My favourite photo cropped to show my grandmother’s face. Read on to see the whole of my favourite photo and find out why it ‘s the one of her that I love the most!
As I continue through 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, this week’s topic is a shorter and more visual one – ‘Favourite Photo’.
What makes a good family photo? It falls beyond the technical aspects, and beyond the artistic aspects. When it comes to genealogy it’s great to find a photo that shows you more than just an ancestor’s face. Any surviving photo is a good photo to have. But if I can get a glimpse into the personality of my family member it’s a massive bonus for me.
My favourite photo was not difficult to choose. It popped into my mind immediately. I present to you my paternal grandmother, Louise Taylor (nee Seal). She is on the left, and her sister-in-law Florence (nee Powell), is on the right.
I remember my grandmother as someone who enjoyed life to it’s fullest. Even my mum, who didn’t always get along with her, said she could make any occasion fun. Doesn’t that just shine through in this photograph? It really brings her personality to life.
A fun-loving woman, ahead of her time!
You can see she was a bit of a trailblazer. The photo must have been taken in either the late 1920’s or very early 1930’s. It was most unusual in those days for women to wear trousers and singlets. I suspect it was in the summer of 1930 or 1931. Summer for two reasons…England would not usually be warm enough to just wear a singlet in other seasons, and they appear to be standing on a beach.
It would be out of the ordinary to visit the beach outside of summer in those days if you were from Birmingham. It’s about as far away as one can get from the English coast! The most common seaside place for Brummies (natives of Birmingham) to visit was Weston-super-Mare, and I think this is probably where the photo was taken.
You can also infer from the photo that she would do just about anything for a joke. Those are not their own clothes. Tiny Louise especially is drowning in those massive trousers, and she was otherwise quite a fashion plate. It appears the hilarity is because they wore their boyfriend’s/husband’s clothes for the photo. I wonder if the clothes were actually swapped. If so, no photo survives of my grandfather wearing my grandmother’s clothes. This will be an eternal mystery!
Your turn…What is your favourite photo and why?
When you look at your family photos, try to look beyond the occasion or the date. Try to place it into a deeper context of where, when, why and who. And not just who were they with. Who are they themselves? Who is behind that face? What can you see about THEM?
And then…does any of that correlate with what you know about yourself or their other descendants? Do they have the same twinkle in their eye as your Dad? Do they look like they are ambitious, hardworking, lazy, funny, serious…and what clues in the photo are telling you that?
Augustine Hoy has provided an enduring mystery for decades. He left many traces of his existence, including a large and fertile family. But then he vanished. His uncommon first name was repeated over and over again through several generations of his descendants, which has been a wonderful boon to research. Namesakes make the job of sifting through copious records so much easier. However, he is one of those ancestors who appear to have been abducted by aliens! There is no trace of him in death, probate or inquest records in the state of Victoria, nor in any other state of Australia. Nor anywhere else in the world that I have been able to find. Augustine, if you’re out there please wave!
What is known about Augustine Hoy?
Augustine Hoy was born in the county of Dublin in Ireland around 1814. No baptism record has been located, so that end of his life is similarly clouded in mystery. A family story survives in more than one branch of descendants that he came from ‘Silveroak Castle’. Of course, there is no such place in Ireland. But let’s take into account the ‘Chinese Whispers’ effect. There is a place known as Slieveroe (which could easily morph into Silveroak over several generations of repetition) near the border of counties Dublin and Kildare. The civil parish there is Newcastle, and yes indeed there are the ruins of a castle in the town.
The Catholic parish is also called Newcastle, and I believe this is his home parish. There were Hoys on land there in the Griffiths Valuation, but this was well after he left the country so I can’t physically place Augustine there. The parish records remain with the local church and are not digitised. I have written to them with no result as yet. So this remains my working hypothesis but further evidence is required before I can be fully confident. I’m currently working on the tree of a Dublin Hoy DNA match to see if I can get there from another angle.
Marriage certificate of Augustine and Frances
He moved to England, but of course, no passenger lists survive. In 1833 he married Frances McGeow in Eccles, Lancashire. No fathers’ names are given, as this predated civil registration by just a few short years. Together they had three children in England…Ann, Margaret and Augustine, the first of his namesakes.
Birth certificate of Augustine Hoy junior.
The Hoys in Australia
By 1841, Augustine and Fanny had decided to emigrate to Australia. They boarded the ship ‘Intrinsic’ on 10th June as bounty emigrants with Margaret and Augustine junior and headed for the recently settled colony of Port Phillip (now the state of Victoria).
The Hoy family on the passenger list of the Intrinsic.
The date is significant as it was just four days after the 1841 Census was taken. An earlier departure would have meant there would have been no trace of his family in any English census. They settled in the Western District, initially around Belfast (Port Fairy) and later at Grasmere, where he farmed a little land and Fanny raised a rapidly growing brood of children as well as being a cook for local whalers.
The conditions under which the Hoy family emigrated.
He was mentioned several times in the diary of another early settler, Augustus Bostock, who eventually took over Augustine’s land when he became insolvent in 1857. The insolvency did not necessarily indicate he was bad with money. Several of the locals found themselves in the same situation following a fire at Bateman’s store in Warrnambool. He, like many, had been paid for his produce in tokens issued by the business. These became worthless when the store was completely destroyed by fire on the eve of Bateman’s business practices being investigated by the bank.
A Bateman’s store token. Credit: Museums Victoria https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/articles/2569
For many years this was the last I heard of him. His children grew up, and several dispersed around the state – Margaret and Reuben went north to Ararat, Mary Ann even further north into New South Wales, Charles went to Geelong and Joseph went east to Sale in Gippsland. Fanny and the remaining surviving children (Augustine and Thomas) stayed around the Warrnambool area. She died in 1895. Her death certificate indicated she was a widow. The informant was Augustine junior, so this should be reliable information.
So where was Augustine Hoy between 1857 and 1895? In desperation, I purchased all of the marriage certificates of his children. A couple mentioned he was a gold miner, so it became apparent that he had sought his fortune on the goldfields. Not unexpected given the gold rush was in full flight in 1850’s Victoria.
It wasn’t until Trove grew to include a wider range of newspapers that I eventually found him mentioned in the mid-1860s up in Ararat where Margaret and Reuben were living with their families. This was probably where he had been mining, as their rush had started in 1857, just when Augustine had needed to start over. By then he was doing agricultural work as a ploughman. But still, no mention of his death. There was no death certificate issued. There is no record of him being buried in Ararat or anywhere else. He simply vanished.
Augustine’s namesakes
For such an elusive man, his family seem determined to remember him. At least four generations continued the name of Augustine. So far I have found over 20 descendants using his moniker, though often as a middle name. This has proved to be a wonderful way to verify the correct Hoy family amongst several others around the state. Let’s face it, Augustine is unusual, and we’ve already seen the usefulness of unusual middle names! But no one in the extended family seems to have any idea where he went, how he died or where he is buried. If only they could have remembered that!
Did he fall down a mine shaft, where his bones lay to this day? One would think that a total disappearance would have rated a mention in the newspaper. Especially given that the forfeiture of his entry in a ploughing competition in Ararat garnered a mention! Did he leave for greener pastures? I thought he may have followed the gold to the later rushes in New Zealand. His death isn’t registered there, nor any indication of his presence. He continues to baffle and flummox.
This week’s 52 Ancestors topic is ‘Family Legend’. When I was little, I always heard that my grandmother’s mother, Leah Swinbourne was ‘born of gypsy blood’. She foretold her own death in quite some detail by reading the tea leaves. But that’s a story in itself, to be told another day. I know my Mum was always very respectful of the gypsy women that would come to our door selling pegs and heather. She always managed to find sixpence to spare, even during lean weeks.
I quite liked the idea of being a gypsy. As a little girl it conjured up all sorts of romantic notions of campfires, dancing and magic. To this day I enjoy the sound of traditional gypsy music.
By Unknown author – “Victor Hugo and His Time” by Alfred Barbou. 1882;, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28275842
It took a while to find any evidence of gypsy blood though. Even now it’s largely circumstantial. Leah’s birth certificate showed her to have been born in a ‘normal’ house in Birmingham, and the family’s census entries showed addresses that weren’t gypsy encampments. There was quite a large gypsy camp in Birmingham at a place known as The Black Patch near Smethwick. This has become rather well known for being the birthplace of Charlie Chaplin according to his family members, so I was hopeful of finding a link there! As it turned out though, the gypsy connection was from another part of the country.
Charlie Chaplin – proud of his gypsy origins.
Leah’s mother Elizabeth (nee Beckett) was born about 1856 in Bath, Somerset. She was the daughter of John William Beckett, a coach trimmer and his ‘wife’, Eliza Kaines. They seemed to avoid officialdom at almost every turn to begin with. There was no marriage to be found, their first-born Elizabeth’s birth was not registered. Nor was she baptised. Same with the next child, Alice, by which time they had moved on to Trowbridge in Wiltshire. Luckily, they eventually began to register the births (perhaps they had copped a fine!) and were visible in censuses, so they weren’t too difficult to keep tabs on. I even eventually found their marriage. In 1878, between the births of their 8th and 9th children, they finally tied the knot in Birmingham.
John William Beckett was himself the son of a coach trimmer, William Beckett. William had married Mary Ann Hayden…and this is where the gypsy blood enters our family line. Mary Ann hailed from Hampshire, also with family in Wiltshire, and I initially had no idea that she was a gypsy. In retrospect, it provides a good theory as to how she and William met. Gypsies, after all, often lived in vardos, the colourful little caravans that would presumably need repairs, maintenance and decorative tasks done on occasion!
I received an email around 20 years ago from a Hayden cousin explaining the family’s background and where we fit into the tree. This gelled well with what I knew and quietly blew my mind! She told me that right into the 20th Century the Haydens were maintaining the gypsy tradition of burning the vardo and all it’s contents after it’s owner died (a la Peaky Blinders!). Sadly, I had a hard drive failure and lost all my emails and therefore contact with this and many other cousins soon afterwards. A reminder to always disaster-proof all aspects of your research and back up regularly. I’m still broken-hearted about that loss two decades later, but older and wiser now.
Around 10 years ago, my mother and my maternal uncle were DNA-tested. Both of them came up with small but significant South Asian in their ethnicity results. This is a strong indicator of gypsy origins in otherwise ‘beige and boring’ completely British subjects. Sadly, it’s washed out of my genome, but at least I know it was there right up until the last generation. This is another reminder – that our genealogical family tree and our genetic family tree are not the same as one another. We don’t get DNA from every single one of our ancestors. How could we? Where would it all fit? This is why it is important to test not just yourself, but other willing members of your family. What doesn’t show up in you may show up in your sibling or parent.
So what signs of gypsy blood in the family have been apparent during my lifetime? My grandmother didn’t set much store by it all, but she’d had all that ‘nonsense’ beaten out of her by the nuns at the orphanage. That didn’t stop her however from having some strongly held superstitions which I think came from her mother. Shoes on the table were banned. I’ve not heard of this superstition anywhere outside our family. People just look at me blankly if I mention it. But it’s been passed on strongly and I cannot bear it if people put a pair of shoes on a table to this day.
My Mum was famous in the family for being great at interpreting dreams. Perhaps this was just that she was naturally intuitive. Perhaps it was that gypsy DNA making itself known. I once played the part of a palm reader at the village fête as a teenager to raise money for the Youth Club. It felt natural, the ‘fortunes’ just flowed and I loved doing it, but I don’t have that DNA. I just love playing dress-ups and had no trouble reading what the customers needed to hear!
Do you have any ancestors who moved about a lot, and seemed to avoid marking significant life events through the official channels? Do census entries show different birthplaces for many of the children? Does the DNA of you or anyone else in your family show more than a smidge of South Asian ethnicity? Consider the possibility that you may have some gypsy blood in your family.
Memorial card for the 15 victims of the Whittall St explosion who were buried together at St Mary Whittall St.
This week marks a new beginning for me. I have decided to take part in the 52 Ancestors event, attempting to tell a story on a different theme every week. Hopefully, that will get me back into the swing of regular blogging. Let’s see. This week’s theme is ‘beginnings’, which seems a sensible place to start.
The Whittall St explosion of 1859 may sound more like an ending than a beginning. But it so shocked the people of the UK, that it helped bring in the Act of 1860. This governed the way that firearms, ammunition, and fireworks were manufactured and their components stored. In essence, it was one of the first occupational health and safety acts to be enacted. And at a personal level, there were new beginnings in the Groocock and other bereaved families as a result of this disastrous accident.
The Whittall St Explosion
Pursall and Phillips was a percussion cap factory located at 22 Whittall St in the heart of Birmingham’s Gun Quarter. Birmingham was one of the major centres of the global gun industry, employing thousands in the manufacture of guns and ammunition. In 1859 guns had largely moved from using flintlock to percussion caps to ignite the gunpowder. Percussion caps, however, were extremely dangerous. The fulminate of mercury used in the caps was very sensitive to sudden movements or pressure and extremely explosive. Factories in Birmingham at the time were usually small and jammed closely together.
On the 27th of September 1859, the unthinkable happened. A huge explosion tore through Pursall and Phillips mid-morning, reducing the entire factory to flames and rubble. There were around 70 employees at the factory. Many were women and children, who were often employed to do the small fiddly work. Indeed of the 20 people known to have died, 19 were female, ranging in age from 10 to 31 years. The one man who died, Humphrey Wood, had initially survived but ran into the aftermath to rescue his wife Elizabeth who also worked there. He was crushed when the building collapsed on top of him.
The Whittall St explosion captured in an engraving in the Illustrated London News, 8 October 1859
The cause of this (inevitable) explosion was a broken gas main in the basement, which added to an already volatile atmosphere. The three-storey building exploded, burned and collapsed around the unfortunate workforce, many of whom did not stand a chance of escape.
The Whittall St explosion made huge news all around the country, with a collection taken up for the families of those bereaved. The local community gathered together too. Most of the victims ended up being buried together on the same day at the local parish church, St Mary Whittall St. They only remained there until the 1950s however, as they were amongst the many who were exhumed and reinterred at Warstone Lane Cemetery in order to expand the grounds of the Birmingham General Hospital. Ironically, this was where most of the victims had died.
Martha Groocock
Martha Groocock was born Martha Benton around 1829 in Birmingham. She was one of the two eldest to die in the explosion. The other was Fanny Dollman, nee Earp.
Martha was born to John Benton and Mary Ann Wainwright. This Benton family originated from Kings Norton, as in ‘All roads lead to…’ if you are a regular reader! She used to be one of a handful of people in my tree who I was related to on both sides. Or more accurately her children were. She’s still related to my (now half-)uncle, but due to an unfortunate ‘Misattributed Parentage Event’ uncovered by DNA after my first 25 years of traditional research, she is now only related to me by marriage!
Martha married Henry Groocock, who to the best of my knowledge is still a blood relative(!), on Christmas Eve, 1848 at St Philips Cathedral in Birmingham. Henry was a cooper, born in Gilmorton, Leicestershire in 1827 to William Groocock and Betsy nee Boulton. Henry and Martha went on to have two sons, Henry (1853) and Joseph (1856). The marriage was not a successful one. How do I know this? Because Henry was already making new beginnings before the Whittall St explosion even happened.
Henry Groocock’s new beginnings
By the time of the Whittall St explosion, Henry had already bigamously remarried over two years earlier. His second wife was a young woman by the name of Emma Mason. She was in the very early stages of pregnancy with their first child when Martha died. Henry almost immediately married Emma again, legally this time and they went on to have four children together over the next 17 years.
He was not the only one to quickly make some new beginnings following the tragedy though. Remember the other ‘senior’ victim of the explosion, Fanny Dollman? Her husband William George Dollman remarried on Christmas Day 1859 – one of those oh-so-common Christmas weddings of the era. This was to be forgiven, and possibly expected in those times, as there were children who needed a mother. It was common practice to marry again without a long courtship. And at least he didn’t ‘pre-marry’ like Henry did. Although, wait…his bride was none other than the widow of the loyal Humphrey Wood who had died trying to save her from the explosion!
