Author: Ian Elsom

Arwen

I was confined to barracks by the storm and, as I couldn’t find a stock picture I liked, this is Redux’s first photoless day.

I placed the first “Saturday stone” on the Shared Tree though and will add some more information to the Johnson, Gibson and Taylor families tomorrow.

The Slovenian Nurse

Several backwater news outlets mentioned her a couple of days ago. But was she real or “made-up”? A video has now appeared and Seemorerocks offers the link.

Rosiener

When she married William Anderson JOHNSON (the Younger) in 1894 the clerk at St James Church in Hull named her Rosiener. Her signature in the register offered an alternative spelling.

Some Census enumerators had difficulties, except in 1891 when she said her name was “Rose”. She is “Rosina” in the GRO Births Index.

HALL, Rosina, Mother’s Maiden Surname: KIRKWOOD. GRO Reference: 1864 D Quarter in SCULCOATES Volume 09D  Page 126.

Kath calls her this in Filey Genealogy & Connections, adding a note –

Name spelt: Rosiener in marriages. altho’ there are two variations of it ie Rosienier. 1901; aged 35 with husband William A Johnson & children Charles & Gertrude. living at 8 Church Street. Her husband was an insurance agent

This afternoon I photographed the Johnson house in Church Street. (I don’t think there has been a numbering change.)

“Rose” was the household head on census night 1911, with her two children. Charles, 16, worked as a florist’s assistant. I must look for William! He died in 1932 aged 61. FG&C has Rosina living to the grand old age of 87 but I haven’t yet been able to confirm her death at Hunmanby Gap in 1952.

Sunrise 52 · Mini Golf Course

A Missing Firstborn

Agnes GIBSON, who would give birth to twenty children, is currently the first child of Henry and Alice on the FamilySearch Shared Tree.

There is clearly time for Agnes to have had an older sibling after her parents married.

The next headstone on my To-Do List marks the grave of William Anderson JOHNSON and his wife Mary Elizabeth née Gibson. Mary is without forebears on the Shared Tree.

In the 1871 census, her birthplace is given as North Burton (an alternative name for Burton Fleming).

A simple query for “Mary Gibson” in FamilySearch Sources returns the top hit as –

The 1851 census clearly indicates the girls are sisters and it is surprising that the Shared Tree hasn’t brought them together. The absence of a birth registration for Mary may be responsible. It took me a while to find a confirmatory baptism source. For a number of years, the sisters, with their husbands and children, were near neighbours on Filey’s Crescent, the Johnsons at No.30 and the Perrymans at No.23.

I will place Mary Elizabeth with her birth family on the Shared Tree tomorrow and add the Johnson stone as a memory on Saturday.

Wave 49 · Filey Bay

Uncertain Future

We have the “pandemic” with the threat/promise of more contagions; wars and preparations for further conflicts; climate change; democide. (I don’t think that’s everything.)

I am too old to bother with prepping for survival, but I am interested enough in what is going down to spend most of each morning catching up with “events”. I now have less time for Filey history and genealogy. But what is the point of that anyway, if the end of the world is nigh?

Of course, we may not be doomed, so I will continue to put St Oswald headstones on the FamilySearch Shared Tree, for as long as the Old Internet remains accessible. I doubt I will be allowed onto the planned New Internet. Going forward, I will attempt to post a stone each Wednesday and Saturday.

Photographs of Filey are more popular than the history, so I will continue to post an image each day.

I may also briefly document the continuing human adventure, as reported by journalists and commentators. (Picked up pieces.)

It’s not dark yet, but we are getting there. It has been a long journey. At breakfast this morning, I read Simon Schama on the “prodigy” Samuel Palmer. As part of his education, there were “outdoor excursions into suburban pastoral”.

To persuade themselves that the deep country was the spiritual corrective to the grinding materialism of the town, the Romantics had to close their eyes to the brutalities of the modern British countryside, where enclosures, the peremptory disappearance of common grazing, and the incoming revolution of threshing machines had liquidated small tenancies, impoverished rural labourers, ignited violent attacks on the machines, brought militia into the villages, and sent multitudes into the rookeries of the towns and the maw of the factories.

The Face of Britain, p.384

Townscape 74 · Mitford Street

Nothing stays the same