Independence Day, Far-off Bakers and Not being in Love: DNA hints at 1776 illegitimacy

Taking a virtual road trip to Pembrokeshire
Licking my wounds after DNA took a knife to my ambitions of Wirksworth ancestry and mostly ripped apart a cracking story, leaving elements of the family tree and lingering doubts...

...it was delightful to scamper through the lanes of Pembrokeshire this last weekend (or two), and frankly mop up, collecting a rather interesting corner of the family tree, and absolutely passing 'Go' on the way back.

Many folk are using cluster tools in DNA to prettily depict connections between various cousins. I must confess I tend to use right click and mouse to home in on any new bunch of names.

I thought it was time to look at the following cluster:
F. R. 21cM
Katherine O. 16cM
Teresa T. 24cM
Shirley G. 22cM
Stuart B. 23cM
Jennifer B. 21cM

ThruLines told me that F. R. was a descendant of John Francis 1817 but was very silent on the others. In theory then all the above folks ought to be related in some way shape or form to my Francises, from Pembrokeshire, being as John was born there, and his brother, my forebear William, too.

Teresa T.'s tree was quite brief, just naming her father, but that was enough to work out that Katherine O. was actually her sister. Both were raised in Utah and have a long pedigree there going back to early settlers, who feature in the buzzing Deseret News of 1862. Speaking of which I had no idea 'til just now that Nevada was formerly part of Utah Territory.

Introducing the James sisters
Shirley G.'s tree I had looked at before, and the way it stacked, I really liked her great-great-grandma, Eleanor Maria James, born in 1844, who was of known Pembrokeshire stock. That seemed to be the link. Poring over the rest of Shirley's tree, I am not seeing Pembrokeshire, or Wales, anywhere.

By the time I came to look at Teresa T. and Katherine O. a few months later, amnesia had set in, and I couldn't remember anything about this. I gaily homed in on THEIR great-great-grandma, Catharine Anne James, born in 1840. Now it would have paid me richly to have attempted to link her up with Eleanor, but of course I didn't do that. I had forgotten all about Eleanor. So I did the spadework the hard way.

Who was Catharine?
Catharine was helpfully listed on all trees everywhere as 'born in Wales'. Yes, well thanks. She had married 'aged about 12' because she needed to be ready to have her first child at 15 to fit the records. Clearly that was all hokum, and her first child, it seems, was a stepchild. She actually married at 20, was out of the country barely a year later, had her own firstborn at St Louis, before crossing the plains and somehow making the famed Deseret News as an arrival in 1862 [tbc]. She would be widowed 7 years later, and yet 6 children would arrive (tbc) before death welcomed her not long later.

It was kind of irritating that no-one had bothered to investigate Catharine. Homing in on her marriage, in Merthyr Tydfil registration district in 1860, we can see that the marriage licenses are on FamilySearch but no way of viewing them short of breaking into a library (discouraged), so the marriage cert. is on order. We next examine ALL those girls named Catharine James who are aged 11 in the 1851 Welsh census for the registration district of Merthyr Tydfil. Just the one:

Catharine A. James, 11, born in 'Harfordwest', Pembrokeshire, employed as a nurse.

Catharine will of course prove to be a sister of Eleanor, and proof comes in the form of their brother, Orson James's obituary, which names Catharine's only surviving child as his next-of-kin.

Funeral services for Orson Franklin James [1852-1926], age 73, who died Wednesday morning at 8 o'clock of ailments incident to old age, at the home of his niece, Mrs. William Baty, were held at the Harper ward chapel at two oclock this afternoon under the direction of Bishop Henry Yates. Following the services, the body was interred in the Brigham City cemetery. Mr. James was born September 17, 1852, in Ayreshire [Aberdare], Glamorganshire, Wales. He emigrated to Utah in 1861, settling at Centerville. Later he moved to Kelton and engaged in ranching and cattle raising. For thirty-five years he had his home at Warren, Idaho, where he followed prospecting and mining. He has resided at Harper during the past two years. Mr James spent a number of years in early days freighting from Corinne into Montana and the northwest. When a young man, he drove a team back to Missouri to assist emigrants n-route to Utah. He passed through the experiences of early pioneer life in Utah and Idaho, and was an Indian war veteran. Mr. James never married, and is survived only by his niece, Mrs Wm. Baty of Harper. From: The Box Elder News; April 16, 1926 (via The Salt Lake Tribune; April 15, 1926)

All eyes are now on the parents of Catharine and Eleanor, John James, labourer and his wife, Maria James (nee Llewhellin). Surely they must be the connection to my family, and the Francis DNA matches, but how?

First, we dispense with the notion that it was the husbands of the two sisters who were the link, being perhaps cousins of each other (this has happened to me before), Eleanor's husband is allegedly from Anglesey, while Daniel is not seemingly from Pembrokeshire. I am taking this a little on trust, but rebuilding all the half-baked trees from unverifiable sources, and I can see 109 of them, is rather out of my scope. For now.

Let's also remind ourselves that the sisters are from Haverfordwest, which is the Francis family stronghold, so we shall not look this genealogical gift-horse in the mouth any longer.

Who's Zooming Who?

We cannot quite click a link to see our 'early modern' forebears in their own homes, which would be awfully helpful. Instead, by genealogical brute-force we have learnt that 6th cousin Stuart B. and his sister Jennifer B. both descend from Elizabeth Francis (1786), sister of our Thomas. Let's immediately eliminate half the possible pain, then, by declaring the James sisters to be relatives of 4xgreat-grandfather Thomas Francis (1783) and not of his wife (a coastal girl). 

Illegitimacy in Haverfordwest

Vision of Britain's data shows Haverfordwest had a higher illegitimacy rate than the national average before WW2 (tumbling thereafter until the 1970s). The University of Cambridge's Populations Past has got this rather startling map which it dates as '1851'. Haverfordwest is the south-western hub of illegitimacy at this point, and I would not be at all surprised if one street 'The Quay' was particularly responsible.

I would like to compare illegitimacy with endogamy as I suspect they are inversely related. This article may yet prove useful: English rural societies and geographical marital endogamy, 1700–1837.

Here is a summary of relationships:
The ladies in Utah descend from Catharine and Eleanor.

The death of John James

John James is cited as dying on the waggon trail, pushing a handcart in the winter of 1856. Of course this was not the case at all, he arrived in Utah in some comfort six years later. He is cited as being the son of Samuel James and Margaret Thomas and this we suspect is true. The names are not leading us anywhere near the Francises, however.

Could Samuel or Margaret be a cousin of my 4xgreat-grandfather?

This is unlikely as this would make the two ladies my seventh cousins, and we would not expect to see them sharing 22 cM with me, if they were related to me (as we suspect) through just the one route. We think that Teresa T. and Shirley G. are unlikely to be more remote than my half-sixth cousins as they share upwards of 22 centimorgans, and I am ruling out that they were related in multiple ways based on their family trees which show only one known Welsh line. It would be handy to know how much DNA the two ladies share, to corroborate this.

Could Samuel or Margaret be half-kin to my 4xgreat-grandfather?

This is not impossible. Margaret was from 'Llandeney' which appears to be a some distance from Haverfordwest and in the wrong direction from our stronghold (Wiston). Samuel James was from Uzmaston, and 'late a farmer' suggesting he inherited land. As you can tell I am not favouring this hypothesis, particularly given that none of Samuel's extensive descendants in Pembrokeshire match my DNA, although admittedly these descendants all come down from one child, Catherine Laurence (inn-keeper), who may simply not share DNA with me. It is also a pity that we lack both Samuel and Margaret's baptisms.

Could Margaret have given birth to John James out of wedlock?

We lack John James's baptism. His putative parents, Samuel and Margaret do have a child named Catherine (as does John) and their youngest child's baptism in an independent chapel reveals Margaret's maiden name. John himself calls his first son, Samuel. Records from descendants in Utah list John's parents' names, but we do not know the source yet of this. If Margaret had John out of Wedlock, Thomas Francis senior was then in his 50s (not impossible) whilst Thomas Francis junior was just 20. It all seems a bit unlikely, but apologies for not dwelling on this in more depth.

So, for now, we present the 'death' of John James as a candidate. We have a better one.

The baker's daughter

Maria Llewhellin, wife of John James, mother of Catharine, Eleanor, Samuel, Orson and others, is destined to have quite a life. 'May you live in interesting times', runs the ancient Chinese curse. She is baptised in 1814 at Haverfordwest St Mary, daughter of Thomas and Frances Llewhellin (nee Owens), and appears to be their only surviving child. She is orphaned at 14, and is possibly cared for by an older sibling (before their apparent death), and has an illegitimate child herself age 19, possibly in Northumberland. By the age of 23 she is married to John James, although the marriage record has of course not yet appeared.

In her 30s, she and John move along the coast to Aberdare, Glamorganshire. If this move seems dramatic wait till what's next. John is a labourer, most probably at the ironworks. By age 58 he is just a gardener and the ironworks are on the wane. At some point they must have joined the Mormon Church. If I look at the book Pioneers and prominent men of Utah, I can see two people from Aberdare and five from Merthyr, but I do not yet know much about the LDS activities in the area.

In 1862 John James, wife Maria, and their children arrive in Utah, as per the Deseret News roster of immigrants, published September of that year. Maria may well have continued on until 1891, age 78, but the source for that is shrouded in copies of typed copies of copies of copies. We need to go back to her parents.

The baker

Maria Llewhellin was baptised on 15 March 1814 and was born on 13 March 1813 according to (copies of typed copies of copies of copies). Her father, Thomas Llewhellin was baker in Quay Street (likely not the best part of town) and her mother, Frances Llewhellin, well is unknown.

Could Maria be an illegitimate child of Thomas Francis (1783) by now settled miles away the other side of town on the coast? I think that question just got answered. Although T. Llewhellin the 'father' was elderly, I think he'd have noticed a fisherman from the coast visiting a far-off baker (his good self) and spending too much time with the baker's wife and sent them packing. We'll instead assume Maria was born in wedlock, her father being 48 and her mother 47, well at least according to the burial registers of 1826 (age 60) and 1828 (age 61), respectively.

Thomas Llewhellin (c. 1766) is hardly likely to be a half-brother of Thomas Francis (1783) but I am ready to believe anything at this point.

Frances Llewhellin (nee Owens) (c. 1767) is not recorded at all, beyond the marriage and burial, and therefore I cannot confirm if she's a half-sister of Thomas Francis (1783) either. Remember, I am saying that they 'cannot' be any more remotely connected to us, e.g. cousins of Thomas, as that would mean our lovely Utah ladies are 7th cousins, which the centimorgans don't seem to indicate. (Although anything is possible, as cited ad nauseum throughout!)

What about if Frances Llewhellin (nee Owens) was not born in 1767 at all! We can then turn our eyes carefully to the following baptismal record in Haverfordwest, which at the very least requires our attention:

Mary Frances Owen baptised 14 Sep 1776 Haverfordwest St Mary daughter of Mary Owen

She's illegitimate. Is it possible that the age on Frances's burial record is wrong, out by ten years. It would mean a bit of a change in her biographical tale, meaning she's 38 (not 38) at the birth of her youngest child. And married at 25 (not 35), to a much older man, which frankly would befit her circumstances as an illegitimate child. We're invited to believe she was known as 'Frances', which is not a particularly rare name in the town. There's no other trace of Mary Frances Owen under this name, suggesting we might be on to something.

State of Independence

American Independence Day is going to help us here. Frances's daughter, or Frances herself, may not have known her exact age, but she would definitely have known she was born a few months after American Independence (2 July 1776). The humble clerk then gets out his cold tired hands (it was a week before Christmas of 1828) and attempts to start with seven and take off the two, or should he start with the 100 and take off the seventy-six, and add back the twenty-eight after? He comes up with an age at death of 61, exactly ten years (and a twelvemonth) out. Near enough!

So WHO could be the father of Mary Frances Owen, if she became Frances Llewellyn? How about Thomas FRANCIS (c. 1750) who is based six miles out of town at Wiston, does not marry for five years (fingers burnt?) and generally keeps out of Haverfordwest from here on in. This would make Frances (as she was known) a half-sister to our Thomas Francis (1783) and to Elizabeth Francis (1786) and thus account for the 21-or-so centimorgans that their descendants appear to share.

Not in Love

Discussing the family set-up with close relatives, I wondered why Thomas Francis senior never married Mary Owen. We've seen the high level of illegitimacy in the town in the 1851 era and no reason to think it would be vastly different in 1776. Not all the illegitimacies in the parish registers show people in the poor-house, and there's work to do on finding out varying levels of Workhouse admissions for children around the country (relative to population). I would imagine families stretched their hearts, minds and rooms to incorporate an extra mouth to feed.

I think Mary Owen and Thomas Francis were asked by their families, are you 'in love': will you marry? They were not, and did not. The lack of contraception must have meant families could not afford to be sanctimonious and I doubt the churches were particularly dominant in promoting fire and brimstone in 1770s Pembrokeshire. With all the comings and goings from Ireland, Devonshire and along the coast, too many sailors and single folk would muddy the waters. Not to mention the heady feeling of walking through Haverfordwest Town on a Friday night.

Leaving Pembrokeshire

When Frances Owen married, the witnesses were two ladies who appear in the records without other trace 'Elizabeth Garnett, Mary Jermin', together with John Perkins. We hope that all three ladies avoided the workhouse. We also hope that some residual connection was kept, beyond the DNA, with the half-brother and his family out on the coast. For when Thomas Francis (1783) came to the great wen, Merthyr Tydfil, in the 1830s, it was Maria (seemingly now his half-niece) who followed ten years later to nearby Aberdare.

But we will need to read and absorb the following work to see just how common, or not, moves from rural Pembrokeshire were to the new industrial centres of mid-Glamorgan: John L. Williams, 'The move from the land', in Trevor Herbert and Gareth Elwyn Jones (eds), Wales 1880–1914 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1988), 30.

In the meantime, we now have some good reasons to visit Pembrokeshire. I do not want the experience however, of John Jenkins, of Llangym, who at half-four on a January morning [1830s] took a lighter (vessel) from The Quay, Haverfordwest, belonging to another, contemporaneous, Mrs Thomas Llewhellin (not ours), and who fell overboard on his way home half a mile from town (source: local newspapers).

We await more developments, but frankly, or perhaps Francisly, this is enough for now.

Mitochondrial DNA and finding a cousin

Serendipity has struck and we have found a cousin.... It helps that due to some time-lags, they are the same generation as my late grandmother (who was born 1905), though considerably younger. Thus there are fewer generations to leap back to the MRCA (most recent common ancestor). This is not important genetically, but just simply in terms of getting the story across. The mutual forebear is Hannah Doxey (b. 1750), entirely in the female line, and thanks to three coincidences, this was also the name of our cousin's grandmother, so not such an alien name as it might have been. In fact, not alien at all!

There are three reasons how this serendiptous naming has happened:
Reason 1) Hannah's daughter married back into the Doxey name, having married a first cousin.
Reason 2) Our cousin was illegitimate, and thus brought up by grandparents, which brings the older folk to the fore, baby Hannah being given the name of her grandmother's mother.
Reason 3) The aforementioned time lags which reduce the number of generations we need to get from 1750 to now.

We look forward to the testing results in due course, and to learning more about Hannah Doxey and her family. (She was evicted from her childhood home, Wirksworth, Derbyshire, in 1786, and this resulted in three deaths in the family that year. We will contend that the eldest daughter then 12, eloped, ran away, five years later. Which DNA will prove.)

#TheGirlFromWirksworth

Grandfather's grandfather's grandmother

It occurred to me, that there should be dozens of these in the family tree, but of course adding them up there's just eight. I have three, partly as there is a cousin marriage which consumes the fourth; and then as on the paternal side we can't quite go back that far. Two of the three are Welsh, and two are called Margaret: Rebecca Phillips b. 1780, Margaret Evans b. 1792 (a twin), Margaret Trewhella b. 1784.

Paternal grandmothers' paternal grandmothers are interesting if you look at x-dna. This gets passed on - intact? via son to paternal granddaughter. I need to do some more reading around this.

The one thing I won't comment on too much is y-dna as this doesn't seem very interesting to me at all... Apologies!

Coefficient of grandparents

I'll start by saying this is not really a coefficient, which implies multiplying and producing a figure between 0 and 1, but rather, involves adding. Much easier.

My grandparents have the figure of 88. Why? Because they died when I was respectively 2, 12, 34 and 40, which adds up to 88. In other words I had 88 years' worth of grandparents, while I was alive.

An interesting contrast is the figure for my great aunt Hilda (name slightly changed). Her figure is extremely low, in fact possibly as low as the figure can ever be. It is MINUS 80. Her grandparents died 2, 15, 28 and 35 years before she was born. This came about for two reasons: firstly that she was the youngest grandchild born when both parents were well on in their forties (and both parents had lots of older siblings as well); secondly the grandparents (who would all have been at least in their eighties) were from a different generation and all suffered some form of childhood loss, or in one case extreme poverty.

When I think of my meeting with aunt Hilda (born 1916), I cannot believe her grandparents belonged to such an early epoch, for instance
* her grandmother was orphaned in 1844 (and the wrong side of the Pennines to boot)
* her grandmother features in the will of Lancelot Gibson (b. 1785), who flourished as estate manager in northern Northumberland in another era
* her grandfather, a bit of a charmer, was the cause of Joseph Carline re-writing his will in 1856 (although this will never went to probate)
* her grandmother died only a hundred years after her great-great-great-grandfather, John Brasier, who kept rabbits at Checkhill Common, Kinver passed away in the 1790s
* when her grandmother was orphaned, in 1844, and brought back across the Pennines, her Scottish great-grandmother was then still living (but where was she from?)
* when her eldest grandparent was born, George IV was still on the throne (whose great-uncle was tutored by Edmond Halley that 'invented' Halley's Comet)
* her grandfather was the result of the marriage of the children of two brothers from a hat-making family in Derbyshire, born in the 1780s. One, careful, organised and wealthy. The other, disorganised, dissolute and poor.
* her grandmother, whose illegitimate birth has caused me much consternation, allegedly sat in 'that chair over there'

I would be interested to hear if her record of 'coefficient of grandparents' can easily be matched.

From one Overlord to another, a-ha: How Ancestry ThruLines confirmed a 5xgreat-grandfather

I was going to write 'Ogre' but neither of our two Overlords were ogres. They were powerful enough, and their underlings too well schooled to argue with them, that they had no requirement to be nasty. Thanks to ThruLines I know I descend from one of them.

The First Overlord (West of the Pennines)

Joseph Moses (b. 1743) had two orphan daughters by his first wife (a cousin), namely, Mary and Hannah. Then his second wife brought him three lovely lasses, Elizabeth, Jenny and Margaret. The families of both wives were elided, and wherever Grandpa Moses went, some sons, daughters and grandchildren followed in light formation. (The above portrait is not Joseph, but his brother, Christopher, which nonetheless gives an idea about him.) The family lived at Huddlesceugh near Renwick on the west side of the Pennine Hills, somewhere in Cumberland. Joseph would have been an astute, respected, farmer and businessman who knew his own mind.

Joseph's Daughters
Jenny was particularly in the thrall of her father. She'd rebelled as a child and begun a romantic relationship with the penniless gardener, W. Dodd. They "eloped" in 1808, were forced to marry and in effect became tied to the family farm while Joseph still lived. Which he did: for a very long time.

Meanwhile, Margaret and Elizabeth had married well, to an Excise Officer and a medium landowner respectively. Mary and Hannah had married also, rather cautiously: Mary to a well connected local farmer, and Hannah (in 1797) to the widowed Mr Watson of Scalehouses, which will link, in a moment, to our genetic story.

Scalehouses backs right on to the Pennines with some sheep land rising to 2500 ft. The farm house is a decent size, white-painted, black-timbered, not overly tall and surrounded by its own land. The Watsons had long lived there but our Hannah made the place her own. She planted sycamore trees in the garden, which for all I know are still there.

The Moses men come out in force to witness these careful marriages. There's upwards of five witnesses. I don't know if this is a Northcountry trend, but the bevy of witnesses makes the point that the marriage is a significant family event. Notice this excerpt from a letter, which contains a rather throw-away comment about the daughters.

The Second Overlord (east of the Pennines)
Elizabeth, one of the wiser sisters, had a new brother-in-law, the powerful and influential Rev'd Christopher Bird, vicar of Chollerton, across the Pennines into Northumberland. He will be our second Overlord. When trouble strikes, it is to the Rev'd Mr Bird that the family will go.

Death of Joseph
Joseph Moses eventually died in 1833 at Morland Hall Farm, which he had presumably been renting, in the parish of Morland, near Penrith. He was 90.

Crossing into Bird territory
Jenny Dodd, her husband William, their younger children could all now pack their bags and escape. Frankly they had little choice. The Overlord had died and they were now at the mercy of the new Overlord, C. Bird.

So in 1833 the Dodds crossed the Pennines to Chollerton, where their eldest daughter was already living. Dodd found work as estate agent in Allendale (for Mr Bird). Their daughter Jane soon married the son of Mr Bird's bailiff, Johnny Gibson, although he was not her first choice, according to very well-informed petrified family gossip.

Daughter Jane Dodd (Gibson) is immortalised in our family as "Granny from Old Town". Despite being born back in 1814 in the wilds of Cumberland, she made an impression on a great-grandchild and so has "survived" into our epoch.

There are further twists and turns. My line, from Jenny Moses (Dodd) is not destined to remain east of the Pennines and the road ahead will be treacherous.

Hannah Moses's family at Scalehouses
Meanwhile, the Watsons remain at Scalehouses for generations and it is thanks to an old family letter from 1890 that we know of Hannah planting her sycamore trees. The letter is being sent, rather wistfully, to Australia. I think the writer knows contact will one day cease, despite his best efforts at logging every newly-arrived nephew and niece.

ThruLines
Ancestry ThruLines (which has already been added to my phone's spellchecker) is going to confirm something remarkable: Five times great-grandfather Joseph Moses, our first Overlord, is indisputably my forbear. One of the wiggly Watson lines which went out to Australia, match my DNA. Incredibly an even more remote cousin, in the States, holds the above portrait of Joseph's brother, C. Moses.

Without the ThruLines technology, which examines each generation carefully and rebuilds trees where details are missing, I'd never have worked out the connection to cousin Julie myself. This part of my tree is very distinctive. I have no other Cumberland ancestry, and neither, I suspect, has Julie. This lends a further weight of evidence to the suggested tree.

Whilst extremely impressive, DNA has already been able to take me back to an even more remote 'Most Recent Common Ancestor', this time from the 1600s... Stay tuned for more!

Tracing Cousins, an Index to Articles

List of topics

Tracing cousins:

1939 Register - wife swap: popular

A day of industry : a rant

All thanks to the right church : bit geeky

Ann, 18, not in South Africa : funny, well written

Clues from the cousins #1 : clever way to find Amy from Wales

Clues from the cousins #2 : old man's pen stroke leads to Ada

Come on Eileen : silly but worth a read

Cousins laid to rest : nostalgic

Davies? Evans? no problem  : finding an address

Facebook for finding cousins : beginner's guide

Facebook's useful experiment for family historian  : bit geeky

Faith, Hope and Ancestry : story of finding Louisa Smith

Finding Edward Jones names : heavy-going

Finding lost cousins: the strength of weak bonds  : a rant
Finding Thomas Jones born 1895 in Wales  : well written

Found in Bradford  : bit geeky (concentrates on one finding)

Getting past missing marriages  : short and informative

Illegitimate sister, garbled details? Part Two : update on a long saga

Jamestown Pearls  : chatty story of finding great-uncle in USA
Long journey: 3 quick stories of hard-to-find relatives

Lost memories  : funny and well written

Making work for the postman : required reading on contacting new cousins

Meet Mr Zero : silly, brief

Miscellaneous marriage thoughts : bit geeky and uninformative

On a roll  : heavy going

Riddle of the timeshare  : long but well written

Sure looks like my Ellen in Chowbent : funny and plucky

Taylors: delete

The sixteenth letter of the alphabet : heavy going with a clever tip

The Tuckingmill Hotel  : long story

Tracing Wilcie Urch  : whirlwind success story

Who Exactly are Rachel's Kids?: story of diligence

Finding 4 New Jersey husbands with no marriage index : worth reading

Research stories:
specific (i.e. about a particular resource)
humorous
interesting/curious

1600s handwriting: I predict a baptism : details of 1600s research
1911 deleted entries at Findmypast  : specific
Bogralin - clue to Scots ancestry : finding Scots origins
Best of Genes Dictionary : funny
Census: 'my wife's cousin', a nice clue : specific
Come on, give yer Granny £1 : funny
Creating Speculative Searches :  long form lots of info
Death duty indexes  : specific
European Genealogy across 13 countries : short and interesting
Gateway to the Wall and Canal  : a rant
Goodies from FindMyPast probate index : specific
Hidden Roots: Behind the Marriage : getting back beyond a 1791 marriage
Italy: From Stranger to Native : specific
Matrimonial mischief in Somerset : short story
Review of the new GRO index : worth reading
Primary records and why you need them: a rant
Searching for burials : specific
Solving a Smith puzzle...  : funny and surprising tale

Speculative Search in Australia : bit long
Ten tricks to help your family history : short punchy tips
The Betsys yet to come : funny hunt for Betsy
The Something, The Baker, the er- Mint-cake Maker? : sweet eaters in the tree
Three Sisters: Fifteen Counties : short and interesting
Two little bits of paper : usefulness of birth certs
Untangling 1780s baptisms in Cornwall : untangling
Using the Death Duty records at Kew : specific
What a difference a decade makes : surprises from the census
Will: 'You still need me' : specific and interesting
Yorkshire short-arse nails Chinatown gunslinger  : humorous
Young husbands on the family tree: interesting

Faith, Luck, Persuasion and Determination
Persuasion in Family History : antsy Grandpa steps away
Faith in Family History : it shouldn't have worked, but it did
Luck in Family History : the 1841 saves my bacon
Determination in Family History : itching a new path

ENDS

The Girl from Wirksworth - Part One

If you have read my post The Teenagers, you will know what a tough time they had. Sarah Brasier (b. 1751) was sixteen on her marriage and sent far from home to live; Ann Shaw (b. 1774) was orphaned age 12; her daughter Hannah Bagshaw (b. 1792) never knew her mother, and was totally orphaned at 13. I can add another one, Sarah Carr (b. 1859) who sent herself many leagues across the Sea to South Africa aged 18. Why did she do that?

But it is Ann whose story we are trying to tease out. She was evicted from Wirksworth age 12, in 1786, the year when her mother and two sisters all died. They died before the move, and after move, but in the same year. I am almost certain she would have been one of Arkwright's Girls, workers at the cotton mill a few miles away in Cromford. A long uphill journey back, but at least it's downhill in the mornings.

She may be no connection at all. The trail for her goes completely cold in 1786, age 12, and there are no further references. But I think she is my ancestor. And DNA will prove it, very soon. Very soon indeed.

The product of three canals

Hundreds of tonnes of clay and granite. That's what had to be shifted to create the Staffs & Worcs Canal, and then the Chesterfield Canal. Without these two canals I wouldn't be here.

My forebear, Hannah Gee, born at Chesterfield in 1792 is a product of these canals. She is also the product of a third canal, the not-yet-constructed Cromford Canal, where her parents arguably met. However no earth or sand needing shifting ahead of her birth. Her father didn't even lift a sod of earth before he had eyes smitten on the young millworker (Hannah's mother).

The Staffs & Worcs is staggeringly pretty. They say you are taken through gently rolling West Midlands countryside, never quite making it to an urban settlement. I walked along this canal by accident last February, little realising it was where my ancestors met.

Jonathan Gee, the canal builder, came across Sarah, a girl from Swindon, Staffs, in 1767. He was working on the Staffs & Worcs, which ran through Swindon. She fell for his charms immediately and they were married.

They are enticed into Derbyshire by the building of the Chesterfield Canal, that's canal number two.

Their son Nathaniel breaks away from his father's influence, and casts about for work on the third canal, the Cromford, with plans beginning in 1791. Nathaniel's interest is very much diverted by the presence at Cromford of a girl called Ann. She fell for his charms immediately and they were married.

Hannah, their child, is born at Chesterfield in 1792, the product of three canals.

Watching her bake bread and cakes in later years, living in a pit village - you never would guess at the millions of tonnes of earth moved ahead of her birth. Did she sing?

♫ I feel the earth move under my feet, the sky tumbling down... ♫

Most un-Royal

Why can't I seem to get back to any Royal forebears? Cornish cousins just a snitch away in Gwithian have ancestry through the Edwards family of Lelant and back to some lord in Devon, namely Mr William Crimes, and thence back to the famous Neville family, who made Kings and were grandsons of Kings.

I come close at times, brushing purple cloaks with the real deals, but then in my dreams the ancestor bows and scrapes away and is revealed simply to be a passing medieval tradesman. Again!

Hard-working Cornish folk in my tree washing filthy big yards of linen and left it stewing in massive dye pots, and produced politicians poets and physicists in two generations. Yet more are quoted in their earthy tones talking at us from centuries past [see Hunter].

Our ancestors the Holme family, Kings of Mardale, now under Haweswater, had massive beef with King John back in the 1200s, and as such none of their descendants would have dallied with the royals, living as they did in Norse obscurity in their hidden valley in the Lakes. So that profitable line of enquiry goes nowhere.

Our forebear Thomas Beresford, had 21 children and lies in a grand old tomb in Fenny Bentley, Derbyshire. He is accused of sending a private army of men to Agincourt, approximately 5 years before he was born - so again, perfidy disrupts a really nice story.

My grandmother's maternal line hails from Derbyshire, the scene of much of this frustrating screed. It seems that they might just merge with the Gell family of Hopton Hall, Derbyshire in the mid 1600s. Some enterprising fellow has scoured the Gell ancestral origins for anything remotely Royal, and found the following piece of mediaeval scrag end:

Hugh Lupus, 'Fat Hugh' 1047-1101, who probably wasn't a nephew of William the Conqueror, and who probably wasn't the father of Geva Lupus. Geva did marry in to the Basset family who eventually washed into the Beresfords, and thus Gells.

It is almost as if my determinedly independent ancestors sheered away from the royals at every and any opportunity.

Nobody ran away to become a mistress of the King or his functionary or anything similar. They just weren't having any of it.

Most un-Royal.

Road Outta Town... Take 2

Of course everything you read and feel has to be right. Doesn't it? My Carlines migrated to the city in 1865 marrying in one big town, then making Manchester and Salford their home for ever more. In 1865, like I said. Previously they were in a the little mining village of Eyam, where people tipped up their incomes from the scrubby land by digging out what they could in a primitive way.

Villager comes to city. What a story. Love it. Except it's not true... exactly.

Ellen Carline did arrive in Salford in 1865 with her husband in tow, and for sure she grew up in that lead-mining settlement in the northern Peaks. But this wasn't the end of the tale. It wasn't even the beginning.

Roll the clock back please. Five generations if that's ok? In this family, that equates to only 100 years.

Sarah Brasier was baptised in Kinver parish church, rural Staffordshire in September 1751. Before she was two the family were on the road. You can see the picture of the actual road, above. In September 1753 her sister was baptised in the new home, Swindon, half-way to Wolverhampton. It's a lot more built up, with 2.5 acres per person rather than 4 acres in Kinver (from information at GENUKI).

Trivia note: Sarah was even younger than 2, owing to traumatic calendar changes around her first birthday - causing 1752 to lose 11 days in the wrangle. Some bender.

Leaving Kinver was a seismic change and the kind of move that, they say, only happens once. "That's it. We're townies now". Except, of course, that her great-great-granddaughter ended up having to repeat the rite of passage a century later.

What happened between 1751 and 1865 then?

Well. Sarah married in big old Dudley's 'Top Church' age 16, 1767, and the family moved to an admittedly rural area working on canal infrastructure and later moving raw materials up the conduit to big old Sheffield. Her son Nathaniel opened a public house opposite the iron foundry in reasonably-sized Chesterfield and died young, 1805, owing to his wild ways - we suspect. That left granddaughter Hannah armed with no choices at all but plenty of latent business acumen. She married a lead-mining widower from a small peak village, 1807, aged 15, and catapulted herself back to rural obscurity. Great-granddaughter made no changes to the marker. Great-great-granddaughter eventually left the obscure village in 1865.

End of the line

The remnant
Down the end of the lane, where grass still grows in the middle of the road, lies my landlady's old home. It's still there, untouched, unvarnished. Like a book sitting on a library shelf, it contains all you might need on the long dead subject.

Hannah Dooley was agreed to be the last of the family residents in Eyam, passing away in 1946 (not bad for a grandfather born in 1771). I've got a letter from someone who remembered her little cottage, plus some postcards she wrote, and she also left a Will. The Will isn't very interesting, but we're happy enough overall.

Another last-of-the-line was the box-of. -frogs that was Miss Stuart Barone. Rich,storied, and in ill health, her light odometer reading  masked an exciting life in exile during the war. With her dying gasp you can hear the grief in her Sicilian village home. And to accompany this there'll be plenty of candles. She leaves a document, another Will, hopping around the decades. Announcing her birth in Alberta (1908); sorting out her grandparents for posterity, and scattering about the American connections like wild mountain herbs.

Treasure is a wonderful name for any family member, and this one was also, last-of-the-line. Someone told me he made a bonfire around the time he was in poor health, making his peace with the world, of all the family effects. Bonds of indemnity for obscure field purchases from the 1860s, solicitor's letters to his long-dead grandfather. It all needed to go up in smoke before he died, he felt.

Harrumph was my reaction, ambitious as I was to find a photograph of the parents and children, or even his grandmother, a key person in the tree.

Last week a gentleman wrote me from southern Somerset, exorcising his own ghosts. There were photos of cows from the 1960s, old cottages in hamlets the motorcar hadn't seen. And round the corner, in every frame, out of shot, was Treasure, carefully described. These memories have been pickled in amber for us.  And better by far, after a wait, than silly old parchment from the bonfire.

My mustachiod great- great- grandfather, William, has 85 descendants living, at a conservative estimate. Yet his two sisters Arundel and Catharine had children and grandchildren but no surviving descendants at all!

One spinster lady I met thought that her sister, who'd died age 16, would have been the one to get married. Catharine's grandson Phillip wanted to marry, but nobody wanted to go through with it. In a small town in Oregon, his father's shame  was too much to bear.

Three troubling events occurred in poor Percy's life (the only child of Catharine to have issue): losing his elder boy in the swollen waters of the Washington River in 1921; being found to defraud local people out of their money at his small town in Oregon. But the trigger for all the sorrow and insecurity was decades earlier in 1896, age 22, when this mild but bright fair skinned lad-on-the-make got too close to the flames. Witnessing a Chinese gangland murder in L.A., he went on the run. I honestly think if he'd kept his pretty nose out of Chinatown, Catharine (his mother) would have descendants, and Phillip, buried in a Veterans grave, would not be End of the Line.

Their lives in 65 characters

The sisters, by which I mean, mine and my mother's, asked for kind of a one-pager on the family history.

Key facts, quirky discoveries, who's who, exactly who the cheese maker lady was, which relative went to Bogota, the name of the place in Ohio where they all went.

They want me to empty my pockets in the school yard and show them all my best marbles.

Or, they want me to 'fence off' all the soft leaves of the forest floor and hurry them quick to the one or two precious orchids.

After nodding my head enthusiastically at this idea, because I do want to share, I realise that's not the way it should happen.

You all need to comb through the dull pages and discover gems for yourself. To read through the source materials and pick out passages that you personally like.

I don't mind making that process a bit easier by providing typescripts of cramped original text, providing a master chart showing how the mini-charts fit together, setting up a keyword index to aid navigation...

But the discovery, that's got to be a personal matter.

Let me know how you get on 😁

Letters from 1921 and from my DNA sequence

You can't hide your letters from me, bud.

A long time ago, back in 1921 as the world settled down to a brief peace, my grandmother was due, and, later, born. "I hoped she would be called 'Ellen' after me," wrote the baby's grandmother, a crotchety old woman born before the Crimean War.

Everybody in the letter is now gone of course, including my grandmother (aged 96) who limped on until 2018.

But in the letter from the time of her birth is mentioned an abstruse relative, cousin Margaret from Westcliffe(-on-sea). One of my first tasks as a child genealogist was to peer at old maps and yes to conclude this was probably the Westcliffe near Southend rather than the one in rural Lincolnshire.

Margaret appears once, at the dawn of my grandmother's long life and is never mentioned again. It eventually transpired she was Ellen's first cousin a poor orphan thing, a jewellery polisher from Soho no less.

(And yes that is the Soho in London not the one in the Mendips!)

The shutters have long since come down on Ellen's day. The letter briefly puts Margaret and her very London childhood on the same page as Ellen, who, I slightly exaggerate, grew up in a castle. The accidents of birth and the lives of two very different sisters in the previous generation.

Well now, it is indeed very much 2018 and why am I telling you allthis?

The letters in my DNA are recently sequenced and they shout very loudly that I'm related to folk in Rensselaer county, New York, a mostly German area in the eastern upstate bordering New Hampshire. It's the place where cousin Margaret's sister Mrs Starck arrived a lonely undocumented teenage bride from Soho with her older Prussian husband, in 1863.

Margaret would hardly remember her and you'd never tell from her will, penned from Hildaville avenue, Westcliffe, that she had any relatives at all. Only her devoted cousin Ellen.

What a shock that was to learn.

So, as the dust eats us all up, memories, dislocated teenage brides (delivered to a lunatic asylum before time progressed further), hand-penned letters about long-ago babies, a silent box holding 96 years disinterestedly... My deeply encoded genetic letters back it all up.

You can't hide your letters from your genetic buds.

I'm off to marvel at the Hanoverian prinzessen and their likeness to my somehow-cousins over in Rensselaer county.

And say a quiet prayer for Sarah (yes, that was her name).

A Blast of Fire and Ice

Five senses aren't enough... to describe everything. Heat rising from the roof of my skull, my temples pulsing. Some other force is at work: sometimes fire, sometimes ice.

Phillimore is an American-sounding company. They published vanity books, seeming replicas of parish registers in a typed format on heavily textured cream paper, artistically torn down the sides. To me age 12 their product looked the real deal. Forgetting the medium I went straight to the message:

Catherine Marshall, my forebear, had married James Lowry at Truro St Mary in 1809. And the witnesses were William Marshall and Nicholas Marshall. A powerful, strong, entry to come down through time.

The creamy paper, the incredibly high ceilings of the Westcountry Studies Library. The new names, the family unit. The sense this was deep Cornwall. The heat blew off the roof of my skull.

Since then, well, I've learnt it's bad to be obsessed with genealogy. We all descend from the same ancestors after all and maybe we're a chaotic mishmash with no real threads that can be followed backward meaningfully. Throw in a vast number of "non-paternity events", confused clerics muddling or omitting the names of females...

And, here's the killer fact. Apparently the DNA of some ancestors gets diluted away to nothing in the random cement mixer that is the cell meiosis. In effect over time their contribution was just an empty box.

Hmmmph. Let's raise an empty glass to ancestral anonymity!

This week has restored the story I always knew had to be true. That history, our private family history, is passed down through real named people, every step of the way. What your Grandpa said, true. What the registers said, true.

I match exactly the DNA of a descendant of Nicholas Marshall.

~~~~~

My other Cornish blow-your-head off moment was the day I sat with salt in my hair in the microfilm reading room in Truro. This time I was a few years earlier, in the 1780s on the coast near St Ives. By virtue of another forebear, I was a Trewhella. The temples pulsed. Dang I can still feel it.

This week, two decades on, I match the DNA of a Trewhella descendant.

These people are in my veins.

The character in Daphne Du Maurier's House on the Strand loses his grip on reality through connecting with the past. I'm happy just to have a blast of fire and ice.

The Teenagers

When I first heard that Henry VII's mother was only 14 at the time she have birth to him I was understandably appalled.

It is very rare in my family for couples to marry below the age of 21, and I can only think of one example where the bride was below 18. That was Mercy Haine an orphan who married at 16 in East Pennard, Somerset, sailed to Prince Edward Island and gave birth to her first child the following year, 1834 age 17. She was a remarkable lady having 12 children in all and becoming the first lady of the Island.

Consequently, I was highly sceptical of the published dates of Hannah Bagshaw (1792) and her eldest son John (1808). Was she only sixteen? I ignored the problem as she was a healthy 34 when my ancestor Milly came along in 1826.

We eventually found the marriage for Hannah to Mr Bagshaw and it was in 1807 so she was in fact only fifteen. I had never heard of such a marriage. It took place in Rotherham where the records were shockingly bad. Money must surely have changed hands with the clergy here.

Hannah's daughter Milly and Milly's daughter both had their first child age 19/20. So this makes already the generations of young relationships, 15, 20, 19.

Going back into Hannah's past was going into the unknown. Her father's mother was only sixteen when she got married back on Christmas Day 1767 in Dudley.  Dudley at Christmas would be bad enough perhaps... (I'm sure its lovely!)

Hannah's mother marries at the church of the unusual spire, Chesterfield, and the record is beautifully kept - unlike that of the next generation at Rotherham. We don't know her age for sure but with a husband of 23 she has to be fairly young. The handwriting says as much. We think she was 17, as a candidate of that age fits all the naming patterns and biographical setting.

So we have Ellen 19, mother Milly 20, mother Hannah 15, mother Ann 17?, mother in law Sarah 16 (and her mother 19). At least five generations of inexperienced women becoming wives and mothers, surely a recipe for disaster and social ills.

I am absolutely not condoning the circumstances under which these women might have lived, but they were not sixteen forever. They lived, mostly, to become wise elders offering counsel and guidance to the next generation.

This series of episodes remained hidden in our family tree until last year but covers I suppose the periods 1767-1808 plus 1846-65. I am aware that at least two of the girls were in service when they fell pregnant, while two may have been romances and the other a rational choice to escape a family situation.

Sarah has then the dubious honour of being my youngest six x great-grandmother. I recently walked in her footsteps of the family move in south Staffordshire from the 1750s.

There is more yet to find about these folk.

Research on age at marrying:
From Average Age at First Marriage for Women in Mid Nineteenth Century accessible by NFR Crafts, 1976, shows the estimated median age at first marriage for women in Staffordshire (1861) was 22.4, whilst for women in Derbyshire it was 23.2, a full year older. Those in the Westcountry and the Welsh borders added another year on top before marrying. Habakkuk (1971) found that urban classes married earlier than their rural counterparts, adding that urbanisation is therefore a major cause of population growth. Crafts argues against this believing that infant mortality (in the time in question) countered out the earlier marriage dates.

Even in 2014, women in Wolverhampton were still marrying at an age two years younger on average than those in Derbyshire. Fertility across the two areas is dauntingly higher in Wolverhampton, too, see here and here. The younger relationships which happened in Derbyshire can be explained by illegitimacy.

Further reading:
Population Growth and Economic Development since 1750 in History Review. Habakkuk, 1971
Age at Marriage in England from the late Seventeeth to the Nineteenth Century in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. R B Outhwaite, 1973.
Age Patterns of Marriage, Population Studies. A J Coale, 1971.

Daughters of Hannah

Many of you will know the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose body kept on giving before death (in the form of lots of babies), and after death (in the form of her cancer cells which have divided at an incredibly rapid rate). Keeping up with her descendants, or the location of all her cancer cells, would keep someone occupied for a long long time.

I gave given myself the task of finding the descendants of Hannah Shaw born 134 years earlier in Derbyshire 1776, around the time we lost the American Colonies. There are loads. At first I thought there would hardly be any, as only a rag-taggle bunch are still at home in 1841. Hannah really struggled to get going, finally getting a good rhythm with her cousin (and husband) in her late 30s. It was Ellen, born when she was 37, who really got the tree moving. I am losing track of all of her granddaughters, and great-granddaughters.

My plan is to find one descendant of Ellen (and Hannah) in the female line each week. So that by June 2018 I will have a suitable candidate from Hannah's line ready to do a DNA test. The candidate must be in the female line, in other words 'of the body' of Hannah.

We have my cousin Klaus waiting in the wings, descendant of Hannah's older sister Ann. Hannah and Ann lived very different lives but much seems to link them together. Until we do the DNA test we won't know for sure they were sisters. The test will very much cement together exactly what happened in those key years 1790-1 in the family tree.

Putting it crudely, who exactly screwed who.

I am flitting back to Bonsall Bank where much of the action took place with a view to establishing even more postcodes of living relatives, of the body of Hannah, who will be suitable for the DNA project. Watch this space.