fbpx

Category: Genealogy

Posted on

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!

Posted on

Reel in the Relatives – Cousin Bait and How to Make the Most of it!

This week’s 52Ancestors challenge is ‘cousin bait’. What is cousin bait? It’s any way you are sharing your family tree, stories and information that allows other family members to find it (and you!). When you connect with others researching the same tree, you can share information with one another. There are bound to be things each of you didn’t know. There may even be artefacts, photos and documents passed down to another branch of the family that you hadn’t been able to access before.

A case in point – the family bible that was pivotal in solving my longest-standing brick wall, the Vaughan family. It was through a third cousin who I had been in contact with for several years before she realised that I might find its contents useful. We had originally connected through the discovery of our similar trees online. The family lines had long since lost track of one another in real life. Once the bible was shared I was able to solve the mystery that had held up both of our research.

Cousin bait tools

Cast a wide net when looking for cousins! Image: Chandan Mohapatra at Scopio
  • Online family trees
    • make them public so your cousins can find you
    • consider more than one site, different people fish in different ponds
    • make them wide as well as deep, your cousins may recognise their families’ names or those more closely related to them
  • Website or blog
    • share your names, places and stories
    • ‘cousin bait’ is a major and unashamed motivation for this blog! I’ve shared stories and information about several family lines, usually containing some useful (I hope!) ideas on how to approach problems or resources to use. Unknown cousins who Google our surnames and places in common will be greeted with a story about our mutual ancestor in the search results and a way to contact me!
  • Social media
    • join groups that cover genealogy for your places or surnames and post a query
    • also join general groups such as The Genealogy Squad, as they can have large member numbers across the globe. They also provide lots of guidance on methodology, tips and resources to help you!
  • Mailing lists
    • many of the old Rootsweb lists still survive, at least the ones that were active! Most of them are now over at groups.io, and can still be a great source of information and connections
  • Lost Cousins
    • The Lost Cousins site will match you with people who have ancestors who’ve flagged the same census entry as you. Therefore, when you connect with them you already know where they fit into the tree! There’s also a very useful fortnightly newsletter as an extra benefit.
You have soooo many cousins you’ve never ‘met’!

Do you have any other tried and true cousin bait tools in your tackle box that I haven’t mentioned here? What works for you?

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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…?

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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!

Posted on

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?

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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?