Whitby

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.

Corporal Harrison

Robert was the first of four sons born to Charles and Mary Edmond nee LANE (Tuesday’s post The Young Father). He is remembered on his parents’ headstone but is buried some distance from them in a Commonwealth War Grave.

Information about his army service is sparse on the CWGC website – and his service number in the index differs from that on the grave marker.

The birth of a daughter, Dorothy G., was registered in Ripon in 1934, mother’s maiden surname GREENHOW, but I cannot find a record of the marriage of Robert and Vera Beatrice.

I haven’t made any progress connecting Robert to his forebears on the FamilySearch Shared Tree. This is how things stand today.

Landscape 132 · Primrose Valley

Did He Drown?

Kath asks the question regarding Edward COWLING in a note on Filey Genealogy & Connections. Edward is remembered on the headstone of his son, John William, who perished after being swept from the coble Concord, (see last Tuesday’s post).

Edward died at the age of 62 on 22 February 1895, whilst line fishing from the Whitby ketch Princess Royal (WY40). It seems, though, that he was taken ill and brought quickly ashore, where the cause of his death was given as “bronchitis”. He was buried in St Oswald’s churchyard on the 24th.

Edward on FamilySearch Tree.

Ten Station Weather, Week 27

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A curious week in which two stations that have warmed considerably so far this year, Koltsovo and Sydney, returned mean temperatures below Pre-Industrial. And the coolest southern hemisphere station to date, Buenos Aires, topped the chart at 4.13℃ above P-I.

This week’s twins are Washington and Cape Town. Both stations show a warming trend over the past five weeks, though Washington’s is minimal. Some welcome warmth has come to north-east England – and it shows in the Durham Tees trendline.

The southern hemisphere stations are significantly warmer (as a collective), but the 5-week trend below the equator is nonetheless towards cooling.

With a mean temperature of 0.85℃ above Pre-Industrial, Durham Tees is, perhaps for one week only, exactly as warm as the 10 Year average. Which way will the year go from here?

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Lunatics at Large

On the 7th August 1880, the unfortunate George MARTIN appeared before the Bridlington Petty Sessions. This insignificant event passed me by on Tuesday so I made a note to update the story next year. This morning the Radio Five Live breakfast news informed me that “America” was intending to impose more sanctions on Russia for poisoning the Skripals. And yesterday several social media companies in the vicinity of San Francisco wiped Alex Jones’ Info Wars from their platforms. News of other hideous events appeared during the day. They all seemed to be connected.

I wrote a brief post about poor George in Looking at Filey a few years ago. Here is the syndicated news report that also appeared in The Scarborough Mercury.

1880_MARTINgeorge1_NEWS

I added the following comment:-

The only likely young George MARTIN I could find was George J., aged 20 in 1881, a jet worker living with his widowed aunt at Pier, Whitby (RG114834 f95). I hope this was the wanderer because the record suggests he had three things going for him – a roof over his head, a wage coming in and family to care for him – enough to keep the demons at bay, perhaps. I wonder what became of him.

With access to more sources, I looked again and found evidence to support my hunch. Two months earlier a Whitby jet worker of the same name had appeared before a Scarborough court.

1880_MARTINgeorge2_NEWS

I think there is just enough here to proceed on the assumption that these disturbed Georges are one and the same – and that he was with his Aunt in Whitby when the census enumerator came to call the following year.

I did some more detective work but failed to discover what became of George. I found out, though, that tragedy attended his birth. He was just a few days old, at most a month or so, when a terrific storm hit the northeast coast of England. Many vessels were driven on shore and wrecked. A lot of sailors lost their lives. The Whitby lifeboat went out at least five times and rescued a number of men before a particularly nasty combination of waves, rebounding from the stricken vessel Merchant of Maldon, turned the lifeboat over. Only one of the crew survived. Of the twelve that drowned…

Six of the bodies, viz., Isaac Dobson, Matthew Laidley, Wm. Walker, Wm, Storr, Wm. Tyneman, and George Martin, were recovered on the same day. The majority of these twelve men had saved the crews of five vessels that day; and these brave fellows, especially the Storrs and the Laidleys, had on many occasions within the last twenty years heroically and devotedly risked their lives for the preservation of others; and it mattered not how tempestuous the storm, or how heavy the sea, if they saw their fellow creatures in imminent danger, they would make intrepid and strenuous exertions to save them.

This Yorkshire Gazette account of 16 February notes those left behind included “Geo. Martin, aged 25, wife and infant”, and says, “It may also be remarked that George Martin’s brother and Christopher Collins’s brother were drowned by the upsetting of a coble on February 4th, 1842.”

When the 1861 Census was taken a few weeks later, on the 7th of April, infant George James was with his mother Jane at the home in Cragg, Whitby, of her older sister Ann, and husband Mark WINN. Ten years later Jane and George were enumerated at Pier, Whitby. And, as noted earlier, in 1881 widow Ann Winn, aged 60, is recorded at Pier with George James and niece Ellen NORTON, aged 12. Sources indicate that Jane had remarried and was living nearby, at Cragg, with husband William LEWIS and 24-year-old stepson, Henry – a police constable! (You couldn’t make it up.)

The WILTON girls, Ann and Jane, can be found on FamilySearch Tree, and Mark WINN too, but they are as yet “unconnected”. I couldn’t find the Georges Martin but they may be on the World Tree somewhere.

The bravery of those Whitby fishermen and sailors, who risked their lives to save others, is in marked contrast to the behavior of “men” nowadays. A couple of news reports today say a Saudi led airstrike on Yemen has killed fifty people, most of them children in a school bus, and a report just released tells us that monks and teachers at Ampleforth and Downside schools have been sexually abusing children for over 40 years.

It seems unlikely that America will impose sanctions on the Saudis for slaughtering innocents. Perhaps it will be argued that International Law hasn’t been broken.

Unless I have missed something, there has been no evidence presented yet to prove that Russia tried to kill the Skripals with Novichok. The regimes in the United States, UK, some EU countries, Arab States, Israel – lunatics all and, terrifyingly, at large. (Many of their misdeeds are, of course, not reported at all.)

The Unfortunate Apprentice

On the night of Sunday, 10th January 1892, a gale blew the Whitby brig Lancet towards the Filey rocks. The Master, Lewis, ordered the anchors to be cast and these held the vessel until early morning when distress flags brought out the Filey Lifeboat, Hollon the Second. It took about six hours for the Filey volunteers to rescue seven of Lancet’s crew of eight. A newspaper reported that “one boy was drowned while launching the ship’s boat in an effort to get ashore”. Another report named the deceased as Henry COOR, who hailed from London and was “within eight months of completing his apprenticeship”. Henry’s body was transported by wave and tide about three miles and was found at Reighton the next day, the 12th. Several newspapers repeated the macabre and possibly misguided observation that “the poor fellow had evidently been alive when washed ashore, as his hands were full of gravel”. It is hard to imagine him surviving 24 hours in the winter sea.

Henry’s age isn’t given and I couldn’t find a “boy” with his name in London birth registers. Henry Thomas COOR, born in Bethnal Green, would have been 21 in January 1892. Old for a boy, and perhaps for an apprentice seaman, but a curious fact suggests it was indeed he who drowned in Filey Bay. His mother’s maiden name was registered as McCLARENCE. In the June Quarter of 1892 in Bethnal Green, a boy was born to Mrs. COOR née McCLARENLL (sic) and given the name Henry.

The names COOR and McCLARENCE bamboozled most registrars and their clerks. I couldn’t return the young man to his folks today with certainty. I think his father was William and his mother Maria – but she seems to have died aged 24 when Henry the First was two-years-old. It isn’t impossible that Henry the Second’s mother was Emma McCLARENCE, wife of  James COOR and a younger sister of Maria, but it’s quite a stretch.

I just hope the unfortunate apprentice will take his place on the FamilySearch Tree some day.