Live Blogging An Ancestor Hunt

My fortuitous coincidence from the other day has continued paying dividends. Ancestry informed me that someone had the death certificate of my great great great grandmother, Hannah Maria Holt, saved in their private tree. I contacted them to ask if I might be able to have a copy, and it has turned out to belong to a close relative - my Dad's cousin's husband. I'm thrilled to be in touch with them again, as I last spoke to them probably 15 years ago, and wasn't sure how to find them again.

Right now I'm working through my daughter Poss's paternal ancestry. I've found a branch of her family came from Jersey, on the Channel Islands. The main family lines there are LeBoutillier and Payn(e). A quick search for Leboutillier returns this factoid about the surname:

<snip>... recorded in Jersey, Channel Islands U.K. as far back as 1205 

So there could be some lengthy links with that part of the world.

I have Eliza or Elizabeth Maria Esther Le Boutillier marrying Elias Payn or Payne in Jersey. She died in 1860, but he remarried in Surrey to Susannah Horlick and died in 1891.

I can't find any hint through Ancestry of what Eliza(beth) Maria Esther Le Boutillier's father's name was, but Trove has come up trumps again with this little gem:

Interesting that the maternal grandfather was singled out by name in this notice. Was he important?

I can't find any records in Ancestry that confirm that Elizabeth's father was George LeBoutiller, but I did find this interesting post on Rootsweb:

John married Mary Falla, His sister Elizabeth born 1816 married Elias Payn. Parents of John, Elizabeth and Phillippe were Jean Le Boutillier and Elizabeth Hacquoil. 

If that's the case, then I can easily identify Elizabeth Hacquoil (born 1797 at St Ouen, Jersey) in other Ancestry trees, and her family connection to Jersey goes back generations. The earliest Hacquoil I can find without stretching myself at all is Nicolas Hacquoil, born "Abt 1570 in Bailiwick Of Jersey, Channel Islands". The trick is going to be to find some supporting evidence to tie it all together.

I found an 1841 census entry for Jean LeBoutillier and Elizabeth Hacquoil's family that supports the Rootsweb poster's information; it shows that three of their children are John, Philip and Elizabeth, but it doesn't offer any way to confirm if that's our Elizabeth who went on to marry Elias Payn.

Further census results show Elias Payn(e) was a Master Carpenter. His marriage to Susannah Horlick gives his father's name as Philip Payne. Digging around Ancestry, I find some trees have his father recorded as "Phillippe Payne Jr" (born 24 June 1787, at St Martins, Jersey) and his mother as "Anne Le Sueur" (born circa 1790, at Trinity, Jersey).

Looks like I've got a whole new chapter of research opening before me. Lots of clues, very few sources so far.

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A Fortuitous Discovery.

Well, the other half has returned from his jaunt halfway around the world and life is returning to normal here, so I've gleefully dived back into my tree.

Tonight I put some effort into researching Hannah Maria Holt, my great great great grandmother. She married Richard Smart Groombridge in 1842, and gave birth to my great great grandmother, Harlettee Louisa Groombridge in 1846. Tragically she was widowed in 1858 when Richard Groombridge suffered "a series of epileptic fits" which resulted in his death.

In 1861 she remarried to Edward Henry Palmer.

Reviewing my tree today, I saw some impossible dates on Hannah Maria Holt. Her birth was given as 1800, and her deadth as 1902. While she could have lived to 102, I doubted that she married for the first time at the age of 42, and was having children into her late 40s. I found other trees that recorded her year of birth as 1820, which sounded far more reasonable. I thought I'd try to look up her death record to see if I could find any further information, and I went to Trove because I was curious to see who might have placed a death notice for her. That was a dead end. I searched for Hannah Maria Palmer in vain.

I turned my attention elsewhere and worked through some other bits of the tree. I looked into her granddaughter, Myrtle Elsie Adelaide Turner, and found the shipping record of her departure from England after the visit in 1950 that I referred to in an earlier post. Myrtle's address in the UK was given as 6 Beckenham Road, W. Wickham, so that's another angle to pursue some day.

She left England on the Himalaya on the 6th of September, 1950.
I also took another look on Trove at the account of Myrtle's apparent suicide attempt some years prior. The Mercury reported on the 4th of January 1932:

Woman Poisoned
Mrs. Myrtle Rush, 42 years, of 175 Elizabeth Street, Hobart, was admitted to the Hobart Public Hospital about 11.30 last night, suffering from the effects of an irritant poison. She is alleged to have taken a quantity of disinfectant.
It is stated that Mrs. Rush underwent a serious operation about four months ago. An emetic was administered, and her condition was afterwards satisfactory.

My understanding is that Myrtle's marriage was not a happy one, but even her mother's letters from the early 1920s mention Myrtle suffering from health problems.

 After that, I suddenly decided to try searching for Hannah Maria Holt again, but this time I used the surname from her second marriage, Groombridge. In doing so I found her death notice. It had been listed under the name "Parmer" instead of "Palmer". I never would have found it but in a stroke of enormous good luck, George Groombridge died a couple of days later and his obituary was in the same column (good luck for me, not so good for George).

GROOMBRIDGE. - On Tuesday, December 16, 1902, at his late residence, 11 Cross-street, Battery Point, George, the beloved husband of Margaret Groombridge, in the 58th year of his age.

PARMER - On December 10, at her son's residence, Kingston, Hannah Maria Parmer, aged 82. 

No information on who placed the notice, but I have something I didn't have before: an exact date of death.

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I Aint'nt Dead

In the immortal words of Granny Weatherwax, I aint'nt dead. I'm just taking a few days off while the other half is away on a business trip. My kids, Poss (aged 6 years) and The Womble (3 years) keep me on pretty tight schedule of fetching drinks, cooking meals, adjudicating arguments, assisting with bodily functions, watching this, cleaning up that... You know, Mum stuff. With Himself away, it's the same as usual but a little bit moreso. I will resume posting just as soon as I can.

Take care!
-- Carol

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The Ladies in the Photos

I wish I knew more about this photo!

It came from Linda Grumont and she's the one who has written (and scribbled out) names on it. Eventually she settled on the left one being Auntie Annie (Marianne Smith, who married Thomas Talbot), and the right one being Auntie Ettie (Henrietta Smith, who married William Gavin). I don't put a lot of stock in that because one of the names she initially wrote (and crossed out) is Auntie Clara. That would be Clarabell Turner, who died at the age of 3, and is therefore absolutely not the subject of the photos.

Someone once told me the outfits are not inconsistent with the 1880s. Ettie died at the age of 20 in that decade, so this wouldn't rule her out.

I think the photos may both be of the same woman, although it could be sisters with a very strong resemblance. It could be one (or two) of Linda Grumont's grandmother's sisters (another daughter of Harlettee Groombridge), as she said, but I don't see how we'll ever know.

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The Day My Tree Went Off The British Isles And Wound Up In Prussia

My most unfortunately named ancestor is Fanny Leak.

No, no, don't laugh. The woman actually existed. Want proof?

And she wasn't alone. She came from a long line of Fannys...

Ok, if you're going to be like that, we should probably talk about something else.

Unusually named ancestors are my favourite. They stick out like sore... thumbs. After years and years of searching, many of my ancestors shared a few predictable names:
William
Thomas
John
Edward
Jane
Sarah
Ann(e)
Mary/Maria
The surnames were hardly better. What I kept finding was that my ancestry was exclusively limited to the British Isles. I can't say I longed for something "exotic", but I definitely found the lack of diversity a little uninspiring.

Then it happened. While pouring over old marriage certificates, I found something I wasn't expecting. I was looking at the marriage of my mother's grandparents, Thomas Wilton and Gertrude Battersby (an exception to the Jane/Sarah/Ann(e)/Mary rule herself) and her mother's name leapt off the page at me.

Arnstina Paulina Wandel.

That's not English! Or Irish, or Scottish. That's another flavour altogether! And I still remember that moment, staring at that name. It was a first for me.

As it happens, her ancestors were from Prussia. They originated in Ransen, Silesia - it's now called Ręszów and is now in Poland. Her father was Carl Georg Wandel and her mother was Franziska Louisa Pech, daughter of Wanzy and Meliza. Carl Georg Wandel's father had been a windmill keeper in Prussia, and after the father's death, his mother, Anna Suzanna Dorothea Hahn, remarried to a Georg Zobel, and the family emigrated to Australia. They settled in South Australia and to this day have many descendants and relatives in that area.

Arnstina Paulina Wandel's name is rendered different ways in different documents. The order of the names is altered, and sometimes Arnstina is rendered as Ernestina. I know from speaking to my great aunt Pauline that she was known as Lena. At some point I settled on recording her name primarily as Ernestina Paulina, but I didn't leave notes to myself explaining why, so I hope it is based on something factual like how she signed it herself, or the most commonly used variant, but perhaps I just drew it out of a hat. Anyway, Lena married Frank Battersby and had seven children.

Incidentally, as a teenager, I once encountered a fellow descendant of the Battersby family in the Traralgon Genealogy Library on Kosciuszko Street, but I didn't get his name and I never saw him again. I think he was descended from one of Frank's siblings. If he ever reads this, then hi! Please comment and make yourself known. I've been kicking myself for 20 years that I didn't talk to you more that day to figure out our connection.

Going back to Ernestina Paulina Wandel... I found myself in touch with a man named Hedley Wandel, who has put together a painstaking list of the descendants of the Wandel family, and who provided invaluable information to pad out that side of my tree. He sent me two folders of information, including detailed descendant charts and factual information about the area the family emigrated from, maps, shipping manifests. Every time I set out to write a post for this blog, I realise there is someone who has been an enormous help to me and I really need to thank them. Thank you, Hedley! You really are so very generous about sharing your data, and you've worked so hard to put it together.

Hedley's outstanding work has filled in a gap in our oral history. How sad that somehow that information was lost; Lena's descendants at some point didn't know their family was from that part of the world, and (in our branch at least) they haven't held on to any traditions that her family must have brought over with them. At least we can acknowledge it now, and make sure that link is not easily forgotten again.

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A Letter From 1920

The Turner/Groombridge line was tricky to get anywhere with, and I felt that finding out more about the daughter who was born Melinda Elvina Smith would help me get further with it. I began looking into her descendants.

I found her granddaughter, Linda Ettie Walsh, in the Digger birth records in 1999, and I put out feelers on the internet, hoping to track her down. Of course I got no response.

My message searching for her is still viewable online.

Linda Ettie Walsh was born in 1916, so of course I was looking for a very old woman, if she was even still alive. I had nothing further to go on, no married name, or any idea where she would have ended up living after being born in Carlton. I shelved that idea.

I looked up Melinda Elvina Smith's death and discovered that she was known as Linda Stapleton Simmons by that point in her life. She died in 1970, so I visited the State Library in Melbourne and went through old newspapers there.

In the death notices, I found one that was signed The Grumont Family, and was clearly placed by close relatives. I took note of their name because it was an unusual surname that I hadn't seen before. A quick look at the phone directory, and I realise there were only about a dozen families in Melbourne by that surname so I took a punt and dialed a number at random. The lady I spoke to told me she had no clue about family history, but that her grandmother knew everything and I should try her instead. I dialled the number she gave me... and Linda Ettie Walsh answered the phone.

Of course, I didn't know that immediately, but as we talked it became evident that she was the lady I'd hoped to find and given up on as dead, untraceable or both. She was a very animated soul, and she loved to talk family history. I was invited to visit.

She lived in an outer eastern suburb of Melbourne, so I made my way there just as soon as I could. My, what a character! She was a vibrant, sharp 84 year old, living with her husband Frank. They were quite a pair! I remember her ordering him out to make tea with the "dingle dangles" - she seemed to have her own language for everything. I think computers were click-clacks. She made me laugh.

Linda gave me the box of treasure I talked about in this post, and I posted images of some of the certificates it contained in this post. There were certificates, photos, letters, postcards... an unimaginable resource to have. Linda said she didn't have another member in her family interested in the family's history so she asked me to take it and look after it. I think it's too precious to keep entirely boxed up, so I want to share some of it here.

I've picked this letter to share today because it talks about the Groombridge family history. It appears to be directed to Doris, her granddaughter, by Harlettee Louisa Groombridge.

First page

Kingston

October 31st '20

My Dear Granddaughter,

With pleasure I am answering your welcome letter, and thanks for the photos. She is like your mother when she was her age, but not a bit like my little Rosebud. I will be thankful if you can get me a Card of the Cottage in the Village of Groombridge, Kent. That is where my Father was born at a place named East (or West) Farleigh, and the village was named after the family.
Your G Great Grandfather was a Giant in Strength and your Great Grandfather Richard Smart Groombridge, my father, was a very strong man and was born in 1805, and died in 1858, so he has departed 62 years.
They were a well respected family. Till lately, my Father's offspring were the only Groombridges in the Colonies, and I was the only Miss Groombridge till my Brother John Smart G. married and now there are dozens of them but all have sprung from my Father, your G G.father.

Second Page
I believe there was not a poor Groombridge in Kent. My Grandmother was a Jewess. Her name was Rachael Stephens before she married and had five sons and two daughters. The sons were named:
John
William
Richard Smart, my father who named his sons after his brothers
George
Samuel
All Blacksmiths
Daughters Amy and Henrietta married two Brothers named Adams.
I believe William went to America.

Well, dear Lottie, I am returning your Card of Cottages and would be pleased if you could get your friend if he ever goes to Kent to make Enquiries of any of the old Groombridges concerning our family. Kent is not far from London. I had a letter from Sydney telling me he had a very bad poisend (?) hand, and have answered it. Poor fellow. I am very sorry for him. I hope he has work by this for I know what it means to be out of work in Melbourne with a family dependant on one's earnings.

Third page (not pictured)
Myrtle has not been well lately. The Doctor ordered her away to the Country and she stopped a month. The Baby boy got Bronchitis and Hooping (sic) Cough but is better now. He is a fine little chap. He weighed 17 1/2 pounds when he was two months old and is so good, in fact he has not cried since he was born. He is over three months now and just like his mother. Lottie is a nice girl and will be 13 years on the 24 of Dec and Ivy is over 10 years. They have opened a Beautiful shop at 337 Elizabeth Street N. Hobart everything up to date and it takes all her time to mind the shop and the Baby while Frank serves his Customers. Outside school (ex?)cluded, his is the best Ice Cream in Tas. and that is saying something. He makes all his own Icecream and Cordials of all sorts, and keeps Fruit & Confectionary of the best. Well dearie I will close this scribble with best love to all from your loving Grandmother

H. L. Rothery.

What has been the matter with your mother is she well again, don't be long in replying. All revvir x

Fourth page (not pictured)
Dear Lottie

I wish you very many happy returns of your Birthday and am pleased to hear that you are getting on so well. From your Grandma Rothery.

Love to little Linda. I may (obscured) some day but am getting to (sic) old to (obscured) much now. I will be 74 yrs on the 24th of November.

There is a lot of information about the Groombridges relayed in this letter, but it is hard to know what is accurate. "Rachael Stephens" the Jewish grandmother referred to seems to have actually been named Sarah Stephens, however it could be that her name was Sarah Rachael Stephens, or Rachael Sarah... or perhaps a good 62 years after the death of her father, Harlettee's memories of what he told her about a grandmother she never met had faded a little. There is a village named Groombridge in Kent, not far from her father's birthplace of West Farleigh, but it seems more likely that the family took the name of the village for their surname than the other way around. The names of the brothers and sisters is correct, and Amy and Henrietta did both marry men with the surname Adams, but I can't confirm if they were brothers yet. They were not the only Groombridges in the Colonies, and others by the surname Groombridge arrived from early the previous century but she may not have known about them.

How I wish she had known this letter would survive nearly 100 years, and that she could have written more about her memories of what her father told her about Kent, and his family, and her ancestry! But at least I have this, and others, that give some insight into her personality and snippets about the family.

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Got You On My Tree, Neighbour

Who's that? Oh, just a cousin of mine.

Ok, not quite.

The story goes like this:

Eliza Clapton is my Great Great Grandmother. She married Nathaniel Higginbottom, their daughter Jessie Higginbottom married John Hanniver, and my grandmother Rose was a product of that marriage.

Whenever we spoke about the Clapton branch of the family, my cousin Don would ask "Are we related to Eric Clapton?". One day, with time on my hands, I set out to prove that we weren't. I failed.

Eric Clapton's Ancestry

Eric Clapton is not a stage name. He was born Eric Patrick Clapton, the son of Patricia Molly Clapton and a father who was absent from his life from the beginning. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Rose nee Mitchell, and her second husband, Jack Clapp, in Surrey. Reginald Cecil Clapton was Rose's first husband, and was the father of Patricia (and grandfather of Eric).

Reginald Cecil Clapton was born in Madras, India, in 1900. He was the son of Augustus Oliver Clapton and Marie M. Haire. He died in 1933.

Augustus Oliver Clapton was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire in 1867. He was the son of James Clapton and Melina Wilkins.

James Clapton was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire in 1833. He was the son of John Clapton and Dinah Skinner.

John Clapton was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire in 1802. I have not uncovered any information about his parents, so the line stops there. 

Eliza Clapton's Ancestry

Eliza Ann Clapton was born in Avoca, Victoria in 1856. Her parents were Charles Clapton and Sarah Barratt.

Charles Clapton was born in Oxfordshire, England in 1818, the son of Thomas Clapton and Mary Morris. He married his first wife, Sarah Painting, at Shipton-Under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire, and his second wife Sarah Barratt at Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.

Thomas Clapton was born in Oxfordshire circa 1790. He married Mary Morris at Guiting Power, Gloucestershire, and resided at Lyneham, Oxford at the time of the 1841 and 1851 censuses.

So What's It All Mean?

It means that, around the beginning of the 19th century, Eric Clapton's ancestors lived in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, and my Clapton ancestors lived in the Guiting Power, Oxfordshire area. Distance: 5.7 miles.

I can't conclusively rule out (distant, very very distant) cousinship. At the very least, they were close enough to be called neighbours.

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