Having spent the first part of this year concentrating on my maternal grandfather Frederick England’s family, including the Englands, Lings, Halls and Buxtons, in the next few posts I’ll be be turning my attention to his wife, my maternal grandmother Julia Mary Mills, and her ancestors. Like her husband, my grandmother was born in Derbyshire, but her family came mostly from Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, and whereas Fred’s ancestors were largely miners, travelling hawkers or small business owners, hers were mainly argricultural labourers, framework knitters and rural craftsmen. I will be returning to Grandpa Fred at some point to write about, among other things, his experiences during the Second World War, but as I’ve now looked at all the major branches of his family tree it felt like the right time to move on.
Thank you for all the kind comments and messages I’ve received so far. More stories to follow.
One of the frustrating things about family history is that no matter how much you find out about your ancestors, you never really feel acquainted with them unless you know what they looked and sounded like. The further back in time we go, the more difficult it becomes to find photographs, films or voice recordings of family members, so researching them can sometimes feel a little like conversing with a taciturn pen friend who one never meets up with in person. Sounds and images can make us care about our subjects, and even if we are unable to find illustrative media which relates directly to our ancestors we can still often find materials which capture something of the world in which they lived. Below I have highlighted a few of my favourite image, sound and film archives which are available on the web, and how they have helped me in my research.
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Images
Wherever possible, I try to illustrate my blog posts which contemporary pictures showing places my ancestors would have known, events they lived through or occupations they held. As someone with roots in the East Midlands and West Yorkshire I am lucky to be served by two excellent online photographic archives, Picture The Past and Leodis, covering these two areas. On many occasions they have provided me with useful images like the ones below of my great-great-grandfather Thomas England and a pram shop owned by my great-great-grandmother Emma Sillers (née Brook):
The deacons of Riddings Baptist Church, c. 1910, featuring my great-great-grandfather Thomas England on the far left. (via Picture The Past).Sillers Prams, 1937, Vicar Lane, Leeds (via Leodis).
Similar local collections are available for many other regions, but national and specialist subject archives may also be of use. In previous posts I have used images from both the Imperial War Museums and the National Fairground Archive when discussing my First World War and travelling showman ancestors. Other more general collections I have found helpful include:
Archive Images – Describes itself as “a web based picture library for authors, publishers, local history buffs, genealogists, picture framers and print sellers”. Its collections are free to search but high-resolution non-watermarked images are only available upon payment.
The Card Index – An online archive of historic UK postcards which can be searched or browsed by location, subject or publisher.
Getty Images – One of the web’s largest online image collections containing a huge number of excellent high-resolution archive photographs.
Old Photos UK – An index of old photographs organised by location which allows users to submit their own images.
All of the above have been helped me get a better idea of what my ancestors’ lives would have looked like, and on occasion they have even turned up surprises like the photograph below from The Card Index, which very clearly features the sign for my great-great-grandmother Emma Sillers’s mail carts shop in Leeds.
Vicar Lane, Leeds, c. 1910, showing my great-great-grandmother Emma Sillers’s mail carts shop on the left (via The Card Index).
Taken from virtually the same angle as the photo from the Leodis website above, it shows that between around 1910 and 1937 her business had begun specialising in prams in place of of mail carts.
Lastly, although not designed with genealogists in mind, it should be remembered that commercial websites dealing in old prints and postcards like ebay can be a good source of photographs unavailable elsewhere. In some cases, postcard sellers even include the sender’s name in the item’s description and a scan of the message on the back, making it possible to search by names as well as locations.
Sound
Often overlooked as a resource for local and family historians, sound archives can provide us with a way of finding out what our ancestors voices may have sounded like, the songs they would have known and the everyday noises which populated their auditory environment. By far the most important of these for UK researchers is the British Library’s Sounds archive, which holds thousands of recordings that can be listened to for free via their website. Some categories which may be of interest to family historians include:
Accents and dialects – Includes recordings of British PoWs from the First World War, a survey of English dialects taken between 1951 and 1974, and a selection of early spoken spoken word recordings taken from commercial 78 records.
Environment and nature – Mainly of interest for its period sound effects, featuring Victorian street scenes, leisure activities like football matches and funfairs, battles of the First and Second World Wars and a variety of historic workplaces.
Oral history – A diverse collection of voices of people from a variety of backgrounds and occupations, including Holocaust survivors, craftspeople and agricultural workers.
World and traditional music – Includes examples of regional folk music from the British Isles alongside many other countries.
While researching my England ancestors, most of whom were involved in Derbyshire’s mining industry from the early Nineteenth to the mid-Twentieth Centuries, I was able to use the collections above to gain an understanding of their environment which I never could have done with words and pictures alone. For example, this recording of retired collier Horace Brian, who was born in north Derbyshire two years before my great-grandfather Tom England in 1876, provides me with an idea of what Tom’s accent may have sounded like, as well as some of the experiences he would have had at work. The British Library’s sound effects collection was also of help here due to it’s large number of mining-related recordings. One entitled At the coal face was of particular interest to me because, as a coal hewer, it would have been the daily soundtrack to Tom’s working life for close to half a century.
Film
Old film footage is perhaps the most evocative media through which we can learn about past societies. Although I have not yet been lucky enough to find any of my ancestors on film, my research has certainly benefited from the growing number of online film archives which are now available. Two of the most important are the news archive British Pathe, and the collections of British Film Institute, both of which contain early footage of many UK towns and cities. Although their URL unfortunately no longer appears to be active, there was also a BFI-led initiative called Your Film Archives which aimed to provide a single-search interface allowing users to across seven regional film collections. These were:
It was while searching the Yorkshire Film Archive’s collections when a run of lucky strikes led me to discover of a piece of early film footage relating directly to my family. I had been searching for ‘Leeds’ just in case there were any contemporary films of Vicar Lane where my great-great-grandmother’s shop Sillers Prams was located (see photograph above). Among my results was a street scene from 1898 which, although not featuring Vicar Lane itself, was still interesting for its depiction of late-Victorian city life.
The film ends with ‘phantom ride’ through the busy streets shot from the top of an electric tram. On about the third watch, two minutes and ten seconds in I spotted the words ‘Mail carts’ on the side of a building, which immediately raised alarm bells as I knew my great-great-grandmother had run a mail carts shop in Leeds city centre prior to establishing her pram business. The word above it looked like it could possibly be ‘Sillers’ but I needed to work out the location of the film to be certain.
Screenshot from ‘Leeds Street Scenes’ (1898) showing a mail carts shop sign near the top left (via Yorkshire Film Archive).
I found the locations of my great-great-grandmother’s shops at 49 and 51 Vicar Lane via Google Maps, then attempted to follow the tram’s route on the map with my finger in time with the footage to see if they lined up correctly. Unfortunately they didn’t. As a last resort I checked the film’s comments for clues as to the location shown in the its closing seconds, when I noticed someone had mentioned it ‘obviously’ showed the route along Boar Lane from the Queen’s Hotel to the junction with Briggate. This was slightly disappointing at first but then I remembered that Emma Sillers’s first shop had been on Briggate in about 1900, roughly when the film was shot. I looked up the shop’s exact address which was 150 Briggate, then checked Google Maps for its present day location and there it was on the junction with Boar Lane, leaving me in no doubt that the mail carts shop in the film must have belonged to my ancestor. Later I was able to track down the photograph below via the Leodis website showing the same shop in the film four years on.
Sillers Mail Carts, 1902, 150 Briggate, Leeds. The sign for my great-great-grandmother Emma Sillers’s shop can be seen beneath the larger sign for ‘Yorkshire Relish’ (via Leodis).
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The websites mentioned above are just a few of my personal favourite image, sound and film archives and is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list. If you work in this area or know of any interesting local or national collections please feel free to mention them in the comments section.
This is the fourth post in my series on the Lings, the maternal ancestors of my grandfather Frederick England. In this final installment I will be looking at the children of John Ling (1849-1894), including Frederick’s mother Maud. To read the family’s story so far see parts one, two and three.
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Until the mid-Nineteenth Century, few members of the Ling family appear to have ventured far from their ancestral homeland in rural Suffolk. This all changed when George Ling (1824-1884) arrived in Alfreton in the 1850s, and over the next hundred years his descendants would carry his name far and wide across much of the North and East Midlands. One particularly well-travelled group were the sons and daughters of his eldest child John (1849-1894), who were briefly introduced in the previous post. Their names were Annie, Isabella, George, Maud, Bertha, Charles and Olive, and their story will take us up and down the highways and byways of England before eventually leading back to Alfreton, and an encounter with a local family we have already met.
By the time their father died in 1894, the majority of John and Mary Ann Ling’s children were still living in the family home at 34 Silver Street in Doncaster. Their eldest however, Annie Elizabeth Ling (b. 16 July 1862, Alfreton Derbyshire – d. 11 March 1940, Ardsley, Yorkshire), had already been married for two years to a local bricklayer named Benjamin Hobson. The 1901 census shows them living just down the road from Annie’s former home at 12 Silver Street, along with their three children and a domestic servant. By this time Benjamin was working as a glass dealer, suggesting that he and Annie had taken over her late father’s business after his death.
By 1911 however, things looked very different indeed. Not only was Benjamin recorded as a ‘travelling showman’ but the family were also now living in a ‘van on wheels’ in ‘a paddock off Wrawly St, [Glanford] Brigg.’ Although generally travelling showpeople were a closed community into which one had to born, there would have been a degree of cultural overlap between them and itinerant dealers like the Lings and Hobsons due to their shared nomadic lifestyles. This could partially explain how Benjamin Hobson managed to establish himself as a showman despite not coming from a fairground family himself, but as we shall see below, he also had a brother-in-law who probably influenced his career-change. Annie and Benjamin had two more children together before Benjamin’s death on 22 February 1934, by which time he had been serving as President of the Showman’s Guild of Great Britain and Ireland for three years. Their descendents continued to work in the travelling fairgrounds industry until at least the early 2000s.
Benjamin ‘Ben’ Hobson, c. 1933. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.
Annie Elizabeth Hobson (née Ling), c. 1912. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.
Hobson’s Cake Walk, 1933, Dewsbury, Yorkshire. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.
Annie and Benjamin’s introduction to the world of travelling fairgrounds almost certainly came through Annie’s younger sister Isabella Ling (b. 1 October 1874, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. 9 November 1941, Fairground, Central Avenue, Worksop, Nottinghamshire), and in particular her husband Enoch Clifford Farrar, “a rugged Yorkshire showman” from Wakefield (Ling, 1992, p. 1). Enoch appears to have been involved with fairs since at least 1891, when he was recorded living at 33 Silver Street in Doncaster, next to the Lings’ home at 34. His occupation is difficult to make out in that year’s census but appears to read ‘Attends fairs, hawker.’ He and Isabella were married two years later later on 31 January 1893 and went on to have six children together, however only two sons survived infancy.
The Farrars have so far proved difficult to trace on later censuses, possibly because of their travelling lifestyle, however the fact that they went on to become one of the most prominent show families in England is well-documented elsewhere. The following description is taken from the National Fairground Archive’s website (The University of Sheffield, 2007):
One famous show family associated with Sheffield is of course the Farrars. Enoch Farrar, the founder of the firm, provided a mirror show and a fine art gallery. The latter was a kind of peep show which had a carved front with Sleeping Beauty featured in a glass case on the front. In 1905 Enoch Farrar broke new ground when he acquired his first cinematograph show later to be replaced by another show which by 1912 was one of the largest travelling the countryside. Other rides associated with Enoch include the Dragon Scenic Railway built by Orton and Spooner of Burton on Trent. So proud were the family of the new ride that a special opening ceremony was performed on the ride and Mrs Farrar gave a short speech and broke a bottle of champagne to christen it. Mr Enoch Farrar died in the 1930s but his sons carried on the business, always keeping up-to-date with new attractions: Dodgems, Noah’s Arks, Waltzers, Mont Blancs and Moonrocket by the outbreak of the Second World War.
A selection of these attractions can be seen in the photographs below, including Enoch Farrar’s original ‘fine art gallery’ (a travelling open-air cinema with an organ and a stage in front), also known as a ‘peep show’ or ‘bioscope show‘, and his ‘scenic railway’ (a contoured wooden merry-go-round), shown at its opening in 1910. Hundreds more are held by the National Fairground Archive and are available to browse via their NFA Digital catalogue.
Enoch Farrar’s Bioscope, c. 1905. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.
Detail of show stand featuring Ben Hobson (far left), c. 1907. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.
May Barker and Annie Elizabeth Ling (née Julien) front of Enoch Farrar’s bioscope’s gavoli organ, c. 1908, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive (provenance by Ling, 1992, p. 3).
Farrar and Scenic Railway, 1910, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.
As showmen’s wives Annie and Isabella Ling would have played a pivotal role in running the fairs. As well as looking after children, cleaning their living wagons and providing meals for the family and its employees, they would also have served as “secretary, accountant, worker and business partner” (Dallas, 1971, 68). While showmen of Enoch Farrar and Ben Hobson’s generation were often virtually illiterate, their wives tended to be better educated and therefore handled the majority of correspondence and paperwork. For this same reason they would also most likely have been in charge of keeping the accounts, paying bills and counting the weekly cash takings, but according to Duncan Dallas (1971, 73) not all of their work would have been behind the scenes:
The type of work that [a showman’s wife] does will vary according to the nature of her husband’s holdings, but she will always work long hours…If the family own a show it is more than likely that the wife will be taking part, especially if it is an illusion which requires a girl to lie in one position for as long as the show may be open. Through mirrors, or under special lighting, she may be exhibited as the ‘Living Mummy’ or ‘Girl under Water’, or ‘Woman with the Body of a Bat’…The wife is involved in every show to the extent that she must design and make the costumes. She will also have to help with the spiel on the parade in front of the show. At the very least she will have to sit in the pay-box and take the money. The wife of the ride-owner is not involved in building up or maintaining the rides, but she usually sits in the cash-box and takes charge of one ride. This is a somewhat greater responsibility than just taking the money at a show, where it passes straight from the customer to the showman.
When Isabella died in 1943 the business and her £1,671 0s. 4d. fortune were passed on to her two sons, and the Farrar name’s association with travelling fairgrounds continues to this day. As we saw in the previous post however, there was a third boy who had been bought up by the Farrar family, Joseph William Ling, the son of Isabella’s uncle William. Like his adopted brothers, Joe and his descendants went on to become a highly successful showmen, making Enoch and Isabella responsible for not one but two great fairground dynasties. According to his son John (Ling, 1992, p. 2):
To begin with my father worked for Enoch Farrar on his shows, and here he met Annie Elizabeth Julien, who joined the Farrars at Maltby, working as a wagon maid for Mrs. Farrar. Later she worked as a parader on the front of the Cinematograph Show [see photograph above]. Girls were employed to dance on the front of the shows to attract crowds, and with as many as half a dozen shows at the big fairs such as Hull, competition was stiff.
[…]
When my father married, Mr. Farrar gave him his first stall to travel and from this he moved on to shows. His first was “The Great American Bear Pit”, for the craze in 1910 was for Teddy Bears. This featured “the finest collection of live teddy bears ever exhibited”.
Despite the cuddly-sounding description these ‘live teddy bears’ would in fact have been real bears, chained and trained for the audience’s amusement. The 1911 census shows the family at around this time staying in a caravan at the Blue Ram Inn’s yard in Grantham, where Joe is recorded as a ‘showman (stall holder)’. It is unclear exactly what kind of stall he would have been running at this time as his son seems to imply the Teddy Bear ‘craze’ was confined to 1910, but a reference to Joe in a local news item shows that he had previously been in charge of a coconut shy. According to the report he had fined 39s. in 1908 for using 14 lb balls of iron covered in fibres in place of real coconuts (The Cornishman, 7 May 1908, p. 2, col. 2), suggesting his later success may have had as much to do with a certain wiliness as it did with any natural charisma or business skills he possessed.
Later Joe began travelling his own Cinematograph Show, but this was not to be the last of his acquisitions according to the National Fairground Archive (The University of Sheffield, 2007):
After the war he had a set of Steam Yachts, along with a Hoop-la, coconut sheet, spinner and later the famous Chicken Joe stall run with Joe Barak. Later came the Ben Hur Speedway, Moonrocket, Dodgems and Autodrome.
As with the Farrars, the NFA’s website features many fascinating photographs of Joe Ling’s rides, living wagons and family members, of which the four below are only a tiny selection. Another tantalising glimpse into the Lings’ world can be found in 1912’s Easter on Shipley Glen, a rare example of early fairgrounds on film.
Joe Ling’s Steam Yachts, 1926, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.
Joe Ling’s Ben Hur Ark, c. 1935. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.
Notable showmen, featuring Joe Ling (back row, third from the left), 1936, Goose Fair, Nottingham. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.
Unidentified Ling family members, c. 1950. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.
Following Joe Ling’s death in 1953 the family continued the business under the name Ling’s Family Amusements, and today one can still find amusement arcades in northern seaside towns like Skegness and Bridlington which bear their name. Remarkably, even some of Joe Ling’s oldest rides are still travelling the roads, albeit following extensive restorations. I know this for a fact because two years ago at Carter’s Steam Fair, I came across this:
Carter’s Excelsior Steam Yachts (built for Joe Ling in 1921), 2014, London.Detail from above describing the ride’s history, 2014, London.
Naturally my partner and I treated ourselves to a ride, and I’m pleased to say for a ninety three-year-old attraction my cousin Joe’s steam yachts are still providing good value for money. That said, we were wise enough not to try our luck at the coconut shy.
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This talk of coconut shies brings us neatly to George Ling (bp. 11 November 1877, Ripley, Derbyshire – d. 16 May 1933, Sheffield, Yorkshire), John and Mary Ann’s third child and oldest son. After living with his family at Silver Street in Doncaster, the next record we have of George is that of his marriage to Agnes Amy Hunt in Lincoln on 9 February 1899. The 1901 census shows them two years on living with their infant daughter (the first of eight they had together) in a caravan in Holbeck (Leeds), where his occupation is given as ‘cocoa nut [sic] stall proprietor’. Before discovering the Lings’ fairground connections I had assumed this meant he ran a market stall selling coconuts, but of course it would in fact have been a coconut shy. His children’s baptism records reveal that while in 1901 he was still working some of the time as a general dealer, by 1905 he had established himself as a showman. According to Joe Ling’s son John (1992, p. [i]):
George Ling travelled a Theatrescope and a Peep Show, or Fine Art Gallery as they were euphemistically known. These travelled widely as early as 1906, attending fairs in Accrington, Sheffield, Goole and Hull, as well as appearing at the Agricultural Hall, Islington, for Christmas and New Year in 1907-08. The Peep Show had a splendid carved front with paintings, and a barrel organ, powered by a small vertical steam engine.
From this description it sounds like George may have been working alongside his brother-in-law Enoch Farrar and cousin Joe Ling, who were also travelling ‘fine art galleries’ at around this time. The 1911 census seems to support this conclusion, as even though his family were recorded living in a caravan at a fairground in Goole, he gives their main address as 28 North Parade in Grantham, the same town where Joe Ling was staying in 1911.
Also present in Grantham that year was George’s younger brother, Charles Frederick Ling (bp. 19 August 1888, Doncaster, Yorkshire – d. 20 February 1940,Fairground, Alveston, Derbyshire), John and Mary Ann’s sixth child, after whom my grandfather Frederick England was probably named. As Charles’s life appears to have been closely linked to that of his cousin Joe and brother George it makes sense to introduce him in this section before returning to John and Mary Ann’s fourth and fifth children, Maud and Bertha.
As a boy Charles had been apprenticed to his glass dealer brother-in-law Ben Hobson, and the 1901 census records them living together in the same house at 12 Silver Street along with his older sister Annie. Like Ben however, by 1911 he had moved into the travelling fairground industry, and in that year’s census is shown lodging in a house in Grantham together with four other fairground workers: an electric light worker, two labourers and a singer/dancer. Charles’s occupation is given as ‘Operator (Cinematograph)’, which together with his location strongly suggests he was working for either his cousin Joe or brother George at the time.
In 1913 Charles married Victoria Williams, the daughter of yet another travelling showman and cinematograph proprietor named Robert Williams of Warrington, and they appear to have had at least five children together. Just seven days after the birth of their first son however Britain declared war on Germany, and on 12 December the following year Charles enlisted as a Private in the 3/4 Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. From his service record (serial numbers 30343 and M322972) we can see that by 1915 he was working as a showman, like his older brother George, and was temporarily staying at the Greyhound Yard on Fisher Gate in Doncaster. He is described as 5’4″ with a chest measurement of 37″ when expanded.
Charles remained in the Army Reserve until he was mobilised at Pontefract on 1 June 1916 and posted to France the following day, most likely in preparation for the Somme Offensive. He returned home on 1 February 1917, possibly as a result of a gun shot wound to his shoulder which was mentioned in his discharge papers. After convalescing back in England he qualified as a steam lorry driver for the Army Service Corps, a role for which he would have been well-suited given his background transporting heavy fairground rides across the country via road locomotives. He spent the remainder of the war at a variety of locations on the home front, including Balby and Chesterfield, and on 29 June 1918 was promoted to Acting Corporal of “V” Company. He was formally discharged on 1 May 1919 on account of being no longer physically fit for war service, but was granted an army pension of 6s. per week. After the war he appears to have returned to his former occupation as a showman, as when he died in Alveston, Derbyshire at the age of fifty one, his place of death was recorded as ‘fairground.’
I will return to John and Mary Ann Ling’s fourth child Maud at the end of this post after looking at their two youngest daughters, Bertha (b. c. November 1884, Ripley, Derbyshire – d. 17 October 1963, Etwall Hospital, Etwall, Derbyshire) and Olive Emma Ling (b. 19 August 1894, Doncaster, Yorkshire – d. December 1988, Weston Super Mare, Somerset). Both women went on to marry members of the Hall of Belper who (perhaps unsurprisingly) worked in the fairgrounds and amusements industry.
Bertha’s husband Harry Hall, who she married in 1905, was the son of a publican, confectioner and former painter from Belper who by the 1911 census was working as a ‘Roundabout Proprietor’ in Derby (see photograph below). Although Harry, Bertha and their three children are shown living in caravans, they do not appear to have been travelling with Bertha’s brothers and cousin Joe, who were all in Grantham Fair at the time. From the number of photographs bearing his name in the NFA’s online catalogue, Harry seems to have acquired many more rides over the following decades, and for a time traded under the name Hall & Proctor alongside his sister’s brother. By the time he died in 1954 he had accumulated a personal fortune worth £19,771 16s. 8d., and the family business was carried on by his son Harry Jr. who later opened ‘Harry Hall’s Amusements’ at Matlock Bath.
Bertha died nine years later at Etwall Hospital in Derbyshire, by which time the family’s wealth had dwindled to just £521. Despite the lengthy intervening period between their deaths, both their probate records give their address as 85 Mansfield Road, Derby, suggesting that despite their travelling lifestyle they had a fixed base from which they operated. According to members of her extended family, their home served as a gathering place at Christmas time, and apparently included a cellar, snooker room, and barn, as well as a showman’s yard at the back where Bertha’s sister Olive and her husband kept their living wagon.
Olive Emma Ling, the youngest of her seven siblings by some distance, married William Henry Hall in Chesterfield in 1921. Like her sister Bertha’s husband Harry, William was the son of a publican from Belper, however his family also appears to have spent time as “van dwellers” according the the 1901 census. From the photograph below featuring an engine belonging to ‘W.H. Hall & Sons Amusements’ it appears that William’s father, William Henry Hall Sr., had become involved with travelling fairgrounds at some point before about 1920. Olive continued travelling until around 1970 when she settled in Bristol after her husband’s death. Olive lived to the grand age of ninety four, and died peacefully at her home in Backwell, Somerset in December 1988. She and William Henry had three children together, and some of their descendants can still be found travelling today.
William Henry Hall & Sons’ engine, c. 1920. L-R: Ben Lewis Hobson (son of Ben Hobson and Annie Elizabeth Ling), his wife Sarah Hobson (née Corrigan), possibly Violetta Hall, Henry “Harry” Hall, Horace Hall, up identified child. Provenance Keith Henry Hall. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archives.
William Henry Hall and Olive Emma Ling, c. February 1921, Chesterfield, Derbyshire. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archives.
William Henry Hall and Olive Emma Ling’s wedding, c. February 1921, Chesterfield, Derbyshire. Olive’s mother Mary Ann Bestwick (formerly Ling, formerly Buxton, née Hall) is on the second row, fourth from the right. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archives.
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We come now, at last, to my mother’s paternal grandmother Maud Ling, who was born in Ripley on 17 April 1881 but not baptised until 3 July in Alfreton. She is not recorded living with the rest of her family in Doncaster at the time of the 1891 census, as according to a descendent of her sister Olive, she was taken in by her maternal uncle John Samuel Buxton’s family at 27 King Street, Alfreton (see Halls that echo still (part 3)), who were desperate for a child at the time. The 1891 census even shows that she briefly took on the Buxton family name. After John Ling’s death and the birth of Olive in 1894, Maud’s mother Mary Ann is said to have “had her hands full”, and the arrangement with her brother’s family continued until Olive no longer required full-time care. By 1901 however Maud was back living in Alfreton with Olive and her mother, who had taken over her late husband’s china dealership and was managing her own shop on King Street. The family lived in the flat above at number 16, and although it is not explicitly stated in the census it seems highly likely that Maud and Olive would have been helping their mother with the day-to-day running of the business (one of Olive’s daughters claims many of the Ling girls met their showmen husbands through selling china at markets where funfairs were held). Also at around this time Maud is said to have been working as a nanny for the vicar of Moorwood Moor near South Wingfield, and apparently used to walk the four mile journey there and back every day.
King Street, Alfreton, 2011. Maud, Olive and Mary Ann would have lived above their china shop at number 16 which today is home to Broadbents Solicitors.
I have speculated that Maud may have met her future husband Tom England while working in her mother’s shop on King Street, and the details of their marriage, the sons they had together and their subsequent move to Langley have been covered in my previous post There’ll Always be an England (part 3). While that post focused mainly on Tom and the challenges he would have endured as a coal miner in the early Twentieth Century, Maud’s role as a wife and mother running a household with six working-age men in it should not be underestimated. In addition to her ‘unpaid domestic duties’ (her occupation recorded in the 1939 register) such as cooking, cleaning and managing the family budget, she must also have provided a much needed source of stability if and when Tom’s drinking threatened to become disruptive. Outside the home Maud is also said to have been quite political, and was closely involved in the local co-operative movement (most likely the Langley Mill and Aldercarr Co-operative Society). This would undoubtedly have influenced her son Harry’s decision to stand as a Labour candidate for Heanor Urban District council, which he was elected to in 1936. She is remembered as a lovely person by those who knew her.
Maud died in my grandfather Frederick’s house at 119 Holbrook Street, Heanor, on 22 July 1950, and like her husband she chose to be cremated rather than buried. Her effects were valued at £915 17s. 11d. Looking at Maud’s life it is perhaps remarkable how very different it looks to those of her siblings, who without exception all became involved with travelling fairgrounds. For whatever reason, Maud preferred to remain in and around Heanor for close to fifty years, dedicating herself to her family and the local community, but neither she nor her children ever tried to hide their traveller connections. Her sons stayed in touch with ‘the cousins’ for many years, some of them even working on their fairs for a time, and they remained Lings every bit as much as much as they were Englands.
Left to right: my grandfather Frederick England, my grandmother Julia Mary England (nee Mills), great-uncle Norman England, Maud England (nee Ling), my aunt Gillian Maureen England, and great-uncle Albert England, c. 1940, 7 Grace Crescent, Heanor, Derbyshire.Maud England (nee Ling), 1881-1950.
Sources:
Dallas, Duncan. The Travelling People. London: Macmillan, 1971.
Ling, John. John Ling’s Memories of a Travelling Life. Newcastle under Lyme: Fairground Association of Great Britain, 1992.
This is the third and (for now) last in a series of posts describing the paternal ancestry of my grandfather Frederick England, the first two of which can be found here and here. This part mainly focuses on his grandfather Thomas England’s children, including Frederick’s father Thomas England Jr. (1878-1944).
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The funeral of Cllr. Thomas England at Swanwick Baptist Church on 24 February 1918 would have been one of the largest family gatherings the Englands had held for many years. The extensive list of mourners reported in The Derbyshire Courier (2 March 1918, p. 1, col. 5) gives some indication of the family’s size at this time, but also raises some puzzling questions. Among those present were his older brothers George and James, his older sister Mary and younger half-sisters Alice and Elizabeth, plus a fourth sister, ‘Mrs. Watson,’ who I have yet to identify. His two other known sisters, Hannah and Ann, had both died decades earlier, and while this Mrs. Watson could have been his half-brother William Grice’s widow Mary, I can find no proof that William died before 1918 nor that Mary later remarried and took the name ‘Watson.’ The identity of the second mystery mourner, ‘Mrs. T. England (widow),’ is even more obscure. Thomas’s wife Mary Ann had died in 1913 according to the same headstone beneath which Thomas was interred. This newspaper report is the only evidence I have ever found of him marrying for a second time between 1913 and 1918, and although it’s possible the they could have made a mistake I think this is unlikely given how detailed and comprehensive the rest of their account is. The idea of Thomas remarrying in his mid-sixties is perhaps surprising but at present I can think of no other explanation for this enigmatic widow’s presence at his graveside. Hopefully further research will reveal more in time.
Swanwick Baptist Church, c. 2010 (via Geograph). Thomas and Mary Ann’s headstone is the light grey cross-shaped one directly behind the darker one on the right.
Also present at the funeral were, of course, all of Thomas’s surviving children with the exception of one, to whom I will return later. His five daughters Lucy Ann, Emma Jane, Lottie, Nellie and Amy all attended with their husbands and families. The eldest, Lucy Ann, had married an electric crane driver from Northamptonshire named John George Smith with whom she’d had one daughter. John had died not long afterwards however, and by the time of her father’s funeral she was married to another man named Herbert Hoskin, a labourer at a chemical works. Thomas’s second daughter Emma Jane had at least six children with Frederick James Fido, and Lottie, who was recorded as a dressmaker’s assistant in the 1911 census, had married George Whylde in 1913. Both husbands were local coal miners. Lottie’s death at the age of ninety two in 1987 makes her the longest lived of Thomas’s children, as well as the only one whose life overlaps with my own. Nellie, unmarried at the time of the funeral, went on to marry a lorry driver named Walter Syson three years later but it is unknown whether or not she had any children. Thomas’s youngest daughter Amy had four boys and two girls with Bertie Crownshaw, a baker from Sheffield, but sadly, as is the case with the rest of Thomas’s daughters, not much else is known about her. The only son of Thomas’s named in the list of mourners is his third, John James England. According to one of his descendants, John had been a boot boy at the Royal Alfred Hotel in Alfreton when he was ten before securing an apprenticeship as a sawyer’s labourer. By 1911 he was working at a chemical works (possibly Kempson & Co. of Pye Bridge, his father’s company) and had married Bertha Ellen Sparham, with whom he had five children. He is remembered fondly as a very “quiet, gentle man.”
So where were Thomas’s other sons? His eldest George William England had, like his father, been a coal miner since he was a boy, and by his early twenties was working as a hewer, one of the most dangerous occupations in an industry comprised largely of dangerous occupations. Hewers were responsible for loosening rock at the coalface with picks, working deep underground in sweltering conditions. By the time George started working in the 1890s there were still no restrictions on the number of hours a miner could be obliged to work per day, wages could be cut arbitrarily and safety measures were still minimal. But while the average miner’s working conditions could be said to have improved little since George’s grandfather’s fatal accident in 1850, the organised labour movement had grown in strength by then and was starting to demand a better deal.
In 1893 when George was sixteen the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain called a strike against a proposed 25% pay cut, in which George’s union, the Derbyshire Miners’ Association (according to The Derbyshire Courier, 10 July 1915, p. 5, col. 4), were participants. The strikers held out for many weeks, and eyewitnesses at Swanwick Colliery recalled seeing pit ponies, which perhaps had not seen daylight for years, grazing freely above ground (Stone, 1998). Unlike earlier strikes in the area though this one was a success, and the management agreed not to reduce any wages. Industrial action by miners would of course continue throughout the twentieth century, including the National Coal Strike of 1912 which began in Alfreton and soon spread across the country. Their core demands were expressed in a popular chant, which could be heard at pits from Kent to Clydeside:
Eight hours work, Eight hours play, Eight hours sleep and Eight bob a day
The miners’ victory that year led to the passing of the Coal Mines (Minimum Wage) Act 1912, one of the first minimum wage laws passed anywhere in the world and a huge milestone in the history of workers’ rights. Many of the basic freedoms we enjoy at work today owe a great deal to the efforts of people like George, his brothers, their wives and workmates.
At the time of the strike George had been working at Birchwood Colliery in Alfreton for about seven years, about thirty minutes away from where he lived at 118 Prospect Street with his wife Amy (née Kinnings) and four children. By 1915 he had been promoted to the position of colliery stallman, an overseer’s role which perhaps could have been the start of a promising career had disaster not struck later that year. On Thursday 17 June, George was working alongside fellow stallman Henry Jenkins when at around 12.30 midday they heard a crash. Henry, on hearing George cry out, ran to his aid only to discover that he had been almost completely buried under the fallen pit roof, fracturing his spine and inflicting several other internal injuries. He was quickly pulled out and conveyed to his house on Prospect Street but it was too late, he died of his injuries almost three weeks later on 5 July. The coroner’s inquest which followed returned a verdict of ‘accidental death’ but noted that a slight crack in one of the pit’s supporting posts had been detected before the accident and that nothing had been done about it. His funeral took place on Thursday 8 July at Alfreton Cemetery. At the following Monday’s meeting of Alfreton Council his father Thomas received a vote of condolence from the other councillors. He was, he said “passing through troubled waters, ” having lost his son-in-law (John George Smith), his wife and his son in such a short space of time (The Derbyshire Courier, 10 July 1915, p. 5, col. 4). Sadly, 1916 would see no reversal in the England family’s fortunes.
‘The late Mr. G.W. England’. Source: The Derbyshire Courier, 10 July 1915, p. 5, col. 4, via The British Newspaper Archive).
Edwin England, Thomas’s youngest son, was born on 8 November 1893. His three older brothers were all at least ten years older than him and had already started their first jobs by the time he came along. It therefore seems likely he would have been closer to his sisters growing up, all of whom were nearer to him in age. From the 1911 census we know Thomas and Mary Ann had a total of thirteen children together, but sadly only nine of them appear to have survived infancy. Of the four who died the only name we know is that of Ernest Edward England, who was born in early 1892 and died on 27 November that same year. Although infant mortality rates were much higher back then I believe the timing of Ernest’s death must have had an impact on how Edwin was raised, even his name sounds like it may have been intended as a tribute. Having gone through the experience of losing a son the year before would surely have made Edwin’s birth and survival feel even more special, and it’s easy to imagine him as the youngest boy in the family becoming something of a favourite. Unlike his older brothers, when Edwin started work his father would have been successful and influential enough to help him out, and perhaps it was Thomas’s recommendation which had secured him a clerk’s job at Birchwood Colliery by the time he was eighteen (The Derbyshire Courier, 4 November 1916, p. 1, col. 2).
While as a young man Edwin may have seemed poised to follow in his father’s footsteps, there was of course a key difference between him and his father. When Thomas had turned twenty one it had been 1871 and Britain was at peace. When Edwin reached the same age the year was 1914. On 4 August that year Britain declared war on Germany, and Edwin, as the only England brother not employed in a reserved occupation would have faced enormous social pressure to enlist in the army. On 9 June the following year he enrolled as a private in the 9th Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters at Nottingham, and a month later he left Liverpool on a ship bound for the North Aegean. On 7 August he disembarked with his battalion at Sulva Bay, Gallipoli.
Men of the 9th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters, refilling mess tins and bottles at a well. Gallipoli, August 1915 (via the Imperial War Museum).
The events of that famously ill-fated campaign to capture the Dardarnelle Straits from the Ottoman army hardly need repeating here, but the 9th Battalion are said to have “maintained stout hearts and a soldierly spirit” despite heavy losses. Edwin apparently escaped the battle “without a scratch” (The Derbyshire Courier, 4 November 1916, p. 1, col. 2) before his battalion were evacuated to Egypt via Crete in December. In July 1916 they were redeployed to France, and on 26 September 1916, at the Battle of Thiepval Bridge, the first large offensive of the Battle of the Somme, Edwin was killed in action near the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle. He likely fell during the capture of the German Hessian and Zollern trenches however his body was never recovered. He was twenty two. His memory is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial in France, and on his parents’ headstone in the churchyard of Swanwick Baptist Church.
Edwin England, 1893-1916. Source: The Derbyshire Courier, 7 November 1916, p. 4, col. 3 (via The British Newspaper Archive).‘A Pye Bridge Loss’. News of Edwin’s death reaches Derbyshire. Source: The Derbyshire Courier, 4 November 1916, p. 1, col. 2 (via The British Newspaper Archive).
Unlike George and Edwin, Thomas England’s second son Thomas England Jr. would go on to outlive their father by several decades, however his name is conspicuously absent from the list of mourners at his funeral. Apparently, his wife Maud did attend (identified as “Mrs. T. England (daughter-in-law)” in The Derbyshire Courier, 2 March 1918, p. 1, col. 5), which makes Thomas’s unexplained absence even stranger. There are a number of possible explanations for this of course, but before exploring these let us first take a look at his early life. To avoid confusion with his father I will from this point on refer to Thomas Jr. as ‘Tom,’ as this is the form he used on two of his sons’ baptism records and therefore was probably the name by which he was best known.
Born on 28 July 1878, by the time he was thirteen Tom had already left school and was listed as an ‘errand boy’ in the 1891 census. He would likely have started down the mines not much later, as by 1901 he is recorded as a coal miner. It is unknown which pit he was based at then but he would probably have been working for the Babington Coal Company at Birchwood Colliery alongside his brothers George and Edwin. At around this time, just up the road from the England family home on Park Street was a china shop at number 16 King Street run by a widow named Mary Ann Ling, who lived above it with her daughters Maud and Olive. Maud (b. 17 April 1881, Ripley, Derbyshire – d. 22 July 1950, 119 Holbrook Street, Heanor, Derbyshire) would undoubtedly have helped her mother out from time to time at the shop, and it was perhaps here where Tom met her for the first time. It’s tempting imagine a romance blossoming between them over the counter during Tom’s frequent visits as an young errand boy, but that’s maybe a little fanciful. Their wedding, which took place on 16 November 1901 at Alfreton, has already been described elsewhere but I’ve reproduced their marriage certificate below which gives their names, their witnesses, and their fathers’ names and occupations.
Thomas England and Maud Ling’s marriage certificate with missing left quarter, 1901, Alfreton, Derbyshire.
Tom and Maud appear to have left Alfreton shortly after getting married. They had one son there in 1902 but the rest of their children were all born in Langley in south Derbyshire, including my grandfather Frederick England. Their names were:
Albert (b. 6 September 1902, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. 17 October 1948, The City Hospital, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire)
Arthur (bp. 15 December 1904, Heanor, Derbyshire – d. c. May 1905, Derbyshire)
Harry (bp. 23 January 1908, Heanor, Derbyshire – d. 26 January 1958, 7 Grace Crescent, Heanor, Derbyshire)
Frederick England (b. 23 July 1912, Langley, Derbyshire – d. 24 September 1980, Codnor, Derbyshire)
Herbert Kenneth (b. 30 April 1915, Langley, Derbyshire – d. 27 March 1984, Derby, Derbyshire)
Norman (b. 23 April 1921, Langley, Derbyshire – d. c. May 1983, Nottinghamshire)
In the 1911 census the family were living in a three-room house at 15 ‘Odessa Yard’ in Langley. I initially had some difficulty locating the present-day site of this address but after checking the house numbers which came before and after the Englands in the census schedule I now believe they were actually based at 15 Laceyfields Road. Like his older brother George, Tom was a coal hewer, and we know from an article in The Nottingham Evening News (12 Nov 1910, p. [4], col. 4) that he was employed by the Butterley Company Ltd. at the New Langley Colliery (Thomas had been a witness to a recent pit fatality and was giving evidence during the inquiry). In 1912 he would most likely have participated in the National Coal Strike, as well as the General Strike of 1926. By then though he was no longer working as a hewer but an ‘onsetter’ (according to an application for a copy of his son Frederick’s birth certificate dated 4 August 1926). Onsetters were in charge of loading the cages at the bottom of the shaft which conveyed miners to the surface, as well as giving the appropriate signals to the winding engineman. Their equivalent above ground was known as a ‘banksman,’ which is the occupation Tom gave the following decade in both his son Frederick’s marriage certificate from 1938 and in the recently-released 1939 register.
An onsetter signals for the cage to be raised up the shaft, Denaby, Derbyshire, c. 1910 (Elliot, 2014, xii).
By this time he was sixty one years old and living at 98 Holbrook Street in Heanor with his wife Maud and their son Kenneth (Frederick and his wife Mary also stayed with them for a period in the late 1930s before moving across road to number 119). Tom died in 1944 while his sons Frederick and Norman were away fighting in Europe. Unusually for the time he chose for his remains to be cremated rather than buried, which was perhaps appropriate for a man who had already spent so much of his life below ground.
Although I know a great deal about my grandfather Frederick from my mother, and over time have managed to piece together almost as much about his grandfather Thomas England Sr., many of the details of Tom’s life are still shrouded in mystery. I have neither the wealth of anecdotal information about him which I have for his son, nor the extensive news coverage on his activities which I have for his father, and that has somehow always made him even more intriguing to me. This curiosity has been fed by the two major pieces of anecdotal information I do have about him: that he was an excellent fiddle player and a heavy drinker.
The former has always struck me as unusual. Given the time and place in which he grew up, if Tom was musically inclined one would probably have expected him to gravitate towards the local colliery brass band, or perhaps some form of sacred music (which I’m sure his father would have preferred). In contrast to these more traditional, community-based forms of music-making, to me playing the fiddle feels more individualistic, more romantic and possibly a little wilder. This image of him seems to fit well with the fact that he was also known to enjoy a drink. Although it was fairly common for miners to be heavy drinkers at this time, the very fact that this is one of the few pieces of information about him which has been passed down to me suggests his habit was somehow exceptional he may have suffered from alcoholism (Maud apparently had to hide money around the house to stop him spending it on drink). This is pure speculation, but based on the few details I have about him, Tom seems like very different character to his father Thomas England Sr., the respected town councillor, Freemason and deacon, so perhaps his absence from his father’s funeral was due to some kind of falling out? Alternatively Tom may just have been sick or unable to get out of work that day, and his drinking habit could have developed later (perhaps triggered by the deaths of his parents and two brothers in the space of five years). Like so much else about his life, the truth is now lost to us and we must make do with what have the faculty to imagine.
Tom England (far right), with (L-R) his sister-in-law Ethel May England, mother-in-law Mary Ann Bestwick, c. 1935.Tom England (far left) with Maud (seated) at his son Harry’s wedding to Ethel May Buxton, 1935.
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Although I fully intend to return to Tom’s sons in future posts, because their stories are inextricably tied up with those of several living persons I am ending my in-depth history of the England family here in order to to preserve their privacy. In the posts to come I’ll be turning my attention to the family of my grandfather Frederick’s mother, the Lings, a family so different to the Englands with their deep roots in the Derbyshire coalfield it’s a surprise their paths ever crossed.
This is the second post detailing the paternal ancestry of my grandfather Frederick England, the first of which you can read here. This entry focuses mainly on Frederick’s grandfather Thomas England and covers the period between 1850 and 1918.
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Born on 26 May 1850, Thomas England would have been the only one of his six siblings with little or no memory of their father James, who had died in a mining accident before Thomas was eighteen months old. For the next year and a half he was raised by his mother Alice alone, perhaps aided by his older sister Ann, until his mother’s second marriage to William Grice on 17 May 1853. He would have received only the most basic education, possibly at a Sunday School set up for miners’ children, before starting work as a pit boy at Swanwick Colliery aged ten, working twelve and fourteen hour shifts.
According to his obituary, four years later Thomas “met with a serious accident which caused an injury to his spine and he became a weigh clerk at the Swanwick New Pit where he stayed for another […] years. He then went into the colliery offices where he remained for 22 years” (The Derbyshire Courier, 2 March 1918, p. 1, col. 5). The exact chronology is somewhat unclear as the number of years Thomas is said to have worked as a weigh clerk is illegible (it could be five or six) but the jobs described match up with his occupations recorded in the 1871 and 1881 censuses (‘weighing machinist, colliery’ and ‘clerk in colliery office’ respectively). As a weighing clerk Thomas would have been responsible for recording the weight, quality and intended destinations of the coal waggons as they left the mine. Although operating the weighing machinery would have involved a certain amount of physical exertion this was far less strenuous work than anything below ground. In addition the opportunities for advancement would have been more numerous here, and it isn’t difficult to imagine how displaying an aptitude for numbers, attention to detail and accurate record keeping could have led to a promotion to the colliery offices. His obituary describes him as a ‘plodder,’ who gradually improved his position throughout his whole life.
Weighing coal at a pit head, from a Victorian print. Source: Illustrated London News, 21 September 1878, p. 285 (via Old Print).
By the time of the 1881 census, Thomas, now a thirty one year old married father of two, had moved away from Sleetmoor Lane next to Swanwick Colliery to 15 Park Street in Alfreton. This new address closer the town centre reflected his rise in social status from manual labourer to salaried white-collar worker. His wife Mary Ann Munks (sometimes spelled ‘Monks’, b. 30 April 1854, Bottesford, Leicestershire – d. 11 January 1913, Pye Bridge, Derbyshire), who he had married five years earlier at Swanwick Baptist Church, was the daughter of John Munks, a Leicestershire bricklayer’s labourer, and Ann Askew, a former servant and charwoman. In the 1871 census Mary Ann had also been working as a domestic servant, and although it’s not certain how she and Thomas met it’s possible her job may have drew her into his orbit. At this time even many lower middle class households like Thomas’s employed servants (her employer in 1871 was a banker’s clerk), so it’s not inconceivable that she could have been working for someone he knew from the colliery. They had a total of thirteen children (according to the 1911 census), the ones whose names we know were:
George William (b. c. February 1877, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. 5 July 1915, Derby, Derbyshire)
Thomas (b. 28 June 1878, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. c. November 1944, Heanor, Derbyshire)
John James (b. 22 January 1882, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. 6 December 1957, Leamoor Avenue, Alfreton, Derbyshire)
Lucy Ann (b. 7 November 1883, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. c. February 1950, Nottinghamshire)
Emma Jane (b. 15 April 1888, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. c. November 1971, Chesterfield, Derbyshire)
Ernest Edward (b. c. February 1892, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. 27 November 1892, Alfreton, Derbyshire)
Edwin (b. 8 November 1893, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. 26 September 1916, Ovillers, Somme, Picardie)
Lottie (b. 20 March 1895, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. c. November 1987, Selby, Yorkshire)
Nellie (b. 12 November 1896, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. c. November 1976, Derby, Derbyshire)
Amy (b. 19 January 1899, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. c. November 1966, Derby, Derbyshire)
Unfortunately Thomas’s plodding ascent up the social ladder was to be halted abruptly in 1889. That year he was dismissed along with two other clerks from his job at Swanwick Colliery by the owner Charles Rowland Palmer-Morewood after they gave evidence in an action against the colliery manager Frederick George Pogmore (The Derbyshire Times, 27 November 1889), who had been accused of seducing the seventeen year old daughter of another colliery manager, Thomas Severn (The Derbyshire Times, 21 August 1889). The incident provoked a strong reaction by the Radicals, who cited it as an example of the Conservatives’ contempt for the working man (Morewood was a member of the latter party), however the Conservative candidate for mid-Derbyshire, John Satterfield Sandars, used a Conservative meeting at Alfreton to condemn Palmer-Morewood’s action and express his sympathy with the men (The Derbyshire Times, 27 November 1889, p. 2, col. 4). We know Thomas was in attendance as at the end of Sandars’s speech he proposed a vote of thanks to Mr. Sandars and thanked the Conservative Party for “the practical help and sympathy which had been shown to his fellows and himself.”
In the report Thomas was named as the secretary of the Alfreton Conservative Association. A few years earlier he had also apparently served as the Alfreton delegate for the Nottingham Imperial Order of Oddfellows (Nottingham Evening Post, 13 July 1886, p. 4, col. 5), a friendly society with a Masonic-style lodge structure. Both positions suggest an increasing interest in local affairs and a growing public profile. By 1891, when the family were living at 28 Park Street, he had found a new job as a bookkeeper for the Wingfield Manor Colliery Company, and from this point on his name begins to appear more frequently in local news stories. For example, according to the Derby Mercury there was a bizarre incident at his office at Highfield Cottage on 26 June that year when a man who lived above them was charged with deliberately damaging the company’s books. Thomas was quoted as a witness, saying that the man had entered the offices clearly drunk and ordered him and an assistant to leave, threatening to chuck them out if they did not. Thomas put the books away in a cupboard before leaving, and then the man proceeded to destroy or damage a large quantity of said books (The Derby Mercury, 29 July 1891, p. 3, col. 3).
A year later the Manor Colliery Company went into liquidation but Thomas and several other ex-employees successfully recovered £90 in owed wages from the owner John Brocklehurst (The Derbyshire Times, 23 January 1892, p. 8, col. 5). Later in the year Thomas is reported as giving “corroborative evidence” in the case of the Manor Colliery Co., Alfreton (In Liquidation) v. W.B. Hodgson, which involved another claim of unpaid wages against his former employer (The Derbyshire Times, 16 July 1892, p. 4, col. 8). After these debacles Thomas left the mining industry altogether and got a job as a clerk, and later manager at Kempson and Co. of Pye Bridge, a company producing sulphuric acid, coal derivatives and tar distilleries. Not glamorous perhaps, but a world away from what his brothers would have been exposed to down the mines. His wife’s epitaph states that the family lived somewhere called ‘Tynefield House’ in Pye Bridge in 1913, and the fact that their house had a name (and one worth mentioning on a gravestone) rather than simply a number suggests they were living in rather more spacious accommodation than they had done at Park Street (the 1911 census describes it as having eight rooms). Thomas’s importance within the company can be attested by the fact that he is listed as the company secretary in both a public notice in The Derbyshire Times (30 October 1897) and the 1912 edition of Kelly’s Directory.
This same directory also mentions that Thomas was a local councillor for the Somercotes and Riddings Ward of Alfreton Urban District Council. His interest in politics can be traced at least as far back as his work as secretary for the Alfreton Conservative Association, and in 1895 he had been appointed as a scrutineer in the sixth ballot of the Alfreton Building Society (The Derbyshire Times, 6 November 1895). This same public spiritedness can be detected again in 1901 when he had served as the census enumerator for his home district of Alfreton. Rather pleasingly, this means he would have met a large number of my Alfreton ancestors during census week as he trudged from door to door handing out the blank forms and collecting them a few days later.
Census enumerator at a gypsy camp (via History.org).
Thomas had first been elected councillor on 29 May 1906 following the retirement of his predecessor Mr. F. Bonsall of the Midland Miners’ Permanent Relief Society (Nottingham Evening Post, 16 May 1906), and stood successfully again in 1909, 1912 and 1915. During this time he served as superintendent examiner for Somercotes Technical Education Committee (The Derbyshire Times, 15 February 1911, p. 6, col. 6), presided over a number of meetings coordinating Alfreton’s contribution to the war effort (Derbyshire Courier, 22 August 1914, p. 3, col. 6, Derbyshire Courier, 17 April 1915, p. 3, col. 7) and was promoted to Chairman of the Alfreton Urban District council, a position which carried with it a magistracy. In his later years Thomas also became increasingly involved in both his local Masonic lodge, into which he had been initiated on 21 April 1908, and the Baptist church at Swanwick where he and Mary Ann had married in 1876. Some of his activities reported in the local press include opening a fundraising bazaar for the church on Easter Tuesday 1911 (Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald, 22 April 1911, p. 7, col. 8) and opening a new Sunday School there the following year (The Derbyshire Courier, 6 January 1912, cols. 3-5). According to his obituary he also ran a bible class and was a deacon at Riddings. The photograph below shows him with with his fellow deacons when he would have been around sixty years old.
Deacons of Riddings Baptist Church c. 1910. Thomas England is stood on the far left (via Picture the Past).
Thomas’s final years were marred by a series of personal tragedies. In 1913 his wife Mary Ann passed away at the age of fifty eight. Her epitaph reads “rest comes at length,” from the hymn ‘Hark, Hark, My Soul.’ Her death was followed by those of their sons George in 1915 and Edwin in 1916, and after a long illness Thomas himself died on 21 February 1918 aged sixty seven. His obituary described him as “a man of many parts [who] was thorough in all he did,” and a “very popular member” of the council with “a large circle of friends.” His funeral took place at Swanwick Baptist Church three days later, where he was laid to rest in the same plot as his wife. Although on the surface his life can seem like Victorian self-improvement fantasy (the working class lad who overcame various hardships through faith and perseverance), to me Thomas seems like a more complex character than this would suggest. Although possessed of a strong work-ethic (or perhaps just restlessness) he seems to have been genuinely motivated by a desire to do good for his community. Perhaps his memories of that cramped house on Sleet Moor, and of another life underground which he’d so narrowly avoided, had something to do with that.
Thomas and Mary Ann’s headstone, Swanwick, 4 November 2011. The full epitaph reads: “In loving memory of Mary Ann, beloved wife of Thomas England of Tynefield House, Pye Bridge. Died January 11th 1913 aged 59 years. Rest comes at length. Also, the above Thomas England. Died February 21st 1918 aged 67 years.”
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A brief note on how I discovered the site of Thomas’s grave. When I first began looking into my family history in 2010 neither the 1911 census nor the British Newspaper Archive were available, so my knowledge of Thomas’s life was initially limited to what I could glean from the censuses of 1851-1901. I could find no record of his marriage or burial in the local parish registers but didn’t realise till much later that this would have been because of his Baptist faith. The key piece of information which led to the discovery of everything else was the brief reference to his role as councillor for Riddings and Somercotes ward in the 1912 edition of Kelly’s Directory. The news that he’d worked as a local councillor convinced me he must have had an obituary in the local newspaper, and this quickly obtained via the Derbyshire Record Office. In it was the first mention I’d seen of his involvement with Riddings Baptist Church, and from there I was able to identify him as the man in this photo from the excellent Picture the Past website. Later that day, a bit more research led me to the site in Riddings where the Church had once stood (now a car park, but the wall the men in the photo are standing in front of is still there), and while in the area I thought it might be worth a quick look around the Baptist churchyard at nearby Swanwick, just in case. His and Mary Ann’s marble headstone was one of the largest and best situated there, standing in an unmistakably prestigious plot in front of the church. Even more surprising was the presence of a third commemoration on the stone’s left hand side which simply read “Also Edwin their son, killed in action, September 26th 1916 aged 22 years.” His story and that of his brothers and sisters, including Frederick’s father Thomas England Jr., will be told in the next post.
Thomas England, 1850-1918. Source: The Derbyshire Courier, 4 February 1911, p. 9, col. 4 (via The British Newspaper Archive).
This is the first of a series of posts detailing the paternal ancestry of my maternal grandfather Frederick England from the late 18th Century to the early 20th. This part will focus on the period from 1797 to around the 1850s.
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The England family name seems to have originated independently in a number of different places where Anglo-Saxon ‘Englishmen’ were historically a minority, including the borders of England and Scotland and the Scandinavian-dominated Danelaw in Yorkshire and the East Midlands. Given where his immediate family came from it seems likely that the earliest ancestors of Frederick England would have come from the second of these two areas, and indeed the earliest documentary evidence I have found featuring the name of one of his England ancestors appears in the parish registers of St. Martin’s Church in Alfreton, Derbyshire. There on 20 March 1797 the marriage of Samuel England (b. c. 1772 – bur. 28 January 1829) to Hannah Stendall (b. c. 1779 – bur. 15 June 1809, Alfreton, Derbyshire) took place, witnessed by Joseph and Elizabeth England. Given their surnames it seems likely these witnesses were members of Samuel’s family but their exact relationship is unknown. Between them Samuel and Hannah had four children, the last of whom, Frederick’s great-grandfather James England was baptised on 15 June 1809, the same day Hannah was buried suggesting she may have died in childbirth.
The next time we encounter James is in the parish registers of St Mary’s Church in Greasley, Nottinghamshire for his wedding to Alice Sisson (bp. 3 April 1820, Strelley, Nottinghamshire – bur. 18 August 1896, Swanwick, Derbyshire) on 23 May 1836. The following year, James and Alice had moved back to James’s home parish, and according to the birthplace of their first daughter Hannah (perhaps named for his late mother?) were living in the small community of Pye Bridge on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border. This record also confirms that James was employed as a collier (coal miner) at the time, and aside from the 1841 census on which he is listed as an iron ore miner, James appears to have worked in the coal industry his entire life.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the East Midlands region which included Swanwick Colliery, James’s place of work, was one of the most heavily industrialised places in the world. At this time however mining was extremely dangerous work and poorly paid. Safety measures were almost non-existent and the living conditions of the workers were often cramped and overcrowded (by the time of the 1851 census James’s household included nine people). It was common for miners to start work before day break, spend all day underground and not emerge until after sunset. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that the area was an early hotbed of working class radicalism, with the Swanwick Miners’ Association organising an ill-fated strike as early as 1844, in which James England could well have participated.
Mine conditions in 1842, taken from a contemporary report by the Children’s Employment Commission (via the British Library).
On 20 October 1851 when James was only forty two he was killed in an accident at Swanwick colliery. According to a subsequent inquest he had been “using a crow bar for the purpose of removing a prop, when the bar slipped and springing back caught him such a severe blow in the pitt [sic] of the stomach that it caused immediate death” (The Derby Mercury, 5 November 1851). He was buried on the 23rd of that month, leaving behind his wife and five surviving children.
Coroner’s inquest following James England’s death. Source: The Derby Mercury, 5 November 1851, p. 3, col. 2 (via The British Newspaper Archive).
So what of the family James left behind? Between 1837 and 1850, he and Alice had had at least seven children, whose names were:
Hannah (bp. 21 May 1837, Pye Bridge, Derbyshire – bur. 14 June 1842, Pye Bridge, Derbyshire)
Ann (bp. 10 February 1839, Pye Bridge, Derbyshire – bur. 5 March 1879, Swanwick, Derbyshire)
George (b. c. April 1842, Pye Bridge, Derbyshire – d. c. November 1918, Derbyshire)
Samuel (b. 3 September 1844, Somercotes, Derbyshire – bur. 7 April 1845)
James (b. 4 April 1846, Sleet Moor, Derbyshire – d. 15 May 1933, Nuttall Street, Alfreton, Derbyshire)
Mary (b. 6 May 1848 Sleet Moor, Derbyshire – d. c. August 1945, Derbyshire)
Thomas (b. 26 May 1850, Sleet Moor, Derbyshire – d. 21 February 1918, Riddings, Derbyshire)
Just less than two years after James’s death, Alice remarried on 17 May 1853 to another coal miner, William Grice (b. c. 1823, Min, Leicestershire), with whom she had at least three more children:
Alice (b. 1 April 1855, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. c. August 1925, Derbyshire)
William (b. c. November 1856, Sleet Moor, Derbyshire)
Elizabeth (b. c. 1860, Sleet Moor, Derbyshire – d. c. May 1910, Derbyshire)
We of course cannot say whether Alice remarried for love, the need to support her children economically or a combination of the two, but in the years between the death of James and her second marriage she must have struggled to provide for her children, especially as her mother Ann was no longer around to help having died nine years earlier (Alice was the eldest of two two ‘illegitimate’ sisters, no father is named on her baptism record but on the record of her marriage to William Grice thirty three years later she gives her father’s name as Thomas Dewes). Tragically, only ten years into their marriage Alice’s second husband William died, like her first, in an accident at Swanwick Colliery on 15 November 1863. According to a report in The Derbyshire Times, two other men were seriously injured, and the accident had occurred in the same pit where two men had drowned the previous October.
Coroner’s inquest following William Grice’s death. Source: The Derbyshire Times, 21 November 1863, p. 3, col. 2 (via The British Newspaper Archive).
The regularity of pit fatalities like those of James and William at this time is quite shocking. A search of the Coal Mining History Resource Centre’s database of Coalming Accidents and Deaths shows that between 1851 and 1919 there were thirty five incidents reported at Swanwick Colliery alone. According to this database James has the dubious honour of being the first man to die at Swanwick Colliery, but unfortunately many of his descendants also appear among the lists of dead and injured.
After Alice’s marriage to William the family never left the Sleet Moor area, the small semi-rural community located just south of Swanwick Colliery but North East of Swanwick village. Growing up in the shadow of the Palmer-Morewoods’ great pit it’s hardly surprising that all her children who survived infancy grew up to either work down the mine or marry a collier. Her eldest son George suffered bruising and a broken collar bone in a pit accident at the age of forty three (The Derby Daily Telegraph, 24 June 1885, p. 2, col. 6.) but survived to live another twenty six years. Alice and James’s youngest son Thomas, Frederick England’s grandfather, also met with an accident aged just fourteen. His resulting spinal injuries were so severe he was prevented from ever working down the mines again, but in his case this turned out to be something of a blessing as it led to a career as a clerk above ground. Later, despite his humble origins he would go on to hold an important managerial position in a local chemical works at a time when such social mobility was unusual, and became a councillor for the Somercotes and Riddings Urban District Ward, perhaps providing the origin of the England family’s later involvement in local politics. His story however will be explored in the next post.
Map of Alfreton and surrounding villages c. 1837. Swanwick is visible in the bottom left quarter, and the colliery were James worked is indicated near the centre of the map, about half way along the long East West road on the left-hand side (Sleet Moor is unmarked but would have been the area just south of here). Riddings and Pye Bridge can be seen in the bottom right-hand corner (via The British Library Online Gallery).
This post is the second of a two-part account of my introduction to family history. Here I pick up where my previous post left off and describe how the discovery of my grandfather’s wartime letters led to further revelations about his life and ancestry.
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Having found out so much about my grandfather Frederick England’s wartime experiences I wanted to learn more about his life during peacetime. In addition to photographs and personal correspondences, some of the most useful items I found among my mother’s family records were financial records like his account books, solicitors’ fees and insurance policies which tracked his major purchases and varying fortunes over the years. For example a receipt from F.G. & P.M. Robinson, Solicitors reveals that the family purchased their second house in June 1959 for £1,650, almost £1,000 below the national average house price for that year and worth approximately £25,245 in today’s money. His ‘borrower’s passbook’ from the same year shows their mortgage repayments were initially £8 18s. 2d. per month (about £136.30 today) at a time when an average worker’s monthly earnings was around £46.
Financial records like these can help us understand our ancestors’ position in society but can also tell us about relationships between individuals. For example, from an account of the estate of Frederick’s mother Maud England I not only found out that her personal wealth at the time she died was £985 2s. 3 ½ d., worth around £22,440.86 today and surprisingly high for a miner’s widow, but also the names and addresses of her descendants who inherited it. This list of names enabled me to expand my family tree significantly and opened up several new avenues for research.
One such avenue was that of Harry England, Maud’s eldest surviving son and brother of Frederick whose obituary in the Ripley and Heanor News (see below) was among the more interesting items I found among my family records.
Harry England’s obituary. Source: Ripley and Heanor News, 31 January 1958.
This clipping included his address (7 Grace Crescent, Heanor) and inferred date of death (26 January 1958), a photograph and details of his life including the fact that he had been “a staunch worker for the Labour Party” and had served as a town councillor for Heanor.
Another document I was only able to make sense of after studying the account Maud England’s estate was a very old and fragile marriage certificate bearing the names England and Ling (see below). The certificate had been folded into eighths and at some point the left quarter of the document containing the year and bride and groom’s first names had become detached and lost, so it was unclear which of my ancestors it had belonged to. Fortunately however I knew from her estate records that Maud England’s maiden name had been Ling, and therefore the marriage certificate had to belong to her and my great-grandfather Thomas England.
Thomas England and Maud Ling’s marriage certificate, 1901, Alfreton, Derbyshire. Note the missing left quarter.
This marriage certificate confirmed that Thomas was employed as a miner, the couple’s ages and the fact that they were resident in Alfreton at the time. Crucially though it also included the names and occupations of their fathers Thomas England Sr. (a chemical manager) and John Ling (deceased, a general dealer), plus two witnesses George William England and Lucy Ann England whose names suggested they were related to the groom.
This wealth of information enabled me to find Thomas and Maud in the 1901 census via Ancestry, and I then worked my way back through the earlier censuses all the way to 1841, taking in several generations of Englands and Lings along the way. Without this document I doubt my family history research could have progressed much further along this branch without recourse to ordering a number of expensive certificates, and though I did not realise it at the time it was also my first clue that my grandfather’s much-talked-about traveller connection was more than just a family legend.
My second clue, which was similarly lost on me at the time, came in the form of another certificate, this one pertaining to the death of someone named Mary Ann Bestwick who died on 30 July 1938 in Storthes Hall Mental Hospital near Huddersfield (see below).
Mary Ann Bestwick’s death certificate, 30 July 1938, Kirkburton, Yorkshire.
As neither I nor my mother had any idea who this was and did not recognise the name Bestwick, I initially ascribed little importance to it. Later however I discovered a letter from the superintendent registrar for the Belper Registration District which revealed that someone in my grandfather’s family had gone to great lengths to track down this certificate. This suggested they required proof of their relationship to this person, perhaps because an inheritance was at stake?
I cross-checked Mary Ann Bestwick’s details as presented in her death certificate with those of everyone else I had uncovered in my grandfather’s family and noticed that she shared a first name and approximate birth year (c. 1850) with his maternal grandmother Mary Ann Ling. I knew that Mary Ann Ling’s husband John had died at some point before 1901 as he is marked as deceased in their daughter Maud’s marriage certificate from that year (see above), and as Mary Ann would have only been around fifty at the time it seemed quite plausible that she could have subsequently remarried and taken the name Bestwick.
I checked Ancestry to see if I could find any evidence to back up this hunch and quickly found that she had married a Thomas Bestwick in 1910, thereby confirming that the death certificate was indeed that of my great-great-grandmother. Taking into account her age and the probable date of the photograph (as well as her intimate positioning next to Maud and the arguable family resemblance) I believe Mary Ann Bestwick is the unidentified woman second from the left in the picture below.
L-R: My great-aunt and Harry England’s wife Ethel May England (nee Buxton), my great-great-grandmother Mary Ann Bestwick (formerly Ling, formerly Buxton, nee Hall), my great-grandmother Maud England (ne Ling), and my great-grandfather Tom England, c. 1935.
Having established my relationship to Mary Ann Bestwick I began examining her death certificate more closely and was intrigued to see that under ‘Rank or profession’ the superintendent registrar had entered “of Caravan, Toll Gate, Hotel Yard.” I had initially overlooked this detail but now that I knew Mary Ann was Frederick England’s grandmother, the fact that she had been living in a caravan immediately called to mind Frederick’s supposed traveller origins. Looking again at his parents’ marriage certificate for further clues I decided to do a Google search for John Ling’s given occupation “general dealer,” and sure enough I found a number of sources which confirmed that the terms ‘dealer’ and general ‘dealer’ were used by Gypsies and travellers in the late 19th Century. This revelation led to many fascinating discoveries about the lives of my traveller ancestors on the Ling side, including a book one of them had published entitled Memories of a Travelling Lifewhich deals with a branch of the family who became successful travelling showmen.
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I will hopefully be returning to the Ling family again soon as theirs is one of the more unusual stories I have uncovered during my research. Before leaving Mary Ann however, there is a postscript to her story which it seems appropriate to include here.
Several years after finding out about Mary Ann and her connection to the famous showmen family the Lings, I decided to check out the National Fairground Archive website to see if they held any records relating to them. Their site contained a fantastic collection of photographs of caravans and rides which various Lings had owned at one time or another, but most exciting of all was the description of a four-generation family photograph in their list of digital media which featured a ‘G’mother Mary A Buxton.’ After viewing the photograph at the archive I was no longer in any doubt that the woman standing next to my great-grandmother Maud in the previous photograph was indeed my great-great grandmother.
L-R: Mary Ann (Hall) Buxton , Isabella Cicely Hobson, Annie Elizabeth (Ling) Hobson, Mary Ann (Hall, Buxton) Ling, c. 1907. Source: Ben Hobson & Others Fairground Pictures, DVD; National Fairground Archive).
The ‘G’mother Mary A Buxton’ identified in the photo above is seated on the far left and her resemblance to the older woman in the previous photo (taken around thirty years later) is undeniable. In addition to Mary Ann, this photo also provided me with my first look at her mother (my great-great-great-grandmother!) Miriam Buxton (née Hall), her daughter Annie Elizabeth Hobson (née Ling) and granddaughter Isabella Cicely Hobson. Finding multi-generational photographs like this is sure a rare treat for family historians. I particularly like how this one captures how women’s fashions were evolving at this time, with Miriam and Mary Ann’s Victorian mourning garb contrasting with Annie and Isabella’s more practical Edwardian look.
Many thanks to the National Fairground Archive for their help during this research.
Like many people, my interest in family history began innocuously enough through conversations with my mother about her childhood. I was curious about her family because her father, Frederick England, had died before I was born and naturally I wanted to find out more about his life and the sort of person he was. I was especially intrigued by the tantalising snippets of information I’d heard regarding his ‘exotic’ traveller family and tales of his experiences during World War II. Below I’ll describe some of the family records I came across when researching my maternal grandfather and how these helped me piece together part of his life story
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After acquiring my grandfather’s Africa Star service medal I’d decided to track down his wartime letters. The box said to contain them was so full of old letters, cards and other family records deemed worthy of preservation I initially had difficulty finding them, however eventually I came across a number of photographs of my grandfather in uniform. On the front of one of them was inscribed “Your loving son Frederick,”and on turning it over I found a message he had written to his parents from Bari, Italy in July 1944.
Inscribed photograph of Frederick England, dated July 1944.Reverse of the above.
The date and location both suggested he’d fought in the Italian campaign as well as in North Africa, but the content of the message gave no indication as to his regiment or division. Examining the photograph however I noticed a badge on his right shoulder depicting a white rhinoceros in a black oval which I thought could be a helpful clue.
I ran a Google search for WHITE RHINO ARMY BADGE and among the top results was an item from the Imperial War Museum’s online catalogue (see image below). Clicking on the link revealed a larger image of the badge on my grandfather’s uniform, as well as some accompanying information connecting it to the “1st Armoured Division & 2nd Armoured Brigade,” a tank division of General Montgomery’s 8th Army which was active in North Africa and Italy.
1st Armoured Division & 2nd Armoured Brigade badge (via the Imperial War Museum).
Shortly after this discovery, in the same box I found an envelope containing an old two-page letter which the owner had clearly taken care to preserve. Reading through it I realised to my delight that this was another of Frederick’s wartime letters, only this one was longer and more revealing. In it he discusses his brother “Norman’s safe arrival home” after a period in a German PoW camp, his subsequent frustration at not being able to see him, the progress of Tito’s campaign in Yugoslavia, and at the end he offers his opinion on the recent general election, stating “I don’t know who to be disgusted with, Labour on Con.” In addition to providing an insight into his feelings during an important event in British history, this detail enabled me to pinpoint date of the letter with greater accuracy (i.e. 1945, the year of the general election) as the only date given in the letter was “May 26th.” Finally, the return address provided me with vital information about his rank and regiment (see below).
Detail from Frederick England’s letter, 26 May 1945.
If my interpretation of his handwriting and military abbreviations is correct the first line reads “6983one Tpr F England,” the first part being his service number and the ‘Tpr’ abbreviation before his name stands for trooper, his rank (the cavalry equivalent of a private). This is followed by what looks like ‘A Sqn’ referring the name of his squadron, while ‘9th Lancers’ is the name of his regiment and ‘GMF’ I believe stands for Ground Mobile Force. Using these details I was able to work out exactly where he was and what he was doing throughout the war, including during key events like the Battle of El Alamein, by consulting published regimental histories such as John Bright’s The Ninth Queen’s Royal Lancers 1936–1945.
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The story above illustrates just how much we can find out by digging around in our attics and spare rooms even without the help of Ancestry or findmypast. Family records like these can provide us with all sorts of insights into the lives of those to whom they belonged, and can gradually help us build up a timeline of an individual’s life. For example:
Details of births, marriages and deaths can be found in all sorts of documents, including obviously birth, marriage and death certificates, but also address books and calendars, family bibles and news cuttings.
Family relationships can be inferred from beneficiaries listed in wills, or posed family photographs.
We can work out where our ancestors were and when from seemingly ‘dry’ documents like passports and insurance policies.
Details of occupations, income and war service can be gleaned from obituaries cut out of the local paper, or war medals.
Their appearance of course can be revealed through photographs, passports and driving licenses.
And if we are lucky we may even be able to gain some insight into our ancestors’ inner thoughts and feelings from things like diaries, letters, journals, greeting cards.
In the next post I’ll be looking at how records like these helped me trace my grandfather’s family back a generation and discover his traveling ancestors, the Lings.
Rob's Family History Blog 