Category: Research

As a follow up to my previous post on how I got through a brick wall, here’s an account of a will from which it was possible to squeeze some valuable information. Warning: this post is about research techniques and is probably not interesting to anyone except me!

I was able to order a copy of the will of John Richards Burbidge (d. 1873, brother of my GGGG Grandmother Elizabeth Burbidge) directly from the government’s probate service at https://www.gov.uk/search-will-probate. Less than a week after I ordered it, a scanned copy was available for me to download.

While I’m still struggling with many of the open questions from the end of my last post, this will answered many other questions I didn’t know I had yet!

John opens with a bequest to “Louisa Cole daughter of my cousin Ann Cole, ” which intrigued me. Soon after he mentions bequests to his nieces Elizabeth Chapman, Julia Moore and Mary Luning. He also mentions his niece Esther Monger alongside his grandchildren.

This gave me absolute confirmation that all my previous research was correct – among other things, John had to be Elizabeth’s brother if Julia Moore nee Blackburn was his niece.

But I was more excited about “Louisa Cole daughter of my cousin Ann Cole”, since the identity of any cousin of John (b. 1785) would surely provide clues about the family of his mother or father. Would it be possible to figure this out? If Ann Cole was John’s cousin, she would have to have been born one of the following:

• Ann Burbidge (dau of a male sibling of William Burbidge)
• Ann ??? (dau of a female sibling of William Burbidge)
• Ann Richards (dau of a male sibling of Mary Richards)
• or Ann ??? (dau of a female sibling of Mary Richards)

I searched birth records for each of these possibilities but turned up nothing conclusive. It occurred to me that the best way to find them conclusively would be to search for Ann and Louisa Cole in the same house.

findmypast.co.uk has a good search interface customised when you’re in a particular record set. So I searched the 1851 census for Louisa Cole, with Ann (include variant spellings) in the same household.  This brought up 2 or 3 possibilities. I then did the same for 1861. One result stood out:

• An Ann Cole has daughter Louisa Cole living with her, who was born around 1827 in Hampshire.
• Ann was born in Brompton, Kent around 1795
• She has an unmarried sister called Pugh living with her, also born in Brompton, Kent.
• The three are in Ewell near Kingston in 1851 (not far from Surbiton where John was), and then in Brighton in 1861 (this is where John was in 1873 when he died)

At this stage I was still not certain. Both Louisa and Ann were still in Brighton in 1871, and I had inferred from will that perhaps Ann was dead by then (if not, I wondered why John specifically left money to Louisa and not to Ann).

However, a number of factors started to point in the right direction:

• Louisa was born in Emsworth/Warblington – so another connection with John, who lived there in 1841.
• Also Ann’s place of birth was Brompton, Kent, which is right by Chatham, where John’s brother William settled.

I was of course very lucky – since Ann had an unmarried sister living with her, I had her maiden name.  The name was also a familiar one – Ann Pugh had been a witness in Elizabeth Burbidge and William Blackburn’s marriage. I now know this was Elizabeth’s aunt (or her aunt’s daughter).  Armed with the census information, I now had the following baptisms to search for:

• Ann Pugh, daughter of XY Richards or daughter of XY Burbidge, born about 1795 in Brompton, Kent
• Louisa Cole, daughter of Ann Pugh and XX Cole, born about 1830 in Hampshire/Emsworth

Searching on Louisa first, one candidate jumped out.  It’s slightly hard to be definite because the years of birth given in each census varied wildly (although in once case the enumerator has clearly swapped out the ages of the sister and daughter). It appears that both Ann and Louisa are about 5-10 years older than they’ve said they were:

For Ann, there was only one real candidate in the baptism records:

While still speculative, this seemed promising. I then found this marriage:

Ann Pugh married Thomas Cole on 30th Jul 1816 in Alverstoke. It’s not far from Emsworth. It’s probably them, but I’m not too worried about it. What I’m really interested in is Ann’s parentage, so I can confirm how she is the cousin of John Richards Burbidge.  If her father was William James Pugh, that’s quite a distinctive name, which is encouraging.

This left me with the following hypothesis to research:
–  William James Pugh married Ann ??? (Richards or Burbidge I hoped!) some time before Ann Pugh’s birth in 1791.

I was flabbergasted to find the following almost immediately:

Bingo! Thanks to John’s bequest to the daughter of his cousin, I now knew that my 5G grandmother Mary Richards (later Burbidge and Gravatt) had a sister called Ann.  Coupled with a kind message by the writer of the parish record (‘mother from Thorpe, Leic.’), I now had far more to go on when seeking Mary’s baptism.

Sure enough, I was able to find five children, baptised 1757 to 1763, of John Richards and wife Mary in Thorpe Acre, Leicestershire.  The five children were John, Dorothy, Mary, Ann and Elizabeth.

While more proof would be welcome, I’m now satisified I have the correct baptisms. As well as Mary and Ann, I note that the witnesses at Ann’s wedding were Dorothy and Samuel Cole.  

A quick search of the records (here I’m lucky the marriages were happening in London parishes where the records have been preserved) revealed that Samuel Cole married Dorothy Richards in 1782 (with sister Elizabeth as a witness!). While I don’t have absolute proof of this, it appears that Ann Pugh and her husband Thomas Cole were first cousins.

I can now welcome John Richards (senior) and his wife Mary into my direct line of ancestors.  And a quick google of “John Richards” “Thorpe Acre” even brings up what’s almost certainly Mary’s grave at Dishley Churchyard:

2.     Mary wife of John Richards of Thorpe Acre d. 1776 aged 39.  Stone 2 x 4 ft., curved top with border decoration.  Engraver – N. Webster.  Verse: Within this grave a social friend is laid / Who hath the common debt of Nature paid / When living, honest, generous and kind / Now dead, a loss to all friends left behind / But she’s to happy regions wing’d away / Where souls enjoy soft rest and endless day.

While I had to work for it, this was a very pleasing haul from my £10 investment in John Richards Burbidge’s will, and 145 years on, I’m very grateful to him for his generosity to his cousin!

One point for further research: the names ‘King’ and ‘Cave’ come up as middle names.  At a guess, Cave might be William Burbidge’s mother’s maiden name, while ‘King’ might be John Richards’s wife Mary’s maiden name.  I haven’t been able to corroborate either.

Next up – a summary of my (so far forlorn) attempts to track down William Blackburn!

It’s hard to know how probable or improbable this is. Obviously, the number of cousins at this level that I have is rather high. That said, finding print evidence of the two completely separate branches of my family on top of each other seems bizarre.

Genealogical research for me has been a journey in which I’ve developed different skills.

I went through what I expect is a typical process. At first, I’d leap to conclusions about ancestors without having proper proof.  Then as I gained more insight, I’d often return to retrace my steps and remove people and assumptions from my tree if I had no real proof.

At this point, I have a healthy scepticism when it comes to any historical source, whether it’s a parish record, wedding notice, newspaper article or letter (and particularly if it’s in someone else’s tree on Ancestry.com!).

I’ve come across several cast-iron mistakes recently in newspaper articles. Below, the marriage of Richard Jones is mistakenly recorded as being to ‘Anna Maria, daughter of Mr. John Highington of London.  Multiple sources prove that her name was Ann Maria Heighington and her father was not John, but Charles Francis Heighington (who did actually have a brother called John).

And here’s the record of the death of John Cooper’s wife at Alverstone farm:

There’s a problem here though – John’s wife (who did indeed die the Wednesday before) was called Ann, not Jane!

Since mistakes happen, when you find something that looks like a mistake, it’s tempting to write it off as one immediately. But sometimes it’s not a mistake at all, just slightly counter-intuitive. This one puzzled me for some time:

Here, I was using a famous relative (Sir Isaac Wilson) to try and track other relatives, since newspaper references would often boast of the connection. The confusion here is that Sir Isaac’s sister Mary (born c. 1765) married John McWilliams.  Here we had a newspaper report of the death of a Mrs John McWilliams who was born around 1814. To add to the confusion, this seemed to tie my family to the Carnteel McWilliams family, while the known connection was to the Glencull McWilliams family just down the road.

Eventually I was able to see beyond this apparent contradiction and realise that there could have been an additional intermarriage between someone of the next generation. But thanks to the hilariously patriarchal culture of the time, she was listed as Mrs J. McWilliams, so I had few clues as to her identity.

Working back, I looked to known relatives. Sir Isaac’s will lists his 7 siblings with the married names of his sisters.  At this point I got lucky – a search for marriages brought up a familiar name – Clarke.  Just sneaking into civil registration, I was able to establish that a John McWilliams had married a Margaret Clarke in 1845, and that Margaret Clarke was the daughter of Sir Isaac’s sister Elizabeth.  The presence of Adam McCarogher as a witness was additional evidence to tie the wedding to the Wilson family (Adam being a descendent of another of Isaac’s siblings).

In conclusion, you can’t assume things written down are wrong, but you also can’t be sure they’re right.

Fresh from identifying the ancestors of Charles Francis Heighington, I moved across to revisit those of his wife, Anne Maria Whitmore.

All I knew of Anne Maria was that her father was John Whitmore, her mother was Margaret Leake, and that her birth might have been illegitimate (unusually, the last name of the mother is given on her baptism).

Charles and Anne Maria were married in the Church of Creeting All Saints, Suffolk in 1790 (not long before the church collapsed about 10 years later).  By consulting a microfilmed transcription of the parish records at the Church of Latter Day Saints family history centre at the National Archives in Kew, London, I had been able to confirm John’s death in 1795, with his grandson who had died aged 2 buried in the same tomb.

Alas, that was as far as I could get. I could find no birth record for John, and while there were many sets of Whitmore in England at the time, some quite well researched, I had nothing to tie him definitively to any of them.

All I really had was a Shropshire connection. In spite of the wedding and burial in Suffolk, Ann Maria had been born in Wellington, Shropshire.

Buoyed by my Canada drug superstore coupon code, I did a Google search for “John Whitmore” “Creeting”. I reasoned that any page with this combination of exact phrases was likely to be relevant (although in practice this argument is negated slightly by the presence of many ‘catch-all’ sites on the internet that are set up by spammers expressly to intercept any search).

This time I got lucky. Within the first few results was an article about the Whitmores of Ludston, Salop that was published around 1900.  This is a thorough history of this particular family of Whitmores, piecing together information from parish records and other sources.  It was not long before I came upon the relevant passage:

This was definitely my John, so this pointed to a few things:

• John might have been born in London (previously I hadn’t known whether to look in Shropshire or Suffolk)
• His father was George, of Saint Bartholomew the Less.

Some research quickly brought up a will, from 1754, in which both John and his sister Henrietta were named.  It also confirmed George as a Chemist by trade. Armed with this information, I was able to do some more searches that brought up some other interesting documents:

• As well as being a chemist, George was a member of the Merchant Taylors in London (an Ancestry search then uncovered the original document admitting him) [incidentally, my other ancestor Isaac Grey, into whose family George’s great grand-daughter would marry, was also in the Merchant Taylors, serving as third warden in 1679]
• In 1759, John was married to Anne, and George’s will from 1754 had specified that if John or Anne died, there would be an adjustment in how the inheritance was split.
• The collection was part of a bundle to do with the Eyton family, part of the Shropshire gentry
• A bundle of letters (partially transcribed), correspondence between John’s niece Frances Mabel Sparrow (daughter of his sister Henrietta) and his daughter Henrietta.
• The will of Mabell Whitmore, widow

The upshot of all this is that I was able to figure out that George Whitmore’s wife, John’s mother, was Mabell Eyton.  This opens out another set of ancestors going back quite some time, long documented.

I was even able to get an original copy of the Parish record showing John’s birth, and those of three siblings, two of whom died young.  One of these also revealed that George and Mabell resided at Little Britain in the City of London.

And as for John, it would appear that he had a daughter Henrietta with his wife Anne, who then died. He then started another family with Margaret, but may not have married her (perhaps for reasons to do with inheritance). This is from a letter dated 1795 not long after John’s death:

“… if you would not think it a strange question I long to enquire whether or not you suppose my Uncle and the person now stiled Mrs. Whitmore were ever married, I have forborn asking the question during his Life least it sho’d be supposed it might have affected him with respect to the payment of his annuity…” H. is to assure Mr. Pennington that F. will be happy to settle his demands upon her on H’s account and asks for a copy of her mother’s settlement beforehand. Is Mrs. W. so called H’s guest at present? and is her daughter in such a situation as to be able to receive her or afford her any assistance? There is not a family in the village where the children are not ill of measles or chickenpox – she hopes H’s children have escaped.
1. It appears from this letter that H’s father John Whitmore (F’s only uncle on her mother’s side) had after the death of his wife Anne produced a second family by an irregular union. Presumably “Mr T.Whitmore” is a son of this union. The annuity paid to H’s father for life has been mentioned before (665/5953) and will be again (665/5963). In the next letter “my Uncle’s poor children” have been kindly remembered by Mr Boone (665/5959). Mr T.Whitmore’s visit to F. in Dec ember 1796 is described (665/5962). His mother and sister are then in distress and not on good terms with H. See also 665/5963. By 1802, they are “well situated, however (665/5973)
From the whole tone of this letter, it does not seem as though Uncle Whitmore were greatly mourned, either by F. or by his daughter (unless a letter of condolence should have been sent between April and June, and not survived). H. is said to have “recovered”, from any shock.

To be continued!  In the meantime we have three or four new generations of Whitmore. To trace it back:

• My grandmother’s father was John Victor Charles Jones (b. 1874)
• John’s father was Charles Richard Jones (b. 1828)
• Charles’s father was Richard Jones (b. circa 1798), who married Ann Maria Heighington (b. 1798)
• Ann Maria Heighington’s mother was Ann Maria Whitmore (b. circa 1769)
• Ann Maria’s parents were John Whitmore (b. circa 1727) and Margaret Leake (b. circa 1730)
• John Whitmore’s parents were George Whitmore (b. circa 1700) and Mabell Eyton (1703-1771)
• At this point, both George and Mabell’s families can be traced back a few generations via 18th/19th century pedigree charts

The one above indicates that Mabell was the daughter of Rachel Acton and the reverend John Eyton, vicar of Wellington, who in turn was the son of Thomas Eyton.  A Sarah Acton was George Whitmore’s grandmother, so I’m guessing there was some intermarrying within families.

George’s father was John Whitmore, son of the Reverend John Whitmore (who served in Stockton), who was in turn the son of John Whitmore who built Ludstone Hall at Claverley, which still stands today (I’ll have to try and make it up there for the next open day!)

I should also record here that the Shropshire archive letters (written by John Whitmore’s niece Frances Mabel Sparrow) seem to indicate that Margaret, John’s second ‘wife’ and the mother of my ancestor, was a known figure in Wellington, Shropshire – there’s a passage referring to her son Thomas’s possible likeness to her. This therefore points to her being born in or near there. There’s a likely baptism for a Margaret Leake, the daughter of Joshua Leake (who was a Maltster) and wife Margaret, on 27 Sept 1745.  I await evidence that this is really her.  There was another more aristocratic family called ‘Leeke’ nearby, but given the spelling for Margaret is consistently ‘Leake’ or ‘Leak’, and there’s no Margaret in that family of the right age, the baptism above seems more likely.

In addition, I was able to find John’s son Thomas’s wedding, featuring the signature of none other than Anne Maria Heighington (nee Whitmore), who was a witness. Maybe it’s time to start an autograph book!