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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Lately, a message came to me on FindMyPast from a young lady called Amy, who was a descendant of Lillian Norah Maxted, the sister of my great granny Florence. Only after some years of research had she discovered that their mother was Irish Mary Dolan. As I had a photo of Mary Dolan, she wished to know if this was authentic, and yes was my answer. Amy was in contact with another lady of our family, Jill, descended like her from Lillian Norah, and it so happened I was already friends with Jill on Facebook, since mine and her sons dna results had linked us as cousins. Amy went quiet after this tiny exchange, but Jill herself was now sharing information about our family with me. which she in turn had been hearing from her Aunty Doreen, Amy's granny, who was a surviving daughter of Lilian Norah Maxted and her husband William Garwood. This Aunty Doreen, who still, like the others lived in Eastleigh, was rather old, aged 91, and yet was 'as sharp as a button'. How cool it was that she was still going strong at such a great age. Lilian Norah's husband, William Garwood, was mustard gassed in World War 1, from which he never properly recovered, life always being a struggle, inhibiting their raising of a family and finding work. William was hunch backed, had many health issues, and ended up living in a home, where he died at the age of 36. As for Lillian Norah, she had a personal tragedy herself, an awful mishap befalling her when she was aged 40. She was at that time out, walking with her baby, Pat, in his pram, when a roof time fell onto of her from the Co-op building in Eastleigh. This knocked her unconscious, and soon after that episode she had a massive stroke, the consequence of which she went blind.
These ladies were all my Eastleigh relatives, descended from the Maxteds of Nine Elms, and they had photos to share, but none with any descriptions on the back, for which it was not much known who was who. One lovely photo of a young lady, she was said to be of the Maxted family, but not who she actually was, so that for now she would have to stay a mystery person. 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. I researched in old newspapers again, for anything extra of my ancestors and I did find a couple of possibilities. For instance, totally the correct age of my George Maxted when he was a teenager, in the summer of 1804 a notice was put out that he was a runaway from his service as a ploughboy at the grand Preston Court, near Canterbury. Interestingly, a description is given of him, being 17 years of age, about five feet high, with light hair and marked with smallpox. His employer, William Harrison, was determined to hunt him down, offering a guinea reward for whosoever may find him and even going so far as to write 'Whoever harbours or employs him will be prosecuted as the Law directs.' It sounds not so far from slavery really, such as it had been for the poor people of our lands. The other article is potentially a reference to George's father, Edward Maxted, being of Westwell, his village. He was charged with stealing some fence posts, the property of Thomas Back, but of this he was acquitted. Always interesting stories are to be found in these old newspapers. In the same paper, the Kentish Weekly Post, it is written of how one dockside labourer in Woolwich undertook, for a wager of five shillings, to eat a rat, skin, bone and all, 'which the monster performed in a few minutes'. In consequence of this he lost his job, for being 'deemed a disgrace to his fellow servants'.
I made another long journey from central London out to the Kew Archives. Not that I made such grand discoveries as last time. Seeking my ancestral Maxteds in a big book of Nine Elms railway employees yielded nothing. But I did find a few things which had so far eluded me. And that was just by accessing Find My Past, information I'd not been able to find on the Ancestry website. I had already sussed out, by deduction, that my ancestor Robert Bunney (Senior) had married an Ann Aylward, but had never found a marriage record confirming this till now (my deduction had been due to Alyward being used down generations as a middle name for various children). It was at the church of Mary Magdalene (of course lol) that they had married one another on 26th February 1764 in Bermondsey. And I found my Welsh ancestor John Harrisons school admissions for the hamlet of Pwlldu, , in both 1876 and 1877, recording that the familys adress was at 'Lower Bank' and that his father worked as (yes I knew) an ostler. What I was really pleased with was at last finding Thomas Sugrues baptism, which was in Greenwich in 1854 at the Roman Catholic church of Our Lady of the Sea. Thomas's birthday was here recorded (a good find) as being on 24th Febfuary (making him an Aries), the baptism having been on 26th March. His godparents were Michael and Maria MacDonnell. I found Roman Catholic baptisms for Thomas's siblings too, for Joanna, Catherine, Jacobus, Edmund and the twins Daniel and Bartholomew. Interestingly I discovered also that the childrens father, Bartholomew Sugrue, had also had a child with his first wife, Ellen, who had died of Asiatic cholera. I'd never seen anything to prove before that they'd had a baby together, but there she was, a daughter, Anna, born in 1847, her godparents being Corey Malvina and Margaret Gallachan.
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 looked back at some of my genealogy research and amazingly found out something new about my great great grandmother Mary Dolan of Westmeath, like her origins I try to find still and cannot.
But what I did find was that before she married her husband William Maxted in 1887 in St Peter's church, Hammersmith, aged 27, which was rather late for a lady to get married in those days, she had years previously been engaged to another, back when she was 19, a soldier of 22 years of age called Henry Black Douglas McLaren, and they even went through three weeks of banns at the same St Peter's church, but the very wedding the following day never happened. Oh why? Rather the following year Henry married another girl, Alice Wright, and by 1891 at the age of just 29 he was dead, by which time Mary had married William Maxted and was up in Sunderland. It was on clearing in the house that I found some family tree certificates and in looking at them once more, and reading of my great great grandparents, William and Mary Maxted's daughters death, of young Sarah, aged 13, from heart failure, that I saw something I'd not taken note of before, which was that the address had been given as Nazareth House in Isleworth, not their home at all. On looking up this place, I saw that it was and industrial school for Roman Catholic girls. Two considerations now came to me, one naturally being why was Sarah even there, as such schools were in general for children who had fallen into trouble and who had been sent there by the courts, and maybe to her detriment considering that she had died there. And secondly, I had seen from baptisms already, that although William Maxted was and English fellow and not at all Roman Catholic, he had nevertheless honoured his Irish wifes wishes by allowing her the grace to raise their children in her own religion, and maybe Sarah's death at an institution run by nuns ended all that. 'No more' I could imagine him saying. On looking up about Nazareth House it appeared to be a fine estate in London, with gardens and an educational curriculum teaching all the skills a girl back then was thought to be good for them, such as cooking, laundry, needlework and housmaid service, as well as musical drills to keep them fit, and access to a toy cupboard and library. And yet Sarah's health had deteriorated there. Hammersmith in London, where my family lived, was where the original Poor Sisters Of Nazareth first set up, their mission being to take care of both young and old. From there the houses had spread out into the rest of Britain. I saw an address I could write to, by snail mail, to ask for any relevant information to this situation, from the nuns archives; so I promptly wrote a letter, hoping for something, anything, in response. And it was then that I saw negative looking links about these very Sisters of Nazareth, in which abuses were insinuated. Nazareth Houses were dotted around England, to be found in various cities, and specific writings about them had disturbing titles, such as 'Suffer The Little Children - The True Story Of An Abused Covent Upbringing', Guradian articles such as 'Nuns Abused Hundreds Of Children', 'Sisters Of No Mercy' and 'SIsters Of Nazareth Become Second Catholic Order To Admit Child Abuse'. I guess the first would be the Magdalene nuns who had been outed for abusing pregnant girls. I was shocked. Like, Hello, are you the representatives of God and of Jesus? Devoting your lives to a holy path and yet abusing and traumatising those given unto your care. I now sensed my own ancestors pains and trials tied up in this story. To trust in the church and yet be let down by them. One Guardian article was even titled 'Children At Derry Care Homes Were Made To Eat Vomit, Inquiry Told'. I did hope the actual Isleworth home had decent friendly nuns in it. Anyway, from Amazon I ordered one of the books, the 'Suffer The Little Children' one by Frances Reilly, who a a girl had been abandoned by her mother, along with her sisters, outside a Nazareth House convent in Belfast. She had suffered there from brutal beatings, was abused, molested and worked as a slave. In later life Frances prosecuted the nuns and in this she was successful. In another account about an abusive Nazareth House, by a man, Fred Atkins, who had regularly been beaten up by the nuns from the age of six, he even in old age was still haunted by the noise of children banging their heads against the walls of the dormitories. Night time sleeping would be interrupted by the nuns checking for bed wetting, for which beatings would follow, one bed wetter being held out of the window by her ankles as a punishment. Nuns had leather straps dangling from their waists next to their rosary beads. Another lad had named this institution the 'House Of Hell'. When I at last heard back from the nuns of Nazareth House. Their achivist, Christine H, had not found anything in regard to my Sarah, but she did invite me to provide more information by email, which I promptly did.
This extra information resulted in a reply of a little more substance than previously. Sarah Kathleen Maxted had indeed been a child in the care of the nuns, number 49 on the Isleworth Children's Register. She had been sent to the convent by a magistrate, Mr Rose, for which one had to conclude really that she had been sent there for some mischief, not that any note had been made of why. Christine noted that even prior to Sarah being sent to Nazareth House she'd had an ongoing religious connection with the place, having had certain Christian moments there, of confirmation, first confession and holy communion. Christine had not found any such moments for Sarah's siblings or her Irish mother.* It had certainly been a contemplation of mine that Sarah may have had downs syndrome, hence why she would have spent so much time with the nuns and would then explain why she had a weak heart and had died at only 13 years of age. I had often wondered what it would have been like for such children in olden days, in times before this was even recognised as a specific condition. 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. |
AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Categories
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