My dad and my mom used to tell me family stories, some of which I used to think were tall tales…
I eventually found out they were mostly true, only the details being slightly bent in the oral history.
I found out, for instance, that my father came from a family that had been very determined to keep family records, before and after coming to America.
And that my mother had a grandmother who’d lived a real western adventure.
And that my parents both grew up in Oklahoma during the wild days, just after the state came into the Union.
The outlaw Cole Younger, associated with Jesse James, had a nephew who worked on my mother’s parents’ farm. And it was this gentle-spoken young man who introduced my mother to my father. Cole Younger himself had been in prison in Stillwater, MN, and had been released, to spend his final years in Missouri. Most of Cole Younger’s family had been killed in the violence of the post-Civil War period in Kansas—it was a bad place and a bad time. But one of his brothers or sisters apparently lived long enough to have a son, whose name was Bill or Bob, as my mother recalls, who worked on the family farm in Anadarko OK, and who apparently visited his uncle in Stillwater. When my father admired my mother from a distance, Younger, acquainted with both, managed an introduction. My father worked at the Anadarko ice house, and my mother began to insist on doing the drive into town after ice that summer. They were secretly married in El Reno OK, and didn’t tell relatives on both sides until some months later.
My maternal great-grandmother was the survivor of an accident that drowned or separated her family as they were crossing a major river on the move west. Her name was Missouri Duff. But in my searching census records, I found her on an old census report from before the accident, and I found, in the next census, her mother and a brother living in a town near the Missouri river. Evidently they’d survived, her father and other children had drowned—and she’d survived, taking the name of Missouri and moving first to Kansas and then to Oklahoma, to grow up and marry with never a notion she had living relatives.
My grandfather was a cowboy turned salesman as Indian Territory became settled towns. His mother was Louisiana Carolina Boone, and my father named me after her. She was one of those Boones, and she came into Indian Territory out of Texas with her husband, my great-grandfather, and ended up living with my grandfather, then taking care of my father when he was very small.
When she died, my father went to live with other relatives, an uncle, and only came home to live with my grandfather when he married my step-grandmother, a spectacularly gracious lady, in every sense of the word.
Well, I got all the family stories—including the night St. Elmo’s fire turned up on a herd of cattle when my grandfather was riding herd in an impending thunderstorm: horns and hooves glowed—the herd spooked, and if you remember the song “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” it must have been like that.
A part of my family is Dutch, and used to own a major slice of New Jersey and Manhattan: they became bankers, and one a Supreme Court judge—but half that family broke off and went down to Virginia and the Carolinas. That was my half, poor as church mice, and working in farming, from Virginia to Nebraska during the Civil War and down to Kansas in the Bleeding Kansas days, then on into Oklahoma.
But when I got seriously into genealogy, I began to fill in the pieces of various things. I found Missouri Duff’s missing family. I found how we connect to Daniel Boone’s father, Squire Boone, and how we connect, though part of the Boone family fiercely disputes it, through a dubious union, to the de Bohuns, one of the kingmaking families in England. Whether or not the Boone line does connect—I’m related to the de Bohuns down another line as well. And here’s an interesting point: these families keep connecting and reconnecting: geographical closeness, and social circles: availability of potential good matches, strengthening economic and political ties, in an era of arranged marriages. When you have a nest of connections that keep reiterating, I think it likely that relationship is true.
A great number of my forbears came over from England: read: ran for their lives to get out of England during the English Civil War. A lot of them were Charles I’s supporters. My ancestors were not fans of our Pilgrim fathers, quite on the other side of the political fence.
I’ve been able to trace relations going back and back and back…a lot of lines through those English emigres…
And here’s the kicker. It turns out Jane and I are related to each other—back in England. One of her folk married one of the de Bohuns, both of us in direct descent.
One of the really fun things is going through Wikipedia finding out about these people. Mine had a penchant for getting involved in royal politics and getting caught on the losing side—many were very creatively executed in a very brutal age.
Fortunately, they managed to reproduce before meeting their nasty end.
Not all were saints. I’m related to Hugh the Despenser—-reputed as one of the most corrupt men in England. And to William Marshal, reputed as one of the most honest.
I’ve found answers to family mysteries: the family story is that we came over from Ireland, when most geneologies try to make us German. Well, we’re right: our guy, John Cherry, married to Bridgett Haney, was of British origin, but had been living in Ireland, and his wife was apparently Irish—when they, or he, immigrated to the states. And that was the origin of the story. That family came over from Normandy, but not in the invasion: the name(of, originally de Cerisy, has a ‘de’ (of)—which is the sort of thing that ordinarily denotes some lordly family, but in this case I think it simply means “from the village of Cerisy”, a little place in Normandy, France, no nobility involved, and not one of William the Conqueror’s lot, just a guy from a French village who came to England.
And—a very interesting update: research in French records gives another story—not de Cerisy, ‘from the village of Cerisy’, but de Chery, from the town of ‘Chery,’ in the Centre district of France. It seems that one Jean de Chery held property in Normandy, or had some ancestral rights in William the Conqueror’s land, but that one could not at that time enter Normandy from the rest of France without a royal permit—which Jean de Chery sought from his king, Charles. King Charles, now called Charles the Mad, had once been known as Charles the Good, but he had had a mental breakdown, what they call the glass syndrome, becoming convinced he could shatter, literally, and convinced that assassins were on his track.
Actually, re Charles’ paranoia, it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you, and it wasn’t a bad guess. There were three contenders for the French throne: the Capets, descended from Charlemagne, the Burgundians, who claimed southern central France as their ancestral domain, and had allies clear across France; and the de Courtenays, who contended they should be kings of France. Burgundy was assassinating people who stood in his way.
And there is a document which indicates that the de Cherys were a) in charge of the substantial town of Chery, and b) closely tied to the de Courtenays who were c) increasingly split as to where their fortunes would best advance, in William’s enterprise, or in France, trying to succeed the failing Charles Capet the Mad…that Burgundy was intent on killing and supplanting. There was a de Courtenay branch, the lords of Arrablay, one of whom, I think also named Charles, is documented to have married his neighbor, one Jeanne de Chery; so there were marriage ties between the de Cherys and the vastly powerful de Courtenays.
Burgundy began to gain ground, and while the de Courtenays didn’t sail with William the Conqueror, a number of them went over to England after the Conquest—possibly because they were feeling the heat from Burgundy and Charles the Mad was, well, mad…
The de Courtenays who emigrated to England set up a castle with William’s permission, in Leicestershire, central England.
Well, now we have one Jean de Chery (the male form of John/Jeanne) who at a certain point seeks the permission of Charles the Mad to go visit his properties in Normandy, after which he vanishes from history, and the de Chereis turn up in Leicestershire…attached to the de Courtenay branch that had established in England. It was, thanks to William, *no* trouble to get ship from Normandy to England in that time.
And Burgundy was busy assassinating his rivals, and King Charles was getting crazier, and the de Courtenays in France finally dwindled down to a few, one female unable to pass the title, and virtually powerless, though they still existed.
Part of the de Chereis family moved from Leicestershire and set up in the south, at Maidenhead and Bray, in Berkshire, and those folk by then are spelling it Cherry, and still marrying people of some substance, to judge by the graves, the literacy, and the constant interweaving of spouses of some indication of wealth, even title. Then from Bray, a Cherry (they all tended to be named John and David and Thomas) went over to northern Ireland, and after a few generations, a John and his son David emigrated to Virginia, in a time of religious unrest and civil war. So my little guy from de Cerisy may instead be a much more politically connected guy skipping out of the town of Chery, in central France to go join the de Courtenays in Leicestershire, before the king who was his patron went entirely over the brink.
Jane’s family name, possibly originally Faucher, may, according to one name-origin, have come from the Limoges area of France, then to London, then to the Americas, which is kind of generic information and not easy to attach to individuals, but there is new information, too—indicating a substantial house in England, the house at Fanshawe Gate, which is now a beautiful garden showplace in Derbyshire—and a connection of her very definite ancestor, via records in Massachusetts, to a Fanshawe from the house at Fanshawe Gate who went from that Derbyshire hall down to London: that ancestor married one Eunice Bouton, who seems like a quiet New England lady of French ancestry—until you get into her past, and figure that—ironically enough—that lady’s ancestors run back to the dukes of central France, back before the Norman Invasion. Both these possible connections are still under investigation—but they do answer some interesting questions and fill in some gaps; and they are better connected to specific individuals whose time and place we can say match and intersect. It’s worth more study, at very least. The de Chereis are in Burke’s Peerage.
Anyway, hunting ancestors one of my favorite winter-evening hobbies. I was amazed that I could trace anybody by real, checkable records, but the computer age has made it an easy-chair kind of hobby; you can access, almost instantly, every digitized census report and village record, not just in the States, but in Britain, Italy, France, and now apparently into Japan and Germany, the Netherlands, you name it. They open up more of these every month, and if they ever digitize Creek County, OK, I may be able to open up a whole new part of the tree by finding my paternal great-grandmother. That could happen.
The software system I use is www.ancestry.com and if you’ve ever wanted to get into this, it’s a marvelous way to learn history: it gets pretty personal when you know it was your great-great-great-great grandfather in that battle…
For any of you who are in the Ancestry network, our tree is “It’s the Eleventh Century and We’re All Barbarians…”, a quote from our favorite Christmas movie, The Lion in Winter, which is appropriate on so many grounds.
Here’s a little something you should find amusing.
http://www.cluewagon.com/2011/04/breaking-news-scientists-pinpoint-the-origins-of-piles-of-genea-crap/
LMAO! I guess it’s official — we all have ADD.
lol—Jane and I are related up and down the charts: just noted that her 22nd-great-grandmother and grandfather are my 24th-great. Right down the same branch of the tree for that one!
Official continuation of the genealogy thread from over on the Foreigner thread. 😉
We were talking about finding the hard-to-finds.
Let me say as a starter that every time you pay a tax, buy a ticket for transport or emigration, arrive in a country, or buy a piece of property, get hired, or get born or die, you are apt to generate paper trails. This may be a parish birth register, county record, US or UK census, or court record, including the Old Bailey dockets, the land records, even slave ship manifests or records of lawsuits. My own records are extensive, when I own property, pay taxes, am listed in a phone book, and just reside at a certain address. I spent quite a while actually entering records for Ancestry, volunteer work, because I speak Latin and read several languages besides, and I can read 17th century handwriting pretty easily, with all the abbreviations and flourishes. I entered stuff from slave ships (really badly written) and the phone book of a part of Sydney, I think it was, where neighborhoods became kind of chancily organized around partially dedicated streets; I entered US Cavalry pay records. I entered the parish records of a town in Shropshire during the Plague years. If you have talents for reading the badly written and damaged, oh, can they use you! It’s a pity they don’t award free weeks of membership for doing that job, but they don’t, probably for fear of getting volunteers who’d be more problem than help.
But never give up! I finally found my grandmother because I remarked to Jane that I couldn’t find anybody named Basil in the Boone line (the Boones are given to naming kids after famous folk)—and Jane said: Maybe it was from his mother’s family.
Doh!
After all these years, and many, many searches. Feeling like a total fool, and a little excited, I searched Basil with his mother’s last name, and things started coming together, all in one evening. We were watching a movie—I have no idea what, because I was online, raking in records one after the other.
Oh d-d-d-dear dear dear! I can see that this ancestor research could take an enormous amount of time!
It’s a lot different than it used to be. Once upon a time you had to spend your vacations in cemetaries hunting down relatives, then in city hall checking records, then a drive to another county…and that only for one relative. Now, with everything digitized, you can spend your vacation vacationing and do your searching online, where a key-tap can pull a census record from a county in Tennessee from 1850-something, and accepting that “John Smith” as your relative will prompt the db to offer you his civil war record and the fact he had two sisters, while a few more hints accepted will find his great-grandfather who arrived on a wooden ship on Virginia shores a century before, and the place in England where he was born. A membership in ancestry.com is pricey, especially for the worldwide one, but when you count what people in the past have spent just tracking down one town hall record 8 states away…hotels, meals, driving, and then not finding what you need…it’s really put the hobby in most families’ reach. Only one member needs to have the membership: they can open the tree to view by people they want to invite; and that spreads it out quite a lot. It means that the more computer-savvy youngers can do some fierce research, and trust gran and great-uncle for references and hints of places and relationships that power their search. So it really can be an all-family deal. I only wish more of my family were still alive to appreciate it. I didn’t get to tell dad I’d found his mother’s family, and that they really were Irish, but that his Irish great-grandfather was really English; or mom and dad both that they had ancestors in common; or tell mom that part of her grandmother’s family may have survived the flatboat accident that cast her grandmother alone on the Missouri shore.
But my niece and cousins will get the story.
A whole bunch of my genealogy has been already been worked back I don’t know how far, but there are a few dead ends that many people have taken a stab at and not found. One day I was staring at my pedigree chart and said to myself, “This is just a bunch of names to me. Who ARE these people?” So I started using Ancestry (mostly) to try to reconstruct at least skeletal family histories and learn where they came from, who their aunts, uncles, cousins, and so forth were, and where they lived and when.
I now have a large and growing collection of whos, whens, and wheres. There still aren’t enough whats and fewer whys, and I’ve only worked back to about 1880 on most lines, but I’ve already collected quite a few interesting and colorful stories, and a few tragic ones. Tracking my family’s history has become easier and more fun than I ever expected it to be.
It’s the world’s longest novel. The more you do it, the cannier you get at working out likelihoods—and there’s always the chance that some long-lost 3rd cousin might pop up with the family Bible or a story from an uncle…
What amazes me is how often these lines of mine loop back on each other, and you can see the pattern of social circles and regions, as generation after generation looks for mates in the same area. They weave back and forth, and repeat patterns, and then you often see whole associations start trickling over to the Americas…one goes, and takes wife and papa, and then a few years on, here comes cousin Jesse and then neighbor Charles and his wife…all headed for the same district in the Americas.
Also, with new data being transcribed every day, you can suddenly find records online that lead in new directions. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a cousin about great-great-grampa’s parents. That one is still a black hole, but just out of curiosity, I looked up his wife’s parents and BINGO, found the records for the tiny German village they had immigrated from (circa 1850) had been uploaded. Prior to this, gggrandma and her parents just appeared in the 1870 Ohio census. Civil AND church birth, death, and marriage records were up! Four days of genealogy bliss… crawling through records that go back to the 16th century. I finally managed to add information on 4 generations that were missing. More research has shown half the village must have immigrated together to Ohio.
Now, if only I had a time machine and could go back and tell these people there ARE OTHER NAMES! Of the 7 male names I managed to add to my direct tree (not including collateral lines) FIVE of them are Johann Jakob (3 of them), or Johann Georg (2). The oddballs are Georg and Karl. And each of them had children named some variation of Johann, Jakob, or Georg. I finally put it aside for a while because I couldn’t figure out WHICH just-plain-Johann was mine
@Weeble: Time to make a spreadsheet and timeline. That often sorts things out.
I checked out ancestors.com but was put off by the cost and the time I would have to spend. one or two little mysteries in my family, particularly one great grandfather who sired my grandmother and then disappeared off the map completely, the family story is that my great grandmother was his housekeeper, his wife was an alcoholic, my great grandmother had the baby (there is a photo of her and the baby taken in Newcastle, 1891) and then left him after an appeal from the wife, to go and live with her sister in Sheffield. the sister was well to do, had her own business, and a husband, frightfully respectable (there is a nice story there too) and she more or less brought up my grandmother. grt gran married a stout chap and had about 4 more children, after her sister rejected the errant father without telling her when he turned up saying his wife had died and he wanted to marry my grt gran. Quite sad really. anyway, we don’t know what happened to him after that. the family concocted all sorts of fairy stories around all this to make it seem more respectable – a gretna green marriage, bigamy ….
another great grandfather was a genealogist, FRS, D Litt, and researched all his side of the family back to Chaucer’s wife, and flemish immigrants and probably most of the county ….
but it would be fun to see if I could get back to Charlemaagne etc as you have, CJ!
If you ever feel the need to follow up on your great grandfather just let me know. I have subscriptions to 2 of the major sites with a lot of Norfolk data up to and including the 1911 census and a lot of military pension and militia files.
that’s very kind, but the counties he was active in were further north – my great gran came from a farming family in Lincolnshire (it’s very strange she looks like a changeling compared to her 3 raw-boned sisters, no record of a different mother), probably had my grandmother in Jesmond, newcastle, and lived with her sister in Sheffield. my norfolk connections are all more or less done and dusted, going back to the Crusos, flemish wool merchants all documented in st peter mancroft church in norwich, and through a load of female ancestors to chaucer’s sister in law, the one who was John of Gaunt’s mistress and third wife, Katherine Swynford. my victorian ancestors were pretty much vicars and I think baptist ministers on the male lineage, active in Norwich. we have photos and paintings, they were middle class people who obviously thought a lot of themselves!
That’s OK. My subscriptions are worldwide except that Scotland is poorly covered (Scotland’s People pretty well has that tied up).
John of Gaunt was Jane’s 19th or 20th great grandfather, and my 17th-great, my line by Katherine Swynford and Jane’s by Blanche of Lancaster.
I have the worldwide subscription, too, so looking up Lincolnshire, or Ghana, for that matter, is no problem.
my connection to Katherine Swynford is via her first marriage, nothing remotely Plantangenet or royal!
I think my cousin has all the info, I must get some copies from her. I seem to remember a Thomas Swynford, K S’s son being the first descendent. So you two are related to the tudors and all sorts then!
The time and the cost is a lot less than it used to be: one evening at the keyboard can rake in what would take months to collect. Another resource (free) is Facebook. There’s a Genealogy page and there are some people who will do a lookup for you, just to see if there’s info out there.
Also if you can get a week’s vacation to spend, ancestry offers a free week as a promo: a week spent with dates, numbers, names could turn up most anything that’s lurking in ancestry.com. And I think if you buy a software like Family Tree Maker it comes with ‘free’ time on ancestry.com.
If you can get great grandfather’s records, that would help.
But your other side is like my dad’s mother. In my family, I strongly suspect there was no marriage. My grandfather was living with his mother (great-gran) when my father was born, and I also suspect the baby was born in that house, possibly in the care of my great-gran, who was scarily like Ilisidi. She ruled with an iron hand. If there was an impending unmarried birth, she’d have taken charge, no question. In the early days of the state there was frequently no record made of rural births. And my great-gran being a pioneer woman who’d had nearly a dozen kids, was probably perfectly capable of midwifing a baby into the world—in secret. She was so autocratic that part of the mystery of my father’s name was a piece of charity. I wouldn’t have believed that she would have let my father’s mother have any part of the naming. But she shared the naming. I just hadn’t thought she would, and kept looking for my father’s name among great-gran’s relatives.
But my father’s first name was bestowed by the mother, and only the middle name by my great-gran. The mother disappeared from the scene immediately. Great-gran brought up my dad for his first three years, before she died (she was far from young, and had had nearly a dozen kids of her own, all mothered rather fiercely…I have the feeling it was rather like being brought up by a mother lion.) My great-grandfather, who was a cowboy turned traveling salesman (I kid thee not) was on the road most of the time, and with a 3-year-old on his hands, he was in a fix. He just took the baby to his uncle and aunt, in another small…you would call it a village.
So after great-gran died, my dad grew up rather loosely cared for. His mother dropped by a couple of times, for an hour or so. His dad finally showed up when he was somewhere between 8 and 10, and went away without an actual meeting: he was pointed out to my father, but left again.
When my grandfather actually married, he did immediately come and collect my father; and my father forever held his stepmother in greatest reverence—she was a very kind woman who did her absolute best to take care of him. He was never bitter about it all, loved his dad—what had happened in his view was just the way of things, and he was just glad finally to have a home somewhere. Modern psychologists have given us all sorts of terms and models for how things are supposed to work and how we’re supposed to react if we’re normal, but in those days, people just coped. My dad, who probably didn’t even go to school until his dad came and got him and took him to a larger town, grabbed learning wherever he could get it, valued books, and was grateful to all the people who’d brought him up.
The mystery in your family, as in mine, is bound to turn up some real interesting people.
This all sounds familiar. Great grandmother Elizabeth neglected to tell the GRO who were the father(s) of her 4 children. He and Elizabeth are totally missing from the 1881 census, unless she renamed both of them, and I finally tracked him down in 1891 working on the Coleman Farm (the mustard people) when he was 15. The story was that his aunts raised him, all maiden ladies, but we know that isn’t true as a couple of them had married and had 1 or 2 children.
Census lies—oh, they are myriad: ladies lie about their birthdate, because they (and their families) lied to their husbands about their age when they were courting. They’re widowed, living with son or daughter, and between one census and the next, they become venerable, ancient, living for a hundred and elebenty years if you reckon the dates. I remember when census takers came to the house, knocked on the door, or called a meeting in town hall, worse, and had a recorder there, writing down things, because it was assumed you couldn’t spell your own name—and it was a lead pipe cinch the recorder couldn’t, either. In those meetings or even in living rooms little white lies were challenged and, oh, yes, people lied, maintaining the fictions they’d told their neighbors when they arrived, as to where they’d come from; or whose kid that was; or their ages, etc.
Then there are the filing errors. I found my blue-eyed grandfather’s draft card filed as Colored, stamped right on it.
And great-gran on the other side may have been Henrietta Farrel, but she’s H Ferrel, Hattie Ferrall, and one, as I recall, Terrell, all married to David Abijah Tipton.
Been telling a friend about the current thread who is way more experienced on digging up one’s ancestors than I am and she sent me this. I laughed so hard, I had to share:
i still think the best one i’ve ever found was my grandpa sterzer. he was from germany and grandma was from poland so i can only imagine the census taker was having a rough time with the accents. in 1920 Utah, Emanuel Sterzer was morphed into E. Manial Sterzer. hmm, maybe the census taker was onto something after all. his middle name was Gottlieb, so that wasn’t a factor. i laugh every time i see it. most of my sterzer relatives are about half a bubble off center.
The best I ever came up was a baby girl “Ann Twynet” and if you run the words together you get Antoinette.
Must be the ‘literate’ version of when in doubt, mumble.
Ilisidi is the archetypical great gran – black silk dress, all straight back and ferocious penetrating looks! photos of my great gran, and mother’s memories of her reinforce this impression – a hawkish high-cheekboned face in old age, and the repression of her rebellious and ill-judged youth.
well I might ask if anyone has seen a John Hoggard, peripatetic victorian photographer, or any other descendants of his besides my gran, when I can get a few more pointers off my cousins. they are a little busy at the moment with their parents both 91, just having to leave their bungalow and go into (very nice) sheltered housing.
Some approximate years would be good. There’s quite a few John Hoggard’s around and the profession isn’t indexed.
that’s the problem, apart from the fact that my grandmother was born in 1891 in newcastle upon Tyne (no birth certificate) I don’t have any facts and will have to ask … so when I have got some facts I’ll ask again! thanks! 😀
Give us your gran’s full name and precise date of birth so far as is known, to-whom-married, name of child, and any other names you’ve got, because the database operates off a constellation of relationships, and searches a range of dates in that place. It’s a very sophisticated search engine in some ways, so any bit of concrete or near-guess information can help steer it. Father: John Hoggard—the dates at which he was operating and where would be useful.
One thing to note: Hoggard and Haggard are easily confused, so it might be worth searching both, just in case, likewise Hogarth, and other sound-alikes. When someone is writing down something from oral history, anything can happen.
A brief plain google search for “john hoggard ca 1850 england” didn’t turn him up, but did find a connection of the hoggard and haggard names, and a siting for several bearing the name Hoggard and Haggard in Yorkshire, ca 1600, and emigration to Virginia.
I’m doing the Happy Dance this morning. I’ve just found (I think) my 2x gt grandfather’s baptism and parents and their marriage as well. This is all in the London collections of Ancestry, courtesy of the London Metropolitan Archives.
Oh, Happy Dance indeed. I hope it is, and that it leads many new places!
We’ll never know for sure. These folks were in and out of the Workhouse in Hackney but this is the most likely I’ve found after looking off and on for a number of years.
The workhouse records are on Ancestry but only as images to browse; they’re not indexed. That’s work for a rainy day, or sure.
Ow. At least, however, there ARE records, and it does definitely pin down neighborhood: maybe relatives can be traced and reassembled, even if you have to do a couple of map searches, borough history, and just poking the db with likely dates. If you can turn up anybody of similar names in nearby regions including more rural districts, there might be a connection.
Also—do you have any idea how the family had fallen on hard times? Historical crises of the time might provide a clue as to what was going on in the country at various moments. I know some of my relatives’ relocation in Gloucestershire from Gloucester to Cold Ashton pretty nicely corresponded to the Civil War and the cannonfire aimed at Gloucester. It’s not certain why they left, but it’s a decent guess that cannons might have figured in their motives.
This is the early 1800’s in London. At least one came from the Colchester area in Essex but so far they are all “of this parish”, words I’m beginning to hate. 2x great grandfather is described as a waiter on the baptismal records of his daughters and then the silly clunch caught a chest cold one winter, declined medical help, and was found dead in his bed one morning at 47. COD is “Natural Affection of the Thorax upon Severe Cold” – probably developed pneumonia.
Oh, dear. Multiple children and dead youngish of a curable disease—could certainly cause financial hardship.
I did find an interesting site, looking at Hackney around 1802-10. http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Hackney/ gives the rules and operation and a bit about the history of the place, including links to archives and records.
this is the info I have at the moment. my grandmother had a problem getting her pension because she had no birth certificate!according to some papers I have she was her name was Maud Herman Paul (taking the name from her aunt). she was brought up by her aunt, mrs Charles Paul, in Sheffield. they had a post office and china shop. Which is another family story! Her mother was Maud(e) Musgrave, but she did call herself Maud Hoggard at one point, even though they hadn’t married she probably protected herself and daughter by taking the name.
so my great grandmother Maude Musgrave was brought up genteely, her family were tenant farmers in East Drayton, Lincs, but they were quite well off. the family have traced the Musgraves back to marriage in Saxby Lincs in 1610, Robert Musgrave to Anne Marshall. 1871 census gives Maude as a scholar, 8 years old, living with her uncle Job, a miller and landowner and aunt Annie Burbank in Nocton Lincs, probably due to her mother’s illness. 1881 sees her at home, 17 years old, with father George Musgrave at Manor House Farm, east drayton Lincs. 1891 she is Maude Hoggard living with her sister as above. so presumably late in the 1880’s she ran away with my great grandfather, John Hoggard, got pregnant, had the baby we know in newcastle upon Tyne – there is even a photo of her with the baby (under 3 months by the look of her) taken in a grainger street photographers in newcastle – then got cold feet for some reason (maybe she hadn’t known he was already married) and went to live with her sister. possibly grt grandad worked for that photographer at the time.
I suppose I could look up John Hoggard on the census – isn’t it all on line now?
we have a photo of J H too – handsome type, a bit arty. looks in his 30’s, and as we have it, it must date from the time of her relationship with him. so probably he was born around 1850.
Intial search on ancestry gets (from the Hawnt family tree):
Maud Elizabeth Musgrave
b. 17 May 1863 in E Drayton Notts
d 12 Feb 1941, Yorkshire
m. 1895 in Caistor, Lincs to James (Jimmy) Hawnt, but previously married (or not) to John E Hoggard.
Her parents:
George Musgrave
b 18 Feb 1824 in Cold Hanworth, Lincs
Mary Ann Burbank
b abt 1828 in Lincoln, Lincs.
You apparently have living cousins of some degree in the Hawnt family.
cor, that was quick! my gran married into the Hartley family, which we have quite a lot of info on, they had a cutlery business in Sheffield, which they lost due to the gambling activities of an eldest son. don’t know much about Hawnts – except my grt aunt Nora and grt uncle stuart. we all feel bereft not knowing what happened to JH.
There’s more:
John Hoggard was born in 1840, Mumby, Lincs,
His parents:
John Hoggard, b. 1813 in Walesby, Notts
Lucy Raynor, b. 1817 in Hogsthorpe, Lincs.
John sr’s parents:
John Hoggard
and that John’s parents, (I had to erase it to clear my own tree before it became officially part of the database, so I think there is one more John Hoggard in there, but there may not be: it may go directly to John Hoggard of Edwinstowe.
another John Hoggard,
b 1765 in Edwinstowe, Notts, where he was a blacksmith.
His wife: Mary Gabbitas.
At any rate, if you take that free week on Ancestry, I think you’ve got threads out there that you can follow.
ooooh, thank you so much!
I’ll bet if you go poking about in churchyards and parish registers you may find things. So nice to be within a train ride or two to these sites. http://www.edwinstowe.co.uk/ was Robin Hood’s village, so they say. 😉 Ah, me, well, I could reach the Wenatchee apple festival. Somehow it’s not quite the same!
Hey I go out for a while and look what happens!