I was now focusing on my project about the world of Caucasus white slave girls who at one time graced the harems of the wealthy. It was very much the way of affluent Persians that upon marriage the bridegroom would at the same time establish his own private harem, full of Georgian and Circassian slaves (all from the Caucasus mountains), having negotiated with the brides family how to go about this. And so it was, throughout the Near East, from Constantinople to Mecca, that those girls considered to be the most beautiful of the whole of humanity, were sold to a lusty mans pleasure. This was the last remaining slavery, long after the West Indies black slave trade was done away with, for it was something the Ottoman Empire especially, and the Arabic colonised Mohammedan world in general was lax to give up, slavery being upheld within the Koran. Those slaves who were from Nubia, African black women, were used as domestic servants, and the women of the Caucasus, prized for their beauty, were sex slaves to enjoy in ones harem, so expensive that they could only be bought by the trés riche, and who would be showered in luxury and even end up as the wives and mothers of sultans and pasha's. On the one hand it was said those girls families wanted their daughters to enjoy such wealth and opportunity, and on the other we see examples of the girls being capture and stolen away by marauders. Slavery was quite the way for most ancient peoples. Going to war against neighbouring territories was not just about acquiring land and plunder, but was about profiting from slavery. Any European was vulnerable to being stolen away, white women always the ones most highly desired by other ethnicities. Naturally I have considered this as a way my own distant ancestresses from the Caucasus would have ended up far from home. The ideal of the perfectly beautiful Caucasian woman long captured the imagination of the masses, although in our multi-cultural sensitive times I doubt this is what modern people would indulge their thoughts on; the persecutions of certain others, yes, of Africans, of the Irish famine victims, of feminist causes, of witches of old, but never do they seem to acknowledge that Europeans in their masses have suffered too. And yet our ancestors suffered immeasurably along the path towards civilisation and human rights. My impoverished Londoners lived through horrendous situations, and those are but our people of more recent history, which we may identify and find records about; what to speak of those whose stories are ever lost to us. When I look at slavery I know not in what ways this personally affected my ancestors, other than that this would have been a reality among which they lived. Interestingly I have seen a theory, now presented, that Leonardo Da Vinci's own mother was a Circassian slave, Catherina, whom his father, as a lawyer, managed to gain freedom for. To our ancestors such women were the most beautiful of creation, which in itself presents another challenge to modern peoples, that women of fair features and pale skin may have been regarded to have in some way attained aesthetic superiority. And yet our ancestors had no qualms with that. It was just so, whether this came from the perspective of Europeans or darker ethnicities. In 1819 when the Persian ambassador came to London, he did so with the companionship of his most prized Circassian slave woman, and with a carriage of black slave eunuchs to guard her. So much did the Londoners wish to set eyes upon her beauty that in great numbers they would stand outside the ambassadors house in Berkeley Square, but she was well hidden, her rooms constantly guarded by two of the black eunuchs with sabres in their hands. She became an invisible celebrity, said to be musically adept and to have a cultivated mind. Esteemed gentlemen guests to the home never hd the opportunity themselves to see her. But as for some of the women of high society, they were made allowance of, and one of those ladies sketched a picture of her, full length and in traditional dress, which she gifted to the lady proprietor of the house, who in turn sold it to the Lady's Magazine, who printed this, at a cost, for their readership. What a scoop they had, the face that so many had wished to set eyes upon. In 1841, when an Austrian man, Baron Welzlar, converted in Constantinople to Islam, his sponsor there gifted him a beautiful Circassian slave. This was the stuff of dreams and fantasies. In 1856 the sultan of Constantinople gifted 75 Circassian female slaves to an old man of Mecca. Both the Russians and the British tried to stop this white slave trade, but for long it continued, and yet who knows of such history, not so many really.
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I've learnt how to do cropped screenshots on my new MacBook, which is so cool for newspaper excerpts on my current projects, which right now were about witchcraft and the slave girls of the Caucasus, in the same manner as I had done for the gypsies. Basically I was making a presentation on my genealogy website, looking deeply into these matters, in accordance with surviving newspaper articles which I'd earlier made note of, while adding more of current research. This began with a paper from back in 1679 relating to the witches of Bo'ness, or Barrowstones as it was written back then. They were a bunch of widows, in the main, who were accused of consorting with the devil. As it was written on the official paper, the crime of witchcraft is declared to be a horrid abomination, capital crime, punishable with the pains of death. Annabel Thomson, one of the witches, was said to have encountered a black man on more than one occasion while out and about, and it was he who was said to be the devil. The first time she'd met him, he'd expressed empathy for her struggles in life, promising her that if she followed him her life would be so much better. She didn't take him up on his proposal, not until coming across him again five weeks later. I do wonder if this romance she then found herself in was indeed with a man of colour, and maybe even a man of the gypsy travelling community, who were indeed known for their magical powers. At the time of their second encounter she'd been on her way to the coal hill, early in the morning, and upon her accepting that this time she would follow him he threw her to the ground and they had 'carnal copulation'. From then on, he and another man friend, William Craw, would meet her in the nights, with other ladies too, to party and dance and drink ale, the 'black man' playing a pipe to provide the music. It was in her final meeting with him, when she was on her way to the Grange coal hill, that he invited her to drink ale with him in the salt pans. Another woman, Margaret Pringle, also had carnal copulation with this black man. They'd held hands together, after which for eight days her hand was in pain. Another widow, Margaret Hamilton, had been lovers with this man for 8 or 9 years. They'd first met at the town well, where they had got into conversation. She took him back to her home where they drank ale and got intimate, for which in gratitude he'd given her a gift of gold. Another woman, also with the name Margaret Hamilton, had known this man for the longest. She recalled experiencing him as a black man in copulation, and yet upon his leaving he having the appearance of a black dog. Although the sentence for such consorting was to be burnt at the stake, the witches were first to be 'wirried', that is they were estranged by wire, their bodies thereafter being burnt to ashes. Some of the newspaper articles after that time referenced the Auto de Fé's of Spain and Portugal, in which the monks of the inquisition regularly made victims of not only witches, but also polygamists and converso's, who had in the past converted from Judaism to christianity, but who were observed to be lapsing back into their old ways. I'd seen of this before in regard to Goa in India, where Portuguese settlers who were too much familiarising themselves with the ways of Hinduism themselves became victims to the Inquisitors. Sometimes those accused of being witches were simply healers who had cured people of that considered to be incurable. This included a man who was a surgeon and had merely been too good at his job. In 1726, at the village of Burnt Pelham (now known as Brent Pelham), near St Albans, an old lady was brought to trial as a suspected witch, only for the judge to on but a glance dismiss her, as he could not take seriously that such a homely old woman would be involved in witchcraft. And this was even though it had always been the old women who were more largely the ones being prosecuted. In consequence of the judges words it was after reported that by current opinion of the learned, none but the young and beautiful were truly the witches. This created a panic among the beautiful young ladies of the area, serval of whom absconded for fear of being targeted as witches, for all the men about who were charmed by them. In Hungary, at Segedin, witches continued to be burnt alive, as was recorded in the British newspapers in 1728. One of the victims there was an 82 year old man, who'd been a former judge of the town, said to have practised the dark arts for 50 years. Another was a midwife who'd baptised 200 children in the name of the devil. Meanwhile in England attitudes to witchcraft were changing, the intellectual classes generally dropping such superstitions, while country folk themselves clung longer onto such beliefs. This meant that although the authorities no longer took such accusations seriously, the general poor were still blaming local calamities upon old widows, and sometimes without any authority would take such matters into their own hands. One example, in 1731, occurred at Frome in Somerset. A child of the Wheeler family, who live in the forest, had taken ill with 'extraordinary fits', for which it was assumed that she had been bewitched. The culprit was assumed to be an old lady known as Goody Richards, who lived at nearby Witham Friary. And so this old lady was dragged out of her home by a mob, and was taken two miles on horseback to a millpond where she was stripped of her upper clothes, her legs tied together and a rope around her waist, and she was thrown into the water. 200 spectators were there making noise and abetting the riot. She swam like a cork, even though they plunged her several times. Whenever dunked she consumed plenty of water, for which she was pulled out almost dead. Brandy was poured into her mouth to revive her, she was dragged into a horse stable and there thrown into the sewage, still in her wet clothes. In but an hour she was dead. 40 people had directly taken part in plunging her, and masses of witnesses had been there, but all remained silent when the authorities did their utmost afterwards to find out who had been the ringleaders of this affair. The locals remained satisfied that the old witch, as they called her, had been destroyed, and for the 'fine sport' they'd had in 'swimming her'. By 1735 the statute against witchcraft was repealed and those who continued to duck witches would now themselves be guilty of crime. And yet still the lynchings continued. In that same year, at Nantby, a poor shoemaker, John Kinsman, was suspected to be a wizard who had conspired with the devil, and all because the 'lazy' dairymaid seemed no more able to make good butter and cheese. John was taken by the mob to be ducked at a pond in Kelmarsh, whereon another younger and stronger man, named Barwick, intent on saving his life, offered to be ducked in his place. He survived those waters, whereas the shoemaker likely would have not. And so these stories continued. And the question arises, why were suspected witches dunked in water and if floating considered guilty, and the answer is that the witch would have renounced her baptism by water, for which the water now would not receive her. At another ducking, at Oakley, in Bedfordshire, a visiting gentleman who was a bystander to such an event ultimately stepped in to save the life of the targeted woman. In Bedfordshire, in that area, so prevalent was the belief in witches that, as the gentleman said, 'One would think oneself in Lapland were you to hear their ridiculous stories'. It was a 50 years old lady at that time being ducked, which she was in agreement to, to save hers and her children's reputations. What is more the parish authorities had offered her a guinea if she should sink. The appointed place was at the river Ouse, by a mill, and there were 500 spectators. At eleven in the morning she arrived and was tied into a sheet, but for her face and hands showing, her thumbs tied together, and likewise her big toes, and her hands being tied to the small of her legs. A rope was fastened around her waist and into the water she was thrown. Unhappily for her she didn't sink, even though for as long as a minute and a half her head was under water. She was taken out, half dead, and when she'd managed to take a breath the experiment was repeated. Each time she floated, for which the crowd were shouting 'A witch, a witch, drown her'. The poor lady was lain once more down upon the grass, unable to speak and almost dead, as people threw insults at her, not any pity nor compassion, but for the visiting gentleman who now took it upon himself to protect her. He cut the strings which bound her and carried her to safety in the mill, and he reasoned with the people, at risk to himself, near to being mobbed by the crowd. He appealed to them that this was an unreliable experiment, as any woman of her age tied up in a sheet would float. In Portugal, the Auto de Fé's continued, there always being Jews in trouble for not being authentic converted christians, all of whom were burnt, and there even being a nun accused of being a sorceress. It's so that Joan of Arc had been regarded by the English to be a witch, an article in 1748 looking back on this. The English soldiers so believed her to have been sent by the devil that her very presence terrified them. At length, she was convicted of witchcraft and burnt, that it may be fulfilled, which was spoken of by the prophet, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live'. In 1749, a ship off the Capes of Virginia, being blown far off course by a rough storm, led to an elderly woman on board, suspected of being a witch causing all of this, being thrown overboard. All such perpetrators would in turn be punished, and yet people kept upholding the need for such actions to be taken against witches, supported by the mobs around them. I still see this in people today, just as deluded, ignorant and aggressive, lacking in intellectual reason, those who make up part of our democratic evolved lands, who get included in all our devision making, so that as with friends I know even, sickness is not something natural, but is to be blamed on chemtrails, evil plots and the depopulation agenda of those who govern us, and rogue tyrants who gain power and create havoc are portrayed as saviours, and even terrorists gain worldwide support from those whom they would in turn destroy. Such low consciousness in people is potentially brutal and dangerous, as can be seen with the witch hunts of the past, but such people never seem to have the ability to see all this themselves. This has always been one of humanities struggles, with at least some of the elements within society pursuing ignorant causes, whether those in leadership, or the general people, or both. Witchcraft persecutions are the craziest example of this. All our ancestors lived in such a climate, whether victims themselves, astounded bystanders, or perpetrators and their collaborators. Until there came the Age of Enlightenment, looking to scientific and logical explanations for what happens in the world, rather than aligning with sinister and harmful superstitions. I always said it, that the people of my own village would have had me done for a witch years ago. there's a reason why scapegoating others is still called making a witch hunt. To survive in those olden times one needed to be humdrum and the same as most others, and in no way exceptional, unless one had the privilege of wealth and nobility, and even then at times one may have become a victim. The freedom we now have, to be as we are by nature, so long as it harms no other, is as precious as a jewel and should never be taken for granted. Again, in 1751, there was a mob action against suspected witches, for which the ringleader of the attack, Thomas Colley, was later executed. The victims that time were an elderly couple, the Osborne's of Tring. It was announced in three separate markets that they were to be ducked, for which 10,000 people came to witness and take part in their demise. The mob pulled down a portion of the workhouse where the couple stayed, and set fire to the rest, only to discover the couple were actually taking shelter in the church vestry. The mob broke in there, tied the old couple together by their thumbs and big toes, and carried them to the water for their ducking, during which the old lady, Ruth Osborne, perished, and Thomas Colley had to take account before the law for what he had done. Even into the 1800's such incidents continued, so stubborn that the people were about not giving up their old ways. In a Biblical context these actions were sanctioned by Scripture, touted confidently by the witch hunters, for the line 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live'. Therefore in seizing and burning witches these people were carrying out the word and command of God. In such a way the Bible was turned from being a helper of humanity to a hinderer of progress, which should serve as a warning to people that just because a church or any religion teaches something or other does not mean that thing is true. It was back in 1848 that the Pope had first ordered the inquisitors to hunt out and put to death all practisers of the diabolic art, after which the Reformation changed little in this regard, protestants being just as eager to condemn any woman suspected of selling her soul to the devil. The old Biblical reaction against witches is still believed in by born again Christian types, like one ex new ager lady I know, who online sensationalises the witchery issue and goes on and on about it, gaining fame in such circles for herself for being an 'ex witch', now repentant and exposing all, although she was never truly an old style sorceress but merely someone who'd been exploring the divine feminine, now sharing regularly former stunning photos of herself when she'd been doing the devils work, along with artful videos, aesthetic and compelling to see, but still damning, the modern PR of demonising those who explore their spirituality in any way other than evangelical Christianity. She's a beauty and content in her world, but does no favour to women and their natural explorations into the world of goddesses and the divine feminine. Even herbal healing she dismisses and demeans as demonic, like the inquisitors of old who had turned on healers and midwives. In this she never relents, feeding unnecessary ignorance into her small minded American based community. In olden times the witch would not have been suffered to live. She is an enabler and a driving force for where all this is at in current times, within that very specific sect of western christianity. It's bizarre. Like one wanders here who really got into the clutches of the demonic, the free spirited one or the accuser whose weapon as always is their favourite scripture.
My mum phoned me, saying she and her partner Brian wished me to do some genealogy research for them. Brian's half sister, Doris, had just died from vascular dementia, and for her son, who knew so little, they wanted to find out where Doris was born and what was the name of her own mother, as even that much was unknown. This mysterious mother, she'd barely married Brian's father, Ernest Russell, when she died of lukemia. So this little challenge I focused on for some time, eventually phoning back with the results. Doris Evelyn Russell, her birthplace then, that was Bromley, born there in 1934, and as for her mothers name, she was Edith May Neller, born in Poplar, in 1905. As an extra, Edith May Neller and Ernest Russell had married in 1932, in Plaistow. So, yes, I answered the posed challenge and a little more besides, like finding newspaper articles for both mother and daughters marriages, and I found Edith May, aged 15, in the census of 1921, living with her family at 84 Holly Bush Street, Plaistow, her own mother, Mary Ann Neller being by this time a widow, Edith's father, Harry Neller, having been a gas works stoker. For this I earned my mums praise, she thanking me for 'hard work and information found'.
Lately, a message came to me on FindMyPast from a young lady called Amy, who was a descendant of Lillian Norah Maxted, the sister of my great granny Florence. Only after some years of research had she discovered that their mother was Irish Mary Dolan. As I had a photo of Mary Dolan, she wished to know if this was authentic, and yes was my answer. Amy was in contact with another lady of our family, Jill, descended like her from Lillian Norah, and it so happened I was already friends with Jill on Facebook, since mine and her sons dna results had linked us as cousins. Amy went quiet after this tiny exchange, but Jill herself was now sharing information about our family with me. which she in turn had been hearing from her Aunty Doreen, Amy's granny, who was a surviving daughter of Lilian Norah Maxted and her husband William Garwood. This Aunty Doreen, who still, like the others lived in Eastleigh, was rather old, aged 91, and yet was 'as sharp as a button'. How cool it was that she was still going strong at such a great age. Lilian Norah's husband, William Garwood, was mustard gassed in World War 1, from which he never properly recovered, life always being a struggle, inhibiting their raising of a family and finding work. William was hunch backed, had many health issues, and ended up living in a home, where he died at the age of 36. As for Lillian Norah, she had a personal tragedy herself, an awful mishap befalling her when she was aged 40. She was at that time out, walking with her baby, Pat, in his pram, when a roof time fell onto of her from the Co-op building in Eastleigh. This knocked her unconscious, and soon after that episode she had a massive stroke, the consequence of which she went blind.
These ladies were all my Eastleigh relatives, descended from the Maxteds of Nine Elms, and they had photos to share, but none with any descriptions on the back, for which it was not much known who was who. One lovely photo of a young lady, she was said to be of the Maxted family, but not who she actually was, so that for now she would have to stay a mystery person. Genealogy, so time consuming, much to look at, and often nothing to find. and then hurray, a little treasure of information presents itself. In my case it was discovering that my Irish Greenwich based Bartholomew Sugrue was godfather to another families child. Bartholomew the Godfather. Godparents are never, as yet, included in transcriptions, for which this was really quite a find. Getting to such a find involves a whole lot of detective work which could lead nowhere. Here, it was from looking at the lives of those who had been godparents to Bartholomew's own children and looking up their own family records. The Graney family, also from Ireland and settled in Greenwich, had been godparents in 1860 to Bartholomew's daughter, Catherine, registered in the baptisms of the Roman Catholic records of Our Lady Star Of The Sea, at Greenwich, when she was just over a year in age. And then, such joy for me, like really, to find that the very next year, in 1861, our Bartholomew was in turn a godparent to the Graney's son, William Joseph Graney. Of this Graney family, friends to the Sugrues, the head of the household, John Graney, worked with Bartholomew in the building trade, and his wife, Mary Graney, née Kane, I saw that by 1881 she was a widow, just about surviving as a hawker on the streets, and interestingly her place of origin was listed, maybe being another clue to the Sugrue families own origins, all being from County Kerry, her hometown being Castleisland at the beginning of the Vale of Tralee, a town surrounded by hills and boglands, atop a vast cave system known as Crag Cave, within which were the underground waters of the Green Lake. Ah, I have tried and tried, and yet have never found a baptism in Ireland for Bartholomew Sugrue, for which I wonder if his family were travellers, not bothering with the system and its obligations; like it's so that Bartholomew never bothered legally registering his children births when living in Greenwich, even though by law one had to do so. And then again, some of the Irish settlers appear to have used alternative names, such as Garrett London, who was a godfather for Bartholomew's son Daniel in 1857 and yet called himself Garrett Barry in the 1851 census. And at the time of the marriage of Bartholomew's grown up son, Thomas (my ancestor), instead of giving his fathers name as Bartholomew Sugrue, Thomas said he was James Seagrove, although we can surmise that by then Thomas wished to disassociate from his fathers scandals. This family continues to fascinate me, and the next day I happily found out more about the Sugrues. I'd not realised it before, but Bartholomew's close friend, Patrick Reardon, who had been best man at his wedding to his first wife Ellen Sullivan, was actually his brother in law, Ellen being none other than Bartholomew's sister, Ellen Sugrue. This and more I was finding out by grace of the Roman Catholic records of our Lady Star of the Sea on FindMyPast, which I had paid a lot to join for a year, but which was yielding anyway these delightful finds for me. Bartholomew's sister, Ellen, was a few years older than him, and this sibling connection explains how it is that these two families were so entwined. It was in looking at a baptism of Patrick and Ellens daughter Mary Ann Reardon, that I saw a side note saying sub-conditional, which at first I though meant handicapped in some way, but actually it referred to a child that may or may not have been previously baptised. Well, it was on that baptism, that I saw Ellen Reardon's surname prior to marriage revealed: she was a Sugrue. I next found that Bartholomew Sugrues first wife, Ellen Sullivan, was a godmother to Patrick and Ellen Reardon's first child, Helen (Ellen) in 1846. It was three months after that baptism that she and Bartholomew married, and then, as I know, having had one child together, Ann, Ellen became very ill in the summer of 1849 with cholera and died. And as for another of Patrick and Ellen Reardon's children, Catherine, Bartholomew's second wife, Catherine Sheehan, was the baby girls godmother in 1855. I happened now to find the Roman Catholic version of Bartholomew Sugrue's marriage to his first wife, Ellen Sullivan, which had more detail than the official certificate, on account of it giving the names and locations of the couples parents. Ellen Sullivans parents were John and Ellen Sullivan of County Kerry. Bartholomew's parents were Thomas Sugrue (I'd already known he had Thomas as a father) and Joanna, which I had not known, they being of County Kerry. So for all of this I could add two new people to my tree, Joanna as Bartholomew's mother and Ellen as his sister. Sad it was to see that his sister, Ellen, died in 1865 aged 45. Interestingly, in one of the census's Ellen gave her place of birth as Church Hill in County Kerry, at last the best clue yet as to where Bartholomew himself may have been born. The Roman Catholic residents of that village, at the time when they would have been there, attended an old and dilapidated chapel, in nearby Chapeltown.. This was due to the original medieval Roman Catholic Church of their own village, on its splendid old hill, with its fine views of the sea, having been long been supplanted by a protestant church. Back in the 1700's, this whole area had been a place of smuggling and the village itself was a protected archeological site. Eventually Church Hill would have a Roman Catholic Church again , but not till after the Sugrue's would had left for England, the church to be St Marys, Star of the Sea (like the church in Greenwich). Tralee, from where was the lovely folk song I used to sing on the piano, was the nearest sizeable town, 10 klms away. Patrick Reardon himself was from Waterville in County Kerry, and we see now another of the family friends, Mary Kane was from Castleisland. And it's fine enough to piece together information once these folk were in England, but Irish records are still as vague and untraceable as ever.
I was still filling in all my known ancestors onto FindMyPast, almost complete, but for the masses of my Shetland family, this being rather complex for their many intermarriages back to the times of royalty. I at last got one line going back to King James V, leading up to James's lover, Elizabeth Carmichael (some say her name was not Elizabeth but Catherine). The other line I have leads to another of his lovers, Euphemia Elphinstone, with more intermarrying of her descendants, and I had yet to tackle that. Both these lovers of the king were my ancestresses, the kings real sweethearts, rather than his later royal wives.
It is John Stewart who was Elizabeth Carmichael's son by the king, illegitimate, although later legitimised, his sister being the famous Mary, Queen of Scots, who apparently found him adorable for his 'leaping and dancing' in all those noble pursuits with which the aristocracy and royals entertained themselves at the time, like in the equestrian game 'running at the ring', especially popular with the Tudors, and in most of these games it being the way to dress up as colourful characters, whether that be men dressing as women, or as people of foreign lands, or the wearing of masks. John Stewart and his friends were ones to get up to mischief. One time, being denied entry to one house, to which they had come wearing masks, they broke the door down, for which the following day a brawl broke out in the market place. Mary Queen of Scots gave John a big telling off for this. Sometimes John went on trips to France, accompanying either Mary Queen of Scots or his stepmother Mary of Guise. The French king, being well disposed to him, even gifted him an abbey, the Abbey of Flavigny en Auxois. I found something of interest, looking again at Roman Catholic baptisms for my Sugrue family in Greenwich, which I'd formerly at last accessed from, yes, FindMyPast at Kew Record Centre. What I now found was another baptised child of the family, hitherto unseen, Carmelita Jane. This baby must not have survived so long. What a super name Bartholomew and Catherine had chosen for her, Carmelita, which derives from Mount Carmel in the Holy Land, which means a beautiful lush garden, essentially the beauty of nature. I do wonder if they had been inspired by the lovely grand gardens of Greenwich, the Greenwich hill being nicknamed by them, and maybe others of the Irish community, Mount Carmel, or so I imagine. Even the godmother chosen for Carmelita had an unusually colourful name, Concetta, a name referring specifically to the immaculate conception.
I at last got immersed in genealogy work once more setting up a family tree from scratch, on FindMyPast which I had just joined for a year. For now I was focusing on my Welsh people, getting back to my centenarian ancestresses of Wonastow, and finding new information, by grace of Findmypast, which was that my Molly Morgan, who had lived for 103 years had the maiden name of Elias (I had not known that). Molly had been born in 1763, in Wonastow, her parents being William and Ann Elias. I found her wedding at last, now that I knew her maiden name, it being in 1784 that Molly, with her official name of Mary Elias, married Thomas Morgan, on 29th December, at the church of St Winaloe in Wonastow. It was in contemplating this new information, that I wondered if Mollys grandmother would then be another aforementioned centenarian of Wonastow, written of in the papers, even from one of the same articles in which Molly's story was shared, this older ladies name being Ann Watkins. And so what connections may I find out in regard to this? Well, Molly's mother, Ann Elias, someone had transcribed her own maiden name to be Haskins, upon her marriage to William Ellis in 1762, and one could not see the original from which this had been taken, but this was similar enough to Watkins, which in the rough handwriting of the time may have looked the same. And the paper had mentioned Ann Watkins being buried with another related centenarian, a Mrs James, so was this her mother or a sister? Even I see from church records that Molly herself had a sister, known as Mrs James, she being Elizabeth Elias, born in Wonastow in 1770 who married a Richard James in 1794. Although we would be looking at an older Mrs James here. Molly Morgan of Wonastow, known now to have been born and raised as Mary Elias, there had been plenty of newspapers about her great age, as I have written of before. I'd found her home even, Gorse Cottage at Treowen, this being the cottage she had been born in, and would later die in, working even when old from there as a midwife. Now, suppose Molly's granny was indeed the written of Ann Watkins. Well, her life story was written of in that same newspaper article, stating that she had died in 1823 at the age of 104, meaning she would have been born in 1719. As the paper had also shared, she had spent her married life in England, at Brinsop in Herefordshire, on account of this being where her husband was from, and not until she was a widow did she return to Wonastow, her son William Watkins being close by, he being the miller of the Wonastow Corn Mill. I found that indeed there was a William Watkins, born in Brinsop to a Thomas and Ann Watkins, in 1763. During her life she'd had nine children and had long been a tenant to the family at the grand Wonastow House. Her 'relative' with whom she was buried, Mrs James, was said to have already died at the age of 101. With my own Welsh grandfather, their descendant, having lived till 100, this was an interesting long life phenomenon worth looking into. As for Molly's daughter, Ann Morgan, also my ancestress, her married surname being Thomas, she herself lived for 104 years, and I was now finding out about her grown up daughter's families, all living in and out of one another's houses, swapping their children and grandchildren around. In 1851, according to the census of the time, when Molly Morgan and her daughter Ann Thomas were widowed and elderly, living with one another, they were residing next to other close family members, the Matthews and the Potter families, which Ann's daughters had married into, with a related Jones connection showing up as well. The present miller at this time, on account of William Watkins having having long died, was Thomas Potter, the husband of Molly Morgans granddaughter, Esther. I now found a newspaper article I'd not seen before for the death of Ann Watkins in 1823. An interesting note is made of a strange coincidence for both the burials of Mrs James and Ann Watkins, it being that the river Trothy both times had flooded its banks so that the procession with the bodies to the place of burial was not an easy task. Ah, yes, I was once more immersed on genealogy, my favourite hobby.
Looking up some genealogy, I still have that ever query as to whether Percy Spencer was really my nanny Eileen's dad or not. I've never had any cousin matches to confirm any genetic lineage through Percy, as happens with other lineages; I thought to check my relationship calculator between me and my cousin Dee Lovelock of Luton, who has also tested her own dna, to see if a clue may lie there, Percy Spencer for sure being her own great grandfather, through my nanny Eileen's later sister, Molly. Always the issue with baby Eileen is that her mother, Florence, married Percy just two weeks before Eileen was born, along with the fact that he was considerably older, as also that his family were reluctant to accept these sudden new additions to the family. They'd had a firm story to allay all doubts, which was that he had been at sea, hence why they could not have married earlier. Nevertheless, such a story remains something to question. And it doesn't help for there to be no corroborating cousin dna connections, which is always essential to confirm a lineage is authentic.
And, lo and behold, although Dee is for sure my second cousin, the dna result concludes her to be a third cousin, that is more distant, which would support our not having the same great grandfather. So that's interesting. Like I'd hate to be denying Percy if he was genuinely my ancestor after all, but I need some proof here. I know that, regardless, he doted on young Eileen; for sure she was precious to him. The research I had done on Percy's Essex ancestry, was along with our Norfolk heritage some of the first genealogy I'd done, but is any of it even relevant?! Marc Sirota turned up to fix some of my broken floor tiles, and while he was doing that, he having in conversation mentioned that his maternal granddad once had had an apothecary in Garstang, I looked up on my iphone what I could find more on this for him. And indeed I came up with much information. The name I first had to discover, Henry Copeland Thomas. Henry was a rich and successful man. As Marc knew, Henry had been a cheat, having children secretly with other women, and he was a gambler who left his family destitute when he died. He had perished young, at the age of 44, collapsing on the bathroom floor. He was a freemason, traumatised in France during the Great War, a cricketer, a pigeon breeder and a fisherman, involved with this and that local association, his uncle being the Mayor of Rochdale. His father, Joseph Thomas, was the breeder of the Lady Egg-a-Day chicken. The apothecary had already been in the family for 100 years, since it was acquired by granddad Jonathan Jowett Thomas. Why was the family left destitute? As I found out from Henry's will, all his money had been left to William Astbury, a retired builder. Such money would have equated to nearly 3 million pounds today. When Marc went I spent some time looking more at this line of his family. I'd researched previously his fathers Jewish lineage, but not as yet his mothers side. One of his ancestresses of Garstang, whose lineage I looked into, came from a family of hatters and felters, descended from Quaker families.
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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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