Do I have a Smuggler in the family?

I remember watching old films with smugglers heaving goodies up the rocks on darkened beaches, hiding their loot in caves or scrambling through underground passages to elude authorities. Little did I know that my ancestors may have been involved in these activities. To be honest, I will probably never know if they were, but the fact that my great, great grandmother, Ellen Tanner, was born in 1840 at Pitts Deep, Hampshire a notorious smuggling area definitely opens up the possibility of a smuggler in the family.
It was on trying to locate where Pitt's Deep was that I stumbled onto the areas smuggling history, as shown here:

Safe landings on this coast are few and far between, but there was one at Pitt's Deep: a winding creek that cuts through the mud-flats. Here a jetty, Pitt's Deep Hard, provided a berth for even quite large ships. The deepest part of the trench cut by the brook flowing into the sea at this point was used for sinking tubs when danger loomed - and won the nickname Brandy Hole. Pylewell Home farm nearby was also used as a storage place by smugglers, and Tanner's Lane in the same area was a popular route inland. (1)

The fact that there is a Tanner's Lane also indicates the family have been associated with this area for a long time. Ellen's grandfather, William Tanner, owned a boat in this area in the early 1800's which led to his untimely death at the age of 33. Ellen's father, also William, was only 8 years old at the time. An Inquest was held into his death and a report appeared in The Hampshire Chronicle on 9 September 1816 as follows:

The 1851 England Census, shows William Tanner's occupation as a fisherman and the four children listed all born at Pitt's Deep. Ironically the 1841 Census shows them residing next to the Pitt's Deep Preventive Station (the name given to the Coast Guard Station at the time).

Whether any of the Tanner's were smugglers or not is unknown, but given the long association the family had with this well known smuggling region it provides a good talking point! It has also increased my curiosity to see the area later in the year.

(1) http://www.smuggling.co.uk/gazetteer_s_12.html, accessed 28 April 2018.

From Cemetery to Park

As family historians, we spend a lot of time wandering around cemeteries trying to find those extra details about our ancestors and to pay respect to people we never knew. Old cemeteries can be fascinating places and in my research I have found two that are used as parks today, both connected to the one family but on opposite sides of the world.

Bunhill Fields Burial Ground is located in Islington, London. It is grade 2 listed because of its historical significance and is maintained by the City of London as part of its Open Spaces program for the public to enjoy. The name Bunhill is thought come from "Bone Hill" as when it closed in 1854, it was thought to have been a burial site for over a thousand years.

Bunhill Fields Burial Ground

In Plot 59 at Bunhill Fields are buried Cornelia (nee Stites) Galbreath who died on 19 June 1800 at the very young age of 33yrs, also her son John Stites Galbreath, who died on the 26 March 1843, aged 52 yrs and six of John's children who died in infancy. This illustrated the high child mortality rate that existed in 19th century London. Of every 1000 children born, nearly half of them died before reaching the age of 2. Luckily some of John and his wife Ann's children did survive. One in particular Ann Jane, a dressmaker, came to Australia.

At St. Mark's in Collingwood on 16 December 1856, Ann Jane Galbreath married widower, Francis Scammell. Francis had been in Melbourne since 1842, a very early arrival. In the 1860's Francis continued that pioneer spirit by moving his family to Mulgrave. When Ann and Francis died they were buried at Oakleigh Cemetery.

Oakleigh Pioneer Memorial Park

Oakleigh Cemetery when first opened in 1859 was in bushland, one of the first public cemeteries in Victoria, now it sits in the centre of a residential and shopping precinct beside a major arterial road. Burials stopped in 1960 and it has been renamed the Oakleigh Pioneer Memorial Park as a testament to the early settlers of the area. It too is a park for the public with a picnic area and children's playground and winding paths amongst the trees.

It is great to see these cemeteries being re-purposed, but with great respect to the deceased and open for the public to enjoy.

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Another Story Unfolds

When I asked my uncle about his grandmother, Henrietta Rogers, he assumed she had died before his mother married because she never talked about her. However she did talk about her own grandmother a lot. For many years I have tried to unravel this mystery, unable to find anything about Henrietta, except her birth, marriage and the birth of her two children.

Henrietta was born on the 18 Jan 1877 in Nairne, South Australia. She was the only child of her mother Ellen's second marriage to Edward John Rogers, but she had five older half siblings. Sadly she didn't really get to know her father as he died 3 months short of her third birthday.

At the age of seventeen and half, despite the marriage certificate saying she was eighteen, Henrietta married William Walmsley who was twelve years her senior. She misspelt her name as Heneritta when she signed. Her older half sister Annie and her husband, Samuel Short were the witnesses to the marriage which took place in the Adelaide Registry Office. Eight months later and only eleven days after her eighteenth birthday, Henrietta gave birth to my grandmother, Annie Edith. It is possible she named her after her older half sister. Four years later she gave birth to a son, John Henry. Everything seemed rosy, but that was when the trail went cold.

A few years ago, I happened to stumble on this notice that appeared in the Evening Journal, Adelaide:

Annie was nearly seven and her brother John only 20 months old. Now I understand why my grandmother never mentioned her mother and was possibly brought up by her grandmother, Ellen, but what happened to Henrietta? I will probably never know the full story but at least today I finally found where she died.  I had a Queensland burial transcription for a Henrietta Walmsley alias Stokes and also a similar probate notice in the newspaper, but until today I had been unable to find a death certificate for either name. I thought I would check to see if Queensland Registry had updated their index and found you can now purchase an historical certificate as a PDF and finally I hit the jackpot with this:

Many questions still remain, but now I at least know where she died. 

Researching Ancestors is like doing a Jigsaw

I have always enjoyed doing jigsaws. As I was growing up, for a lot of years, their was a family present under the Christmas tree of 1000 piece jigsaw which was taken to our holiday house and set up on the bench between the kitchen and the lounge room. Anyone that visited over the holiday period was drawn to putting at least a few pieces in that puzzle, often a lot more! Two things happened this week that made me think how similar, in some respects, family history research is to doing a jigsaw. We are all searching for the many pieces to make our ancestors stories complete just like we put all those pieces together to make a picture with a jigsaw.

As a reply to a Facebook request for help in locating the ship an ancestor had arrived on, I suggested looking at baptism records in England and also the 1841 census as the death certificate indicated she hadn't left England by then and also gave a place of birth. This I thought would narrow down the time frame to look at as well as show parents she may have traveled with. Rather than a thanks for the suggestion the reply I received was - 'I only want to know the name of the ship'! It is often impossible to find the piece of the puzzle we want until we have all the surrounding pieces to help us.

Following on from that, I learnt myself the hard way how true this is. For many years I have had both the 1841 & 1851 census showing my 2x great grandmother, Ellen Tanner and her parents in Pitts Deep and then Boldre in Hampshire. I have the shipping record of them coming to Port Adelaide in 1855, Ellen's baptism, her death certificate and index records of 2 of her 3 marriages, but I have never been able to find anything further about her mother, except that she was born in Beaulieu, Hampshire. In order to have all the details I could for my trip to England, I decided to order a pdf of her birth certificate while the GRO are still doing their trial. Perhaps there would be a different address or some other detail I didn't have. Four days after my order the pdf was available to download.

At first I thought I had ordered the wrong certificate, as the surname for her mother was a name I had never seen 'Nutbeem' and an unusual one at that! As far as I knew Ellen's parents, William Tanner and Ann Etheridge, had married in Boldre in 1834. However after some more research I found that Ann Nutborn (don't you just love the variations in spelling) had married James Etheridge in Beaulieu 10 years earlier. They had one son, George before James died in 1830. Interestingly enough George appears on the 1841 census as William Tanner's son, George Tanner, so he obviously took on the role of father when he married Ann.

So it just goes to show you do need to gather as much information as possible to get the full story of your ancestors, just as you need every piece to make a complete jigsaw puzzle.