Highlighted Cases

A recent difficult case highlighted the usefulness of DNA testing alongside traditional research methods.

George Williams was born in 1877, the son of George Williams, a soldier in the 3rd Hussars.  When George’s younger brother was born in 1880, George Williams senior was this time described as a bandsman with the East Kent Militia.  The family were living on Military Road in Canterbury but when the census was taken the following year, George was not in the household.  Although his location could not be found in 1881, George was still in Canterbury the following January when he was imprisoned for 21 days’ hard labour for stealing cake from a baker’s on Military Road.  By June it seems George had left his family as his wife baptised her youngest child with only her name appearing on the baptism record and an indication that she was in receipt of parish relief.

 

There was no record of George in the 1871 census as he was stationed in India at the time with the 3rd Hussars.  His army record gave his birthplace Bethnal Green.  When he married he stated his father to be John, a cabinetmaker. 

George’s whereabouts are not known between January 1882 and March 1886 at which point he enlists with the Middlesex Militia, 4th Battalion Royal Fusiliers.  Here he states that he had been living at 82 White Street in Bethnal Green and working for a Mr A T Juist of Homerton.  He gives his trade as a musician and states that he is single.  He declares his previous military service with the 3rd Hussars, giving his discharge date of October 1879. 

 

At this time of March 1886 he claims to be 33 years and 11 months old.  This differs from his age on his previous army record where his birthday was around the November/December time rather than April.  This gives a year of birth around 1852 rather than 1847 which the Hussars attestation in December 1866 at the age of 19.  When he left the Hussars in August 1879 he gave his age as 31 years and 9 months.  His intended place of residence was 47 Military Road, Canterbury.

 

George’s second army record stated him to be present for militia training in 1887 but the record ends after this date and it is unknown what happened to him after this time.

 

George consistently gave his birthplace as Bethnal Green in his various army records.  It may be that he was not born there, however, and simply remembered this being where he grew up.  George initially enlisted in 1866 at Aldershot, giving his trade as musician.  This therefore may be an indication that he had joined the army as a boy and been a bugler or drummer boy with the Hussars before joining them properly as an adult.

 

Perhaps George still had connections in Bethnal Green which is why he returned there after his relationship with Emily broke down.  The person, John Abbott, who lived at 82 White Street (the address George gave in his army record of 1886) appeared to have no connection with the Williams family.

 

 

 

There are no census returns or baptism records that fit with the given information about George being born 1847-52 at Bethnal Green with a father named John who was a cabinetmaker.  In such a situation it is usually the case that the individual is under a different surname.  Perhaps George’s father died, or he was illegitimate and his mother was living with another man.  For this reason, George joined the army as a boy soldier and the Williams surname was his original name but he appears in census records under a stepfather’s name.  It had not proved possible to find George prior to 1866 or after 1887 and for this reason an Ancestry DNA test was used try to trace the earlier origins via an analysis of DNA matches.

 

DNA matches were sorted into groups to find those linked to your Williams side.  These were then gone through to find matching common ancestors.  When looking at the tree of one of these matches the surname of Abbott caught my eye.  George Williams had stayed with John Abbott when he went back to Bethnal Green.

Looking further it was discovered that John Abbott of Bethnal Green was a brother to to this match’s ancestor, Ann Abbott.  The Abbott family was therefore investigated and it was found that John did indeed have a brother named George and he had been born in April which was one of the suggested months of birth for George.

 

John Abbott of 82 White Street (the address George Williams gave on his army record) had married Emma Bass in 1864.  Here he named his father as Thomas Abbott, a weaver.

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His sister, Ann, by now married to John Redburn, acted as a witness.

John and Emma had a son named Thomas.  He went on to have a son Charles, who had a son Charles, who had Catherine G. – another of the DNA matches.  There were a number of matches via the Redburn line.  There also connections to Southon which was the surname of the husband of Mary, the youngest Abbott child.

 

When John’s younger brother, Edward, married in 1870 he named his father as Thomas Abbott, a carpenter.

 

 

The family disappear after the 1851 census and the various children are not found again until they are adults.  It is not known what happened to Thomas and Louisa.

 

Thanks to the DNA connections which strongly connected to the Abbott family, combined with the known fact that George Williams stayed with John Abbott, it was possible to confirm George Williams being the same person as George Abbott.  This allowed the earlier ancestry to continue to be traced.

By always chasing a single surname are we overlooking one of the most important relationships in our family history?

The mother/daughter relationship is arguably one of the most important relationships, whether negative or positive, the influences and experiences of this bond can often be felt down the generations.  However, this aspect of family history is often ignored and never investigated in any great detail.  As a professional genealogist of over twenty years experience I can count on one hand the amount of clients who have commissioned research to trace the maternal line back, from daughter, to mother to grandmother to great-grandmother, and so on, following the female line each time rather than a particular surname.

A recent case provided a whole new perspective on a family’s story that would not have been discovered if the family history had not been traced via the maternal line at each generation.

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This Kentish family of strong women encountered many challenges and inspired my client to view her maternal ancestors in a whole new light.  When Elizabeth Grout gave birth to her daughter in 1940, she was the first for at least 120 years in her matrilineal line to either, not have had a child prior to marriage or be heavily pregnant at the time of marriage.  The story begins with Sarah Jolly, born in 1808 on the Isle of Sheppey in north Kent.  Before Sarah was ten years old, she, along with her parents and elder brother, Thomas, moved to the parish of Denton near Dover.  Sarah married there ‘with consent of parents’ when she was aged 18.  Her brother and his future wife were witnesses.  Sarah’s labourer father, Edward, had died four years earlier.  He had left Sarah’s mother with four small children to care for.  She saw all her children to adulthood however and died a pauper in Dover many years later.

Sarah’s first child was baptised seven months after her marriage to James Howlett.  This baby would be the first of eleven that Sarah would go on to have but her youngest child was not her husband’s.  James died in 1844 but five years after his death, Sarah had a son.

When Sarah’s husband died in the winter of 1844, she found herself with ten children, the eldest aged 18 and the youngest just a few weeks old.  The elder children would have been able to help with childcare and to bring an income to the family, but undoubtedly James’s death would have been a heavy loss.

The family moved a few miles from the village of Lydden, to Charlton on the outskirts of the town of Dover by the time Sarah’s illegitimate son, Charles, was born in the summer of 1849.  Only Sarah’s name was recorded in the parish register (the name of her deceased husband was initially recorded but then scribbled out).  By now Sarah was aged 41.  Two years later the 1851 census was taken and it was discovered that Sarah had been working as a laundress.

It seemed that Sarah’s fortunes were about to change.  In 1852 she married Edwin Louney a Hungarian who worked as an interpreter.  His father had been in the Hungarian army.  Edwin is a mystery.  No other record can be found about him except his marriage record to Sarah.  In the end the marriage did little to alleviate her circumstances.

The family moved into the town of Dover and in 1857 Sarah was described as having a lodging house at New Street Court which ‘constitute a resort for persons the opposite of reputable’.  To Sarah’s credit, she had reported two soldiers, who had slept at the house, of suspecting them of having stolen property.  Sarah had been at New Court since at least 1856 when once again a newspaper reported a theft by a soldier frequenting the property.  The newspaper blatantly described Sarah as ‘obtaining a disreputable living by letting her apartments for prostitution’. 

Sarah had moved to Limekiln Street by 1859 when Sarah was called as a witness regarding the death of a soldier whose body had been found at the bottom of a flight of steps.  She is described as the wife of Edwin Louney in the newspaper report and in 1861 he is still living with Sarah but seemingly was unemployed.  A number of female lodgers are listed at the house, as well as five of Sarah’s children.  Within the next month Edwin disappears and Sarah found herself in a very chaotic time in her life.  In May 1861 Sarah was assaulted by a gunner in the Kent Militia Artillery.  Sarah claimed not to know why the gunner had come to her house on several occasions, threatening her and striking her several times.  The gunner claimed that Sarah was the keeper of a notorious brothel, where he had slept and left some money, and the reason why he had assaulted her was because she would neither give him his money nor let him come into the house again.  Sarah claimed merely to take in female lodgers but this was plainly not true as the following January she was charged with keeping a disreputable house.  A number of witnesses were called by the parish officers who wished for her to be removed from the house.  They all attested to the fact that women ‘of ill-fame’ resided in the house, with the shocking revelation that one of Sarah’s own daughters was among them.  The house was a constant resort of soldiers and sailors who frequented the place at all hours and in various stages of inebriety.  The house adjoined the Plume of Feathers public-house with side doors to both houses opening on to a passage about six feet wide; the licence of the pub was suspended as it was difficult to tell whether the disturbances came from there or Sarah’s house. 

Sarah told the parish officers that she intended to leave but had not been able to due to the sickness of her 13-year-old son who was said to be ‘a cripple and that it would endanger his life to remove him in his present state of health’.  Sarah was given three months to quit the property to avoid charges and was able to pay the £50 bond to guarantee her appearance at the next assizes.

The following April Sarah was recalled to the court, described as ‘a super-stout, middle aged female’, the parish officers stated that she had only quit the property the previous Friday and had been carrying on the brothel business the whole time since January.   Sarah claimed that her son had been dangerously ill and that this, as well as the difficulty in securing somewhere new to live, had delayed her leaving.  The judge made it clear that it was only the fact of her child being ill that she was being spared a lengthy prison sentence. 

The social and legal ramifications of Sarah’s choices, including her arrest for running a disreputable house, did not stop her from trying to provide for her family, even in the face of public scandal.

It certainly sounded like Sarah was facing a difficult situation – a husband who had disappeared, and without work, likely due to needing to care for a sick child, it left her with little option to carry on with the only thing giving her an income.

After being forced out of Dover town, Sarah went to live in Buckland where the 1871 census recorded her with her youngest son who was now working as a shoemaker.  Sarah died in 1878 aged 71.

The subsequent generations followed a similar pattern of hardship mixed with perseverance. Marrying young and pregnant, was a common theme in the family history.

Sarah’s eldest daughter, who had been named as a prostitute in her mother’s house, had a child in 1850 and a daughter the following year.  She attempted to take the alleged father to court for the child born in 1850 where she claimed not to have had relations with any other man but it was proven that she had previously given birth to twins.

One of Sarah’s other daughters had her first child at the age of just 14.  She subsequently married a soldier when aged 19 and lived in India with him for a number of years before his death and her second marriage at the age of 30.  Sarah’s youngest daughter was four months pregnant when she married a soldier at Dover.

Against this backdrop my client’s direct ancestor, Jane, married in 1849 when seven months pregnant with her first child, at the age of 17.  Her labourer husband was six years older than her.  After the death of her son at just 11 weeks old, Jane went on to have two daughters.  In the early 1870s Jane, her husband and youngest daughter left Dover to take up positions at the Tenterden Union Workhouse.  They were employed by the workhouse for 25 years. 

Meanwhile, Jane’s eldest daughter, named after her mother, had her first child aged 21.  She named the child after her sister but there were no clues as to who the father of the baby was.  Jane junior did not marry until three years later to a man who himself had been born illegitimately.  Jane and her husband Thomas went on to have eight children together.  Jane would have been well known in her community as she worked as a midwife for many years.   When certification for the profession was introduced, Jane registered as an already practising midwife.  She appeared in the Midwives Roll until 1915, two years before her death.

Of Jane junior’s many daughters, my client’s direct ancestor was the third eldest.  Hilda, like her mother, had her first child out of wedlock.  The baby lived less than six months.  The following year Hilda had another child.  This time she married the father – but not until a year after the baby had been born.  Hilda waited until after the marriage to baptise her daughter, Beatrice, my client’s direct ancestor.  Hilda went on to have a further eight children.  In 1921 she appeared in front of the local Petty Sessions for failing to send her son to school.  Hilda sounded like a formidable character, making accusations against the School Attendance Officer, and saying the whole family had been ill to explain her son’s absence.  Meanwhile, the Attendance Officer told the Bench that Hilda was ‘a confounded liar’!.

Hilda’s assertiveness in court, defending her choices against the accusations of the School Attendance Officer, illustrates the resilience passed down from Sarah’s generation. The ongoing cycle of single motherhood, late marriages, and the challenges of raising large families seems to have been less a cause for shame and more a reflection of survival under difficult circumstances.

In the same year that Hilda was appearing at the Petty Sessions, her daughter, Beatrice, returned to her parents’ home from domestic service to give birth to a daughter from an unknown father.  Around this time Beatrice’s father was working on a farm with a young widower, George Smith; three years later Beatrice and George were married and went on to have five children together. 

For the client, learning of this complex and often turbulent history may have reshaped their understanding of the women in their family. Instead of seeing a lineage of misfortune, they could see a narrative of resilience, where strong women faced their circumstances head-on, often with limited choices, and managed to forge a path for their descendants. This story reframes illegitimacy and poverty not as stains on a family’s history, but as badges of survival and fortitude in the face of overwhelming odds.

Such discoveries would have been unknown without seeking the family’s ‘herstory’.

Will you now investigate your own family herstory and see if this opens your eyes to a new perspective on your family.