Ann Willis

Landscape 153 · Brigg Corner

I have added the ROSS and RICKABY headstones to the Shared Tree as memories.

baptism In her eighty-two years, Margaret MEDD doesn’t seem to have strayed far from Weaverthorpe, where she was born and baptised in 1821. Her representation on the Shared Tree is currently problematic. I think she may have had three children with William RIDSDALE – and none of them is George [MP8M-F98]. He has no dates but an attached source says he was christened in 1799, long before his mother was born.

I am struggling to find what happened to William, but I was surprised to find Margaret, a married woman of thirty, in the Butterwick household of two bachelor labourers – Samuel BLANCHARD, 53, and his brother John, 47. Margaret’s infant daughter, Hannah, is also a “visitor”, less than a year old and born in Butterwick. (Butterwick is only a mile and a half from Weaverthorpe.) Eleven years later, Margaret, is married to John Blanchard.

In 1871, John and Margaret are enumerated at a house in Front Street, Weaverthorpe. Near neighbours are her father and an uncle. John dies aged 71 two years later. Margaret lives for another thirty years in Weaverthorpe, sharing a cottage with her unmarried son Thomas Ridsdale. In 1901 she is “in receipt of parochial relief” and Thomas is described as an “ordinary agricultural labourer”.

I have updated Wednesday’s post with information about William CAMMISH and Silas TAYLOR.

Another Anniversary

Clouds 56 · Filey Bay

Anniversaries

1816 Rillington · Birth Ann WILLIS is the mother of Thomas Robert CAMMISH. I offered a link to the inscription that remembers her last Wednesday. Her birthplace, Rillington, is eighteen miles to the west of Filey and, as I write this, her parents are not shown in the married state on the FamilySearch Shared Tree. In all but one of the 1851 to 1901 census returns in which she appears, Ann gives her birthplace as Scarborough. In 1861, the enumerator writes “Rillington”.

Filey Genealogy & Connection (FG&C) does show her parents.

The note in the panel (right) includes –

Probably born at Rillington as her mother hailed from that neck of the woods.

The International Genealogical Index considers Ann’s birthday to be 23 February and her birthplace Rillington.

The sea claimed Ann’s husband and she was a widow for over forty years. She appears to have lived alone for much of that time but the census offers two snapshots – with her grandson William HEWITT in 1871 and twenty years later in the bosom of the family her daughter Mary Ann made in Scarborough with Joseph YORKE. (Five grandchildren aged 20 down to ten.)

Ann, “ripe in years”, died in Scarborough and was brought to Filey for burial.

1815 Whitby · Baptism  Jane MIDWOOD married David HUNTER in the town of her birth. It seems that all her children were born in Whitby but some of them didn’t stay long. A headstone remembers Hannah, Mary and Catherine “who died in infancy”. The memorial is in St Oswald’s churchyard and it tells us that Jane died in January 1881, aged 66.

Today, Jane has five children on the Shared Tree. There are two iterations of both Dorothy and Hannah Mary plus John, Mary Ann and Peter Forest. There is room for more children between 1841 and 1852 and the GRO Index offers Catharine (1845), Andrew (1848) and Hannah (1850). The Death Index may have the three lost Hunter infants in Hannah Mary, who died in 1839 aged 1, Catharine in 1851 (5) and Mary Ann in 1852 (9). (There is a christening record for Mary Ann in September 1841. She would have been eleven in the final quarter of 1852.)

Memories of the children who died may have been too much for the parents to live with, prompting the move south to Filey. When the family is properly constituted, I’ll put the headstone on the Shared Tree.

1811 Filey · Marriage  Work is needed to uncover information about Alexander YOUNGER & Susannah HOPPER. Shared Tree

1846 Gristhorpe · Death   It seems unlikely that Jane Walker née PARKE was buried in Filey churchyard on the same day she died in Gristhorpe, but that’s what the sources indicate. I will put her stone on the Shared Tree when the uncertainty is removed.

1893 Filey · Burial  Jane DUCKWITH, wife of Dunn Charles CRAWFORD. Shared Tree.