Thirteen great-great grandparents
Town and country, land and sea, north, south and Midlands
Alongside nature and birds, one of my other obsessions is family history. I’ve seen other people posting about their 16 great-great grandparents so thought I’d have a go. For me, some pieces of the genetic jigsaw puzzle are missing. I have a grandfather and a great-grandmother who never knew their fathers. DNA testing might reveal the answers in due course…
Here are the 13 I do know about.
Emma Wood was born on Sash Street in Stafford in November 1851. Her parents, William Bodley1 and Esther Ann Wood, didn’t tie the knot until Emma was around two years old. By 1861 the Bodley family had moved to Northampton, where Emma’s father worked as a shoemaker. Northampton and its surrounding area were noted for their boot and shoe manufacturing.
Emma married in Leicester – another shoe-making town* – in May 1870 at the age of 18. Her 16 year-old husband was Robert James Fuller, and (in common with many brides) Emma was already pregnant with their first child. At the time of the 1871 census the couple lived in Leicester with Emma’s mother.
Robert was born on Mellowes’ Row in Northampton in 1854 and was the son of Robert Fuller (another shoemaker) and his wife, Elizabeth (née Farndell). The Fullers were not from Northampton but arrived from London around 1845 (when the town got its first railway station), presumably following employment opportunities.
Robert and Emma lived in Northampton from 1873 before moving to Kettering around 1892. They had nine children in total: Arthur William (born 1873) died at two years old and Clara May (born 1885) died at the age of 18. Robert worked as a boot and shoe ‘clicker’, using a knife to cut out the leather shapes that formed the uppers.
Emma died in Kettering in 1919 at the age of 67 and Robert died there in 1935, when he was 81.
* when I did a few weeks of temping at the Griggs factory in Wollaston - home of Dr Martens - I became the sixth and last generation of the Fuller family to work in the boot & shoe industry in Northamptonshire.
In August 1862 Lucy Howard was born in the west Norfolk village of Grimston to William Howard and his wife, Hannah (née Anderson or Andrews). She was their youngest child. I don’t know what happened to William and Hannah, but by 1871 Lucy and her sister Eliza were inmates of the Freebridge Lynn Union Workhouse in Gayton.
Other members of the extended family migrated to the fishing port of Whitby, Yorkshire – almost 200 miles away by land – and in spring 1881 Lucy lived there with her eldest sister, Jane, whose husband had been lost at sea the previous autumn. Lucy gave birth on 30 April 1886 at the Whitby Union Workhouse to Annie Maud Howard, (who would turn out to be my Dad’s grandmother).
We don’t [yet] know who was Annie’s father [waiting on DNA evidence to pop up] - so he is one of the missing great-great grandparents.
In September the next year, Lucy had another daughter, Louisa Rose Howard, born at Kettering Union Workhouse in Northamptonshire. She then had a son, Harry Howard, who was born at Northampton Union Workhouse in March 1889. Lucy brought an affiliation case in an attempt to prove the identity of Harry’s father and to claim maintenance money from him, but the case was dismissed.
Lucy’s daughters were taken in by her brother, Thomas Howard, and his common-law wife, Sarah. In 1891 Lucy married Samuel Parrott in Northampton. The couple brought up Harry together and he took his stepfather’s surname.
Lucy had a tough life. Though eventually she settled down with Samuel in Leicester, she must have spent a lot of time in poverty, also facing social pressure and disapproval. She died in 1918 from influenza during the Spanish Flu epidemic.
Frances Adeline Johnson was born on Boxing Day 1870 in the west Northamptonshire village of Long Buckby. She was the daughter of Robert Johnson (a builder) and his wife, Priscilla (née Adams).
At the time of the 1891 census Frances worked as a domestic servant while she lived with her parents. They also had a lodger named George Henry Sharman, who was a hairdresser and tobacconist. Frances and George married on 19 April the following year. (George was baptised in Long Buckby five days before the wedding, on his 21st birthday.)
George Henry Sharman was born in 1871 in the town of Kettering. His parents were Henry Fergus Sharman (who was born out of wedlock and originally bore his mother’s maiden name, Mutton) and Amelia Abbott. The Sharmans lived in Kettering; George’s father worked in the boot industry and later became a grocer and beer retailer.
Frances and George had a total of 12 children, but Frank Edwin, Edith Elsie and Phyllis May did not survive childhood. Their first child was born in Long Buckby in 1892; by 1894 the Sharmans had moved south to the town of Watford, Hertfordshire. They settled at 99 Vicarage Road where George kept his tobacconist and hairdresser’s shop. Frances died there in 1945 and George died in 1955.
In the fishing port of Lowestoft, Suffolk – the most easterly point of Great Britain –Annie Allerton was born on 16 December 1865. Her parents were Robert Brown Allerton and his wife, Mary Ann (née Cooper). Robert was a shipwright and boat builder, like many members of his family. At this time Lowestoft was a bustling town, thanks to the booming North Sea herring fishery.
When she was 21 Annie married Peter Cooper in Lowestoft. He came from a family of fishermen but worked as a labourer.
Peter, the son of Robert Cooper and his wife, Isabella (née Johnson), was born in Lowestoft in 1864. Isabella was born in Northumberland and must have travelled to Suffolk to work as a “herring lass”, gutting and packing fish. The Coopers remained in Lowestoft and Annie died at the age of 54 in 1919 from heart failure.
Peter married Alice Kate Cook in 1921. In 1939 he worked as a “night smoker, herrings.” He died in 1943 at the age of 79.
On my mother’s side, my great-great grandmother, Lydia Gibson, was born in Bilton, east of Hull, in 1868. She was the daughter of John Gibson and his wife, Mary, née Spence. Lydia was part of a large family - she had 10 brothers and sisters and 37 cousins - with deep roots in the Holderness peninsula.
In 1888 Lydia married a farm labourer, John James Long. He was born in 1859 in the Wolds village of Goodmanham to Charles James Long and his wife, Maria, née West. John was one of eight children and had 41 cousins.
John and Lydia also had a large family, with 10 children born between 1889 and 1909. John’s work meant the Longs moved around the East Riding before settling in the village of Eastrington. My great-grandmother, Mildred, was born there in 1904. (Her son, my grandfather, Cyril, was born out of wedlock and that is another of the reasons why I only know the names of 13 of my 16 great-great grandparents.)
John retired from policing in 1912 after being hit by someone wielding a stick. Lydia worked informally as a midwife and was also a newspaper correspondant, supplying news from Eastrington to a local paper. John died in 1927 and Lydia followed the year after.
Elizabeth Beckitt was born in 1862 in the busy port town of Hull, Yorkshire. Her parents were William Beckitt (a basket-maker and dock labourer) and his first wife, Jane Hague Atkinson. Elizabeth’s mother died in 1867 and William married Elizabeth’s aunt, Sarah. It was illegal for a widower to marry his dead wife’s sister.
Elizabeth had three full siblings, but her younger brother, Charles, died when he was one. Of her seven half-siblings, only one, Louisa, survived to adulthood.
On her father’s side, Elizabeth had Huguenot ancestors. Denis Pere was the grandson of two French refugees who fled to London after 1685, and he moved to east Yorkshire around 1770.
In 1883 Elizabeth married Alfred Nicholas Smart. He was born in Hull to James Smart and his second wife, Mary Ann Danby. James’s first wife was Maria Danby - Mary Ann’s sister (another illegal marriage).
Alfred had four half-siblings, of whom three died in childhood. He was his mother’s only child. The Smarts ran a pub on West Street in Hull, the Rose and Crown. Following their marriage, Alfred and Elizabeth moved to Goole, Yorkshire.
After working as a chimney sweep and lamp-lighter, Alfred ran a general dealer’s shop in the arcade in Goole and became a member of the Goole Board of Guardians.
The First World War took a heavy toll on the Smart family. Their youngest son, Charles, was killed in France in 1916 aged 19, their second-youngest son George was killed onboard HMS Torrent in 1917 when it struck a mine, and their eldest son, my great-grandfather James, was taken prisoner of war in 1918 but was later released. Alfred is said to have sold James’s piano while he was away at war.
Alfred died in 1948 and Elizabeth died in 1952 at the age of 90.
Elizabeth Easton was born in Pocklington, Yorkshire, in 1849. Her father, William Easton, was a blacksmith, and her mother was Charity Rispin, from a family with its roots in the Yorkshire Wolds.
The Eastons lived in Pocklington from at least the 1680s and worked as blacksmiths, farriers and innkeepers. Their pub, the Three Horseshoes (I like to think this was a clever bit of branding, promoting one arm of the family business with another), was knocked down in the 1950s. A member of the Easton family was killed during the First World War after serving as a Shoeing Smith.
In 1872 Elizabeth married George Coggrave at Leeds Register Office. George was born in 1852 in the village of Airmyn, Yorkshire, to Charles Coggrave and his wife, Ann Patrick.
George carried out farm work before he married. He fathered a son, William Stephenson, in 1871. William’s mother, Hannah, emigrated to Canada with the rest of her family when her son was a baby. (We only found out about William after DNA tests revealed a cluster of Canadians who were also George’s descendants.)
George and Elizabeth Coggrave moved to the up and coming town of Goole, with its port connected to the Aire and Calder Navigation and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.
George worked on the railways, starting as a dock labourer and rising to become a railway goods foreman, and was a member of a railway servants’ union. He’s on the left in this photo.
George and Elizabeth lived on Parliament Street in Goole, close to family members. George died in 1922 (when he was reputed to be the “oldest man in Goole” at the age of 70) and Elizabeth in 1928.
A note on Emma’s father: when he was 14 years old, William Bodley appeared in court charged with the manslaughter of another boy, but he was found not guilty. He was in trouble throughout his life for more minor matters, usually relating to drunkenness, and in 1890 it was said in court that “the language defendant used was not fit for a pig to hear.” Clearly he did not mellow with age.