As we look back on life, we realise that experiences are instructive, and bad experiences more so than good. In the overall scheme of things, this week's lesson is not among the greatest disasters ever. Far from it. But it has taught me to expect the unexpected and to follow the 'rules', such as they are. It won't surprise you to learn that this is all connected with my family history.
For the last few weeks I've been digging into the Garrard family. They're not my blood relatives, but my 6th-great aunt married a Garrard and these are their descendants, so variously my fifth, sixth or seventh cousins. Last week I was looking at a particular family of eight children born between 1855 and 1873 and by this week I found myself making interesting discoveries regarding their fifth child, Beatrice Mary.
She married a Scottish migrant in 1897 - I found myself thinking of a song by the Dubliners, 'The Dundee Weaver', but this was a draper from Dunbar - and settled in Essex. In the 1901 census they were shown there with two children, a boy of two and a girl only a few months old. I eagerly moved on to 1911, hoping to discover the rest of the family. There, sure enough were John the draper and the children ... but who was this Gertrude, his wife ... and she only 30 to his 48?
It didn't take long to establish that Beatrice had died in 1907 and, after a respectable interval of just over two years, John had remarried in the autumn of 1909. As seems often to have been the case, the truth was massaged when it came to ages on the census return and I always wonder just how honest a couple was with each other. Not having access to Scottish birth records, I could only refer to the age given on an earlier census, but when I found Gertrude's birth registration in late 1881, the two together revealed that that eighteen-year age difference was actually more than twenty!
I began to think about the family situation in those years before the First World War and, I confess, my view of the Scottish draper and his young bride was not particularly generous to this man. However, when I discovered the birth of their daughter in 1912, and imagined the role of the dominant male in the decision of her name, my heart melted somewhat. She was named Mary Beatrice Gertrude, obviously in honour of both of his wives. (I do accept that there could be other interpretations, and who are we to judge the motives of those long dead?)
The family was still together in 1939, with Mary now the head of the household, a clerk in the Ministry of Labour, and her parents living with her. I found no sign of her step-sister, but I traced the draper's firstborn to a soldier's death with the RASC in 1941. He is commemorated on a memorial in Greece and was mentioned in despatches.
After recording the various discoveries, I was reviewing this whole story and suddenly noticed that, although she was born in 1867, I had recorded Beatrice in 1891 and 1901, but not the two previous censuses in which she would have appeared. To my surprise, she wasn't there. The best match I could find was a Beatrice M Garrard living in Ipswich, but her parents were Joseph and Sarah and not the Jonathan and Mary I'd been following. Amazingly, this Beatrice had two younger siblings whose names matched 'my' family.
Suspicious, I retraced my steps. How had I come upon these children in the first place? It was a natural sequence: Jonathan Garrard had married Mary Girling in 1854, so I'd sought Garrard children in the succeeding years, whose mother had the maiden name Girling, and found these eight reasonably spaced registrations the first six of which were all in the same district of Suffolk where Jonathan and Mary had married. I began to look into Joseph and Sarah and - lo and behold - there was a marriage in 1866 between Joseph Garrard and Sarah Girling. So far as I could find, although Joseph and Jonathan were born in the same village, they weren't related ... certainly not brothers or first cousins, and there seems to have been no link between Mary and Sarah either.
The principle of 'family reconstruction', which I follow these days, says that you find everyone in all the censuses - or else explain why they aren't there - before you can say hand on heart that the family is the way you are portraying it. During this period of 'confinement', I decided I would look at some of the earlier discoveries of my twenty years or so of research, and clearly I hadn't been following that discipline when I added those eight children!
My lesson learned, the Scotsman and his family have now been expunged and, although more accurate as a result, my tree is the poorer for their departure.
Friday 27 March 2020
Friday 20 March 2020
"Before I Catch the Bus"
This afternoon, I happened to notice the clock out of the corner of my eye. It was '3.15 on a Friday afternoon' and that expression wafted me back to a time about sixty years ago. Family ties were much closer then than now, and I suspect less formal, too. If I were away from school, either from sickness or at holiday times, my mother might see the clock and say, apparently to me, "Well, it's a quarter past three; I don't expect we shall see uncle Arthur now." There was no formal arrangement, no plans to be upset: sometimes he'd call, sometimes he wouldn't.
Picture if you will, the busy town on market day. The town's population would have swelled by several bus-loads of folks who had taken the chance to meet old friends, to get essential provisions or do some special shopping not possible at the village store, or just to see what was going on at the sales. There were live- and dead-stock auction sales at a number of locations in the town most Fridays and the Corn Exchange still functioned as was intended when it had been built in the 1850s. Here tall square stands would be manned by merchants from miles around, buying and selling on the strength of samples brought along by the farmers.
A short, well-built man would emerge from a shop, pub or café, his dirty white raincoat probably open, unless it were raining, and the ubiquitous flat cap firmly seated on his head. His shopping and other business completed, he would take his fob watch from his waistcoat pocket and decide whether or not he had time for a family call before catching the bus home. Nowadays, there is a regular service between Diss and Bury St Edmunds, which calls at Hinderclay three or four times each weekday. In those days, there was just one into Diss in the morning and one back in the afternoon on market day, to cater for the needs of the villagers. He knew that he had to be there when it left at 4.0 pm.
To visit ours, he would have to walk up from the town. It wasn't far, something a little under half a mile, but it was up a moderately steep hill, and a bit of a challenge for a man in his mid- to late-seventies, especially after walking around the town for a few hours. After a rest and the inevitable cup of tea and a home-made bun, he would then need to walk back through the town to the bus station on the far side, probably half as far again as the upward trek, so he needed to make sure of his timing when deciding. In former times he would visit his younger sister, who lived nearer the town centre and just before that same slope which, in her road, was more steep further up.
Uncle Arthur - he was really my mother's uncle - never married. He was one of a family of six children born in the village of Hinderclay between 1877 and 1891. When I was growing up, I knew only two of them and, since they lived in the same place and were known as 'uncle Arthur' and 'auntie Annie', it was some time before I discovered that they were, in fact, brother and sister. I then realised that my grandmother (known as 'nanna') was in fact their sister who, while she was alive had been in the habit of receiving Arthur's Friday visits.
The eldest of the family, William, proved to be the 'black sheep' and was ostracised because he had dared to fall in love with a woman who had suffered at the hands of her first husband and had managed to divorce him. The eldest daughter, Lizzie, born just two years later, died soon after I was born, so I never knew her. She had been in service in London at the turn of the twentieth century, and later in Felixstowe, but by 1939, she was back home in rural Suffolk. Arthur was next, and his younger brother Albert died in 1917 of wounds sustained in one of the preliminary actions in the Ypres area leading up to to the 'muddy and bloody' battle of Paschendaele. My grandmother, Emma, and her younger sister Annie made up the six.
When their father died in 1922, Arthur took on the family farm; by the time my cousin and I - their only third generation - visited as children thirty-odd years later, the farm consisted of little more than an orchard and a few chickens and the house was quite dilapidated, but it had successfully provided for the ups and downs of that family for some seventy or so years.
Picture if you will, the busy town on market day. The town's population would have swelled by several bus-loads of folks who had taken the chance to meet old friends, to get essential provisions or do some special shopping not possible at the village store, or just to see what was going on at the sales. There were live- and dead-stock auction sales at a number of locations in the town most Fridays and the Corn Exchange still functioned as was intended when it had been built in the 1850s. Here tall square stands would be manned by merchants from miles around, buying and selling on the strength of samples brought along by the farmers.
A short, well-built man would emerge from a shop, pub or café, his dirty white raincoat probably open, unless it were raining, and the ubiquitous flat cap firmly seated on his head. His shopping and other business completed, he would take his fob watch from his waistcoat pocket and decide whether or not he had time for a family call before catching the bus home. Nowadays, there is a regular service between Diss and Bury St Edmunds, which calls at Hinderclay three or four times each weekday. In those days, there was just one into Diss in the morning and one back in the afternoon on market day, to cater for the needs of the villagers. He knew that he had to be there when it left at 4.0 pm.
To visit ours, he would have to walk up from the town. It wasn't far, something a little under half a mile, but it was up a moderately steep hill, and a bit of a challenge for a man in his mid- to late-seventies, especially after walking around the town for a few hours. After a rest and the inevitable cup of tea and a home-made bun, he would then need to walk back through the town to the bus station on the far side, probably half as far again as the upward trek, so he needed to make sure of his timing when deciding. In former times he would visit his younger sister, who lived nearer the town centre and just before that same slope which, in her road, was more steep further up.
Uncle Arthur - he was really my mother's uncle - never married. He was one of a family of six children born in the village of Hinderclay between 1877 and 1891. When I was growing up, I knew only two of them and, since they lived in the same place and were known as 'uncle Arthur' and 'auntie Annie', it was some time before I discovered that they were, in fact, brother and sister. I then realised that my grandmother (known as 'nanna') was in fact their sister who, while she was alive had been in the habit of receiving Arthur's Friday visits.
The eldest of the family, William, proved to be the 'black sheep' and was ostracised because he had dared to fall in love with a woman who had suffered at the hands of her first husband and had managed to divorce him. The eldest daughter, Lizzie, born just two years later, died soon after I was born, so I never knew her. She had been in service in London at the turn of the twentieth century, and later in Felixstowe, but by 1939, she was back home in rural Suffolk. Arthur was next, and his younger brother Albert died in 1917 of wounds sustained in one of the preliminary actions in the Ypres area leading up to to the 'muddy and bloody' battle of Paschendaele. My grandmother, Emma, and her younger sister Annie made up the six.
When their father died in 1922, Arthur took on the family farm; by the time my cousin and I - their only third generation - visited as children thirty-odd years later, the farm consisted of little more than an orchard and a few chickens and the house was quite dilapidated, but it had successfully provided for the ups and downs of that family for some seventy or so years.
Friday 13 March 2020
Now that Everywhere is on the Front Line ...
It's very quiet as I write this afternoon. It may be the Friday afternoon rush-hour but, even living in an industrial part of town, it's very quiet. The quietness is not just due to the absence of wind or traffic ... although these are both noticeable; I'm also aware of a distinct quietness within.
One of my friends posted on Facebook this morning that she has worked from home for several years, so self-isolation would be no problem. Technically I worked from home when I was driving for a living and although, of course, the work itself was all over the country, within the vehicle, I was always in my own company. Now that I'm retired, for much of the time the same status prevails and - for the most part - I'm not lonely. But today, for the first time, I have noticed a distinct and different quietness ... and, somehow, it is lonely.
The news bulletins and social media convey news of events, gatherings and sports fixtures being cancelled or postponed so as to reduce the possibility of infection; and certain aspects of normal life are now banned until further notice. While of course I realise the need for these restrictions, support the action being taken and will, to the best of my ability, comply - as much for my own safety as for that of everyone else - nevertheless, I resent the intrusion of the rest of the world into my own little haven, the way I've moulded my lifestyle into what's comfortable and ... well, mine!
It's not just the physical changes around me: the way sanitising hand-gel has appeared in virtually every place I look, for example, and the half-empty supermarket shelves. I find my thought-patterns have changed, too. Last weekend, I said to a friend "I just feel unclean all the while", and he readily agreed, implying that he was experiencing the same thing. Now, as I look at the people around me on the few occasions I go out, I find myself wondering about their cleanliness; as I go about my everyday life, I'm more aware of things I normally touch without thinking, like door handles, keys, even this computer keyboard.
While many of these are things only I touch, it seems there's a greater need to consider with every move, whether there's a possibility that someone else has touched it as well ... and when ... and with what implication.
Meanwhile on the 'normal life' front, there's little going on, so little to comment about. I finished the investigations into the family of John and Agnes (see last week's post) and now I'm working on his elder brother William, who usefully married a woman with the wonderfully rare name of Fanny Hancer. They had seven children, and I've still got three of them to occupy my thoughts this weekend.
My work at the hospice distribution centre has become more settled again, after a few weeks of upheaval and uncertainty. When I joined their volunteer brigade almost eighteen months ago, I made it clear that I was willing to be a relief driver for their vans and have enjoyed a number of spells of holiday cover, sometimes the odd day and sometimes as part of a complex schedule to cover a whole week of absence. With the end of the holiday year approaching, there have been more demands in that direction lately.
In addition, there has recently been a complete re-think of transport patterns to cover the fact that some of the shops are open at weekends. As a result, I now have a permanent slot in the programme to drive a van one morning a week, and then carry on with the work I have been doing inside in the afternoon.
Enough for now. If all the precautions by me and around me are successful, there should be another bulletin next weekend!
One of my friends posted on Facebook this morning that she has worked from home for several years, so self-isolation would be no problem. Technically I worked from home when I was driving for a living and although, of course, the work itself was all over the country, within the vehicle, I was always in my own company. Now that I'm retired, for much of the time the same status prevails and - for the most part - I'm not lonely. But today, for the first time, I have noticed a distinct and different quietness ... and, somehow, it is lonely.
The news bulletins and social media convey news of events, gatherings and sports fixtures being cancelled or postponed so as to reduce the possibility of infection; and certain aspects of normal life are now banned until further notice. While of course I realise the need for these restrictions, support the action being taken and will, to the best of my ability, comply - as much for my own safety as for that of everyone else - nevertheless, I resent the intrusion of the rest of the world into my own little haven, the way I've moulded my lifestyle into what's comfortable and ... well, mine!
It's not just the physical changes around me: the way sanitising hand-gel has appeared in virtually every place I look, for example, and the half-empty supermarket shelves. I find my thought-patterns have changed, too. Last weekend, I said to a friend "I just feel unclean all the while", and he readily agreed, implying that he was experiencing the same thing. Now, as I look at the people around me on the few occasions I go out, I find myself wondering about their cleanliness; as I go about my everyday life, I'm more aware of things I normally touch without thinking, like door handles, keys, even this computer keyboard.
While many of these are things only I touch, it seems there's a greater need to consider with every move, whether there's a possibility that someone else has touched it as well ... and when ... and with what implication.
Meanwhile on the 'normal life' front, there's little going on, so little to comment about. I finished the investigations into the family of John and Agnes (see last week's post) and now I'm working on his elder brother William, who usefully married a woman with the wonderfully rare name of Fanny Hancer. They had seven children, and I've still got three of them to occupy my thoughts this weekend.
My work at the hospice distribution centre has become more settled again, after a few weeks of upheaval and uncertainty. When I joined their volunteer brigade almost eighteen months ago, I made it clear that I was willing to be a relief driver for their vans and have enjoyed a number of spells of holiday cover, sometimes the odd day and sometimes as part of a complex schedule to cover a whole week of absence. With the end of the holiday year approaching, there have been more demands in that direction lately.
In addition, there has recently been a complete re-think of transport patterns to cover the fact that some of the shops are open at weekends. As a result, I now have a permanent slot in the programme to drive a van one morning a week, and then carry on with the work I have been doing inside in the afternoon.
Enough for now. If all the precautions by me and around me are successful, there should be another bulletin next weekend!
Friday 6 March 2020
I do like to be 'Beside the Seaside' ...
I recalled this morning a Thursday afternoon - gosh! - fifty years ago, when I learned of the expression 'opportunity cost'. It was during my brief spell at college, when our economics tutor announced that this was defined as 'the cost of the alternative foregone'. He then went on to explain what on earth he was talking about and, by the end of the lesson at least, he had given us a good idea of this concept. This is more than could be said of the chap who spent Wednesday evenings trying to explain the ins and outs of statistics. He may have known it all, but when it came to enthusing and convincing a roomful of teenagers ... hopeless!
So, you may ask, why this sudden foray into my academic past? You might be surprised to know that, despite the recent fall in the stock markets because of (speak of it quietly) Covid 19, it had nothing to do with the world of finance. No ... check back to last week's blog. Alice Octavia Jackson, there mentioned, was my fifth cousin once removed, with our link ancestor being one Robert Everson the third (1704-1784) of Thorndon, Suffolk. This week I've been following up the many children of John Hatsell Garrard, of Laxfield, Suffolk, who was Alice Octavia's fifth cousin once removed, their link ancestor being one further generation back, Robert Everson the second (b. 1680), the father of Robert the third.
John Garrard (who was therefore my fifth cousin twice removed) lived from 1866 to 1943 and was the person who moved his branch of the family from Suffolk to the south coast, marrying Agnes Jones who was not a Welsh lady, but was born in Chichester. She and John had ten children, born either in Brighton, where they married in 1889, or nearby Portslade, so my attention this week has been tightly focused in 'Dear old Sussex by the Sea' ... and, before you ask, no, I don't know the words of the song!
I suddenly realised this morning that my energies have not been so focused on the family history since last summer, and I began to wonder - worry, even - what it might have been that had distracted me during the past seven months or so and, perhaps more importantly, what it is that I ought to be doing instead of 'wasting my time' with things historical, however interesting. I regret to inform you, dear reader, that I've not come up with a positive answer. There have been a number of seemingly regular diversions, but nothing outstanding that appears to have been overlooked.
So I'm free to tell you some of what I've been discovering. John and Agnes may have felt some foreboding when their seventh child and third daughter, named Agnes Florence after her mum, died in 1900, when only a few weeks old. However they went on to have three more children, evening the genders at five apiece, before their next daughter Gladys Mildred also died. I wrote last week about children who were born and died between censuses; Gladys has to have been one of the most unlucky of these children who, in cricketing terms, 'didn't trouble the scorer'. She was born only weeks after the 1901 census, and died just before the one in 1911, and only just short of her tenth birthday.
Their second-eldest sister bore the fascinating name of Mary Malvina. If you were around in 1982, you'll recall that the Argentine name for the Falkland Islands is Islas Malvinas, and I can't help wondering whether there could be a link there somewhere to be traced another day. She certainly fascinated one Reuben Charles Virgo, who was not so foreign as his name might suggest, since he was born in Portslade, the son of another Reuben, who was also born there. They married in the summer of 1915, and their daughter was born in the first quarter of 1916. I've not found any further trace of mother or daughter. Reuben, however, reappeared in 1939, as Richard. I wonder whether he had feared that his real name might sound too Jewish, given the political situation then. Interestingly, he worked with sugar in the confectionery trade in 1911; his occupation in 1939 - where he was lodging in Nuneaton - was given as 'school dental surgeon'!
John and Agnes' second son, Harry Thomas, married Nora Wishart. She wasn't Scottish, but her father was and, since marrying a Sussex girl, had travelled to Uxbridge and at least as far as Somerset, before settling, however briefly, in Redhill, where Nora was born. They eventually moved back to Uxbridge, however, for it was there that she and Harry married, and there too their second child and first daughter, Audrey, was born. A firstborn son, Hugh, and two more daughters Nora and Rosemary, were born on the Sussex coast, between 1922 and 1929. Tragedy struck in 1932. Whether or not the two were connected isn't clear, but Audrey died in the spring, and Rosemary in the later months of the year. I've found no further trace of Hugh, but their sister Nora found happiness during wartime when, in 1944, she married Kazimierz Iwachow; I presume he was Polish. They settled in the Worthing area and had a son and a daughter soon after the war.
So, you may ask, why this sudden foray into my academic past? You might be surprised to know that, despite the recent fall in the stock markets because of (speak of it quietly) Covid 19, it had nothing to do with the world of finance. No ... check back to last week's blog. Alice Octavia Jackson, there mentioned, was my fifth cousin once removed, with our link ancestor being one Robert Everson the third (1704-1784) of Thorndon, Suffolk. This week I've been following up the many children of John Hatsell Garrard, of Laxfield, Suffolk, who was Alice Octavia's fifth cousin once removed, their link ancestor being one further generation back, Robert Everson the second (b. 1680), the father of Robert the third.
John Garrard (who was therefore my fifth cousin twice removed) lived from 1866 to 1943 and was the person who moved his branch of the family from Suffolk to the south coast, marrying Agnes Jones who was not a Welsh lady, but was born in Chichester. She and John had ten children, born either in Brighton, where they married in 1889, or nearby Portslade, so my attention this week has been tightly focused in 'Dear old Sussex by the Sea' ... and, before you ask, no, I don't know the words of the song!
I suddenly realised this morning that my energies have not been so focused on the family history since last summer, and I began to wonder - worry, even - what it might have been that had distracted me during the past seven months or so and, perhaps more importantly, what it is that I ought to be doing instead of 'wasting my time' with things historical, however interesting. I regret to inform you, dear reader, that I've not come up with a positive answer. There have been a number of seemingly regular diversions, but nothing outstanding that appears to have been overlooked.
So I'm free to tell you some of what I've been discovering. John and Agnes may have felt some foreboding when their seventh child and third daughter, named Agnes Florence after her mum, died in 1900, when only a few weeks old. However they went on to have three more children, evening the genders at five apiece, before their next daughter Gladys Mildred also died. I wrote last week about children who were born and died between censuses; Gladys has to have been one of the most unlucky of these children who, in cricketing terms, 'didn't trouble the scorer'. She was born only weeks after the 1901 census, and died just before the one in 1911, and only just short of her tenth birthday.
Their second-eldest sister bore the fascinating name of Mary Malvina. If you were around in 1982, you'll recall that the Argentine name for the Falkland Islands is Islas Malvinas, and I can't help wondering whether there could be a link there somewhere to be traced another day. She certainly fascinated one Reuben Charles Virgo, who was not so foreign as his name might suggest, since he was born in Portslade, the son of another Reuben, who was also born there. They married in the summer of 1915, and their daughter was born in the first quarter of 1916. I've not found any further trace of mother or daughter. Reuben, however, reappeared in 1939, as Richard. I wonder whether he had feared that his real name might sound too Jewish, given the political situation then. Interestingly, he worked with sugar in the confectionery trade in 1911; his occupation in 1939 - where he was lodging in Nuneaton - was given as 'school dental surgeon'!
John and Agnes' second son, Harry Thomas, married Nora Wishart. She wasn't Scottish, but her father was and, since marrying a Sussex girl, had travelled to Uxbridge and at least as far as Somerset, before settling, however briefly, in Redhill, where Nora was born. They eventually moved back to Uxbridge, however, for it was there that she and Harry married, and there too their second child and first daughter, Audrey, was born. A firstborn son, Hugh, and two more daughters Nora and Rosemary, were born on the Sussex coast, between 1922 and 1929. Tragedy struck in 1932. Whether or not the two were connected isn't clear, but Audrey died in the spring, and Rosemary in the later months of the year. I've found no further trace of Hugh, but their sister Nora found happiness during wartime when, in 1944, she married Kazimierz Iwachow; I presume he was Polish. They settled in the Worthing area and had a son and a daughter soon after the war.
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