Flamborough

Superdad?

I ended Friday’s post with a 1901 census screenshot of “wrong” Elizabeth STORK as Mrs WESTFIELD. The only birth record I had found that was a reasonable fit for her gave the mother’s maiden surname as ULLIOT. It didn’t take long to figure that this woman was not the mother of the future Mrs Westfield. Here is the birth registration of the besmircher of little Elizabeth Stork’s memory.

STOCK (sic), Elizabeth, Mother’s Maiden Surname: MAINPRIZE. GRO Reference: 1845 J Quarter in BRIDLINGTON Volume 23 Page 21

In most other readily available sources this Elizabeth’s calculated birth year is 1851. There is a record showing that she was baptised at the age of two that goes part way to explaining the six year discrepancy.

Elizabeth, daughter of William Stork and Frances “Fanny” Mainprize, already has a place on Filey Genealogy & Connections, but the information about her maternal grandparents there is minimal. I had to do more work to establish that, in reality, grandfather Leonard Mainprize was born in Flamborough in 1785. In a corner of the Shared Tree he is almost a quarter of a century older. And this fellow married twice and appears to have fathered seventeen children. I have put the two families together –

“Wrong” Elizabeth’s mother is child 8 on the right.

That John Mainprize should have been born in 1807 to both Mary Morris and Frances Vickerman is only one indication that all is not well here.

Leonard is apparently sixty-seven years old when his last child, Mary, is born. In 1851 she is described in the Census as a “house servant”, 23 and unmarried, living in Flamborough with her widower father. His given age is 65, not 90.

One of the FamilySearch Genealogies, from a partner site (MyTrees.com), has a firmer grip on reality.

If this mess on the Shared Tree can be cleared up, the relationship between the two Leonards may become clear – and little Elizabeth Stork can sleep in peace eternally when “wrong” Elizabeth is laid to rest in the right place and at the right time.

(I have just had a quick look online and the FamilySearch Shared Tree has been calculated to be 98% accurate.)

Beach 139 · Filey Sands

Arndale Slip

Monkeying Around

In April 2019 I put a headstone on the Shared Tree that remembered Robert STORK, his two wives, Margaret CHAPMAN and Rachel HUMPHREY, and Margaret’s second daughter Elizabeth, who died aged six in 1857.

Elizabeth already had an ID [MGCB-W3S] but if you search for this now you get…

Hmmm.

Searching for Elizabeth, born 1851 in Filey, delivers this Top 3…

Number 1 is our wee girl, with her parents and correct years of birth and death – but a different ID, GS79-JX2. Click to the Shared Tree…

Although heartened that this Elizabeth has the right dates, I am disappointed that her “memory” has been removed. And who is this “rachel Stork”? She has no sources attached and I don’t think any will ever be found.

It gets worse.

Number 3 on the search list (above) is Elizabeth Stork born in Flamborough in 1851, wife of George Henry WESTFIELD. On the face of it she is not our Elizabeth but click on her and, notwithstanding death in 1906 and the absence of forebears, she has a memory.

So much for little Elizabeth’s early death being written in stone – and affirmed on paper.

Finally, the Elizabeth currently tagged to the Stork headstone has a calculated age at death of 55. The GRO Deaths Index entry says Mrs Westfield was six years older than that.

WESTFIELD, Elizabeth, Age at Death (in years): 61. GRO Reference: 1906  M Quarter in SCULCOATES Volume 09D Page 156 Occasional Copy: A

I cannot find a Bridlington birth registration for Elizabeth Stork in 1844, 1845 or 1846. There is this in 1847 –

STORK, Elizabeth, Mother’s Maiden Surname: ULLIOT. GRO Reference: 1847 D Quarter in BRIDLINGTON Volume 23 Page 29.

And here is “wrong Elizabeth” in 1901, from FamilySearch records –

Found Object 58 · Monkey

The Separation

I have stayed away from the entangled CARTER families for a couple of days, leaving them in the adventurous hands of ‘homebuilt’. I visited them this morning and was pleased to see one family had become two. Several children were living on the wrong side of the tracks but all the heavy lifting had been done (thank you, James) and it was a simple matter to send Elizabeth, Hannah and Edward over to Malton and add poor Robert to the Bridlington folk. I despatched Ann to the cyber-orphanage. I am convinced her mother is someone other than Mary Thompson or Mary Stephenson. Someone may give her a home eventually.

There is work still to be done but both families look healthier after the surgical procedure. Look back to last Monday’s post to see the way things were. As I write, the two Carter families look like this –

The stage is now set for the story of James Robert Carter and the Two Donkin Sisters.

Beach 117 · Mile Haven

Primrose Valley stream and a clearing rain shower

John, John

In 1821, they were christened 49 days and about the same number of miles apart – and their mothers were called Mary.

FamilySearch.org
FamilySearch.org

Their wives were also called Mary and the couples chose the same names for three of their children.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that the two families became tangled on the FamilySearch Shared Tree.

The first thing I did this morning was to extract all Yorkshire Carters from the 1881 Census as an Excel file and sort them by birth year, first for “John” and then for “Mary”. It was no surprise to see the men “twinned”. Three hale Marys, all widows, separated the wives.

Interesting that George should be living next door to his parents. (His wife and children are on the next page.)

Huntingdon John laboured on the railways for much of his life while Flamborough John worked the land. The agricultural labourer’s life would be shorter by sixteen years.

The railway man was a widower for seventeen years and lived for most of that time in Norton with his youngest son Thompson, daughter in law Sarah Ellen, and five grandchildren. The family’s move to Norton shortened the distance between the two Johns at death by almost twenty miles.

Efforts are being made on the Shared Tree to tease the two families apart. I am not acting alone, so a certain amount of chaos can be expected. I will let you know when I think it is safe to pay the Marys and Johns a visit.

Nature Morte 16 · Catshark

Small-spotted catshark, Scyliorhinus canicula, Filey Sands

Mary, Mary

I was preparing a story about the man who married sisters when I noticed the FamilySearch Shared Tree has given him a guesswork grandmother.

The nine children of Mary THOMPSON shown here can only rustle up one source between them – and that is a census. Had the contributors of this oddball brood sought evidence of their arrival in the vale of tears, they would have discovered that four began life in the body of another woman. And the genetic material to make the other five was donated by a different John CARTER.

John of the screenshot has two sources – both noting his baptism in Flamborough. Just before Christmas 1845 he married Mary STEPHENSON.

Marriages Dec 1845

CARTER John & STEPHENSON Mary, Bridlington 23 43.

Free BMD

Mary S. was born in Ulrome in 1824 to William and Hannah. She gave birth to five sons, the first four boys in the screenshot above and poor Robert, who lived for just a few weeks.

Mary T. first saw light in Kexby, almost forty miles inland from Ulrome. She married her John in York.

Marriages Mar 1846

CARTER John & THOMPSON Mary, York 23 677. 

This chap worked as a “railway labourer” and the couple started their family in York. The births of Hannah, Edward and Thompson were registered in Malton.

Given the lack of care in putting this misleading family unit together, I do not have any qualms about attempting to set the records straight.

Path 112 · St Oswald’s Churchyard

The Wrong Wife

John Braithwaite TAYLOR is currently married to Ann CHADWICK on the FamilySearch Shared Tree. Nine sources are attached to his record but one is duplicated and another has been removed. Only the Civil marriage registration source is misleading.

Here is John’s Probate entry –

Hmm, Elizabeth. The 1881 census finds John and Elizabeth at 14 Ferndale Terrace, Scarborough, with two children – Annie Gertrude, 4, and Francis Edward, 2. And the GRO Births Index offers…

Clearly, the marriage of Ann to John Braithwaite Taylor on the Shared Tree should be dissolved so that the birth of her first daughter with George COCKERILL can be recorded.

This child was born in Filey. She does not have a Shared Tree ID yet but she is with her seven siblings on Filey Genealogy & Connections. Her father has a foothold on the Shared Tree.Ann Chadwick has two IDs, one tying her to the wrong husband, the other placing her in the bosom of her birth family.

Elizabeth, the right wife, died shortly after celebrating her seventieth birthday.

Found Object 40 · Love Mask

Three Widows

On the 5th of November 1852, Flamborough men John BAILEY, John MAJOR and George STEPHENSON went to sea “in pursuit of their calling”. Their fishing coble was turned over by the waves and all three drowned, “each leaving a widow to lament their bereavement”.

John Major’s body was soon recovered and laid to rest on the 7th. Jane, his widow, wasn’t a stranger to the graveyard.

Grave of John Major_straight
Photo courtesy Ann Davies

On his last day, John could not have known he would become a father again. His daughter, Jane, was born the following year, in July.

Widow Jane had been a minor when she married but signed the register with a neat hand (after a false start).

1839_JaneBROOKS_signature

In 1861 she is living in Ship Inn Yard, Flamborough, with three children – Ann (12), William (10) and Jane (7). At the same address ten years later, young Jane is absent on census night, and William, now 20, is supporting the family by fishing. He marries two years later and sets up his own household. The enumerator in 1881 finds Jane in South Dalton, about thirty miles from Flamborough, working as a housekeeper to Henry Llewellyn CHOWEN, a single man, aged 38, and a land agent. He also employs Jane ELLERBY, widow Jane’s 14-year-old granddaughter as a servant. Jane the Elder is still Henry’s housekeeper in 1891. I don’t know if she stayed in post until his death in 1900 but at census the following year she is back in Flamborough with son William, a fish merchant now and a widower. It must have been a comfortable home because William’s three unmarried sons are all working and his daughter, yet another Jane, keeps house.

Widow Jane dies aged 87 in the winter of 1908. Find her on the Shared Tree.

The bodies of John Major’s drowned companions are not recovered for a week or more. John BAILEY is buried on 16 November and George STEPHENSON  two days later.

1852_BAILEY_Burial

John married Frances HUNTER in 1849 and the couple had one son before death intervened. Frances is with 10-year-old William Hunter Bailey in Mosey’s Yard, Filey in 1861 but she dies before the next census, aged 50. She is buried somewhere in St Oswald’s churchyard but her headstone has been relocated to the north wall. You can find a photo of it as a memory on the Shared Tree.

Alice COCKCROFT married George in 1850 and only had time to have one child with him, a daughter, Mary. Shortly before she buried her husband she had seen her two sisters laid to rest, Esther in August aged 17 and Hannah in September aged 26. Alice and Hannah’s husband George BIELBY, bereft and both with infant daughters to raise, moved in together. They didn’t marry and it is nobody’s business whether the arrangement ever had a romantic dimension. Six successive census enumerators from 1861 to 1911 noted Alice’s status as George’s housekeeper – and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Find Alice on the Shared Tree.

Bird 79 · Chiffchaff

19_20200419Chiffchaff♂2_6m

 

Sarah’s Unfortunate Menfolk

Sarah was the middle child of five born in Flamborough to Tanton CHADWICK and Mary STEPHENSON. When she was eight years old, her father left home one day to fish and didn’t return.

BRIDLINGTON: – On Monday, the body of Tanton Chadwick, one of the fishermen who was missing from Flamborough in the late gale, was washed ashore at Filey bay, near the lighthouse.

Yorkshire Gazette, 18 October 1851.

Tanton was buried in Flamborough St Oswald’s churchyard the following day.

Ten years later Sarah was working in Driffield as a housemaid to Anna Stephenson, a grocer/draper recently widowed (at just 24) and possibly a relative. I don’t know how Sarah met fisherman William SAYERS, but she married him at Filey St Oswald’s in November 1865.

In January 1877, while pregnant with her fifth child, Sarah received news that two of her brothers had drowned.

1877_CHADWICKwm&saml_DROWNED

Baby Susannah would die on the fourth anniversary of the deaths of her uncles. She was old enough to have been excited about welcoming a baby brother into the world. The birth of Thomas was registered in the same quarter as Susannah’s death, but he lived for just nineteen months.

The gales of early March 1883 took the lives of four Filey men, one of them Sarah’s husband.

1883_SAYERSwm_DROWNED

(Horatio WILKINSON and George SCOTTER were the other two fishermen lost on 6 March.)

William’s headstone in Filey St Oswald’s churchyard has a fine carving depicting a yawl.

D297_YawlDetail

Denison (SH88) survived the beaching at Spurn. Built in Rye in 1859, it had a long working life before being wrecked at Saltburn on 4 August 1904.

In 1911, widow Sarah was living in Hope Street with her son William, byname “Ginger Billy”, daughter in law Elizabeth née JAMES and six grandchildren. She had ten more years ahead of her, dying at Seadale in November 1921, aged 78.

I did a few hours of research into the Chadwick family of Flamborough before discovering they were well represented on the Shared Tree.

It isn’t a simple matter to marry Sarah off to William. As the son of yesterday’s fisherman, the union might raise the ghost of the shoemaker. I have messaged a contributor to the pedigree of William Benjamin SAYER and maybe the “issues” will soon be resolved. I will add a photo of William and Sarah’s headstone to FST as soon as I can.

D297_SAYERSsarah_20170504_fst

 

Alice and Her Sisters

Alice COCKCROFT was one of the three widows left to “lament their bereavement” following the deaths of their husbands in November 1852. She was well practised in lamentation.

On the 29th August that year, her younger sister Esther had been laid to rest, aged 17. Ten days later, her elder sister Hannah was buried.

1852_COCKCROFTsisters_Bur

Alice’s daughter Mary was about 9 months old at this time and her niece, Sarah Ann BIELBY, had recently celebrated her first birthday. There may not have been much discussion before the bereft man and woman, each with an infant to raise, chose to live together. (They would be inseparable for about fifty years.)

The 1861 census found Alice keeping house for George Bielby and Sarah  Ann in Foxroyd Yard, Flamborough. (Mary was with grandmother Sarah Cockroft in South Street.) Ten years later the two girls, now 19, were in Front Street, Flamborough, with their “single parents”.

Mary Stephenson flew the unusual but practical nest first, in 1874, to marry William Joseph GARDINER. The couple moved to Hull and lived in Terry Street for about forty years – without the “blessing” of children.

Sarah Ann married Richard Acklam BAYES in September 1876 and had four children, three girls and a boy who would play cricket for Yorkshire.

George William Bayes, as an amateur in a summer sport, would almost certainly not have given up his job as a fish buyer, or his home in Flamborough. In 1933 he made a short film of fishermen at North Landing and “the climmers” on the headland. You can watch it here. George William was not related by blood to George Stephenson but it would be surprising if he hadn’t been told stories about his “granduncle”.

1933_GeoWmBAYES_screengrab
Screengrab from George William’s film.

I have made some connections on the FamilySearchTree that help to form a picture of the future denied to George Stephenson. I am unable to present his forebears because there are problems to be resolved.

I have found Flamborough Fishing Families to be a reliable online resource but in this instance, it doesn’t agree with FST.

FFF indicates that George’s parents are George and Mary née CHADWICK. I think this is correct.

FST marries George, son of George and Mary, to a “Mrs Stephenson”, with daughters born in 1857 and 1862. I think Mrs S is Jane DANBY, of North Frodingham. She married George there and they raised their family in Roos. Just to confuse matters further, FFF has the George who went to Roos marrying “Elizabeth”.

Of the three men who drowned in 1852, two families (Bailey and Major) have representatives buried or remembered in Filey St Oswald’s churchyard. If I find Flamborough Stephenson connections to Filey I may return to the difficulties with George senior and junior.

Fathers, Lost

William Hunter BAILEY was two years old when his father failed to return home.

1852_MAJORjohn_NEWS

John BAILEY was 28-years old, George STEPHENSON 27 and John MAJOR 35. Their bodies must have been recovered because their deaths were registered locally, but I have only found a burial record for John Major.

1852_MAJORjohn_BURIAL

William and his mother moved the few miles to Filey, where Frances died in August 1870. A few months later William married Elizabeth CRAWFORD. At the 1871 census, the couple was enumerated in Mosey’s Yard and ten years later in Providence Place, having been joined by two children, John William and Sarah Ann.

William, undaunted by his father’s fate, worked as a fisherman. Like his dad, he didn’t make old bones but I have been unable to find the cause of his death at age 34.

His headstone in Filey St Oswald’s churchyard has been moved from his grave to the north wall.

H26_BAILEYfrances_20170504_fst

In remembrance of FRANCES, wife of JOHN BAILEY, who died Aug 14th 1870, aged 51 years.

‘Farewell dear son, do thou earth’s days employ

To fit thee for our Father’s home of joy

Sleep on dear Mother and take thy rest

God took thee when he thought it best.’

Also, WILLIAM HUNTER BAILEY, son of the above and the beloved husband of ELIZABETH, died 16th Sep. 1884 aged 34 years.

Find the three drowned fishermen on FamilySearch Tree: John Bailey, George Stephenson and John Major.

Today’s Image

I walked along the beach to Reighton this morning as a way of remembering the solar eclipse.

20_20150320Eclipse1_8m

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