I had again been looking at my Forest of Dean ancestors who long lived on a hill called the Lonk between Joyford and Berry Hill just a little north of the market town of Coleford, at a time when little children too often burnt to death, having been left unguarded in their homes, and girls got gang raped in the forest byeways, and petty criminals roamed about with notorious reputations and fearsome sobriquets such as The Rough, The Giant, and The Lion. Many catastrophes befell the minors who worked underground. And all such things I was discovering from trawling through old newspapers. In 1836, at the Bennets coal mine, six men were ascending from the depths, in a lift known as a skip, when the rope pulling this upwards broke and the skip went hurtling down. Two Harold brothers and two Blanche brothers died on the spot, their corpses mangled in a shocking manner. For several years afterwards this incident aroused pain in the people of the Forest. Many more incidents would follow, generally of massive rocks falling upon the miners and crushing them, and one man even being scalped by the sharp edges of one such rock. Of girls being gang raped, concern was expressed in the Gloucestershire Chronicle, that 'we sincerely trust' the rapists 'will be made an example of and this species of offence, so rife in the Forest, will recieve so wholesome a check that innocent females may once again walk forth on the highways of her majesty in their accustomed safety and confidence in the proper feeling of the locality and the protection of the laws of our happy constitution and country.' And of little children catching fire: 'Such frequent repetitions of melancholy accidents of of this nature show the necessity of extreme vigilance on the part of those who have the care of children.'
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I discovered a free mobile ap which coloured in black and white photos, or at least puroprted to, but on most pictures made little effect. A few though had at least some potential which I then worked on myself.
That was fun. I was so getting into genealogy researach, and not even my own. Rather, as an intellectual challenge, a detective challenge, I was updating my friend' Jare's alias Nitai's tree, pushing back the boundaries. And this was well interesting, for its involvment if early immigration to Australia, of both convicts and free settlers. One of Nitai's ancestors was Jesse Froy, born illegtimate in Hitchin, Hartfordshire in 1819, son of his mother Martha Froy. He was at first a soldier in the 11th Regiment, sent to various barracks, in Devon, Northamptonshire and Kent, the latter place where he met his Irish sweetheart, Mary Malone. From Chatham in Kent the soldiers were sent to guard convicts in Van Diemans Land (Tasmania). Jesse made sure to return to Kent to marry Mary and then took her back to Australia, travelling there on the ship Ramilies, and they making a life together in Sydney, having many children, nearly all boys. Jesse took to drink, spending his evenings in the pub, and in time no more cared for his wife and children, so that he was even prosecuted for neglecting and abandoning them. For this he spent one month in prison, from the records of which we get a detailed description of him. He was a little over 5ft 10, could read and write, had dark brown hair and hazel eyes, sallow skin and a stout build. His trade was gardening, he was a protestant, and he had various tattoos, which included a flower and love hearts. In 1859, one of Jesse's drinking mates, his Irish former convict neighbour, Hugh Glenn, murdered his wife Ann, also an Irish immigrant former convict, in a drunken rage, whacking her hard with his homemade broomsticks. Jesse's wife, Mary, heard all this going on through the wall. Hugh's landlord's son, who'd been staying with the Glenn's while his parents were away, and who had seen the beginning of the attack, ran for refuge to Mary's house. Mary was too afraid to intervene. After killing his wife, Hugh came to Mary with blood on him; saying to come and see that he had found his wife dead, faking that he had just found her like that. But Mary knew well the truth. Instead of going straight with him to his house, she first went to the pub to alert her husband to what had happened, for which Jesse and others of the pub went to Hugh's house and saw that Ann truly was dead. Both Mary and the landlords son testified against Hugh and he was found guilty. It was a year after that incident, in 1860, that Jesse Froy was himself prosecuted for neglecting his family. He was apprehended in the Waverley Tea Gardens Hotel in the act of 'tossing off a pint of ale'. His children had been begging and sleeping rough, 'in the bush', one boy found sheltering in a 'delapidated fowl house', and at another time sleeping in a toilet. They would sleep in the bush, by the roadside and in outhouses. When Jesse was pulled up on this he declared that his wife Mary was as much to blame as himself and that he neither knew nor cared anything about the children. Mary was found to be at home with their latest baby, aged but 4 months. Of Jesses it was said 'he never seemed to have any business to attend to, continually loitering about the pubs' and that he was 'a worthless dissipated fellow'. His family were known to be in a wretched state, begging for food. Jesse and Mary's son George Froy married Jessie the daughter of a convict John Edwards. This John Edwards had arrived in Australia in 1814 from Liverpool on the ship Parmelia. His job in Liverpool was making ropes and he had been sentenced there, at the age of 18, to 14 years transportation for stealing 'silver plate'. Ad records do state, he had a ruddy freckled complexion and sandy red hair, grey eyes, could read and write, was a protestant, and he aldo had tattoos of a loveheart and darts and anchors and stars, as well as a blue ring tattooed on the middle ad fourth fingers of his left hand. He was held at the Australian penal settlement of Port Macquarie. In 1842 John sought permission, as a convict, to marry Agnes Thompson, who was a free immigrant, and three years later attained his certificate of freedom. Agnes was a Scots girl from Glasgow. She had travelled out to Australia, at the age of 22, in the care of an aunt and uncle, on the ship Trinidad. Back in Glasgow she had been a nursemaid, living in with a family while looking after their young children. She could read and write, her religion was 'independant' and she was in good health. Agnes and John married at Port Macquarie, known for its penal colony. This colony's distance from Sydney had made it ideal as a place of punishment for 'convicts of the worse character'. Wheever those convicts escaped into the bush, they were taken back by aboriginees in return for blankets and tobacco. Disabled convicts were also placed here, men with wooden legs, one armed or blind. Really the penal settlement had done its time when John arrived, only 'special's in small number being kept there, and free settlers like Agnes and her relatives were now interested to make a life there. On gaining freedom, John and Agnes lovde to Moruya and then to the McCleay River where they put down roots, John being a tenant farmer at Austral Eden on the Lower McCleay. The Edwards family saw much tragedy. John died of pneumonia at the age of 44 and Agnes drowned at the age of 45. As an orphan, Jessie, aged just ten years old, had to be raised by another family. It was Jessie and George Froy's daughter Agnes Lilian, who married John Edward Young, a plumber of Irish origin who had arrived with his parents, George Young and Jane Gilmore on the ship Pericles in 1878, they being farm labourers from the Bailieborough region of Cavan, Ireland, Wesleyan Methodists who had married in a Presbyterian church, so not your general catholic Irish.
John Young and Agnes Lilian's son, George Gilmore Young, married Mary Jane Barker, who had emigrated from Sunderland to Australia at the age of ten with her family. Her father, Christopher Barker, a boilermaker by trade, served in the first world war, getting mumps while on the ship journey from Australia back to England, and then while fighting in France suffered such bad gunshot wounds to his face that he needed plastic surgery. I was researching more of my Norfolk lot, the Beans, Sextons, Gayes and Presses of Bacton, Knapton, Easton, Mundlesey, Blakeney, Sidestrand, Gimmingham and North Walsham. My Sarah Gaaze of Paston, when married as a Sexton in Knapton, was a spinner of yarn, quite an old time pastime of the women of that region of Norfolk; even the term spinster for an unmarried woman derived from this activity. Before the Industrial Revolution, families were themselves 'industrious' utilising their creativity to generate income outside of labouring for employers. And in Norfolk, the area around North Walsham where my ancestors lived had since the 12th century been a place for its yarn and cloth, with weavers even having relocated here from Flanders, this being the Dutch community of Belgium, who were most skilled in this regard. With my Banes of this region having long been tailors, and my Bean ancestors being spinners, they were likely part of this Dutch derived community. Sarah was actually prosecuted, at the same time as many other women, for reeling false yarn, the 1700's being a time of the overseeing of legislation, which led to thousands of prosecutions. For this Sarah had to pay a fine. It was thanks to these Dutch and Walloon 'strangers', as they were known, that Norwich became the wealthiest city in Britain second only to London, a third of the cities population being made of these refugees. Queen Elizabeth 1st had invited so many more over during the 1560's, they being protestants escaping the Spanish Inquisition. Not only did they enrich Norfolks mercantile trade, but they are also known for bringing along their pet canaries the nickname to this day for the Norwich football team. This huge wealth died out as a consequence of the mechanised Industrial Revolution. As I also read, those canaries sang to the workers as they weaved, for when their machines made a noise the canaries would reply and keep them company throughout the long hours. The first Flemings had come to escape large scale floods. Then of course later they were escaping religious persecution. Many came from Leper in West Flanders. The English welcomed them and they were well disposed to them. As one new settler wrote home, if you were to come to Norwich you would never think of returning to Flanders. 'Bring two wooden dishes to make butter' was the advice, as the British at that time only ate pig fat.
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AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Categories
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