 which would also fit his older brother Christopher 1757.  Across the road lay the black hole of Ston Easton with its lately missing registers.  I hope they looked both ways before crossing that road.  These boys married three times, Francis, it seems, to several Misses A'Barrow.

We have the story of a Scottish Laird, bankrupt, coming down to Somerset to begin life again, and this has always been attributed to the Scotts, as there was little to disprove it.  There is apparently a family book which has the name 'Scott' written on it.  Doug Padfield thought we were related to Scott of the Antarctic, because they came from the same village.  (No connection seems likely though Scott’s uncle did bear the name Cornelius!)  As our Scotts were earlier Scutts, long entwined with deeds of Emborough, I am putting these stories in one of the Mendip’s back lime burners.

Being held by a young Wesley

Long forgotten were two tedious stories by my great-grandfather Rev'd A H Creed, whose memories I typed up in the 1980s, and which now seem to have disappeared.

1) that a bankrupt Scottish Laird had come down to Somerset to begin again.  I doubt it.  I shall file this story under our most un-Scottish Scotts.

2) that an ancestor of Albert's was held as a baby by John Wesley, founder of Methodism, and perhaps also perhaps baptised by him.  Let us examine this one more closely.  Albert gave us some details about the baby: she was a girl, and she was his great-great-grandmother.  The good news is that the dates fit.  Such a child would be born before the 1750s, when there was a good deal of Methodist activity in Somerset.  I am going to list his great-great-grandmothers and, to be exhaustive, those of the next generation as well:

* Rachel Coombs c 1733

* Ann (later Padfield) c 1735

* Betty Young 1742 - daughter known to have hated Methodism

* Jane Lester c 1750   - church-goers

* Mary Earl c 1752 - church-goers

* Miriam Bond 1753 (twice) - mother known to have attended church

* Mary Portch c 1756  - church-goers

* Mary Hill 1763 - wrong generation

* Betty Scott 1778 - too late

* Martha Scott c 1784 - too late, though no baptism found

* Priscilla Newport 1784  - church-goers

We have CofE baptisms for many of these and several passed onto their children a strong Anglican inclination, as noted.  The ground thins fast leaving us with two options, Ann Padfield and Rachel.  I strongly suspect that some of Rachel's grandchildren became Methodists, but her own children seem linked in to the church.

Albert's brother said they were fifth in the line of Methodists, and the strongest Methodist line were the Padfields of North Somerset, a mining area.  Methodism took hold here in those early days, far more than in the southern Mendips.  Yeoman farmers were very comfortably off at this period: vast diaspora of farmers had yet to contribute to low wheat prices.  I think Wesley was in North Somerset fairly early, with his deputies, Adam Clarke, Jabez Bunting, working the ground later. 

About Ann Padfield, we know that she died fairly young.  Her married a proud woman, certainly a church-goer, who kicked out his son.  We know the boy’s uncle Isaac remained a Methodist, probably since those early 1730s, and supported the boy as he too found his faith and purpose. 

So my candidate for this story is Ann, being held by a 32 year-old Wesley in a Somerset mining community, and whose brave son would have been proud to carry the memory onward.  But we shall have to check Wesley's diaries to find his movements in more detail.