This blog post continues the account of my research into the ancestors of Florence Mary Sanderson. Florence Sanderson was my maternal grandmother and was very much a product of London's East End. However, her ancestors came from Yorkshire and Staffordshire, and it is with the Staffordshire branch that I am currently busy.
My grandmother's mother was Florence Mary Wilson, who was in turn the daughter of Mary Ann Howell. The Howells were from Bilston, Staffordshire, and it isn't clear how Mary Ann ended up in London. According to census records, she moved south between 1851 and 1861, or sometime between her fourth and fourteenth birthdays, so it is likely she accompanied her parents or relatives when they travelled south. Yet, from what I can tell, her parents never left Bilston. Joseph and Mary Howell remained at the same address for their entire married life. So, why exactly did Mary Ann leave Bilston, and did I even have the right parents for her in my family tree?
Genealogical websites often advise amateur family historians to start with their most recent ancestors and work backwards from there. When I tried to trace Mary Ann Howell in both London and Staffordshire, however, I only got confused. The name Howell is extremely common in both locations. Moreover, the name Mary Ann turns up frequently, and there is more than one person named Mary Ann Howell born in 1847 in the Bilston area. The Howells of Bilston appear to be a long-established family with deep roots, and there are multiple Samuels, Williams, Sarahs and Phoebes in each generation. Faced with so many options, I didn't know how to distinguish one family from another.
Finally, I had an idea. Focusing on just one collection, the 1841 census for England and Wales, I typed in the surname, birth year and birth location of the man I had identified as Mary Ann's father; namely, Joseph Howell. Deliberately omitting his first name, I sought all men born in Bilston who were capable of fathering a daughter in 1847. Thus, I came up with a list of over 20 individuals, enabling me to sort out the different families according to street address. Then I did the same exercise using the 1851 census. This helped in two ways: First, it let me add other, younger children to the families. Second, it clarified who was who in each family because the later census included the category "Relationship to head" alongside each name. If an individual appeared as "nephew", for example, it established a possible link between that Howell household and another with children roughly the same age.
It took me days to go through all the family groups and I struggled to trace connections between them. While there were several Howell households in Bilston's Oxford Street in 1841, they weren't obviously related. Doubtless, they shared common ancestors and knew each other as cousins of some sort, but tracing them all back into the mid-1700's and beyond posed too great an obstacle for my flagging energy! I opted instead to check my references for all the people I had already included in Mary Ann's tree to see if they stood up to scrutiny and, happily, they did. I found convincing documentary evidence for her birth to Joseph Howell and Mary Vaughan of Oxford Street, as well as for Mary Vaughan's birth to Edward Timothy Vaughan and Ann Prosser of Bridge Street.
At the same time, I messaged several of my DNA matches and came up with a strong link between me and a descendant of George Frederick Wilson. George was, like my great-grandmother Florence Mary Wilson, a child of Mary Ann Howell and Thomas Wilson. The DNA match proves that the documentary evidence I have for Mary Ann Howell and her Bilston-based family is indeed correct, and it also proves that there weren't any cases of misattributed paternity in that line.
But my original question still exists; what brought Mary Ann Howell to London in her teens, and how did she meet Thomas Wilson of Bethnal Green? Such mysteries are what good stories are made of. I'm hoping that, by putting my question out there, someone will be able to solve the puzzle. For that matter, any information that can shed more light on the Howells of Bilston and the Wilsons of Bethnal Green would be much appreciated.
Photo credit: "Bilston Town Hall: Church Street and Litchfield Street" by Elliott Brown
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