Researching Barnsley WW1 POWs using the Absent Voters Registers

Just before I started writing this blog last year I discovered an item in the Barnsley Chronicle from 1918 listing known Prisoners of War (POWs) from Barnsley and district. I recently wrote the story of one of these, Riley Smith, whose name and story interested me particularly.  Now that Barnsley Archives has reopened and has a digitised copy of the Barnsley Chronicle it will be even easier to find information on these Barnsley men.

Barnsley Chronicle 24 August 1918 (from Barnsley Archives)

Last week, on my first proper researching trip to the Barnsley Archives since the Experience Barnsley Museum opened, I consulted the 1918 Absent Voters Register.  This is a listing just like a standard electoral roll but it contains the men who were missing from their homes when the 1918 electoral roll was drawn up.  It is organised by wards and streets within wards with all printed entries appearing on the left hand side of a double page spread.  For each street the men are listed by house number, so sometimes you get more than one name against a house number suggesting a family connection.

The following are a few entries I found for the OH's family when I first consulted this source several years ago.

[Number in List] Name [House Number] Military Details/Handwritten entry on Facing Page
East Ward Polling District 2b
Pontefract Rd
[298] Duncan Cyril [25] 10885 Pte RAMC / 95 Field Amb BEF
[299] Duncan Horace [25] 1434 Cpl 13th Y&L / BEF
South East Ward Polling District 8h
Sheffield Rd
[2410] Duncan James Stevens [242] 15923 Gnr HMS Attentive II / GPO London
[2411] Staples Arthur Rice Vivian [242] 625401 Gnr 309th (HAC) S Batt / BEF
[2412] Duncan Frederick [242] 099572 Pte 801st MT ASC / PA

As you can see for each man we get his Regimental Number and Regiment or other military location.  Cyril and Horace Duncan are the brothers of Reginald Duncan, whose WW1 story I wrote some time ago.  They are both listed at 25 Pontefract Road which was in the East Ward of Barnsley.  Cyril was in the Royal Army Medical Corp and Horace served in the 13th York and Lancaster, the 1st Barnsley Pals.  The final piece of information for each man is a handwritten entry on the facing or right hand page of the book.  This appears to be an indication of the forces postal address or general location of the man.  So BEF is British Expeditionary Force; James Stevens Duncan is in the Navy, his entry is care of GPO London.  I haven't worked out what PA means yet, as noted after Frederick Duncan at 242 Sheffield Road, but other terms I have seen include Home Defence and Depot.  Interestingly Arthur Rice Vivian Staples (wonderful name!) married a Duncan, the sister of Frederick and James - I suppose his home address may have been that of his wife, Ethel, who was staying with her parents for the duration of the war, rather than his own parents in London.  This is a perfect example of using this register to demonstrate family links.

I also noticed that Prisoners of War are indicated in this handwritten column.  I have set myself the task of noting each one who appears in this source and comparing them against the list from the Chronicle.  As the Electoral Roll was in use after October 1918 it seems likely that there might be men mentioned in it as POWs that are not on the list from August which appeared in the Chronicle.

Other entries in the handwritten column note men who were missing or who had been killed since the list was compiled.  I have even noticed a mention of a deserter - thankfully not a man who was connected to the OH's family as far as I know.

My only regret is that the boundary of Barnsley at the time did not include Cudworth and some of the other outlying areas, so this source, the Absent Voters Electoral Register, will only help me identify men whose home addresses were in the immediate Barnsley area at the time.

Tombstone Tuesday - Retired Barnsley Publican John Savage marries his Deceased Wife's Sister

I opened the page to write this blog about three hours ago and have been spinning around in circles on Ancestry ever since.  It seemed simple to begin with - write the story of a Barnsley publican whose wife's gravestone I found and photographed last week in Barnsley Cemetery.

Mary Ann Savage's elaborate memorial

There aren't many gravestones in the OH's family, let alone ones so elaborate, although to be honest it is stretching a point to say these Savages are the OH's relatives.  His great-aunt married a Savage and a distant cousin married the grandson of another in a couple of those convoluted family relationships I'm finding after more than ten years of researching the OH's family in Barnsley. 

The Savage family in Barnsley seems to mostly descend from George Savage, born 1767, possibly in Nottinghamshire or Staffordshire, who moved to Barnsley, Yorkshire between 1815 and 1819, having already had a large family in Newark, Nottinghamshire.  The story of one branch of his family is told in 'Moving Lives' a book published by the Barnsley Family History Society some years ago which is still available from GenFair.

I only took a picture of this memorial on our way out of the cemetery last week because it caught my eye as we were leaving.  At that point I wasn't even sure that Mary Ann and John Savage were related to the rest of the family who are so tentatively linked to ours.  Checking the family tree the following day as I transcribed the stone for the Billion Graves website I soon tracked them down ...

The John Savage on the memorial is the grandson of the original George Savage by his youngest son, Joseph, the only one of George's children born in Barnsley.  His father was a weaver when John married Mary Ann Brown in 1869 at St John's church which lay in the middle of one of the poorest districts of Barnsley.  I wrote a blog post last year about Wilson's Piece as the area was called then.  So how did a man from a poor part of town, the son of a youngest son, so no family money to depend on in all likelihood, how did that man manage to succeed to the extent that he could afford such an elaborate memorial to his wife?


Sheffield Independent Saturday 27 March 1869 (from Find My Past - Newspapers)

The answer seems to lie with that very wife - Mary Ann Brown was born in 1850, the daughter of a coal miner in Worsborough - but when she married John Savage in 1869 her father's occupation is given as Victualler and the marriage is reported in the Sheffield Independent (see above) and by the time her sister marries Edward Patterson in 1879 James Brown has ascended to the heady accolade of Gentleman!  Now this might be because Edward Patterson was a Solicitor's Clerk himself - a good middle class job in those days and maybe James didn't want to embarrass his daughter by putting Publican on her marriage certificate.  However when James dies in 1881 he leaves £399 in his will, the equivalent of over £19,000 in today's money.  He has made a success of running various pubs around Barnsley including the 'Royal Arms Inn' at Smithies and the Clarence Hotel on Sheffield Road as noted in Mary Ann's marriage announcement. 


The 1889 map of the junction of New Street and Sheffield Road
Showing the Black Moors Head, the Clarence Hotel and the Melbourne Hotel

John Savage must take a leaf out his father in law's book because in the 1881 census return he is running the 'Dog and Gun' on New Street.  The article in Moving Lives notes that he also ran the 'Tinner and Brazier', the 'Old Royal Oak' and the pub we find him in in the 1901 census return, the 'Black Moors Head' on Sheffield Road.  Barnsley Streets vol 1 places John Savage in the Black Moors Head between 1883 and 1918, the year he died, however he is no longer living over the shop - his address in 1911 and at his death is Myrtle Villa, 7 Huddersfield Road. 


Close up of the Inscription on
Mary Ann and John's Gravestone

And the explanation for the title of this blog post ... Well, Mary Ann Savage dies in 1908 after 39 years of marriage - she has borne at least nine children  - those are the ones I've found in various census returns and the author of the family story in Moving Lives mentions John and Mary having TWELVE children!  So she had a long and busy life.

Her sister Elizabeth Patterson (remember, she married the solicitor's clerk in 1879) had been a widow for thirteen years at this point, her husband had died in 1896 and her only son was living away from home, managing a hotel (another member of the family in the pub trade) in Hoyland. 

We can only imagine that John and Elizabeth found comfort in each other after her sister's death.  A law had been passed in 1907 allowing a man to marry his deceased wife's sister - it had previously been prohibited for many years by the church and this prohibition had been carried forward into civil law.  There was no reason for them not to marry if they wanted to, so in 1909 they did - about a year after Mary Ann's death.  I can't find the marriage in the parish records on Ancestry, so I assume it was a quiet affair in the Register Office.

Elizabeth died in 1913 and was buried with her first husband.  John passed away in 1918, at the grand age of 72 years leaving £13,000 in his will which is about half a million pounds in today's money - his house on Huddersfield Road is probably worth that by now!   Given the number of children and grandchildren he had by then it was probably spread pretty thinly even so.