In genealogy I was back to looking at the 1921 censuses, seeing as I had Findmypast membership which had a monopoly on this, focusing on my Maxteds and their extended family members. And why did William Maxted's Irish wife Mary Dolan, on the 1921 census, say she was born in Cork, rather than Westmeath? Those parts of Ireland were so far apart. Notes online about this giving of different birthplaces suggest that this information gets more accurate as one gets older. Had Mary sought to hide her origins? Skeletons in the cupboard? Could there have been a single mother born babe at a convent, she being either the mother of the babe? This remained a mystery. But, yes, babes out of wedlock were there in her family, with her granddaughters Norah and seemingly my nanny Eileen. So this looking at various 1921 census for Maxted descendants was my own personal detective challenge of the moment. My Maxteds had originated in the apparently haunted Kent village of Pluckley, at some point relocating into London, and then ending up in the Hampshire town of Eastleigh. That was where William Maxted and his Irish wife Mary Dolan were living in 1921, where William worked as a boiler maker for the railway. The families married daughter who lived on the same road, Market Street, Mary Green, had begun by 1921 naming all her daughters after flowers. Another married daughter, Florence, my own ancestress, was far away in Parkestone, Essex, at 2 Bridge Cottages, for which I found a picture and recalled in this even having been there as a child when my nanny friend Nina (?) lived there, a time I'd been made to sing for everyone, where pigeons were kept at the end of the garden and all manner of home made wines were being created from fruits, barks and flowers. For all such censuses I thereafter tracked down I sourced if possible accompanying pictures of where these families had lived or pictures connected to their occupations. Some of the Maxted family had remained in London, such as William Maxteds brother and sister, Matilda and Henry, still in Nine Elms where they'd all been born. Henry worked there as a crane attendant for the railway. Other family members had moved to Brighton, Luton, Plymouth and the Isle of Wight, one of Williams brothers Frederick Maxted being an armourer of rifles, pistols and machine guns at the Admiralty supply depot in Plymouth. Back in London, at Islington, two of William's cousins, the Arnell sisters Molly and Minnie, who never married, worked worked for the animal food business of Joseph Thorley Limited at Kings Cross, specifically for the cattle foods department. And two brothers John and William Maxted, who were nephews of our own William Maxted, being sons of his deceased brother John, worked in Fulham, London, for the biscuit manufacturer Marfalane as dispatcher and packer. Of those who had moved to Luton, one cousin, Henry Pratt, the grandson of William's deceased sister Sarah, worked as a painter of the cars of the famed Vauxhall Motors long situated there.
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I decided it was my great grandma Florence Maxted's turn for the avatar and time travel experience, luckily having a few photos of her to work from, and now gaining so many delights. So happy I am for this. Florence was half Irish through her mother Mary née Dolan. I see from a photo of her mother that they have the same eyes, which my father also had; Irish eyes. Florence's fathers family came from Pluckley, the most haunted village in England. 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.
My daughter Eleanor presented to me a goddess card on this day of Mother Mary, saying to expect miracles, and one came to me indeed, this being the accessing of deep notalgia animation of ones ancestors, via their old photos. The 'miracle' in this, although really but science, was that one's still photos of the ancestors were as if brought to life, moving their eyes and faces and looking around, rather reminding one of Harry Potter's moving paintings. I actually discovered this on tiktok, and saw that it was a new app exclusive to MyHeritage.
I began experimenting with these animations for myself, seeing my ancestors as if coming to life before my very eyes, which was utterly magical for me. I wept an ocean of tears again and again, for these were my dearly beloved ancestors, whom I'd spent so much of my adult life researching, right there looking at me and all around, as if reborn. Not all the photos worked so well with this, but many did, even an indistinct very old one of my Irish great grandmother Mary Dolan, her eyes coming alive, strong eyes, shared with her daughter Florence. Mary Dolan's photo had always looked so severe and unrelateable, up until now. I reanimated all my grandparents and I animated my Shetland island great grandparents. All was incredible. And from those anmations I made a tiktok, set to the music of Edgar's 'Salut D'Amour'. This was so incredible to me that I watched it again and again. Ah, my beautiful grandma's; how I loved them. I got into trying to understand just a little something about one-to-one DNA comparisons. One of my cousins, Dee, who was the daughter of Linda, who was herself the daughter of my nanny Eileen's sister, Molly, also had her DNA online on the useful Gedmatch site. For which I could compare shared segments of chromosomes between me and her and also with my Aunty Lolly (my fathers sister). In this way I worked out what on my own chromosomes was of our shared Maxted-Dolan ancestry, this being the DNA passed onto us by my great grandmother, Florence Maxted (and of her husband Percy, he was not included, because I had pretty much observed by now that there had been no cousin links between me and his ancestors other descendants, by which I could conclude he was not really my nanny Eileen's father, supporting a hypothesis I'd had anyway). So I worked out all the chromosomal chunks shared between us three, which I could then label as of Maxted-Dolan derivation, these segments being found on chromosomes 2, 5, 7, 11, 12, 16, 17 and 20. I had it confirmed that I was on the right track with this by looking at a distant cousin match suggested to me on Gedmatch, for the person of Kevin James Young, seeing that the DNA we had common to one another was on chromosome 12 at one of those aforementioned segments. It was for this, excitedly I knew it, that he had to be of this same lineage, from either somewhere back in William Maxted's ancestry or Irish Mary Dolan's, both these great great grandparents of mine being the parents of Florence Maxted. And sure enough he was! I had to suss out the links between us myself, there having been no online tree showing our connection. But he had listed online one of his family surnames as Swinden, and it so happened that I knew well of the Swindens, from where further back they connected to my own ancestors. Even I knew of this in my head without looking it up, that William Maxted's mother, who was Sarah Green, had two sisters who married Swinden brothers. Therefore I connected up our families, by which not only did I authenticate my own family tree researches in this regard, but I saw exactly where came from that DNA chunk found on my 12th chromosome (the range being between 88,000,000 and 129,000,000 on the said chromosome), this then being what I had inherited from the Lambeth residing parents of Sarah Green, either from her father Henry Green or her mother Elizabeth Harding. My research into this rather foreboding subject of DNA comparisons had paid off. This was my breakthrough of the day. What I found most strange was that my mother and my Aunty Lolly shared a segment of DNA; like what, how come?! I knew of no connections between their two families, and yet something was there, or so the DNA was suggesting. Maybe this came through their Irish ancestresses.
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 worked on my genealogy website, looking at my nanny Eileen's quite vague Irish origins from Westmeath, and at her half Irish mother Florence whose school, which she'd attended in the poor streets of Lambeth, was so bad for bullying that one girl even died as a consequence, her head bashed on stone steps and upon a desk. Before that, and only briefly, Florences schooling was at the convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Sunderland, those same nuns infamous for their Magdalene laundries and rough treatment of single mothers. 1901 Florence started school at Lambeth in the Springfield School on her birthday 18th March. Information given: Florence Maxted, daughter of Willilam Maxted, boiler maker, address of 18 Springfield Place. Former school marked as none, then changed later to The Convent, Sunderland Violent School Children
While at Springfield School, South Lambeth, one day last August, Grace Smith, aged 8 years, was pushed down the steps at the school. She complained of pains in her head; but the mother did not find any mark of violence. On 20th October, however, she again complained, saying another child had struck her head on a desk. In more detail, another schoolgirl had 'pulled her hair until her head struck the desk'. Eventually she died in St Thomas's hospital, from pressure on the brain set up by an abscess, 'of delirium and hemorrhage', the abscess having formed behind her ear. At the inquest, the class teacher and one of the school managers, a curate of All Saints, South Lambeth, was called. The teacher said she did not hear anything about the pushing downstairs. The curate said he had been unable to obtain any trace of the children who pushed Grace or struck her head on the desk. He quite understood the possibility of pushing taking place on the stone steps, as there was only one exit for 500 children, and much crushing was inevitable. The jury found a verdict of death from misadventure. I got into looking at my aunty Lolly's ethnic DNA, which after all I had paid to get done on the Family Tree site. Apart from that which I had expected, British and Viking and some near European, there was a smaller amount of Greek which I do now know must come to me through my father. And, what was totally interesting, other than that, was a 3% Middle Eastern, 1% of this being from the east of the Middle East, that is from the Persian shores of the Caspian sea down to Mesopotamia, and the other 2% being from the west middle east, that is from Anatolia down through Lebanon and the Holy Land to the shores of the Red Sea. I was so excited by this that I couldn't sleep for ages that night, for I have long felt an emotional kind of connection to the Middle East, this being pre-Islamic, or at least non-Islamic, some connection to all the minority groups under threat in this fascinating part of the world. The next step for me is the free transferal of these results to other DNA platforms, Myheritage and Gedmatch. It was in then looking at my own DNA matches, that I spotted a new close one, quickly working out this was a third cousin descending from my Maxted line. And the tree he'd put online was so minimal that there was not even any mention of Maxteds, but as usual I had applied my detective skills. This cousin, Dominic, was just 20 years old, a scout volunteer working at the Holiday Inn and raised in Eastleigh. His mother, Jillian, then would be my second cousin, she being granddaughter to Lilian Norah Maxted, who was sister to my great grandmother, Florence Maxted. Chatting online with Aunty Lolly, about her ethnic DNA results, and sharing research I have done on the family, she talked of her grandmother (my great grandmother) Florence Maxted and of how she always took in lodgers, and had run a fruit and veg shop in Eastleigh on Desborough Road. It was far to visit, from Dovercourt in Essex to Eastleigh in Hampshire, but still the families would reunite twice a year. Lolly remembered Florence's sister, Lilian Norah, as being blind. As Jill, new found second cousin, would tell me later, Lilian Norah, who was her granny had suffered a stroke, due to an accident, at around the age of 40, hence why she was blind, for which she was also unable to talk properly. Aunty Lolly said even Florence's sight wasn't so good, for which she had as a child read aloud the horse listings for her, the family having been quite partial to a flutter. Florence always made a big bowl of soup every Saturday and everyone came round to make their bets and partake of her soup, always such times being such fun. Sometimes they would win, though the bets made were only ever small. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees ![]() I've been considering the x's, the passing on of the feminine, into both men and women, having been talking rather interestingly of this with my friend Liz at a ladies luncheon, interestingly on World Ladies Day. The subject relates to a realisation I've just had, on contemplating the strong connection I feel to my deceased nanny Eileen, even though she is not of my matriarchal line, like my granny Isabelle, rather being my fathers mother. So why do I feel her so present? My realisation is that it is down to the X. I have two x's, as science has shown us ladies, men having one X and one Y. One of my x's logically comes from my father, naturally having been passed to him by his mother, my nanny Eileen, as from his father had come only the Y. So my x from my father makes sense suddenly of how it is that I feel the strong presence of my nanny Eileen. And as for the X she had passed to my father, thereafter coming to me, this could have had one of three origins, so I ponder. She'd had two X's to select from, one being from the mystery unknown (as is my theory) father, which in turn comes his own mother, a mystery grandmother. The other X would be from Eileen's half Irish mother Florence Maxted, and that in itself would either have come from her own Irish mother Mary Dolan of Westmeath, or from her father William Maxted's mother, the maybe gypsy Sarah Green. Wow, what new world of contemplation does this now open up, the journeying of the X's. Like, what then are the sources of my own two X's? My own four children wouldn't necessarily get passed down the same one, they getting either the one passed from my nanny Eileen or the X from my own mother. This is suddenly fascinating, not something I'd considered before. Distant cousin DNA matches sometimes have an X marked by them, and what the hell was that about, my poor unmathematical brain so far dismissing even trying to understand that. But now I start to see. Matching to those distant cousin x's, theoretically, one can come to know the source of one's own. Like the X I've got from my mother, which may or may not be the same as my sister got, has to be again of one of three routes, either of my mothers paternal grandmother, Shetlander Helen Inkster, or of a direct matriarchal line from half Irish Mary Ann Seagrove, or from her patriarchal grandfather D'Auvergne's mother Hannah Bean (the latter also being a questionable potentially illegitimate lineage). A new angle for me then, and most interesting. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I still puzzle over my new autosomal update, for as far as logic will concede, the Spanish and French parts of my ethnic make-up suggest alternative fathers to otherwise husbands, somewhere along the line, and quite recently too. If Lyall Inkster, my Scottish grandfather, accounted for the Scandanavian, ie. Viking DNA, that leaves only 55% of British DNA to share amongst the three remaining grandparents. I have long anyway doubted my nanny Eileen Spencer's paternity, her mother Florence Maxted having been 9 months pregnant when she married her Percy in a registry office. And so the French part may account for this, she having been a barmaid in a port, so it may be that she was romanced by a French amour, visiting on the ships, who then returned home, never to be seen again. Or could that be the Spanish mixed with European, and what, African? Oh, how can I know? Anyway, it does look like Percy Spencer had accepted to play daddy to someone else's child. If only I could test other family members to understand this more! And other than this, somewhere, there has to have been another hidden paternity, to account for the rest of the foreign blood. And I do think this must have been on my granny Isabelle Bane's line, somehow, as both my pop George Harrison's parents looks are in our family. Could it be that Irish Thomas Seagrove also was not the father of Mary Ann? She was he firstborn of her mother Maria Harrison, she of the exotic looks, who similarly may have been the result of a foreign romancer. It could be that Maria herself may have been Spanish, mixed with Armenian and whatever else. How do I logically even try to resolve all this. Although her genetic contribution would be equivalent, in average terms, to 6% of my DNA, she could have contributed a larger chunk, as any amount of DNA can be passed on, it does not have to be uniform at all, so all really is complex in such matters. I can discount, actually, that my Eastern European is potentially Jewish. I'd not seen before that there was a separate results part relating to Jewish DNA, two categories, one for Ashkenazi and one for Sephardic, both being 0%. 0%'s, as such, are indicated for all the America's, all of Central and Eastern Asia, all the rest of Africa (but for the Central South African part), all Jewish types, the eastern part of the Middle East, nothing of Finland, not Siberia, nothing of South East Europe, and not Oceania. There isn't a separate category for Ireland, which is included in the British Isles. The great known archaeological site within the South-Central African area, of which I have 2%, was prior to European colonialism the 'Great Zimbabwe'. The vaster area is that which had led to Swahili culture. Arab traders had early on come to this region, since the 8th century, before which these lands were isolated, with some farming and iron working and many hunter-gatherer tribes. The earliest peoples here created rock art of which there are numerous examples. Another new section deals with ancient European origins, as revealed by the autosomal testing, something I'd not seen before, which shows I have more hunter-gatherer DNA than farming or metal workers: Hunter-gatherer 46% Farmer 41% Metal Age Invader 13% AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
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