Family History - tales around the tree
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Names
Blundell - Wigan & Wirral
Boniface - Sussex
Bradley - Suffolk & Essex
Bustin - Oxford
Campleman - Hull & SE
England
Catt/Cattley - Kent & London
Courtney - Wirral &
Liverpool
Cox - Dorset & Sussex
Coyne - Ireland & Chester
Curtin - Ireland, Midlands &
USA
De Normanville - France,
London & South Australia
Divall - Sussex & Lewisham
Foot - Dorset
Greenway - Sussex & London
Griesel - Germany, London &
Essex
Grubb - Lewisham
Holbrook - London & Essex
Hopkins - North Shields,
Wirral & Liverpool
Hurst - Hounslow & Rhyl
Laird - Surrey & London
Lovel - North Shields
Milleman - Holland, Kent,
London & USA
Molnar - Hungary & London
Morgan - Devon
Murray - Kincardineshire,
London & South Australia
Paver - Hull & London
Pearl - Suffolk & Essex
Rankin - Glasgow, Midlands
& Canada
Robson - Lewisham &
London
Skinner - Essex
Smart - Essex, London,
Canada & Seattle
Starr - Norfolk &
Westminster
Still - Kent/Sussex, Essex
Tales around the tree
unrelated stories I’ve come
across in the course of
research and too good to
ignore
The Gallery revived
School photos, Midhurst and
Birkenhead & more
Monday 16th May 2022 - Coppings in Margate
I’d always been a bit doubtful about the apparently well-accepted birthplace of
Borden in Kent for my 3x great grandmother Hannah Copping, as in each
census she appears in she says she was born in Margate. So when two DNA
matches on Ancestry led me back to a Susannah Copping born in Margate in
1791 I thought I’d look again at Hannah and found her baptism under the
surname Cuppen - one of the less likely versions of the surname in the register.
Born on the 24th November 1789 and baptised on the 12th of January 1790,
her parents, like Susannah’s, were Thomas and Mary; and there was another
sister, Elizabeth, born in 1787. Hannah’s birthdate now matches her ages in the
censuses and her age when she died in December 1861. Another DNA match
points to another sister, Ann, who was born in Ickham in 1786, and who
married John Holmans in Sandwich in 1805.
Hannah married the widowed William Milleman in Margate in 1812. Her sisters
also married in the town: Susannah to William Solley in 1817 and Elizabeth to
John Pointer in 1816. Before she married John Pointer, Elizabeth had an
illegitimate daughter Mary Burley Coppin born in Faversham in 1810; when this
Mary married William Savin in Margate in 1838 her father’s surname has been
corrupted to Berby, but she does give his name as David Berby, a mariner, on
the marriage certificate. This cleared up another mystery: Mary Berby Savin is a
witness at the marriage of Charles Henry Murray and Caroline Augusta
Milleman (William and Hannah’s daughter) in Margate in 1841; as Elizabeth’s
daughter she is Caroline’s cousin.
Who were the original Thomas and Mary Copping who had the three daughters
in Margate? They both died in Margate, Mary in 1833 and Thomas in 1836, and
their ages in the burial register put both their births in 1761. Ancestry would
suggest that they are the Thomas Copping and Mary Stannard (Stanred) who
married in Adisham on the 21st November 1785; according to the family trees
here Thomas was born in Barfreston, and Mary in Ash.
Thursday 24th March 2022 - The Rickling Skinners
I have a group of DNA matches that I've labelled the Rickling Skinners. As far as
I can see at the moment they have nothing to do with my Witham Skinners who
either stayed in Witham or moved down the A12/old London-Colchester road
through Hatfield Peverel and the Walthams to West Ham. The Rickling group are
descended from a William Skinner who married Elizabeth Stubbings in
Wendens Ambo on the 19th October 1790 and settled in Rickling, and their
descendants stayed there and in neighbouring Quendon. Elizabeth Stubbings
was born in Debden in 1764 and was the daughter of John Stubbings and
Hannah Stanley. Born in Debden in 1726/27 Hannah was the daughter of James
Stanley and Anne Scotcher, and so the sister of my four times great
grandmother, Martha Stanley who married John Smart.
William Skinner was a native of Rickling and a lot older than Elizabeth
Stubbings; having been baptised in Rickling in 1748 to parents William and Ann
(née Knight) who had married in Quendon in 1744. It's possible that William's
marriage to Elizabeth in 1790 was a second marriage. He died in Rickling in
1822 but was buried in neighbouring Quendon on the 7th July aged 77. William
and Ann's first two children were baptised in Quendon: Mary in 1745, and
Robert in 1747; they had five more children, including William, baptised in
Rickling. The Essex Record Office have a settlement certificate in Rickling in
1747 for William Skinner of Newport, a carpenter and his wife Anne and family,
and this sounds very much like the right family, which takes this Skinner line
back to Newport. Is this William Skinner senior (b. c1720) related to the Edward
Skinner (1746?-1824) who was a carpenter in Newport during the 1770s?
William Skinner junior and his wife Elizabeth Stubbings had two daughters,
Mary and Sarah, who both produced illegitimate children before settling down
to married life. Mary was baptised in Rickling on the 23rd October 1791, and
had a daughter Keziah baptised on the 14th April 1811. A bastardy order
identifies her father as William Perring the younger, labourer, of Rickling, and
Keziah used his surname when she married John Wratten in Cambridge in 1834.
Mary went on to marry William Bell of Debden in Rickling on the 24th October
1815. Sarah Skinner, baptised in Rickling on the 30th June 1793, had three
illegitmate children born in Rickling: Lucy in 1812, William in 1815 and James in
1817; only James is the subject of a bastardy order, and his father is named as
James Bond of Stansted Mountfitchet, labourer. Sarah married the much older
Edward Reid in 1819 in Rickling and they had a daughter Jane before he died in
1823. Sarah appears in the censuses as the wife of a George Reed, but I can find
no obvious marriage for this couple.
Tuesday 8th March 2022 - Jagger to Smart
When Thomas Jagger, a blacksmith of Newport in Essex, wrote his will on the
11th October 1830, he left, after all the usual payments "all the rest residue and
remainder of my monies securities for money goods & chattels stock in trade
personal estate and effects whatsoever and wheresoever" - sworn value under
£300 - to his wife Elizabeth. He died aged 74 on the 9th November that year,
and this Elizabeth was his second wife, a widow whom he had married in
Newport on the 28th December 1808. There were no children from this second
marriage, but from his first marriage to Elizabeth Smart on the 9th December
1782 in Debden he had at least five who had survived to adulthood and who by
this time were all married with children of their own, some still living in
Newport. Wills are usually a good source for identifying family relationships, but
in this case you could be forgiven for thinking that Thomas Jagger was childless,
or had already made substantial settlements on his offspring.
His first wife Elizabeth Smart died in 1806 in Newport, and two of his daughters
married there in 1808, just before his second marriage. His daughter Martha
married Henry Beckwith who was the son of his soon to be second wife
Elizabeth Beckwith, née Ware. The Beckwith family can be traced back as
blacksmiths in Newport to at least the early 1600s, as can the Jaggers as
blacksmiths in nearby Wendens Ambo, so this was a double linking of two
families in the same working tradition. So why do none of these offspring
appear in his will? I think it hints at a major family rift, instigated by the death of
his first wife and his second marriage.
His oldest son William Jagger, baptised in Newport on the 14th August 1791,
worked as a blacksmith, probably his trade learnt from working alongside his
father. By 1812 when he was 20 he was living in Linton in Cambridgeshire when
he married Anne Baldwin on the 31st January. They had three children born in
Linton: Thomas who was born and died in 1812; Eliza born in 1813; and Emma
Elizabeth born in 1816. While having these children William managed to attest
for the 48th Foot Regiment in Cambridge on the 1st February 1814. He is
described as being 5' 7¼", having a fair complexion, blue eyes and light brown
hair, with an oval "form of visage"; and he's a Blacksmith, born in Newport in
Essex. Whether his military career took him anywhere is not clear - perhaps he
was just kept on as a reservist, or did he desert?
He next appears, with his family in Wanstead in Essex, when he and Anne have
a baby baptised as Thomas William Smart (my great grandfather) on the 26th
September 1819, and the family would continue to use the surname Smart - his
mother's maiden name - from now on. If he was a military deserter that could
explain the name change, but it doesn't explain why his brother James - Thomas
Jagger's only other son - had also assumed the surname Smart by 1827 when
he married Amelia Brill in St George Hanover Square.
Between 1819 and 1831 William and Anne were living in Hackney where they
had three children baptised, with William working as a blacksmith all this time.
By 1831 they are in West Ham when their son John was baptised in All Saints
church. There is no obvious baptism for the Joseph Smart who appears as their
son in both the 1841 and 1851 censuses; born apparently in West Ham in about
1834, I wonder if he had been absorbed from some other part of the family,
and assumed the surname Smart.
William Smart and Anne and children James, Eliza, John and Joseph are living in
Chapel End, Walthamstowe in 1841, not far from their Smart cousins, the
children of their mother's brother Thomas Smart, who, born in Debden, are
working nearby as gardeners. According to this census, where William’s age is
rounded down to 45, he - along with the rest of his family - wasn't born in Essex;
perhaps he didn’t consider Newport to be in Essex, but two of his sons were
supposedly born in West Ham.
William Smart died in Leyton in 1846, probably in the West Ham Union
workhouse infirmary, before the more detailed 1851 census. His brother James
however, now a shoemaker living in West Ham, reveals that he was born in
Newport and is 52, so, he says, born in 1799; he was actually born in 1797 and
baptised in Newport on the 20th August that year as James Jagger. William's
family is lodging in Bow in 1851, with his sons Thomas William and John now
working as blacksmiths. Living in West Ham in 1861 Anne gives her place of
birth as Linton in Cambridgeshire; she is now living with her son Thomas
William and his family. In 1871 Anne is living in the West Ham almshouses, and
she died in West Ham in 1873 aged 80.
It wasn't really a surprise to find that the Baldwins were also blacksmiths.
Centred on Linton they moved between the villages on the Cambridgeshire,
Essex, Suffolk and Hertfordshire borders. Sadly I can find no baptism for an
Anne Baldwin in Linton or any of the surrounding parishes in the early 1790s,
though DNA matches point me in the direction of the family of Joseph Baldwin
who married Hannah Wright Cooke in West Wratting in 1785. Joseph's parents
were Joseph Baldwin and Elizabeth Challis who had married in Balsham in 1761
and who had seven children in Linton. Joseph senior is probably a master
wheelwright there in 1784 and it seems that two of his sons, and several
grandsons went on to become blacksmiths. His son Edmund married in
Haverhill in 1785 and had five children there before moving back to Linton to
have a further six; one of these was a daughter named Ann, but she was born
and died in 1797.
Joseph and Hannah had one son Joseph - baptised as Joseph Cooke in West
Wratting in 1785, nine days before they married - before moving back to Linton
where they had two more sons - Samuel in 1795 and Thomas in 1797. They also
had a daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1793 and for whom I can find no further
record; did she assume the name Anne later in memory of her mother Hannah?
Of course the DNA link could be through Hannah Wright Cooke; she was born
in West Wratting in 1765, the illegitimate daughter of Sarah Cooke and - I would
strongly suspect - with a father surnamed Wright.
Apart from the recently discovered DNA links to the Debden and Newport
Smarts, I'd already suspected that William and James Smart were related in
some way. Their familes both ended up in West Ham, and James's wife Amelia
was one of the witnesses to the marriage of William's daughter Eliza to John
Phillbrook in Bow in 1852. A hint to the family name change came from James’
son, James: he was baptised as James John Smart in 1829 in All Saints West
Ham, but when he married in Shoreditch in 1853 he states his name as James
Jagger Smart.
William and Anne's daughter Emma Elizabeth Jagger born in Linton in 1816 also
assumed the name Smart. She never married and lived out her life in Leyton,
acquiring along the way two illegitimate sons: William born in 1847 and Henry
in 1852. She died in 1866 and was buried in St Mary's Leyton where her father
had been buried twenty years earlier. In 1851 she, with her son William, is
lodging with the family of Richard and Catherine Hemingway; in 1861 she is
described as Housekeeper to the now widowed Richard living in Leyton High
Street, and both her sons are with her.
For more on the next generations of Smarts but some needs updating now.
Thursday 18th November 2021 - Sidney Tuffrey 1865-1961 Read more …
Thursday 2nd September 2021 - Wolvercote - Balls, Busbys and Bustins Read more …
Friday 27th November 2020 - Curtins & Rankins Read more …
Tuesday 5th October 2020 - Charlotte Cox Read more …
Tuesday 29th September 2020 - Jessie Mary Woodward Read more …
Tuesday 4th August 2020 - The Queen’s Arms near Dartington, and the Alsop family of
Newton Abbot Read more …
With family members from most of the counties of England (also Scotland, Ireland and continental Europe, and
probably Wales and the Isle of Man) this is a collection of stories about people whom I have found interesting. This
page reflects my current research and the sidebar lists the main names already researched to a greater or lesser
extent.