Influencer; Or Influenced? A Contemporary of the Pankhursts

One of my most favourite ancestors, discovered in my research, is Miss Florence Nicholson Edgill; the older sister of my maternal great grandfather. 

Florence was born in 1867. It's not super clear who her natural father was, or if she was born legitimately, but the father on record at her baptism was William Nicholson Edgill; clerk to the Guardians of the Chorlton Poor Union and superintendent registrar for Chorlton (a part of Manchester.) The mother listed at that baptism was Hannah Edgill (nee Standring.) (I shall probably explain the conundrum of Florence, my great grandfather, and their younger siblings' parentage in another blog post; it's complicated!)

Florence never married. At the time of her father's death it was Florence who represented the family after his assing, by writing to the Chorlton Board of Guardians. 

From the Manchester Courier & Lancaster General Advisor,
dated Saturday, April 11th, 1891

We learn a lot about Florence's life through newspaper clippings. The next time she is mentioned it is in The Guardian, on September 11th, 1908, where she is cited as having been the first woman to be elected to a position on the Council of the Association where she was to take the role of Organising Secretary for the Stretford Higher Education Authority. At a time when women couldn't vote, I imagine winning an election for a public position was quite the feat, however perhaps not in Chorlton.

The Guardian, September 11th, 1908

It was in Chorlton that the Pankhurst family lived, and worked. Emmeline Pankhurst was elected to the position of Poor Law Guardian in Chorlton-on-Medlock in 1894, just 3 years after Florence's father, clerk to the Guardians, had passed, while still in office. After her husband, Richard Pankhurst's, death in the summer of 1898, Emmeline was left in debt. In an effort to improve their circumstances Emmeline gave up her position as Guardian, and took a paid position as registrar; another position that Florence's father had held before his death. Emmeline also at this time, moved her family into a less expensive home at 62 Nelson Street, which was next door to the nursing home where Florence eventually passed away, in 1918.

60-62 Nelson Street was the birthplace of the Suffragette movement in the UK.
It is now home to The Pankhurst Centre, a museum celebrating the lives of Emmeline Pankhurst, her children, and the movement that led to women winning the right to vote.

In 1900 Emmeline was elected to the Manchester School Board, and it was her work here that showed her how poor the educational opportunities open to women were. By 1902 eight evening Institutions for Women and Girls had been established, focusing on continuing education for the female population of Manchester. It was in 1908 that Florence was hired to her position as Organising Secretary for the Stretford Higher Education Authority. It seems to me that it is more than likely that Florence knew the Pankhurst family; they moved in very similar circles and in a relatively small community. I like to imagine that Florence was more than on the Pankhurst periphery, but that she was an active founding member of the Women's Social and Political Union. I am, admittedly, rather fanciful; I agree that history may not consent with my imagination!

Another tidbit we find about Florence, from newspaper clippings of the time, is this announcement printed in The Guardian, on September 27th, 1913.

It was at this meeting that we learn about Florence's politics and see how she might have been somewhat of an influencer herself. Shortly after the meeting we see a write up about the event, published in The Guardian (October 3rd, 1913).

I love that in this speech Florence started out by saying that educators should "inculcate a love of home in all our young people". Young PEOPLE! Not girls, women, or ladies, but gender non-specific PEOPLE! She then went on to label those who considered domestic work degrading as not just snobbish, but having "snobbishness in its most acute form". She continued by further berating anyone with such an opinion and calling them indecent. This suggests that Florence leaned towards socialism and understood the difficulties with a classist society. 

I imagine that there were probably only a few women in this meeting, and perhaps many of the men, at the start of her speech, might have sniggered a little. I'm sure with these words she quickly put them in their place, and held their attention for her next blow; suggesting that the men in charge (ie the ones in the audience) were incapable of understanding the need for domestic education. If she didn't have their attention before, she did now! She finished her speech by making good her point that the teaching of home-making was valuable and that the school board should be supporting such an endeavour.

At a time, and place, where women were making their voices heard, sometimes by force, it was quite feat for Florence to take such a stand and speak loudly about the right of all women, including those of the working class, to an education. 

Stretford Higher Education Committee held many classes where domestic skills, and economy were taught, as well as other skills. Exhibitions of students work were held on an annual basis.

Sadly, Florence Edgill was not to be blessed with a life long enough to influence much further. She died in 1918, just a few months after women were granted the right to vote, following the passing of the Representation of the People Act of 1918. She was just 50 years old. Her death certificate suggests that she had kidney stones which a surgeon attempted to remove, and following the surgery she contracted an infection which ultimately caused her death.

I don't have any pictures of Florence, but I can clearly picture her character. Many living members of my family share similar traits. A strong character, with a vigorous sense of duty to the community, to those who are less fortunate, and to social and educational service.

Manchester has been a centre for social change over the years, and the time that Florence Edgill lived and worked for the Stretford Higher Education Committee was a time of great social change, both for the rights of workers, and general improvements in living conditions for working people, but also for women and their ability to vote, and take more space in the work place. It's possible that Florence was just a product of her time and place; influenced by the socialists and liberalists around her. But I like to think that she had a hand in some of the influencing of the time; influencing young women to take domestic sciences classes, and learn how to better economise in the home, and perhaps influencing some men, helping them learn the importance of understanding the role that women can play both in the home, and in the workplace.

#Edgill

Witness to History; Signatory to the Treaty of Ghent

James Gambier was the son of John Gambier, Lieutenant Governor of the Bahamas, and a descendent of Nicolas Gambier, a French Hugenot refugee from Caen, who had escaped France following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Like many men of his family James Gambier took to the waves to make his fortune.

So much is written about Admiral James Gambier, Lord of Iver, that it's more than a little superfluent to write about him here. He is, however an excellent ancestor of ours to mention, when inspired by the phrase 'witness to history'. You can read about him from Wikipedia if you wish to know more about his life at sea, on land, and in court- just click on the caption to find the link.

Lord Gambier, Admiral of the Fleet

Most articles written about him relate to his success against Napoleon's fleet, and at Charleston, during the American Revolutionary War (bizarrely where members from another branch of our family fought on the side of the revolution). And all articles about him make a big deal of him calling a court martial on himself, in an effort to clear his good name. He won, of course, but many felt it was a rigged event, since he was good pals with the right people.

But the event that he witnessed, which I want to focus on, is a part he played in ending a war that every Ontarian school child from Grade 7 and up will know about; The War of 1812. Anyone who has visited Upper Canada Village will know something about the War of 1812, and how the people of what is now Canada, were impacted by the defence of the British Empire, against the USA. Some referred to the war as the second Revolutionary War.

The Battle of Chrysler's Farm, by Adam Sheriff Scott

James Gambier, at 58 years of age in August 1814, when peace negotiations began, was towards the end of his naval career. He was well connected with powerful politicians of the time and as such he was asked to participate in the British team of negotiators with the America contingency, to find a way to bring peace between the two nations.

A team of notable American dignitaries, led by John Quincy Adams, joined Gambier and his crew in Ghent (now part of Belgium), a neutral country. They hashed out an agreement and it was signed in August 1814. On the document where you can see all the signatures, each accompanied by a red seal, you can see Gambier's monicker right at the top.

Click here to see the document from the USA's National Archives

The war did not end immediately. The treaty had to first be ratified by each country's governments, so the war did not officially end until February 1815, by which time The White House had been burned by invading British Troops.

The White House was burned on August 24th, 1812, shortly after peace negotiations had started.

After the war was over, everything returned to as it had been before. Nothing had been gained by either side, and nothing had been lost, except for the lives of those who had fought for apparently nothing.

Admiral James Gambier, Lord of Iver, was my 4x great granduncle, on my maternal grandfather's side of the family. At the end of his life he was living in Iver Grove, Buckinghamshire, where with the help of his gardener William Thompson he cultivated 'heartsease' which are the plants known today as pansies. He died in 1833, at Iver, with no heirs (despite all the nephews and nieces he had from his extensive list of siblings.)

After his passing the house fell into disrepair. The grounds were used in WWII to help house Polish refugees, but it wasn't until 1957 that the Ministry of Works acquired the property and restored it. Later the play and screenwriter Tom Stoppard lived there with his wife, and it was up for sale again, more recently in 2007. It seems like it was proving difficult to sell, and I've not been able to ascertain whether its still on the market or not. Anyone got a cool few million to spare?

#Newell

Favourite Photo; Spaniels & Scandal

I am a dog person, and as it turns out our family are dog people too. Not only that, but I recently discovered that I am the third generation of our family, to have a spaniel as our chosen dog breed. We currently have 2 dogs. One is a flat coated retriever and the other is a 3 year old English Springer Spaniel. I introduced them to you all two weeks back, in my Family Lore blog post. Ted, the springer, is our second springer. Our first was a beautiful dog named Ollie, who will always be in my heart. He was the most lovely dog, and I still miss him greatly. (He died in the summer of 2019, 3 weeks shy of his 14th birthday.)

Spaniels definitely tug on my heartstrings, and perhaps that is because they are somehow in my blood. My mother had a springer as a young girl. His name was Rip. Here he is, in the back garden of the house where they lived on the south coast of England. Curiously, when we visited the house on a recent visit to the UK we met the current owner, and he has a springer too!

Rip, in the garden in Southbourne

Shortly after that visit, whilst going through a pile of photographs and papers with my mum, I came across a rather lovely picture. At first I believed this was my great grandmother Ruth Constance Newell (nee Gambier), but after further pondering I realised it was my great aunt Tara, as a young lady.

I knew Tara as a slight, elderly, single lady, who lived in a sweet little bungalow on the edge of a bluebell woodland in the Sussex countryside. She died in the mid 90's, when I was in my mid 20s, and a university student. It was at her celebration of life that I started to learn about the extraordinary life she had lived.

Whenever I see a bluebell I think of Tara!

Tara was born in 1908, in Weymouth, Dorset but by the 1911 census Tara and her family were living in a sea front property in Sheerness, Kent, with 3 members of staff; a cook, a housemaid, and most importantly to Tara and her brother, a nursery maid. Tara and her older brother were raised by their nannies, and were brought down from the nursery each evening to spend a little time with their parents- a very Victorian way to raise children! You'd think that it would have been a big grand house to have so many staff, but looking at the house now, on Google Streetview, the row of 3 story terraced houses don't look all that grand. Perhaps that's thanks to the addition of the wheelie bins in the front yard, and over 100 years of sea wind.

Marine Parade, Sheerness

I can't find any record of her in the 1921 census. We do know, from family stories, that she was sent off to a convent boarding school in Belgium, after she had been taught at home by a governess. Perhaps she was in Belgium, enjoying that relative freedom in 1921.

At some point she met, and married John Edward Geoffrey Ransome. John was the son of Stafford Ransome, a journalist and author specialising in reporting on engineering in the British Colonies. He was the author of scintillating works such as 'How to Select Woodworking Machinery', 'Japan in Transition', and 'The Engineer in South Africa'. When John signed up in 1914, to serve in WWI he joined the Kings African Rifles. He was 23, and may have been in Africa at the time that the war started. Considering his father's work out there, it's very possible.

John was considerably older than Tara; 17 years her senior. Perhaps it was this age difference that caused her parents to be vexed. Either way, her parents did not approve of this union. Despite this disapproval Tara married him anyway, and off they went to Tanganyika (which is now Tanzania) in east Africa, where he had been working, as a District Officer. 

A District Officer acted as an administrator and sometimes magistrate, in parts of the British colonies, linking the colonial government and the people of the district. From what I can tell from records available to me, John had been travelling back and forth to Tanganyika to the UK since 1925, often staying at the Thatched House Club, St James' Street, London, when in England. This was the home of the Civil Service Club, and an ideal place for an overseas based colonial civil servant bachelor to stay, when visiting home. It was probably on one of these visits to England that he met Tara, and whisked her away to another world.

86 St James' Street is now home to Mark Masons' Hall

.

In 1931 Tara was 23 years old, and living with her parents in Clive Court, Maida Vale, London as a Newell, but just 3 years later, at the end of May, Tara was arriving in Southampton as Mrs Ransome, with her husband, on a ship from Tanganyika. When they returned to Tanganyika in mid November of the same year, there were 3 Ransomes. Tara and John returned to Africa with a 3 month old son named Michael Gambier Stafford Ransome.

It can't have been  easy to live in such a different land, so far away from friends and family, but I suspect Tara enjoyed the relative freedom and the adventure, in much the same way she had when attending boarding school with the Belgian nuns. Sadly, the adventure was not to last. In 1938 Tara returned to the UK with Michael, and towards the end of September the same year their second son was born; Mark Edward Ransome. At some point around this time John died. Tara was in her early 30's with a new baby and a young child, the world was again on the cusp of peace and war, and she was once again living with her parents.

Tara & Michael returned to England aboard SS Malda,
which was later sank by the Japanese Navy in 1942

In 1939 the Register of England and Wales shows Tara was living, as a widow, with her parents in Sussex Michael, now aged 5 was away at boarding school. Strangely there is no record of Mark, who was only 1 year old at the time. I wonder where he was?

But the death of Tara's husband did not bring an end to her parent's disapproval. You see, Tara would not remain single for long.

Alec Ernest Haarer was born in Devon in 1894, and he married Susan Marjorie Pascoe in 1917. From the year of their marriage Alec and Susan started travelling to Africa, destination Tanganyika. Alec started out in the colonial service as a planter and rose to the position of agricultural officer for the British Colonial Service. He later went on to write "Modern Coffee Production". It is likely that his role in Tanganyika was to improve the standard and quantity of coffee production in the region. Between 1919-1925 the British planted 10 million Haya coffee seedlings so Alec would have been a busy guy. 

Alec and his wife Susan were busy at home as well. Their first child, Marjorie Mary Haarer was born in Kamapala on the 11th April, 1918. By 1925 they were parents to 2 sons also; Philip Ernest (1920) and James Alec (1925). By the start of WWII the Haarers had returned to England, and were living in Taunton, Somerset. Alec didn't stay in Taunton very long. At some point Alec left his wife and children, and moved in with Tara (who he had met whilst in Tanganyika.) Tara, Alec, and her sons lived together in that sweet bungalow I mentioned above. I don't believe that Alec and Susan ever divorced; at least I've not found any record of a divorce. Tara and Alec never married, and lived together in the pretence that Alec was her lodger. 

In 1942 Tara gave birth to her third child; a cherished daughter named Bridget. She was the daughter of Alec Haarer, who was clearly NOT a lodger! At her parents insistence Tara went to Lincoln to have the baby. Tara's parents, clinging to their Victorian values, thought it unseemly for an unmarried woman to have a baby. It's possible that the hope was that Tara would give the baby up for adoption. Many mother and baby homes in that era existed for young unmarried mothers to finish their pregnancy and give birth whilst protecting their, and their family's reputation. After the birth the nursing home's role was usually to find a new family for the child. I don't know if that is what Tara's parents had wished for, but whatever the weather, Tara brought her daughter home and Bridget was registered at birth with her father's last name.

Sadly Bridget died in 1962, at the age of 19, from an anaphylactic reaction to an unidentified allergen. Shortly after this tragic death Alec ran off with the cleaning lady. I can't imagine the hurt this must have caused poor Tara. He apparently realised this mistake and begged Tara to take him back but she refused. Good for her! Alec died in 1970; the same year that Susan, his wife, died. 

Tara died in 1995. I remember her memorial well. (She did not have a funeral as she had left her body to medical science.) The church was heaving with people who had loved her well. I was so glad to learn about her life story and the incredible spirit she embodied, so much of which I did not know about until after she had passed. I am so glad to have this beautiful picture of her and her spaniel!

#Newell

Origins; A Long Line of Laundresses

As I looked at the mountain of laundry I had to organise today I stopped for a moment to think about the women on my maternal grandmother's side of the family who made their living taking in laundry. Generation after generation of women in this branch of the family tree were listed as laundresses in census reports.

Lucy Woolven was born in 1780, in Eastbourne, Sussex; a lovely seaside town on the south coast of England. She is the first woman in the family that I have found recorded as a laundress. She married Andrew Munro and had a son (James) and a daughter, (Jane). In the 1841 census, by which time Lucy was a widow, and living with Jane and her family, she was 60 years old and a laundress. Ten years later Lucy was a 70 year old laundress, employing 7 women. This work was probably done in the home, and was heavy, hard work, involving boiling water, harsh chemicals, and mangles with no safety guards. Whilst it was horribly dangerous, and not well paid, it was work women could do in their home, where they could also watch their children (those  that were too young to help with the laundry, that is!) and run their own homes too. For many women this work was what would have kept them from the workhouse. The 7 women Lucy employed in 1851 would have been family members, and neighbours. In fact, we can see in the census return that her daughter, Jane Vinall, was also a laundress, as was their next door neighbour, Sarah Bartholemew.

Lucy died in 1855, and by the census of 1861 Jane had clearly taken on the laundry mantle. Still living in the same small house at #3 St Peter's St, in Brighton Jane was working as a laundress, as was her daughter Elizabeth (aged 22) and her neighbours Caroline Dowling (at #1), Mary Jackson (at #2 1/2), and Elizabeth, Emily and Fanny Cripps (at #6). There is no way of telling if they all worked together, at #3, or if they each worked out of their own homes.

The next in the line of laundresses was to be Jane's daughter Mary Jane. In the 1871 census we can see that at the age of 14 Mary was not a 'scholar' as so many children were recorded in census returns of the time. Instead, just below her mother, the laundress, is Mary Jane who 'helps mother'. 

When Mary Jane was 24, and married to Joseph Funnel, she was living with her husband, 6 month old daughter, her parents and two siblings at #4 St Peter's Street, Brighton. She was working as an 'ironer at laundress', which was also what her sister Louisa was doing for work. Mary Jane died in 1888. Her death certificate recorded her occupation as 'laundry porter'.

When Mary Jane died she left behind 3 daughters, Alice, Louisa, and Margaret. They were 7, 4, and 2 years of age at the time of her death. Joseph married quickly to another laundress, Sarah Jane Marshall. She died in 1899. Whilst Alice appears to have swerved the laundress role, her sisters Louisa and Margaret were both recorded, working together as laundry maids at St Clere, Ightham, Kent. St Clere was a big house owned by Sir Mark Edlmann Collet; the son of a previous Governor of the Bank of England.

Whilst Alice (my great grandmother) avoided the life of a laundress, her daughter was to go on and run laundrettes on the south coast of England. She opened the first coin operated laundry in Christchurch in about 1956; a Bendix laundrette! My granny took the family occupation and shoved it into the 20th century!

A vintage Bendix laundrette in Lincoln.

So, next time I look at the mountain of laundry I need to catch up on, I shall think myself lucky that I have a washing machine and a dryer in my own house, which I can just load up, switch on, and leave for my kids to unload!

(To find out more about laundressing in Victorian Brighton this website is great!)

#Edgill

Origins; Where Are We From?

When I was growing up in London, UK, with a mother from the south coast, and a father from the north west, I felt my identity exactly London-ish; neither northern, nor southern. I thought that all the northern-ness in my family was on my father's side, but once I started studying our family history I discovered that my maternal great grandfather was actually from Manchester. His father, although living most of his life in the north west, was actually from Sheffield, and his father before him was born in London!  Whoever said that people back in the day didn't move around so much?! 

There was still a definite southern-ness to my DNA, with another part of my maternal line living for many generations in the same street (mostly in the same house) in Brighton, or Brighthelmston, as it was known back then.

I'm yet to find out more about my Irish roots, but I'm fairly certain that comes from my paternal grandmother's branch. And I've absolutely no idea where Wales comes from in my DNA map! That should be interesting to discover!

I knew that there were some Scottish roots in my family via my mother's branch, but I did not realise that the Scottish genes were on both sides of my maternal grandfather's parents. Both of these branches need further research.

My Ancestry DNA shows an inheritance from the Baltics and Sweden/Denmark. These links are most likely related to the viking blood we have pulsing through our veins,  which most likely come from my father's side. My father has a funny little thing going on with his little finger, which doesn't straighten properly. When he visited the doctor to have this looked at the doctor said, 'Ah! You must be a Viking then!' This condition, known as Dupuytren's Contracture is often  referred to as 'Viking's Disease' and is considered a genetic trait of Nordic people. The Viking connection also comes via my maternal line through our very distant connection to Rollo; the viking Count of Rouen, and first ruler of Normandy. (More to come on this branch of the family in future blog posts!)

In previous DNA maps, from Ancestry I've had Newfoundland marked out. I've always found this peculiar, but had assumed this was due to members of the (paternal) Irish part of my family having emigrated to Newfoundland at some point in time. I'm sad to see that it's been removed from my DNA map, and plan to figure out a link to Newfoundland at some point.

My husband's side of the family is a delightful mix of English, Scottish, and Welsh, with a twist of Germanic, according to Ancestry DNA. Its interesting that there is no Irish detailed in his report, as we know from research that there is some connections to Northern Ireland, via his maternal line. It's possible that they were originally from Scotland, and were not in Ireland for many generations, before moving on to England. 

The Germanic bit is curious; I've not uncovered anything relating to Germany or that part of Europe as yet. This could be very far back in his family though. An article from The Guardian, back in 2015 reported that a genetic study found that 30% of white British citizens had Germanic DNA. 

"The analysis shows that the Anglo-Saxons were the only conquering force, around 400-500 AD, to substantially alter the country’s genetic makeup, with most white British people now owing almost 30% of their DNA to the ancestors of modern-day Germans."

So, I guess both my viking DNA, and his germanic DNA simply proves that we are just really British!

Family Lore; Rounding the Horn

This week #52ancestors suggests that I write about Family Lore. The best bit of family lore comes from my great grandfather; George Edward Newell, a native of Edinburgh and son of an American sailor, Frederick Newell, and a Scottish mother Christina Hall Main.

Ted Newell was born to be a sailor. His father, a sailor before him, had arrived on British shores from the United States of America, as a sailor, and settled in Leith, Scotland sometime between 1865, and 1870. By 1870 his first son was born; George Edward Newell, aka Ted.

Ted was apprenticed to the British Merchant Navy on the 7th October 1886, at the grand old age of 16 years. Wikipedia explains that during those 4 years an apprentice would have "seagoing experience aboard ship, in work-clothes and as mates with the deck crew, under the direction of the bo'sun cleaning bilges, chipping paint, polishing brass, cement washing freshwater tanks, and holystoning teak decks, and studying navigation and seamanship on the bridge in uniform, under the direction of an officer, before taking exams to become a second mate." On the 5th August, 1890 (the year his indenture ended) Ted earned his Second Mate certificate of competency.

Two years later Ted earned his First Mate certificate of competency. To achieve this certificate a candidate had to prove the ability to navigate by the stars, including being able to calculate in advance the position of useful stars so the sextant could be pre-set to the correct altitude, ready for observations. 

In 1894 Ted earned his Masters certificate. Ted would have had to show that he was able to command a ship, and navigate by the planets and the moon. He would have needed to have advanced knowledge of the compass and its errors, plus an ability to use complex logarithms to ensure accuracy. With this certificate Ted would be able to captain a ship.

Finally, in 1895, Ted was awarded the highest form of certification available to seamen of the time; the Extra Master. David Gittens (Could You Make It To Extra Master?) describes the abilities of an Extra Master here;

"Great circle sailing... was the province of the Extra Master. This learned mariner was required to solve problems of considerable complexity, using spherical trigonometry. An examination question might ask the candidate to determine the great circle course from a point on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia, to Cape Horn, listing all the turning points on the course and the courses to be steered between them, assuming the course is changed every 10° of longitude. This calculation occupies two large pages.The Extra Master was required to know how to find a position by Sumner's position lines...The Extra Master was able to construct Mercator charts from scratch...The would-be Extra Master was required to write essays on such topics as tropical revolving storms and to explain the reasoning behind the celestial navigation. Plenty of diagrams were required and neat and methodical work was expected. This is partly why the examination occupied 26 hours, spread over five days. The examination papers were marked progressively and after a final oral examination the candidate was immediately informed of his fate."

Ted was just 25 by the time he had achieved this certificate.

But the story that has become family lore happened to Ted when he was just 18 years old, and was still working his way towards his Second Mate certificate; just halfway through his apprenticeship to the British Merchant Navy. The tale, related below, was told to three of his grandchildren many times through the course of their childhood. My uncle related the story to his children in turn, as follows....

This tale dates from 1888, when, as a young man in the merchant navy training to be an officer, he sailed from Falmouth round Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America to Lima in Peru on the west coast. I say “sailed” because it was indeed a sailing ship, a training ship, like the ones sometimes used even today.

Ted’s best friend Archie served on the same ship, the Carpathian. When they reached Lima they found another ship belonging to the same company, whose third mate had met with an accident and could not sail with them on the homeward journey. To fill the vacancy, Ted was transferred to the other ship. The Carpathian, with Archie on board, sailed first on the long voyage back to England via Cape Horn.

Watercolour, 1896, by Gaetano Esposito (not The Carpathian!)

One night, when Ted’s ship had in it’s turn left Lima and was sailing southwards off the coast of Chile, he had a vivid dream on which he saw the Carpathian sinking in a terrible storm as they tried to round the Horn, and some of the crew, Archie among them, taking to life boats and reaching land.

When he woke up, Ted was of course very worried, although there was nothing he could do then in the days before wireless telegraphy. When he got back to Falmouth to find that the Carpathian was overdue he went straight to see Archie’s parents to tell them of his dream. They, however, told him not to worry.

Cape Horn is one of the most dangerous parts of the oceans to sail.

On the night of his dream, when he was asleep in his bunk somewhere off the Chilean coast, thousands of miles from England, Ted had appeared to them and told them that the Carpathian had sunk but that Archie himself was all right, having got off in a lifeboat and reached land safely. And so it proved to be! Even seamen’s tales do not come much more bizarre than that.

Ted and Archie saw little of each other after that, but when Archie died at the grand old age of 87 Ted got in touch with his daughter, who came to visit. She confirmed that her father had often told the story. Ted, incidentally, rounded Cape Horn under sail a total of nine times, more than any other living Briton, by the time of his death in 1960.

George Edward Newell (Ted)

I have searched for information about the ship The Carpathian, and have found nothing. The closest I have found is a record of a British ship called The Cambrian colliding with a French ship on the 6th August 1888, off the coast of Chile at Valapriso, which is considerably further north than Cape Horn. Perhaps there is a record of this shipwreck somewhere; I shall continue looking. I DO love the idea that there is a family out there somewhere, telling the same tale, but from Archie's point of view. Maybe one day we will make contact, and share stories!

Additional spookiness to this bizarre tale is that we currently have two dogs. They came to us at different times, and are the best of friends. Their names were given to them without any thought to this story. The eldest dog is a flat coated retriever, named Archie. The youngest, an English springer spaniel, is called...... Yup, you guessed right! His name is Ted.

Ted, on the left, and Archie, on the right!

#Newell

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

A few years ago, at the end of the Holiday season, where we had been visiting with family, I sat chatting with my mum. Somehow we were discussing her regrets about not having asked her mum more about her family history. Mum talked about how her and her siblings knew all about her father's family history, and they just never asked their mum about hers. And Granny never told. They met her sister (their aunt) once or twice, and one of the brothers (their uncle), but they didn't really know anything.

I had always been 'Ancestry-curious', and now I had an excuse! I decided that I would make it my mission to find out everything I could about my maternal grandmother's family, put it together into a sort of book, and gift it to my mother for her next birthday, or next Christmas gift.

That was 6 years ago, and since then I've not only worked on a pretty good history of that branch of the family. I've also worked on my father's paternal branch, and have done a lot of work on my husband's tree as well. Recently, after another visit home, my mother and I found an interesting letter in a mass of paperwork relating to my maternal grandparents, which led me to finding out more about my maternal grandfather's branch of the family. Apparently there was a history there that my mother and siblings didn't know about.

As this Holiday season draws to an end and in the grand tradition of New Year's Resolutions, I've decided this year to try and make more sense of our family tree. I wanted a way to present the stories that I've found in our family, so that I could more easily share them with my kids, and the rest of our family. This led me to the decision to start this blog. 

Once that decision was made I asked in a couple of genealogy Facebook groups. I wanted some ideas on blog hosting sites and such like. This is how I ended up with Blogger, but of course, when you ask one question, very often another gets answered. One member replied with a suggestion to check out '52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks'. They said that it was a great source of inspiration for them when they started their blog last year. I took a look, and it really does seem like a great idea, and its free, so if I decide to go 'off piste' and write about something else, it's no loss.

So, here goes nothing, which actually feels quite BIG..... wish me luck!