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Category: Family Stories

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The Millen Murder: John Taylor and the Manchester Police

John Taylor, Superintendant of Police, Manchester, 1842-1855

It was the early 1990s when I first discovered that my husband was descended not only from a convict, but also a Superintendant of Police! Back in the days of having to use snail mail and be satisfied with not viewing original records easily. Thirty years later, I discovered a transcription error that has hidden an intriguing chapter of John Taylor’s career from view. The Mitten Murder was really the Millen murder!

Finding a police officer in the tree

Hannah Taylor was my husband’s great-great-grandmother. I knew she and her husband had arrived in Australia from New Zealand after each emigrating separately and marrying there in early 1867. So I took out my pen and wrote to New Zealand’s National Archives. They sent me a transcript of both their marriage and their application to marry (no parents’ details on either) and some photocopies of their mentions in the local Dunedin newspapers. One was the marriage announcement which described Hannah as ‘the fourth daughter of Mr Superintendant John Taylor, Chorlton Town Hall, Manchester, England’.

Marriage announcement from the Otago Daily Times, 30 January 1867

Soon after, I found that Hannah had died just a year after arriving in Australia. I obtained her death certificate which confirmed he was a Superintendant of Police.

Excerpt from Hannah (Taylor) Finck’s death certificate, 1888

John Taylor’s career details

The 1851 Census was unable to assist in locating John. It turned out that this section of Manchester’s census had been destroyed by water damage, and only the 1881 Census was otherwise available back then – there was no John Taylor, Superintendant of Police to be found there.

Taking out my trusty pen again, I wrote to the Greater Manchester Police Museum to see if they had any information on John. They wrote back to say they only had details of post-1858 recruits onwards. He wasn’t amongst them.

So that was that, until two years later, when they wrote again, bless ’em. They said that they had a volunteer researcher compiling an index of earlier officers and they had remembered my request. Attached was a three-page transcription of his service records, his 1855 letter of resignation and a report of the Watch Committee approving his superannuation payment.

It was fascinating reading. He’d been recruited in 1833, and become an Inspector very quickly, rising to Superintendant of the D Division by 1842. Among other notes, he was recorded as having been severely injured in the Chartist Riots in 1848. It was on the basis of his ongoing head and leg problems from these injuries that he resigned seven years later.

In an otherwise very impressive career summary, there was one blot on his copybook. Reference was made to an enquiry regarding ‘the murder on 13th August 1844 of a woman called Jane Mitten, by a man called Evans’. John had allowed a confidential letter to be seen by the press and was found guilty by the Watch Committee of ‘the most inconsiderate and reprehensible conduct’.

Finding The Mitten Murder

Of course, I wanted to know more, but could find no reference to the murder of a Jane Mitten anywhere. As in my previous post, it was only when I recently remembered to revisit this mystery that I found the answer. I went looking for Jane Mitten in the British Newspaper Archive…

…still nothing. I went back to the original correspondence from the Police Museum. They had mentioned that much of the Watch Committee Minutes was written in illegible handwriting. I tried various combinations of names and alternatives. Finally, I found a plethora of articles regarding ‘The Millen Murder’. Jane Mitten was actually Jane Millen mistranscribed from those messy minutes.

The Millen Murder

A particularly detailed report was printed in the Manchester & Salford Advertiser and Chronicle on August 17th 1844 under the title ‘Barbarous Murder and Daring Robbery’. It told of the crime, the chase, the capture, the prisoner’s statement, the inquest and court case over several tightly packed columns. This included praise of John Taylor and his ‘extraordinary exertions and vigilance’ to bring the prisoner to justice.

Initial praise for John Taylor in the Millen murder

The Millen murder was an awful crime. Jane Millen was an elderly lady who took in a lodger by the name of George Evans. He subsequently lost his job. She supported him for six months, kindheartedly waiving his rent and feeding him. Eventually, she began to ask him to make more effort to find a job and ultimately found him one. He worked for a day and then decided he didn’t wish to return to the job the next morning. Instead, he bashed her on the head and strangled her, before stealing several items from her home and catching the train to Liverpool. He was found in a lodging house there, awaiting a steamship to New York the next morning. Evans was totally unrepentant and it took a very short time for the jury to find him guilty of ‘Wilful Murder’.

The Tide Turns

Just a week later, the newspapers revealed the letter for which John Taylor was severely upbraided. It is printed in full in the Manchester Courier and Lancashire Advertiser of the 24th August:

The rogue letter that got Superintendant Taylor into so much trouble

It was quite rightly felt that since it had been published in a rival newspaper before the trial it would have been prejudicial for the jurors to have the opportunity to have read it. This newspaper took full advantage of the opportunity to criticise their rival, thus bringing even more attention to it. The Watch Committee had to act.

The Watch Committee’s findings

On the 14th September, the same newspaper published the Watch Committee’s findings on the matter.

Report of the Watch Committee

And thus, with John’s previous good record and eating of much humble pie, he retained his position and reputation. What a relief.

Once again, newspapers have come to the rescue to brilliantly add detail and colour to the information supplied in other documents.

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Another Railway Tragedy in the Family – John Rigby

mattbuck (category), CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Recently I decided to take my focus off the ancestors further back in my tree to fill in some details on more recent generations. It’s always good to come back periodically and review what is now available to flesh out the stories of our relatives. So many new sources are constantly being made available! And when it comes to railway tragedies, it is very likely that multiple records will be left.

John Rigby and Charlotte Teague

John Rigby was born in 1837 in Shoreditch to a silk weaver also named John and his wife Sarah Morter (last mentioned here). However, he did not follow his father into the declining silk industry but became a cigar maker. He married Charlotte Teague, the third daughter of Enoch Teague and Sarah Townley in 1861 at Christchurch Spitalfields.

John Rigby and Charlotte Teague marriage certificate 1861

Together they had 8 children, the first three of whom were born in London, the remainder in Leicester. John and Charlotte had relocated about 1868, where John worked and eventually became a foreman in a cigar factory. It is possible he worked with Joseph Carey ‘John’ Merrick, who became known as ‘the Elephant Man’, as they were both working in a cigar factory and living very close to one another during the mid-1870s.

John Rigby Junior and the Railway Tragedy

1862 baptism of John Rigby

John and Charlotte’s eldest son, also called John was born in 1862 in Hackney. He too became a cigar maker. Of all the children of John and Charlotte, I had never found what became of John after the 1891 census. At that stage, he too had moved cities, from Leicester to Sheffield, also to work as a foreman in a cigar factory belonging to Messrs J Morris & Son of Whitechapel and Sheffield. He had a wife, Mary Ann (nee Hall) who he had married in 1887 and two children, John and George both born in Sheffield. After that, he appeared to have disappeared in a puff of (cigar?) smoke and I abandoned him for a decade or two. It was now time to see what I could find about his later life.

John Rigby and family in the 1891 Census

Once again, the newspapers came to the rescue. They have become my absolute go-to source these days given the accident-proneness of my family!

The reason I hadn’t found John in any later censuses was that he hadn’t lived to see 1901. From the newspaper reports following his death, it seemed that John had become very depressed during 1900. He was convinced that his employers were unhappy with him. He thought that he was about to lose his job (something they strenuously denied at his inquest).

Trip to London

At Easter, he went to visit his father in Leicester, who was determined to cheer him up. John Senior bought railway excursion tickets for himself, John, and one of the younger Rigby brothers to visit London for a few days.

Approaching London, there was a long tunnel at Haverstock Hill. The train carriages were unlit. John took the opportunity of the darkness to smash the carriage window and leap out onto the tracks. His father tried to grab his coat but was unsuccessful. John was then horrifically killed by a train passing in the opposite direction.

The death and subsequent inquest were reported in several newspapers with varying levels of detail. In none of them did it report which brother had been in the carriage with the two John Rigbys.

Inquest report in the Leicester Chronicle, 21 April 1900

It is hard to imagine how traumatising this would have been for both his father and this brother, and what impact it may have had on their later lives.

There were three younger brothers of John who were alive at the time – George, Charles and Alfred. Charles was my great-grandfather and I suspect that he might have been the brother on the train.

Why? He effectively became estranged from the family. Although he was still in Leicester in 1901, by 1911 he had moved to Bedworth, by 1915 he was in Coventry, and he ended up in Birmingham by the following year, where he lived out the rest of his (short) life. His father died in 1917, and his will reveals bequests to all of his living children…except Charles.

The rest of the Rigby family remained in Leicester and by all accounts were close to one another. I wonder if Charles somehow got the blame for not saving his brother? Pure speculation on my part and probably unable ever to be confirmed one way or another. Of course that is not the only possible reason for his estrangement from the family, but that’s for another blog post.

Two families with railway tragedies in common

You may remember a railway tragedy in the Swinbourne branch of my family, which I wrote about here. Well, the two families impacted by railway tragedy happened to merge. Charles Rigby married Leah Barnett (nee Swinbourne) in 1916. His brother and her son, both killed by trains. What are the odds of that?

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Digging Into the Townley Gardeners – Proving Betty Oldaker

The next phase in sorting out the Townley family, or the story of how I tried to disprove a strange hint and ended up proving it!

Regular readers may remember that I blogged last year about my Townley family and the strange propensity people have of assuming that William Townley, victualler of London was the Reverend William Townley of Orpington, Kent. We now have him tracked down to Charlton next Woolwich in Kent where his father John was a gardener. Through combing the parish registers, his siblings Robert, John, Mary, Thomas, and Joice (the only one to be baptized in Charlton) were discovered. A satisfying number of DNA descendants of this Townley family matched with my family through this line. So what now?

If there is no trace of them in the Charlton parish register before the 1790s, where were they before then? And could I pin down exactly who was John’s wife Betty?

There was a multitude of possibilities for baptisms of my ancestor William, so I decided to focus on Robert, a less common forename.

St Michael’s Church & Buckland Manor Hotel near Broadway
cc-by-sa/2.0 – © Colin Park

Let’s disprove the Buckland Townleys!

I could find one baptism that fit well with the known facts in all respects except one. It was a long LONG way from Charlton. A Robert Townley was baptised to John and Betty on 11 Nov 1787 in Buckland, Gloucestershire. Buckland is a little Cotswolds village near the Gloucestershire/Worcestershire border. 100 miles away from Charlton. As I began to research further it was with the thought of disproving this was the correct Robert, not proving it.

So I leapt into the Buckland parish registers. Wait, there was also a son William baptised on 29th August 1779 to John and Betty! Another perfect fit. Interesting. Was there also a Mary, John and Thomas, the other siblings that had married in Charlton? No. Okay then. Probably not the right family, right? There were however baptisms for a Sarah in 1770, and two James’s in 1785 and 1786.

A Full House of Townleys

So who were the John and Betty Townley of Buckland? The only John Townley and Betty (or Elizabeth) that I could find a marriage for were John Townley and Betty Oldaker in 1769 in Withington, 13 miles away. Could this be them? It would fit with Sarah being baptised in 1770. But there was a big gap between her baptism and William’s in 1779. Was I looking at two separate families? I spread the net a little wider. At Chipping Campden, less than 5 miles away, a John and Elizabeth Townley had baptised Mary in 1772, John in 1775 and Elizabeth in 1777. This perfectly filled the gap, accounted for two of the other known children and added one more unknown. Still, just because it fits, doesn’t mean it’s true. It still could be coincidence.

I looked for burials around Buckland of any of the children that I knew to have grown to adulthood and settled in the Charlton area in an attempt to rule them out. None of them was buried in the area. I did notice though that many burials in the second half of the 18th century were of people ‘of London’. So plenty of Londoners seem to have been recruited to Buckland for work in this timeframe. Perhaps it wasn’t so unlikely that John Townley had gone 100 miles for work after all. I have found no record of major works occurring in this time period in or around Buckland but perhaps the Lord of the Manor, Thomas Thynne (at that time 2nd Viscount Weymouth) needed workers for his lands and gardens.

Townley as a name in the Buckland parish registers seemed to be confined to this family, though there were some Townley families in Winchcombe, just a few miles away.

Who was Betty Oldaker?

What about Betty Oldaker, the wife of this John Townley, where was she from? Her baptism to Thomas and Mary Oldacre was found in the Buckland parish registers in 1747. She had siblings Robert, Mary, James, Thomas, Sarah, William and…Joyce! Many names already known to have been given to Charlton John and Betty’s children. And Joyce was actually baptised in Charlton. I was beginning to believe that these were in fact the same family. Betty Oldaker’s paternal ancestry shows many Joyces through the generations, so though it wasn’t a really common name at this time, it had significance in her particular family.

If the John and Bettys were the same people, given that they moved to Charlton when their eldest child was still only in her teens, I should be able to find records of her and the other previously unknown children Elizabeth and James in the Charlton/London area then, right?

Sarah Townley 1770

Once I knew of Sarah’s existence, she wasn’t hard to find. She married in 1793 to John Embleton at St Botolph Bishopsgate. How do I know it was the Buckland Sarah Townley? A witness was James Oldaker, now known to be her uncle.

Elizabeth Townley 1777

Elizabeth Townley was also found quite quickly. She married John Blasdall in 1804 at St George the Martyr, Southwark. Not only was this where her brother William was baptizing children at the time, but her brother Thomas had married Frances Blasdall there the year before.

James Townley 1785 and/or 1786

James remains a sticking point. I can find no trace of him yet. Was he baptised twice? If so, why? Is the second baptism actually a misrecorded burial? Or is one of the baptisms actually a misrecorded Thomas for whom I have not yet found a baptism but who is known to be part of this family? The search continues. This did sow a seed of doubt, the one thing that didn’t fit, until…

The Death of John Townley’s Mother-In-Law, Mary Oldaker

Mary Oldaker (nee Bravel) of Buckland died in 1786. Her probate documents sealed the deal. The administrators of her estate were James Oldaker her eldest son (Betty’s brother) of Charlton, Kent and John Townley of Buckland (remembering that John and Betty were still in Buckland at that time). There is the definitive link to Charlton, and to the James Oldaker who witnessed Sarah Townley’s marriage!

James Oldaker and John Townley named together on Mary Oldaker’s probate documents, linking Charlton in Kent and Buckland in Gloucestershire

James’ signature on each document was definitely made by the same person…

The signature of James Oldaker (and lack of signature of John Townley!) on his mother’s probate documents in 1786
James Oldaker’s signature on his niece Sarah Townley’s marriage record in 1803. Undoubtedly the same man.

So there was much circumstantial evidence that led me to believe that Buckland John and Betty and Charlton John and Betty were one and the same. But this single document definitively tied the places and people together.

John Townley, born 1738 in Chelsea, moved to Buckland sometime before 1769, met and married local girl Betty Oldaker, moving back south together in the late 1780s with their family. They settled in Charlton, where Betty’s brother was already living and John’s living siblings were close by. Just waiting for some DNA pings from the descendants of the ‘new’ children now!

RootsTech Pass Giveaway Winner!

Congratulations to Becky Smith who won the three-day pass to RootsTech in Salt Lake City next week. Have a wonderful time!
A reminder to those who aren’t making the journey that virtual RootsTech is free to attend online. If you haven’t yet registered there is still time…and while you are at it, Relatives at RootsTech is happening again, giving you the chance to find cousins and compare notes. Why not register for that too?

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One Line on a Gravestone – Discovering Bigamy in the Jobbern Family

Last time, you heard about the tragedy that befell the Jobbern family after the almost simultaneous deaths of the two eldest children. This week, one line on a gravestone helped me begin to piece together where Catherine and her daughters went…and what they resorted to along the way.

Gravestone of Catherine and her daughters, Woodlands Cemetery, Stamford, CT, USA (photo: Graveyard Walker, used with permission)

Stage 1 – Manchester

Catherine and her two remaining daughters had clearly left Thomas in Birmingham by 1847. But where had they gone? They hadn’t remained in Birmingham, they were nowhere to be found in the 1851 Census.

Sarah Ann

The first one of them to be located was Sarah Ann. She had married John Baptist Bradshaw on 17th August 1847 at Manchester Cathedral. She gave her father’s name and profession as Thomas Jobern, silversmith which was a clear match.

Marriage certificate of Sarah Ann Jobern and John Baptist Bradshaw, Manchester Cathedral, 17th August 1847.

Neither her mother nor her sister had witnessed this marriage, so I wasn’t sure if she’d arrived in Manchester alone at this stage. It turned out that they had also married on the same day at the Roman Catholic church of St Augustine in Chorlton Upon Medlock, a mile away. This helpfully also further confirmed her identity by naming her mother as Catherine.

They’d not kept the marriage a secret, publishing it in the marriage notices of several newspapers in Manchester and Liverpool.

Marriage announcement in the Manchester Times, 21st August 1847.

Sarah Ann and John were easily found in the 1851 census in Hulme, Manchester. Further confirmation that this was the right Sarah Ann was provided by her birthplace of Handsworth, which was in the correct area of Birmingham. They had no children at this stage, but did have both a servant and a lodger. John was a wine and spirit merchant’s agent. She had clearly moved up in the world.

Catherine and Jane

So where were her sister and mother? The 1851 Manchester Census is very difficult to read in some parts due to water damage, but I eventually found Jane with her mother, now known as Catherine Fowler, also in Hulme, lodging with the Hayhurst family.

1851 Census for Catherine Fowler and Jane M Jobern, Hulme, Manchester

Interestingly Jane was described as a ‘Professor of Music’, while Catherine was a Monthly Nurse. Catherine’s name had changed to Fowler and she was described as a widow. The GRO index had a marriage between a Catherine Jobbern and a William Fowler listed for 1845 – so I ordered it.

Marriage certificate of William Fowler and Catherine Jobbern, St Augustine Catholic Church, 1st July 1845

Though she described herself as a widow at this marriage too, we know Thomas was still alive till 1851. This was the first bigamous marriage I stumbled across. One of the witnesses was her daughter Sarah Ann. This was a pattern that would repeat. I found William in 1841 with his first wife Jane, but do not know for sure that he was the widower he claimed to be either. It is probable that Catherine was telling the truth when she claimed to be a widow of her second marriage (if not the first!) in the census, as I’ve not yet found any trace of William beyond their marriage. I’m deciding whether to invest in the pot luck of death certificates to find him with such a common name – sometimes you need to avoid the rabbit holes!

So it appears that Thomas’ wife and both his daughters left him in Birmingham very soon after the deaths of Caroline and Thomas junior in 1844.

No further signs of them were apparent in Manchester so I began a broader search for Fowlers and Job(b)erns. One line on gravestone posted at FindAGrave suddenly revealed where they had gone.

Stage 2 – USA – ‘One line on a Gravestone…’

Catherine and both her daughters were buried together in Stamford, Connecticut in the US! One line on the gravestone showed beyond doubt it was the right people. However, the whole stone raised questions of its own.

Whoever had commissioned the gravestone did so after the death of Sarah in 1911 as it was obviously all carved at the same time. And they wanted it to be clear that Catherine Fowler had been married to Thomas Jobern, and that her daughters were his daughters. This is what tied the gravestone to the family from Birmingham and Manchester. Who that person was remains a mystery that I’m trying to get to the bottom of, but I have my suspicions (to be revealed later!)

What it also revealed was the husbands of the daughters. But wait, where was John Baptist Bradshaw? Sarah Ann’s husband was named as Isaac Wood! More on that later.

Sarah Ann

I managed to find John and Sarah Ann Bradshaw living next door to Catherine and Jane in New York City in the 1860 Census.

1860 New York Census. All the Jobbern women in two households.

John and Sarah Ann had had two daughters, mistakenly recorded as having been born in Mississippi. The vital records for Boston, Massachusetts reveal that this was actually where they had been born. So John had made it to the US with them sometime in the early 1850s.

Birth records for Louisa and Catherine Bradshaw in Boston, Massachusetts, 1854 and 1856.

I can find none of them in the 1870 US Census yet. Nor the 1871 England & Wales Census. But why would I even look there? Well…

…guess where I found the marriage of Sarah Ann and Isaac Wood in 1869? Manchester!!

Marriage certificate of Sarah Ann Bradshaw and Isaac Wood, 21st Dec 1869, Manchester Cathedral.

Both state they are widowed. It is the correct Sarah Ann. Her father is named as Thomas Jobern, though he has mysteriously become a ‘manager’ rather than a silversmith now. Digging into Isaac’s background explains why. He came from quite a respected and well-to-do family in the US. Sarah Ann was reinventing her background. Both of her teenage daughters witnessed this bigamous marriage, as she had her mother’s.

In truth, neither party to this marriage were widowed. This too is a bigamous marriage. Isaac had left his wife, Eliza Jane (nee Griffith) who was alive and kicking for at least two further censuses, and their two daughters, Eliza Jane Wood and Catherine Cole Wood. John Baptist Bradshaw appears to have died in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1881.

Death notice for John Baptist Bradshaw, in the Boston Globe, 2nd March 1881.

I don’t know how long Sarah Ann’s marriage to Isaac lasted. She is next found in the 1881 Census in Chinley, Derbyshire with her daughters (helpfully confirming their birthplace as Boston), listed as married, but Isaac is not with them, and I have found him in neither the 1881 Census, nor back in the US in the 1880 Census. He died in 1895 in the ‘House for Aged Men’ in Brooklyn, New York. This was a charity home, so he had fallen on hard times (perhaps disowned by his family for his actions?). He is buried in the Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Sarah Ann and her daughters had returned to the US by 1900 (probably before 1891 as they cannot be found in the 1891 English Census and Louisa married in 1896 in the US). She was living in Broad St, Stamford with her married daughter Louisa in both the 1900 and 1910 Censuses. The 1900 Census indicates her immigration was in 1854 which fits well with the birth of her daughter Louisa in Boston in the same year.

Sarah Ann died in Stamford on 24th November 1911. Multiple death notices were published in the newspapers of Stamford and Bridgeport in Connecticut, Boston and New York. These provide evidence of her further embellishing the story of her background. Her father was said to have been an aide to the Duke of Wellington during the Napoleonic Wars. Ahem. If you recall from the first blog on the Jobbern family, his service records show him as a private, discharged with a very bad conduct record, and he had never served outside of Scotland and Ireland on garrison duty only.

Sarah Ann’s death notice in the New York Times, 26th November 1911.

Catherine and Jane

Catherine had died in Fairfield County, Connecticut in 1874, and Jane on 4 May 1877 in Stamford. Sometime between 1860 and 1877 Jane had married an Isaac Hull. No trace of this marriage has yet been found on either side of the Atlantic, and thus far her life between these years remains a mystery. Her death notice provides nothing more than her date and place of death as Mrs Jane M Hull.

Clearly, this story is far from over. It is complicated by lack of documentary evidence to show when the transAtlantic movements took place. I’m yet to find them on any passenger lists, though they seem to have travelled across the ocean on several occasions. They also seem to have dodged some censuses though I’m still trying to find them. Some digging into other US sources such as tax records, directories, probates, land records etc may reveal more. It is an ongoing project as I am fascinated by these women!

But what of that one line on the gravestone?

Who could have had a vested interest in having a link recorded between Catherine, her daughters and the ne’er-do-well Thomas Jobbern? Everyone who had known him in the USA was dead. Or were they?

If you cast your mind back to the beginning of this story, Thomas had a brother John, my stepdad’s direct ancestor. He too had had ‘issues’ and was long dead, but he had several children including a daughter, Caroline Jobber. Long before any of the Jobbern branch story came to light I had known she had emigrated to the US in 1867. Indeed, most of the DNA matches to my Dad come from this US branch of the Jobber family. What’s more, she too had settled in Connecticut. I suspect she, as Thomas and Catherine’s niece, was behind the one line on the gravestone that revealed Catherine’s secret.

One line on a gravestone and a lifetime of subterfuge is gradually being unravelled…

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One Paragraph in a Newspaper…Discovering Tragedy in the Jobbern Family

I’m in the middle of some research into my stepdad’s Jobber/Jobbern family. It can be hugely helpful when a surname is unusual. In this case, it’s been a slow old slog and only recently it has gathered pace. The catalyst was a single line on a gravestone in faraway Stamford, Connecticut. More on THAT in the next blog! This has turned into a two-parter to save your eyes, dear readers!

This is the story (or as much as I have currently found!) of the family of Thomas Jobbern, the brother of Dad’s great-great-great-grandfather John Jobber. Notice the slightly different surnames – Dad always said that the family name ‘was originally Jobbern’. This has turned out to be true – from his 3 x great-grandfather down, they have all been Jobber. His brother Thomas’ line continued with the ‘n’ at the end of the name. The two variants were often used interchangeably in many other Jobber/Jobbern families. The number of ‘b’s in the name is also variable.

The brief death notice of the two elder Jobbern children in Aris’s Gazette, Birmingham, 22 April 1844.

The Jobberns

Thomas and John were the sons of Thomas Jobbern, born 1756 in Whittington, Staffordshire to Solomon and Truth (nee Hodgson) Jobbern. Thomas senior was the first known military man in the family. He served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, 6th Regiment of Foot. Somewhere along the way, in either Ireland or Nova Scotia based on his service records, he picked up a wife, Caroline. Their marriage has not yet been found. I’m currently favouring Ireland as both his sons followed in his footsteps. They both joined the military and married Irish women while stationed there. As a result, my Dad has a healthy dose of Irish DNA from this and subsequent repeats in later generations!

Thomas Jobbern (1795-1851) and his family

Thomas junior was born on the 3rd March 1795 in Birmingham, Warwickshire according to his military records. Thank goodness for the thoroughness of the military as there is no baptism yet to be found for either he or his brother. He joined the 90th Regiment of Foot in 1811 and served in the 2nd Battalion. This battalion was on garrison duty in Scotland and Ireland for the entire time of his service. There has been no record found yet of his marriage to Catherine, born about 1796 in Ireland, though at least as you’ll discover later, I now know her maiden name…thanks to one line on a gravestone.

Thomas Jobbern appears to have had what we may in the 21st Century call ‘issues’ (from his military service records).

Together they had four children: Caroline Mary (born about 1819), Thomas (born about 1820), Sarah Ann (born 1822) and Jane M (born 1826). The 1841 census suggests they were all born in Warwickshire, however it is much more likely that the first two were born elsewhere. Thomas was not discharged from the army until 1820 at which time he was in Stockport, Cheshire. Although his discharge was on medical grounds, his conduct was noted as ‘very bad’. This may have some bearing on later events.

1841 Census of the Jobbern family, All Saints, Hockley – note incorrect age of Catherine, she was not a daughter, she was his wife and of a similar age to him.

Tragedy Strikes the Jobbern Family

In 1843, Caroline Mary Jobbern married Samuel Homer, a coach builder. Only 10 months later she was dead at the age of 25. She died on the 4th April 1844 at her father’s residence and was buried at Hockley All Saints church six days later. Her cause of death was described as ‘water on the lungs’. The modern term is ‘pleural effusion’ and can have many causes ranging from infections, pneumonia, TB and cancer through to trauma. We do not know what the cause was in Caroline’s case as it does not appear to have been investigated further.

Caroline Homer’s death certificate

As if this wasn’t enough, just two days after she was buried, her 24-year-old brother Thomas also died. He too passed away at his father’s home and this time of consumption, now known as tuberculosis (TB). This may lend weight to this also being the cause of Caroline’s pleural effusion but we will never know.

Thomas Jobbern junior’s death certificate

The deaths of the two eldest Jobbern children were so close to one another that they appear as consecutive entries in the parish burial register.

Caroline and Thomas, buried just one week apart, as recorded in the burial register of All Saints, Hockley.

One can only imagine what devastating impact this would have had on the Jobbern family. The father, already known to be troubled, the mother who had lost her two eldest children, and the two young daughters remaining must have suffered agonies of grief. And it does not seem to have brought them closer together.

There are several military pension documents over the ensuing years, and in one from October 1847 the note was made that he had no family. Wait, WHAT? There were no deaths registered for any of them, so where did they go?

Thomas Jobbern Dies

The Returns of Payment for September 1851 noted that his pension was ceased due to his death on 10th September of that year. Remember that date. He did not die until late 1851.

Thomas Jobbern’s pension ceased due to his death

This meant that I should be able to find him in the 1851 census. His burial record indicated his residence was Price St, Birmingham. Even a manual trawl, household by household fails to reveal him in this street. In fact, he cannot be found anywhere on the 1851 Census at all, despite using all the tricks to find someone on every site that holds this census. I wonder if he was sleeping rough by then and missed being enumerated. Or perhaps he sent the enumerator away in a drunken rage, refusing to take part. Again, we’ll likely never know.

Thomas Jobbern’s burial record, claiming he lived in Price St, Birmingham

But what about the missing family members? Their deaths hadn’t been recorded between their last mention in the 1841 Census and their absence in 1847. Where were they? That is a story in itself…and one for next time as the Jobbern family plot thickens…

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Time to Dismantle ‘Accepted Wisdoms’ – Frances Scully or McHugh?

Last year I wrote about the mysterious disappearance from records of Augustine Hoy. This time around, I want to unravel his wife’s maiden name, which is just as mysterious! Was she Frances Scully or McHugh?

The commonly held wisdom is that Augustine’s wife Frances (or Fanny) was born Frances Luby Scully. I’ve known this to be so ever since I started researching the family in the 1980s. But time and the gradual collection of both documentary and DNA evidence have undone my belief that this is the case. Today I want to illustrate why I have concluded that Frances Scully was actually Frances McHugh.

It is also unashamed ‘cousin bait‘. At last count, there were 189 trees on Ancestry alone that almost all attribute the name Scully to Frances, most unsourced. If just a handful of them stumble over this blog and are open to looking at the evidence, it may go some way to prevent the further proliferation of the name Scully (at least in that part of the tree!). Also, I’m hoping someone holding further documentary evidence one way or the other that I have not yet found may get in touch!

Augustine Hoy Frances McGeow marriage
Marriage certificate of Augustine and Frances

Who was Frances?

Frances was the wife of Augustine Hoy. She was born in approximately 1814, probably in the West Indies (according to her death certificate) though of Irish background. A small but significant bit of African DNA that pops up among descendants regularly shows she was possibly of mixed race. This may support the claim on her death certificate that she was Caribbean-born.

The first documentary evidence I have of her existence is her marriage to Augustine in Eccles, Lancashire, England in 1833. They had three children together before emigrating to Melbourne in 1841 with the surviving two, thankfully after the 1841 Census where they were living in Liverpool.

Augustine Hoy 1841 Census
Augustine, Frances with surviving children Margaret and Augustine in the 1841 Census, just prior to emigration.

After settling in the Western District of Port Phillip Colony, later Victoria, they went on to have a further six children together. Five of these lived to adulthood. She was rumoured to have been a cook for the whalers at some point during that time, though no evidence of this other than family stories has yet been found. She died in Warrnambool in 1895.

Augustine Hoy passenger list
The Hoy family on the passenger list of Intrinsic.

Which Documents Show Her Maiden Name?

Documents that potentially reveal her maiden name include those relating to her own marriage and death, and the civil registration (birth, marriage and death) and possibly baptismal records of her children. An obituary with lots of lovely detail would be welcome but none has been located as yet.

Only one child’s birth was registered in England. One was born well before, and the other just five days (AAARGH!) before civil registration commenced.

Augustine Hoy junior's birth certificate
Birth certificate of Augustine Hoy junior.

Civil registration did not begin in Victoria until 1853, so the births of all but her last Australian-born child could not be registered and it seems the last one was just not registered. Luckily, Victorian marriage and death certificates contain the mother’s full birth name where known.

See the table below for what records I have found containing a maiden name for Frances. It is worth noting that her marriage certificate was signed with an ‘X’, indicating she was illiterate. This would account for the spelling variations in her surname. McHugh is by far the most common variant of this name and is why I’m using this in the face of so many possible spellings!

Frances Scully or McHugh in documents
Scully vs McHugh in documents

What About DNA?

As usual, I then turned to DNA to utilise the other form of evidence that may help answer the question.

At AncestryDNA, I have a great-great-granddaughter and great-great-great-granddaughter (from a separate line) of Frances amongst my kits who have been sorted into ancestral groups. So I did a search for Scullys and McHughs amongst the group which I know to be related through Augustine and Frances’ family.

The only matches with a Scully in their trees were those who had attributed this as Frances’ surname. No other Scully families at all. There were a bunch of McHughs and McCues, all from County Mayo.

Repeating the process over at MyHeritage where I also have the DNA of a now-deceased great-great-great-grandson as well as the above two, I found the same thing. Again, predominantly from County Mayo, although there were a couple apparently from County Galway too.

Frances Scully or McHugh?

Wherever Frances gave her own maiden name, it was a variant of McHugh (written on her behalf as it sounded to the writer). This is significant. Who would know better than she whether she was Frances Scully or McHugh?

Her daughter’s civil marriage certificate also gave this name. It’s often the case that daughters know their family history better than sons.

Frances Scully or McHugh Mary Ann's marriage certificate
Mary Ann Hoy’s marriage certificate

Three sons used another name for their (first) marriages, two Scullys and a Tully. Two of them married twice. Both of them gave a variant of McHugh instead at their second wedding.

Frances Scully or McHugh - Augustine Hoy 1st marriage certificate
Augustine Hoy’s first marriage certificate
Frances Scully or McHugh - Augustine Hoy 2nd marriage certificate
Augustine Hoy’s second marriage certificate
Frances Scully or McHugh - Joseph Hoy 1st marriage certificate
Joseph Hoy’s first marriage certificate
Frances Scully or McHugh - Joseph Hoy 2nd marriage certificate
Joseph Hoy’s second marriage certificate

Son Thomas only married once and was one who used the name Scully. However, his witness was his brother Augustine who had also used the name Scully at his own first wedding and may have helped him fill in his wedding certificate. (Thomas may have stuck with this belief. The authorised agent who acted as the informant at his death used Scully too – who gave him this information? His wife was dead, so maybe one of his children?) The other sons just didn’t know their mother’s maiden name at all.

Interestingly, son Augustine was the informant at Frances’ death and gave her parents’ names as ‘unknown’. Perhaps he was too emotional to remember at the time that her father at least would have been a McHugh or a Scully. He also got one sister’s name wrong, though can be forgiven as she died before he was born.

Death certificate of Frances Hoy, 1895

The DNA appears to support the McHugh surname but not the Scully surname.

So was she born Frances Scully or McHugh? Based on the evidence I have so far, my deduction is that Frances was born Frances McHugh.

So Where Did Scully Come From?

So let’s now jump into the land of supposition and guess where Scully might have come from. I believe there’s a good chance it will turn out to be a family name, just further back in the tree (this would also make it less likely to turn up in DNA matches). For example, if Frances talked about Scully relatives to her sons (especially Augustine) at some point, maybe the assumption was that she was born a Scully. Time will, I hope, tell.

The other name that is often associated with Frances is the middle name Luby. I’ve only heard this from other family members, but on multiple descendant lines, so this belief goes back several generations. I am yet to see any document containing this middle name, nonetheless, it appears to be associated with her. Luby is also an Irish surname. So I’m keeping my mind and eyes open in case this may provide a clue.

Next steps

  • I’m currently trawling through the McHughs in the area around Eccles and Liverpool to see if I can find any evidence of other members of her family there. She was quite young when she married, so there is a chance that she wasn’t originally there alone. She may turn out to have witnessed a wedding or been a sponsor to a child of a family member if this is the case. Utilising the ‘FAN Club‘ may be very useful.
  • I’m also building out trees of DNA matches to see if I can find the McHugh connection between them. I’ll be extending the search to ungrouped matches and other sites where I have DNA kits for her descendants uploaded.
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That Pesky Townley Family! Navigating Through Obstacles Seeking The Truth

Over the past few weeks (now that the Duddleston dust has settled), I’ve finally resumed my search for the origins of my Townley family. Earlier attempts, what feels like a century ago, hit brick walls. Even now, there are obstacles to overcome.

Be methodical when tackling obstacles in your family tree. (Photo by form PxHere)

They’ve Got the Wrong Man!

Most researchers have come to the conclusion that ‘my’ William Townley was ‘The Rev. William Townley’. He was the vicar of Orpington in Kent and apparently the son of a linen dealer named John Townley. Unfortunately for this to be true it would involve him coming back to London periodically to produce children with his wife Sarah (nee Gussin) and claiming to be a victualler rather than a vicar on baptism records!

Baptism of Frederick Townley, 14th November 1813 (the date in the margin is his birthdate), St Botolph without Aldgate, London. His father William is clearly noted as a victualler.

According to the Clergy of the Church of England database, at the time of his supposed son Frederick’s birth in Aldgate he was a deacon at Old Windsor in Berkshire. He had moved on to Wyrardsbury, Buckinghamshire as stipendiary curate by 1814, while his family (according to the accepted wisdom of the genealogical community) continued to be raised in Aldgate. Although he was in London for a short while before this he was based in Marylebone, not Aldgate, and by 1816 he had taken up the position of Vicar in Orpington. He remained there until his death. He’s there in the 1841 Census. Tithes were still being paid to him in 1843. Finally, his death, still with the title of Vicar of Orpington is announced in the Gentleman’s Magazine as having occurred on 24th September 1847.

Surely it would have been scandalous and not a little inconvenient to have his family ensconced in London for all that time? Especially when he was rattling around his church-provided Vicarage with only a couple of female servants for company?

I stick to my claim that William Townley, husband of Sarah Gussin, who claimed to be a victualler was….wait for it….a victualler!

William Townley, Victualler not Vicar

It just so happens a William Townley purchased his Freedom of the City of London by redemption through the Innholder’s Company as a victualler in 1803.

The Freedom of the City document showing William’s entry to the Company of Innholders as a victualler.

John Townley, Gardener not Linen Dealer

The document does indeed name his father as John. But John is not a linen dealer. He is a gardener, and the document tells us where he was from in the margin. Let me turn that image around for you and save your neck.

Detail from the Freedom of the City document margin, showing that John was a gardener, deceased.

Great handwriting, huh? And it led me down the garden path, no pun intended. I read the place as being Carshalton. Carshalton is not in Kent, it’s in Surrey, the county next door. Hmmm, it could have been a mistake by a clerk who hadn’t spent much time south of the Thames. I ran it past a ‘jury of my peers’ at The Genealogy Squad without letting on what I thought it said. They unanimously said it was Carshalton, confirming what I had thought. So, I hit the parish registers to try to find John’s death and hopefully William’s baptism.

Nothing.

I ended up searching through a hundred years of the Carshalton parish register the old-fashioned way until I went cross-eyed, not relying on indexes or transcripts, looking for evidence of Townley families in the parish. There was nothing found to indicate that there were Townley families established at Carshalton.

So, if Carshalton doesn’t seem right, Kent might be, right? I looked for places in Kent that had a name that could conceivably be construed from the margin notation and decided to give Charlton a look. There are two Charltons in Kent. One near Dover and one near Woolwich. William and Sarah’s first couple of children were baptised in Southwark, not too far from the Charlton near Woolwich. This wouldn’t likely have been Sarah’s doing, her family was from Epping in Essex. So, I opted to start with investigating that one.

Charlton House, Kent (Bencherlite, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Charlton, not Carshalton

The good news. It seemed Charlton was the location of a grand house with massive gardens, so gardeners would not be unusual there. Secondly, I found a John Townley buried at the parish church in 1798. Promising.

But the bad news was there was very little of the parish register available in the usual places. I extracted what I could find, a grand total of less than ten of them and way too late for my William’s baptism. With a bit of digging, I found that North West Kent FHS had the full parish registers on CD-ROM and ordered a copy from them. While I waited for them to arrive from England, I began the quest to tie up all the Charlton Townley families from any sources I could find in the meantime and ‘FAN club‘ the stuffing out of them.

Robert and Mary Ann (nee Hammond) Townley stood out. He was a blacksmith not a gardener, but he was from Charlton and was baptising children there in the handful of records I’d found. Census records showed he was of an age to possibly be William’s younger brother. So, I built their tree out and down through the years, incorporating clues as to how the other Townleys fit with this family. Gradually they all began to fit together and I was gathering confidence that the local Townley families seemed to spring from one source. Many were gardeners and many also had strong links to Hackney, a massive market gardening area in that era.

Taking a deep breath, I added the word ‘HYPOTHESIS’ in the name suffix box on Ancestry (so as not to confuse anyone) and linked Robert to John the gardener as a son. I was still waiting for the CD so I decided to see whether DNA would help confirm things. Apart from myself, there are four DNA kits I manage that come from that same family line – 2 siblings, a first cousin and a 3rd cousin.

The Townley family emerges

Within hours, common ancestors going back to various children of Robert and Mary Ann began pinging up against all of these kits. My mum’s DNA never made it to Ancestry before she passed away so I went to the site where hers was. Same result, matches that went back to Robert were there too. Carshalton was hurled out of the window and Charlton is definitely where John Townley had died and his children were raised.

I say raised rather than born, because when the CD-ROM arrived, I could only find one baptism of a child to John. Joice Townley was baptised 4th July 1790 to John and Betty.

Baptism of Joice Townley, 4th July 1790, Charlton, Kent.

Joice went on to marry David Lake at St Botolph Bishopsgate in 1807. This was only a third of a mile from St Botolph Aldgate where my William and Sarah were baptising their later children.

So it seems that John arrived in Charlton somewhere between Robert’s approximate birth in 1788 and Joice’s in 1790. It is highly likely he was the 1738 son of Nathaniel Townley, a gardener of Chelsea and his wife Jane (nee Cheasey). Nathaniel and Jane moved to Lewisham (3 miles from Charlton) by 1744 and remained there for the rest of their lives.

Ploughing through the registers it looks like the other children of John and Betty who mostly stayed in Charlton, married and had children, were John, Mary and Thomas. I’ve now built their trees out and down too, looking for more DNA pings. Betty was likely the Elizabeth Townley who witnessed both Mary and my William’s marriages in 1797 at Charlton and 1801 in Aldgate respectively. The signatures are certainly the same person.

Where To From Here For The Townley Family?

Betty at this stage could be Elizabeth Cutter who married John Townley in 1757 at St Botolph without Aldersgate. Or more likely Elizabeth Panter who married John Townley at St Mary Rotherhithe in Southwark in 1766. Or perhaps an entirely different marriage that I haven’t yet found. More work to do, there are some pros and cons to both hypotheses. The next step is to find the baptisms of the pre-Charlton children, including my William. Wish me luck!

So, lousy handwriting nearly put a spanner in the works here. It pays sometimes to not trust your eyes or even the eyes of multiple others when it leads you to dead ends. Be creative, look at all aspects of the writing. I’d still be looking round Carshalton if they hadn’t written Kent next to it. Think outside the squiggle even if it doesn’t make sense. Try it all out. Deeply. FAN club the entire village if you have to. And never assume a victualler is a vicar.

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The Duddleston Family – Another Brick Wall Is Demolished!

brick wall demolished Duddleston family

Edward and Ann Eginton (also Egginton) are my 4th great-grandparents and have been a bit of a nightmare, to be honest! No matter where I looked, I could not find the record of their marriage. Ann stubbornly remained ‘just’ Ann. This week, I uncovered her maiden name. She was born into the Duddleston family, and I now have a whole new family to explore.

Edward and Ann Eginton

So how did this brick wall tumble? Like the Vaughan story, it’s a long tale. Strap yourself in. I knew Edward was from Birmingham, baptised as the son of William and Mary (nee Holt) at St Martin in 1778. Edward and Ann had baptised their first known child William at the same church in 1802. Immediately above this entry in the register is the baptism of his brother Francis’s daughter Ann on the same day. There were no more children baptised to Edward and Ann in Birmingham until 1818, when three more were baptised over the next four years. How odd.

Building the tree forward to the era of censuses, I found links between William and some other Egintons born in Yorkshire. This led to me to travel north (in a virtual sense!) and do some more digging there. Edward and Ann had settled in Sheffield for several years where he worked as a silver plater in the cutlery industry. Many children had been baptised and some buried there before they returned to Birmingham. I now had a beautiful timeline of their offspring, with no overlap between the two places or unexplained gaps, that covered Ann’s entire expected fertile years.

But I still had no wedding to give me her maiden name. There was nothing for an Edward Eginton and an Ann in or around Birmingham, and nothing in Yorkshire either. I now knew that it had likely taken place around 1800/1801, given their ages and when their family together had commenced.

Grasping at straws

The other day, on a whim, I decided to check out FreeReg.co.uk for this marriage. This site can be useful as it contains transcriptions of parish registers from all across the country, including many places which don’t yet have good coverage at other sites. There are no images, it contains purely derivative sources, but it’s a starting point. Bingo! There was an entry that was in the right timeframe, just 10 miles from Birmingham in Walsall, Staffordshire. It was, however, between an Edward Egerton (not Eginton) and Ann Duddeston.

It wouldn’t have even turned up on the search if it weren’t for the eagle eye of the transcriber, Dale Braden, who made a note that the vicar had entered it as Egerton, but the groom had signed clearly as Eginton. The transcriber entered the transcription under both surnames. THANK YOU DALE! I’m not surprised the vicar got it wrong. The couple were clearly not really of the parish, as claimed. It had been almost forty years since any Eginton had appeared in the register and would be more than twenty years until an Egerton turned up. There were no Duddestons at all.

Egerton Eginton note on marriage transcript Duddleston family
The note added by the transcriber at FreeReg which set me on the right path.

Now I needed the image. Reminder: always get back to the original source if possible! FindMyPast holds many but not all of the images for Staffordshire parish registers. Unfortunately, their Walsall, St Matthew coverage was only transcriptions, and they had indexed it only under Egerton, not Eginton. FamilySearch had similarly indexed the entry, but I knew they would have an image available on request. So I used their free lookup service to get the original parish register image.

I already knew Edward’s signature looked like this:

Duddleston - Edward Eginton signature 1836 Duddleston family
Edward Eginton’s signature at the marriage of his son Thomas Eginton to Mary Locke, 14 March 1836, at Aston, St Peter and St Paul.

He had been a witness to his son Thomas’ marriage in 1836. So, seeing a matching signature on his own marriage document would be great supporting evidence.

When the ‘Egerton/Duddeston’ marriage image arrived though it was clearly not the original entry, but a Bishop’s Transcript. Everything, including all the signatures, was written out neatly in the same hand, and they’d written ‘Egerton’. I would have to take Dale’s word for it for now and find some other sources of evidence until I could track down the actual parish register.

Finding Ann Duddeston [sic]

Yes, this was an error as well. The Duddeston surname quickly turned out to be a dead end. However, there was an Ann Duddleston of the right age who was baptised in 1780 by Hugh and Ann Duddleston in Birmingham where she was known to be from. Could this be her Duddleston family?

I turned back to Edward and Ann’s marriage entry. The witnesses were John Webster and Elizabeth Yeomans. I decided to see if they were related. By now I knew most of Edward’s family and nothing jumped out at me from there. But Elizabeth turned out to have been Elizabeth Duddleston, who married William Yeomans in 1795 in Harborne, just outside Birmingham at that time. Elizabeth was a member of Hugh and Ann’s Duddleston family…Ann’s elder sister!

Hugh Howard Duddleston and Ann (nee Hilton) were really beginning to firm up as Edward’s wife’s Duddleston family. So I began to build their family tree down and peruse their associated documents. It wasn’t long till I found Edward Eginton again signing his name with his distinctive flourish on his initials when he witnessed the 1818 marriage of Ann’s brother Thomas. His signature had matured over the years but it was clearly the same man. The other witness was Elizabeth Yeomans, Ann’s sister.

Duddleston - Edward Eginton signature 1818 Duddleston family
Edward Eginton’s signature at the marriage of his brother-in-law Thomas Duddlestone to Deborah Foster, 21 April 1818, at Birmingham, St Martin.

So now I had the same Edward Eginton witnessing a Duddleston marriage of another child of Hugh and Ann, his hypothesised parents-in-law, alongside the woman who had witnessed his own marriage. I’m happy with that!

Does DNA support the hypothesis?

Now I decided to turn to the DNA…it was stretching the limits of autosomal testing but would I find matches who descended from the same Duddleston family? I sure did. Since I’d built the tree down as far as I could on all lines and attached it to Ann over the course of several days, Ancestry had had a chance to do its magic, and I had four matches who connected with the common ancestors being Hugh Howard Duddleston and Ann Hilton. Three had public trees, and they were from different lines of the same Duddleston family. My brother had six matches, four of whom were unique to him, tying him to this Duddleston family through still other lines. So far there are DNA matches who descend from three of Hugh and Ann’s children. My half-sister (on the ‘other’ side!) had no Duddleston relatives amongst her matches at all.

One further match even extended a further generation back. I had already come to the conclusion that Hugh Howard Duddleston was the son of Ralph of Wolverhampton. There are not many Duddleston families. In fact, Ralph’s was pretty much the lone Duddleston family in the area at the time.

Rather conveniently so far, at least two of his sons emigrated to the US. This is always a bit of a bonanza when it comes to DNA. More people in the US have had their DNA tested, and those early immigrants often had large families with most of the children surviving compared to England. Therefore, the chances of a DNA match with a descendant are good.

The match that was from this generation was a descendant of Hugh’s brother Thomas Duddleston who as it turns out was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. I’ve been able to find a swathe of documents on him and will be building his line of the Duddleston family out too. Sigh, I feel yet another one-name study emerging out of this find. I just can’t help myself.

So, in conclusion…

We know that original sources are better than derivative sources. However, sometimes we need to start somewhere. Without that note on the transcription of the ‘Edward Egerton’ and ‘Ann Duddeston’ marriage in Walsall, I perhaps would never have found the Duddleston family branch. Do not dismiss transcripts and indexes when you are having trouble finding an elusive ancestor.

Remember to look at collateral branches, check witnesses, use the ‘FAN club’. It may make your tree big and unwieldy to include all these other people, but it’s often a great source of pieces of evidence that may not lie with your direct ancestors. And that big tree also helps with identifying DNA matches in that family line.

Good luck with breaking down your next brick wall. The Duddleston family look like keeping me busy for a good while now!

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Workplaces – The Most Exciting New Addition To The Census in 1921

workplace 1921 census Austin Birmingham
The Austin Motor Works, Longbridge, Birmingham around 1920

The 1921 Census of England and Wales was released with great fanfare on January 6th 2021. It is the last census that most of the current generation of family history researchers will see (the next will not be available for 30 years!). So it’s important that we take the opportunity to mine it for all the information we can extract. Countless articles and blogs have been written about the 1921 Census itself. I’d like to focus today on an aspect of it that can be extremely helpful with our research – the inclusion of workplaces in the 1921 Census.

Every census contains slightly different information, depending on what the government of the day wanted to know about the demographics of their population. We tend to forget as genealogists that the census was not designed for us, but for their planning purposes! I am very grateful that they focussed on workplaces in the 1921 Census.

Workplaces in the 1921 Census – what’s the big deal?

Every previous census has contained the occupations of people at each address. So why is adding the name and address of their workplace in the 1921 Census of any additional advantage? Well, it’s all about context. It’s all about enriching the stories of your ancestors’ lives. As a passionate seeker of my family’s stories, this new addition of workplaces in the 1921 Census has been my favourite thing so far!

I have focussed on only looking up my direct ancestors while the census is pay-per-view, cheapskate that I am. Just wait till it’s included in my FindMyPast subscription, they won’t know what hit them! There were seven households containing my grandparents, great-grandparents and even some great-great-grandparents still living in 1921.

What have I found so far?

My ancestors of that era mostly worked in the metal trades around Birmingham. Unsurprisingly, many of them worked at the Austin Motor Works in Longbridge (see photo above). Two of my grandparents grew up to work there too, so it featured in my childhood a lot. Good to know it was a multigenerational thing!

I knew that one of my great-grandfathers, William Simpson, worked as a painter and decorator and that he had died falling from a ladder. It was wonderful to find his workplace in the 1921 Census. It wasn’t a major factory like the Austin. How was I able to establish that? I found a photo online. It was a small firm called Pitts and Phillips. The address showed me how close he lived to his place of employment and I was able to map his likely route to the office on Google Maps (although I’m sure he spent most of his time onsite at jobs).

workplace 1921 census Pitts and Phillips Birmingham
Pitts and Phillips, Bristol Rd, Birmingham in 1923

Now I intend to dig through Birmingham Archives and see if they have any documents from the firm. Perhaps they might have records of the workplace accident that led to his death? Perhaps they kept employment records? Dig through the relevant archives to see what you can find in their catalogues.

If I’m really lucky there might be a published history somewhere of this or one of the other companies I’ve discovered my ancestors working at. If I’m really REALLY lucky there might be photos that could include them, or at least show more of what their work involved.

For the larger companies like the Austin there might be staff magazines. For any company, a search of newspapers using their name might pull up some stories, where the ancestor’s name wouldn’t. if the company is still going, you may find a history on their website…

You get where I’m going with this? Workplaces in the 1921 census lead us to all sorts of record sources to help flesh out the family stories. Find them, plunder them and build out your family stories!

“Out of Work”

One apparent oddity you may notice is that ‘out of work’ is written next to the workplace. How can someone be simultaneously out of work and employed somewhere? Many of my family members had this on their census forms.

William Simpson – employed but ‘out of work’

This is for the same reason as the census was delayed from April to June. 1921 was a time of great industrial upheaval and strikes were occurring at the time they were originally going to hold it. They delayed till June to allow it to go ahead less impeded by strike action. However, many people were still involved in or affected by industrial events by June. So they were employed by a company but may not have been actively working there at the time of the census. When I see the size of some of the households and how many were out of work, I wonder how they survived, and hope they were soon back to paid employment!

Enjoy trawling the 1921 Census, I hope it brings you luck in adding colour and enrichment to what you know of your family in that era!

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Immigration Stories – The Tragic Voyage of the Ward Chipman

Artist’s impression of the Ward Chipman by K.A. Marshman from In Search of A Better Way by Aubrey Harris

All too often, when we read immigration stories written by descendants, we hear little of the actual immigration itself. Why did they leave their homeland? What was the journey like? When we delve a little deeper into this momentous portion of our ancestors’ lives, too often summarized as a set of departure and arrival dates, their story becomes richer and deeper as a result.

I hope to illustrate this a little today with some of the immigration story of John Harris and his family who came to Australia from Bristol on the 1841 voyage of the Ward Chipman.

John Harris of Shirwell, Devon

John Harris in 1872, detail from ‘The Explorers and Early Colonists of Victoria’, State Library of Victoria

John and his wife Elizabeth (nee Trump) were from Shirwell, near Barnstaple in Devon and came from farming families. They had married in 1829 at nearby Loxhore, and Elizabeth had borne seven children, though two had died in infancy.

After the death of their sixth child James in 1837, they had moved to the busy port of Bristol, Gloucestershire where their last child Elizabeth was born. John became a policeman, recruited into the recently formed Bristol police force.

We cannot be sure what drove John to uproot his family from Devon to Bristol, and then ultimately to Australia. However, there was a lot of political unrest at the time and the economic situation was challenging. An unsuccessful vote of no confidence in the government took place that year. Ultimately the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne was to resign.

John Harris and family in the 1841 Census of Clifton in Bristol.

At the time of the 1841 Census, the family was living in Whittaker’s Buildings, Clifton. A government sanitation survey taken in 1850 stated that:

“the lower storey of one house is used as a public receptacle for filth“

and that the building was set into a hillside and terribly damp. It is therefore not unreasonable to believe that the family was struggling to make ends meet, and saw emigration as a potential remedy.

The Harris Immigration Story Begins

A week after the census was taken, the following advertisement appeared on the front page of the Bristol Mercury, and the decision was made to make a new start.

The advertisement in the Bristol Mercury on June 12th 1841 that triggered the emigration of the Harris family.

In order to qualify for free passage as a bounty immigrant, John had to meet the occupational requirements stated in the advertisement. He had previously worked as a mason in Barnstaple, and he stated this as his occupation in order to get his family aboard this vessel.

The Ward Chipman was scheduled to sail on August 1st, but from the very beginning, this voyage was a disaster. Poor planning meant that there were delays in Government inspections and the ship was not ready to sail on that date. Despite that, the passengers were required to remain on board for over three weeks until she finally set sail on 27th August 1841. This must have been an awful beginning to their journey, with 325 cabin passengers crammed together in the height of summer, consuming much of the water and food intended for the voyage.

The Harris family in the Ward Chipman passenger lists

Things went from bad to worse during the journey, with not only shortages of provisions and implements, but also an outbreak of food poisoning from faulty tinned food. Twenty-one people were to die on the journey, nineteen of them infants and children. Sadly, as an assisted migration vessel, there are no known surviving ship’s surgeon journals for further insight into the dreadful experience endured by the passengers. Luckily, none of John’s family succumbed.

Detail of deaths on the voyage, found on the summary page of the passenger list.

Research tip: Don’t confine your searches of passenger lists to the page on which your ancestors appear. There is much more useful information that can be found within its pages!

They finally arrived in Port Phillip Bay on December 16, 1841. This did not however mark the end of the scandals regarding this voyage. On arrival, a claim for 4524 pounds of bounty payment was denied to Arthur Kemmis, a prominent local merchant and Managing Director of the Steam Navigation Company. Several people who had worked on the ship were also denied pay.

A New Life in Australia

After this inauspicious start to their new life, John and his family initially settled in Melbourne. He apparently bought some land on the corner of Spring and Lonsdale Streets (what would that be worth now?!). Ironically, this was either on, or immediately across from the present-day site of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

Finding the then dirty and primitive Melbourne not to their liking, their immigration story continued when they moved to the Western District of Victoria. Details of this journey and its timing are not yet known, but it must have taken place by 1845 when his eldest son William died in Port Fairy. It is highly likely that the Harris family were part of a contingent of forty families who travelled there together in early 1843 according to reports in the Port Phillip Gazette on the 25th February of that year. I need to have a dig about and see if I can find the names of those families! He took up land, and went back to his farming roots, eventually dying in 1900 in Mailors Flat, leaving behind a large and comfortably-off family.

Immigration stories – not just departure and arrival dates

When looking into the immigration stories of our ancestors, it can be really helpful to check out newspaper reports (in both countries!) and advertisements to find more detail about the voyage. They can also provide information more broadly around the political and economic landscape impacting their lives, which may have influenced the decision to leave the country. Don’t forget history books (try the Internet Archive or FamilySearch Digital Library!), both general and local which can give marvellous insight into the time and place our families were experiencing. Archives may even hold diaries and letters, if not of our family, perhaps of their fellow passengers. Dig, dig, dig!

Note to Regular Readers…

Apologies, ‘life’ got in the way for a few months and the blog suffered neglect as a result. It’s taken a while to have the mental bandwidth with everything else going on to be able to get back into the swing of regular activities. I hope to bring you more regular blogs in the coming months, though it may take a little while to become as prolific as I was previously. Bear with me, thanks for your patience!