I can't resist it, to get stuck into some genealogy researching. I'm curious to see if I can find any more clues to some gypsy heritage. There are hints, but no certainties. I did a read up about gypsies, both Irish and swarthy easterners, but I'm none the wiser. Maxteds were many in Kent, and one I can see was a farmer, very much a settled profession. One Maxted stole from a Kingsnorth in Pluckley, the Kingsnorth's being the family of my friends Jeremy and Ian, for which he was sentenced to transportation to Australia. One of my great Aunts, Selina Maxted, eloped to America with a cousin, being pregnant by him and having two daughters out there before returning. She never married. I want to find out more on this story, but fail to find records so far. Selina's brother was my ancestor George, the one who died falling off a haybale, being pierced by a stick into his entrails. If I was a superstar on Who Do You Think You Are, they'd whip out the whole story, no problem, and for sure tell me if there was or was not gypsy blood. It's interesting that I do have Mediterranean DNA, for so do gypsy descendants, their Indian traces being oft watered down and out. It's also interesting that I can feel so at home in these warmer foreign lands. I am not such a stranger to these places after all. Back to researching, I found out more about my many times great Aunt Selina. Her cousin Edward was a bricklayer who died when they were back in London, after their few years in New York, maybe after a bankruptcy, after which Selina put an advert in the papers looking for a position caring in homes or offices. As revealed by the next census, she and her remaining daughter, the first also having died in London, both found work as family nurses. So, Selina, yes, she does sound interesting somehow, a single mother who had a stint in New York. And I was looking at my ancestress, Elizabeth Mugway of Stalisfield, who got into the papers as an old widow. By marriage she was Elizabeth Roberts. It was her husband, Charles Roberts, who is said to have been of a gypsy family, the Otterden gypsy Roberts. Elizabeth was in the papers for having been neighbour to a murder victim, Hannah Giles, killed by a man, Samuel Seager, who obsessively stalked Hannah while her husband was out rat catching with his dogs and ferrets. Elizabeth was well acquainted with both Hannah and her killer Samuel. Rumour was that this fellows obsession was borne from an affair which she had no wish to continue. That very morning Samuel had visited Elizabeth and she'd told him he was a 'queer fellow'. He warmed himself by her fire, while spying through the window on Hannah's house to be sure the husband had gone out. He then called on Hannah with the excuse he wanted her to stitch him some trousers. He was a shoemaker and sometimes she would bind his shoes for him. Having heard the rumours, Hannah's husband, Stephen Giles, had confronted Samuel and told him he was no longer welcome in the family home. Hannah made her sons stay by her whenever Samuel was around, but he got her alone when that evening she was off along the country road to babysit the children of a nearby farmer. He mercilessly slit her throat with a razor, shot her in the thighs and set her on fire. Such are the potential deeds of a stalker who who finds himself attracted yet thwarted by a lone vulnerable woman. Elizabeth and other neighbouring women sobbed their eyes swollen from distress at the killing of their friend and they robed themselves in black. The bakehouse they shared was where Hannah's body was lain, naked and burnt, all the locals and even strangers coming to view her. In one paper a map was drawn showing who lived in what cottage and the spot where Hannah had been found dead. Elizabeths cottage is marked, being the first homestead through a shared gate and across the gardens of the families. Hannahs house was the end one of a row of three, the bakehouse they shared being on the other end. As Elizabeth had been a frequent caller to Hannah's, she must have been party to Hannah's fears. And yet all else in the village had thought Samuel such a harmless man. After the killing Samuel went on the run, later to be found in another county, hungry and looking for work on the railroad, using another name, saying that he was of the Roberts family. He was recognised by a description in the papers, confessed, and was sentenced to execution. They'd 'had words' was the reason he gave for her death. Looking again at Maxteds, I found that Charles Maxteds marriage to Sarah Green, and I'd never noticed this before, though one just had to switch to the next page to see, a double marriage, the same time as his sister Sarah married her own amour. Sarah, the sister of Charles, had already had two illegitimate children, one while she herself was but a young teenager, and for respect of the second child, she had been in church about to marry, the record having begun to be written, only for it not to go ahead, not till these years later with another child now on the way. It sounds Eastenderish, dumped at the altar! Oh, the stories of the past, if we but knew them. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees.
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![]() 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 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. ![]() My daughters friend, Tom, is an interesting mix, looking very English, but being, like her, part Indian, and even part Singaporean (by an illegitimacy), part Polish, English naturally, and some Spanish. The exotic descendance is from his mother, whose Indian ancestor was a princess, apparently this being written of in William Dalrymple's 'White Moghuls'. This princess had married to a General Palmer, who had set up the first Indian restaurant in London, Veeraswamy's. Wow! What interesting genealogy. And this his mother had a phone conversation with me about. General Palmer had three wives altogether, the first having died in childbirth, and the family reunions make a point of distinguishing who is from which wife. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() Finding some time to do research, I look to improving old friends trees, starting with Judith's, finding out that mystery of who is her half-brother. I found the very newspaper article by which her dad was forced by law to support the baby son of a lady in his village of Roade. He denied this child, of an Eileen, was his, but four hours of investigation and many witnesses went against him. With the child's name unmentioned in the article, I found him by looking up Eileen's surname to match a child of that time. There he was, a Stephen. And I informed Judith of this, but it so turned out that she had eventually, anyway, talked of this with her father, and indeed the boy was called Stephen, but still Judith's father told Judith he had never even done anything by which this lady could have become pregnant. This is the kind of thing, ultimately, that can only be cleared up with DNA tests. But Judith does trust her fathers word. She says Eileen targeted him for support because he was from a well to do family. His grandfather, Charles Frederick Alsop, was in the paper tonnes of times, his law firm having supported Judith's dad in the case, chairman of this and president of that, again of Roade in Northamptonshire. I don't see Judith's people in and out of the workhouse like mine. Not even a whisper of anything dubious, not anywhere, but for the illegitimate maybe, maybe not, child. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I awake to a whole new excitement. What has dawned on me is something more about this family mystery to do with my great grandfather D'Auvergne's unusual name. I'd thought him potentially a love child of his mothers with George Barnard of D'Auvergne ancestry. Now I consider that more likely he was born of Hannah's oldest daughter, Alma, and that the father would be George Barnard's oldest son, who actually was named D'Auvergne Barnard and who was a composer. At that time he would have been 18, when he was being trained for a music career. Alma was only 16. So here is my new theory. Some mothers even used to wear padding round their waists to pass off that an illegitimate grandchild was theirs. And it kind of makes sense. The families were friends, connected by George Barnard's partner, Charlotte, who was related to the Banes, and these families shared a colonial enthusiasm and pride. It was long before George Barnard got round to marrying Charlotte, who he kept as a mistress for many years. A repeat of this destiny for Alma, to be but a mistress, would not be acceptable. Hannah was 41, still of an age to pass off being a mother. This would answer how it was that D'Auvergne was always so close to his 'big sister' Alma, so much so that every year, even as a married family man, he would journey with his wife and children to visit her. Not because she was his favourite sister, but because she was his secret mother. The name D'Auvergne would have been chosen deliberately, for this truly having been the name of his father. Without losing my Bean/Bane ancestry, there would hithertoo be an unknown Barnard/D'Auvergne one. And how to prove or disprove this. But the theory appeals. If D'Auvergne Barnard had been a popular composer by then, one could have explained this as being due to an appreciation of his works. But no, this was prior to his days of greatness. For some reason George Barnard had put down his foot, or Richard Bane had, objecting to a marriage. Eventually both would marry other people. D'Auvergne, my great grandfather, totally adored Alma. He must have known and this is so thrilling to contemplate. Somehow it seems to add up. At one time D'Auvergne was engaged to marry a beautiful middle class girl, who he loved. If he had confessed to her his illegitimacy, this may have been enough for her to dump him. She chose another man, anyway, and broke his heart. He gave up his law studies and, in time, eloped with my great grandma who was of humble poor origin, Mary Seagrove. I need to see if I can find more clues to support such a theory. It does appear that I have cracked something here. Maybe. I looked into this potentially new side of the family, but finding their Indian records is not so easy. Some are there. The Barnard ancestry is military, working for the East India Company. The D'Auvergne name comes from a Mary D'Auvergne who married an army fellow, Henry Clapton Barnard, his own parents being John Barnard and Eleanor Clapton. It was Henry Clapton Barnard who went out to India where he met and married Mary of the D'Auvergne's. Her father, Philip D'Auvergne, was a brigadier in the Bengal Army. He had married a Mary Lowry, and how to find out more, all in India, India, India. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. On having watched some Jeremy Kyle clips, revealing cheating partners, by DNA tests men finding out the children they'd fathered were not always their's, or in mistrusting the others infidelity finding they actually were the dads, this inclined me to contemplate that in all my genealogy research I may sometimes fruitlessly be pursuing lines that I'm not even really genetically connected to. As I had recently discovered from the gossip of older members of the family, my Uncle Clive was not really after all my Pop's son, but was the result of a wartime romance. And I can't even be sure my Nanny's father, Percy Spencer, is really her dad after all. Her mother, Florence Maxted, was a Southampton seaport barmaid and she only married Percy three weeks before my nanny Eileen was born, in a registry office. On taking her home to his Dovercourt family, they certainly didn't trust this lady who appeared as if from nowhere, a red haired mother with a red haired daughter. I have originally researched rather a lot the Dovercourt lineage, but don't know, more and more, if I should pay any heed to it. We so could have done with DNA tests long, long back. And I do wonder about my ancestor D'Auvergne Bane even, like, why was he given this name of D'Auvergne which I know was the surname of an Anglo-Indian family? Could he also have been the result of an illicit affair? Could this have been with the billiards hall proprietor of that family who had come to London from India? This is not at all a name from our own family. So one does have to wonder. I would happily embrace a connection to the land of India. How would I know? Here is some of my theorising about a link between these families anyway. For Richard Bane and Hannah Bean, D'Auvergne's parents, to have met in London in the first place a key person may have been Charlotte Empson, the partner of George Barnard, a billiards hall proprietor of the D'Auvergne lineage, and this I deduce because all were connected to the same places in Norfolk and must have known one another. Richard grew up next door to her in North Walsham and she and Hannah were from the same village, quite possibly being related. Both families, the Banes and D'Auvergne-Barnard's with their colonial and military connections, I am sure, would have been warm friends. Both families gave the name of Alma to one of their daughters. They chose such a name because it reflected their colonial British pride. I can imagine the men playing billiards together, and George Barnard entertaining everyone with his tales of India. Charlotte stayed with him, bearing his children, even though for years he dilly-dallied about marrying her. He must have had quite some charm, which maybe worked some of it's charm on Hannah too. Naturally, this is but speculation, but Hannah did have a son and he was called D'Auvergne, a name from George's own family. George already had a teenage son called D'Auvergne, a name to honour the ancestors. That is not an easy name for an English society. George's son, D'Auvergne Barnard, turned out to be a famous composer, though not as yet, so no reason to copy his name out of admiration for his music. Really, why choose a name that one has no connection to, which is why I consider the name could be token to an affair. I discovered a first world war military photo of the composer D'Auvergne Barnard's son, Eric D'Auvergne Barnard. It's in a group and is not very clear, but he has a slender almost pretty elegance, which does bear a likeness to the look of D'Auvergne Bane and his own son, Richard. Eric D'Auvergne Barnard, I discover, died while still young of yellow fever. The D'Auvergne-Barnard family, living for generations in India, could then account for my own soul connection to that land. I too have an interest in India's British Raj, the old clubhouses with animal heads upon the walls, the spicy foods, the horror at the mutiny and its slaughter of genteel women and their children, sadness for the many young British ladies who from exotic diseases lost their lives so young, and the grand veranda's. George Barnard was from Jubblepore (Jabalpur), not only the home of billiards and snooker, but also being the place where thuggee was tackled by the Brits, this being another subject that has interested me. Hill stations, tea gardens and servants. I'd like to have a real family connection. This is likely fanciable, wishful thinking, but is not an impossibility either. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
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