The Families of Nash and Fern

I’ve been digging into the family history again.  Tissues at the ready?

When the census was taken on 3rd April, 1881, there was living in the south Derbyshire village of Egginton, a household comprising Henry Nash, 37, his wife Ann, 32, Priscilla, 8, William, 6 and Elizabeth, 5.  At first glance they were a normal family, but this was far from the truth.

Henry was born in 1842, the eldest son and third child of  William, a labourer in Thurvaston, a hamlet of Marston Montgomery on the western edge of the county, and his wife Alice.  By the age of 28, he had become a farm servant at a large farm in Doveridge, where he was the eldest of a team of eight servants altogether.

In nearby Church Broughton, on 14th September, 1845, Elizabeth, daughter of William and Harriet Gotheridge, was baptised.  In 1871, she was a domestic servant, but still living at home, so presumably working close by.  She and Henry were married at Church Broughton on 27th January, 1874.  No doubt all were pleased for the couple, but the following winter tragedy struck.  At the end of January, or possibly the first days of February, she died during or soon after giving birth to their son.  She was buried on 4th February.  Her son was given the names William Gotheridge Nash, and was baptised on 21st March, 1875.

Not far away, in Egginton, Ann Brittan was born in the summer of 1848, the fourth child and second daughter of John and Elizabeth, another labouring family.  At 12, she was housemaid at Park Hill, a large house in the village, the home of Thomas Radford, a small farmer and grocer.  Ten years later, she had spread her wings, and was found in Market Street, Heckmondwike, near Dewsbury, Yorkshire.  Here she was a general (i.e. the only) servant to Edmund Dent, an iron and metal agent, where she met the needs of Mr & Mrs Dent, their three sons, aged 17, 8 and 4, Mrs Dent’s mother and two sisters. Ann was only 22.

Were things too much for her?  Did she give way to temptation, or was she taken advantage of?  We'll never know the circumstances but, during the spring of the following year, she gave birth to a daughter, whom she called Priscilla.  At that point, her career at an end, and possibly with a degree of shame, she returned to Egginton.  Not long afterwards, other unknown circumstances brought Henry Nash and his son to Egginton, and Henry and Ann were married there on 22nd June, 1876.  In addition to their own respective children, they took into their household the illegitimate daughter of one of Ann’s sisters; she was Elizabeth, the fifth member of the ‘family’ recorded in 1881.

The fact that they stayed together for almost 30 years, until Henry’s death in 1905 would suggest that things were rosy for them and, indeed, this may have been so for the most part.  There was sorrow, too, though, not least that Ann outlived her daughter by over five years, before her own death early in 1933.

Yorkshire-born Priscilla had the same exploratory gene as her mother and, at the age of 18, she was the general servant to 25-year-old Oliver Car, his wife and one-year-old son.  Oliver was the harbour master at Morecambe in Lancashire.  She later returned to Egginton, however, where she married George Edward Fern on 11th September, 1897.  In 1891, George was shown as a Brewer’s labourer, living with his family in Stapenhill (then in Derbyshire, but now part of Burton-upon-Trent), where he had been born in 1874. In 1901, they were living in Egginton, with one child, William Arthur, aged 1 year.  Priscilla junior arrived later that year.  Then things went awfully wrong, although the records don't reveal any details.

On 12th April 1903, at All Saints’ Church, Coventry, seventeen-year-old Emily Rose Holloway, daughter of Walter and Rose, married George Fern, said to be the son of Edward, a farmer, now deceased.  The 1911 census shows them living at 118 Nicholls St, Coventry, with Annie Rose, 7 and George Herbert, 6.  If Emily had been pregnant when she married a man nearly twelve years her senior, and at such a young age, then it’s likely she miscarried, since no records of any other children have been found and she described herself as ‘married 8 years with two children both still living’. 

In 1901, Walter was a ‘filer up’ in a cycle works; Emily (then 15) was a plater, and her brother a wheel maker.  In 1911, Walter was still in the same business, along with four of his children.  It would appear that George had been welcomed into the family, for on his census form he was described as ‘stores clerk, cycle industry’.  He died in Coventry in 1955, Emily in Warwick in 1968.

We cannot guess what Priscilla had been told of all this.  In 1911, she was living with her widowed mother, Ann, and her own two children, William and Priscilla.  Both she and her mother were working for Burton-upon-Trent Corporation as osier peelers (they peeled the bark from willow stems for basket weaving).  The most intriguing detail, however, was that in those ‘fertility columns’ of the census, she had described herself as ‘Married 13 years, with two children, both still living’.  There is no sign of another George Edward Fern in the 1911 census, and no ‘convenient’ birth of another George Fern of that age, farmer’s son or not.  We must suspect bigamy.

You may well ask, what is my interest in this family?  Ann (1848-1933) was the great-aunt of my aunt by marriage: the wife of Charles, my father’s eldest brother.  He used to visit us on an annual basis in my childhood, but I never knew Mary; she had died in the early 1950s.