World War One Soldier's Story - Crossland Barraclough

I've been adding photos taken by the Barnsley War Memorials Project Information Officer, Pete, in Barnsley Cemetery, to an index page for War Memorial Gravestones there.  I was intrigued that Crossland Barraclough's next of kin on his Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) entry was his mother, Amelia who lived in Wallsend-on-Tyne (that's how they wrote it!) That and his unusual name ... presumably a family name for a first name, but we will see.
 

Crossland Barraclough's CWGC entry (from the CWGC website)

My own grandmother was born in Wallsend in 1907.  There will be no connection between the two I'm sure, but simply the coincidence of the place attracted my attention.  Easy to distract from 'proper work', that's me, especially in the current heat!  It's 24 degrees in our dining room where I'm sitting typing this.  

Crossland is remembered on his father and sister's gravestone
in Barnsley Cemetery (photo by PS)

This is the photo that the quest began with and the inscription on the gravestone transcribed for you (by Pete) below:

In Loving Memory Of / Oswald / the dearly beloved husband of / Amelia Barraclough / who died Oct. 16th 1920 / aged 54 years / also Crossland, the only / beloved son of the above / who died from wounds / received in action in Palestine / May 2nd 1918, aged 24 years / also Millicent Edna / their daughter / who died in infancy / Peace Perfect Peace.

We can see that his father, Oswald, died in 1920.  So that means that the CWGC entry shown above was compiled after his death as in that he is referred to as 'the late'.  There is also a sister who 'died in infancy'.  Lots of clues.  But why did Amelia end up in Wallsend?
 

Crossland Barraclough's SDGW entry (from Ancestry)

Checking on Ancestry for Crossland's Soldier's Died in the Great War record I see that it appears he lived in Wallsend when he enlisted, but that he actually enlisted in London into the London Scottish Regiment.  This agrees with the CWGC entry.

Crossland's Army Service records do not appear to have survived and the Long, Long Trail website, which is usually very helpful about the movements of various regiments can only tell me that the 2/13th and 2/14th (County of London) Battalions arrived in Salonika in November 1916 and then moved to Egypt arriving in Alexandria on 5 July 1917.  The 2/14th (County of London) Battalion (London Scottish) moved to France on 30 May 1918, which is after Crossland's death.

Jerusalem War Cemetery entrance (from the CWGC)

He is buried in an individual grave in the Jerusalem War Cemetery, which, according to the CWGC, took in graves from battlefields and smaller cemeteries in the neighbourhood.  The new documentation on the CWGC site confirms that he was in the 2/14th London Battalion and that his mother paid for the addtional text "Awaiting a Higher Command" to be added to his stone.  The record for the Cemetery notes that the advance to Jerusalem took place in autumn 1917 and that the Allied forces formally entered the city on 11 December 1917.  

It is hard to say for sure how or when Crossland was injured (he died of wounds according to his SDGW entry), however looking at the other men buried in the same cemetery there are quite a lot from the London Scottish, the London Civil Service Rifles and the London Irish Rifles who were killed at the end of April and the beginning of May 1918 suggesting a battle of some kind.  A search of Wikipedia for the dates and area brought back a report on the attack on Shunet Nimrin and Es Salt in which the 60th London Division took part.  This is a very detailed report and I will let you go and read it yourselves!  It does seem likely that this was the action in which Crossland and his colleagues were killed and injured.  There were 1,116 casualties suffered by the London Division from a total of 1,649 British Empire casualties, including Anzac and Australian soldiers too.

The reason that this story caught my interest is the question why the family moved from Barnsley to Wallsend?  Another Google search on Crossland's unusual name brought back a listing on a War Memorial at St Peter's Church in Wallsend.  So he was also remembered in the area in which his mother was living in the 1920s.  I have sent an email to the group researching this memorial asking if they know anything about the family.

A general search on the Ancestry website gave me the information that Crossland Barraclough was baptised in Tankersley on 17 June 1894, his parents (as we know) being Oswald and Amelia Barraclough.   As this combination of names is very unusual I have confidence that we have found the right family.

1891 census snip for 23 Sheffield Road, Hoyland Nether (from Ancestry)

Oswald Barraclough married Amelia Crossland in the September quarter of 1890 in the Barnsley Registration District, probably in St Edward's, Tankersley or St Peter's Church in Hoyland Nether as that is the area where the young couple are living in 1891, with her widowed mother.  Eliz Crossland is 'Living on her own means' and her sons Walter and Joseph have good jobs,  Walter as an Assistant Schoolteacher and Joseph as a Grocer's Assistant.  Oswald, who gives his occupation as a Coal Mines Deputy was born in Silkstone around 1867.  Amelia, who is a little older than Oswald, had been born in Tankersley in 1865.

Snip from the 1900 baptism register of St Mary's Church, Woodkirk (from Ancestry)

In 1901 Oswald and Amelia are living on Pinfold Hill in Ardsley.  Oswald is still listed as a Colliery Deputy.  They only have the one child, Crossland.  However a search of the baptisms on Ancestry reveals that they had a child, Millicent Edna, who was baptised in 1900 in St Mary's Woodkirk which is on the far side of Wakefield from Barnsley.  On the baptism Oswald's occupation is given as Under Manager Pit.  Searching on the Old Maps website I can find Woodkirk and there are a lot of quarries and brick works nearby, but I can't pin point a likely coal mine that Oswald might be working at.  Maybe it was very short lived and that's why he came back to Barnsley.  Millicent Edna Barraclough dies in the Wakefield Registration District (the same one in which she was born) in the September quarter of 1900, and was buried in the same church at which she was baptised aged just five months.  Interestingly Millicent is remembered on her father's gravestone in Barnsley Cemetery along with her brother even though she is not buried there either.

1911 census snip from 16 Lingard Street, Barnsley (from Ancestry)

By 1911 the family have moved into the central part of Barnsley, Lingard Street is just off Victoria Road, very near to the current Barnsley College.  A further daughter, Constance Muriel, has been born to the family at Stairfoot and thanks to the additional information on the 1911 census we know that Oswald and Amelia had been married 20 years and only had three children, one of whom died young.  This is a very small family for this era, did Amelia have difficulty getting pregnant or did they purposely limit their children?  Oswald is now a Colliery Underviewer.  

Crossland is working, despite being aged only 16 years, he is a Bursar, a job suggesting the handling of money and which sounds responsible and which could lead to better things.  Has he obtained a good post because of his father's position?

A section of the record for Wallsend Colliery (from DMM)

Oswald Barraclough is listed on the Durham Mining Museum website as being the Under Manager of the Wallsend Colliery in 1914.  From 1921 to 1927 my own great, great uncle Edward Nutley was the manager of one of the mines in this group.  My own grandfather William Satchell Hutton worked at a pit in Wallsend until 1931, which was the year he married my grandmother at St Luke's Church there.

We now know that the family were in Wallsend by 1914.  We know that Crossland Barraclough enlisted in London (had he moved there to improve his job prospects?) and we know that when the CWGC approached Amelia for about his gravestone that she was living at 31 Beech Grove, Wallsend.  This was probably in the early 1920s.  Oswald Barraclough died in October 1920, so it was after that, and a search on FreeBMD shows that he dies in Barnsley!  Odd.  I had assumed he had died in the North East ... a search of the Barnsley Cemetery records show that he died at 54 Sackville Street and that he is the only burial in that grave plot.  So Amelia was not buried with Oswald.

Constance Muriel Barraclough may have married a Charles H Davison in Barnsley in 1921 - but as the marriage is not available to check on Ancestry I can't be sure it is the right person.  The only death of an Amelia Barraclough that fits Crossland's mother is in Hendon, London in 1933.  That seems a bit of a stretch, but I suppose her daughter could have moved down there ...

I am happy to have found out why Amelia's address was in Wallsend after the war, but it would have been nice to have finished the story off properly.  Maybe there will be a part 2!  You never know.

Week 7 - Book of Me - Grandparents

This week's prompt for the Book of Me (an online writing project promoted by Julie Goucher of the Angler's Rest blog) is 'Grandparents'. 

We are now into Week 7 and despite looking forward to writing this post I've been putting it off until I had posted something for last week's tricky 'Journals and Diaries' prompt.  As I have never really kept a diary it was a bit difficult to find something to write about ... until my daughter came last weekend to have a poke around in my loft to reclaim some of her old books and DVDs.

The pictures I posted for Week 6 are of badges that I collected over an eight or nine year span from various rock concerts I attended.  It is noticeable that once I married and the children came along this stopped!  We found the strip of material on which I had saved the badges in a box with an old fringed suede jacket and some really fancy black leather and concho'd belts.  Mmm, yummmm! I don't think they fit me any more but it was nice to remember wearing them and having fun!

For the week 7 prompt Julie gave us some further additional questions:

Grandparents

What were their names?

Where were they from?

Were they related? – Cousins perhaps

Where were they born, another Country or state/area

Photos

What did they do?

Did you know them?

What was your relationship with them?

If you didn't know them have you researched about them?

  

My paternal grandparents were Edward Lawrence Hall and Janet Bunn.  If I remember aright my dad used to say his father was called Barney - he didn't know why.  My dad was Edward Lawrence as well and he was called Laurie ... rebelling against awkward family names must just run in the family as I am also known by my middle name!

 

They were born just a few miles away from each other and my grandmother was a smidgit older than my grandad.  He was born in 1904 in Witton Gilbert, Co Durham and she in 1903 in Langley Park, Co Durham 1.3 miles away according to Google Maps.  They were not related but my grandmother's cousin had married my grandfather's brother three years before my grandparents' married which might have something to do with them meeting - I really don't know.

 

Grandfather Hall was a coal miner, but the story goes that he left home to join the army after a bit of bother involving my grandmother - I will not go into the details in a public blog.  You can read more about his army career on a previous blog post.  There is also a nice picture of them with their youngest child, my aunt, on that post.

Back row: Arthur Bunn, Vera Bunn, Linda Bunn, Henry Bunn
Middle: Henry and Linda's son Peter
Seated: Clementina Bunn, Janet Hall (nee Bunn), E L Hall

I understand that my grandmother Janet or Jessie as she was known was in domestic service before she married.  She picked up a lot of tips about the 'proper' way of doing things that she tried to pass on to her family and children.  She came from a large family, her brothers and their wives and her mum Clementina appear in the picture above.  Grandfather and Jessie married in 1926.

She died before I was born, but my mum says that she knew I was 'on the way' so that's a nice thought.  Despite my grandfather not passing away until I was in my late teens I didn't really know him.  We had moved away when I was only a small child and we did not visit.  He stayed close to his daughter's family and my cousins and they have some fond memories of him which they passed on at a family gathering earlier this year.

 

My maternal grandparents were William Satchell Hutton and Doris Gibson.  I have written a couple of blog posts about my grandad, one about some of the treasures I found in an old tin box and one about his Home Guard service during the Second World War.   He was born in 1905 in Crook, Co Durham - I visited Crook with the OH some years ago now and walked from there to Witton le Wear searching out family history - you can find those posts here, here and here.  We also visited again this year as I had realised I had been looking in the wrong place for many years for his birth place and now I needed new photos.

My grandma Hutton was born in 1907 in Wallsend, Northumberland (now part of Tyne and Wear).  She hadn't worked - or maybe just a 'little job' in a local shop - I'm not sure about this.  She was the youngest of a large family and her next oldest sister had died in the flu epidemic in 1918, my mum thinks grandma was a bit spoilt by her parents as a result of this.  She met my grandfather when he moved to Wallsend to work in the late 1920s.  I remember her telling me that they used to go to the same tennis club, and I think they may have attended the same church too.  They married in 1931.

Doris and William's Wedding Day
Back row: Jim Hutton, Doris Hutton (nee Gibson), William Hutton
Front row: Jean Hutton, little Irene Nelson, her mum Lily Nelson (nee Gibson)

I knew my Hutton grandparents very well, we actually lived with them for a few months when my father changed jobs - I wrote about their last house, one of my childhood homes, a few weeks ago.  Even after we moved away from the North East we visited them regularly and usually spent Christmas with them and my mum's brother, sister and their families.  I am convinced families are usually matriarchies, with husbands joining their wives families and socialising more with them than their own relatives after marriage.  Note I did say 'usually' I'm not claiming this as an unbreakable rule of course!

Doris and William Hutton enjoying their retirement

Grandad passed away in 1983 - he died of 'Chronic obstructive airway disease', a legacy of his lifelong career down the pits.  Grandma moved to live near my mum and enjoyed another 20 years with her grandchildren and great grandchildren visiting, gadding about on foreign holidays with my parents and generally being everything you might expect of a great grandma!  Their ashes are buried together in the cemetery in the village where my mum still lives.



Moderate - not a description but an unusual surname

A couple days ago I posted an item about digitising newspapers and one of my examples concerned the tragic death of Jeremiah Moderate aged sixteen who was knocked down by a train in the course of his duties as a telegraph clerk.  It occurred to me that despite occasional side references like this and one article about Uncle Joe Moderate quite some time ago I have hardly touched on the history of my most unusual family name.

The Gibson Family after 1918

This is a picture of my grandmother, the small girl stood in the middle, her parents and brother.  It must have been taken after 1918 because grandma is wearing the locket that had belonged to her next oldest sister Winnie who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 aged just seventeen.  My grandma was Doris Gibson, born 1907 in Wallsend, Northumberland, so she is about eleven or twelve in this photo.  Her father was Thomas Harle Gibson, born 1864 in Longbenton, Northumberland and her mother was Mary Jane (maiden name Moderate) born 1865 in Carlisle, Cumberland.  Robert Ernest Gibson, her brother, was born in 1897 in Hebburn, Durham and had served in the First World War losing a leg my mother says. 

Thomas and Mary Jane had eight children in total, that I know of, my grandmother being the youngest.  Somewhere I have a piece of that good quality pinky purple writing paper that my grandma preferred with a list of all the birthdays for her immediate family ... I don't know exactly when I found out that great-grandma Gibson's maiden name was Moderate, but it was something I knew before I started researching family history seriously. 

In fact this very name is probably the reason I did start. 

When asked by my then partner's mother (AM) many years ago what family names I knew of I mentioned Moderate along with Fiddler, Bunn and some others.  She leapt upon Moderate commenting that it was a very, very unusual name and well worth researching.  She lent me some Open University books from a course she had just completed (DA301, Studying Family and Community History: 19th and 20th Centuries) a newish course in the mid 1990s.  I was hooked ...

All my researches point to the English Moderates being descended from just one man, John Moderate born around 1777, a mariner, who died in January 1825 in Maryport, Cumberland.

Map of the northern part of the Irish Sea (from Google Maps)

Since then I have found other families with the Moderate name in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Donaghadee near Bangor in Northern Ireland (the extreme east coast of Ireland) and in Kirkmaiden, in the Rhinns of Galloway (the extreme west of Scotland), Ballantrae (again the western coast of Scotland) and another in Workington, Cumberland, just down the western coast of England from Maryport.  The distribution of these families around the fairly tight area depicted on my map snip above still suggests a common root to me.  After all, a friend from Northern Ireland once told me that Irish emigrants to Scotland used to row back to Ireland for church services, so they can't have considered a bit of sea a barrier to social activity.
 
John Moderate married a local girl, Jane Ritson, in Crosscanonby, just north of Maryport, in 1804.  They had four children, but only one, the first Jeremiah Moderate, born in 1810 in Maryport, survived to have a family of his own.  With John dying well before even the 1841 census I have no way of determining his place of origin.  When he marries Jane in 1804 one of the witnesses appears to be a William Moderate, so he wasn't alone in England at that point, however the only further hits for a William are two children in Workington in 1809 and 1811 to himself and his wife Grace.  Then William, Grace and their family disappear from the English records.  Do they die, return to their place of origin, be it Ireland or Scotland or emigrate?  Another mystery.

John gives his occupation consistently as Mariner at his marriage and the baptisms and burials of his children.  However I am aware of no records for sailors that start as far back as the first couple of decades of the 19th century.  Registers of Merchant Seamen don't commence until 1835.  So that's another dead end.

Various theories over the past twenty years have suggested that the name comes from the idea of Moderators in the Scottish church or that the family may have been immigrants from France whose name was mis-transcribed by an English clergyman or other official.  I'm tending towards a seafaring family from Ireland who spread outwards from there.  Before that, who knows?

When I compiled a list of the Moderates in the English telephone book in 1996 I got no more than eighteen different addresses, plus a couple of strays in Aberdeen, Scotland and Bangor, County Down, Ireland.  Writing to all the English hits I received sufficient replies to link each and every one of the eighteen to each other and all of them back to John Moderate in Maryport in 1804.

I was very pleased to receive the replies to my letters all those years ago (seventeen years have since passed!) and I hope I managed to interest one or two of my distant relatives in their own family history.  I was sent dates and names and in one memorable package an original indenture for a great-great uncle on his apprenticeship to the Co-op in Walker, Northumberland in 1880.  Needless to say I copied that precious document to the best of my ability at the time and carefully returned it to its owner.  Thank you so much for that.  I even had a phone call in 1997 from a relative in Northumberland who already appreciated her Moderate legacy to the extent of preserving the name as her middle name after her marriage.  I reunited my grandmother with her cousin Neville, whom she hadn't seen since he was a toddler - he and my mum kept in touch until his death only a few years ago.

Thanks to one and all for all your help back then - I'm sorry I let the exchange of letters dwindle when I had to go back to full time work - if anyone even vaguely Moderate related would like to get in touch again I'm still here and I have time on my hands once more!

Daniel Harle is from Kirkwhelpington - what a great place name!

Working in our office today - that sounds posh, but it's actually the front bedroom which has a big bay window onto the main road that the sun is currently pouring into.  It may be cold outside but in here it's quite warm.  My cat likes it too - we often find her up here sunning herself and tormenting (unwittingly) the little dog across the road.  When we moved into this house eighteen months ago we decided the front room was far too big for a bedroom so the OH put in a custom made 'two person' computer desk (we can see each other as we work) and I filled the rest with bookshelves!

Kirkwhelpington - I'd never heard of it before I found it mentioned on one of the Harle baptisms last week. 

From the baptism of Sarah Harle in Gosforth 1805 (from Family Search)

The wonderfully detailed baptism record for my 3x great grandfather's sister Sarah in 1805 reads "Daniel Harle Brakesman N [native] of Kirkwhelpington by his wife Isabella Dr [daughter] of William Penman N [native] of Whickham". 

On the baptism of John Harle in 1809 Daniel's origin is fine tuned a little more - this time he is noted as a native of "Great Bavington".

Snip from Kirkwhelpington Parish Register showing Daniel Harle's baptism in 1781 (from Family Search)

Daniel Harle was born around 1781 to John and Sarah Harle, of Great Bavington, and baptised in the church at Kirkwhelpington.  These registers don't give as much information - the local clergy were not required to follow any particular format at that time, although from 1798 the new Bishop of Durham encouraged an eponymous system with the extra detail we have seen in the later Gosforth registers. Note that the entries on either side of Daniel mention Whelpington, without the prefix 'Kirk'.  My Oxford Names Companion says the place name is Old English meaning "the estate associated with a man named Hwelp" and that the Kirk will have been added later from Old Scandinavian.  It all sounds very Anglo-Saxon and Viking.  St Bartholomew's church is 13th century (or earlier) and appears to have been larger in the past.

St Bartholomew's, Kirkwhelpington (from Google Maps)

Kirkwhelpington is 21 miles north west of Newcastle upon Tyne which is too big a distance to even think about fitting them on the same map snip for the purposes of illustration. 

Map of Kirkwhelpington and Great Bavington (from Bing maps)

Great Bavington is about four miles south of Kirkwhelpington; the map snip above shows a bridle path that seems to follow a shorter route than either of the roads - though when I Google map'd the roads they were pretty narrow. 

Interestingly the Genuki listing for Kirkwhelpington quotes from an 1855 Topography of Northumberland that "instances of longevity are not at all uncommon" - well that sounds good.  Unfortunately the same source notes that the population was in decline from as early as 1821, "in 1811, 814; in 1821, 793; in 1831, 789; in 1841, 705; and in 1851, 679 souls" and a Bartholomew's Gazetter I have notes that in 1963 the population was 230.  Wikipedia says that the village had a school between 1858 and 1972, but it is now a private house.  A memorial hall was built in 1924 to the men from the village who died in the First World War.  I can see four men from WW1 and one from WW2 on the Commonwealth War Graves site - there may be others whose inscription doesn't mention the village by name or who came from the surrounding hamlets.

Great Bavington from the north east, on the road from Kirkwhelpington (from Google maps)

Great Bavington looks lovely and peaceful from the images online, but I don't think I'd like to be there in a bad winter.

Newcastle Courant 13th January 1781 (from Find My Past)

I found this newspaper cutting from 1781, the year of Daniel's birth, which mentions a Mr John Harle of Great Bavington, this is probably his father.  Their comment "conveniently situate for Morpeth, Hexham and Newcastle markets" suggests the distances between these places were not a problem. 

1919-24 Bartholomew's map of Kirkwhelpington (from National Library of Scotland)

Of course there were trains to more places in times gone by - compare this snip from a 1919-24 map to the modern one above - that black line wandering across the top is a train line - on the modern map you can just see the red dotted footpath that presumably follows the old track now.  The railway from Morpeth reached Knowesgate station, at the top centre of the map in 1864 and it was open for passengers between 1865 and 1959.  For short distances our ancestors would have used their own horse and conveyance (cart, carriage) or used a paid service, a carrier's cart or mail coach. 

Morpeth Herald Saturday 10 September 1881 (from Find My Past)

We can see from this newspaper cutting that in 1881 it took about three and a half hours to travel the 21 miles to Newcastle by coach.  The overcrowding accident reported (it sounds like the pushy passengers might have been overindulging in the local pub!) resulted in some broken limbs but no fatalities fortunately.

A "Mr John Harle of Great Bavington" is buried at Kirkwhelpington in 1788, when Daniel would only have been seven years old.  He was John Harle's eldest son to Sarah, however there are some baptisms where the father is a John Harle, without a mother's name mentioned, recorded between ten and twenty years before Daniel's birth, so he may have been a younger son to a second wife and not entitled to any inheritance from his father.  He could have left Great Bavington and Kirkwhelpington as quite a young man to find work in the collieries around Newcastle.  Daniel marries Isabella Penman in Gosforth in 1804 and his first child Sarah is born in 1805.

More about Daniel sometime soon.

Surname Saturday - now was it Harle, Hasle or Hall?

I was going to blog this topic tomorrow for Church Record Sunday - but as I've spent the last hour reading blogs about the new Dr Who and I'm still here - despite my mum having put all the clocks forward already (British Summer Time starts tonight), so if I look up it's a quarter to eleven now  - I suppose I might as well fill in an hour with a post.

I've found that my mum, unsurprisingly I suppose, is more interested in family history research about her own ancestors.  So today, for something to talk about I set out to fill in a gap in my 4x great grandparents in her Harle line.  Recently I blogged about our various ancestors who seem to have come within a whisker of each other in Walker in the second half of the 19th century, the Harles were one of those families.  But where did my 3x great grandfather William Harle come from?

He's inconsistent in the census  - in 1861 he says he's born in Newcastle, Northumberland and in 1851 he says Kenton, Northumberland.  Now these days that would be the same thing, Kenton seems totally submerged in the suburbs of Newcastle, but I expect that in 1807 (his age IS consistent), Kenton was a little village three miles NNE of Newcastle upon Tyne, just like it says on the Vision of Britain website.  Helpfully this site also tells me that it was part of Gosforth parish, so let's start our search there. 

On Family Search putting in Harle (surname) and Gosforth (place of birth) brings back a set of perfect parents for William, Daniel and Isabella Harle, having children every two or three years around the first two decades of the nineteenth century, but unfortunately no William.  Why are they perfect?  Well, my William's children include an Isabella, his eldest daughter and a Daniel, his third son.  It was very, very common for children to be named after grandparents in the past, some cultures even had strict patterns to the naming, though I'm yet to be convinced my relatives followed any pattern.

Next step: assume someone's made a mistake in the transcriptions and he really does belong to this family ... I put Daniel and Isabella, with no surname stated, as the parents at the birth of "a person with no names" in Gosforth for the twenty years around the children I had found. 

The results of a search for children of Daniel & Isabella, no surname, in Gosforth from 1800-1820 (from Family Search)

Lo and behold, there appeared, not a star in the east, but a William Hall in 1807 in Gosforth!  And a Sarah Hasle just to add to the confusion, although she seemed to have been transcribed twice as I already had her in 1805 listed as Sarah Harle with the exact same dates.  The above two entries were followed by the various Harle entries I had already found.  Note that Isabella has a surname, Penman, this doesn't mean that she and William weren't married, it does however indicate that her surname is mentioned in the full baptismal entry.  Now wouldn't it be useful if we could see the original to check if William Hall is a transcription error ...

Handily for me many of the Bishop's Transcripts (BTs) of the Northumberland and Durham parish registers appear on Family Search as un-indexed images.  If you've not used these before, they are great - but you do have to be patient.  Go to the home page of the Family Search site and scroll down to the lower half of the page.

The bottom half of the Family Search home page

Click on the "United Kingdom and Ireland" link - look second from the bottom in the little list, you used to be able to click on the map, but that doesn't seem to be working at the moment ... and on the next page scroll down to England, Diocese of Durham Bishops' Transcripts ca., 1700-1900 and click the link again.  Yes, you would like to browse through 106,351 images, click the link ... and choose Northumberland from the next page (well choose Northumberland if you are coming with me to find my Harles).  On the next page scroll down to Gosforth, click the name, the next page only gives you one date range to select, click it (yes, I know there's lots of clicking, you'll be playing castanets next!).  Finally the image of the first page of the Gosforth BTs appears. 

This is where it gets clever - you know the spread of the records is 1762 to 1846, that's what it says at the top of the page - so take an educated stab at where 1807 might be in the 730 images.  Things to remember - in earlier years they fitted many, many more events to a page than they did once proper printed parish registers were introduced in 1813 (earlier for marriages, but not always in BTs) - despite the date range shown the earlier entries could very well be patchy, years missing, pages lost that kind of thing - so don't just make your guess on proper maths (which would suggest 1807 should lie be found just after the half-way mark (45:38) in the 730 images).  In this case I found 1807 at image 119 and onwards, and William Hall on image 124. 

1807 entry for William Hall (sic) in the Gosforth register, edited to fit on this page (from Family Search)

Hmm, he is listed as Hall ... "William Hall, [born] 23rd April [1807], [baptised] 31st May [1807], 1st son of, Daniel Hall, Labourer at East Kenton Colliery by his Wife Isabella, Dr [daughter] of William Penman, keelman of the Parish of St Johns, Newcastle upon Tyne." 

The bits in [ ] aren't there - I've just put them in to help you decipher the entry.

Not giving up ...

Going back to 1805 I found the entry for Sarah Harle, baptised 15th December.  On her entry it states "1st dau of Daniel Harle, Brakesman, N [native] of Kirkwhelpington, by his wife Isabella, Dr [daughter] of William Penman, N [native] of Whickham."

Oh dear - another variation, but at least this was definitely a Harle entry.  Next ...

In 1809 John Harle was "2nd son of Daniel Harle of Kenton, native of Great Bevington in this Cty [county], by his wife Isabella daughter of William Penman, keelman, native of Whickham, Cty [county] of Durham."

Ahh, there's a Great Bavington about two and half miles as the crow flies from Kirkwhelpington and Isabella is consistent even if her father moves from Whickham (where he was "native") to Newcastle at some point.  Remember that BTs are transcriptions of the original parish registers, a copy sent every year by the parish priest to the bishop for his central records.  And to be honest, there isn't much difference between Harle and Hall if you say it fast - if the Harles couldn't read - when he married my William signed the register with a x - they wouldn't have known the priest had written their surname down incorrectly.

I think we can safely say my hunch was correct - William Hall born 23rd April 1807 to a father working in East Kenton is William Harle, aged 44, who says his place of birth was Kenton on the 1851 census.  Another mystery solved! 

I'm rather enjoying having a new 5x great grandfather who was a keelman as well.  The OH has a few of those with his Castleford Taylors, but I've never had one before.  Another reason for that nice boat picture I fancied last month!

Whichever Way You Turn, falling over Ancestors in Walker, Northumberland

This morning the cat would not let me sleep – she woke me at 3am and wanted more food, then once she had eaten she wanted company.  Sitting on my chest she purred, but if I dared to fall asleep she stuck her face on mine or pawed me insistently on the neck – I did find this a little intimidating.  The OH always says just ignore her – fine for him, he can sleep through a thunderstorm, hurricane or as he often says “on the back of a galloping hedgehog”!!!  If I ignore the cat she goes and scratches the chest of drawers at the foot of our bed and it’s one of those blackboard/fingernails type sounds – there really isn’t any way for me to ignore it. 

So by 6am I had decided to give up and turn on the laptop.  Last week I split my family tree, which was getting far too big to work efficiently, into separate families – one for my ancestors, one for the OH’s and one for my children’s father, my first husband.  I have done this before and regretted it as something usually gets lost.  In Family Historian you create a copy of the original tree and then using the wizard supplied (that’s a pre-written programme for those who don’t follow techno jargon) delete the items you don’t want.  Unfortunately if, once you have tidied up the people, you then tell it to delete all sources, notes and images without links to people and it can remove something you want to keep because you didn’t link it in to a person in the first place.  Yes, yes, I know that makes it my fault for not using the programme properly and citing all my sources thoroughly dah, di, dah, di, dah … but many, many years ago when I first started family history I didn’t know the importance of recording sources and my own family tree is one of the older bits of my research so the facts often have no citations and sources such as maps and pictures are just floating around unattached.  I'm working on it ...

William Satchell Hutton, the master mariner, married Ann Bormond Smith in Walker, Northumberland in 1861.  Her family had lived in Haswell, Durham up to at least 1855 as that was the birth place of her youngest sibling.  But by the April of 1861 in the census they are in Walker on Church Lane, later Church Street, and that is the parish in which Ann marries.   

I have a map of Walker from 1864 and another from 1897 from the Old Maps site – I take screen shots of the bits I’m interested in and stitch them together in Photoshop – the more recent one have the Old Maps imprint on them (I guess they caught on to what people were doing!) but they are fine for reference.

 

Walker in 1864 (from Old Maps)

Family Historian allows you to add an image and then link it to a person – you can link the whole image or use a tool to outline a section specific to the person – great for family group pictures, you can draw the outlines around each face and attach them to the people in your tree and the little sections then appear on the person’s individual record and in any reports you produce.  For maps I draw around the relevant street, if the image is larger than the window on the screen when you click on the person’s name it automatically moves the image until the bit you want is on the screen – very clever – and great for maps.  You can add a fair sized piece of map and select streets or even individual houses if the map is large scale enough.  You can attach sources to an image – it sounds a bit backwards – but imagine adding the map, with the church highlighted, to the source record for the marriage certificate for William and Ann …

 

A screen shot of Family Historian showing a highlighting box around Church Lane, Walker
This was the address of Thomas Smith in 1861

A lot of the way that I set up Family Historian is dictated by the way in which Gedmill processes the records when it creates my familyhistory web pages.  I learnt early on not to just have one source for multiple records with images, that related to many different people – an example was the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) website – yes, of course cite the main site, with some relevant text, but then I create a separate source for each image so that on the web site you see the right screen shot for a casualty, not every single image I’ve ever captured from the CWGC site.   

Back in Walker - with my two map sections on the screen I decided to add some other ancestors that I knew lived in the same area.  Family Historian has a new feature called Plugins, they are like apps I suppose, other people can write them to work along with Family Historian to do small tasks.  I have downloaded a plugin which searches your whole tree for a specified word and presents you with a list – handy if you are looking for a particular place across a number of different types of events – census, birth, death, marriage etc.  I entered Walker and was surprised at the number of results.  There were a lot of duplicates, where people had remained in Walker over more than one census return they had been listed each time, and of course each child of a family was listed so in my typical large 19th century families there were sometimes eight or nine entries for one family on the list.  Even so some names appeared that I hadn’t recalled as having any connection with Walker.

On my mother’s paternal side there were the Smiths, with whom I started, the family of William S Hutton’s bride, Ann Bormond Smith, who were there from around 1861 with a brother of Ann’s remaining there until sometime in the middle of 1891.  A cousin from that side of the family turned up as well, Joseph Bormond, a nephew of Ann’s mother.  My family seems particularly fond of using family surnames as middle names – which comes in very useful when they are unusual.  Sorting out Smiths is a thankless task, but throw in a Bormond and there are no problems working out which Ann Smith you are after!

On my mother’s maternal grandparents’ side, my 3x great grandfather John Gibson lived there from before 1841, his son, another John Gibson,  moved to Byker, a few miles to the west, but his son Thomas Harle Gibson (my great grandfather) was in Walker in 1881 living with his widowed mother whose Harle family had been in Walker since around 1851.  Harle branches persisted in Walker for as long as I’ve been able to trace them.  The wonderfully named Elizabeth Decima Harle (so you know how many children were in that family!), who was my half second cousin twice removed, was born in Walker in 1901. Her family appear in the 1911 census for Walker where I see the family has been added to, now 11 children, all surviving to the census at least.

On my father’s maternal side my 3x great grandfather James Russell died in Walker in 1888, he had been living his son George who was still there in the 1911 census.  George’s grandchildren, Russells and Oswalds, more of my second cousins twice removed, are being born in the Walker area up to 1922 and possibly beyond.  One of George’s nephews, a George Deacon, passes through between 1898 and 1908 judging by his children’s birthplaces.

My father’s paternal side seem to steer clear of Walker – although there are some Dixons and Robsons who come very close (Newcastle upon Tyne) in the early 19th century!

I commented some time ago that researching my OH’s family tree here in Barnsley in great depth has led to me finding out that his lines cross and interlink and that all kinds of people are related to each other.  It may be that if only I had all the resources and time to do the same for Walker I might discover that my branches do the same, as it does seem that wherever you turned in Walker in the latter half of the 19^th century and the early 20^th century you were likely to bump into my relatives!

 

Uncle Joe - who fell on his head in Jarrow

Well, that's the story my grandma always used to tell us.  We always got the impression that Uncle Joe had been a favourite of my grandma and that he had been taken in the prime of his life.  Certainly his death had made a big impression on her.

When I began my family history research nearly 20 years ago the first family (on my side) that I researched were the Moderates (I had already done a lot of digging into my ex-husband's Sheffield ancestors, but that was made easy due to the proximity of the records).  My parents came from Durham and their ancestors from Durham, Northumberland and Cumbria (mostly! - see my Surnames page for more details) so all the research had to be done long distance.

This is what I wrote about Uncle Joe in March 1997:

Since I last wrote [about the Moderate Family - I was writing a newsletter to send to other people with the Moderate surname] I have been busy finding out all about Uncle Joe. 

Uncle Joe Moderate (from Ileen Moderate's album)

This is he, the second son of Joseph Moderate and Ann Taylor, born in 1868 in Walker, Northumberland.  This photograph is a copy made by Neville Moderate of one of the photo's in Ileen Moderate's album. 

He was a joiner, in fact Joseph Moderate snr seems to have made sure that all his sons had a good trade.  John was a grocer, William a plumber and Jeremiah a photographer before he set out for the West Indies via Belfast.  Ernest worked for the railways.

Joe lived at 74 Croft Terrace, Jarrow just across the road from his parents.  This is the address he gave when he married on 31st July 1902 to the 'girl next door' Elizabeth Johnson of 73 Croft Terrace.  He was 34 years old and she was 22.  Maybe he had waited until he was able to afford a house before he married.  My Grandmother recalls Uncle Joe and Aunt Lily, she says they took in a niece, Peggy, as they had no children of their own.  This was probably a daughter of William, but I can't get it to fit with any of the names I know. (and all these years later I still can't!).  When Norman Moderate wrote to me last year he mentioned meeting a Peggy Moderate in Longhorsley village near Morpeth in the war.  She was married to a Mr F Knox, and running the local store.  Maybe this was the same Peggy, she did mention Croft Terrace to him.  If so I can only suggest she married twice as no Moderate I have found in the St Catherine's House indices married a Knox.

My grandfather had always said that Uncle Joe died by falling through a hatchway on the 'Duchess of York' in Jarrow shipyards. So when I found the entry for his death in the indices we sent for the certificate.

1928 Death certificate for Uncle Joe Moderate

Sure enough it gives the cause of death as 'fracture of base of skull accidentally caused by falling through a hatchway ...' The next problem was that the ship number given on the certificate, No. 967. 

Old copies of Lloyd's Lists are not available in my local library, Sheffield is rather a long way from the sea!  I suppose there isn't much demand.  But my (then) partner's sister lives in Bristol and the library there was able to supply copies of the book going back to the 1850s.  However there was no sign of a ship number 967, or any 'Duchess of York' in the right place.

The puzzle had to wait until we visited Bristol ourselves at Christmas.  My partner had the bright idea of looking up Palmer's Yard itself in Lloyd's Lists, and there it was ... Ship no. 967 under construction in 1928, the 'York' a cruiser.  The next step was to look up the entry in Jane's Fighting Ships. 

HMS York under construction in 1928 (from Jane's Fighting Ships)

The picture shows the 'York' under construction in 1928.  A later entry describes the ship as 'the first attempt on the part of one of the Treaty Powers to break away from the 10,000 ton type of cruiser'.  Below is a diagram of the vessel also taken from Jane's.

A diagram of the York taken from Jane's Fighting Ships

The HMS 'York' was involved in the defense of Crete in 1940.  On 12th October HMS 'Ajax' sighted an enemy force, she crippled one destroyer but the rest of the force escaped.  HMS 'York' came up in support.  The next morning the crippled Italian destroyer was spotted in tow to another enemy destroyer.  The damaged ship was the 1,620 ton 'Artigliere'.  The second ship fled in the direction of Sicily at highspeed.  HMS 'York' joined the 'Ajax' and the gave the Italian crew half an hour to abandon ship.  After this the 'Artigliere' was sunk by gunfire.  'York' dropped rafts for the survivors and broadcast their position on the radio.  This was done despite the fact that such a signal compromised the position of the British forces.

During the German assault on Crete in May 1941 the Italians claimed to have destroyed many British ships.  Amongst these was the 'York', hit by an explosive motor boat, she beached in Suda Bay.  Meanwhile a 'brilliant rescue' had been achieved by our Navies and survivors from Crete transported to Egypt. Dive bomber attacks prevented the repair of the 'York', and her wreckage was not salvaged until after the war.

So Uncle Joe helped to build a warship in Palmer's Yard, and she did not disgrace herself in service either.

When he died, at age 60 years, Joe left no will.  His effects amounted to £330, and his wife Elizabeth survived him.  They were still living at 74 Croft Terrace and my grandmother can remember how upset her mother, Joe's sister, was when she heard the news across the river in Wallsend.
.................................................

Even now, all these years later, I still can't find Peggy, the power of FreeBMD and Ancestry are not enough to solve that puzzle.  Maybe she was a relative on Elizabeth' side, a Johnson, but she used Moderate when she met my relative Norman Moderate just to strike a friendly note. 

The information about the York's war service was taken from an old illustrated book (almost a collection of picture magazines) about the Second World War that belonged to my dad, I'm afraid that 15 years ago I wasn't as concientious about noting down references so I don't know, off hand, what it was called, though it is still on the shelf at Everton.

My grandmother would have been 21 years old when he died and although he was still working, not a lot of pension and no Welfare State in 1928, Joe was hardly a young man in his prime when he died.  It just shows how family stories and memories are not completely reliable, I suppose we change things over time to appear more tragic or more exciting. 

Scotland's People, Gardening and Children in Need

This morning my daughter paid back another installment of the money I lent her for the deposit on her University accommodation the year before last.  I had been waiting for this cash with bated breath as without any income of my own (since my Employment Support Allowance was stopped in April) I can't just buy credits for Family History sites whenever I want them. 

(Incidently I'm typing this whilst watching Children in Need, so I apologise for any mistakes and possible stilted grammar. And aren't One Direction young?  Very young!  and Terry Wogan getting rather old.  Though on Pointless earlier they did say that Children in Need has been going since 1980.  Good grief, I was only 19 when it started! )

You may have seen that last week I was researching the Whealleans family.  My great, great, great aunt Amelia Mordey Hutton (b. 1842) married Thomas Davidson Whealleans
(which I think is a really great name for researching) and in the first census after their marriage, 1871, they are living at Otterburn Hall in Northumberland.  Their two sons are both born at Otterburn, Edward in 1871 named after Thomas's father and Thomas Frederick in 1874 named after Thomas himself and Amelia's father (so she maybe she had forgiven him for running away when she was a child?). 

On Thursday I discovered that someone who was descended from Thomas and Amelia Whelleans had put their family tree online on Ancestry.  I hadn't filled in many of the blanks in my tree at this point - one of the sons appears to vanish and the other has moved to the Lake District by 1911.

(Dr Who minisode - hmm, that was interesting, maybe, and has the actress who plays Madame Vastra changed?)

The online tree showed that a daughter of one of Thomas and Amelia's sons had married a William Dixon in 1927.  In fact the person who posted this tree only had Thomas and Amelia's younger son listed, oddly the one I couldn't find earlier.  The problem with the Whealleans name is that it is often transcribed incorrectly, without the h, so that's Wealleans, sometimes with one or more of the e's missing, for example Weallans and even with completely the wrong vowels, that would be Whillians.  Honestly, as found on Family Search.

(John Craven just turned up on Children in Need - he read out a letter from me on the Multicoloured Swop Shop when I was 17, he was less grey then!)

On Ancestry online trees you can look at the person's family tree diagramatically, so I had a scan.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that William Dixon's mother was a Bormond.

A section of the Dixon Family Tree from Ancestry.co.uk

I don't think I've told you this yet, but one of the very uncommon family names in my tree is Bormond, all the Bormonds in Great Britain appear to descend from a family in Alnwick, Northumberland in the 18th century and there aren't that many of them.  So seeing this name on someone's family tree is very exciting.  And to see it on a tree that is already related to me via another line is very intriguing. 

(Short pause - Russell Grant and Ann Widdecombe dancing ...)

This means that William Dixon and Mary Whealleans were already related before they got married!  Yaaayy!  With the help of the diagram tools in Family Historian (my family tree programme) I soon worked out the relationship.  William Dixon's great grandmother's sister was the mother of the wife of Amelia Mordey Hutton's brother.  I really don't expect you to get that in one, but there's a helpful diagram coming up in a minute ...

(Dr Who Christmas special trailer - oooohhh!)

Bear (ha, Pudsey Bear!) with me - note that William Dixon's great grandmother (Agnes Bormond) is the sister of Mary Wheallean's grandmother (Amelia Mordey Hutton)'s brother (William Satchell Hutton)'s wife (Ann Bormond Smith)'s mother (Jane Bormond)

So, having worked that out - which makes me happy even if you are confused - we move on ...

The owner of the Dixon tree had noted that the children of Thomas Frederick Whealleans and Esther Common were born in Scotland but he/she did not know where the couple married.  I nipped along to the Scotland's People site and searched the Statutory Marriages for the name Whealleans.  I got two hits.  Now to view the hits you need to use credits and I just happened to have three credits left from a foray onto Scotland's People with a friend in August (whilst at the Great British Beer Festival, but that's not relevant). 

Scotland's People marriagesearch results

(Girl's Aloud - looking like very decorative stewards in orange frocks - the song's a bit shouty though.  Have you noticed how the Strictly Come Dancing competitors seem to be turning up in Children in Need?  The chap from Westlife was in Greggs making cupcakes earlier.)

As you can see from the image above it costs 5 credits to view a marriage certificate.  This is much cheaper than buying a paper copy of an English or Welsh certificate.  30 credits cost £7 so 5 credits is about £1.17 and  the certificate is available instantly whereas an English/Welsh certificate costs £9.25 and you have to wait for it to come in the post. 

(They've made £10 million already!)

The only problem was that I had no money last week.  I was waiting for my daughter to pay me and she was waiting for her Uni bursary to turn up.  Eventually today it came - hooray!  I logged on and using the saved searches in my account was able to download the marriage certificate for Thomas Frederick Whealleans and Esther. 

(Alan Sugar in East Enders ... I haven't seen East Enders in years, but I still seem to know who everyone is!)

1900 marriage certificate for Thomas Whealleans and Esther Common from Scotland's People

Scottish certificates contain more information than English/Welsh ones too!  Instead of just the father's name you get the mother and her maiden name.  As you can see here this confirms that Thomas F Whealleans' mum was indeed Amelia Mordey Hutton, my great,  great, great aunt.  I also downloaded the 1901 census for the couple, showing that they were living at Tarras Lodge, deep in the hills of Dumfrieshire.

I fed this information into my tree, just in time as the OH came home early and wanted to know what to do with his unexpected day off.  Here's the finished section of my tree.  The little yellow tags show that I've found the person in the various census returns. 


My OH had been sent home from work as they were unable to find him light duties as recommended by the firm's occupational health doctor.  We ended up doing some gardening, with the OH doing a lot of the things that the doctor said he could do but his boss was reluctant to let him ...

(Chris Moyles and Morecambe and Wise! I agree with Tess - surreal!)

We emptied the compost bin, the OH reinforced the raised bed, we moved pots, planted daffodil bulbs, the OH dug holes in our concrete front garden and we planted lavender.  His firm may not have found anything for him to do this afternoon, but I made up his hours.

(Lisa Riley from Strictly up the BT tower with some children, what next?)

I think that's it for tonight - back to Children in Need!