Filey Genealogy & Connections tells us that John Tindall STEPHENSON was 58  years old when he married Ethel COWTON at Filey St Oswald’s in 1925. She was just thirty, and John was unlikely to have been rich on a labourer’s wages.

FG&C notes that John is the son of Johnson Stephenson. The Shared Tree offers plain John and Jane as his parents. A Blue Hint for the 1911 Census has him married to Dorothy Isabel, and they are without children in their Hunmanby home. Isabel is four years older than John T. and had married him less than three years earlier when she was 46. She may have been married before and therefore not a WARDELL at birth. She died in the winter of 1923 at 25 Church Street, Filey.

I wonder if John T. had married as a young man.

I am not aware that Emily Jane BRONTË visited Filey. She has a place in FG&C because Charlotte had a couple of holidays here – and Anne is buried a few miles up the road in Scarborough. She takes the birthday-girl spot today because memories of the first reading of Wuthering Heights came flooding back. In the Sixth Form room at Malet Lambert, ‘JR’ sonorously intoned the opening paragraphs and I was hooked. Since that day, Emily has kept her place near the top of my list of best-loved humans.

Agnes PRUDENCE was a bit of a puzzle for a while. Born in Gristhorpe, her mother’s maiden surname at registration is given as HAKINGS – but when she married William two years earlier, she was a JOHNSON. Her first husband had left her with two or three children to raise. Exactly how many isn’t clear. In 1861, three are enumerated with Hannah at her parents in Winteringham near Malton, but Isaac is ten years old. If he was Hannah’s child, she would have been sixteen years old when she gave birth and perhaps not yet married. Alice Elizabeth was three and Margaret two – and all three grandchildren bear the “Haykins” name. Future census returns for William Prudence and Hannah’s family would help enormously but I have yet to find them.

Charles RUDSTON only makes it onto the grid because he must have relatives entombed in the churchyard Mausoleum – but I haven’t had time to check who they might be.

William TOUT is the father of Minnie Maud Charlotte Geatches – baptism anniversary 1 June.

Measure of Man 83 · Down the Choobs