I was so getting into genealogy researach, and not even my own. Rather, as an intellectual challenge, a detective challenge, I was updating my friend' Jare's alias Nitai's tree, pushing back the boundaries. And this was well interesting, for its involvment if early immigration to Australia, of both convicts and free settlers. One of Nitai's ancestors was Jesse Froy, born illegtimate in Hitchin, Hartfordshire in 1819, son of his mother Martha Froy. He was at first a soldier in the 11th Regiment, sent to various barracks, in Devon, Northamptonshire and Kent, the latter place where he met his Irish sweetheart, Mary Malone. From Chatham in Kent the soldiers were sent to guard convicts in Van Diemans Land (Tasmania). Jesse made sure to return to Kent to marry Mary and then took her back to Australia, travelling there on the ship Ramilies, and they making a life together in Sydney, having many children, nearly all boys. Jesse took to drink, spending his evenings in the pub, and in time no more cared for his wife and children, so that he was even prosecuted for neglecting and abandoning them. For this he spent one month in prison, from the records of which we get a detailed description of him. He was a little over 5ft 10, could read and write, had dark brown hair and hazel eyes, sallow skin and a stout build. His trade was gardening, he was a protestant, and he had various tattoos, which included a flower and love hearts. In 1859, one of Jesse's drinking mates, his Irish former convict neighbour, Hugh Glenn, murdered his wife Ann, also an Irish immigrant former convict, in a drunken rage, whacking her hard with his homemade broomsticks. Jesse's wife, Mary, heard all this going on through the wall. Hugh's landlord's son, who'd been staying with the Glenn's while his parents were away, and who had seen the beginning of the attack, ran for refuge to Mary's house. Mary was too afraid to intervene. After killing his wife, Hugh came to Mary with blood on him; saying to come and see that he had found his wife dead, faking that he had just found her like that. But Mary knew well the truth. Instead of going straight with him to his house, she first went to the pub to alert her husband to what had happened, for which Jesse and others of the pub went to Hugh's house and saw that Ann truly was dead. Both Mary and the landlords son testified against Hugh and he was found guilty. It was a year after that incident, in 1860, that Jesse Froy was himself prosecuted for neglecting his family. He was apprehended in the Waverley Tea Gardens Hotel in the act of 'tossing off a pint of ale'. His children had been begging and sleeping rough, 'in the bush', one boy found sheltering in a 'delapidated fowl house', and at another time sleeping in a toilet. They would sleep in the bush, by the roadside and in outhouses. When Jesse was pulled up on this he declared that his wife Mary was as much to blame as himself and that he neither knew nor cared anything about the children. Mary was found to be at home with their latest baby, aged but 4 months. Of Jesses it was said 'he never seemed to have any business to attend to, continually loitering about the pubs' and that he was 'a worthless dissipated fellow'. His family were known to be in a wretched state, begging for food. Jesse and Mary's son George Froy married Jessie the daughter of a convict John Edwards. This John Edwards had arrived in Australia in 1814 from Liverpool on the ship Parmelia. His job in Liverpool was making ropes and he had been sentenced there, at the age of 18, to 14 years transportation for stealing 'silver plate'. Ad records do state, he had a ruddy freckled complexion and sandy red hair, grey eyes, could read and write, was a protestant, and he aldo had tattoos of a loveheart and darts and anchors and stars, as well as a blue ring tattooed on the middle ad fourth fingers of his left hand. He was held at the Australian penal settlement of Port Macquarie. In 1842 John sought permission, as a convict, to marry Agnes Thompson, who was a free immigrant, and three years later attained his certificate of freedom. Agnes was a Scots girl from Glasgow. She had travelled out to Australia, at the age of 22, in the care of an aunt and uncle, on the ship Trinidad. Back in Glasgow she had been a nursemaid, living in with a family while looking after their young children. She could read and write, her religion was 'independant' and she was in good health. Agnes and John married at Port Macquarie, known for its penal colony. This colony's distance from Sydney had made it ideal as a place of punishment for 'convicts of the worse character'. Wheever those convicts escaped into the bush, they were taken back by aboriginees in return for blankets and tobacco. Disabled convicts were also placed here, men with wooden legs, one armed or blind. Really the penal settlement had done its time when John arrived, only 'special's in small number being kept there, and free settlers like Agnes and her relatives were now interested to make a life there. On gaining freedom, John and Agnes lovde to Moruya and then to the McCleay River where they put down roots, John being a tenant farmer at Austral Eden on the Lower McCleay. The Edwards family saw much tragedy. John died of pneumonia at the age of 44 and Agnes drowned at the age of 45. As an orphan, Jessie, aged just ten years old, had to be raised by another family. It was Jessie and George Froy's daughter Agnes Lilian, who married John Edward Young, a plumber of Irish origin who had arrived with his parents, George Young and Jane Gilmore on the ship Pericles in 1878, they being farm labourers from the Bailieborough region of Cavan, Ireland, Wesleyan Methodists who had married in a Presbyterian church, so not your general catholic Irish.
John Young and Agnes Lilian's son, George Gilmore Young, married Mary Jane Barker, who had emigrated from Sunderland to Australia at the age of ten with her family. Her father, Christopher Barker, a boilermaker by trade, served in the first world war, getting mumps while on the ship journey from Australia back to England, and then while fighting in France suffered such bad gunshot wounds to his face that he needed plastic surgery.
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Having seen a documentary on the Yorkshire Ripper, I began working out some of his family tree. My interest firstly was around one of his victims, Patricia Atkinson, being of the same location and surname as some of Rosie's ancestors, for which I realised she must be one of her distant cousins, although as I do see there were many, many Atkinsons around. I was then wondering, could this sadistic killing trait already have been in the Ripper's ancestry and so began to look for any clues to this. The Ripper's hometown was Bingley and one of his ancestors there, his great granddad William Speight, was born in Philadelphia, America in 1894. He had been written of in the local papers, helping a drunk basket maker, John McDonnell, along a river path at night, homewards from the showground at the gasworks field where William worked. The dazzling electric lights had compromised John's ability to see well, the night was dark and the path slippery. So John was helped along by William until all appeared safe to carry on alone. John drowned in the river that night. The verdict of a jury was 'found drowned, probably accidentally fell into the river'. I looked to see if there were more drownings at this river and there were many. Maybe this was the usual way in an era when few people would have known how to swim. Still, I looked for any possibilities of foul play. One lady, some years later, was found dead in that river, naked, with her clothes hidden in a bundle. But who can know if such things were not just down to personal distress. And, anyway, I was struggling against such a slow internet. Interestingly, I then found a ripper style attack. This was in 1888 and was in the area the Yorkshire Ripper was from. A young boy, John Gill of Bradford, had been murdered and mutilated. This was the same era as the London Jack the Ripper killings, and the local people were horrified. So much is in the old newspapers on this. The milkman the boy loved to ride on the cart of, William Barrett, was the last to be seen with him. Though he was tried for the murder, he was acquitted, despite so much being against him, such as his activities in darkness during those days which others had observed, his befriending of children, and his calm state of mind under accusation, unruffled, with not a show of emotion. He had the support of church, family, his village, money gifts for the best of lawyers. he was said to be lovely, loved by children, that he never could do such a thing. He never explained what witnesses saw or heard of him. He went on in life, with wife, with children. All was before DNA analysis; what an amazing difference this has made. The murder was never solved. I can't conclude anything about the Rippers own ancestry from this, just food for thought. But then again, how much shall I fill my head with such things? I tune into other things instead. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. 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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