Jamestown Pearls

Main Street, Jamestown NY 1914, from Wikipedia

The full story is now pieced together so tight I can nearly tell what great-uncle William had for breakfast.  The day he set sail with new wife Anna for a new home in the States.

We know he was 70 years 4 months and 2 days old*, when he died, on 1 August* in the year 1921.  Had he lived a mite longer, he would have overlapped with his niece's baby, my grandmother, born in October.  It mightn't've made any difference, as he only appears once on our family's tree and in other places is just a question-mark, or not even mentioned at all.  In this family, by the time the 1920s rolled around, the sisters only had each other.

I had a strong genealogical certainty that the boy married at Garboldisham, Norfolk, was our missing William, just 21, even though none of the family were there - his father's occupation was wrong, and we'd never heard of his wife.  And neither had the family history databases - the couple clean got away.

After eliminating a tonne of William and Annas in England, I turned to the States, to find there was only ONE couple that fitted - in Jamestown, New York.  Everything fitted, except for Anna's age - but after her husband's death she regained the lost 8 years, perhaps she'd never told him?  Some years later Michael Crick of Salamanca, NY, contacted me through his cousin and it turned out had done a shed-load of work on this family - certificates, burial records, newspaper cuttings, the lot.  Anna was not the first in the US - her uncle Josiah* had come out thirty or more years before.

William's mother died in March 1869 and his father remarried later that same year.  His father's wife was unpopular and he himself was also deaf, so in my view was squeezed out of the picture.  The eldest girl married at 18 the next year, and William days after turning 21.  His bride being some seven years older would have upset the family, though it was an exact mirror of his parents' situation 20 years earlier.  His uncle John Lain had left the Smiths a lot of money - specifically with instructions that William's father couldn't touch it.

It's my belief that William's determination, Anna's bravery, his mother's money and his father's indifference brewed the cocktail to 'push' the Smiths out of the UK.  In addition Jamestown was crying out for carpenters - it becoming furniture capital of the world, and Anna's uncle was there with family ready to welcome the young couple.

I knew none of this when I started reading the letters of William's sister Ellen.  Not a mention is there of this brother, to whom she must once have been close.  More emerges - his only son died a year before him; he was one of the 800 passengers all rescued when their steamer the SS Oregon sank off Island, New York in 1886 on a mild March morning, on its way BACK from Liverpool.  Had he made his final visit back home?  Who did he see?  I presume this event put him off further travel and contact with him.  This gem must have made its way to us from the Jamestown newspapers.

I can compare the photo of smiling Victoria Smith (looking more like an Alice) with that of her non-smiling aunt Ellen - who terrified her young granddaughter, and who presided over family events despite her supposedly lowly status as a widow.

Ellen may never have mentioned her brother, but she did mention her almost royal birth at Mulbarton Old Hall in Norfolk, which kept generations of family wowed about her roots.  But Ellen's brother did mention her.  In his obituary (1921) his wife makes plain that he had a brother and 3 sisters in England, and as that was the truth, there was not a thing Ellen or the others could do to unprint it.

For those struggling to place Jamestown NY, I append a link with great description of its somewhat isolated location, its weather and its cultural burden.

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.

The exclusion of the sisterhood

When Ellen Smith married at the pretty, remote, church of St Lawrence in 1874, it was pretty final.  She kept in touch with her sisters, who fled the area around the same time, and whose holiday snap at Clacton ten years earlier tells of the closeness between them.

But the address book slammed shut on the others.  The death of Mrs Smith in 1867 had been followed by an unpopular marriage of the father.  One-by-one the three girls left their former home and for them it never became their home again.  The eldest girl made rapid vows at 18 as did the boy a year later, who not only married an older lady but apparently emigrated too.  There remains a shadow over the character of the father, Henry, and his role within the family.

The dust had long settled by the 1920s when Ellen was living in some comfort in North London and penning a letter to her very pregnant daughter and musing on old times.  From now on, all that mattered were her husband children and family plus of course those dear sisters.  The editing pen had been viciously active over the Smith family and we didn't get the full picture for many years.
*

1986 and I get a Smith family tree through the post - well it was for Ellen's family by marriage but the Smiths got a mention.  I can't figure out the hand - my uncle, his mother?  On it the sisters feature of course but not so much the brothers.  One version has an enigmatic '?' while another puts the boy's name down, William.

This family were great at deleting people they didn't want to remember, or claimed not to remember.  Yes let's remember the happy 1920s Christmases at the house in Muswell Hill with nice tidy children and Edwardian elegance.  But what about a few miles down the road?

Arthur Smith, the brother-who-never-was, had produced 12 children and now grandchildren who weren't bank managers and couldn't always find work and were not so well-off but did alright - in Bermondsey.

Did Ellen fear a door-knock and her ancient Suffolk past catching up with her.  Not one brother, but TWO elided from the tree.  And then her nephew's children going into care as well.  No wonder she repressed a gasp in 1921 when she opened the door and out stood her niece, Miss Daisy Skinner looking quite confident in the autumn cool.  For a moment Ellen wondered what the lady wanted.  She was ready to close the door.  But Miss Daisy had done alright.  She was getting herself together.  While Daisy may genuinely have been fond of this uptight old aunt, there was a business perspective to her visit.  Who knows how she'd spent her twenties - dancing, clerical work, or dressmaking - but she was now about to buy a little hotel by the sea, and family members would be useful income for her.

Whew.  Ellen allowed her grip to unravel from the newel post of the staircase at the house in Hornsey.  It hadn't been her brothers' family.  It was only Sophy's girl.  She'd been married over 40 years and still the inconvenience of her brothers and father bothered her.  What had William been doing in America, was he going to come back?  Arthur had broken a gasworks strike and subsequently done a runner.  He wouldn't be back, but his family - could find her at any time.

~

Suspicion clouded her mind but not a whisper of this reached her daughter.  The ability to compartmentalise the story is extraordinary.  Ellen remained fond of her sisters, and even went down to Bexhill to see them at Daisy's hotel, exactly as Miss Skinner had forecast.  She loved the place of her birth - the Old Hall at Mulbarton and several times she would speak of it, in the happy years before she lost her mother.  Even my own grandfather knew the family only as 'blue-blooded' and 'from the Hall'.

This is a peculiarly Victorian story.  The rise from solid working-class to middle-class was a precarious one for the rider.  Whilst the wife of a Methodist minister's position was fairly secure, she had duties to educate her children and ensure they made the right choices in life.  Knowledge of close family members who were not known to have made this rise would have been most alarming to her.  The advent of opportunities for wide travel - leaving not only the county (Norfolk) but the country (England) could split up even the closest of familial bonds.  Add into the mix, a disrupted childhood (death of mother, move to another isolated rural community, growing deafness of father and finally his remarriage), the importance of status or money over family and increasing mobility and the ground was set for divorce.

Ellen protected herself and her family and ironically was similar to her runaway brother in prizing everything more highly than her family of origin.  I feel she could have been closer as a mature married woman, to her brother in America, but the opportunity wouldn't have arisen.

The father Henry's paralysing deafness was the lynchpin that failed to link the family together.  His siblings were close - Richard, Harriet and the children of Sarah were still in touch into the twentieth century and did what they could for Henry.  Can anything sinister be read into his daughters' turning their back on him?  The uncle at Mulbarton had been quite specific that his wealth should go to Henry's *wife* and not to him, but this was standard practice for clued-up testators.

Another mystery is the photograph of Clacton-on-sea from, I thought, 1860, when the town wasn't founded till 1871 and railway line didn't get there till late 1860s.

Britons in Africa

Africa United was a great movie.  I seem to remember getting pressurised to watch it while somewhere really unexpected like the University of London students' union or a socialist demonstration, or possibly strolling through Mayfair.  We need to be united in our search for records in Africa.

Britons in Africa is now online.  It is a showcase database, enabling people to be surprised at finding one of their folks on the great unexplored continent.  The Stirling Castle, Dublin Castle, Walmer Castle and a dozen other Union-Castle ships could get you to a new life in as little as 23 days.

However, until recently, those 23 days could see your descendants in England closing the door completely on your life, as no genealogical information was obtainable from South Africa, which became a Republic (after Afrikaaner-dominated voting) in 1961.

Now, on FamilySearch, Natal marriage records are online (to 1955) and Zimbabwe deaths, in a somewhat crude index up to the last days of Ian Smith.  It looks like the card indexes were hurled out on the table and rapidly photographed before possible destruction by the incoming government.  Who knows.  It's great to have them.

These new databases that allow us to follow our relatives around the world, should be applauded.

Clues from the cousins #2

It's very nice to get one's own detailed family tree back with a few amendments.  In the case of 87 year-old distant cousin Ted W, the additions were limited to a couple of pen strokes.

Next to Robert Boocock I'd optimistically put a ? in case there were any other siblings.  Ted just put a red line through that.  Nice and clear.

I nearly missed it but under his uncle William Young, he'd put something.  It was definitely his writing and not his young nephew's.  It was the three letters ADA in capitals.  Well that was something, didn't know about her.  Also the digits 23.6.  I guessed this was Ada's birthdate - the 23rd of June.  Not much to go on - but a whole new unexpected family group to add to the tree.

Sure enough I checked the birth records and censuses and found William - with a completely different age and a very different wife from the one I expected.  I put Ada on the backburner, happy to have at least found a record of her birth on the banks of the Tyne (Northumberland).

Then I thought - I can't just abandon this information.  Surely a record of Ada's later life can be found?  I teased out information concerning all the Ada Youngs who married on the Tyne and one fitted the best.  The next challenge came for her daughter, listed as Dollie J (name slightly changed).  I might have used Findmypast's excellent marriage finder, but in this case I employed an alternative tack.  Looking for all the children with the right mother's maiden name born near the Tyne, I found only candidate that fitted and this led me to the missing marriage.  Now I have Ada's two children to write to, living not far at all from where there grandfather William Young was in the 1911 census.

Sadly Ada has now long been deceased, but she was remembered I'm guessing affectionately by her elderly cousin Ted, and it's time now to see if her children would like to know something of her family background after such a long gap.

Postscript: No Tynesider will be surprised to hear that Dollie knows Ted W, and is in touch as I am with Ted's nephew Dave.

Clues from the cousins #1

I write the letters, I enclose the trees, I post them off.  This takes at least a week.

I enjoy contacting new cousins, as they can tell me anything that I really ought to have known but which has slipped between the cracks of the records.

And so it was with Annie Whitehead.  She was well known to her nieces but completely missing from my clever-clever tree.  Turns out she was born before her parents' marriage as Catherine Ann Nevitt, and had two children herself around the same time her Dad was just finishing up his (2nd) family.  Dad was a railway platelayer in Abergele, on the Welsh coast.

How on earth was I supposed to find out what happened to her child, Catherine A Roberts, born 1920?  There are 18 of this name who marry in the 1940s.

Well, as luck would have it, a clue - the only clue, came in the form of the North Wales birth index.  This gave me Catherine's middle name of Amy.  Sadly, I concluded she was likely to have passed away so I checked the death indexes for the period 1969-2006 and just searched on the firstnames 'Catherine Amy' and the birth year of 1920.

Believe it or not, there is only one entry across the whole of England and Wales, in Suffolk.  Unusual, but an explanation came along.  It seems Catherine had married in Suffolk, 1945, and indeed that her mother, my original 'Annie', had died in Suffolk visiting her daughter when aged 60.  (This is very different from the, also true tale, that Annie had lived in rural North Wales.)

It was then fairly easy to locate Catherine's family in Suffolk and hopefully there is a grand story to be told.

Incidentally, this family at a stroke, knocks ten years off the previous record for oldest relative on my generation.  Five generations of producing children at 23 puts them nearly 60 years ahead of me - easily my oldest fifth cousins; sadly deceased even before my own birth.

Newspapers part 2 - man bored in Springfield

Take these snippets from GenealogyBank concerning my Richard Feltham ostensibly of Springfield, Ill., Dakota and Seattle, but really of Alaska:

Richard Feltham 1889 and bride Maggie Van Deren returned from bridal tour
letter from husband 1898... Klondike... frozen
daughter dies of typhoid 1907
wife sues for divorce 1909 remarries 1911
both move to Seattle to start a business there
husband dies in Alaska

We can add to this with the 344 words rescued from Google’s snippeting tool:
on a/c of ill-health had to go to the Klondike.. and chase buffalo across Dakota (for more)

I haven’t made up my mind if this is some kind of homosexual cover story or just a set of extremely unfortunate events followed by another set of unfortunate events that don’t really undo the first; or a typical story of a climber always away from home; or the male/female/Springfield divide.  Woman happy with husband doing well in Springfield.  Man bored of Springfield.

His great-nephew Homer White was not expected to have family as none appear in the censuses, yet his father’s obituary tells of Miss Josephine White prompting me to look a little deeper.  Sure enough he has a girl somewhere in Tennessee with his first wife – see the Tennessee Delayed Birth Records 1869-1909 and let me know where!

Newspapers part 1 - a burning tale

Farewell this week to free snippets from GenealogyBank.  They’d cottoned on to the fact that free snippets was maybe not the cleverest way of displaying newsprint.  Some of the articles are barely half-an-inch deep, so why pay to get more, when there wasn’t any more to be had?

Back in 2005 I learnt of the death most likely of Esther Symes (born 1817 Hornblotton) at a fire in her home in Ohio, some time in the 1840s.  This was reported fifty years later – come on, journalists! – at her husband’s own death, 1896.  (This in itself odd, as the widower had sired and lost a whole other family in the intervening decades.)  Genealogybank kindly filled in the gaps for me.  The Canton Repository writes: On the 2d inst. [2 Nov 1846] the house of Thomas Cook of Lordstown, Trumbull co. Ohio, was destroyed by fire, in the absence of Mr. Cook. His wife and family had got out, but the wife returned to the building to secure a pocket book &c. when it fell in and she perished.

That’s it.  No more to be had, but pretty useful.  Superfluous information such as the lady’s actual name can be had elsewhere.  A natty finger points to the entry just in case you miss a genuine news item amongst the accounts of turnip growing or whatever else occupies regional newspapers.  We can tease out that 2 Nov was a Monday, likely wash-day, so Esther would have a lot on her plate with the infant and 2 other children under 4 to keep busy.  Tragedy would strike as the boy was killed in the Civil War, while the infant was to herself die in childbirth.  Minnesota was exceptionally mild in that month with persistent south-easterly winds and no frosts – with the warmest weather overall for 85 years.  Might these facts explain our story in Ohio?