Lest We Forget: 11/11/12

In memory of the members of our family who gave their lives in the service of their country. This list has been updated from last year, with the addition of five more names to the World War 1 Roll of Honour. The list now contains three sets of brothers.

 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

(Lawrence Binyon, For the Fallen, 1914) 

 

Died	Place	Rank	Name	Age	Regiment / Service
Afghan Wars
12 Jan 1842	Afghanistan	Captain	Edward Macleod Blair	38	Bengal Light Cavalry
Indian Mutiny
14 May 1858	India	Major	John Waterfield	40	Bengal Native Infantry
Boer War
14 Feb 1902	South Africa	Artificer	George Howard Clark	23	Queensland Imperial Bushmen
World War 1
25 Apr1915	France	Private	Richard Michael Ryan	25	Royal Irish Fusiliers
9 May 1915	France	Corporal	Charles Mulligan	28	Black Watch
9 May 1915	France	Rifleman	Thomas Stanley Groves	31	Royal Irish Rifles
27 Jun 1915	Belgium	Private	John Julius Groves	32	DCLI
24 Aug 1916	France	2nd Lieutenant	Lawrence Ernest Bennett	22	Queen’s Regiment
15 Sep 1916	France	Gunner	Cyril William Coles	23	Tank Corps
18 Oct 1916	France	2nd Lieutenant	Christopher Gilbert Durant	20	Worcestershire Regiment
10 Jan 1917	Egypt	Captain	Duncan James Nugent Blair	34	Royal Field Artillery
26 Mar 1917	Palestine	Private	William Gurney	21	Middlesex Regiment
19 Apr 1917	France	Private	Arthur Tom Munden	31	Hampshire Regiment
23 Apr 1917	France	Lance Corporal	Hubert Gurney	21	Middlesex Regiment
10 Jul 1917	Belgium	Lieutenant	Sanford William Shippard	21	North Lancashire Regiment
12 Aug 1917	Greece	Private	Ernest John Bentley	41	Durham Light Infantry
16 Oct 1917	France	Private	Frederick Alexander Drackett	21	Hampshire Regiment
9 Apr 1918	Palestine	Lieutenant	Gilbert Seymour Worsley Spencer-Smith	23	Hampshire Regiment
11 May 1918	France	Captain	Arthur Alexander Austen-Leigh	27	Royal Berkshire Regiment
18 Sep 1918	France	Captain	Eric Fairfax Bennett MC	20	Queen’s Regiment
World War 2
21 Jun 1940	at sea	Sub Lieutenant	Ian Reginald Winn Stileman	20	RNVR
21 May 1941	Crete	Driver	Robert George Davis	25	NZ Army Service Corps
28 Oct 1942	Egypt	Private	Ronald Archibald Halkett-Hay	34	Australian Infantry
3 Nov 1942	Egypt	Lieutenant	Nigel Aves Watson	22	Royal Hussars
13 Jul 1943	Italy	Lieutenant	Derek Pease Gregg	26	Glider Pilot Regiment

John McCarthy: A taciturn giant in Canada

Last November I took out a subscription to the US newspaper website Genealogy Bank. I did so as part of my search for Captain John Winn. I haven't found him yet but the subscription has paid for itself in an unexpected way. It seems US newspapers in the early 20th century were fascinated by the workings of Scotland Yard and I have found many articles which mention my great grandfather, John McCarthy.

 

 

Last night I came across a real gem - an article written following John McCarthy's appointment as Superintendent in charge of CID at Scotland Yard in 1912. It appeared in The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, dated 18 October 1912, in a gossip column with the extraordinary title: "Gossip Of Europe. Marquise De Fontenoy's Budget of Old World Celebrities".

After paying tribute to John McCarthy's predecessor in the job, Superintendent Froest, the article goes on to describe the new appointee:

 

 

I shall have to ask my mother, who lived with him as a child, whether he was really "a giant in stature and strength" and "exceedingly silent and taciturn". The latter seems an unlikely description of any Irishman.

The information about John McCarthy accompanying the Prince of Wales (later George V) on a tour of Canada was new to me. It adds yet another dimension to my family's relationship with the country of which I have recently become a citizen.

 

 

Good old Wikipedia provided me with a detailed itinerary, in an article on Royal tours of Canada:

As modern modes of transportations allowed for easier travel across the oceans, more of the Royal Family came to tour the King's northern Dominion. The first since Queen Victoria's death was the son of the reigning king, Prince George (later King George V) and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall and York, who arrived in Canada in 1901. The royal party – which consisted of 22 people, including the Duchess' brother Prince Alexander of Teck – landed at Quebec City on 16 September, from where the group then travelled to Montreal – where separate Francophone and Anglophone welcoming committees caused confusion – and then on to Ottawa, where the Duke watched the lacrosse final for the Minto Cup, which he enjoyed so much he kept the ball that was used. They then shot the timber slide at the Chaudière River, watched canoe races, and picnicked in Rockcliffe woods, near Ottawa. They passed through Ontario, creating "incredible excitement seldom seen since the visit of his father in 1860." Amongst other duties, the Prince dedicated the Alexandra Bridge in Ottawa, in honour of Queen Alexandra.

The Duke and Duchess moved on to Manitoba where the former opened the new science building at the University of Manitoba, and then to Regina in the Northwest Territories. In Calgary, they met with First Nations chiefs and viewed exhibitions. Westward, they ended up in Vancouver and Victoria, to turn back again towards Banff, where the Duchess went to Tunnel Mountain and Lake Louise while the Duke went to Poplar Point. After passing back through Regina, they reunited in Toronto, welcomed by the Mendelssohn Choir, and attended concerts at Massey Hall. It was then around southern Ontario and back to Montreal again, where the Duke opened the newly rebuilt Victoria Bridge. The tour ended with a trip through Saint John, Halifax, and then out of Canada to the then still separate Newfoundland.

I also found on YouTube an old film of the royal party in Montreal and Quebec. Unfortunately, I cannot spot John McCarthy in any of the footage but, no doubt, an important part of being a royal bodyguard is to be discreet and keep out of the limelight.

 

John McCarthy's youngest daughter, Sheila, was born on 30 September 1901, whilst he was away in Canada with the royal couple. I don't suppose that made him very popular with his wife, my great grandmother, Agnes McCarthy nee Fritz. Sheila was given the second name Mary - hardly surprising in a good Catholic family - but I wonder whether it may also have been in honour of Princess Mary, with whom he was travelling when the baby was born.

10 things my ancestors did to annoy me

The Society of Genealogists sells a booklet called "My Ancestor was a Bastard". I have to admit that is often the way I feel about my own kin.

Here are 10 things they did to annoy me:

1. They settled where three counties meet. That way they could get married in one county, baptise their children in a second and be buried in a third, all without travelling more than a few miles from home. But I have to travel to three different record offices, miles apart, to have any hope of tracing their complicated genealogy.
2. Namesake cousins married namesake girls. I am either descended from John Coles and Mary Holloway, who married at Damerham, Wiltshire on 23 October 1737, or from John Coles and Mary Holloway, who married at Damerham, Wiltshire on 16 December 1738. I bet they are all having a good laugh about that one at the great family reunion in the sky.
3. They were not wise children and did not know their own fathers. Mary Ann Baldwin gave her maiden name as Blakey but her father's name as William Clayton. It took years to find the marriage of Susannah Blakey and William Clayton which proved he was her step-father. William Prebble Barnes invented a bank manager called George Barnes as his father. It took decades to find his illegitimate birth to Elizabeth Prebble.
4. They moved around. Joseph Bentley served as a Methodist minister in 17 different places. Frederick Davis lived in nine different counties and three different countries.
5. They baptised their children in batches, in a place remote from where they were born. Susannah Baldwin was born in Portsmouth and baptised four years later in Gravesend. Thomas Heale baptised his first four children as babies but made the last two wait over twenty years until he had died.
6. They left the country at census time. Thomas Bluett went all the way to New Zealand to avoid an entry in the 1841 census which would have told me whether or not he was born in Ireland.
7. They lied about their ages. Frederick Rayman claimed to be 23 when, aged just 15, he married his pregnant 21 year old bride. Catherine McCarthy stayed 40 for two successive censuses. Alice Wiles was 55 in one census and 72 in the next.
8. They kept just off the page of any printed pedigree. The Red Book of Perthshire contains detailed family trees for the Haldanes, Haliburtons, Reids and Stewarts which stop just short of connecting with my own proven research. Douglas' Baronage of Scotland mentions two of the children of John Smith of Glasswall, but not the daughter through whom I am descended.
9. They disappeared. John Winn sailed to North America, where he vanished. Clement Davis went out prospecting in the Nevis mountains of New Zealand and never came back.
10. They spent all the money. When William Winn died in 1891 he left £82,446 12s 9d, the equivalent of £5.5 million today. His son, William, inherited one quarter. By the time he died in 1906 it was all gone. In the space of 15 years he had squandered the equivalent of over one million pounds on yachts and gold plated taps.

Thrifty Thursday - Save £££ using a Library

I've been a bookworm ever since I learned to read. I've been a library user for almost as long. Aged 10, I was given special permission to use the adult library because I'd read everything in the children's section. I cried when I realised there were more books in the world than I would ever be able to read.

My love for books carries over to my family history research - they are amongst my most valuable sources of information. Since Cyndi Howells first taught me how to do well targeted searches using Google, I have regularly trawled Google Books for family information. I rarely come away empty handed. I found an article about a British ancestor's unlicensed lunatic asylum in a German psychiatry magazine and have traced the career of a 19th century King's Messenger entirely through books found online. I even found The Boating Man's Vade Mecum, written by my husband's great grandfather, William Winn.

For books still in copyright, Google Books only provides a snippet view - or sometimes no preview at all. This can be very frustrating. No-one wants to buy an expensive book just to obtain the nugget of genealogy information contained in a footnote on page 169. Fortunately, there is no need to do so, if you belong to a library.

When I find a book of interest, my first stop is the website of my local library consortium - Libraries West. Using their online catalogue, I can search for the book in over 100 libraries in a region extending from the Cotswolds to Exmoor, including major public libraries in the cities of Bath and Bristol. Obscure books can be found in the most unlikely places. I located a book about an East India Company family which had been placed into storage by the Somerset County Library service - it had last been borrowed in the 1960s. A book about London's worst Victorian slum was gathering dust on the sleepy shelves of a library in a Gloucestershire market town.

If I find the book in the Libraries West catalogue, I can reserve it for collection at my local library, 100 yards from my front door, for the princely sum of 90p. If I do not find it, all is not lost. I next turn to WorldCat to locate the nearest library with a copy. WorldCat covers institutional libraries as well as the public library service. I recently found a rare book very close to my home in the library of my old alma mater, Bristol University. Armed with details of the holding library, and the call number of the book I require, I go back to the Libraries West website and put in a request for an inter-library loan. The fee for this service is higher, at £2.20 per book, but still much cheaper than buying my own copy - cheaper even than the postage on my own copy.

And inter-library loans are not restricted to published books. In my time I have borrowed a typed manuscript from a library in the Orkneys and even borrowed microfilm copies of an ancestor's journals from the Hudson's Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg, Canada. For £2.20, that has to be the bargain of a lifetime.

All the nice girls love a sailor - 2

In Part 1 of this post I wrote about my husband's great great grandfather, Captain John Winn, a master mariner who disappeared in "North America" sometime between 1830 and 1848.

In trying to crack this major brick wall I have pursued many different lines of research. I began by reading this book, published by the Society of Genealogists:

I then explored the following sources:

Censuses

I cannot find John Winn in the 1841 or 1851 British censuses, the 1840 or 1850 US Federal censuses or the 1851 Canadian census.

Lloyds Registers of Shipping

These annual lists can be fully viewed on Google Books. I have extracted the names of all merchant ships with a captain or owner called Winn between 1807 and 1865. I have eliminated those vessels where I have been able to discover the captain's first name and it is not John. I've also eliminated those still sailing from British ports after 1848.

This leaves me with six captains & vessels:

• 1811-12, Thirsk, J Winn, Hull coaster
• 1822, Holland, Winn, Exeter coaster
• 1830-33, Legatus, Winn, Sunderland, Bristol, Montreal
• 1832-33, Kate, Winn, New Brunswick, London, Halifax
• 1836-40, George Canning, Winn, Newcastle, Halifax, Bombay
• 1841-44, Rainbow, Winn, London, Cape of Good Hope

Passenger Lists

There are three masters called Winn on the Ship's List website but, from the names of their ships, I have eliminated all three as being different people. The captain of the Legatus is also mentioned there, spelled Wynn. Using One-Step Webpages I turned up a John Winn, ship master, aged 35 years & 4 months, who arrived in New York from the Turks on board the schooner "Deposit" on 23 August 1836. However, he is described as US born & resident.

Probate

I can find no will, and no action by the family to have him declared dead.

Records of Merchant Seamen

There are no records of merchant navy officers in the UK before 1845. I spent a day trawling through seamen's records and crew lists at the National Archives. There were many John Winns, all ordinary seamen, but nothing to identify my man.

Newspapers

I can find no reference to him (such as a missing person advert) in the British Library's 19th century newspaper collection.

Genealogy Bank turns up various references in US newspapers in the 1830s to John D Winn, captain of the Eliza from Salem, Massachusetts.

Wrecks

I can't find him listed as the captain of a ship that went down at any of the websites devoted to wrecks.

Where should I go next? Please leave your suggestions in the comments. I'll use them to draw up a future research strategy for Part 3 of this post.

All the nice girls love a sailor - 1

Marian Pierre-Louis has kindly publicised my search for the elusive Captain John Winn in her excellent Roots and Rambles blog, so I thought I’d start my blogging journey with him.

John Winn is my husband’s earliest known Winn ancestor and a huge stumbling block to tracing the family tree any further back in time. He first appears in the records with his marriage to Heneretta Tomlin on 5 October 1829 at St Mary-le-Bow, London, when he was stated to be “of this parish”. The witnesses to the marriage were Heneretta’s father, William Tomlin, and a so far unidentified man named John Nickless.

John and Heneretta had only one child, William, baptised on 29 August 1830 at St Dunstan's, Stepney. The baptismal register shows that the family were living in Mile End Old Town and that John was a master mariner i.e. the captain of  a merchant ship.

I could not find John Winn in the 1841 census, which did not surprise me, given his occupation. Heneretta was living with her sister and brother-in-law, James and Mary Ann Horn, in Green Street, Bethnal Green, a short distance from her father’s business premises at Twig Folly, Bethnal Green. William Winn cannot be identified with any certainty, the most likely candidate being an 11 year old pupil at a boarding school in the township of Roby in Lancashire.

Heneretta’s father, William Tomlin, was a prosperous man, the owner of lighters and barges which transported coal from the docks at Limehouse along the Regent's Canal. His grandson, William Winn, would later take over the family business and eventually serve two terms as Master of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen. No formal apprenticeship records for William Winn can be found but it is likely that he served some sort of apprenticeship in the London docks, for which a baptismal certificate would be required.

It was probably in this way that Heneretta discovered that her unusual name had been wrongly recorded as Hannah in William’s baptismal entry. For on 25 February 1847 she swore a formal oath before the magistrates in the Thames Police Court, in order to get the entry corrected. In her affidavit she described herself as the “wife of John Winn of 6 Waterloo Terrace Commercial Road in the Parish of St Dunstan Stepney”.

Heneretta clearly still regarded herself as the wife of John Winn but that was not how her father saw things one year later. On 10 February 1848, William Tomlin wrote his will, in which he described his daughter as:

Heneretta Winn the wife or widow of John Winn who some years since went to North America and whose existence is uncertain.

By the time of the 1851 census, William Winn described his mother as a widow:

and when she made her own will on 9 July 1856, she did the same:

but eight days later, when William Winn married, he made no mention of his father being dead:

When Heneretta died in Southampton on 15 August 1857, her death certificate described her as the “widow of John Winn master mariner”.  That is the last mention of John Winn in any records I can find.

In Part 2 of this post I will describe the efforts I have made to find additional information about this wayward matelot, who appears to have no beginning and no end!

Welcome

I’ve started this blog to share some of the fascinating stories I’ve uncovered during 25 years of researching my family history. I’m also aiming to share some tips on how I broke down “brick walls” in my genealogical research and point readers towards new sources of information for their own families.

Ancestral Places

My research interests are global – mainly in the UK but also in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. From time to time I’ll focus on some of these ancestral places.

Ancestral Faces

I’m fortunate to have a wonderful collection of old family photographs. Some were given to me by my mother but many others have been shared by generous cousins around the world. Using some of these ancestral faces, I’ll show how the clues in a family photograph can lead to new avenues of research and fascinating new information about the lives of your ancestors.

Friends and Mentors

Genealogy is the most clubbable of hobbies. I’ve made firm friendships online with family historians I may never meet in person, “pen pals” for the 21st century. I’ve also been privileged to learn from some outstanding professional genealogists. Although I’m British, and focused mainly on UK research, most of these friends and mentors have been Americans and Canadians. To all of you – and you know who you are – this blog is dedicated.