I made a tiktok about our family member Edward Beane who was on the Titanic, he being my ancestor D'Auvergne Bane's cousin. On Edwards honeymoon with his beloved Ethel, as a man of second class he was not to be put on the lifeboats, as Ethel was; nevertheless, he jumped into the water and found his way to the half full lifeboat and thus was a survivor.
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I decided to try doing avatars for my other ancestors, despite a lack of photos, which can make for rough results, so I did this for my great grandfather D'Auvergne Bane, and yes, as expected, the results bore little of worth, but those that worked out were really cool, and when I shared them on social media were much liked. D'Auvergne was a gentlemanly artistic soul, whose family lived for a while in Barbados, though he was born in London.
1921 Census Day, new records released, as revealed at midnight. In a few locations in England one can view this freely, but I am in France. Therefore I would have to pay. At first I was not going to look, as it wasn't that I expected to find any vital information there. Rather I messaged my London based daughter, Eleanor, to let me know if she visits Kew Gardens, as this was one of the locations of free access (in and around the Kew Archives). But as a keen genealogist I couldn't then resist to at least have a little look, firstly just at my Welsh family (simply by transcript), then I saw that for just a little extra money one can download the originals and in my excitement ended up doing this for everyone. So the Welsh Harrisons of Varteg were the first I looked at. I already knew their ages, places of birth and occupations. What I did learn was which colliery they worked at. It was on the Varteg Hill that my great grandfather, John Harrison, worked as a colliery examiner for John Vipond & Co. My pop, his son George, was at that time a 12 year old boy. Ok, secondly I looked at my Maxted's of Eastleigh, to the family of my great great grandfather, William Maxted, who was a boilermaker on the railways. His Irish wife, Maria, who had always been a mystery, having previously said she was from Westmeath, now claimed in this 1921 census to have been born in Cork. So, yes, armed with his new information I looked once more to finding something of her origins, but still found nothing. What I did find from this census, which I had not known before, was that one of the daughters, Norah, herself had at this time an illegitimate baby in the family home, a little girl named Norah Maria Kathleen, the names of both her mother and grandmother. As for William and Maria Maxted's daughter, Florence, she had married a ships cook, Percy Spencer, and was living with him at 2 Bridge Cottages, Dovercourt, with my little 'nanny' Eileen, aged three years. Florence's younger brother, Henry, was also living with them and working as a local postman. My Shetland Inkster's I couldn't look ar as no Scottish records had been as yet released. I now looked at my Seagrove's of Greenwich. I already knew that my great great grandfather, Thomas Seagrove, was a salvage hand (retired) for the Port of London. And I looked at the Bane's . My great great grandfather, Richard Bane, was newly a widower, aged 81, living with his daughter Alma's family in Walthamstow, Alma's husband, George Reynolds, being a school teacher. All of this I knew. What was new information was Alma's birth in Barbados having been fine tuned to the location of St Anne's, where there had been a British garrison. So this was where my Bane's had lived while they were in Barbados. My 'granny' Isabelle Bane can be seen aged three living with her family at 13 Lee Road in Dovercourt. I'd not so easily found them at first, due to her father, D'Auvergne Bane, using his middle name only of Robert. I already knew that he'd worked as a checker at Parkeston Quay. In the census it specified that he worked for the Great Eastern Railway. That was it for my family in the 1921 census, nothing excessively riveting. But little by little colours are added to the family story.
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. ![]() My mothers ethnic DNA results were in. And, well, I have to say that they quite took me by surprise, because despite already having discovered that my own matriarchal DNA is exotic, the small exotic ethnic DNA percentages I have are not actually through her, but rather they are given to me by my father. She does not have them. The Middle Eastern, Anatolian and African are not at all from her. Our ancestresses leaving the matriarchal homelands, then, was in no way a recent event. What also surprises me is not only does she have less British DNA than me, but also less Viking. This means some of my Viking DNA has to come from my father. Her own Shetland blood must not have been pure Viking after all, but mixed with Pictish types/original island dwellers. The Spanish DNA is not from her, so is of my father. The French DNA, which overlaps into Northern Italy, is from her and she has a huge amount of it, 46%, almost half, which is certainly confusing to me. I only inherited 13% of the French-Italian from her, rather than 23%, sure proof there that what one inherits can be uneven and random and even differ among siblings. So it is that I can now make more sense, or maybe not much sense, of the origin of my own DNA. Oh, and I almost omitted it, that Eastern European I myself have at 1%, well, it comes through her, she having it at 2%. Her British is 35%, and her Scandinavian-Viking is 17%; really, with her inbred Shetlanders I would have expected more like 50% but not so. Having made assumptions about the family origins in light of DNA before, I am lax to go making any more assumptions. But I have to attempt to do so anyway. The huge amount of French-Italian she has, though seemingly equivalent to one of her parents, could rather come through two grandparents, for instance, Mary Ann Seagrove's black haired mother Maria Harrison, could have been Italian, and this would leave D'Auvergne Bane potentially bringing in some French. Even he has the name of a French department! Now, unless his Bane's and Bean's were from an interbreeding of French Huguenot settlers, not much watered down at all, then he could, as I have speculated before, have been adopted or an illegitimacy of his 'big sister' Alma's, and if this was connected after all with the D'Auvergne Barnards, all could make sense, as these colonials of India had, possibly, originated from France and the Channel Islands. By deduction I can speculate the origins more of my own father. Eileen Spencer's, his mother's own paternity, has always been a question mark, and with his British imput being more than my mothers, this would account for my pop George Harrison's Welsh and Forest of Dean, combined with my fathers mothers part Irish. This leaves a bundle of Spanish with rarer exotica and his Scandinavian. I am going to suppose here, with nanny Eileen Spencer having been so freckly fair, that her mystery father was a Scandinavian seaman, her mother having worked in the port; entirely guess work, of course. And I have even more guesswork. The London Maxted-Green-Roberts who I have contemplated previously to have gypsy heritage, well, it seems even more likely now, which would be why Iberian DNA is showing up. Gypsies are associated with a distant Indian tribe, and yet in all their travels did they not mix with locals of the lands they inhabited, did not runaways and people expelled from their own communities join them? Spanish, Anatolian, Middle Eastern, and somehow that bit of African added too... And if not the Maxteds, who may have been Old English mixture with Viking rather than gypsy, at least the Greens and Roberts are surnames associated with gypsy people. And, again, who knows where other illegitimacies have been? So, these are all my first thoughts anyway in trying to make sense of the matter. Certainly these latest results so amaze and give me much food for thought. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I could see that a certain dynamic was in my family ancestry from before I was born, my great Aunty Connie having engineered a kind of exclusion against my granny Isabelle and all for reasons of practicality for which it was considered kosher, for it was on account of Isabelle having had a breakdown that older sister Connie became a substitute mother to my own mum, Joey. In this surely Connie had gloried, as from childhood she had resented her prettier little sister. Connie proved herself useful, not only to the children but also to Isabelle's handsome Scottish husband, Lyall.
Great Aunty Connie was similiar to my own mother in some ways, and Connie was very much like her own mother, Mary Ann, who had come from a humble background in London. These were strong assertive women who were capable of much charm, and were eminently practical. Whereas, as my mother had pointed out, I was more like my granny Isabelle. As I saw it, Isabelle was a totally unapologetic individualist outside of the box, so I didn't mind at all the comparison. And Isabelle was rather like her beloved father D'Auvergne, who was a unique soul from a classier background, a lovely man, kind of lost from how life could have been, with so much unrealised potential, and having a silent kind of nobility. ![]() I have recreated a lovely picture of my great grandfather D'Auvergne Bane from a tiny war pass photo that needed such repairing. He was so handsome, blonde haired and blue eyed, a dapper gentleman. Really so good looking, though when I showed my daughter she said his lips are too thin. Ok, true, but he is still so very handsome. Before I'd only had photos of him as a lad and as an old man, and this is so wonderful, to now have him also as a young man. The picture is, for me, divine. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Setting up a new project, my 'genealogy passion' website, my first mission was to document interviews with older family members, though as yet I could only find a few I had done, a good long interview with my Great Aunty Connie, a couple with my granny Isabelle Bane, and just a smithereen of interviewing my nanny Eileen Spencer. Somewhere there is more, unless the fire and flood disasters had got to them. And I began to write about the life of my great grandfather, D'Auvergne Bane, not for the first time but always improving the account, and I have discovered he truly was a cousin of D'Auvergne Barnard who he was named after. D'Auvergne Barnard was the composer of our family. The correction I had to make here was that my D'Auvergne's granny was not a Bird, but an Empson, and it was she who was sister to the composers mother, Charlotte Empson. My fanciful imagination of my D'Auvergne having been a secret love child to an Ango-Indian family, I have to drop really, not that it's impossible, but seeing a dear close family connection now, that really is enough. I found from rummaging in the garage more interviews with members of the family. The only one I hadn't found now was my Shetland grandfather talking of Shetland and Scotland. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() Updating my genealogy, I became most captivated by what I found. One of my relatives, a Bean cousin of great grandfather D'Auvergne Bane, was on the Titanic when it so famously crashed into an iceberg on it's way to America. Edward Beane, he is my first cousin thrice removed. He was on his honeymoon voyage with his sweetheart Ethel, they having just married in Norwich. They now become my Jack and Rose, but with a better ending, for remarkably they both survived, and were the only ones out of 12 honeymooning couples not to have been separated for ever by the tragedy. Women and children first, that was the noble British way, with the men kept back at gun point. Ethel was put into a lifeboat, which though only half full was set away in the sea, and Edward on noting this, took his chances, jumping into the freezing waters and swimming in the darkness, it being midnight, until he could be with her. One recount says he got to her boat and she lifted him in with her own arms. Another version is that a different rowboat picked him up and not until arrival in New York did each know the other had survived. Safe on the boat, united, if this is indeed how it was, they distantly saw the final plunging downwards of the great ship, hearing not only that band still playing, but the mass wail of the remaining stranded people in the moment of their perishing, a haunting sound Ethel could not free her mind of for many years. Edward was of the family of D'Auvergne's mother, Hannah Bean, being one of her nephews. It is also in looking more at Hannah's parents, Robert and Mary Ann Beane, that I discover what is the connection to Castle Hedingham, made mention of once by my granny Isabelle. For all my fanciful contemplations of was D'Auvergne a love child, was he really descended from the D'Auvergne family, this less and less seems a possibility, even though I had noted that there was a D'Auvergne- Barnard family link to this area. Well, actually, as I now discovered, Robert Beane spent his last years in Castle Hedingham at the Great Lodge Farm, one of his daughters, Mary Ann, having married the farmer there. When his daughter and then her husband eventually died, both having left wills, and not having had any children to inherit from them, D'Auvergne and other family members may have from past assurances reckoned they were in for some of that inheritance, which would explain why D'Auvergne had to go to Castle Hedingham when Isabelle was a young girl. And his upset on returning, would be that regardless of their great wealth, he had not been left anything. It's a less fanciable story, but it would make sense. It was another Beane who inherited greatly from them, a George who worked on the railways. But not our D'Auvergne. And Robert Beane's wife, Mary Ann, who long back I had thought to be a Bird, was actually an Empson. And it was Mary Ann's sister, or was it her aunt, can't recall which, who had married the composer D'Auvergne Barnard's father. So there is a certain link now. 'An aunt' as granny Isabelle had always said, only she'd thought the aunt had married the composer rather than his father. This does after all then make me related by blood to the composer. And so I frequently brush up on my genealogy and sometimes discover the new and interesting. Much of the following day I did my research, particularly being interested in the Titanic story. My friend, Ian, who came over to visit, and who believes in conspiracy theories, told me the Titanic sinking was contrived by the Jewish Rockefeller's, as he would say indeed. Looking more at the Titanic story, at videos of those who survived and those who did not, I got weepy about it all. One lady could have survived, but would not, because she was not allowed to take her dog with her, and she refused to be separated from him. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I watched 'Who Do You Think You Ares' and researched into this D'Auvergne family whose surname had been given as a first name to my great great grandfather D'Auvergne Bane. It appears that there were originally the Jersey branch of what had further back been an aristocratic line. The Jersey D'Auvergnes moved to London, via Great Hallingbury in Essex, where an Edward D'Auvergne lived with his wife Susan, working as a clerk. At the same time, it seems, as a cousin or uncle of the same name, who was a chapel man to the king. His son was a mariner, off to India; his son was a grocer; his son was back off to India, in the military, finally at Bundelkhand where he became sickly, being sent to recuperate in Calcutta only to die there. This later D'Auvergne was buried in the same South Park Cemetery I had roamed around one time with my children. It was his daughter, Mary D'Auvergne, who married into the Barnard's. It is one of these Barnards, the composer D'Auvergne Barnard, who my granny Isabelle has said is a cousin to my great great grandfather D'Auvergne Bane. If there is truly a biological connection between my D'Auvergne and this family after all, I couldn't know this for sure unless I found an authentic descendant of the D'Auvergne family to do DNA comparison with. Only DNA can be the great decider in such matters.
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