Over Silton

The Brothers Dennis?

Robert DENNIS married Sarah Jane HARDWICK, the younger sister of the little girl assaulted on 5 December 1860 in Nether Silton. Robert was 12 years old at that time, living two miles away at Mill Hill, Kepwick. His wife-to-be was just two.

Robert was baptized in Over Silton Church on 1 October 1848 by John OXLEE, the incumbent. He was the sixth child of Thomas, a carpenter. and Jane nee HARKER. They appear to have had four children after Robert, but perhaps there were only three.

I could not find a birth registration for Robert and so guessed he had been born the previous month, September 1848. There is, however, a birth registration for Thomas Dennis in the December quarter of 1848. The notion that the boys were twins was fleeting. The births of both would surely have been registered and/or they would have been baptized together. I could not find a death registration for Thomas – or his enumeration in the 1851 census. It is Robert, aged two, at the Cooling House, Kepwick, with his parents and five siblings that year. Two of these were sisters called Mary Jane (6) and Mary (about six months old). The elder had been registered as “Margaret Jane”. This discrepancy made me think the parents were somewhat forgetful – so young Thomas and Robert were probably one and the same person.

I was surprised to discover that Robert married Sarah Jane in Bradford, when censuses indicated that neither family had moved far during their lifetimes. I had to look hard to find Robert’s whereabouts in 1871 but eventually –

So we can make that nine children born to Thomas senior and Jane. Both parents have seven or eight FamilySearch IDs, generated mostly by baptism records I’m guessing, though I have yet to tackle all of the merges. The Dennis family is “all over the place” on the Shared Tree. One of Robert’s IDs currently has him married to Sarah Jane but they are awaiting the arrival of the first of at least six children (and he only has one sibling, brother Henry). I hope to make some deliveries tomorrow.

Beach 125 · Butcher Haven

Hunmanby Sands

Victims of a Rape

It has taken me several days to sort out someYorkshire HOGGARTH and HOGGART families. Transcribers of terrible handwriting can’t really be blamed for adding HAGGERT, HEGGART, HUGGERT, HOGARTH  and HOGGARD to the mix-ups.

You may recall from an earlier post that the variable Vena/Vera Beatrice SMALL married Cyril Herbert HARDWICK some years after the death of her first husband, Robert HARRISON.

Cyril’s parents were Herbert and Mary Ellen nee HOGGARTH. Mary Ellen’s father is not named in the 1907 Salton marriage register but he was William, an agricultural labourer born in Osmotherly in 1843 to Richard HOGGART and Mary Ann HOOD.

The William Hoggarth who signed the register is most likely Mary Ellen’s younger brother. When their parents married in 1870, their mother signed the register “Christiana SHEPHARD”, her brother wrote “Richard SHEPHERD”. Father William Hoggarth made a mark and was probably unaware that the clerk set down the family name as HOGARTH.

At the 1891 census, the enumerator wrote “Hoggarth” in his book.

It is not unusual to see the spelling of family names change from one generation to the next but, as mentioned already, Christiana Shephard married into the family HOGGART, where most of the men were agricultural labourers and farmers of modest holdings in Nether and Over Silton, and Kepwick.

In 1851 William Hoggart was eight years old, living in Nether Silton with his father Richard an ag lab, mother Mary Ann nee HOOD, an older brother called John and a younger sister, Margaret.

Ten years later, Richard is alone in Nether Silton. Aged 53, he is still married. A death registration for Mary that appears to fit brings her life to a close in York in 1874. In search of an explanation for their separation, I turned to newspapers and found this:-

Almost a year later, on 30 November, the Leeds Intelligencer reported:-

On Tuesday last the under-named prisoners were removed from York Castle, namely […] John Hoggart, acquitted as insane at the Winter Gaol Delivery last year of a felonious assault upon a little girl at Nether Silton, sent to the North and East Riding Lunatic Asylum at Clifton.

Clifton is in York. I wonder if he saw his mother there. She was enumerated at the Asylum in 1861 as a “patient”, and in 1871 as “a lunatic”.

I have been unable to find Richard in 1871. There is a source indicating he died in Streetlam, about thirteen miles from Over Silton, in 1876. Back in 1861 his dwelling in the village was Number 7 in the enumerator’s schedule. The Gold Cup Inn, where Elizabeth Hardwick lived with her parents, a brother and two sisters, was the first household on the page.

The FamilySearch Shared Tree currently presents the distressing indication that our rape victim, when she was only ten years old, gave birth to an illegitimate daughter. I believe Laura  was the daughter of little Elizabeth’s Aunt Elizabeth Hardwick. She was living with her mother on widowed grandmother Ann Hardwick’s Cote Grange Farm in 1871 and died a single woman in 1886 aged 21.

“Our little Elizabeth”, Laura’s cousin, married William GRAINGER in 1878 and had six children with him, five of whom reached adulthood. The 1911 census transcription gives William’s occupation as “Agent For Cakes And Manners”. Whatever happened to Fancies?

Abstract 67 · Church Bridge