European Genealogy across 13 countries - a story starting in the Lakes

  I idly wondered whether Arthur Taylor, living in London age 18, might come back to marry in his native Keswick.  He did!

And on clicking behind the link I spy his wife looked like Isabel Kroll.  This didn't sound like a lasting marriage.  What was he up to?  But I couldn't find anything more, so gave up on him.

But then I found a reference to a lady living in Italy, who just had to be Arthur's daughter, and the game was on.  Arthur turns out to be the International YMCA's 'man in Italy' while Mussolini is at the helm.

It takes me a good year to recover from these Italian revelations before I finally get the will of Arthur Taylor's daughter, Signora Barone.  I certainly expected that the dalliance with Isabel Kroll would long have past, but concluding Alice's long and passionate will comes the note from the clerk...

And then, buried in the text, Isabella's mother is listed with a very English-looking name, Rosalie Stuart-Cowen!  I already knew about Scots in Poland, but Scots and Germans (?) seemed to hold an interesting tale to explore.  Considering I lacked both Isabella's birth, death and previous marriage, it was remarkable what I eventually crowbarred out of the internet.

Here is Isabella's first marriage, which I did not find by idle Googling, but only by the specific search indicated.

Here is Isabella's tree now.

The following countries are covered on the map below
England - where Isabel married in 1907
Denmark - where Isabel's first husband was born (place given as father's birthplace in 1920 census for her elder children)
Sweden - where her daughter Anna's son Hans was a citizen in 1954, likely as an adopted child, and believed to be his final home
Poland - where Isabel's second husband worked in the 1920s after WW1
Netherlands - where Isabel's sister Georgina was living until about 1900 (at The Hague)
France - where Isabel's two elder children (and grandson Hans) were born (Paris, Vaux-sur-Mer)
Italy - where Isabel's second husband worked in the 1930s and where her younger daughter (Alice) settled (in Sicily)
Switzerland - where Isabel's mother died in 1890 (unsubstantiated) and where her sister Rosalie died in 1927 and where her sister Georgina married (in Lausanne)
Germany - where Isabel's sister Rosalie married in 1883 (at Stuttgart), and where she herself was born (source 1920 census), and where her father was born (ibid)
Greece - where her first husband went to live, presumably after separating from Isabel
Canada - where Isabel's youngest child was born in 1908
USA - where Isabel was living in the 1920 census (Washington DC), while her second husband performed his YMCA duties, and where her two elder children settled, and where her mother was actually born
Brazil - where her grandson Hans (John) came to reside or work in the 1950s

What a surprise to tumble out of a marriage in the Lakes.  Lastly a picture of gorgeous Giarrattana in Sicily:

 This was the second Sicilian connection to emerge.  As well as Il Dottore Barone from Noto, I have Signor Leone from Naro a century before.  Agreeably close to Montalbano's fictional Vigata, which I watched sorrowfully in the denouement to this Sicilian episode.  But as Sicily recedes, step forward Malta - even further south, as new home for a descendant of Annabella Airey.

Emmerdale Farm and a wife-swap: the 1939 Register

I was very sceptical that the 1939 Register would deliver anything new for me.  I have been studying family history for over 20 years, and if I needed information about the 20th century, I could mostly look at freebmd.  And then jump straight into the electoral roll, to get an address of a living relative.  I have done this countless times, so what good would sniffing around a 75 year-old summary do for my tree?

Child baptisms of around the year 1900 often gave the infant's exact date of birth - and assuming they lived another 69 years, you can then use this information to find their death record, particularly useful if they married overseas, had a common name or moved around unpredictably.

Child baptisms of around the year 1880 occasionally gave an exact date of birth, but the infant concerned is very unlikely to have lived another 89 years to produce such a record...

Believe me, I homed in on Catherine Jones (born 1881) pretty instantly, scouring the new 1939 Register for any evidence of a Catherine, but she eluded me.  I was pretty sure she had survived and was living in Manchester, but she was proving a mite tricky to locate.

I knew that she'd had a massive bust-up with her sister Florence - the only family member to produce a will.  And Florence goes to great lengths not to mention Catherine, so her archival betrayal means that Cath is utterly missing from our official family record.

Of course, I found her - and on the 1939 Register, too, but not by my own endeavour.  Who should I spy living with Florence Jones in Manchester, 1939, but Katherine Bateman.  Katherine!  My fingers quiver as I double-check the birth-date.  Yes, Katherine was born in March, and yes, she was born on 6 March 1881.  And yes, there was a marriage (one of 23 possibles) in Liverpool 1905.

So, I was looking at the 1939 household before the barney.  Katherine's two grandchildren lived nearby, and thirty years later, old Florence's heart softened and she added them to her will.  Stupidly I had never checked out this reference, as the name Bateman had no resonance for me then.

EMMERDALE?  Katherine's grandchildren both have large Irish-Manchester families.  A great-great-grandson plays a cleaner living in the village of Eccup, just outside Leeds, in the soap Emmerdale.

WIFE-SWAP? Missed the wife-swap story.  It's here.

Tidal wave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Crimes and Rimes

Mary Creed was born in a village near Glastonbury in 1810. She was the last of her siblings to fall to the power of a findmypast search. I found a possible marriage at Pylle, Street on the Fosse, a parish which does not hand across data readily. I ran some possible names through findmypast, and Rimes came up with a matching entry. Mary had married Daniel Rimes, likely while in service in the village. They'd had a large family and bounced around the villages seemingly getting poorer with each passing census. I realised that Julia Amelia one of their several girls was known to me, being housekeeper for many years to Rufus Maidment in fact we now know they were cousins. In the fuss of the 1901 census release I never looked at the original document scans and so missed Julia here, where she's clearly listed as cousin. In fact her middle name was Creed which would have been a big giveaway, had she used it. Grandson Ernest Rhymes was on the board of a Seventh Day Adventist sanitorium in Napa Valley California living in the idyllic surrounds of St Helena later running a small business I think selling smoothies. The grandsons in Australia did the name proud played cricket entered themselves clearly on Trove the newspaper archive, and have lately held reunions between the Sydney and Adelaide branches of the family. In short it is a series of research crimes which kept me from knowing this family sooner!

Mystifying motives: the 1911 census index

Interestingly the 1911 census has twice listed relatives on the form and then these were crossed off so they DON'T appear in the index! One of these was Ellen Elizabeth Cooke (really Cook) who was a nurse in Stoke on Trent living with her aunt Hannah. Ellen must have got called in to the hospital or something as she is deleted from the form and missing entirely from the indexed census. Very strange. Without that deleted line I would never have found Ellen's lovely granddaughter a piano teacher in Derbyshire who has her photographs and stories.
Ellen was born in 1881, and her parents died shortly afterwards. She isn't living at home in 1891 nor in 1901, so without the 1911 census, we'd never have known about her.

Reply from BrightSolid 18 Sept 2010
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Good afternoon,

Thank you for your email.

If the entries are crossed out on the original page they will not be included in our transcript as the individuals would not be present when the census was being recorded.

Best regards,

FindMyPast Support Team

Comment
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Here’s my gruntworthy reply from the usually on-the-money bright solid. The whole point of the index and indeed the interest family historians have in the data, isn’t to know precisely whether a given relative was at home though this is nice, nor to have an exact list of who WAS at home (with the implicit assurance that those who bedded down elsewhere must strictly be omitted). No! It’s to capture all and sundry data which could be useful genealogically. An index which omits this data to satisfy notional and conflicting criteria does not serve the genealogical community well!