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.