Sisters

Before telling you about the BATEMAN girls…

Mary Ann who didn’t become Mrs FANT married William RONALD, a Scotsman, in 1864. After two boys had been born in Hull, the family moved south to Hampshire where Alexander was born. The birth of their last child was registered in South Stoneham (Southampton) in 1884. William, a boiler maker turned rivetter, took his wife and three children north to Tyneside. The family was together in Neptune Road, Wallsend in 1891. Mary Ann’s death at the age of 61 was registered in Tynemouth in March 1907.

I have happened upon several instances of sisters who were not the marrying kind and chose to live together in their old age. Mary Ann, Jane and Eliza Bateman all tied knots but left it rather late and I don’t think any of them had children.

Jane was the first of the trio to wed, becoming the third wife of Thomas Horton BRATLEY in 1877. Thomas was only thirty-one, Jane a year older but he was not too long for the world, dying in Sculcoates in 1885. The registration says he was only 36 but I think he was pushing 39. He was only 17 when he married Mary Ann Catherine (sometimes Caroline) FEMEL, the daughter of German parents, on Christmas Day 1863.

The Femel name is offered in various flavours, as are the places of origin of the parents and Mary Ann’s two brothers. Curiously, the 1861 census says she was born in Louth in 1845 but her younger brother John arrived in Lindesruth and Henry in nearby Reiskirchen two years later (in 1850). A subsequent census confuses the issue by giving Henry the surname YOUNGER. Louis Younger didn’t marry the widow Femel until 1857.

The first Mrs Thomas Horton Bratley had a son in Louth, then crossed the river Humber with her husband and had three daughters in Hull, two of them called Elizabeth after her mother. And then she died at age twenty-eight. Thomas wasted no time finding another helpmeet. Sarah Ann Bateman was over ten years his senior and I have not been able to discover a family connection to the sisters. The marriage lasted four years and ended with the death of Sarah Ann at the age of 44. Six months passed and Thomas married Jane Bateman.

Mary Jane Bateman married widower James FANT about a year after his first wife had died in Scarborough aged 31. I was surprised to see what he did for a living when he first married. Less than three years later he was working as a labourer.

I looked for children but didn’t find any.

In 1881, at the age of thirty, Eliza Bateman was in service, working as a cook. She did not marry house and ship painter (and bachelor) John William WALLIS until 1888. They were enumerated in Bean Street, Hull, in 1901 and Eliza’s sister Jane was with them. Jane claimed to be a dressmaker but ten years later, when she was in Filey with her other sister, Mary Ann Fant, she had “Private Means”. In the marriage register below you will notice that one of the witnesses to Eliza’s marriage is Emily Minnie Bratley – the daughter of Thomas and his first wife Mary Ann Femel.

Mary Ann Who?

Mary Ann was buried in St Oswald’s churchyard 111 years ago yesterday but she does not have a gravestone. Neither does she have any relatives in the Filey Genealogy & Connections database.

In 1911 she was living at 16 Scarborough Road, Filey and a sister was with her on census night.

16 Scarborough Road, Filey, photographed this morning

Mary Ann’s husband, James Fant, had died in 1907 and he too rests in an unmarked grave. I did a little snooping on Find my Past before seeking out the ladies on FamilySearch.

Mary Ann has ten sources on the Shared Tree. The 1851 and 1861 censuses show her in the bosom of the BROWN family, her birthplace given as Holbeck in one and Leeds in the other. (The parish of Holbeck would eventually be incorporated into Leeds Registration District.) I cannot access the 1871 Census on Ancestry but we know she married in 1880/1881. The censuses in 1881, 1891 and 1901 show her with her husband James in Scarborough and Filey. In all three Mary Ann is adamant that she was born in Hull. In 1901 they were living at 8 Scarborough Road.

There isn’t a marriage source for the couple on the Shared Tree. Given Mary’s birthplace mismatch, finding it would have been a good idea. (Her birth three years before the supposed parents married should also have raised an eyebrow, if not a red flag.)

I will say more about the BATEMAN sisters, including Eliza, tomorrow.

Landscape 170 · Cleveland Way

Looking north to Hayburn Wyke 54.355497, -0.441668 (approximate viewpoint)

Crushed

George Featherstone BAXTER was Betsy Ann JENKINSON’s second husband. The first, Richard RICHARDSON, had drowned in the Great Storm of 1880 when she was just twenty-two. Betsy waited four years before marrying George. It may have been a conscious decision not to wed another fisherman. Thirteen years later –

The Coroner accepted the proposition that George had “acted contrary to instructions” and, in undermining the wall, had brought about his own demise. He had not had any children with Betsy. Mary Jane, her only child with Richard, would marry William SCOTT and provide her with three grandchildren, though one of them, called Richard, wasn’t a blessing to her for long.

I have put Betsy’s mournful headstone on the Shared Tree.

1876 Filey · Burial Poor little George Edmund Crawford inherited nothing. His father, George, was rich in heartache. A commercial clerk in Hull, he married Margaret CRAWFORD on 6 March 1875 and must have been delighted when she was soon with child. We can assume the boy was born on 2 December – the day his mother died. George junior was baptised on the thirteenth of that month and died the following March the fifth. How did George senior get through the next day? (The first anniversary of his ill-fated marriage.)

In 1881, George is living again with his parents in Hull. Aged 29, working as a general merchant, he has the company of sisters Kate, 18, and Lily, 8. I did try to find him in later censuses but without enthusiasm – in case I found his life didn’t get any better.

Sadly, the headstone in St Oswald’s churchyard also records the death of an infant nephew, Edward Crawford SWANN.

I put the headstone remembering Dorothy BAYES on the Shared Tree about a year ago. There is some remedial work needed on the families associated with John SPICER and Elizabeth BINNINGTON. I may tell their story at a later date.

Beach 161 · Reighton Sands

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 Far Horizon

Joseph BATES, a wool finisher and exporter in Yorkshire, sent two of his teenage sons to the East Indies to further his business interests. Both young men married daughters of a career soldier, Cornelius Umfreville SMITH, in the Fort William Old Church, Calcutta. Edward and his bride Charlotte Elizabeth were under age in July 1836. Edward’s brother Benjamin Hopkinson, and Charlotte’s sister Susannah Mary, were witnesses at the ceremony. Their wedding took place in the same church two years later.

The Smith sisters were children of the Raj but they both sailed 15,000 miles to the “home country” with their husbands. There, they experienced the deaths of infants before dying themselves. The brothers married again. Edward prospered as a merchant and ship owner, served in Parliament, and was raised to the peerage. Benjamin died a bankrupt.

Edward married his second wife, Ellen THOMPSON, in Holy Trinity Church, Hull. It appears to have been celebrated by a large number of people.

I am a little puzzled by “overland mail” but you can assess their successful partnership on Wikipedia and the FamilySearch Shared Tree.

Sky 28 · Filey Bay

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

Ancestral Trials

The Misses Mary TOALSTER on FamilySearch (IDs GZMR-29J & 9QVZ-N86) could not, of course, be merged, being different individuals. I had two choices. Declare them “not a match” and then change the name of “Mary E.” to create the person Mary Elizabeth HUNT. Or I could make this change first, thereby removing the “potential duplicate”. I thought it better not to break the chain of data custody and go the “not a match” route. I started the clock to see how long this would take me. After four hours yesterday I had most of the information I held on the two Marys uploaded to the Shared Tree but hit some obstacles along the way and didn’t get as far as connecting Mary Elizabeth to her forebears. The most interesting puzzle involved Sarah ODLING, a grandmother of Mary Elizabeth Hunt. She has this toe-hold on the Shared Tree.

And here she is, usurped –

Sarah UNDERWOOD/HUNT has six sources attached to her record. Two census returns, three baptism records for daughter Sarah Ann and one reference to the baptism of Mary Jane the Elder. None of these sources identify mother Sarah as a born Underwood.

It seems unlikely that there were two Mary Jane’s living together as sisters. I have not found a record of the younger Mary. Here are the birth registrations of four children –

(Roger, Mary Elizabeth’s father-to-be, is usually “Rodger” in subsequent records.)

It appears we should accept Sarah ODLING as the wife of James Crowther Hunt. Here is the parish marriage register record –

Grimsby is in Caistor Registration District and the family crossed the River Humber after Mary Jane was born to settle in Hull. I found it interesting that Sarah could write and her husband couldn’t. Sarah’s childhood had not been easy. In 1851, given age 9, she was descibed as a pauper inmate of Boston Workhouse, with her mother Ann, (married, 48), brother Benjamin (15) and younger sisters Elizabeth (6) and Mary Ann (3).

It gets worse. On the Underwood screenshot above the “real” Mary Jane Hunt marries William AARON and if you look on the Shared Tree they have (perhaps) seven children. The youngest, Doris, has an attached record showing her baptism in 1895 in Goole, which is about thirty miles from Hull. By some genealogical legerdemain, she transforms into Doris Lynette, born in Athens, Georgia in 1918. It should not come as a surprise that Mrs Mary Jane Aaron, aged fifty when Doris Lynette was born, was not in real life the daughter of James Crowther Hunt.

I’m not sure I want to bite the bullet. It feels as if I’ve been put through a cement mixer.

Found Object 51 · Primrose Valley

A Tale of Two Marys

Mary Ellen TOALSTER was sixteen years old when three of her eight brothers were killed on the Western Front. James came home from India and Arthur William survived the conflict too – as a mechanic in the infant RAF.

A couple of years after the war ended, aged 20, Mary Ellen married George Arthur DICK in their home town, Hull. The partnership was broken by Mary’s death in 1955.

I turned to the FamilySearch to see if George was represented on the Shared Tree.

This screenshot jumps the gun somewhat – in showing that the Mary E. Toalster who died in 1994 needs to be cancelled to make way for George’s second wife.

George was sixty-years-old when he married Mary the Second and it seemed likely that this was her second marriage also.

The GRO Index entry for her death was helpful in giving her middle name and year of birth.

DICK, Mary Elizabeth, [Date of Birth] 1909. GRO Reference: DOR Q1/1994 in HULL (5502B) Reg B51A Entry Number 129.

It also confirmed the approximate date of her death so I then looked at the “possible duplicate” on FamilySearch to see if that offered any clues.

The two addresses for “Mary E. Toalster” were possibly supplied by a contributor with close family connections. I needed to find a birth family for the former Mrs Coultas before I could tackle the merge. Thanks to the 1939 Register data on Find My Past, this was more easily accomplished than I had expected.

A search in the Register for Mary Coultas born in 1909 found the home in Hull that she shared with husband William Henry, a Railway Signalman and two children. The younger child, Brian, had yet to celebrate his first birthday and his registration gave the mother’s maiden surname as HUNT. Mary’s birthdate was clearly written in the Register as “28/2/1908” but her birth registration and a baptism record confirm 1909 is correct.

All I needed now was to show William making way for George, which he did in the June Quarter of 1957, aged 58.

I haven’t found a marriage record for William Henry Coultas and Mary Elizabeth Hunt yet. Ten years older than Mary, William may have first married Agnes SMALLEY in Howden in 1920. But I think I have enough information to hand to do the necessary merge. Tomorrow perhaps.

Bird 97 · Titlark

I think this is a Tree Pipit but I am playing safe. Rock, tree and meadow pipits were all referred to as ‘titlarks’’ once upon a time. Birds Britannica (Mark Cocker & Richard Mabey) has this:-

Small, brown and streaky, pipits represent either an expansive pleasure dome for the hair-splitting expert or a baffling terra incognita to the tyro. Their dullness is legendary.

The Brothers Toalster

I happened upon the Toalster name for the first time a few days ago when I prepared the Monumental Inscription record and headstone photograph for Catherine APPLEBY.

Catherine was the daughter of James Patrick TOALSTER and Ethel May HARRISON, born in Hull in 1906.

A quick search online for the meaning of the family name and its heartland turned up nothing of value and I must go with my instinct that it is an Irish name. Catherine’s great grandfather James Toalster was born in the Emerald Isle about 1810, possibly in Galway – the place named in the first of several records that track his career in the British Army. The others are Liverpool, Poona and London where, I think, he was discharged. In 1861 he can be found living in Scott Street, Sculcoates, given age 51 and described as a Chelsea Pensioner.

James was about 44 years-old when his son, also James, was born and did not live to see any of the twelve grandchildren young James had with Mary Ann CLEARY.

Eight of the twelve were boys and four would join the British Army and serve in the most senseless war. All went to foreign fields and only Catherine’s father, James Patrick, came home.

John

Edward

Thomas

The three brothers are also remembered at the New George Street Shrine in their home town.

The 13th East Yorkshires was one of the Hull Pals Battalions. If you follow the link you will see that those whose Commonwealth War Graves are illustrated were all killed on the same day as Thomas Toalster. But his mother, still mourning the loss of two of her boys, lived in hope for several months that she might see Thomas again. He had been reported missing at the Battle of the Ancre (13 to 16 November 1916). Then, in late March/early April 1917 –

Ancre was the last of the infamous Somme battles fought over five months. John had been killed on the first day. Edward died from wounds suffered at the Second Battle of Ypres, when poison gas was first used on a large scale.

Only the brother who survived the war is represented on the FamilySearch Shared Tree. I will add the others tomorrow.

Sky 24 · Above the Country Park

A Childhood Memory

The Number 30 bus to town would drive slowly down a long, straight street of small shops with its pavements thronged with people not socially distancing. I looked forward to the turn at the end for the glimpse it gave of a church that seemed out of place. It was not drab. There was just time to take in its pastel colours, the stone figures in their niches and, on the pediment two curious words in gold, DOMVS DEI.

The seven or eight year-old me probably asked my mother what “domvers” meant. She may have told me, but puzzled fascination persisted until I started doing Latin at secondary school.

I set out yesterday on the trail of a front line worker’s forebears, this being more of an appreciation than clapping on my doorstep. “A” is not a doctor, nurse or care worker but someone putting themselves in a place of danger most days to preserve something of the “old normal”. Where would we be without cheerful checkout ladies at the supermarket?

On 28 April 1811 Susanna CHAMBERS was baptized in the Saint Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Jarrett Street, Hull.

Fifty years later she was a widow, living in Tadcaster with two unmarried daughters and mother Ann, who is described as an agricultural labourer (aged 81). Susanna’s husband, variously Barnet, Bernard, Bryon or Bryan MURPHY, had been an overlooker in several Yorkshire Flax Mills until his death in 1858, aged 52. His younger daughter, Elizabeth, was sixteen in 1861 and a yarn winder in a Tadcaster mill. I have yet to prove beyond reasonable doubt that she is A’s great grandmother. Elizabeth has, so far, made the slightest of impressions on the FamilySearch Shared Tree.

Returning to the House of God. The front page of the Register in which Susanna’s baptismal record appears indicates that the “Chapel” of Saint Charles Borromeo was founded by the “Reverend Peter Francis FOUCHER” in 1798. About twenty years later he returned to France, his homeland. There are two men of the right vintage on the Shared Tree that share his name. One is the father of Adèle, wife of Victor HUGO, but he was getting married in Paris when his near-namesake was overseeing the building of a church in Hull.

Looking at Filey REDUX

adventures in the kin trade

Hull