One of my ancestresses, Jane Harding née Young, of Camberwell, was a 'monthly nurse', which referred to a live in helper for young mothers and their newborns, generally being for affluent families. Both Jane and her spinster daughter Sarah worked for rich families, both in consequence living in grand homes in the distinguished Grove Lane. The old lady Sarah cared for, Caroline Hilton, was so grateful that upon dying she even left Sarah her home, at 22 Queens Row, Grove Lane, and enough means by which to no longer need to work. It can be seen that serving the trés riche got one out of the slums and into elegant environments. One ancestress, Elizabeth Moulds alias Moules, I discovered to have been born in Wapping in 1774, her mother being Elizabeth née King and her father John Moulds being a mariner, the family living at Milk Alley, near to the infamous execution block, at the rivers edge, where mutineers were regularly hung, all to large audiences which would crowd along the riverside and upon boats in the river to view the morbid spectacle. As for Jane the monthly nurses father, Nathaniel Young of Lambeth, I now found out he had been a waterman on the Thames river, who had apprenticed three of his sons to also be watermen. Not only therefore did I have watermen and lightermen in my family further along at Greenwich, but also at Lambeth too. Nathaniel had done his own apprenticeship in Fulham, from the ages of 10 till 18 under the tutorage of his uncle Robert Lewis (married to Nathaniel aunt Mary), who in all those years would have provided training in boating skills, food, clothes and lodging, according to the contract dates from 1768 to 1776. Generally lads would be apprenticed at the age of 18, unless a father or uncle was the tutor, in which case the apprentice could be taken on at a younger age. Robert Lewis himself had done his own apprenticeship in Fulham with his father, also called Robert Lewis. Another find, at last, something I'd never been able to suss before, was the 1830 baptism in Windsor for my ancestress Sarah Green. Like wow, what a super find (even though the record was merely a transcription and not the original). This gave an address in Windsor, Sheet Street, and what's more I discovered another Green, an older Henry, had been living at the same address, dying there just two years earlier. This may well have been Sarah's grandfather, or even great grandfather, for him having born as far back as 1747. Maybe Sarah's parents, Henry Green and Elizabeth née Harding, had inherited the house, or had taken over the rental, staying a couple of years before returning to Lambeth. So many Greens there were from way back in Windsor, a place I myself had once enjoyed to visit, swimming in the river there.
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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 got back into my genealogy, recieving a reply from my son George's distant cousin, of the De Bella family, Leonora De Bella; well the email was from her husband, Edward Yarrows, they being in America, and he had no family tree for his wife, but he did give me tidbits of information, which at first seemed of little use, but then became clues by which to make up Leonora's tree, her potential parents and their many siblings, by which I found her Italian born grandparents, Francesco Paolo De Bella and Angelarosa Boracca.
This Francesco De Bella was indeed from the village of Turi where George's dad was from and his original surname, well, in America he being a 'De Bella' was originally 'Di Bello', the surname of George's dad, totally the correct surname. And the great grandparents in Italy, as far as I could see, were another Francesco Di Bello and Anna Laporte, again of the village of Turi, born back in the 1840's or 1850's and quite possibly these being ancestors of my own Georgie. I also worked out the expanded tree of some appointed distant cousins for me, who were descended from some of my Londoners, from Henry Green the tailor and his wife Elizabeth Harding. What was fab about this was that it authenticated certain lineages, in this case my Maxted line, which therefore was not of adoptions or infidelities for which they would be only assumed lineages. And likewise, another distant cousin authenticated my Norfolk Bane line. |
AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Categories
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