1856 and all that

In 1856, George Nuttall died and his executor subsequently found (or wrote) two codicils, amending the will in his favour.  Surprisingly it took 38 years and 3 court cases for the truth to out; the witnesses having been probably bribed and lying most inconsistently.

As a naive young family historian in the 1990s I had no idea that what I held in my hand was a document from exactly the same year and town, and every bit as suspicious as the Nuttall codicil.

Joseph Carline had made his will in 1852: a grand old document, running to several pages, and sparing no detail.  He names several properties, including the meadow, the Willow Piece, which I found through tithe maps, and was able to visit, and photograph.

On the day of his death, we're invited to believe he reached for his pen again and wrote another will; without revoking the earlier document.  The date was December 1856.

From 1 January 1858, would-be forgers had to stand up in a civil court and were perhaps more thoroughly examined in matters probate - it no longer being a matter for the Bishop's officers.

Joseph had genuine grounds for changing his will - his daughter had died at Easter, but a simple codicil would have sufficed.  The second, badly drafted will, hints it being made by family members, perhaps at his direction.  He may have forgotten, on the day of his death, that matters were already resolved, and that is why the second document was passed down to me - when if valid, it should have been the one in the Bishop of Lichfield's hands, April 1857.

It was a big shock when I ordered Joseph's will, expecting a carbon copy of the later document, only to find this impressive earlier screed from 1852 being the one kept on file.  I personally think it's genuine, the later document, just ill-advised.  I particularly like the reference to a new house, clearly built in the last four years.  But he would have left four houses to a foppish 19 year-old distant grandson and nothing to family close by: certainly a mistake.

We only know about the document because its transcriber finally learnt to read and write in his twenties, because I wrote to ask him about it, and because I did so in the nineties - the thing having more lately got lost.  It's probable it won't turn up again, though I should dearly like to see it.

The Stapleford dilemma

We've proved it.  Now I need to wonder whether I like it.  John Barton from Matlock moved to Stapleford aged 22 or thereabouts in 1792.  Considering that he was a farmer's son, most probably a carpenter, it's pretty neat to pin him down so firmly.  The evidence is fairly easily acquired: his father's will of 1822 shows he was living then at Stapleford, being the executor.  Further, a John Barton of Matlock marries in 1792 in Kirk Ireton, and that couple's children are certainly born, and stayed, in Stapleford.  Pretty compelling.

Stapleford must have been an attractive village recalled as being in the Broxtowe hundred, with country roads reminiscent of A R Quinton.  The lace industry operated there, and it seems a river ran through it.  My modern AA map makes it impossible to imagine the area before roads, and it's far too dang close to Nottingham.  Mr Woodward kindly tells us two hundred people were thrown out of work 1881 when a large lace factory in the village was burnt to the ground.

Folk of Matlock had several options when the industrial era came, and for unskilled workers, the cotton mills to the west exerted a big pull.  Carpenters could work anywhere, and shopkeepers or publicans could also take advantage of the larger towns to settle there.

In a world where all our big towns look the same (not the smaller Cheadles, Petsworths), and former industrial communities look greenest of them all, I offer three cheers for the Matlock folk who moved to beautiful Bollington; and two cheers for those who went to Gotham, still a small village.  But only one cheer for the Stapleford move.

I am glad to see a picture of the Warren Arms, the Barton home, with the sheep being driven to market.  1792 may seem early enough to be part of rural Broxtowe goings-on, but all too soon it's 1881 and the grandchildren are heading to labouring jobs in Nottingham and Manchester, leaving their heritage behind.  In addition, they'd already lost the extended family back in Matlock by moving twice.

One brave family, the Stapleford Greasleys, rejected the big Midlands towns on offer and went straight to Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, in 1850.

Twenty-three days

The Windsor Castle in 1873 sailed from London to Cape Town in a miraculous 23 days, the subject of this post.  Sarah Carr turned 18 in 1876 and the following January had herself baptised at Eyam parish church, her ancestral home.  I was suspicious of this event: there being too much significance for this to be a casual adult baptism, ‘oops I forgot’.  All the more so as she thereafter disappears entirely from English records!  So I decided to see the Eyam parish record at Kew, to learn where she was then living.  What I saw there excited me, opening as it does so many possibilities and hard questions:

Sarah Carr was indeed baptised at Eyam in January 1877, her address given as Glossop.  The priest notes that she left Eyam the following day, 22 January, for Griqualand West, South Africa!

This was not what I had expected.  It's a very helpful entry for which I am so grateful. But what next? And indeed what before: with whom had Sarah been engaged since her birthday which led to this turn of events?  Unfortunately it's not yet possible to interrogate FamilySearch and find out who else was baptised as Sarah was, on 21 January 1877.

Griqualand West is a diamond-shaped territory, later to be subsumed in with the Cape Colony, and diamonds were the main reason this territory drew such interest.  It was also the Griqua people's homeland, with Griqualand East across the Drakensburg mountains.  1877 was a very significant year in the region, only six years into the ‘New Rush’ of miners.  The Tantallon Castle carried the first group of Scottish farm workers to Cape Town in the very month that Sarah set sail.  A census was held revealing there were 12,374 people of European descent resident, just over a quarter of the whole, a mixture of chancers, farmers, miners, preachers, shopkeepers, and the Griqua people, all competing with each to reside in this rainless place.  The Annexation Act was passed in July, the ninth frontier war took place and stamps were first issued in this year.  Ships of the Union-Castle line were investing in getting people here quickly.  So we imagine Sarah made the trip to Cape Town, and then on by cart on muddy poor roads, to Kimberley, Griqualand West's largest settlement, not yet a town, and surely, her destination, if she made it.  – Although it seems the region had more than mines: ‘most Griqua [1870s] were forced to sell their farms to whites’, records Encyclopaedia Britannica.

After those 23 days, or more, Sarah enters a land of few records, where disease, the fast transient nature of the place and the passage of time could wipe out all memory of a person.  To me this is deeply ironic.  She was a young lady, with a considerable amount of fire to execute such a brave plan, of which we do not yet know the details.

Yet a niece came to my grandparents' wedding in 1930.  And another niece lived in old age with our cousin Edna in Southampton.  I was too busy to contact Edna before she died in 2005, but she would certainly have said if there’d been talk of an aunt in South Africa, had I known to ask.  Two of Sarah's siblings have grandchildren who are alive, but if we expect a story to somehow make up for 130 years of lost history, we are perhaps clutching at straws.

I have though, some hope.  I have tried some clever searches of the South African records, to see which infants were given the name 'Carr', 'Hannah' 'Millicent, in Kimberley or environs, names significant to Sarah, though I lack the dates.  Right now Dermot Carr McClure interests me, I have ruled out the Carr Furnesses.  There are also 50 pages of Methodist baptisms live at familysearch, which one can browse.  In a very real way one can feel the bravery of those mission folk, of whom William Woodman Treleaven and Samuel Morambo: had Sarah married one of them?  Nolene Lossau's terrific transcripts of Kimberley Methodist baptisms supplement this resource, and I am interested in Robert Brooker and others who are listed with a partner named Sarah.

I found reference to several families from Derbyshire settling in the Cape, if not in Kimberley, the Fletchers and Bundys.  I also browsed those listed as born in Cape Colony or Kimberley who appear in British censuses back home.

Let’s face it the shipping lists are unlikely to survive.  However we have the Eyam vicar telling us she left almost immediately.  There was no time for a marriage in England or Scotland (but Belfast has one), so she boarded the vessel a single woman.  I have followed the ships as best I can through the British Newspapers: we read of the Walmer Castle allowing its passengers to disembark at distant St Helena.  Did Sarah leave the vessel at St Helena one wonders?  She would have had two weeks on board to change her mind about where she was going, but we imagine she had connections in the Cape waiting for her.

At 18, she could not have been a nurse, nor did the Cape yet require trained nurses in large numbers.  Could she have been a missionary, and who in Derbyshire had been stirring up such foment that Sarah chose to leave?  She was, surprisingly, Anglican, and hers is the only entry where the Eyam vicar records such an impulsive decision.  Was she engaged to a Derbyshire man, already abroad, who’d written for her to come?  This is a plain explanation with just two people in the picture rather than a host of missionaries or preachers.  Was she going to travel with a family as housekeeper or maidservant, and, if so, we wonder who!

None of her immediate family were abroad, though there remain her father's family yet to be fully searched.  Hugh Carr had a report in the paper at his death in Cheshire 1880.  It would be nice to see that record, though I am afraid should South Africa not be mentioned, I might infer that Sarah had died there.  This absence of information would be a pretty mournful way of learning of the failure of Sarah's plan, which we trust, succeeded, whatever it was.

Sure looks like my Ellen in Chowbent

Every so often I have a purge of hard-to-find relatives.  I clapped my hands with joy when I found Ellen and her eight siblings back in the 1990s thanks to the will that never was.  Little did I know that each and every one of them would prove a cow to find, across five counties.  Nathan gave me microfilm finger, Anna became Elizabeth, Sarah had the same name as her step-sister, while Carrie never married her husband.  And Ellen, I eventually found, had married as Sarah Ellen and moved to Lancashire.  When I saw this census entry I knew I'd got her.  Born in Matlock orphaned at 16, her father took the family away from that town's helpful records to Bollington where she disappeared.  Until now.  Thanks to the Atherton records at the online parish clerk, the Davies next generation haven't been too painful to follow up.  Census image: Crown copyright

Omitted from this account is my method. Well, I wasn't really convinced that Ellen might have died between the censuses. I went through all the Ellens born in Starkholmes, before spotting the Starkholmes reference in the above census. The name Esther clinched it as it was her mother, mother of the brood of nine.

Finding lost cousins: the power of the internet

This second post is in response to Peter Calver's posting on Lost Cousins.com.

I fully endorse the importance of contacting living relatives against the impotence of transcribing public records which have already been indexed.

The one-stop shop for me to locate distant cousins is 192.com. I have been happily using this site for years. I recently traced a relative to the Sevenoaks postal area. The address format was House name, road name, village name, town name (Sevenoaks). It didn't take long to establish the cousin lived in London Road, West Kingsdown. I then had dozens of relevant postcodes to try followed by ten or more possible house names, but I got there. Many times people opt out of the electoral roll but the phone book reveals they're still at their 2002 address, or nearby. I do a cross check to ensure that the phone book entry doesn't refer to another family listed elsewhere on the roll.

In the good old days 192 would serve up the full postcode if you just guessed the first three components e.g. TW10 8. Also you could guess place names by their format try this one XX. XXXX-XX-XXX, XXXX. But that wasn't ideal as in those days the postal area and county were not shown, so it could be a long hunt.

A later bug on 192.com meant you could copy and paste the concealed address into Notepad and the full latitude and longitude of the address would appear. That was an early Christmas present from the company.

I still use the site and have two useful tips for family history searchers:

1) In some browsers you are not restricted on the number of searches you can make. This helps when you are trying to find someone but have limited information.

2) That by monitoring where your cousin appears in the ranked list of results, and having a local streetmap at your side you can work out in which cluster of streets your relative lives, with just a few searches. I use Proviser to get all roadnames from a given postcode prefix.

I have heard back from a woman in New Zealand who has overcome disability to secure paid work for herself (a true heroine). She was shocked and excited to learn she had family in England, and we can now put her in touch with her uncle here thanks to these four sites:

a) Genes Reunited for helping me find Ellen, born 1852 in Buxton, grandmother of the two siblings. Very hard to find because she married four times nowhere near her birthplace.
b) 192.com for providing the address of the uncle's daughter in Cheshire at no cost
c) NZ government for the death cert for the long lost sister, who had married in that country
d) Google for an address for the niece in North Island

So get in touch with your cousins today!

A photographic haul at the station

Very excited as just come back from trip to cousin in Devon with large haul of 500 digital images- photos, postcards, documents, letters. It is pretty comprehensive for my Carlines and Aireys, who were Northcountry folk, while our component branch rested for the main part in North London. There were some oddities - my grandmother turns out to have been baptised at the church where I have for the last two years helped run a Cub Scout Pack. My small cousins are evidently at school in a very lovely setting in Dorset which I know intimately from having walked around it with my sister on our 'early morning runs'. Kath Davies writes a letter of condolence to her aunt on the death of her uncle. Kath's last remaining child died a week ago, (74 years later). Kath could never have written that letter of condolence.

Finally there is a photograph for grandma's grandma Ellen Carline, and she is sitting in her chair to boot - was the photograph thus taken at home? I have seen the chair, a Windsor, much more comfortable than it looks. Ellen looks a stoic as well she might having seen off an alcoholic husband yet provided so fully for her children that her estate was not finally resolved until 1976, three-quarters of a century after her demise, and around the time of my own birth. I was further able to compare her photograph with that of her cousin W B Hannan, the Jamaican farmer, and I was pleased to report a significant similarity. Their cousin 'H E C' sends a postcard of the Eyam Plague memorial service of 1902 with a pinhole through the likeness of herself and her (deceased) husband. Having scanned in the image, I'm now not sure where the pinhole was.

Another postcard begins with the words 'Dear Cousin' and is signed E Turner, of Woodseats, Sheffield 1911. It may be that the word 'cousin' is my fevered imagination, but I'd like to yet think that Mrs Turner might prove to be a granddaughter perhaps of John Bagshaw, needle grinder of Sheffield - Ellen's uncle (update: unfevered and corroborated).  It's most pleasant to have this deluge of information from the past, though I'm sanguine that it may be the last for a little while.

Glossop folks

Glossop folks
I started out with 13 Bagshaw siblings – now I’ve run them all to ground except one who was yet unmarried at 46, so I’m not too worried about her – but where did she go I wonder!
The children were: John, William, Mary Ann, Edmund, Sarah, Ann, Ellen, Mary, Millicent, Hannah, Elizabeth Jane, Edmund, Joseph Nathaniel
DIED YOUNG
Mary Ann – not living in 1841
Edmund – not living in 1841
Edmund – not living in 1841
Joseph Nathaniel – confirmed by deaths index for 1840
We know that nine children were living in 1843 from their father’s will and we know that these must be: John, Ann (from gravestones), Sarah, Mary, Millicent, Hannah, Elizabeth Jane from the 1851 census. William and Ellen were still alive in 1841 living respectively with their parents, and sister Ann. This does not prove that they were still alive in 1843 (and thus two of the nine), but we now know this to be the case anyway.
GRAVESTONES
John – buried with his parents, date of death given as 1855 which ties him in as husband to Tabitha Handley and needle grinder in Sheffield. Also his youngest sister Jane was living with him there age 10. Died before his mother
Ann – buried with her parents, given as wife of Hugh Carr, who’d married at Bakewell in 1839. Died 1859, before her mother. Thanks very much to wishful-thinking.org.uk for getting my started with these siblings.
CENSUS
Ellen – found in 1861 census as Ellen Hannan in Birmingham. Subsequently found her marriage and a remarriage both in that city, and the full story including her move to Stoke-on-Trent, where the majority of her descendants still live. She named two children after her parents and her father’s occupation as miner is given on her marriage. Died 1878.
Mary – had a daughter Hannah Berresford who appears as niece in the 1881 census with her aunt Hannah. Tracking back to the 1871 census we guessed that her mother was Mary Bagshaw and we then found Mary’s marriage in 1866 in Sheffield which proved this. Mary was then 42, and had already had a son out of wedlock many years earlier. Died 1873.
MARRIAGE RECORDS
Hannah – (died 1901)
Jane – found their double marriage (at Eyam) in 1861, the year after their mother’s death. We then found them in the census and could see Jane had many daughters – one (Hannah) became the wife of one of the Carrs, linking the two families together further. Died 1916 – having survived many of the next generation. She lived in Slatelands Road, Glossop, hence the subject of this post.
PROBATE
William – the last to be run to ground, William. We found the record of his probate entry on Ancestry, conducting a probate index search for Bagshaws in Derbyshire. This document not only proves his death details (in 1848 in New York State), but links him firmly with his Eyam origins, and identifies him as the father of Elizabeth Bagshaw Benson. Finally it provides a current address for her mother twenty years later, under her new married name. Died before his mother.
LASTLY
My own great-great-great-grandmother, Millicent, who died 1881. We knew what happened to her.

GLOSSOP
This was the home of Elizabeth Jane Bagshaw, who had four married daughters. Of the three surviving, only Ann lived in Glossop. Ann’s grandson still live on High Street West.
Millicent Carr (daughter of Ann) had several children born in Glossop, and one of them (Robert Knott) married Eveline Jane Higginbottom in 1911.
Christine Margaret, a descendant through various Margarets and Ellens, from Ellen Bagshaw, has moved back to Brassington, Derbyshire from her native Stoke-on-Trent.

Finding Edward Jones

I've had some luck with my Bagshaw Carr connection. T G Carr left a will in 1919 naming lots of known relatives and a couple of new ones, particularly one, nephew 'Edward Jones', who had been plaguing me ever since this will arrived in the mail. I have finally found Edward. It turns out T G's eldest sister Martha Ann was the responsible party. The 1881 census for Liverpool makes it all look so easy, provided you knew what you were looking for. Martha A Jones is listed, with a son Edward, plus some daughters too. Her birthplace, Eyam, and age given match also. Still without specifically looking for her as Jones in this particular census you would have come a cropper. She married in Sheffield in 1862 and then remarried at Bootle in 1877 finally becoming the much needed Mrs Jones. I would like to acknowledge Lancashire bmd for hurtling me down this genealogical bobsleigh. I asked it which Carrs had married a Jones and it thoughtfully provided the Bootle 1877 couple listing Martha as both Healey, a corruption of her first married name, and Carr, her well beloved maiden name. I've found a Jones child, Erminie, wife of Harold Robert Butler. I plan now to run Edward to earth despite his fiendishly common, or in Heirhunters parlance,'bad', last name.

I have now found Edward's baptism and marriage and made a dangerous assumption that he had a son lately living in the Wirral, bp: 26 Oct 1879 St Martin in the Fields Liverpool; marr: 23 Jun 1901 St Athanasius Kirkdale, Liverpool.  I will now get the will of his sister which would struggle to add to the recent haul.

Update: the sister's will and existence confuses everything. Her heiress Ilene is upset at the illegitimacy involved. A third sister's existence in Manchester is stated and proving hard to iron out. Edward Jones, our original man, got his son through Wharton and lived to see his super-feminist granddaughter Barbara G Jones (Walker) born.