Jenny's Genealogy Blog

I had always assumed, given grandparents with the surnames Williams and Phillips, that I had Welsh ancestry. In two years of research, though, I have yet to find an ancestor who was born in or even lived in Wales. I have, however, found a Scot and an Cornishwoman amongst my ancestors, but their backgrounds are proving very difficult to track down.

Before starting my family history research all I knew about my great-grandmother’s family was that she was born Jane Bowhill. Her birth certificate was easy to track down, and showed that her mother was Emily Dear. Emily’s birth certificate showed that she was born in 1848 to David Dear, an engine fitter, and Margaret Perrow. Armed with this information I turned to the 1851 census, but didn’t get any results for a search for Emily Dear with father David. The problem turned out to be that David has been indexed as Edward Dear (admittedly the script is rather faint). He and Margaret were living in Deptford with their three children; he was born in Scotland, and she was born in Falmouth. Finally I had found some Celtic ancestors! As David’s occupation was given as ‘Working Engineer’ I didn’t find it all that surprising that the couple had ended up in Greenwich, where the two younger children (Emily and Helen, aged 3 years and 15 months respectively) were born. But their eldest daughter, Margaret, was aged 7 and was born in Northumberland of all places. It’s not exactly unexpected to find a Scot in Northumberland, but a Cornishwoman?

So I tried to find out more about the couple and started trying to find a marriage certificate and entry/entries in the 1841 census. Several months passed and I had no luck. Then last year a Google search for ‘David Dear Engineer Northumberland’ turned up a discussion from July 2010 on Genes Reunited about the Rowell family which mentioned an 1841 census entry David and Alice Dean, who were, in fact, David Dear and Alice Halliday who married in the September quarter of 1840. I’d seen this entry in FreeBMD when I was searching for a marriage between David and Margaret, but discounted this David Dear since he was marrying someone else. But as ‘Ozbird’ pointed out in the course of the discussion, Alice Dear died in Newcastle in the June quarter of 1845. So once again David had been mis-indexed. I ordered Alice’s death certificate and their marriage certificate (I haven’t put them on my website, though, since I don’t yet have sufficient evidence that it was ‘my’ David Dear) and the marriage certificate said that the groom’s father was David Dear a gamekeeper.

A search of the 1841 Scottish census transcriptions on Ancestry.co.uk threw up nine David Dears, none of them a gamekeeper. But in 1851 the oldest of the eleven David Dears in the results was a gamekeeper (transcribed as ‘G Amekeeper’…), and was a servant in the household of one Horatio Ross at Gledfield in Kincardine. According to Ross MacLeod there is a gravestone in Kincardine Cemetery for a David Dear who died at Gledfield in 1855 aged 82 years, having served the family of Horatio Ross ‘upwards 60 years’. And, thrillingly, the Victoria and Albert museum in London has in its collection an item described as ‘Daguerreotype of Horatio and Colin Ross and Old David Dear fishing at the Falls of Rossie, taken in Scotland by Horatio Ross, 1848-1850′ (left).

To try to find out more about this David Dear I turned to the Scotland’s People site, where you can view images of census returns, death certificates and so forth (for a fee). I was excited to find out that from the start of civil registration in 1855 Scottish death certificates included detail on family background, including place of birth and the details of parents, spouse, and children. (There is more information on this on the Scotland’s People website, here.) Unfortunately, old David Dear’s death certificate provides very little information in this regard: the family sections are blank, even though he is listed as a widower in the 1851 census. Perhaps he was widowed so many years before that nobody could remember his family, but in any case this wasn’t very helpful in finding out whether he had a son called David who became an engineer and went to Northumberland. When I visited Who Do You Think You Are Live in February 2011 I asked a representative from the Scottish Archives about how to go about locating any papers from Horatio Ross’s estates, which I hope might contain information on old David Dear’s work for the family (even just a receipt for the gravestone), but she was unable to find anything in the on-line catalogue. At the nearby Science Museum stand I discovered that they have an archive which may be a source of information for David junior’s work as an engineer, but I’ve yet to follow up that line of enquiry.

So much for David, but what about Margaret senior? If Alice Halliday’s husband was ‘my’ David Dear then Margaret would presumably have made her way up to Northumberland of her own accord rather than as David’s wife. So I wondered if there was a mining connection – perhaps Margaret’s family had been involved in mining in Cornwall, and had moved to Northumberland to work in the mining industry there. That might even explain how Margaret met an engineer (in another branch of my family tree the daughter of a plasterer married the son of a gypsum miner). But I couldn’t find any Perrows in the Newcastle area in the 1841 census. I ordered the CD of Falmouth baptisms from Parish Chest and between 1776 and 1837 it has records for only six baptisms of children with the surname Perrow, all of them the children of John and Margaret. One of them, baptised 1 Jan 1818, was indeed named Margaret. But John Perrow was a mariner, so bang went my theory about the mining connection, and the other children stayed in Falmouth. Why would Margaret have gone to Newcastle?

But was Margaret senior ever in Northumberland at all? At present the only information I have that links her with the area is the census record indicating that Margaret junior was born there. But was she really? In fact, other census records give conflicting evidence for Margaret junior’s birth place:
1851: Northumberland
1861: [No census record found]
1871: Newcastle on Tyne Northumberland
1881: Middlesex London
1891: Westmorland Kendal (actually, “)
I haven’t found any birth or baptism records for a Margaret Dear or Perrow in the Newcastle area in the relevant ten-year window – in fact, I haven’t found any anywhere. And I still haven’t found any marriage record for David and Margaret

So there are far too many ‘ifs’ in this line of my research for me to put the information I have so far on my main site. Any information would be gratefully received!

• Where did David junior and Margaret senior meet?
• Where was Margaret junior born/baptised?
• Did Margaret senior ever spend time in Newcastle?
• Did David and Margaret actually marry?
• Was David the same man as the husband of Alice Halliday?
• If so, how did the son of a gamekeeper become an engineer?

In April and May this year my research was focused on adding to my collection of information on my Olliver ancestors and their relatives.

I was particularly interested in a mystery which came to light right at the beginning of my research, but unfortunately I still haven’t got to the bottom of it. On the 1893 certificate of marriage between Bushby Olliver and Sophia Collins Bushby’s condition is given as bachelor. It’s a copy that has come down through the family, so one assumes that that is what Bushby told the Registrar. But between 1871 and 1881 Bushby had at least 6 children (of whom only 3 appear to have survived) with Harriet Hacker, who is described as his wife in the censuses. I haven’t been able to find any marriage certificate for Bushby and Harriet; although this doesn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t marry, it may be a likely explanation. It doesn’t help that I don’t know whether they met in Sussex or in London: in 1861 Harriet was still living in Sussex, but I haven’t been able to find a census entry for Bushby for that year. By the time of the 1871 census they were living together in London and their son Robert Bushby Olliver was born in the August of that year.

Bushby is still described as married in the 1891 census, when he is living with two of their three surviving boys, but I have not so far been able to locate Harriet in this census nor find any likely-looking death certificate for her. Perhaps she was in service and staying away from home on census night, or perhaps the family had split up? Curiously, Bushby is described as deceased on the 1908 marriage certificate of his youngest son by Harriet (who is not at home with Bushby in 1891). This threw me off the scent for a while when trying to find a death certificate for him as, in fact, he didn’t die until 1923. Had father and son just lost touch, or does this hint at some kind of family break-up? It seems strange that they weren’t in contact given that the 1908 wedding took place at St Philip Lambeth, less than a mile away from the Brixton Road addresses where Bushby was living between at least 1893 and 1901 (although he had moved away to Greenwich by 1911).

Another reason it took me so long to find a death certificate for Bushby is the number of mis-spellings of his (admittedly rather unusual) name in the records: I’ve found him indexed as Rushby, Bushley, and Buesley. Bushby’s name seems to have come from his grandmother, Ann Bushby, who married Edward Olliver in 1781. Ann lived to the ripe old age of ninety, dying in 1842.

In 1841 Ann had been living with her two youngest daughters, Jane and Emy, who were living in the intriguingly-named Miller’s Tomb Cottage by 1851. I thought at first that I had mis-read the address in the census entry, but a Google search turned up a number of images and articles, my favourite being Valerie Martin’s A Miller’s Tale. There is actually a Miller’s Tomb on Highdown Hill near Worthing, built by a John Olliver; John was, I believe, Jane and Emy’s great-uncle. Their father Edward was a miller too, as was their brother, Robert Bushby Olliver, Bushby’s father. Robert was living in Havant, Hampshire when his son Edwin was baptised in 1828 but had moved back to Worthing by the time his son Edward was baptised in 1833, shortly after Edward senior’s death.

In their old age, Robert and his wife Mary moved into Humphrys’ Almshouses in Worthing, where they lived until their respective deaths in 1859 and 1871. The Almshouses were founded in 1858 for Anglicans of Broadwater. In 1861 Mary was living at number 3; this house has been demolished but numbers 7 and 8 (left, built a few years later in 1867) were still standing in 2009. Mary’s death was reported by an Ann Olliver, who may have been Mary’s daughter-in-law, Ann Ayling, or her granddaughter, Ann Olliver.

So some questions remain. Where was Bushby in 1861? And what happened to Harriet?

This year I attended the Who Do You Think You Are Live exhibition for the first time. It was a bit of a trek (and I went along for all three days), but very much worth it: I met a number of people (below) who were able to point me towards some really exciting new avenues of investigation, and I had a really great time. I’m aiming to follow up these leads over the next year, so keep an eye on Jenny’s Genealogy for the results!

The National Archives of Ireland

We spoke to a very helpful gentleman who explained that ‘Kil-’ in place names means ‘church’ and thought that the names of the siblings Honorah and Jeremiah Coughlin suggest that the family may have come from Munster. He was even able to give me the reference number of the microfilm of the records from the most likely parish.

Jayne Shrimpton

Jayne Shrimpton presented a very interesting workshop on family portraits. I showed her copies of some of the family photos at her photo-dating stand the next day, and we think that Alice Chapman’s photo may well be a 21st birthday portrait – she has a ribbon on her dress, and apparently the style of the sleeves dates the photo to the early 1890s (Alice was born in November 1870). Jayne thinks that the picture of the unknown Newland man is an enlargement of a small photo which has been touched up with pencil, and probably dates from the 1850s or 1860s.

Science Museum Library and Archives

May be a source on information on my engineer ancestors like David Dear and Robert Fiveash.

Families in British India Society

The lady we spoke to mentioned secret families, which made us wonder exactly what Thomas Fitzgerald got up to during his army service before he married at the age of 42…

This blog accompanies my family tree site, Jenny’s Genealogy.