I now did my grandfather 'pop' George Harrison's time travel and avatars, always a joy for me. And other ancestors, I shall gradually do likewise. How wonderful is this technology. My pop was from the Welsh hills bordering onto England and he lived for 100 years.
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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.
In genealogy I got to looking at my Welsh ancestry of Wonastowe. I knew my pop's ancestress Mary Ann Thomas had lived like him to a ripe old age, she having died at the age of 104 and he nearly aged 101. Well, now I discovered Mary Ann Thomas's mother, Mary Morgan of Treowen Gorse, was also a centenarian, she having lived till 103. This had been written of in the papers: 'Mary Morgan, aged 103, at Wonastowe. Though having reached an advanced age, she retained her faculties nearly to the last. During her long life she was actively employed in doing good, and after passing her 100th year, she was carried to the cottage of a neighbour and by her timely aid saved the life of the mother and child.' It did say on one of the census's that Mary Morgan was a nurse aged as late as 99 even, which appeared to have covered being the village midwife. 1861 Census Wonastow, Monmouthshire Treowens Gorse Mary Morgan, age 99, widow, nurse, born Wonastow Mary Thomas, daughter, age 76, widow, born Wonastow And here they were ten years earlier in the 1851 census: 1851 Census Wonastow, Monmouthshire Mary Morgan, age 88, widow, annuitant, born Wonastow Mary Morgan, daughter, age 65, widow, agricultural labourer, born Wonastow And ten years earlier still in the 1841 census: 1841 Census Wonastow, Monmouthshire Gorse Mary Morgan, age 75 Ann Thomas, age 55, and her husband, John Thomas, age 60, carpenter, he being born outside of Wales and their daughter, Esther Thomas, age 20, born outside of Wales Certainly there was a long life gene in my Welsh lineage. And there was another article I found about Mary Morgan; 'A Centanarian - Our obituary records the death of Mary Morgan of Wonastowe, better known as Molly Morgan, who has been borne to her sepulchre after an extended pilgrimage of 103 years. It is said that she was born in the house in which she died. ' This house would be Treowen Gorse in the grounds of a mansion farmhouse Treowen House. 'Certain it is, she was never known to live in any other (house). She had been a widow beyond the memory of most of us and had led a blameless and religious life. Her faculties were preserved to the last and within these three weeks she was carried to a neighbouring cottage to see a poor woman in her confinement. her memory was particularly tenacious, she would converse about even trifling incidents which had happened in former years, as well as remember circumstances of very remote occurrence. She was always cheerful and grateful for the visits of any who felt interested in her. A daughter who lived with the venerable matron' (this being Mary Ann Thomas) 'and who survives her is 79 years of age.' When Mary Ann Thomas herself died (1885 Abergavenny Chronicle): 'Death on 15th October at Wonastowe, near Monmouth, Mrs Ann Thomas, aged 104 years. Mrs Thomas's mother died in the same house at the age of 103 years.' There were other examples previously of women living till over 100 in this village. For example Ann Watkins born in 1719, she died in 1823 aged 104, being a native of Brinsop in Herefordshire, she having married and settled there, only returning to Wonastow for the last thirty years of her life to live with her son William Watkins of the Wonastow Corn Mill. She was for long a tenant to the family at Wonastow House. She had nine children.
And a relative of hers, Mrs James, had died previously at the age of 101, Ann Watkins remains being put in the same tomb as Mrs James in the Wonastow churchyard. I do so wonder if these ladies were also Ann Morgans relatives! I found a photo of my Welsh Harrison's ancestral cottage in the Welsh section of a book of Great Britian and Northern Europe that I was looking at. This was at Llanthony, near Abergavenny, not that the book said this, but I recognised it. This was the home of the original George Harrison, my great great great grandfather. My Harrison's living in this cottage as Llanthony, as revealed in the census's: 1841 Census Upper Cwmyoy The Mill George Harrison, age 50, with family, and wifes nephew Jeff Jones age 3. 1851 Census Upper Cwmyoy, Mill House, Llanthony George Harrison, age 55, miller, born in Glamorgan Margaret Harrison, wife, age 53, born Brecon Children: Lewis, 28, agriultural labourer; Margaret, 16; Martha, 11 - all born Upper Cwmyoy Elizabeth Harrison, grandaughter, age 2, born Upper Cwymyoy William Parry, visitor, age 45, unmarried, carpenter, born Upper Cwmyoy 1861 Cenus Upper Cwmyoy, Mill Cottage, Llanthony
George Harrison, age 70 and a widower, with daughter Elizabeth as housekeeper and grandaughter Elizabeth aged 12 ![]() I have discovered a new record, a register from 1939 for all English and Welsh households, compiled to gain information for future war purposes, for the likes of giving out war passes, and later, ration books. Some names are for now blacked out, so not everyone can be found. Using this register I have found my father as a baby in the Welsh mountains with his mother, my nanny Eileen, being with her husband Pop's family, minus Pop himself who was back in Dovercourt with Eileen's family. A kind of swapping of family situations was going on there. I do remember my nanny Eileen saying she'd had to be sent to the healthy air of the Welsh mountains due to a tuberculosis shadow having shown up in her lungs. It was fun updating all the relatives and ancestors with new information from the 1939 register. The 1921 census was destroyed by fire and a 1941 census hadn't even been taken, so the register fills in a much needed gap. Not that any census's beyond 2011 are permitted to be looked at as yet anyway. Through this register I have learnt that the ship our Percy Spencer was a chef on was called the Malinas, making trips regularly between Harwich and Antwerp, and the ships bombing during the war, which had put him off working on the sea evermore, was when the navy had adopted it as a convoy escort vessel and Germans had torpedoed it near Port Said in Egypt. So that's where our Percy had got to then. As for my Pop, George Harrison, he is written of as having been part of the personnel at HMS Ganges across the river at Shotley Gate, there where he had remained till it had closed down in 1976, after many years of travelling to and from work on a ferry boat across the estuary. The HMS Ganges with its Indian prince figurehead was a naval training facility and Pop was part of the maintenance team. The Trog was the name of the boat especially laid on for the HMS Ganges workers. Using the 1939 register I am now working on updating all my accumulated friends genealogies. AuthorAuthor Susie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I have been absorbed in writing info in my genealogy website for my ancestor, George Harrison the original, the miller of Llanthony, which I work at till half past three in the morning. I still feel I need to weave something magical through his story before I can conclude. The only glimpse I get into his personality is him exposing himself in Abergavenny, and I'm not sure what that says! As for his last days, they were in the workhouse. The seeds began in those workhouse days for our present day norm of institutionalising the old, with strangers caring for them rather than ones family. In reading of Wales I wanted to be there, which is the same when I focus on Shetland for those islands, and regarding Kerry in Ireland for my Irish. That night I didn't sleep easily, and when I did I dreamt that my ancient Scottish home was Rio Dolmen. I do look this up the next morning and such a place does not exist. Suspending Welsh genealogy for now, I write up about my ancestress Eleanor Caroline Barton, a line I am far more attuned to, studying her childhood orphanage days. The Queen herself was patroness of Eleanor's orphanage. and gave donations. The orphan girls would sing to audiences to gain more donations. They were lovely, well looked after and easy to adore. Society ladies would choose from among them their future servants. Eleanor learnt to read and write while there. But, also, she encountered for the first time there dreaded tuberculosis, one of the girls having died from it. It could be that in those times the disease seeded in her, latent, waiting to overcome her in young adulthood. I rewrote my Welsh genealogy of George Harrison the miller of Llanthony and this time was happier with the outcome. For the first time I realise that he absolutely must have had more children, their being such gaps, and I look to find out who they may be, but these Welsh records are not easy, almost as hopeless as Irish ones. And I work on Eleanor Caroline Barton's London orphanage days, quite interesting, finding reports of the orphanage fund raising meetings and the songs the girls sang, and a picture of the banqueting hall with raised gallery upon which they sang with all their scrubbed clean and cute appeal. My Eleanor Caroline was there, in that gallery, singing. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I stick to the work of researching newspaper records of my family and have found a couple of interesting ones. One was for my ancestor George Harrison, the original, fined for indecent exposure on the streets of Abergavenny, whoops, and another was about George's oldest son, Lewis, being reluctantly pushed to support him in his older years. When I look at the Welsh borderland region, where they lived, I became nostalgic for this land and know I want to be there again, that a part of my soul is always there, there between Crickhowell to Llanbedr, by Patrishow, to Llanthony and Cwmyoy, the Sugarloaf mountain, the abandoned slag heaps, the Dan-yr-ogof caves, Hay bluff, and that taste once more of the lavabread of the Abregavenny deli. if I had to return to Britian eventually, then why not there. From Govilon up to the ghost village of Pwlldu. The land of my fathers, all this is. I never made it up to Shetland, another ancestral place, and more recently, I learn, so is County Kerry in Ireland. An epic journey may be in order one day to explore all this. The Bog of Allen in central Ireland. The Forest of Dean. Greenwich, in the south of London. Vast homelands. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees.
I created a filmlet on the subject of my Welsh Harrison ancestors, from my grandfather George Harrison of Varteg back to George Harrison of Llanthony. I worked so hard to create this again and again, the windows movie maker repeatedly declaring it to be an 'incorrect format' or 'corrupted' and refusing to open up. I kept on slogging and eventually was successful in my endeavour.
Pop talked to me about having been in Italy during the second world war. I'd heard this before but liked to listen in case something new came to light. As a Royal Naval commando in the war Pop had one of the most dangerous and important tasks of any, as he and his fellows were the first onto the invasion beaches and the last to leave. That work on the beaches was crucial to the success of the allied invasions. Pop was also for a while in Scalpa Flow in the Orkneys which was so boring that a couple of the men cracked up. They had to compress snow to make water. Pop said it took an enormous amount of snow just to make a little water. I watched some of an interesting Italian film 'Paisa', about Naples towards the end of the war, to get an insight into how the situation may have been when my pop was there. I visited Naples for a month too, taking my baby Jai to see his father who was working out there teaching English. I looked up historical references by early travellers regarding Naples and those environs. Pizza had been referred to as a 'horrible condiment' and the city had some 30,000 'registered sinners' of which travellers could 'purchase their repentance at a dear rate' ie. contracting syphillis from the prostitutes. 'The women are generally well featured but excessively libidinous'. The Grand Tour had esteemed Naples as a city worth seeing and by 1817 there were 400 English famillies residing in Naples, after which its reputation dwindled to scorn. Nelson called Naples a 'country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels'. Charles Dickens noted its 'miserable depravity, degradation and wrtechedness'. Ruskin called it the 'most disgusting place in Europe' and the 'most loathsome nest of human caterpillars I was ever forced to stay in'. My parents now decided to take Pop on a trip to Naples so he may relive some of his memories. Pop was so very excited to be going to Italy. He reminisced to me about Pozzuoli and of how he had witnesses the last eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It was at Pozzuoli that Pop had lodged with an Italian family who had a lovely daughter, these times being of his fondest memories.
My parents and I went off on a trip to Wales, heading off along the M4, dads boat on top of the car, and the caravan towing behind us. One of the Caravan Club Sites we stayed at was beside the village of Pandy, close enough to our family Harrison ancestral homes for me to do some family tree research. From there we drove to the nearby village of Llanvihangel Crucorney, which I knew from the census's was where my great great grandfather William Harrison had lived. His house, Bridgend, was supposed to be right by the old Mill which his brother Lewis had been the miller of, and indeed there we found a house called 'Bridge Cottage', very old looking, but which dad reckoned wouldn't be the one, although later we would find out that it was our old family home after all. The rains came so we got back into the car and headed along the Honddu river up the valley, until we came to the hamlet of Llanthony. Not only was this a special place for our family but its old priory was on a leyline. My great great great grandfather George Harrison (the father of William and Lewis Harrison) had been the miller there. His home Mill Cottage was a scenic beauty, still standing, and there were some remains of the old mill there too. We called at the Mill Cottage and were invited in by the occupant, Mrs Powell, who had lived there for 62 years, and was nice and receptive to us. We visited the abbey ruins and looked around the church and graveyard, though found no Harrison graves. Dad enthused about our ancestral cottage and land, toying with the idea of buying it all one day from the Powells. We searched more for the graves of George and his wife, Margaret, further up the valley at Capel-y-Fin, looking through two graveyards there, and then back down at the village of Cwmyoy, but found no trace of any Harrisons. My mum decided she would be my genealogy assistant in the record Office at Cwmbran and so my dad drove us there and left us. The archivist was a shy cute Welsh boy. Llanthony records revealed nothing to us about the deaths of George or the baptisms of his children. It remained a mystery to us as to which church they had attended. We searched through many records and mum enjoyed herself a lot doing it, thinking it was something she could quite get hooked on. When my dad picked us up we shopped in Abergavenny and on the way back to the caravan site stopped for a search of the Llanvihangel Crucorney graveyard. It was there that dad discovered the grave of Lewis Harrison, who was Williams brother, by the church. We continued our grave searching, going to Govilon where William Harrisons wife, Ann Thomas, had come from. In the baptist graveyard there a lady came over to talk to us and pointed out the ancient baptism pool where people were once submerged into the water. Driving off up into the mountains we were looking for the hamlet of Pwlldu where William Harrison had looked after the pit ponies and my great grandfather (his son) John Harrison had been born. This took a while to find as there were no signs leading there. In fact, all that remained of the old hamlet were a couple of buildings, one a pub and the other an outdoor activity centre. We knocked on the door of the Lamb Fox Inn but there was no answer. A car drove up and a man, who ignored us, went into a shed. When we went over to talk to him he said the pub was open still, but he wasn't talking anymore with his father who ran the place. He confirmed that we were in Pwlldu and said the old miners cottages, school and chapel had been knocked down in 1963. He showed us lumps in the ground which were all that remained of them, showed us where the pit ponies had been kept and told us of the old tunnel which led through the mountain to Blaenavon. Mum eventually got the mans father Mr Lewis to open the pub door and we had a chat with him. He told us a BBC film of Pwlldu had been made before it was knocked down. I explored around the area, taking photographs, and further up we found the tunnel which had water in and a crumbled roof. We carried on to Blaenavon for more graveyard searching, and afterwards came to Varteg where John Harrison had begun his career as a miner who checked for gas to be sure all would be safe. The Methodist church revealed no graves for him even though we were well aware he had died there. Varteg merged into Garndiffaith. Dad had spent some of his childhood there and I remembered us all visiting the place when I was little. Great aunt Alice, Pop's sister, was still there, living in an old peoples home, so we called on her and she welcomed us nicely with tea and biscuits. She told us that John Harrison (her father) was indeed buried in the Varteg graveyard but in an unmarked grave. Stopping at Llanvihangel Crucorney mum and I went to enquire at Bridge Cottage as to whether the place had originally been called Bridgend. The lady there told us her house was ancient, the oldest one in the village, but as far as she knew it had always been called Bridge Cottage. She enthused about its history and showed us a book which not only had a picture of her cottage in it, but also one of our Llanthony cottage, which stated many famous painters had once done water colours of it. Inviting us into the cottage she showed us the original old beams and other features. It was an amazing place. She phoned her daughter who owned the cottage to ask if she knew of a Bridgend in the village, and she confirmed to us that this cottage indeed had been Bridgend. And knowing this, we excitedly took photographs both inside and out, and the lady, Mrs Snelus, took us for a tour of the gardens. It was on the last day of our Welsh holiday that we were in Cardiff, at St Mellons to visit another great aunt, May (another of Pop's sisters), who lived in an old peoples home there, drinking tea with her while reminiscing about the Harrison family history, both old and modern. Thus ended our Welsh holiday, for the next day we were off back to England.
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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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