1881 census to Facebook: Smiths are easy you know

Prologue
On the run from demon headmistress, I slunk onto the 2pm coach to Wales, July 2011.

A few days later I was in Merthyr Tydfil and this time I was the hunter.  Margaret Jenkins last seen alive with grandma, 1861.  Jennie Newman’s wonderful BMD index for Merthyr sitting pretty in the library.  I snatched the data and ran off to the record office, hoping to learn her fate and still stalk the halls of the iron (Crawshay) kings before sunset.

I hopped from one leg to the other playing a verbal dance with the registrar’s clerk, elsewhere reported.  Suffice to say I walked away with the name of her husband, Job Smith, and still had time to admire Merthyr’s old buildings, pass Trevithick’s statue and see Cyfarthfa’s mountainous halls.  After a burger in the Wetherspoons of course.

Like the dead swan in the Taff’s salmon-run, poor Margaret only flapped her wings once before death beckoned.  And she produced just this:

1881 census to Facebook
My initial vigour waned, as I noted not a single British trace of James Smith after 1881.
His half-brother is on an Ancestry tree as having died in Queensland, and I decided (in 2016) to investigate the siblings by the simple measure of clicking on their names in the census.  It showed at least two of them died in Melbourne.  Time to see if the whole family emigrated.

Yes – they arrived 2 April 1883, in, surprising place alert – Townsville, Queensland.  The older boys are listed separately on the same page.  All except James, that is. But he didn’t die in Wales 1881-3, so where did he go?

 

 Turns out he did come out to Oz as well.  The death record of James Jenkin Smith (1931) with father Job and mother Margaret Jenkin leads inexorably to this, and other, electoral rolls, revealing two findings:
 
1) the house name, Hirwain, after his place of birth, and
2) he had a wife Margaret (which research shows was from the marriage of James Smith in 1893)
3) he worked on the railways, befitting his training working with iron

Later electoral rolls show his son (source BMD indexes) living in the area, as a manufacturing chemist and a granddaughter, who is shown as dying in 2000, according to The Age newspaper.

Great nephews and nieces are listed in the newspaper, but with no surnames how was I to find them on Facebook?  I had a street address but was keen to get an electronic connection – quicker and easier.  By re-googling the names of the great-nevry, ‘Sonia, Michaela and Alister’ I spy a further reference yielding their paternal grandfather’s last name which they, naturally, share.

By plying this new information into Facebook up comes the whole family network, revealing the Smiths had become Hackett-Smiths, no wonder I’d found them hard to find.

Gratifyingly, the upward trajectory had continued.  The chemist had given way to the architect, whose sons are in design, and plastic surgery.

So Margaret, Swan of Aberdare, who flapped so briefly, and whose story we nearly lost, has helped build the City of Lights 10.6 thousand miles away. 

Creative Commons – flickr.com

Riddle of the timeshare: it was the sun wot won it

Prologue: Emigrayshun

One grey June morning as the sun rose over the steelworks, a group of my family left their home in Redhall Avenue, Connah’s Quay on a journey aimed at leaving the UK and its new queen behind forever.

Our story: Vokayshun

 

Grandpa claimed to know nothing about his family.  That was true, but he did remember some cousins.  Tom Jones wasn’t one of them.  When I found Tom Jones listed in his grandpa’s will, I didn’t think I’d be able to trace him.  By splashing cash on birth certificates I’d maybe get his date of birth, getting me as far as the second-class cabins of 1952, but…. I’d still be left hanging.  It wouldn’t be enough.

Dedicayshun

I picked up the blower to cousin Joyce eighteen years ago, thinking I was at journey’s end.  I’d found her mugshot in old family papers and mini-me had gone through tonnes of microfiche to get this far.  She was off to Italy and was putting info about her mother’s family in the post, she said.  She said.  Actually she died before any of that and my main chance submerged again, leaving just one nice clue.  It took me ten years to remember it though.

Joyce’s wedding photo in our family

My one letter from Joyce

 

Big Break #1.

On the phone, Joyce had told me there was a cousin in North Wales, called Rhona.  I dreamt I was in a cafe in Rhyl, and everyone in tight white curls was called Rhona.  Hello Rhona, have you seen Rhona.  No, Rhona, have you?

Time passes, I grow up.  I realise there aren’t that many Rhonas in Rhyl.  In fact, there aren’t any!  I get busy.  I trawl all Rhonas born in Flintshire with a mother’s name of Taylor and moments later zing up her address thanks to 192.com.

Ten years of inactivity followed by a moment of success.  That describes my entire work on this branch.  But Rhona doesn’t ‘get’ my letter.  This whole line of enquiry is on the verge of evaporating.

I place an ad.  An absolute beauty comes on the market and is duly picked up from Highbury Corner in 2011.  If the letter can’t go to the lady, I will, er go to mountainous lengths to…

Big Break #2

If you need to get away from it all may I recommend Gweryd Fishing Lakes high on the hill off Offa’s Dyke.  They gave this weary traveller his last night of freedom before September’s chastening embrace.  Down the Clwydian Mountains I sped, to the town of Mold, and Rhona’s quaint close.

Not expecting much of a particular, I crossed the threshold of number 6, Mold, glad-handing the aged occupier.  Rhona was niece of a farmer from my Grandpa’s childhood and a good ten years older than the deceased Joyce.  Even if this venerable lady could barely whisper a ‘hullo’, I would be extrapolating from this for years to come, so powerful were her genealogical connections.

I tested the waters with the living legend.  I knew I had a lady whose brain was hard-wired to recall facts from the 1930s, her era.  I pressed my first genealogical button.  ‘Chilton’, I said.  ‘Oh, you mean Hughie.’  Good so far.  ‘Cousin Margaret?’  ‘In a bad way, but alive.’  Ok.  Now for the key moment, the testing of the skeleton key, the run past the warder, the ransom-swop, the border-dash, the inhuman leap….. ‘Tom Jones?’ I lightly enquired?  The 1930s brain whirred and checked its hard-drive and back they came, words of gold.  ‘Oh, Tom Jones! Well his kids Peggy and Dougie went out to Canada.’ And there it was: my cup overraneth.  Not only had this lady skewered her way through a slew of Joneses to find my Tom, she neatly sewed his story up so tight I wasn’t going to lose him now.  And all in five seconds.  I drank the proferred tea, thanked the good lady, slumped on a train at Chester, sold the bike – saying ‘hello’ to September and a new year.

Big Break #3

Veterinary advice: First catch and restrain your animal

Our Tom Jones was born in Morriston, Swansea, about 1894.  Him and his common name moved to North Wales around 1905, ahead of a big steelworkers’ strike.  This whole area around John Summers steelworks is massively under threat, April 2016, a century or more of steelmaking in jeopardy.  According to Rhona, Tom’s kids left yonks ago for a new life of similar industry, in Canada.  So what bits of feather was I left gripping on to in the UK?

Tom gets a mention age 24 in his grandpa’s will, where I first heard of him 70 years later in 1992.  A third of that time again has had to elapse before I could catch him once more.

We’re all in the same boat

Big break number 3 was swiftly catching up with Dougie his son on the boat out to Canada (1952) but *not only that*, finding dad Tom on the same boat, and… *not only that*, after my own internal hard-drive warmed up, a thought burst out?  What about the sister Peggy?  Maybe she was on the same boat too?

Margaret on the same boat as her father and brother, 1952

 

And so it proved to be.  The Empress of Canada gave me emigration notes of imperial quality: my struggling hunt for further records failed to keep pace.  The same address is shown, Redhall Avenue, Connah’s Quay.

Tom had married a Cohen in Eccles, which I’d earlier thought impossible, Margaret (Peggy) being born there in 1919.  Figuring out exactly what happened to Margaret Jones was proving a mite tricky ’til I pored over the Empress-ive records and spotted her as Mrs Robson.  There was date-of-birth, names of kids and all with a matching address in Connah’s Quay…  It was 2012, sixty years post emigration.  Little did I know that Peggy, even older than Rhona and 20 years ahead of Joyce, was still living, a quiet retiree in Canada.

Big Break #4

I stewed on the Robson info a little while, 4 years to be precise, as it remained on the back-burner.  I had brazenly told the cousins in Wales it was game set and match, an email having plonked through for Dougie’s son Col.  That branch weren’t playing ball however, and the contact details fizzled away.  I needed another route in.

Sometime in 2014 I tried again, this time focussing on Peggy (by now, deceased).  It was time to get heavy. I dredged the internet, ripped apart the phonebook and pressed search a bunch of times on Facebook, spraying all my clues in neon to get new life out of them, like tired old curtains.

 

Obvious clue: the name

Several years of obvious clues and several years of missing the obvious: Peggy’s boy’s name.  According to the NorthWalesBMD project, he was born Thomas Peter Robson in Flint, a really good name to search.  When I pressed the keys for ‘T_P_R’ Canada, Google warned me to stand back.  Information of an explosive nature was about to be revealed.

Hmmmm.  Margaret J Robson of Calgary?  probated in Maine. I didn’t think so. This was too confusing.  I had fished out gold, but put it back in the watery internet for another two years.  Glug glug.

Big Break #5

Pushy salesman: “In the absence of a new lead, go back to your old ones.”

It was March 2016 and time to find the Canadian cousins: this was getting embarrassing.  Harder problems had been solved and although this was impossible, with the right alchemy and a splash of oxygen, this can be done.  With my new hard-nosed attitude I brought up the Google search from 2 years before.

The ‘J’ I now dismissed like a nearly-dead fly. It could clearly be Jones, Peg’s maiden name.  No problem.  Exactly how many ladies called Margaret had sons of the right name and age in Canada?  I now suspected not many.  Just the thorny issue of ‘Why Maine?’ to put right.

So I took a longer look at the Maine Probates, nosing around the pages of York county, Maine.  I spied a typical set-up for legal docs: the attorney’s office and their long phone number.  A lemon-eating clerk in a will-free office, and the general message of ‘we are closed – to you anyways’.  I idly combed each of those nondescript blue pages, jonesing for a lead.

Ten white pages

Like Hansel stumbling on a witch-free gingerbread trail, there I beheld ten texty scanned-in pages, white in hue, of the estate of Mrs M Robson.  From the bare bones

to considerably more detail at maineprobate.net:

I had gone behind the surface net into the ‘deep web’ where data lies waiting to be awoken.  Whilst the full addresses were nice to see, they are impossible to capture without the correct file id, so I think are pretty safe.  The cover page was lovely but wasn’t clinching it for me.  I continued through.

And there beheld this battery of clinchers:

• Bang – the name of Jones given as likely maiden name
• Bang – the confirmed, matching, date of birth for Margaret

From the Shipping records

From the Probate

• Bang – the confirmed name as plain Margaret

• Bang – an address in Ontario, the region where Margaret first landed

It turns out the connection with Maine was that affordable way for hardworking folk to get a week of sun: timeshares.  A timeshare in Maine, of lobsters and fishing, was what got us done.

Thank you to Ogunquit, Maine for taking me from this

to this

Footnote:

Never forget your Welsh.  The new cousins in Canada are in fact in touch with their Dad’s family, back in Connah’s Quay.  Hopefully they’ll soon be reaching out to us, too.

South Sea Island cousins

I vaguely knew the 3 Beck boys, or some of them, had left England and gone to Australia, but hadn’t followed up, and brief searches in Ancestry.com’s database hadn’t been productive.   I had been reading about a German family settling in the Galapagos islands, and badly wanted some island connection myself! I turned over the metaphorical page in Google and there was the entry about Charles Percy Beck, from Burton on Trent, below. It told of his evacuation from the Japanese offensive and arrival in Brisbane Australia, 1942. Intriguingly, the article reveals he had left a brother back in the South Sea Islands, specifically the Solomon Islands. A clue emerges, this time in the British newspapers of 1931, where details are given of Burton boy Harold Beck, revealed as a copra plantation farmer in an island within the Solomons. The paper gives the place as Ganouga, and it takes some gazetteering to reveal the correct name as Ranongga, indeed pronounced with an initial ‘g’.   We can now find there were two Beck boys in the late thirties, Bobby and Pete, on this island, at school with Gideon Zoleveke, whose account of wartime Solomons is well worth reading. Peter did well, and one wonders if he is the father of Collin Beck, the islands’ ambassador to the US, these last ten years.   Burton Museum may have been split between the brewing experience venue and the county museum at Shugborough. Staffordshire archives confirm that one deposit from Harold survives. Not his 1931 mementoes, whose fate is unknown, but a tortoiseshell comb, apparently made for a lady back home.when he was the only white man on ‘his’ island.

• 

Ann, 18, not in South Africa (1858)

Excuse me google, have you seen my relative.  She’s about 18, she used to live in England, and I think she went to live in South Africa?  It’s just gone 1861 and I haven’t seen her anywhere in the census so I think she must have left home.  Can you help me?

Google couldn’t help me.  But FamilySearch did.

The story starts with William Frampton Cotty who disappears with his wife and children somewhere between 1851 – when he’s at South Street, South Petherton, Somerset – and 1861, when he’s not in the country at all.  No website had any records on him, but by googling I found references to the family in South Africa, and by checking their National Archives ‘NAAIRS‘ catalogue, I slightly bulked out what I knew on him and his boys.  The youngest girl by a fluke marries in Bristol, has a baby in Lancashire and returns to South Africa (odd).   But of the oldest girl Ann, there was nothing.

A new site, South African Settlers, popped up in my internet browser with extra info on W. F. Cotty.  His entry had been indexed from the Cape Death Notices and was modestly informative.  By this time, I already knew or had surmised that his cousin the housekeeper had become his partner and later his wife, but I didn’t know this:

That Ann had a middle name of Martha.  In 1851 she’s down as Ann M, but her birth shows her as Anne.  I’d even signed up to the Crewkerne Yahoo Groups which has since deluged my mailbox in the hopes of getting the baptism at Hinton St George and finding that possibly useful middle name.

A few days after finding this, having fruitlessly combed South Africa for Annie Marthas who had children in the 1860s, I thought of putting her name into FamilySearch.  It’s worked before.  I now have a claim to the firstborn male of Mount Vernon, NY, as a relative because I put a married couple’s name into FamilySearch.

So off do I try it again.  And, no!   Can this be?

Not expecting to find anything, I pick up Ann as mother of a girl born around 1865 in Springfield Illinois.  Well for a girl born 1840, that’s about right.  It’s more than about right, it’s spot on – Ann’s aunt and uncle lived in Springfield, and of all the places in the US, this is one it makes all the sense in the world for her to have gone to.

She lies buried at Boone, Des Moines, where she’d gone to live with her husband Gus.  She had 5 children, not the 2 stated in 1910, and 4 were living in 1900 (as correctly stated there) – Anna, Mae, Lotta and Earle but only the eldest has family – children Genevieve Eichenberger and Ashley Bowers.  Ashley’s grandson is in England not far from his roots; while Genevieve’s are still in Glen Ellyn or retired elsewhere in the States.

Ann is not the first relative I’ve come across who’s balked at the chance to go overseas with her widowed father or mother.  Elizabeth Swanton and her cousin Sarah Mullins both said ‘no thank you’ to the chance to go to Australia (in 1852) and Ohio (in 1836).  Sarah was already married, so the decision wasn’t hers.

Ann was only 17 and had the perfect opportunity to emigrate while single, just as her aunt Hannah had 17 years earlier:

It’s no coincidence that Anna was the name of her first child.  Had she waited any longer she would have been rushed off to Cape Province, before you can say ‘gold’.

Ironically, maybe her life was harder in America than it would have been in Africa.  The Cottys did well and money was flowing in.  Whereas Ann had to return to Chicago after years out in Des Moines – was she happy about that I wonder.  Her aunt and cousins were around, and hopefully stayed in touch: newspaper articles would confirm.

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.

Not so fertile

Thomas Henry Craig Stevenson in 1909 postulated that working-class women would have large families than those higher up the income chart.  In 1911, he and Sir Bernard Mallett, the Registrar-General, included the famous fertility question in the census, which now makes us consider the number of Victorian infant deaths (10 or more years earlier) rather than there being ‘too many living children’ from the poor.

However, as someone for whom those details have been most revealing in conducting my research, I was of course surprised to find Stevenson among my cousins.  Or rather, I wasn’t.

As soon as I found my relative had married Miss Catherine De Boudry in Bristol, I was pretty sure we’d be surfing a genteel wave for at least a couple of generations, Stevenson in fact was going to marry Miss De Boudry’s grandddaughter.

Just a week ago I despaired of finding out the stories of the 6 Scott children baptised at Ditcheat and environs in the 1780s.  Their cousins set off for Monmouthshire and all sent for each other: though as butchers and factory workers, Chepstow was an odd choice to say the least.  But the 6 Scotts in question didn’t go to Chepstow, they went to Britain’s second city around the corner, Bristol.  I have no idea why Bristol got routinely ignored by my Somerset farming families.  They were happy to retire to regency, tasteful, Bath; but for a farmer, the true county town of Bristol seemed to offer nothing.

To inhabit Bristol with the same style as a yeoman farmer you needed a much higher income.  When I examined the PCC wills more closely I saw that Benjamin and William Scott were corn factors (as was an unmarried sister), while youngest sister Susanna had married an accountant, Henry Northcote.  William’s father-in-law had kept a school at Kingsdown, personally approved by John Wesley.

Northcote stole £10,000 in 1839 and was transported on the Barossa, begging to be given Sunday school duties as he commenced his long sentence.  I haven’t checked to see if he survived, but his wife died of shame.  There’s a clue in her will ‘wife of Henry, LATE of the City of Bristol’: she having been given a house in Sidney Place through a marriage settlement, which did not form part of her husband’s debts.

Benjamin Scott sailed for America after his mother-in-law had died, leaving his eldest child behind with brother William, presumably to claim her inheritance; and also as his poor wife still had no children.  Matilda rejoined the others 18 years later and was still alive age 90, unmarried, according to my reading of US tax records.  (And in 1880 living with E D Scott, Minneapolis.)

That just leaves William and Miss De Boudry to continue the line in England, and as Stevenson might have guessed (with 3 children and no heirs himself) we are shortly and swiftly led to the single descendant – a fundraising expert in Cheshire.

Small wonder I’ve not been besieged by enquiries about these Bristolians.  It’s yet possible that the oldest sister, Grace Scott, had surviving children by her husband James Hill, but I’m not hopeful!  They just had too much money to be fertile.

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.

Jumping the gap

To me, one of the excitements about family history is finding a person in one record and then spotting that person in another record.  This may seem pretty prosaic!  For a long time I believed I needed to find that person in another country, but actually, that proved to be excitement mixed with disappointment.  I can never do as much justice to a family tree overseas as when the family ends up in England: should the line go off to America or Australia it gets a little dull after a couple of generations, being further removed from ‘the jump-off’.

Probably the exceptions to ‘boring Aust-america’ are when we are following the female line, following a story, where there is a strong family connection or where they lived in an evocative place, such as early 1870s Utah or the Wisconsin big woods.  Should the family come BACK to England that can make for a good tale, particularly as British records may be even better than corresponding ones overseas.  (For example Mullins Symes and siblings were born in Ohio according to the British censuses, but there isn’t a single American record confirming this.)

In contrast, if someone migrates to Lincolnshire or Brecknockshire I’m transported with delight: a whole new county and area to explore; new settlements to see through the eyes of my relatives.

I particularly find it wonderful where an ancestor has you weaving through a sea of records like a Turkish bazaar chase , only to have them quietly sipping tea at home by the time you do finally catch up with them.  A case in point is Ann Hooper who marries twice in quick succession, on one occasion in Bristol, and then is away abroad in the next census, before finally, in 1881 letting us in to her Wiltshire farmhouse, twenty years after we’d last seen her with her parents.  Unfortunately she leaves no family now, but it was still important to resolve her, and to have the enjoyable hunt.

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

Eliza Hunter was one of the great unsolved threads in the tree.  Listed unhelpfully as Elizabeth Richards in 1851, seemingly her life is over at the age of 25.

We see her here stopping over with her brother who had the Tuckingmill Hotel.  This same hotel would kill the next-born Hunter children, and so the family would be off by the decade’s end to Bogota to see if their luck would be farer there (ha ha).  Eliza/ Elizabeth Hunter we must leave as a forgotten petal strewn by life’s roadside, along the way.

Now, among the gold mines of Bendigo, 1870, 20 years later, was a young man, John Hunter, newly finding his feet.  Having lost his father in Bogota (a trip that hadn’t worked out so well), he was now doing extremely well, being part of the management of a fuse factory that made fuses for the explosions in the mines.  He’d had a certain fairy godmother help him (can you guess who?).

A young girl caught his eye: Mary Catherine Perry, another Cornishwoman.  She long sat in my tree, not really of any significance, just helping a branch get some momentum before the lower birth rates of the 1900s forced an early end to the family.  How could she suddenly become of significance?

Brett Pierce tells me the Return of Eliza, one of the 3 great Hunter women, all born in 1825, and all destined to dally with the great continent under the sea.  Eliza was the last of these and the first of in Australia.  She went out as a bride of 22 and returned a widow in 1850, losing her husband and then her son.  Briskly following her out were her two cousins, who were even baptised together: they oscillated between the southern gold fields and have over a thousand descendants today, though only one lived to enjoy them.

So, 1851 and the comings-and-goings.  What next for the Hunters and Eliza?  Eliza did not for a minute sit on her laurels and watch her brother sail for Columbia before keeping house for her elderly father.  The moment the census enumerator left the Hotel with a handkerchief over his nose, she must have made her approaches to Perry, a tin miner.  She would need to marry him immediately, give birth to several children, get back on the boat for Australia and be out of the out of the country leaving no ripples by the 1861 census.  And that’s what she did.

I say no trace… but the clue had been staring at me from the page for years.  Even though Eliza was a widow, apparently barren in 1851, SHE turns out to have been the producer of Mary Catherine Perry – in readiness for the 1870 marriage, with little time to spare.  All this happens in just a few short years.  Because Mary Catherine was born in England but after the census years, it would be hard to work out who her parents were.

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 fellower 1825 cousins, who had 95 grandchildren between them; but still very respectable.  She was now based in Victoria and it was through her brother-in-law that young orphan John Hunter got the work in Perry’s Fuse Factory, Bendigo.

The main mystery left is where her mother, Mary Richards of Wendron came from.  Perhaps we can solve it.

This article appeared in November 2011.  The following month, a few weeks before his passing, my grandfather remembered something of the Tuckingmill Hotel.  This is an old man remembering a story from his grandfather, a sunny boy with many adventures in Cornwall and South America before he turned 10.  If we trust this young gallivanting boy, so full of life, unlike his siblings who died in the Hotel – it, had, newspapers, on, the, table.  That’s it.  That’s the extent.