A Sad Tale from the Rabbit Hole

Having determined recently that chasing odd people that aren't connected is a waste of valuable research effort, I couldn't resist telling one last story before I once again apply my nose to the genealogical grindstone.  It caught my eye because it begins in England's smallest county, where I had a very relaxing summer holiday about twenty years ago.  There's something attractive about Rutland's motto, 'Multum in Parvo' (much in little) and I remember that holiday every time I drive through the county.

Emma Barfield was born a labourer's daughter in the village of Wing in 1835, the second of five children listed in the 1841 census.  At the age of sixteen, the next census found her in nearby Morcott, one of three servants in the employ of 33-year-old, Lincolnshire-born, 'gentleman', George Whichcote.  In this post, she was accompanied below stairs by 25-year-old housekeeper, Mary Ann Southwell, born in Uppingham, and the 29-year-old William Judson, who was described merely as 'servant'.  Some time during the next few years, George decided to return to his native county.  He took his housekeeper with him and replaced Emma and William by another Rutland-born Emma as his housemaid, and giving lodging to another William who, it appears, spent much of his time working on a farm, perhaps owned by George himself.

No longer wanted as a servant, but with the experience those years had given her, Emma Barfield sought her fortune further afield.  Why she chose Norwich is a mystery, but it was there, early in 1858, that she married William Boden, a post office sorter.  By the end of the year, she had presented him with a son, William Samuel, and the trio are recorded in 1861 living in the unattractive-sounding Lollards Pit, in Thorpe Hamlet just by the city, with Emma working as a seamstress to supplement the family finances.

The next decade brought joys and sorrows.  William had been followed in 1860 by Robert, who died that winter just before the census; Then came Henrietta in 1862 and Emma Jane the next year, both of whom died in 1864.  Their other three children Amelia in 1865, Robert Francis in 1867 and Laura in 1870 survived, and the family were living in Spitalfields, Thorpe, in 1871.  Ten years later they were still there, and Emma was working as a laundress.

Thorpe didn't treat Emma well.  In the summer of 1882 her eldest son William died, followed a few months later by her husband.  In 1886, elsewhere in the city, Elizabeth Kent died.  She was the mother of Henry James Kent and his siblings, of whom I wrote last week; her demise left as a widower Henry James Kent senior, who was about the same age as Emma Boden, formerly Barfield.  How these two came to meet is another mystery (rabbit holes - like the rest of family history - are beset by mysteries!), but in the summer of 1887 they married, and in 1891 were living in Cowgate Street in the parish of St Martin at Palace, which is where the Kent family had been living, in one residence or another, for many years.  Both Henry and Emma were working as basket makers.

Their union threw apart what was left of Emma's family.  Laura, the youngest, had already left home, getting married in 1886, just sixteen years old, to Henry Read, a coal labourer some eight years her senior.  What Robert had done when his mother re-married is not known; he died in the spring of 1890 aged only 22.  In 1891 Amelia was living with Laura and Henry and their three-year-old daughter Florence.  They had had another daughter in 1889, but she had died before she was a year old.  At the time of the census, Laura was expecting her third child and no doubt Amelia's support was invaluable.  Lavinia was born in the June quarter of 1891.

Emma and Henry enjoyed about ten years together before Henry died in the September quarter of 1897.  Emma then moved to an apartment in the Barnard Building, located in the parish of St Peter per Mountergate.  In 1901 she was living there accompanied by her granddaughter Florence Read.  These two were both survivors of collapsed families.  Florence's parents had split up.  Laura was living as a charwoman in Essex Street, where she was hosting John Woods, a fish hawker, while her husband was lodging a mile away with a 49-year old widow and her two grown-up children.

When Emma died at the age of 71 early in 1906, she had outlived two husbands and five of her seven children.  I would like to offer a happy ending - or at least a conclusion - to the story.  However, like life itself, the story just goes on.  In 1911, Laura was living at a different address, but still playing host to John Woods, this time with a two-year old 'visitor' of unknown provenance, whose surname differed from them both.  Laura declared herself 'married 24 years, having borne three children of whom one had died'.  

Her sister Amelia, meanwhile, was a servant to an art dealer and his wife.  Maybe, still unmarried at the age of 45, she was the lucky one.

of Rabbit Holes and Fence Posts

Yesterday's post brought me a gardening magazine and seed catalogue.  They came in a scrunched up bundle, it having been folded in order to squash it through the letterbox.  I had wrenched this open before I had realised that it wasn't intended for me, but for someone with the right house number in a street the other side of town, whose mail I have had mis-delivered on one or two previous occasions.

Notwithstanding the confusion of the delivery service and the fact that these items are of no use to me, and can no longer be re-delivered either, they do provide a tenuous link to my title this week.  However, the only thing I'm likely to grow - in the total absence of a garden of any description - is a rich crop of mixed metaphors!

'Rabbit holes' is a genealogical term that has come only recently into my cognisance.  I understand it to refer to investigations such as have formed substance for posts here a number of times.  These have arisen because I have tripped over a family whose link to my own is, at the very least, distant but who have aroused my curiosity or sympathy.  In terms of furthering my overall aim, they are distinctly 'off-piste'.

I have often drawn 'fences' into conversations in the past in an accounting sense (although so many years after the event, I can no longer remember the precise circumstances when I might do so).  In essence, their purpose would have been to determine certain considerations that ought to be deemed someone else's concern rather than mine.  That same analogy applies here, but up to now, these metaphorical fences have never had posts to hold them in place.  They have moved to and fro according to the presence or otherwise of tasty lettuces on the other side. (Sorry - is that a metaphor too far?) 

I've been digging into the family - much reported here - of the siblings of my 2xgreat-grandmother, Eliza Burlingham, and more recently into that of one of her nieces, Eliza Batley, who had nine children with her husband Henry James Kent.  Of these, two were killed in the First World War, one died at the age of three and another was married for fifteen years with no children and died leaving a widow who subsequently married a widower with four children.  The other five all married and between them produced a total of seventeen grandchildren, most of whom also married and had further progeny ... all of whom would be my third or fourth cousins.

With so many actual relations to occupy my attention, you would think I'd be content, but no ...  This week I've become fascinated by Henry James Kent, his father of the same name, and his four siblings.  In the case of all of these, if I were to enter them into the report screen of my family history software and ask it to compute their relationship to me, I would be told politely, 'Having checked them up to a maximum of 350 ancestors in 20 generations, we have found no common ancestors.  They are not related.'  My interest has been intensified because - like the Jex family I wrote about here - they all grew up in Norwich, many in the city centre streets that I was familiar with when I worked there fifty-odd years ago, including one family living in 1911 in the very street where my office was situated sixty years afterwards!

Some of the occupations were peculiar to Norwich, too.  I wonder how many of my readers, or their parents or grandparents, would have added a blue bag to the final rinse of their white wash?  Some of these young people worked as 'blue packers'.  There was also a strong concentration of basket makers and rush platters and, of course, all the variety of specialisms in the shoe industry.

I have finally realised the need for my fences to have posts, and I have defined a post as a second marriage (but not in the sense of one person's second marriage following the death of a former spouse).  I have decided that, when I'm already looking at someone who is only linked to me by marriage, then I will include him/her and their siblings, and possibly the siblings' spouses, but if I then have to invoke two marriages in order to define their relationship to me, then their children, however interesting, will not qualify.

I take this decision just in time to prevent my having to delve any deeper into a mystery relating to the family of Amelia Scarles, the wife of Henry Kent's youngest brother.  She appears to have had two sisters named Elizabeth and Eliza.  Eliza died at the age of eighteen months, and Elizabeth married in 1884 and died soon after.  Her widower was living with the family as 'son-in-law' in the 1891 census.  But Elizabeth appears in the same census with a husband she married in 1883, and with five children, whose birth registration indicates that their mother Elizabeth had the same surname as Amelia!

Some people are better left beyond the pale!

Is it Really Only a Dream?

How do you define a nightmare?  I'm thinking that a good definition is a dream that is frightening.  That's a definition that immediately prompts a similar question, of course.  How do you define 'frightening'?  I expect most people would offer two general areas of life, invasion of which would be frightening.  The first would be bodily health and the second, rhyming with it, would be wealth ... or at least something to do with money.

OK, we've passed the first hurdle.  Without fear of contradiction, I can now describe the dream I had a few nights ago as a nightmare.  Given that I'm on a fixed income, i.e a state pension, topped up with a small amount of savings that I want to exhaust as slowly as possible, money is particularly important to me.  I try not to be extravagant in my spending and, if I find a possibly cheaper alternative to something that gives me the same benefit, then I do, at the very least, accord it some consideration.  Conversely, if I were confronted by a sudden increase in the cost of something I tend to think of as essential to the way I live my life, then I would be concerned and actively seek an alternative, while at the same time question whether I can live without whatever it was.

With these thoughts in mind, here's the prospect I was met with in my dream (or, as we have now decided, nightmare) earlier this week.  I looked at my phone and discovered an app that I hadn't seen before.  I'm naturally curious and - despite what those who know me might expect - I don't always think things through to the extent of independent research above personal exploration.  So the first thing I did on making this discovery was to press this new symbol, fully expecting a completely new display explaining what it was and offering a range of options to go further.

The display didn't change at all.  Oh, I thought, it's benign ... completely inactive, shouldn't be there; I'll ignore it.  Then I wanted to do something positive with the phone and opened another app.  It opened normally, with the exception of a small black square in one corner of the screen.  This displayed a number which, as I looked, increased by one unit every second ... rather like a clock.  I finished what I was doing and closed the phone.

Next time I opened it, the little black square was still there, but this time the number was significantly higher and was preceded by a $-sign.  Curiosity to the fore once more, I pressed the little black square and a new display appeared.  I suppose it had a product name at the head, but I ignored that and just read the narrative beneath.  'Thank you for subscribing to ... .' it read, 'We are pleased to confirm that your account is now active.  Your premium, calculated at 1 cent per second, will be debited from your bank on the 3rd of each month.'

I was at first puzzled.  Premium for what?  I don't know about you, but often in my dreams I'm reading something either on a screen or a page of a book; my mind goes over what I've read again and again and I want to scroll down (or turn the page) to see what comes next ... but often that doesn't happen.  This time it did and I learned that I could continue using my phone just as before, with no change to the apps available, or how they would serve me.  It was just that, under this new Premium Service that I had apparently unwittingly subscribed to, I would be charged 1 cent per second for the privilege of having my phone on.

As my mind began to do calculations, I realised just how expensive this would be.  Like many people, I suspect, I have my phone on constantly, so this charge would mount up quite quickly ... 60 cents a minute, $36 an hour, $864 a day, and - frighteningly - an eye-watering $315,000 a year.  Quite apart from the normal expenses of living, my savings would evaporate in no time at all!

Thankfully, I must have woken up at that point ... which is probably why I remember it to tell you about it now.  I often reflect on the dreams I recall and can see a snippet of this and a snatch of that that the relaxing brain has pulled together into a scarcely believable whole.  This one had me puzzled as I thought back over what I'd been doing recently.  The only conclusion I've come up with is the summation of a number of stories I've heard on the news lately: a whole variety of experiences that different people have narrated, but all with a common cause ... Brexit!

What's in a (Familiar) Name?

Perhaps you've known that feeling, when you trip over a familiar name in the course of your research and you wonder whether there might be a connection ... 

Many years ago, I had a friend who was a schoolteacher in Norwich.  She was head of biology at Blyth Jex Comprehensive, the result of the coming together of several earlier schools. Blyth Girls' Grammar School was founded in 1929 and, in 1972, merged with Jex Comprehensive, which a year earlier had been a union of Angel Road Girls' Secondary with Alderman Jex Boys' Secondary.  In more recent years, I learn, extensive building has resulted in a single-site school now re-named as Sewell Park Academy but I remembered the name Alderman Jex from my early working life in Norwich; many of my colleagues had studied there.  I imagined - quite rightly - that the Boys' Secondary school had been named after a local politician.

Frederick Jex was born in 1886, the son of Henry, a greengrocer in a poor area of the inner city on the north side of the river Wensum.  After leaving school at 14 to work in a shoe factory, he became a trade union official, was elected to the city council and was Lord Mayor in 1933.  He was a well-respected and prominent citizen during his lifetime, and is remembered by street names as well as the school.

Picture, then, the thoughts kindled in my over-active imagination when I discovered that Gertrude Ellen Kent, a granddaughter of my great-great-great-aunt Mary Burlingham (now no longer a stranger to my regular readers!) had married someone called Jex!  Could this be a relative of that famous benefactor?

Charles Ephraim Jex was just three weeks old at the 1881 census and was the son of Charles, a 21-year-old labourer and his wife Alice, 22, adding to their income as a silk weaver.   They were living in Water Lane, a thoroughfare in that same area of the city, but so humble that it doesn't appear to be named on the 1888-1913 OS six-inch map.  While there is a chance of some connection between Henry and Charles, I wasn't prepared to go sufficiently off-piste in my research for just a possible massage of my enterprising ego.

At the turning of the century, in the heady days of the Boer War, Charles and Gertrude had other things to occupy their minds and their lives.  They were married towards the end of 1900; Gertrude Ellen was just 18, Charles Ephraim about eighteen months her senior ... and, by the census the following year, their son Charles was two months old.  Charles was described as a labourer, while Gertrude, like her father, brother and sister, was occupied as a basket maker.

In alternate years Gertrude then produced further increments to their family until by 1911 six children had been born  Sadly, Charles had died at only a year-and-a-half and a daughter, named after her mother, had expired only weeks after birth.  Despite the increasing survival rate of children born in the Edwardian era, this unfortunate couple had achieved only a two-thirds result.

However, although it brought the supreme social upheaval of the Great War - Charles enlisted in the Army Service Corps in December, 1914 - the next decade was a time of hope and building for the young Jex family.  Two more daughters joined Rose, Albert, May and Herbert: Ada was born in August 1914 and Eva in May 1919.

For Charles, hard work paid off.  Rose was married in 1925, May in 1930 and Herbert and Ada in 1934; in the 1930s Charles, Gertrude and Eva moved to a new development in Hellesdon, to the north of the city.   Certainly, Gertrude could look back in her early fifties to times of sadness - their son Albert had died at only 15 years old - but more recently the success of  it was four weddings and a growing number of grandchildren.  Unfortunately, she died in 1938, before she could see their youngest daughter marry the next year.

The 1939 Register shows Eva and her husband living in the house at Hellesdon along with Charles, who was working as a labourer in a timber yard.  Charles Ephraim Jex - bearing no connection, so far as I'm aware, to the Jex school - died in 1955 at the age of 74.