Lost in the Branches

I can still hear my mother's voice ringing in my pre-teenage ears, "His wife was a Hxxxx; there was a big family of them, and a right rum lot they were an' all."  One of the penalties of growing up in a small town, where my parents had lived all of their adult lives ... and more, was that entrenched views of the morality of one's neighbours were inevitably passed down. These assessments were received by young ears and minds as truth, rather than mere opinion.

I was reminded of this the other day when I visited my homeland for a school reunion.  One of those present was a man whose concerns and interests seemed to differ little from my own.  He was a child of one of those large family groups about whom my mother had a declared 'opinion'. Although I have long since been of the persuasion to form my own opinions about people ... and to change them if I find I was wrong, I still recall, after nearly sixty years, what I heard in childhood.

One usually finds that a place called West something has a matching East something not far away; the same applies to North and South.  I recall my amazement when I discovered the distance between North Elmham and South Elmham ... they are about 50 miles apart, one in Norfolk, the other in Suffolk.  That surprise was nothing to what I felt when I realised how far West Derby is from the city of Derby.  I've never found an East Derby; in fact, I haven't even looked for it.  This week, I've learned quite a bit about West Derby.  Much of the time I have struggled with a particularly challenging cluster of people in connection with the extended family of my great-uncle George, oft-mentioned here in recent weeks.  This week's study was into the family of one of his military sons-in-law.

The registration district of West Derby lies beside, and appears to swamp, the city of Liverpool and, although someone might well have declared their place of birth as 'Liverpool', I found it necessary in my searches always to include West Derby as well.  Its area includes Everton, and many other well-known suburbs.  It was interesting to look at one short Everton street on Google Maps.  Using the street view, I was greeted by the Liverpool - there, I've done it myself! - that I remember from my delivery days, with the doors and windows of most of the terraced houses secured with steel plates, and signs of life at only two or three of the twenty-odd dwellings.  Switching to the 'earth' view, captured at a later date, I could see that the whole area has been flattened ready for re-development.  Those houses on Venice, Viceroy, Vanguard and Vienna Streets are no more.

My mother's outspoken views (probably conditioned by her own upbringing and a small but firm family background) came back to me again, as I discovered that the father of my soldier had been married either two or three times.  With the common name of James Davies, it was hard to be certain which entries in the records referred to the right person.  When it came to marriages, the same sort of problems arose.  Were the first two wives were one and the same: could Liza A in one census have been Agnes in the next?

I eventually decided that the marriage I'd found for a James Davies and Agnes Elizabeth Caven wasn't the right one after all, and that there were two others more likely to be the true couples, one to Eliza Ann Lindop, and the other to Agnes Conlan.  There was also the need to fit in appropriate deaths, and deaths of former husbands, of course, and in the case of the third wife, Sarah Guy - formerly married to another James - which Sarah she had been before that marriage. Was she Watson or Wright?  And to further confuse an already complicated muddle, there were step children - sometimes not called step- - to be taken into account as well.

By Wednesday evening, I decided to call a halt and spend the next day on other things.  After returning home yesterday in a motorhome with a newly-repaired fridge - some relief, after being confronted by the possibility of an expensive replacement - I sat down with a clean sheet of paper to attack the problem once more.  Another couple of hours or more left me fairly certain of the overall picture, with one unfortunate snag.  There was one boy - a brother of my soldier - whose mother had died some fifteen months before his birth, and his father's next marriage wasn't until about eight years afterwards.  It was at this point that realism took over.  Many of these complexities were so distant from the family that I call mine - children of former husbands of later wives, and so on ...!

To apply an agricultural metaphor, the axe has been wielded, and the fence re-erected nearer home.  I'm now left with a much smaller picture, but one which - however incomplete - I know to be relevant and, to the best of my knowledge, true.