Maps - Week 6: 52 Ancestors: The Southampton Blitz

Bombing of Southampton in November 1940

In 1940, my father Bob Tucker was still smarting over his rejection by the Army on medical grounds a year earlier.  He could have been in Egypt with some of his workmates, defending Britain, his country of birth.

It wasn’t until 1941 that he was required to sign up.  Wearing spectacles didn’t matter by the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbour.

Meanwhile, his mother Edith Annie Tucker was probably thankful - for the first time - that she no longer lived in her hometown Southampton where two of her sisters, Harriet and Kate still lived or indeed in London where two more sisters - Alice and Minnie - lived.

In 1940, Germany commenced bombing raids on London and other English towns.  As England’s premier military port and the home of the spitfire manufacturing, Southampton was a sitting duck for the German air raids. Starting in 1939, many children were evacuated to inland towns in neighbouring counties.

In June 1940, the anticipated air raids began. Many of the attacks were during the day, targeting manufacturing plants such as the Supermarine factory in the suburb of Bitterne where the Spitfires were manufactured.  The work was later spread throughout Southampton and environs but the Germans obviously had good information since these locations were subject to attacks as were air-raid shelters to which the workers would flee.

Later that year on November 30 and December 1, 700 bombs rained down on the docks and the commercial city areas.  This became known as the Southampton Blitz.  In 2016, the Ordnance Survey created a map that shows where each of those 700 bombs fell on those two dreadful nights. The National Archives and the Southampton City Council provided significant assistance to the Ordnance Office to produce the map, shown above.

My great aunt Harriet, a teacher and my great aunt Kate, formerly a bookbinder and by that time both in their 50s and 60s, must have been terrified. Although both were married, neither of them had children.  They remained in Southampton, doing what they could and later writing and sending care packages to my father in New Guinea.  Both of them remembered my father fondly, having assisted my grandmother feed and cloth him after she was widowed in 1919.

Two decades earlier, my father’s Reed grandmother, mother and aunts had been running a tea room and confectionery business in East Street, trading out of the debt left after their master baker father had died prematurely in 1915.  It had closed, debt-free after their mother died in 1924.  But nevertheless, they would have grieved the devastation of East Street, a thriving commercial centre in1940. Their Rose grandfather, George Henry, a butcher had died at 19-20 East Street in 1901 with his Reed family by his side.

Rose and Roger descendants were busily running their pork butchery in Upper Canal Walk, as was still-young widow Edith Tucker, my great grandfather’s second wife in the Canal Walk music dealership she inherited in 1924. The Blitz saw the end of those businesses. Eventually, East Street was renewed as a shopping centre but the area around Upper Canal Walk is now an ugly car park.

St Michael's steeple in middle of photo

Many of the churches they attended in the 19th century became smoking ruins, except for St Michael’s at the end of Vyse Lane where John Rose’s large family lived for three decades in the mid-19th century.  It has been said that the German pilots used its steeple as a landmark, enabling them to target specific buildings including the Civic Centre.

A family tale is that John Rose would take sanctuary in St Michael’s for hours or sometimes days whilst he was bringing in favours to pay his various fines and gambling debts.

The large church of St Mary’s, where many of my father’s ancestors were baptised was restored, but many other churches were not.  In fact, the Old Town within and Below the Walls on its perimeter is now a sad mixture of 1960’s residential Council flats, what remains of the old Town Walls and heritage buildings which somehow missed the severe damage or were able to be restored.

One benefit of the bombing is that the reparation effort after the war accelerated the housing renewal program.  Many of my ancestors endured extremely insanitary,  otherwise unhealthy and crowded housing, whilst others who could afford it - successful small business people - moved further out to London Road to the north and Fremantle, a new suburb in the Edwardian period.  Many of the poorer townsfolk had been living in long-condemned houses.

Altogether, more than 30,000 incendiaries and 2,300 bombs were dropped on homes, shops and factories, as well as port and military installations in Southampton and 631 people, were killed.  A further 898 were seriously injured and 1,000 houses were destroyed.

No wonder the Southampton my father left in 1924 was no longer recognisable and the street map had completely changed by the time I first visited in 1974.

References

 

Southampton Blitz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southampton_Blitz#  accessed 22/1/21

Mapped, the horror of the Blitz  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3339431/Map-shows-locations-700-Nazi-bombs-fell-Southampton-height-Blitz.html, accessed 22/1/22

Mapping the Southampton Blitz  https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/newsroom/blog/mapping-the-southampton-blitz-70-years-on

Branching out: Week 5: 52 Ancestors

Agricultural labourers 

In 2011, in another blog about my Tucker ancestors, I wrote about my 3x great grandfather George Tucker 1802-1886, calling him the ancestor I felt most sorry for.  He was born in the wrong county, in the wrong era, and at the wrong end of his family.  By the time he was of working age, drought had overtaken Wiltshire, farmers were reducing manpower through the use of machinery and the parish of Downton had organised a shipload of parishioners to migrate to Canada.  George Tucker was not amongst them.  He eeked out a living as an agricultural labourer and woodsman, unlike his Tucker ancestors, many of whom were men of substance. By 1881, he was livng in the Union Poor House at Alderbury and died there in 1886.

He and his wife Hannah (nee Isaac) had four children, two sons George (b. 1832) and William (b. 1834), and two daughters (Ann b. 1829) and Mary (b.1840). They lived in the rural district of Hamptworth where there was a pub but no church.  Whilst the two girls married local lads, neither son could see a future for himself on the land and there cannot have been many opportunities for illiterate young men in either Downton or Landford, the two closest villages they could walk to. In 1841, the family was split up with father George, his pauper mother, and two sons living on the land whilst his wife and two daughters lived at Landford Lodge, no doubt working as servants and sheltering from the cold. Mary was still an infant.

By 1851, the Tucker family was reunited in Hamptworth, except for younger son William. He was working as a farm servant for distant relatives in West Wellow, Hampshire.  By the mid 1860s, William had moved to London where he was a fireman and later a stoker for the railways.  He married a widow, Emma Garnett with three daughters and they had two more daughters together.  By 1881, he had died, probably due to occupational hazards and poor living conditions in West Ham where they lived.

Meanwhile his older brother, George had moved to Southampton where there were abundant, if poorly paid, opportunities for work in the ever growing port.  He married another immigrant to the town, one Sophia Jefferis from Fordingbridge in Hampshire.

George and Sophia Tucker were my great great grandparents and were the first of my Tuckers to live in Southampton.  Another three generations did so until my father left for Australia in 1925 and his Uncle Bert Tucker moved to London a decade earlier.

George worked on the docks as a coal porter and stevedore.  No doubt the coal arrived from  all over England and Wales via the railways.  In those days, the Southampton terminus, completed by 1840, was at the docks.  His working conditions would also have been poor but no doubt Southampton was a much healthier place to live than London because he lived until 1914.

Upper Canal Walk aka The Ditches

Sometime before 1861, George and Sophia moved to 9 Bell Street, adjacent to the thriving Upper Canal Walk, also known as the Ditches. They produced a son, George William (1856-1924) and two daughters Louisa (1860-1879) and Ellen Jane (1869-1948).  After George’s death in 1914, Sophia remained living there until her death in 1922.  So she was there for over 60 years, looked after in her later years by her daughter Nellie McInnes.  They would not have owned the house but could have had a long term lease.

This generation of Tuckers had truly branched out, leaving behind their rural lives and personified the industrial revolution which continued to build great wealth for the British empire, if not for themselves.

However, George and Sophia Tucker lived long enough to see their only son become a very successful music dealer and give his own boys a good education and sporting life.

Curious: the case of the retired news vendor

John Rose 1804-1884

“Are you still working, Mr Rose?” asked the census collector.  It was 3^rd April, 1881 and John Rose was at home, 4 Anspach Place, in Southampton Old Town. In fact, Anspach Place houses were built into the old town walls.

“Not these days,” John Rose replied. “But put me down as a retired newsagent.”

I can imagine daughter Hannah, one of 20 children, looking up sharply.  She knew her pa had been a carpet-beater, and earlier, a licensed porter, but a news agent?  Now that was a surprise.

Only 20, Hannah was not interested in her father’s early days, although she’d heard the tale of the tenth son often enough.

Aged 21 in 1825, John had married Isabella Sievewright at St Michael’s church, and by 1838, she’d delivered her tenth child.

Being a practical joker, but at the same time, deeply into radical politics, John decided to make a point about tithing.  He waited till the absentee rector of St Mary’s, Frederick North, soon to be Earl of Guilford, arrived to deliver a sermon and collect his dues.

John handed the baby to the Earl, who admired his chubby cheeks.

“Here is my tithe, my Lord – my tenth son,” John Rose said.

“No, no!” replied the rector, quickly relinquishing the child, who was later baptised Guilford North Rose.

The incident was retold with mirth around the beer houses of Southampton whenever the discussion turned to the unfairness of the annual tithe.

With 19 children born between 1826 and 1864 to his two wives, the Rose household was often crowded.   John wished his work paid better, enabling the family to move away from the dark, dank back lanes of the Old Town.  With so many people arriving from the rural areas, rents were constantly rising.

Indeed, the population of Southampton was exploding, with the expansion of the docks in the 1830s and the railway opening in 1840.  The town was a magnet for agricultural workers seeking employment after years of drought and mechanisation of farming.

Newspaper reports show that John Rose had been a barrowman in the late 1840s, prior to becoming a porter; but there in the 1841 census, was Isabella Rose, a news agent’s wife at 35 College Street, together with an infant daughter and many sons.

But what of John?  I finally found him listed amongst prisoners in the Southampton House of Correction.  He’d been found guilty of libel in 1840.

If he hadn’t been a newsagent for 35 years, why state that occupation in 1881?

Could it be that only that occupation had given him true satisfaction, feeling proud of trying to make his contemporaries aware of social and political injustice?

Newspaper reports of public meetings and his court appearances, whether as a defendant, plaintiff, grieving father or witness, show John holding strong convictions, arguing forcefully and often theatrically.   He certainly believed that working men deserved to have a voice in political decision making and everyday matters.  Daily, he challenged injustice.

As a literate young man, he would have been aware of the Six Acts introduced to Parliament in 1819, aimed at keeping the working classes quiet and ill-informed and at suppressing riots and revolt.  Laws were made to suit the wealthy and well-born, not men like him.

John Rose’s father Simon, of Misterton in Somerset had, by 1795, established himself as a wool comber in Southampton.  This trade was amongst the first to become organised, so I like to think John gained his political consciousness by sitting at his father’s feet in winter, or at the beer shop, where men escaped their crowded housing, telling tales, reading newspapers and discussing politics over a pint of ale.

By 1832 John Rose had established a newsagency in College Street, near the bustling retail area Canal Walk, selling newspapers and tobacco products.  He also set up a printing press, creating posters, almanacs and his own political tracts and humorous ditties.

Like so many other working men and their champions, he’d been disappointed when the 1832 Reform Act dashed his expectations of gaining the vote: only men of property did so.

He became known as the Opposition Town Crier, dressed in a crimson coat with white sleeves and a gold hat, with a bell, announcing the headlines from the radical papers and tracts he sold.   He was a tall man of imposing physique, a consummate showman, not averse to a scuffle or to drown out the opposition with his loud voice.  The Town Corporation tried to shut him down but had no legal grounds to do so.  John was what we’d call a bush lawyer, and had plenty of supporters amongst the poorer town folk and intellectuals.

However, the authorities constantly monitored his activities and, by using the laws enacted in 1819, brought him before the Police Court, fining him for selling unstamped newspapers.  The tax was often four times the unstamped price, putting the papers out of the reach of poorer folk.  After the congregating laws were relaxed, the first working men’s literary or mechanics institutions were born and subscriptions taken out, with better educated men reading the newspapers and tracts to others.  Earlier, beer houses were a place to gather for discussions.

Throughout the 1830s and 40s, John Rose struggled to pay his fines, and sometimes found himself in the God’s House Tower, at that time used as a debtor’s prison, until he could find the money.  Other times, he was fined a small amount, and let go with a surety of £20 or more to keep the peace.  His impetuosity often got the better of him.

The Chartists tried time and time again until 1848 to get their petitions taken seriously by Parliament, but gave up after the third attempt.  It was not until 1867 that the franchise was further extended and the qualifications for seeking parliamentary office extended beyond wealthy landowners and leaseholders.  Universal franchise was instituted in 1928.

Meanwhile, sometime after his libel case, John Rose had closed down his news agency.  I often wonder whether he’d burnt out politically, had a newsagent’s license suspended, or if Isabella had put her foot down and suggested he earn a better living for his fast growing family.

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Note:  John Rose (1804-1884) was one of my 3x great grandfathers.

This post was written as an assignment for the UTas Diploma of Family History in 2017.

Bibliography

http://sotonopedia.wikidot.com/ Articles on John Rose, Anspach Place, God’s House Tower, radicals.

http://www.plimsoll.org/Southampton/streetdirectories/directory1836/default.asp#2 Kelly’s Directory, Southampton, 1836

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Acts

The Man: a rational advocate. Sunday November 24, 1833

http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/group/ukicen UK census records 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881

www.ancestry.co.uk England and Wales. Birth, marriages, and death, including parishes.

www.findmypast.co.uk.  British newspapers.  Many articles from the Hampshire Advertiser, between 1829-1884.

www.localhistories.org/southampton.html Southampton in the 18th century.

www.south-central-media.co.uk/tuppenny_press.html The Tuppenny Press and the birth of the English newspaper.
 

Favourite photo: cousins in Southampton

I’m guessing that this photo was taken about 1918 when high-waisted dresses became fashionable for a short time. It is obviously a studio photo and was captured in Southampton, England.  Then again, I wonder if the dresses are black, meaning the photo was taken the following year and the girls would be in mourning.

Jessie, Molly, and Cecily

The young girls in this photo had no inkling that within one or two years, their lives would be much different.  Already war had impacted two of them - their father Sydney George Tucker was in the Parkhurst hospital on the Isle of Wight during the whole of 1918, recovering from serious war injuries sustained on the Western Front. The other’s father, Alexander Stuart Kennedy was playing cricket for Hampshire as one of the top English wicket-takers, taking on coaching engagements in South Africa and hoping to play test cricket for England.

My dad, Bob Tucker had two older sisters - Jessie Agnes, born 1908 and Cecily Mary, born 1910, both in Southampton.  They were lucky enough to have a cousin, Mary Stuart Kennedy, also born in 1910 and also living in Southampton.  Mary was always known as Molly.  The two sisters are standing on either side of Molly, seated.

The girls’ mothers were two of six Reed sisters, Edith Annie Tucker, fifth born child and fourth daughter of Robert Henry Reed, and Jessie Kennedy, the sixth daughter, and youngest child of Robert Henry Reed (1856-1915).

In 1919, Jessie (junior) and Cecily’s father returned home from the Isle of Wight but it was evident to his family that he was seriously disturbed with shell-shock. He fell off the City Walls, maybe deliberately, injuring himself, and was taken to the Southampton War Hospital where he committed suicide, three days after being officially demobbed.  This wasn’t recognised as a consequence of war until much later so Edith Annie Tucker did not receive a war widow’s pension at first.  Her civilian widow’s pension, based only on his pre-war cash wage (not the in-kind support from his employer father) was not enough to sustain three children.

Seeking relief from her parish, Edith was encouraged by the vicar to put the girls into care at St Paul’s Home in Chelsea, London.  This home closed so by 1922, the girls were taken in by The Dr. Barnardo’s Home for Girls in Barking. Meanwhile, Edith Annie kept my father with her and during the 1921 census, she was described as a confectionary business manager, working with her widowed mother to trade out of debt after their master baker father died suddenly in 1915 owing a large debt to the bank.  I’m told by my second cousins that their grandmother Jessie Kennedy was a talented cake decorator.

Meanwhile Molly’s father Alec Kennedy was successfully becoming an all-round top cricketer and by 1920 he, his wife Jessie, and Molly sailed to Cape Town where he coached and played one series of five Tests for England against South Africa.  Although a highly successful medium-speed bowler and a good batsman, his style was somewhat unorthodox and controversial and this was probably the reason for his not playing more Tests for England.

I found a postcard amongst my father’s memorabilia addressed to him aged 6 from his Aunty Jessie.  Here it is:

Sadly, by 1923, although another daughter, Jean was born in Cape Town, Jessie and Alec’s marriage disintegrated. As the wronged partner, Alec was entitled to custody of both girls but left baby Jean with her mother.  By 1926, Molly sailed for England with her father who resurrected his cricket and coaching career and didn’t return to South Africa until 1947 by which time Molly was raising her first son with her husband John Priestley Palmer.

Meanwhile, Jessie and Cecily Tucker were encouraged by Dr. Barnardos to migrate to Australia in 1924.  They were followed to Sydney in 1925 by their mother and 10-year-old brother (my dad) the following year.  I know my father remembers his Aunt Jessie and her girls meeting him when the ship arrived in Cape Town on their way to Australia.  Apart from Cecily about 1978, the Tucker family were never to see England again.

And as far as I know, Molly never saw her mother again after she resettled with her father in Southampton in 1926, aged 15.  My second cousin - another Alexander who was Molly's son - showed me a photo that I could identify as a farewell keepsake from Mother Jessie to her daughter.  Here it is.

It is inscribed "To Molly with heaps of love from Mum and Baby" 26-3-25, and a verse: 

"Be good sweet Maid

And let who will be clever

Do noble deeds, not dream them all day long."

Mum

The quote was originally from the poem A farewell by Charles Kingsley (1819-1875).

Favourite find: my maternal grandfather

Freda with George and Alice

What a wild goose chase that was!   Family stories, handed down third hand can do that.

My mother, Freda learned at age 18 that she was adopted.  Well, sort of adopted.  There was no such process in New South Wales until 1931. However, as a six-week-old baby she was taken by her birth mother Kitty to the small country town of Dunedoo in the Central West to be brought up by an impulsive woman called Alice Smith and her much steadier husband George, a small farm holder. 

Kate (Kitty) in England

Alice and Kitty had met when Alice had given birth to a stillborn child in the Paddington Woman’s Hospital run by the Benevolent Society. Kitty had been referred to the Society when a kindly old gentleman found her crying in Belmore Park, obviously pregnant.  Kitty was a stranger in town.  She had arrived in Sydney in late February, having been gifted a passage on the Freidrich der Grosse from Antwerp.  She had been escorted there by ferry, possibly by the father of her child.  She told my mother that he had promised to follow her out after tying up his business affairs.

The baby had been conceived in Seal, Kent where Kitty had been working as a parlourmaid - the senior female servant - in a stockbroker’s house where staff were required to live-in.  Her mother, stepfather, and four half-siblings lived in the same village.

In her late 80s, Freda had told me that she wished she knew who her father was but had been too embarrassed to ask her birth mother who had kept in touch with the Smiths.  Kitty had been known to us our whole lives as a family friend.  

Kate Palmer's marriage 1918

In 1918 after working for the family of a footwear manufacturer, Kitty married a returned soldier who was a shoemaker and like her, came from Kent.  In 1922 a second daughter, Peggy was born.  Kitty died in 1970 aged 89, before I knew that she was my grandmother.

In semi retirement, about 2005, I commenced researching my father’s ancestry.   So it was 2008, planning an overseas trip, before I started researching Kitty’s life, building on the research my mother had commenced years earlier.  I presented my aunt Peggy with a 12-page story with the facts, based on records

found on Ancestry, Find My Past, and the North West Kent Family History Society.  I don’t think she was much impressed to find that not only was her half sister illegitimate but so was her mother and maternal grandmother Annie (Ashby) Palmer 1855-1935.  In fact, her mother Kitty was the product of a liaison between Annie and her half nephew!  A bit too close for comfort.

Peggy’s reaction, just months before her own death was to write thanking me in a roundabout way, saying well, it must be so since I was a qualified researcher, and passing on the information from her English aunts that my mother’s father was the “young man of the house”.

So I was keenly awaiting the arrival of the 1911 census which was for some reason made available in 2009, knowing Kate’s full name and place of birth.

1911 census at Godden Green

And bingo.  I thought I had my answer straight away.  Kate, aged 29 was working for a family called Forbes in Godden Green, a hamlet just one mile from the village of Seal.  And for whatever reason, the stockbroker’s son Nevill, aged 28 and a reader in Russian at Oxford University was at home with his parents on census night.

A Google search for Nevill was very productive.  He had written books on topics as diverse as an English-Russian dictionary, Russian textbooks, a book of Russian fairy tales, and scholarly tomes on the history of the Balkans.  He was listed in the Oxford Dictionary of Biography which included the information that he had studied a Ph.D. in Leipzig, Germany, and was the second Professor of Russian at Oxford from 1922.  He was also a well-known homosexual and dressed colourfully.  One could be a homosexual without fearing the consequences in the intellectual circles of Oxford and Cambridge.

Was that a possibility?  That he might father a child?  Why not, I thought.  His sister’s husband, a Cambridge-educated architect was also one but produced four daughters before he gave up all pretense of hiding his sexual preferences.

That same day, I entered his name into Genes Reunited, a popular database in 2009.    Immediately I found an exact match.  I wrote a very circumspect email stating that I thought we might be related.  Within two hours I received a response from an English-born New Zealander saying he thought Nevill was his grandfather.  His grandmother, a widow had been the longtime charwoman in Nevill’s University-leased house in Oxford.  His mother Rhoda had told him one day whilst walking past that she had lived there as a child.  Nevill had bequeathed Mike's grandmother £50 and some paintings when he died in 1929.

To Mike in New Zealand and myself, this seemed to be more than a coincidence.  Mike had been in touch with Nevill’s sister’s descendants and one was happy to reach out to us. Mike and I kept corresponding and eventually met up four times both in New Zealand and Australia over the years since.

The house post WW1

The English “second cousin”, on hearing I was planning an English solo trip wrote to the current owner of the house at Godden Green and arranged for both of us to visit.  She kindly picked me up at my second cousin Linda's house in Horsham and drove me to Godden Green.

Post 1940

In 1940 after Nevill's sister inherited the house, her architect husband removed the Gothic features including the roof.

In the meantime, I had found that Nevill's private papers had been bequeathed to the Taylor Institute at the University by his niece Felicity in 2008.

So Olivia and I caught the train from Guildford to Oxford where we examined the papers and found some of them oddly disturbing.  It included his suicide note and distressed letters between his friends and sister. He had been found bleeding in the bathtub by his servant and the summoned doctor decided not to keep him alive.  Distressing indeed.

By 2015, many family historians were taking an interest in DNA for genealogy.  Although AncestryDNA was the biggest company it had not yet rolled out its service to English or Australian clients.  So I tested with Family Tree DNA’s family finder.  Not much success there but I encouraged Mike to do a test, and paid for Olivia to test.

Guess what?  Neither of them matched me and Mike didn’t match Olivia. DNA experts state that second cousins always match, but not necessarily more distant cousins, even third cousins.  Mike and I should have had Russian cousins like Olivia did because Nevill’s grandmother was born in Russia to Scottish parents but his uncle William married a Russian journalist and had offspring.

So despite the similar stories from 1911, it was simply a coincidence. Had my birth grandmother led her sisters deliberately astray?  Neither was it beyond the realm of possibility that she thought it was Nevill.  Someone had escorted her to Antwerp at four months pregnant and had given her a travel trunk with her initials inscribed. 

So now I had to start again. I decided to look at every potential young man in the village.  The house in Godden Green was opposite a large pub so I thought she might have met a likely lad there.  Not that she was a young maid anymore.  She was 29.

I found a family with three sons of the right age.  They lived in Godden Green where their father was a bailiff but had been born at Lamberhurst, also in Kent. By this time I had uploaded my DNA to Gedmatch and found plenty of matches with ancestry from Lamberhurst.  However, although I built a mirror tree, nothing stood out to confirm a relationship.  Both my mother and grandmother were deceased, as well as my aunt so I had no one to ask.

I also built a mirror tree for the household butler who was the right age but married but because he had the highly common name Jones, I discounted that.  It didn’t occur to me to research matches with his mother’s far less common surname Windebank.

By 2017 I had tested with AncestryDNA and proved many records on my father’s side with DNA matches.  I also found many cousins on my birth grandmother’s side. Although I had only one first cousin who died childless in 2007, previous generations were well-stocked with siblings.

I have many second and third cousins on four continents and we have exchanged photos and other information to create a much more rounded picture of our ancestors' personalities, migration histories, and occupations.

It was not until 2020 that my mystery was solved.  A match popped up with 139cM in common.  It had no other common matches, unusual for that close a match.  Could it be on my maternal grandfather’s side?  However, there was no tree attached.

I sent her a message on AncestryDNA asking her if she would let me know the details of her most recently deceased ancestors on both sides of her family and giving her my email address and Facebook name.  After what seemed like an eternity, she responded with the details.

Within five minutes. I realised that her great grandfather was the butler, Henry Edward Jones, a married man, aged 28 and a father of two including a newly born daughter.  His pregnant wife and older son were living in Seal when the 1911 census was taken.  It would have been just as great a scandal in the village as it would have been for a socially mismatched pregnancy.

No wonder Kitty was persuaded to travel to Sydney, boarding the Friedrich der Grosse on Christmas Eve 1911.

It didn’t please me to find that the culprit was a married man with a young family who didn’t take much if any responsibility for Kate’s predicament.  Mind you, she would have known he was married. I later found from my newly found half first cousin once removed, Catherine that he had banished his own daughter to another county when she got pregnant outside marriage. Her son, born in Somerset was Catherine’s father.

So a hypocrite at well!  I think I would have preferred a homosexual Reader of Russian at Oxford or an unmarried banking clerk son of a bailiff as my ancestor.

Cousin Alyssa with John and me

However, my new DNA match who although English lives in the United States is a very interesting and friendly person.  I hope to meet her post-pandemic because her American-born daughter Alyssa lives here in Sydney with her Australian partner and is a part-owner of a bookshop.  We met Alyssa for lunch at Barangaroo - here is a photo.

At last I have completed my major four branches of my family and have completely filled out at least five generations of my ancestors.  However, with Jones being such a common name in Liverpool in Lancashire, I am having trouble finding my sister’s Welsh connection.  Ancestry allocates her 2% from Wales but me, not a skerrick.

So whilst Henry was not my favourite person, his tree branch is definitely my favourite find.

Foundations

 

Bob & Freda’s wedding 1947

The Theme for Week 1 of the #52ancestors Challenge is Foundations.  I decided to address this theme as the foundation of my passion for genealogy.

If my parents had been born 70 years later instead of 1912 and 1914, undoubtedly they would have had a university degree, both having an inquisitive mind and a belief in the power of education. Instead, they left school at 14 (Freda) and 15 (Bob) and with no expectation that they’d do other than contribute towards their own keep.  

At 18, Freda was told she was adopted and it was time enough to leave home.  Bob was more fortunate because although he lived in a church run boys home, the superintendent and his wife, matron were wonderful people who looked after each and every boy and helped them find jobs and accommodation in a Working Boys Hostel in the grounds.

Married in 1946 after Bob returned from military service in Papua New Guinea and Bougainville, they soon produced a family of three, with my being born in 1947.

After Bob finished his vocational education in horticulture and landscape design, and my brother, sister and I all started school, they decided to take it in turns to pursue interests at Worker’s Educational Association (WEA) in Parramatta.  Bob chose comparative religion and philosophy whilst Freda chose Australian history.

My mother soon joined the Parramatta &District Historical Society and later, the Hills District Historical Society.  She not only went to all the evening meetings but joined in all the day tours and weekends away. She gained enough confidence to become a tour guide on the coaches and spent many an hour researching the places and buildings worth seeing.  Later still, she became a guide at Hambledon Cottage, the house built by John Macarthur for his children’s governess and reputed mistress ( my mother used to say “So some people would have you believe!”).

Many a time we children and our school friends tagged along with her on day trips. We poked fun at some of the members, particularly “Mrs Lipstick” as we called her. Of course we called it mum’s Hysterical Society. We got into trouble poking our noses in to things we shouldn’t, like the Leaving Certificate papers in a teacher’s office at the Thomas Street old building which housed King School Boys.  Funny how about six of my high school friends showed up that day.  We were 16 at the time.

The historical societies impressed upon their members the importance of writing down their own life stories, and although a lot of my mother’s childhood memories were unhappy, she did so.  Later, when my father couldn’t sleep during the night, she suggested that he start doing the same, so he did and I later found scraps of information amongst his possessions.

As a teenager, I gave the impression that I was totally uninterested in any form of history apart from what I studied at school, although I now realise I had absorbed a great deal, particularly since I read most of my parents’ historical Australian novels - Eleanor Dark, Xavier Herbert, Barnard Eldershaw and more.  My mother used to say it was more worth her while to take my friends on outings than me because they showed more interest!

In 1971, on my first overseas holiday I met my father’s only remaining cousins and aunts in London and rural Devon.  Two years later, I found the house in Southampton where my father spent his childhood.  However I was too shy to knock on the door.  At the same time, my mother explained that her birth mother had given her up in 1912, after arriving from Kent, so she began exploring her own family history.

She also spent hours in the NSW Archives looking up shipping records for not only herself but also for our Grandma (her “adopted” mother)’s early ancestors in Australia on behalf of a Victorian relative.

Meanwhile, I was busy socialising, building my career and studying, so gave no thought to my ancestry.  My early years in retirement were busy too, so my mother had died (2004) before I took any interest.  But as soon as I did, and the Internet had made it so accessible, I started with the little I knew and quickly became addicted.  By 2006 I had found English cousins I had never known existed and my father, by then  in his 90s took much pleasure in my findings.

So my addiction to family history research had solid foundations, and I am as interested in much more than their vital statistics.  Visiting my ancestral villages and towns, exploring the history and characteristics of those places and getting to know their family lives, work lives, political and religious views is just as important.

I  wonder what my mother would have thought about the widespread use of DNA to find cousins and verify our paper records?

52 Ancestors

It’s January 1, 2022 and again I have signed up for Amy Johnson Crow’s annual challenge, 52 Ancestors. However, I know what my track record is: never yet have I completed the challenge, requiring 52 posts on set themes.  Whilst the themes are set, the words or phrases can be interpreted however the blogger wants, and each week, Amy reports on how the theme has been used and variety there certainly is.

Many of my University of Tasmania Diploma of Family History Alumni Facebook friends and colleagues as well as many GeneaBloggers from Down Under are keen to join this challenge.

This year to motivate me, I’ve signed up with StickK, a website which describes itself as a behavioural change agent to help someone stick to resolutions.  I can set a goal and sign a contract which should have a financial penalty attached to it. ‘Failure’ money can go to a friend, an enemy, a charity or an anti-charity.  The latter are grouped in pairs, each with an opposing objective.  StickK suggests that subscribers are more likely to meet their goals if an “anti-charity” is chosen.  Once I chose my resolution campaign, I could see the point in that.

For my first chosen campaign, I have set the following parameters:

• A blog post every week for six weeks
• A penalty of $5 to be sent anonymously to the National Rifle Association if I fail to do so
• My husband will be my referee to keep me honest and report faithfully to StickK that I have completed the task or not.

There is no way I would want a cent of my hard earned money going to support the aims of the National Rifle Association. This is my chosen “anti-charity”.  Far, far too many Americans die or are badly injured by firearms every year and most of my fellow Australian citizens reel in horror when we read of massacres or individuals killed due to the easy access to firearms.  We have more than enough domestic shootings, accidental shootings and the occasional massacre in our own country.

So let’s see how I go with this year’s #52Ancestor challenge and whether StickK helps me kickstart my goal.

I intend to publish my posts on Facebook each week.  This week there will be two posts.