This week once again I’m giving an example of how paying attention to a name helps to overcome obstacles in your family tree. We already saw how naming patterns helped break down a longstanding brick wall. Now, here’s a family story I finally proved after discovering an unusual middle name.
My grandmother Ruby had a difficult childhood. She was orphaned by the age of 7 and spent quite some time in an orphanage until her older half-sister Ann turned 21 and could take her home. Consequently, she didn’t know much about her family background and had very few stories to share. Those she did remember have since been shown to have a grain of truth but became distorted over the years by a child’s fickle memory.
Ruby’s mystery brother
Ruby claimed that one of her brothers died on the railway tracks because he was deaf and didn’t hear a train coming. I knew she meant either one of her half-brothers or one of her stepbrothers, as she was the only child of her mother Leah’s second marriage. Leah’s first marriage had been to a widower with a brood of kids, and they had also had several children together. However, she didn’t know which brother the story referred to, and he died well before she was born. The way she described him seemed to portray him as maybe 5 or 6 years of age. Perhaps that’s the way she imagined it when she was told the story.
Early on in my family history journey, I tried to find out what had happened. I had no name or year of death, a vague guess at an age, knew it was probably around Coventry and the surname was Barnett. Not uncommon. Back in those days, even consulting census records was cumbersome, and these children were all born after the (then) recently released 1881 Census. There was no 1939 Register to see who was still around in adulthood. Baptism record availability was patchy. And newspapers were difficult to locate from 12000 miles away. We are so spoilt now with the immediate availability of such a wide range of resources via the internet, aren’t we?
My research progressed over the years and my focus was further back in my tree as a result. The story of my great-uncle’s death had been abandoned and forgotten after those early attempts to find the truth. I hadn’t really thought about him in 15 years. But I decided to resurrect the search and take my own advice about periodically reviewing my tree.
Two of the seven step- or half-brothers in Ruby’s family were known to have reached adulthood. That left five possibilities to investigate. None of them was noted as being deaf on the censuses, so that shortcut was eliminated! I decided to systematically research each boy as though they were new to me. Joy of joys, I discovered that the baptism records for their parish were now available with images on Ancestry! This was the very simple key to unlock the story after all these years.
Alfred Mario Barnett
Alfred Barnett was William and Leah Barnett’s first child together. I decided to begin with him. This was fortunate as I immediately learnt something new about him from his baptism record. He had an unusual middle name – Mario! While that may not sound odd these days, we’re talking about Coventry in Victorian times. There were not very many people bearing Italian names in Warwickshire outside of Birmingham. I checked for a death record – an Alfred Mario Barnett aged 15 was registered in Coventry in 1912. It had to be him.
So where to next? Why the newspapers of course! The British Newspaper Archive has recently reached the milestone of 40 million pages of newspapers. A young boy dying in a railway accident should be newsworthy. His unusual middle name was eminently searchable. I knew the year and the approximate place, and…
…I found him! There were several reports including some very detailed inquest reports…detailed enough to pin down the location of the accident.
How did Alfred die?
Alfred and his friend John Keal went for a walk on the morning of Sunday 22nd September 1912. They were headed for the nearby London & North Western Railway line, although John later denied they were intending any mischief such as putting pennies on the line.
They got to the Folly Lane railway bridge, heading for the iron bridge further down, and decided to cut down the embankment one walking each side of the tracks. Another witness who was on the iron bridge said they were about halfway along when the express train approached. He said there was a strong wind blowing and it didn’t appear that Alfred heard the approach behind him. This may account for my grandmother believing he was deaf. He was hit by the train at between 50-60mph which caused devastating and unsurvivable injuries. The train driver, perhaps fortunately, was unaware he’d hit anyone until he reached Willesden and was informed of the accident.
His unfortunate father had to identify his son’s mutilated body. No doubt it had a lasting impact. William died only 9 months later, leaving Leah and the remaining children in poverty.
Look out for those unusual middle names!
Finding that Alfred Barnett was actually Alfred Mario Barnett made the verification of this family story so much easier. After all these years, within 10 minutes of knowing this extra detail, the mystery was solved. Use names to your advantage. If they are unique, searching is a doddle.
So why Mario? It was an easy matter to check for Marios around Coventry, they were as expected, very thin on the ground. One was William’s former brother-in-law, Mario Veasey. Mario’s wife Maud had been a witness at William and Leah’s marriage, so it appears they were very approving of William’s choice of replacement for Mario’s deceased sister Lucy and the couples were close.
Serendipity strikes again
There were two little pieces of serendipity to this tale:
The next station down the L&NWR line was Rugby, just a few short miles away. This was the station at which Edward Horatio Girling worked when it first opened. This was of course before his unfortunate encounter with a cobra at London Zoo, after his return down south.
When I was 14, the same age as Alfred, I lived briefly in a village just outside Coventry called Baginton. As I was perusing the maps, I realised it was only about 3km as the crow flies from where Alfred had come to grief. I too had wandered as he did with friends at the weekends doing dangerous things (a homemade raft on the River Sowe comes to mind!). It’s amazing so many 14-year-olds survive to become 15 really, but it brought tears to my eyes. I wonder if my mum realised at the time that we were living so close to the scene of her uncle’s demise?
