Thanks to Kathy in Australia for passing this on:
There’s a hand written inscription on the back of what is clearly a professionally taken photo. It reads: Aunt Louie and Uncle Alf Ellacott, Babbacombe. Father’s sister.
It’s a lovely photo and nice addition to the archive.
Just a quick note to update on the progress tracing James Edwards’ family. We now know that James joined the Metropolitan Police (warrant number 26177) on 25 September 1848 and was transferred to Devonport naval dockyard in 1861 (the Met were the force who policed the royal dockyards, not the local bobbies). He left the police in 1866 under something of a cloud – he was dismissed, but I’ll have to go to Kew to access his records to see why. He was a dairyman when he died in 1881.
We think his son William Henry who was born shortly after arriving in Plymouth, became a coach painter and/or a mason and we think we can trace him in the 1911 census and there’s a possibility he died in 1912 but we can’t as yet be certain. There are too many William Henrys to be sure of anything right now.
John Hodder Edwards, James’s eldest son, was a cabinet maker and was lodging with the Bovey household in St Mary Church after his mother Mary (née Rowe) died in 1890. What became of him after that remains a mystery.
We’ve had better luck tracing their surviving daughter, Elizabeth Kate Edwards. She never married and ended her days in 1932 in domestic service. Her death certificate shows that Alfred E. Ellicott, her cousin, was present at her death, and living only two doors down from her in Babbacombe Road.
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.
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.
