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Category: Family Stories

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Finding Esther…Who Was John and Charles Morter’s Mother?

finding esther maze

Inspired by digging into a long neglected family line last week, I decided that this week’s project was finding Esther. This was a good reminder of the value of returning to old research with new eyes periodically. If I could just find out who the mysterious Esther was, this would open up a whole new family for me and tumble a long-standing brick wall.

Esther Morter…

Esther Morter only appears in one document that I have found over the last couple of decades. She is named as the mother of John and Charles Morter, who were baptised together on 14th October 1796 at St Mary and All Saints, the parish church of Kidderminster in Worcestershire. Worcestershire is a difficult county to research unless you are lucky enough to be close to The Hive, their county archives. Currently, only transcripts of parish registers are available online with no access to digitised images. (A little bird tells me that their records are currently being digitised by Ancestry so watch this space over the next year or so, the situation is changing!). So, that was all I had to say that Esther existed. A transcript of a single document.

There was no record of she and Benjamin marrying. Although he married Elizabeth Cupee in 1798 there was no record of a burial for Esther, which was even more puzzling. To add to that, he described himself as a bachelor at that wedding. Did he not marry Esther at all?

Or is she Esther at all?

Digging back into researching Benjamin I found that he had a daughter Elizabeth with an Elizabeth in 1792, before he left London. Was this the same Elizabeth he’d eventually married? Did he just have an affair with Esther in Kidderminster and leave her behind there? Hypotheses were running thick and fast. It occurred to me that if the two Elizabeths were one and the same, she would have had the first child at the age of only 15. Could it be that her family disapproved of their relationship? Benjamin was ten years older.

Did they run off to Kidderminster together? It was another weaving area where he could easily find work. Was Esther really Elizabeth Cupee? This would account for the family of five being removed from Christ Church to Shoreditch after they returned to London in 1797. It would also mean that he was not lying when he said he was a bachelor, and their marriage coincided with her turning 21 and being able to marry without her parents’ consent. Finding Esther, and unravelling her story became even more of a pressing urge.

Finding Esther

I decided I couldn’t wait for the Worcestershire records to become available online. The key could be in that lone pair of entries in the parish register. I needed to see the vicar’s writing. The transcripts at both FamilySearch and TheGenealogist both said her name was Esther. But could it be a mistranscription, or even a mistake? The first theory could easily be proved or disproved by seeing the document at least.

I contacted The Hive. They responded very quickly to say that for the princely sum of 16 pounds they would photocopy and email it for me. I requested that they send the entire page rather than just the two entries so that I would have plenty of the vicar’s handwriting to compare against. Thank goodness I did.

The next day, I received an email with images of both the entries and the full page as requested. I looked at the entries. Sigh. Her name was clearly written as Esther for both baptism entries. The mistranscription theory was disproved immediately.

john charles morter baptism finding esther
The baptism entries for Charles and John Morter, clearly showing Esther as their mother.

Esther is revealed

I looked at the full page. And there was what I believe to be the answer. The vicar made a mistake. Sometimes it happens. Indeed, Benjamin’s brother John had a son in Bethnal Green in 1809. The vicar there recorded him as a son of Benjamin, despite later documents including his will showing he was clearly John’s son. Perhaps this family never made themselves well known to the local clergy except for family occasions.

On October 14th 1796, the Kidderminster vicar baptised four babies, an unusually high number at one time for him. Of the four baptisms, three had the father Benjamin. Two were John and Charles Morter. The third was the child of Benjamin and ESTHER Hemmings. It also appears that one of the entries on the page is in the wrong place, non-chronological. I believe that the vicar may have written down the details on scraps of paper at the time and then neatly transcribed them into the parish register later. Somewhere along the way, all three entries with a Benjamin as father on that day ended up with Esther listed as the mother.

kidderminster baptisms October 1796 finding esther
Reading the entire page shows where the vicar almost certainly messed up!

My current working hypothesis

Benjamin and Elizabeth got together in Bethnal Green when he was in his mid-20s and she in her mid teens. Her parents, Huguenots (Benjamin was not), strongly disapproved when she bore his child at the age of 15. The little family left together for Kidderminster, where they had the two boys. They then returned to the Spitalfields area in London by 1797, where they were described as a family of five on removal from the parish. Elizabeth was five months pregnant again in 1798 when they finally married quite truthfully as bachelor and spinster. She was now 21 and able to do so despite any parental objections. There was no finding Esther. Esther did not exist.

Obviously even though this hypothesis fits all documented facts known so far, it could contain a degree of confirmation bias. I am now digging through DNA matches to see if I can find a match with a descendant from the Cupee line. This of course means my new task is to build out her tree as much as possible to help with this. Previously thinking Elizabeth was a second wife I had done very little with her tree. So that’s what I’m doing now. When DNA matches are verified, I will be fully confident that not only do I have a document trail that works logically but that it is backed up by science! Finding Esther has taken a long time, but finding someone who never existed has been well worth the effort.

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Lost Child Reunites With Parents! A Small DNA Match Story

Image source: Tim Ellis

This week, another longstanding brick wall tumbled. This one was thanks to a relatively small DNA match (19cM) that popped up at one of the sites I have tested with.

Benjamin Morter

Benjamin was my 5th great-grandfather. I had not had any luck in unraveling his origins over the years. He’d lain a little neglected in recent times. Morter is not a common surname and is localised around East Anglia, so I suspected he or his ancestors probably came from around there somewhere. But I’d had no luck in definitively finding a likely candidate.

The only indication of a birth date I had was the fact that he was recorded as 65 years old when he was buried in the Globe Fields Wesleyan burial ground at Mile End Cemetery in 1834. This meant he was likely born around 1769 if the informant was accurate about his age.

His will named five surviving children and I have DNA matches with descendants of at least four of them. It also named a brother, John, and DNA matches to me have turned up on several branches of HIS descendants too.

small DNA match Morter
Benjamin Morter’s will named five children from two mothers, almost all of whom have descendants I share DNA with.

His children were from two relationships. The second was a marriage in St Dunstan, Stepney, London on January 7th, 1798 to Elizabeth Cupee, but the first was with a woman named Esther who remains a stubborn mystery and is my 5th great-grandmother. No marriage has yet been found. Perhaps it didn’t take place and the twins he had with her were illegitimate. It might explain why he was able to call himself a bachelor when he married Elizabeth…or he may just have been telling a fib.

The twins, John and Charles, were born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire in 1796. So for a while I thought that may have been his place of origin. However, I found no evidence of his baptism there, and there appeared to be no Morter families in the area. He likely went there for work.

Benjamin’s London life

He turned up next in London. In 1797, he and his family of five were removed from Christchurch, Middlesex to Shoreditch. I don’t know who made up that five, other than the twins and possibly Esther (there is probably at least one other child to discover). Though given he married Elizabeth soon after that, and she was five months pregnant at the time, perhaps she had already died. I am yet to find her burial.

He and Elizabeth had five children together, all baptised around Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. When he wrote his will, he was ‘of Exeter St, Strand, Middlesex’, so appears to have moved back to the area he was originally removed from in 1797 at least for a time. He was living back in Bethnal Green when he died in 1834.

I had never found a baptism for him in the London area and had no evidence to suggest where else he may have been from.

Serendipity strikes with a small DNA match

Not all useful DNA matches are enormous. Do not ignore your smaller ones.

And then…I got this small DNA match and it all fell into place over the course of the next few hours. Guess who stayed up all night? She was a shared match to multiple other Morter matches. Sure enough, she had Morters in her tree, but it didn’t go back very far. It was a start though.

So off I went and soon found out why she had run into a brick wall. Her furthest back Morter ancestor was orphaned young, raised by an uncle and aunt, and gave the wrong name for his father at his subsequent marriage. He had been born in Norwich and it was a fairly straightforward job for me to find his birth, his parents’ real names, and their marriage.

How a small DNA match tumbled the brick wall

Tracing the tree back, he turned out to descend from a Charles Morter, born around 1763 in Neatishead, Norfolk, who in turn was the son of John Morter and Hannah Walsingham of that tiny village of fewer than 500 people at that time. I checked their offspring. Lo and behold, they had sons Benjamin and John born within a couple of years of the estimated ages of my Benjamin and his brother John. Could this be it at last? Were John and Hannah my 6th great-grandparents?

small DNA match Morter
Benjamin’s baptism in the Neatishead parish register – found at last!

I worked the trees of a few more DNA matches. Some of them also went back to John and Hannah. I constructed a hypothetical tree including as many of the matches as I could and checked the Shared cM Tool at DNA Painter for each one of them to see if it all hung together. It did. I checked that their Benjamin didn’t stay in the Neatishead area or die as an infant. It all gelled beautifully, there was no sign of him anywhere.

This shows that you don’t need to have a huge DNA match to make a brick wall fall. With some solid tree building, research and a thorough analysis of the shared DNA matches you already have, sometimes it can be achieved with a small DNA match which is possibly at first glance not especially helpful.

My conclusion is that John Morter, collar maker of Neatishead, and his wife Hannah are my 6th great grandparents. Now who on earth is Esther…?

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Death in a Teacup. How Leah’s Fortune Became Her Misfortune.

Teacup fortune telling
Photo by  Birgith Roosipuu  on  Scopio

This week, the 52Ancestors theme is ‘Fortune’. My contribution, for something different, is a fictionalised account of the true story of my great grandmother’s death. Don’t be too startled, I don’t intend for this blog to turn into a series of fictionalised accounts, it’s just nice to change things up and try something new once in a while!

You may remember Leah Swinbourne as the mother of the unfortunate Alfred Mario Beckett. Her life continued to be challenging and was cut tragically short at the age of 42. Read on to see why written from her point of view…

Leah as she may have appeared in real life, using the MyHeritage Deep NostalgiaTM feature (from a photo taken in 1913)

Her fortune in the tea leaves

Leah jumped back, startled by what she had seen in the chipped teacup. She was renowned in the family for her fortune telling skills, a legacy of her gypsy grandmother, Mary Ann Hayden. Mary Ann had never lost her gypsy ways and had made sure to pass them down to her daughters and granddaughters.

This morning, Leah had done her customary swirl of the leaves in the last drops of her tea and up-ended her cup to see what lay ahead. Often it was trivial; otherwise-unexpected visitors, children’s bumps and scrapes, rain coming…but today was different. Today she foresaw her own death. The cup dropped from her shaking hands and smashed into pieces on the cold kitchen floor.

“But I’m only 42…”, she whispered to herself, “…whatever will become of the children?”
She didn’t question the patterns in the tealeaves, never for a moment doubted what she saw in her fortune. They were never wrong. Even so, they were very odd. Leah could see a fall, a knock to the head…and then being locked away somewhere? That made no sense. And soon after that, she would be gone from this life. This she knew, and she felt a huge weight of dread settle upon her.

So when would it happen? She knew it would be soon, the dregs of tea were not long-range forecasters. She was a pragmatic woman, Lord knows she’d had to be over the years. Husband number two had been a practical rather than romantic choice. He’d recently died, a late-claimed victim of the Great War. The mustard gassing in the trenches had finally knocked off his kidneys, leaving her alone with eight children to raise.

She had no one left to call on to care for her remaining children. Little Ruby especially was a concern, she was only five years old. Leah’s own family had dispersed with the death of her mother – her brother Alfie had been shipped off to America as a British Home Child and her sister Florence had died tragically young. Leah herself had the poor fortune to have been disowned after trying to run off with her unfortunate choice of first love – Joe, the attempted bigamist.

She couldn’t make firm arrangements anyway, not based on the swirl of a teacup. Her friends good-naturedly accepted that she told fortunes using tea leaves but didn’t especially believe in what they predicted – it was purely a parlour trick to them.

Her misfortune on the tram

So Leah was deep in thought as she headed off to the city with her basket to do her shopping. The tram rumbled to a stop in front of her, teeming with people as usual.
“They really need to run these things more frequently”, she thought yet again. She was squashed up against a musty-smelling old lady and a large man who stank of tobacco and his lunchtime pint, as she precariously held onto the pole just inside the door with her free hand. The tram jolted to a halt suddenly as a dog ran into the road in front of it in hot pursuit of a cat. The large man stumbled heavily into Leah and she felt herself falling….

Groggily, she lifted her head to find herself somewhere else entirely. A cold, gloomy place in one of a row of beds. Was it a hospital? She groaned as a spasm of pain shot through her head where she’d hit the road, unable to break her fall. The face of her eldest daughter Ann appeared above her, with a concerned look on her face.

“Mum, you’re back with us! We’ve been so worried the past couple of days!”

“What’s happened? Where am I?”, Leah mumbled.

“Don’t you remember? You fell off the tram, you’ve got ever such an ‘egg’ on your head!”

And so it transpired as Ann related the tale, that Leah had somehow made her way back home that day, blood streaming down her face, refusing all offers of help. She’d patched herself up, made dinner for the children, put them to bed and had seemed alright, if a little dazed. But later that night she had gone wandering, calling out for her daughter Dorothy who had died of diphtheria as an infant, peering into people’s windows and under bushes trying to find her. So they’d brought her to Hollymoor two days ago, sedated her and she’d been asleep for the past two days.

Hollymoor asylum - misfortune
Hollymoor Asylum, Birmingham

An unfortunate era for head injuries

Hollymoor was not a hospital. It was the local asylum. Because of her sudden erratic behaviour it had been assumed that Leah had had some kind of breakdown. Nowadays we would know it was a concussion, not insanity that drove her actions that night. Nowadays she would have been taken straight to hospital. Instead, she had been ‘put
away’. It was chilly. It was damp. No one except the Director was medically qualified. No one was giving her medical care.

As the lump on her head began to subside over the next few days, Leah began to return to her clear-thinking self. She worried that this was what had been foretold in her fortune– the fall, the head injury, and being locked away. Was she going to be here for the rest of her life? Surely not, couldn’t they see she was herself again and let her go home to her children?

But every time she asked to go home and was rebuffed she couldn’t help breaking down in tears. And every time she got a little more high-pitched and shrill when she asked. This wasn’t helping her case, but she was exhausted. She couldn’t sleep in these awful conditions, with wailing mad women all around her. She couldn’t eat the vile slop they called food. She couldn’t keep dry with the rain leaking in through the roof above her bed.

Two weeks later she was dead. Pneumonia, in an age before antibiotics.

The tea leaves never lied. Her fortune was never wrong.

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The Name’s the Same! And the Names are Different!

This week, the 52ancestors theme is “Name’s the Same”. In a few days, it will be St Patrick’s Day. So I decided to combine the two themes and provide an update on the recently discovered Irish corner of my family tree. My challenge with this branch is now that I’m tackling a massive problem of the same given names AND multiple variations of the same surname concurrently!

For those who have been playing along with my meanderings, my great-great-grandmother Norah Vaughan was eventually found to be an Irish famine refugee from Cork. Since I wrote up the 30-year journey it took to find her Irish origins, I’ve found her baptism which gave her mother’s surname. That led me to her parents’ marriage.

Blarney roots

John Vaughan and Hanora Manley married in Blarney in 1836. Blarney Roman Catholic parish is in the civil parish of Whitechurch about 5 miles NW of Cork city. The Blarney parish registers are some of the earliest Catholic registers available in Ireland. However, there is a significant gap of over an entire generation between 1792 and 1821 for baptisms, after only commencing in 1791. The marriage registers have a gap from 1813 to 1821 after the early flurry of recording from 1778. The details included also varied from parish priest to parish priest over the years.

Manley – the Worst. Surname. Ever (for variations!)

Her surname was given as Maley (as was one of the witnesses), so at first, I was unsure if it was them. So I did a bit of digging. The original Irish name was Ó Máinle. In a Cork accent, the ‘n’ is not strongly pronounced. In fact, the pronunciation can come out sounding like Mauley. Therefore, it’s also occasionally spelt that way.  So, surname variations include all the ways to spell it with an ‘n’ in it. Or without. Or with a ‘u’. Also, occasionally a ‘ur’ or even an ‘or’. With or without the ‘e’. Possibly a double ‘l’. And sometimes an ‘O” on the front for good measure. Most of these variations appear in the Blarney register. They are all at the end of the day, the same name.

There no such thing as one way to spell an Irish surname! Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Blarney appears to be Manley Central for Ireland. It looks at this stage as though there were at least 7 separate but related families by that name in Blarney in the early days of the parish registers. However will I work out which family is which and where my Hanora fits in? Especially given that her baptism was never recorded. Hers is the generation missing from the registers. And their townlands were rarely recorded in the register until after the mid-1850s. Time to FAN club the Dickens out of the entire community!

But the first names are also the same…

The first names are consistent. Sigh. The names are the same, over and over. John, Daniel, Patrick, Timothy or Cornelius for the males. Ellen, Mary, Margaret, Johanna and Honora for the females.

The other ‘name’s the same’ issue that I run up against here is that the pool of other local surnames is also small. I am trying to analyse the witness/sponsor names to gauge patterns that might tie branches of the Manley families together, but it was a community where the same surnames appear over and over too, so conclusions cannot be reached with this approach. Even where there is a pattern it’s potentially a hint only.

Sadly, it was rare to baptise with a middle name. Therefore, there’s been no opportunity to take advantage of the old middle name trick as yet!

The ‘Manley Blarney’ project (because I need yet another project!)

Blarney Castle, site of the Blarney Stone. No wonder I talk a lot. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The ‘Manley Blarney’ project has begun. I have extracted every single person with every variant of the Manley surname from the Blarney baptism and marriage registers up to the turn of the 20th century (so far). Unhelpfully but not surprisingly there are no burial registers to help me kill off the early ones. Now I am systematically trying to cross-reference against Tithe Applotment Books, Griffiths Valuation, civil registration for later entries (especially marriages to tie them to a father’s name and townland), surviving census fragments/pension applications, gravestone records, will indexes, estate records etc. Irish newspapers have not been helpful so far; I need more time to try all those surname variations out!

I will be working through the Catholic record collection on FMP looking for emigrant families in the US, UK and anywhere else, as I suspect many families left during those famine years. Did any other related families end up in the Chepstow area too (it doesn’t look like it so far)? Passenger lists for further-flung locations will also be trawled. Certainly, the parish registers showed fewer and fewer Manleys as the years went by.

I have created a hypothetical tree with a ‘Connector Manley’ as a pseudo-father to each of the Manley children with unrecorded baptisms and uploaded to each database that generates record hints. This has been helpful in discovering a branch that went to Buffalo and another that went to Detroit so far and occasionally helped me give them their real father’s name. Bit by bit as I explore further the children will find their true families.

I’m going to continue to build down the lines to see if I get any DNA hits too. If this happens it may also help me unravel the families. By using WATO, I may be able to see which lines are genetically the closest to my Hanora.

I think this will be a long-term project. It’s turning into both a mini (i.e. localised to one parish) One-Name study and a bit of a One-Place study as so many other local families of the time are being dragged into it!

There will be a further update. It may be a long time coming…

I realise I am setting high expectations on myself, given that it’s not common to get back into the 18th Century for most Irish families. But I don’t give up easily and am looking forward to the challenge of seeing how much of the Manley family I can untangle! It’s a quagmire of names the same and names different. It’s just another temporary brick wall. Let me at it!

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The More the Merrier! Multiple Births in Your Family Tree

multiple births twin feet
Credit: Michael Fallon at Unsplash

I was a twin. All through my childhood, while most were fantasising that they were adopted or actually princesses, I only ever felt like I had a twin somewhere. That I had been part of a multiple birth. There were no other children in the house of the same age, so why did I feel this way? There has been much written about twins having some kind of connection. I always thought that there was someone else out there that I was connected to in this way. I felt daft though. How could this feeling have any basis in reality?

My mum broke the news when I was eighteen years old. She’d been told she was expecting twins. It was her first pregnancy and the labour was dreadful. I was not only breech, but sideways rather than even just feet first. They never resorted to a caesarean delivery which would have changed the course of our family’s history. Finally, my mother was presented with me. Just me. Three weeks overdue but only just over 7lbs. Yes, I was an overcooked twin.

There was no mention of another baby, and she was too exhausted and overwhelmed to ask the question. Somehow, however, when she eventually told me, it all made sense. With it came the knowledge that not only had I had another brother or sister, but that I had killed them by barring their entrance to the world. My first action as a human being and I feel irrationally guilty to this day.

Two’s company…

Twins run in families and are not uncommon. However, it’s only fraternal (non-identical) twins that do this. Identical twins are an accident of fate. This is why I know my twin could have been either a brother or a sister. Because twins do run in our family. When checking your family tree for multiple births, check on the mother’s side. The gene for this is a maternal one.

I had a great aunt Peggy and a great uncle Ron who were on my mother’s side. Going further back on that line Norah Vaughan also gave birth to twins. They both died, and I only discovered their existence through their names being listed in the family bible. Twins are not hugely uncommon. In natural pregnancies, 1 in 250 or so will be twins, so there are sure to be some lurking in your tree somewhere. There may be mention of surviving babies being twins in their birth or baptism records. However, this was not universal, so if it is not mentioned don’t assume it wasn’t so. If the birth dates match though I think it’s probably safe to make a bold assumption!

multiple births simpson twins
The family bible revealed the births and deaths of the Simpson twins

Another hint, the older the mother was, and the more children she had already had, the greater likelihood that she would have twins. In my family branches, twins were quite frequently the ‘grand finale’ of the mother’s childbearing life!

…three (or more) is a rare crowd!

I have found no evidence of larger multiple births, e.g. triplets or quadruplets in my family though. But this is not unexpected. Firstly, they are rarer. Triplets naturally occur in about 1 in 10 000 pregnancies and quadruplets in around 1 in 700 000. Back in the early days, it was unusual for multiple births to have a successful outcome, either for the babies or the mother. They were often miscarried, or very premature and both the pregnancies and the labours were more complicated, perhaps leading to the deaths of all involved.

multiple births pregnancy

When they were successfully brought to term and delivered, newspapers and magazines of the time often covered these families extensively. So if you know of triplets or even bigger multiple births in your family, be sure to check at least the local papers and perhaps even national ones for that coverage! Some of the websites you might try depending on where the families were from may be the British Newspaper Archive (UK and Ireland), Trove (Australia), Papers Past (New Zealand), or Newspapers.com (USA).

What is the greatest number of babies from a single pregnancy that you know of in your family?

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A Fine Yorkshire Romance – The Ellams’ Wedding Night

Yorkshire romance? Given that the good folk of Yorkshire are proud of their plain-speaking and pragmatic ways, is this an oxymoron? Given that I missed the ‘Valentine’ theme associated with Valentine’s day for the 52Ancestors challenge, I decided to think a little more laterally for my late contribution than to talk about the day itself.

I recently made a little breakthrough with finding a record that solved part of a mystery about our Ellam family. Firstly, a little background. Neither one of the couple in this article was born in Yorkshire, but life brought them there. Several generations of their descendants lived there and were proud Yorkshiremen (and women!).

William Ellam

William Ellam was born in 1839 in Whitechapel, London to Samuel Ellam, a gunmaker and his wife Ann (nee Barnes). Sadly, Samuel died when William was just 11, and by the time of the 1851 Census William was living as a pauper inmate of the St Marylebone Workhouse. His mother was no longer an inmate, but was living alone very close to the Workhouse and working as a nurse, quite probably in the Infirmary there. Still there in 1853, he left the Workhouse to take up a parish apprenticeship with George Stubbs of Barking on his fishing vessels. This was the making of William, and when his apprenticeship was over, he headed north to Hull in Yorkshire where there was a thriving fishing industry.

Ann Maria Herbert

Ann Maria Herbert was born in 1840 in Coventry, Warwickshire. Her father was William Herbert. He never married her mother Jane Perkins, who was 26 years his junior, though they were all living together in the 1841 Census, she using her maiden name. By 1851, great upheavals had happened in Ann Maria’s life. At some point, they had moved to Hull, where William had collected a new ‘wife’ before moving on to York. Ann Maria remained in Hull, where she was a 10-year-old servant in the household of Mr John North. No trace of her mother has yet been found beyond 1841.

Yorkshire romance?

One could understand these children being hardened by their early circumstances. Nonetheless, they found one another and married in 1861. Try as I might, I could not find them on the 1861 Census. Then I noticed the date they married. April 7th. Census day. “AHA!!!”, I thought. “A bit of ‘Yorkshire romance’ was taking place, it was their wedding night!” And I stopped looking for this document for many years…

William Ellam Ann Maria Herbert marriage 1861
Marriage of William Ellam and Ann Maria Herbert, census day 1861

…until I checked on The Genealogist. I remembered this weekend that they’re very good for anything to do with people working on boats. I was actually looking for other items about William and up popped his entry on the 1861 Census under ‘Crew Lists’. Many other sites don’t have this category for the censuses, which is why he still doesn’t show up on searches on those other sites. This is much like the breakthrough I got when I found a census entry for Nora Vaughan that was missing from Ancestry but was on FindMyPast and ANOTHER reminder for us to check all the sites!

William Ellam 1861 Census
William Ellam, finally found on the 1861 Census, spending his wedding night aboard a fishing boat!

It appears that William said his ‘I do’ then immediately rushed off to board the ‘Huntsman’ for a fishing voyage! Here’s where the romantic bit comes in. This census document is probably the first document where he ever described himself as a married man. Nawww.

I probably shouldn’t be poking fun at William racing off like that. These were hard-working folk beginning their lives together. Squeezing in their wedding between fishing trips was probably as good as he could manage at the time. At least he married her!

Yet more Yorkshire romance…

But perhaps there is a bit of true romance in the story after all. As you may recall, I am partial to a little FAN clubbing. The witnesses to William and Ann Maria’s marriage, James Hodgson and Eliza Vant married the following year. I like to think that maybe they met at the wedding, one his friend and one hers, and their courtship began after sharing their duties as witnesses.

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Rescue the Spattered and Tattered Recipes!

Often some of our strongest family memories take place around food. Celebrations and other get-togethers invariably involved plenty of eating and drinking. There were always those within the family who had their own specialties, their ‘secret recipes’ that made the fare unique in some way to each family.

If we’re lucky enough we may even have tattered recipes from the ‘old country’! Image by Klaus Beyer from Pixabay 

Some people are lucky enough to have those secret tattered recipes. Perhaps they were handed down by their mother or grandmother. Sadly, too often those grotty pieces of scribbled-on, food-splattered paper are thrown out when a loved one dies. Please, if you ever get the opportunity to rescue the tattered recipes of your family, do so! Just because they contain no genealogical information, it doesn’t mean they have no value. Sooner or later someone, even if not you will pick up that paper again. They will recreate those flavours and smells that will take you straight back to grandmother’s kitchen. And with food come stories.

Here are a couple of memories not too far back in the distant past, that the ‘In The Kitchen’ 52Ancestors topic brought up for me last week… I’m just sad that I have no tattered recipes from past generations, but I will be passing some on when I ‘pop my clogs’.

Both my mother and my mother-in-law have their own forms of legendary status within the family for their culinary skills. Both had some pride in that status, though with vastly different approaches.

My Mum relished, even promoted, her reputation as a bad cook. We would never have known if she hadn’t announced that she was once again about to inflict something inedible upon us. She was determined that she wouldn’t be defined by her household management skills. Okay, so some things were not the standard restaurant quality, but by and large, she was a far better cook than she let on. I still miss some of her specialities (no one made better lasagna!). There is more than one tattered recipe that I wish had lived somewhere outside of her brain.

A particular favourite I have experienced nowhere else was a tart made with grated apple, sultanas and lots of lemon juice and zest to make it tangy. It was often accompanied by custard, which wasn’t a strong part of her repertoire, but I loved it. To the point that I do not enjoy custard that doesn’t form a thick skin on the top and have multiple lumps in it.

Her most famous annual disaster, which she almost revelled in, was The Birthday Cake. The cake itself could be anything, technically a sponge or a fruit cake, or…something. It was often very flat. It was invariably coated in some fluorescent layer of icing which was of a runny consistency. The icing would spread itself across the cake, plate and sometimes the table as we gazed on in delighted horror. Birthday parties were interesting if there were attendees who didn’t already know we were an eccentric lot.

My brother just loved his Mum-style cake!

Oh, how I wish we had captured some of these for posterity. I have not a single photo of her efforts. However, I did attempt to replicate her skill for my brother when he turned 16 so can offer a poor facsimile…it doesn’t do her cakes justice though as it almost looks like a real one.

My mother-in-law Brenda, on the other hand was a bona fide, traditional country woman, from a conservative town packed to the gills with the same. All and sundry passed judgment on the quality of one’s fare and the annual Show was where reputations were made and lost. Brenda was too down to earth to play the judgment game, and let’s face it, far too busy with a large brood of children to really care about entering the Show. But her baking was goooooooood. I had a special love for her neenish tarts and chocolate ripple cakes, but her specialty was her fruit cake.

My wedding cake, made by my mother-in-law

Not only did she do a fabulous Christmas cake every year, but any time the family acquired new members (either spouses or children), she would rustle up a beautifully decorated, rich, moist cake for the occasion. She made both my wedding cake and my son’s christening cake. Oh, and my 21st birthday cake too! Sadly, she has just turned 94 and her vision is too poor to continue safely baking, so we are living on the memories of those cakes now.

I cannot however think of Brenda’s cakes without thinking of the interloper that destroyed our traditional attempt to keep part of our wedding cake to use as the christening cake for our first child.

When we first moved to Melbourne, we lived in a large old double brick walled unit in a beautiful leafy garden in Ivanhoe. Above the stove was an exceptionally large, deep cupboard. It wasn’t easily accessible, so was the ideal place to store things that didn’t need to come out often. Such as (we assumed), the carefully protected top tier of the wedding cake.

One night we heard scratching sounds coming from somewhere in the kitchen. We investigated but found nothing. Again, a couple of nights later, ‘scratch, scratch, bump’. The third night it happened, we finally discovered what the noise was. The door of the cupboard above the stove was open, and fur was visible behind the microwave. The noisy brushtail possum had jammed himself behind the microwave and was now trying to convince us he was either dead or invisible. Carefully, he was wrapped in a tea towel and removed outside.

The cakemunching possum!

The next night we were ready and captured this photo. He had indeed managed to make his way into the cupboard again. Grabbing a stepladder, we peered into the depths of the cupboard and worked out how he was getting in. Right at the very back, one of the bricks had been dislodged. He had been making his way down between the two layers of brick and coming in that way. He had also managed to break open the container holding the fruit cake. Not a skerrick remained. We think he’d begun venturing out of the cupboard in search of more of Brenda’s amazing baked goods.

Our son Jacob was born four years later. We celebrated his christening with a freshly baked brand-new fruit cake from Brenda’s kitchen.

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Her Personality Bursts Through! My Favourite Photo.

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.

favourite photo Louise Seal

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?

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The Incredible Disappearing Augustine Hoy and His Namesakes Galore

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.

Augustine Hoy Frances McGeow marriage
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.

Augustine Hoy junior's birth certificate
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).

Augustine Hoy passenger list
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.

Emigration vessel c1840
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.

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The Legend of Gypsy Blood: Tea Leaves, Burning Vardos and DNA

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.