The John BURR who was baptised on this date in 1780 is a man of some mystery – in the sense that sources attached to him online don’t fit him comfortably. His supposed wife, Hannah LITTLE, is an enigma too, variously dying in 1826 and bearing a fifth child in 1836.

On the Shared Tree, birth “about 1800” ensures John’s marriage to Hannah in 1812 is missed (see ID MF52-9J3). A Find My Past contributor has John dying in 1849 at 60. That would make him only two years older than Hannah at marriage, but nine years too old to be our baptism boy.

John and Hannah married in Woodham Mortimer in Essex, twenty miles to the east of Aythorpe Roding, the 1780 baptismal place. In 1841, the Chelmsford and Essex Agricultural Society gave prizes at the Annual Cattle Show to “deserving labourers and servants”. John Burr was a contender, put forward by Mr J. G. COZENS of Woodham Mortimer, his employer for thirty years. (He didn’t win.)

The Hannah Burr who died in 1828 is buried in Alconbury, 75 miles north of Woodham Mortimer. Two years earlier, her son David Burr, a future sweeper of Filey chimneys, was born and baptised in Alconbury.

I put Sydney Garbutt NELLIST on the Shared Tree today. I think he was an only child.

George PRINGLE, born on the North Yorkshire Moors, married Mary Hodgson in Egton in 1821. I know very little about them. Their immediate descendants didn’t stray far from the Whitby area and it was great-grandson Charles HARRISON who journeyed thirty miles south and married a Filey woman, Mary Edmond LANE. The Shared Tree has eleven of the twelve children I think they had.

There is a “hidden” stone in Filey churchyard that remembers Grace OGLE. It is one of those recorded by the East Yorkshire Family History Society as “ no longer in existence or cannot be found”. The Crimlisks found it in Area G but it was moved close to the North Wall, near the hut, and is no longer to be seen.

2196 Outhet G439

In affectionate remembrance of EDWARD OUTHET of Lebberston, who died February 28th 1875, aged 70 years.

Also of GRACE, wife of the above, who died June 21st 1849, aged 45 years.

‘Watch, therefore, for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come’

Matt. xxiv 42