Joseph WINSHIP’s childhood home was in Chapel Street, Filey. Gertrude Annie COLLING’s early years were spent a quarter of a mile away in Mariners Terrace. They were so close together in age that they must have been in the same class at school. Records don’t tell us when they decided they were meant for each other but they do note their marriage at Filey St Oswald’s in November 1910. Joseph came from a line-fishing family but Filey Genealogy & Connections says that in later years he became a trawler skipper. He had four sons and two daughters with Gertrude, and at least four married.

Whereas barely a month separated them at birth, Joseph had to live sixteen years without Gertrude.

As I write, Joseph and Gertrude are not together on the FamilySearch Shared Tree and, given what may be termed contributor confusion, it may be a while before their online lives are properly arranged.

Here are the five sources attached to Gertrude’s record on FamilySearch (with some additional information in colour) –

Elizabeth SCALES had sixteen children with George WATKINSON. The youngest, Eliza, was perhaps less than a year old when her father died. (I haven’t found a birth registration for her.) Elizabeth coped somehow with her large family, but it is no surprise to see that in 1901 the census enumerator noted that she was “in receipt of relief”. She was seventy-five years old and living in Swann’s Yard, Queen Street, with her eldest son William, a dustman, and youngest daughter Eliza a charwoman. Both were single, though Eliza would marry Robert HAXBY the following year.

Elizabeth and her husband George are both buried in Filey churchyard, but neither has a memorial. Elizabeth does, however, have over forty reliable sources attached to her Shared Tree record.

Reginald NEWSAM was the son of a Barnsley coal trimmer who went into banking. In his twenties and early thirties, he took several slow boats to China on business. I don’t know when or where he met Winifred JACKSON but they married at Filey St Oswald’s in 1931.

In the first five years of marriage, Winifred had three children. I think all of them married but none were enumerated with their parents in September 1939. Reginald had retired as a “bank accountant” because of ill health and was living with Winifred at Gorse Cottage, Ravenscar.

Annie Theresa HUNT was born in Lewisham, Kent, and married Thomas JENKINSON in Scarborough in 1915. I know nothing about their forebears and I don’t think they are represented yet on the Shared Tree.

Richard WARD is also a mystery to me. Born in Kendal and married to Elizabeth GIBSON (possibly) from Foston on the Wolds (maybe), he is an anniversary person on the strength of his being listed in FG&C as an “excavator’s navvy”. His year of death suggests he may have been an incomer who helped to build the new sea wall – and didn’t live to tell the tale.

Mark of Man 91 · Pill Box and Camp Fire