Ruth Charlotte Prudames

Nature Morte 26 · Seabird

Elizabeth Baxter BOWMAN was a niece of Hannah Bowman, the wife of Richard GRICE and mother of Frank. See Saturday’s post regarding Matthew Grice and Ann LONGHORN. Alas, this connection isn’t apparent on the Shared Tree. Elizabeth doesn’t have any forebears. She married John William GRAY at Filey St Oswald’s and moved the few miles to Bridlington to start a family. She had two sons but lost John William junior before his second birthday. Husband John William worked as a bricklayer’s labourer/general labourer – steadily it seems because the couple lived for many years at 53 Nelson Street, Hilderthorpe.

I couldn’t ignore the eight children of Beecroft WINTRINGHAM and Sarah FRANKISH, publicly admitted into Folkton Parish Church following baptism by dissenting minister John Farrar WILKINSON. (The children are entered in the Flixton Parish Register. Flixton and Folkton are distinct and separate settlements but for some possibly quaint historical reason are often lumped together. There is only one parish church.)

The Shared Tree offers little information about the children’s lives. Three emigrated to Canada – and one endured life in Cornwall for a while before returning to Yorkshire. Alfred James was killed.

I remembered the death of Ruth Charlotte PRUDAMES on 10 May but wanted to recall her involvement, with her husband Wilf, in the Reighton Tragedy.

A large stone plaque in St Oswald’s Church recalls the lives of about a dozen occupiers of Gristhorpe Manor. Last but one is Jane, who gave up on life when she was nine years old.

Maxwell Henry BROCK was the youngest of three children born to Arthur Henry, an accountant and insurance broker working on his own account in Doncaster, and Daisy GEE. It was usual for middle and upper-class West Riding families to spend most of the summer at resorts on the Yorkshire coast. The fathers would visit at the weekends. The mothers would have a servant or two to assist with catering and childcare. Accidents happened sometimes and dead children were laid to rest in seaside churchyards. Maxwell was one such – though I didn’t find any reports that his was an accidental death. He simply “died at Filey”. It is pleasing to find that his small cross has survived intact and the grass within a marble kerb has clearly been neatly trimmed, perhaps on a regular basis. Some of the lead letters of the inscription are missing but the acknowledgement of his brief existence is clear enough. Had he lived, he may have gone for cannon fodder. Or he may have achieved great things. His older brother emigrated to Canada.

In ever loving and sacred memory of MAXWELL HENRY BROCK, died at Filey August 20 1911, aged 10 years and 11 months.

Sunset 13 · Cleveland Way

Henry was the first child born to Stephenson HALL and Jane WRIGHT but in the Crescent lodging house his parents kept in 1881 he had a brother some six years older. John Yarnell Wright, father unknown but maybe a Mr Yarnell, had been accepted by Stephenson as his own son.

Filey Genealogy and Connections gives Henry three sisters and a brother. All five children and their mother seem to be strangers to FamilySearch, but you will find Stephenson’s first family on the Shared Tree. The two boys, Henry and Moses, lived longer in Mary Gardiner’s womb than out of it, their deaths registered in the same quarter as their births. Mary, four years or so older than her husband, died in the June Quarter of 1875, at the given age of fifty-nine. Before the year was out, Stephenson had married the much younger Jane. (The “gap” was about twenty years.)

With a large chunk of my working day getting this far, I made a punt at trying to discover what became of Henry Stephenson Hall. He married Minnie FELL in Scarborough in November 1900 and at the start of the Second World War, they were living in Main Street, Seamer. And they are both on the Shared Tree. I know enough to give Henry some forebears but that’s a task for another day – or for someone else to tackle.

Eunice married Harry McINTYRE in 1925  and died twelve days after giving birth to their son, Gordon. She was seventeen years old. I don’t have a photograph of her headstone yet but the inscription reads –

‘I.H.S.’

Sacred to the memory of EUNICE, the beloved wife of HARRY MCINTYRE and daughter of ALFRED AND EMILY LONG, born April 14th 1908, died Jan 31st 1926.

In 1939, Gordon was living in The Newlands, Filey with his father Harry and Margaret McIntyre.

Ruth has featured in a number of LaF and LaF Redux posts. Check out her husband Wilf, and be sure to follow links to Norwood School.

“Wilf”

William Henry CASS was not a stranger to me. I wrote about him almost ten years ago on the first Looking at Filey blog, but somehow missed his connection to the Reighton Tragedy. You will find reference to his attempted rescue of the girls at the Norwood College website. Explore further while you are there and you may happen upon the LaF posts – scroll to the ninth item on the Record of Changes. Make sure you also check out the photographs of Wilf and Ruth here.

There has been some recent PRUDAMES activity on the FamilySearch Shared Tree but there is an amount of tidying up to be done. For some unaccountable reason, Ruth’s Uncle Francis Prudames was given a long life, a wife and many children, when in reality he died in his second year. Before removing  Francis and his sisters Ann and Mary from their unbelievable mother I took this screenshot.

I have left Hannah with the seven questionable children, the first four born before she reached the age of ten, but poor Ann ARCHER is out there somewhere, husbandless. I should, perhaps, feel some remorse at being the agent of her abandonment.

Ruth’s grandfather Samuel was born 111 years after the Hannah Kilborn’s husband. You can find him on the Shared Tree here.

Sunrise 50 · Coble Landing