Coming a Cropper

A change in work commitments meant that I had an entire free morning recently, and with course work up to date I had time to go back to a piece of work I abandoned a few months ago, and hadn't  got back to. I still haven't really got a proper system for keeping track of all the loose ends .

My Great Great Great Grandfather, Samuel Leadbeater, was born in Gomersal West Yorkshire, and was baptised in the Parish Church of Birstall in 1819. His parents were recorded as Thomas and Mary; it isn't common to record both parents names, and immensely helpful in this case, as there clearly at least two Thomas Leadbeaters of marriageable age knocking around that part of Yorkshire in the early 1800s.

I found the marriage of Thomas Leadbeater and Mary Balmforth in 1803, the only one of a Thomas Leadbeater and Mary at around the correct time. But there were a number of other Thomas Leadbeater marriage entries so clearly one or both Thomas's were widowed and remarried. Where the record is the church register, the occupation of the man is recorded which can help, but where there is only a  copy of the Banns you don't have the occupation. Then I spotted that one of the Thomas Leadbeaters had been able to sign his name, whilst the other couldn't write, so I could finally allocate the weddings to the correct Thomas. My Thomas was the illiterate one, and his second marriage, to add to the confusion, was to a Frances Leadbeater who has been widowed.

The second thing which was bothering me were the occupations, as my Thomas seemed to be recorded as both a "cropper" and a "cloth dresser". I was worried that the occupations were very different and that there might be a second Thomas and Mary pairing. I don't know why I didn't do it earlier, but  I looked up the occupation of cloth dresser , and on a site called Spartacus Educational I discovered that cloth dressers were the men who cut the cloth, using shears about 4 feet long, in what was regarded as a skilled occupation. They were also known as croppers! Apparently, their work began to be mechanised in the 1820s, and they were at the vanguard of the Luddite movement.  The site has this picture, which was drawn in 1814, and so is pretty much contemporaneous with my ancestor Thomas Leadbeater.

Hatched, matched, dispatched

One of the reasons I chose the genealogy course offered by the 
Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies is that it is a distance learning course and can be done entirely at your own pace, and with my work commitments that is ideal.  It means I can keep the work ticking over during the Parliamentary term but really get ahead with the assignments during the recesses.

The course is modular, and there are a number of assignments with each one.  Some of them are entirely theoretical but what I really enjoy are the ones which relate directly to my own family history.  Other assignments are a sort of hybrid, where theoretical work is illustrated with examples from your own family research.

The current module is on General Registration; the system of recording births, marriages and deaths  which has operated in England and Wales since 1837.  Theoretically at least, you should be able to take a birth certificate from someone born in 2005, and create a family tree going back to the late 18th century just using the GRO.    ( because a birth certificate from 1837 would show parents who might have been born in the previous century)

In reality, it would be nigh on impossible unless you used census, parish and other records.  Our ancestors did inconvenient things like have common names and move house.  They frequently got things wrong like how old they were, and what their father's name was. Above all they lied - about their ages, their occupations and in one case,  recorded that he was single when his first wife was still very much alive!  That particular transgression cost him 8 months hard labour for bigamy in 1885. More about Thomas Tandy another time.....

The marriage certificate of my Great Great Grandparents Henry and Margaret Leadbeater in Bradford January 1873.  Her name was Margaret Ann White Cummings but the vicar recorded it is incorrectly as White and not Cummings.  Her father was James and not Joseph but died when she was very young.  She couldn't write, so left her mark on the certificate. Just shows that even certificates can't always be taken at face value.....

Stairway to Heaven

All the census records from 1861 to 1911 show that my Great Great Grandfather Richard Roberts was a joiner. Then I discovered from a family connection who still Iives in North Wales that he made the 3 story spiral staircase in Kerfoots Department store in Porthmadog.

You can judge for yourself from the photo, but I think he was a real craftsman, and I am incredibly proud of this piece of his work.

So where did my Great Grandfather come from?

My mum always told us that her father's father Charles Young was a seafarer from Cork, whose family came from Nova Scotia, but when I was looking at his son's entry in 1930 US Federal Census, he recorded his father's nationality as English ( as opposed to his mother's who was Irish). Charles was living in Barry, Wales by the time of the 1901 Census but was not at home on census night and before that he was in Ireland, so I have no record of his age, birthplace or parents names. I know he died between the 1901 census where his wife Jane is recorded as "wife" and 1911 where she is recorded as "twice widowed". A classic genealogical brick wall.

When I was sent details of Jane's burial in 1946 I started wondering why she had not been buried with either of her husbands. I know from his son's birth certificate that Charles Young was a seafarer, so I wondered if he just might have died at sea, and I do have a vague memory of my mum saying that both of her grandfathers had died at sea. So, I took a look at the National Archive website in their section on the Merchant Navy and they directed  me to records of deaths at sea held by Find My Past.

I put in the information and lo and behold there it is! He died on board the SS Longbenton in 1903 where he was working as a ships steward. I am taken aback by the cause of death, given as asthma, because my mum, my daughter and I are all asthmatics.

But what really, really, throws me is that his place of birth, in 1861, is Stettin in Prussia, now Szczecin in Poland.

Gravestones and what they tell you

A few weeks ago, I e-mailed the Glamorgan Local History Society to ask whether there was a Roman Catholic cemetery in Barry, South Wales. My Great Grandmother Jane Gibson came to Barry from Cork around the turn of the last century, and I know that she died in the 1940s when she was in her 70s, but I hadn't been able to identify the record on the death index.

On a private visit to Barry Cemetery, Gwyn kindly took this photograph

A really helpful man called Gwyn Davies got back to me really quickly to say that there was only one cemetery in Barry and that he had a copy of the plots register. He had identified one grave of a Jane Gibson, and that three other people were also buried there, a son James Charles, and his wife Phyllis, and a 29 year old woman called Elizabeth Bright who died in September 1922, aged 29.  I knew then that this was the right grave. I never knew the married name of the great aunt who had died in her 20s,  so I have added her (along with the husband and child I was then able to identify through the index of births, marriages and deaths) to the tree.

I think it solved another mystery too. My Grandad had moved the New York in 1918 and there are no records of his coming back to Barry until the spring of 1922. I think he probably came back because his sister was gravely ill. The shipping records show that he stayed in Wales for about two months, and that when he returned to New York he was not alone. In that short time  had met and married my grandmother, and her record is on the Ellis Island website.

How do you solve a problem like Maria?

April 3

Ann and I spend most of the day in the magnificent Hive in Worcester, searching the local archive records on the Pershore Union Workhouse. There are boxes and boxes of records, but most relate to a later period. We start to go through the minute books of the weekly meetings of the Guardians which read like any other committee meeting minutes. After a time we realised that it is all about mending the drains, tendering for food supplies and managing accounts. There are only a few references to individuals when they are sent off to the lunatic asylum in Fairford Gloucs. We learn a lot about the mechanics of running the workhouse but nothing about the Tandys.

We realise that what we need are the Masters Day books, but despite help from the lovely staff, they can't be located. Am so frustrated that the Millenium history book which mentioned Maria did not reference their source. Instead we take a look at the 1830 to 1835 parish poor relief overseers books to see if Maria was "on benefits " before the workhouse opened in 1837. She isn't but we do find her grandmother Elizabeth Tandy who must have been 80 by then. She receives. 2s and. 6d a week right up until May 1834. The record then shows expenditure of £1 on her funeral.

April 4

We spend some time in the Heritage Centre in Pershore which is opened a few mornings a week in the Town Hall and run entirely by volunteers. We learn more about the town in general and the workhouse in particular but nothing about the Tandys .There are full transcripts of all the parish registers and monumental inscriptions. I think about the hours I spent at the Family Records Centre in Kew recording them all and sigh deeply.

The Abbey Church of Pershore Holy Cross

Worcestershire wanderings

My Dad's family came from West Yorkshire. Almost no one ever seemed to leave and they rarely married people from outside the County. One exception was my Great Great Great Grandad Thomas Tandy who came to Bradford from Worcester in the 1860s.

The old bridge across the Avon at Pershore

He was born in Pershore in 1836, and the records at the church of Holy Cross record that his mother was Maria Tandy, single woman.  The records go on to show, as does the 1841 Census, that Maria had three children out of wedlock, and that two of them were born whilst she was in the workhouse.

My sister Ann and I decide to use a few days of the Easter break to go to Pershore and see what we can find out about this er, unconventional woman.

We take a walk around Pershore on a bright but bitterly cold afternoon. The picturesque old bridge across the River Avon would have been there when my Tandy ancestors lived in the town.  We spend time in the church of Holy Cross where all the main ecclesiastical events of their lives took place.  Am moved to see that the old font, which was discarded in 1840 and used as a cattle trough, has been recovered and takes pride of place in the church.  It was the one in which three generations of my ancestors would have been baptised. We have a classic, "Who do you think you are?" moment and wipe away a tear.

We pop into the library to look at local history books, and to warm up!  My friend Liz Tucker, who had been the local councillor in Pershore for about 30 years,  passes me a book and says, "there's some stuff about the workhouse in here".  Sure enough, the book which was produced by local historians for the town's millennium in 1972 goes into detail.  I then come across this in a paragraph about poor discipline in the early days of the workhouse, "in 1837 Maria Tandy was put on bread and water as a punishment for breaking windows and other acts of violence".  Our ancestor is recorded for posterity... It goes on to describe how the wall between the men's and the women's sections had to be raised by 2 feet. Oh dear, we appear to be descended from a nineteenth century Jeremy Kyle family. My sister and I descend into helpless giggles.