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.

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.

The Tuckingmill Hotel and the Return of Eliza

The Tucking Mill Hotel, March 1851

A new arrival
At the hotel in 1851, someone is about to arrive, my great-great-grandfather, who will be a bouncing baby boy, the only one to survive the depressing wet, cold and stony damp. Cursed from birth with the Hunter need to travel, and travel far, it's fitting that in these waiting months, a visitor should emerge bedraggled at the young publicans' door.

Enter Eliza
Eliza Hunter, the publican's sister. She is one of the great unsolved threads in our tapestry.  Even here she is casually tripped over, listed most unhelpfully as Elizabeth Richards, widow, age 25, but seemingly on hard times, and not expected to survive, I would imagine.

A dangerous hotel
We see her here as a widow, stopping over with her brother who had the Tuckingmill Hotel, presumably not long for this world. She coughed and sneezed, it was a lot colder than she had been used to. This same hotel would I'm afraid kill the next 2 Hunter children, and the family would quit its ornery ways by the end of the decade for Bogota, Columbia, to let their travel genes run free. Maybe Lady Luck will be kinder there (ha ha ha).  Eliza we must leave with her widowed weed's tramping her way to the workhouse. Perhaps.

Many years later, in a mining town far away
Twenty years later one of the family was finding his feet in the gold mining boom-town of Bendigo. A young lad called John Hunter. Having lost his father in Columbia (a trip that hadn't worked out so good), John was now doing quite well thank you very much, being on his way to management in a factory. The factory made fuses to help blast rock away in the mines. A young girl caught his eye, Miss P, a Cornishwoman. Wise move, as it was the mysterious Mrs P who got John up the ladder in the factory. It is now 1870, twenty years after the stranger arrives in the Hotel.

What's the story?
Wanting to lay Eliza to rest, I rummaged around to find how Eliza had became a widow in the first place. She had gone out to Adelaide at 22 and returned two years later. She had lost both husband and son out there in Oz. This was not fair. Her cousins Amelia and Cecilia, born the same year, had followed Eliza out to the the great continent under the sea.  These girls had over 95 grandchildren between them, scattered around the gold fields. Eliza did not. She was sent home early. Back to the Hotel. Rain had stopped play.

The End of Eliza?
Was Eliza really ready for the long walk to the workhouse age 25? Was life finished with her? Tin and copper were at rock-bottom prices. But even Thomas Hardy wouldn't send her to the chop. I'm not so sure she dies, does she?

Eliza's Decision
We look back at that census from 1851 with the dingy old hotel holding the family together. The brother was ready for Colombia. Eliza could watch her brother sail and then offer to house-keep for their grumpy father. She did not. She did not sit on her laurels and mope! She married again.

The moment the 1851 enumerator left the Hotel with a 'kerchief over his nose, Eliza made her approaches to the tin miner Perry. She needs to marry him immediately. Timing is very tight. Two girls are born here, Eliza (now Mrs Perry) gets back on the boat for Australia and is out of the country leaving no ripples by the time the 1861 census rolls around. Vanished! No trace!

Clues lying dormant for decades
I say no trace... but I was missing a clue. Someone had been watching me. It was in fact Eliza who turns out to be the mysterious Mrs P, John Hunter's benefactor in Bendigo. As Mrs Perry, she had produced Catherine Perry barely a year after the census. They sailed together to Australia in Eliza's second trip out there. When her nephew John Hunter came out, it was ELIZA who proved his fairy godmother. She knew he would be gladly gifted the factory to own and run, provided he had a wife, Kate Perry say?, a niece of the currently elderly owner.

Grrrr
Because Kate Perry had been born in England but after the census years, rather than in Victoria itself (where parents names are publically online), I had no idea she was the child of a Hunter.

What we missed
The Return of Eliza, a woman not to be written-off, was there in the records all along. But so hard to piece together, it took myself and great-great-grandson Brett Pierce to put our two halves of the story together. We worked out this incredible woman emigrated TWICE, to different states/territories of Australia to become one of its matriarches: like her two cousins Amelia and Cecilia, fellow women of 1825.

By match-making her daughter to a trusted individual, the in-law's factory would come to him (her own sons being too darn young to succeed), thus looking after her own old age. She was not getting dumped in Australia twice!

Just one example of a hardworking Cornish woman destined for Australia who would not give up until she had got the better life, and would not settle until her future and her family's, was provided for.

THE END
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Further notes: Eliza's later children were born in Australia, with her maiden name of Hunter clearly announced. But what Brett in Australia didn't know, was where Eliza came from, as of course details of her first marriage never reared their head second time around. He definitely didn't know she'd come out before.And what I didn't know in England, was that Eliza had had this second marriage at all, as guessing the name of a new man, and then further guessing that they had gone BACK to Australia, were all beyond my powers of imagination.  I was just sure she'd passed away, in England, leaving no trace, and no family. Eliza had eleven children all told and many descendants who are just learning of her double emigration.  Her fertility is not quite in the same league as her fellow 1825 cousins, whose descendants recently tipped the 1000 mark; but still quite respectable and matriarchal.  She was now based in Victoria and it was through her brother-in-law Charles Perry that our young orphan hero got the work in Perry's Fuse Factory, Bendigo. The main mystery left is where her mother, Mary Richards of Wendron came from and grandfather Hunter. Perhaps we can solve it someday. You can read more about the Fuse Factory here. I have downloaded a copy in case the link disappears over time, like a lot of mining ghost towns.

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This article appeared in November 2011.  The following month, a few weeks before his passing, my grandfather remembered something of the Tuckingmill Hotel from his own grandfather, born there in 1852 just a beat too late to know Eliza. I found myself travelling back 160 years to the clattering streets of Tuckingmill, and my grandfather and I across the table from each other as he described the room. At least I think he did, but tea was served and we moved on.