The thrill of tracking down Auntie Elsie and Uncle Ted from East Ham

We don't know much about Grandma's early life, where she went to school and how she liked to spend her time. We don't even know how she met Grandad, only that they married in 1929 and moved to South Africa to raise a family. What we do know, though, was that she had a cousin named Elsie with whom she corresponded for years and of whom she was very fond.

Until yesterday, my attempts to track down Elsie had been wholly unsuccessful. Without the benefit of a maiden name or married surname, I had been forced to try other approaches: Research the siblings of my ancestors and look among their descendants for girls named Elsie, Ellen or Elizabeth. Assume that Elsie was a Wilson because Grandma's mother was a Wilson and the relationship  might not be that of first cousin. Perform a search for marriages of people named Elsie and Ted plus variations on those names. Alas, all my efforts proved fruitless. It was a brick wall in my genealogy quest and yet I felt convinced the solution was very close.

The reason for my confidence was that I knew about Auntie Elsie from my lived experience. As a child, I often heard Grandma say, "I got another letter from Auntie Elsie this week" or "I must write and tell Auntie Elsie about that." Of course, I took no notice. Being young and preoccupied with what I could grasp first-hand, I simply failed to pay attention.

More recently, I tried quizzing my aunt Gillian for anything she could tell me. She remembered that Elsie was married to Ted but had no idea whether there were any children. Her memories are so scant because she only met them once. It was on a family holiday to England, one of the five-yearly trips that happened when her father visited the London office of Hollerith. Gillian recalls that, when they visited Auntie Elsie and Uncle Ted in East Ham, they were building a bomb shelter in the front yard. She also recalls seeing barrage balloons hanging over London and the need to close all the curtains at dusk for the blackout. Coming from a context where life involved carefree expeditions up the mountain to boil potatoes in a billy-can and watching her father learn to sail, she was naturally struck by the strangeness of it all.

Such was the extent of my knowledge about Elsie and Ted. I had reached the point where my notes on the elusive couple languished in a file awaiting inspiration. Then, this past week, Ancestry made an offer I could not refuse. I had a free account, created when they were offering free access to military records a little while ago, and they saw fit to reach out to me , offering a three-month subscription for just one dollar. Unfortunately, Ancestry is hard to use with accessibility software for blind users so I won't be using it long term. However, the effort it took to build a basic family tree was well worth it because I made a startling breakthrough!

My first Ancestry hint led me to a profile for Grandma. This was unexpected because she had been an only child and I hadn't found her included on any other online family trees. Checking the details for her parents and grandparents, I satisfied myself that there was no mistake. Then I set about tracing the relationship between myself and the owner of the tree.

I hadn't been thinking about Elsie and Ted when, suddenly, I found an Elsie Ada Bristow from West Ham. The name caught my attention, as did her birth date of 1907, just two years later than Grandma's. She was married to an Edward Collins, which ticked the box for Uncle Ted. To top it all, the couple lived in East Ham in 1939, the year in which Grandma, my aunt Gillian and my mother had seen them.

What a find this is! The online family tree makes it possible for me to contact the owner and exchange information. She obviously knows more about Grandma's extended family than I do, while I know more about her children and grandchildren. This opens up a whole new line of investigation. Not only do I have a slew of new names, dates and locations to research, but I have DNA results to compare, photos to share and new ancestors to care about. So many possibilities for exploration!

Photo credit: "A man sits on a park bench in London 1940" by Christine

 

Charles Sanderson and the streets of York

In researching my maternal great-grandfather I made a surprising discovery. The family of Charles Sanderson grew up in what is now an extremely popular tourist area of York. They lived in the historic part of the city known as Micklegate, close to the River Ouse.

Charles Sanderson spent his infant years in the street known as Stonegate. The term "gate" in the name comes from the Viking word meaning "street" and the "stone" part refers to the stone laid on it by the Romans. The street itself is long and narrow, running from Petergate in the north to St Helen's Square in the south. The house in which Charles and his family lived was at the St Helen's Square end, and was likely Georgian in design, judging from the other buildings in the street. Stonegate is said to be one of the most attractive streets in York.

At age 13, Charles was living at High Jubbergate, Holy Trinity King's Court. This street's name dates back to the fourteenth century when Jewish people settled there but it was built much earlier. Although the church known as Holy Trinity King's Court no longer exists, having been demolished in 1937 to create King's Square, it was still standing on the corner of Colliergate and Shambles when Charles was a boy. Drawings done at the time clearly show the church's tower  above the chimneys and rooftops of Jubbergate.

When Charles married Emma Elsey in 1879, he stated his address as 22 Trinity Lane, St Martin's cum St Gregory, Micklegate. Trinity Lane is a small road that connects to Micklegate, the main road on the west side of the river. The house no longer exists but it has an interesting history. From the time of the 1841 to the 1871 census, it was occupied by a coach proprietor named George Walker from York. For twenty years he lived with his wife Mary and a couple of servants, and then, after Mary passed away, was assisted by his young niece, Mary Elizabeth Wilson. Interestingly, George Walker stated that he employed 5 men in his coach business. We know that Charles' occupation in 1881 was "coachman", so perhaps he started out his career working for George Walker. This would explain how his widowed mother Mary Ann Sanderson and three of his siblings came to be living at 22 Trinity Lane in 1881 after George Walker moved away or died.

Charles must have enjoyed the opportunities for travel and adventure that coaching afforded him. However, the market was shrinking. Since the arrival of the railway in York in 1840, the amount of goods being transported by coach declined sharply and many  people chose the speedier option of travelling by train. Still, coaches were familiar, convenient and possibly cheaper than rail transport. A coach journey between London and York typically took four days, stopping overnight at inns which offered accommodation to travellers and stabling for the horses. The coachman and groom would eat and drink in the local tavern and, since they brought news and stories from far afield, drew locals there as well.

Photo credit: "Stonegate, York, England, View from Great/Central Tower of York Minster." By Billy Wilson.

 

My question regarding Mary Ann Howell of Bilston

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

 

Surprising new family member in the Sanderson branch of our tree

In my last blog post, I mentioned the large gap in the ages of my maternal great-grandparents, Charles and Florence Sanderson of Shoreditch. Charles was 46 when they married in 1903 and Florence was just 28. It made me wonder, was Charles Sanderson married before?

Formulating this question made it easy to progress with my genealogical research. Working on FindMyPast, I ran a search for an early marriage record for Charles Sanderson. I estimated that the marriage would have taken place around 1880 when Charles was 23, and restricted the search location to Yorkshire, the county in which he was born.

Sure enough, my search produced a result. Charles Sanderson married Emma Elsey in 1879 in York. The record I found confirmed that Charles' father was Thomas Sanderson and gave Emma's father's name as George Elsey. The Elsey family came from Surrey and George was an agricultural labourer.

Excitedly, I set about trying to find out more. A census record for 1881 revealed that Charles and Emma were living in Roundhay, a rural district of Leeds, Yorkshire and that Charles was working as a coachman in domestic service. This detail was encouraging because his occupation later in life when he was married to Florence was horse keeper. When I researched Roundhay, I learnt that it is an ancient green space outside the city of Leeds, originally enclosed as a deer park, subsequently opened to the public as a recreational area, and more recently developed in part with houses for the working class. Presumably, when my great-grandfather Charles lived in Roundhay, he was serving a rich landowner and driving a carriage pulled by two tall, strong horses like the Yorkshire Coach Horse shown in the picture.

The 1881 census also showed that Charles and Emma were starting a family. Emma had recently given birth to a daughter named Caroline. Caroline Sanderson was just 10 months old at the time of the 1881 census.

This was an extraordinary find. It meant that Grandma, born an only child, actually had a half-sister who was 24 years older than she. Nothing had been suggested about this before, causing me to have serious doubts about the veracity of my evidence.

Then I made an even more astonishing discovery.

Returning to the Sanderson family Bible, I scanned through the names. One name jumped out at me. In a slightly smudged hand, someone had written, "Carre Sanderson born 5th April 1880 at Roundhay, Leeds". I searched for a birth record online and found Caroline Emma Sanderson born in April 1880 with her mother's maiden name given as Elsey. The name, date and location of this record all confirm that Caroline Sanderson, daughter of Charles and Emma, was indeed one of my ancestors.

I then turned to MyHeritage to see if I could find out more. Another census record popped up, this time from 1901 in the suburb of Bethnal Green. Clearly, the person who took down the family's details had terrible handwriting because Caroline's birthplace of Roundhay is transcribed as "Roimdhay" and the county of her birth is shown as Leicestershire, suggesting a faulty transcription of Leeds. In addition, Charles is transcribed as "Marles". Even so, there was enough to convince me that they were the right people. I knew that Charles had married Florence in London in 1903, so this record for the 1901 census helped establish his move. It also confirmed he  was a widower. He stated his occupation as "foreman/house keeper" which is probably another error in transcription, intended to read "foreman/horse keeper" as in the 1911 census. Caroline, at 20 years old,  stated her occupation as "household duties".

My investigation then turned to Emma's death. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any trace of it online. All I know is that it occurred sometime in the 20 years between the 1881 and 1901 census. I tried to find evidence of Caroline getting married or, failing that, appearing on the 1911 census or 1939 register but again, had no luck. I couldn't even find a death record for her, since all the death records for women named Caroline Sanderson corresponded with census records that showed them married to men named Sanderson.

This isn't the end of the world, though. I have lots to investigate for now. Up to this point, the city of Leeds and its surrounding countryside held no interest for me, but that has changed. If I get the chance to travel to Yorkshire, I will definitely make a pilgrimage to Roundhay to walk in the footsteps of Charles, Emma and Caroline.

Photo credit: Cigarette card: Yorkshire Coach Horse by CigCardPix.