Radio silence broken

I haven’t posted anything for two weeks (and the blog views have dried up as a result) and there’s a reason for this – I’ve been busy! Every spare moment that I can spend on genealogy (which is really not much when there are so many other demands on my time) has been spent looking into a family of Edwards’s. Not even my Edwards’s – not directly anyway – those of my second great grand uncle.

Kath got in touch recently and after exchanging some pertinent information (see earlier post) asked if i could look some things up for her so she could draw a line under a particular family. So for the last few days there has been an ever lengthening email trail between me here in the UK and her in Australia. With the two of us rarely awake at the same time it’s been interesting to see what has landed in my inbox of a morning.

The gist of the story is that James Edwards goes to London from Somerset in the late 1840s to become a policeman. He marries Mary Rowe and they have four children (one dies in infancy, another in childhood) before moving to Devonport and having another child. James dies in 1881 and Mary in 1890 from which point the fates of the children (by now young adults) becomes very difficult to trace. We get to the turn of the century ok but then they all seem to disappear and we can find nothing concrete in the censuses of 1901 or 1911, no certain marriages, no deaths to be sure of and they don’t seem to have left the country. It’s puzzling and the sort of challenge that makes us all carry on this genealogy lark.

Fresh leads

I’ve got a lot of new data to sort through!

I think I’ve firmed up James Ellacott born 1665 and there’s a chance that his father was Robert although his birth year of about 1625 makes this 50:50 at the moment, but there are about 150 new Ellacott leads in my notebook now and hopefully a fuller picture will emerge from them. However, who knows when I’ll be able to sit down and go through them‽

A natural death?

It seems that the Ellicott drapery business may have died a natural death. In 1926 when it was being wound up, Alfred was 56 and his sisters Annie and Adela were 59 and 70 respectively. Julia, the family milliner had married in 1911 aged 39 and had probably moved away – her husband Fred Bidwell died in Southampton in 1932. So it looks like the sisters had moved or retired prompting the move to “Ellicott & Son” in 1923 in an attempt to keep it going. The son in question must have been William because as I’ve mentioned before, Ted was in the Seychelles with Cable & Wireless and Stan was an engineer and it is now clear was on a ship bound for Lagos as the business was closing.

William married Peggy Brunsdon, who was from Swindon, in Gloucester in early 1929 and moved to South East London soon after, so it seems likely that his interest in the business had rapidly waned, if he was interested at all. This must have prompted Alfred to close the business and retire. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to discover William’s occupation yet but it looks unlikely to have been drapery.

Ellicott drapers news

I was trawling the newspaper archive (britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), taking advantage of their half price month offer (NOV50), and finally came across this advert from The Western Morning News and Mercury for November 20, 1926.

John Yeo is selling off the drapery stock from a number of businesses including Ellicott and Son. So we have an end date for the business, now we just need a reason.

Ancestor hunting in Devon

Going to Devon to hunt ancestors was an expedition long needed. I had two principal aims; to dig further back in time and discover the earliest generations of Ellicotts that I could, and to discover what happened to A& J Ellicott’s drapers shop in Torquay. We planned an itinerary that would allow a day at the Devon Heritage Centre and a few days exploring the area, including a visit to Farlecombe and Sampford Courtenay.

So, day one:
The heritage centre had plenty of parish records to trawl both in transcript and on microfiche, and I was fairly successful; adding three generations to what I knew and can now look back to the 1660s and a certain James Ellacott in Zeal Monachorum.
There weren’t, however, as many trade directories or business records available as I’d hoped and I was only able to narrow down the timeframe in which to look further. Interestingly, A&J Ellicott became, in about 1925, Ellicott & Son. – interesting because by this time Alfred’s sons were largely elsewhere. Edgar was in the Seychelles, Stan was engineering and heading for Sierra Leone, which leaves William. William got married in Gloucestershire in 1929 and soon after moved to Woolwich, so if he is the “& son” his removal would go some way to explain the business’s disappearance from the 1929 edition. I fear/suspect a trip to Torquay may be required!
All of which leaves a few loose ends but at least I feel that I’ve made good progress and I’ve still got a good amount of fragmentary data to go through.

The next day we went to Newton Abbott market and then tracked down Farlecombe, Uncle Stan’s old farm. The narrow tracks became more recognisable and as we drew up to the farmhouse it was immediately familiar. Thankfully the current occupant was in the yard with her horse and she remembered “Old Mr Ellicott” so we were able to have a quick look round, which was most enjoyable.

On the third afternoon we arrived in Sampford Courtenay, the centre of the area the Ellicott/Ellacott family lived before moving to Torquay. It is a charming village with lots of thatch and picturesque cottages. We found St Andrew’s church and started clambering among the gravestones looking for any Ellacotts we could, uncertain if there were any to find. About half way round, success! there was the grave of Susan, William and their daughter Susan Snell Ellacott. The gravestone was crisp and legible and as far as you can jump for joy in a graveyard, I did. We also spent an interesting few minutes in the church itself, which was an education learning about the Prayerbook Rebellion of 1542.

After all that excitement, I’m working out which part of the country to visit next – possibly the Medway Towns to look for the original Philip!

Aren’t people helpful?

Every so often one’s heart gets warmed.

I’ve just had an email exchange with someone I had been in contact with, briefly, a few years ago. We have a common interest in the Edwards family in Somerset. Anyway, she has basically said ‘here’s a load of information for your tree that I have’ and sent me a summary of the particular family members I’m interested in and a descendant chart for another branch. It’s the sort of help that turns a few disparate facts into a history.

Going to Exeter

I’m off to Devon next week on a well-deserved break. I will also be taking the time to visit the Devon Heritage Centre and am ready to dive into the microfiche, thumb the trade directories and search the archive. Should be a lot of fun! Hopefully I’ll find out more about the drapery business and make some more connections further back in time. Unfortunately some of the local records are being re-shelved and may be unavailable, but by emailing ahead I’ve got a few documents set aside for me by the very helpful Mandy.

The next day we’re going to visit Sampford Courtenay, where the Ellicotts were based until the move to Torquay, and see if we can find some pertinent gravestones in the churchyard.

And relax…

Ellicott progress update

After a few hours sifting through the lists of results from Find My Past and sorting them into trees, I’ve managed to link up the Honeychurch, Winkleigh and Ashreigney lists. There’s still a question mark over some of Richard and Joanna’s later children; whether it’s still the same family as there’s 21 years between the oldest and youngest on the list with parents “Richard and Joan[na]” – not impossible, obviously, but questionable. I’ve put some of the info into Ancestry and got plenty of reassuring green leaf hints, so that’s some sort of confirmation that I’m heading in the right direction.

There’s no obvious link yet to the list of Ellacotts in nearby Hatherleigh, which is the next one to tackle, and there’s still a biggish gap in data for the mid 18th Century making the Sampford Courtenay list still a bit detached.

And they really weren’t very imaginative with names either; Richard, Mary, Elizabeth, Thomas, William and James in abundance.

Onward.

Excitement and frustration

The beauty of the internet age for the genealogist is that new stuff gets digitised all the time. Find my Past recently (I think it was recently) released a whole tranche of Devon parish records and I thought it would be useful to have a poke around them looking for more Ellicotts. Because there seems to have been a substantial period of time when the family, or the name at least, centred around Sampford Courtenay in North Devon, I ran a search for Ellicott* and Sampford with no time restriction and got about 50 results. It was clear from these results that there were four distinct Ellacot family groups in the area at different times; all very good, except they don’t really connect with each other and there’s a noticeable gap in data between 1700-1780.

So I expanded the search to include the communities around Sampford Courtenay, places like Bondleigh, Ashreighney and North Tawton, and got a further 40 results. Some of these tie in with what is already known plus there seems to be a big Ellacott family in Winkleigh in the 1820s but there is still a lot of work to do. This is when genealogy becomes a jigsaw puzzle; I have lots of data but no clear picture. Now is when the fun begins; matching dates, places and people – wish me luck.

*including Ellacott and Ellacot

Tommy Currie

That’s him on the left with one time partner Steve “Nobby” Smith. Tommy was a music hall artiste in the 1930s and 40s and ended up marrying fellow performer, singer Roma Ellis although she was known as Roma Currie long before they officially tied the knot. Although we know a fair amount about his private life, we have very little information about his career; just a couple of reviews mentioning him and Roma in the Smeddle Brothers’ “Blue Pencil Revue” of 1941. On which tour, incidentally, they had a lucky escape when playing the Alexandra Theatre in Hull, the show had not long finished when it got flattened by a German air raid.

There is a story that he toured German cabaret clubs in the 1930s but it might just be a story – there has been a sorry dearth of information so far. So this post is also something of an appeal; if you know anything, or know where we might find out more, please get in touch!

too many philips

a search for ancestors