Category Archives: Williams

Family history, Poulson, Williams

Twenty-somethings in Portsmouth in the 1920s

Gamps in a swimming costume
Gamps in a swimming costume

My paternal grandparents married in St. Luke’s Church in Portsea (Portsmouth) in April 1923 after about 3 years of knowing each other. Portsmouth wasn’t a family home for either of them. Gamps and his sister Goggie had left their home in Knottingley, Yorkshire to live with their Aunt Mary in Portsmouth in 1910. In 1913, Goggie went to Chiswick Hospital to train as a nurse; in January 1914 their uncle died. August 4th Britain declared war on Germany and that day my 17-year-old grandfather lied about his age to join the 2nd Hants. Battery; on October 9th he was on his way to India.

Nanny’s family ran a tobacconist in Portsmouth after her father, Ernest Henry Williams, retired from the Army in 1907 – she was born in Malta during one of their overseas tours (two younger brothers were born in Bermuda). Whether they realized it or not, something Gamps & Nanny had in common was having moved around and being apart from most of their families.

I don’t know how they met but had long assumed it was via Gamps’ friendship with fellow bank clerk and cricket fanatic Ernie – Ernie was married to my grandmother’s older sister. Turns out there was a bit more to the story.

Gamps in India (seated, 2nd from right)
Gamps in India (seated, 2nd from right)
Portsmouth Evening News 5 Aug 1914-King needs you
Continue reading Twenty-somethings in Portsmouth in the 1920s →
Family history, Forster, Jenkins, Meredith, Poulson, Procktor, Shepherd, Williams

Families from Faulds to Williams – roadmap to the blog posts

I’m not finished writing family short stories, but there are enough for walking through them to be confusing. My second cousin mused how great it’d be if a Wikipedia-like service could organize all online family stories. It would, but as an interim step I thought I’d try a roadmap/Table of Contents as a start.

WordPress has a search feature – which works well – but that presumes you know what you’re looking for. With the bow tie charts to show family in our three groups and a list of posts about each of the people, I’m hoping content will be easier to navigate.

Continue reading Families from Faulds to Williams – roadmap to the blog posts →
Family history, Williams

Troubles with Shrivells- Brighton ancestors

Shrivell ancestors

I chuckled the first time I heard my paternal great-grandmother’s maiden name – Clara Shrivell. Not a polite thing to do, but she was long dead and my father wasn’t fond of her – described her as the old battle-axe – so my rudeness didn’t start any trouble. The trouble began as I tried to organize the family tree with so many large Shrivell families re-using first names, and living in the same area – Brighton. Before 1841 there was no census to help, and many parish records, most from St. Nicholas Church, are transcript only and missing helpful features like name & profession of father on marriage certificates so you know which Cornelius went with which William (or Thomas, or Robert, or…).

I’ve never met a Shrivell or lived in Brighton. The closest I come is maternal grandparents who retired to Worthing (next town over from Brighton) which we visited many times as children. Legions of retirees taking walks along “the front” – the paved pedestrian path running along the top of the beach – seem in no way connected to the 19th century’s hustle and bustle of bricklayers, ironworkers, watchmakers, servants, fishermen and families crowding the now-demolished cottages near Brighton’s beach. I am intrigued by the stories I’ve turned up about the variety of occupations and types of people. I even found the first example of a relative sentenced to transportation to Australia, along with a mixture of hardworking tradesmen, drunks, petty criminals, one city surveyor and assorted colorful characters.

Continue reading Troubles with Shrivells- Brighton ancestors →
Family history, Williams

John Hewitt Hatfield-watchmaker to surgeon dentist

William Williams bow tie chart

John Hewitt Hatfield is my 3rd great grandfather – his daughter Jane married the brewer William Williams. John was born in Great Wigston – or Wigston Magna – in Leicestershire in 1821 (or thereabouts). His father, John, was a watchmaker from a nearby town, Husband’s Bosworth. Adding another lovely name, John Hewitt’s father died in Kibworth Beauchamp . I think the family may have been non-conformists (i.e. not Church of England) and records of John Hewitt Hatfield’s birth or baptism aren’t available anywhere I can find. Civil registration of births, marriages and deaths only began in 1836, so without a parish record of a baptism, later census records are the only source (and as they’re self reported, they aren’t always reliable).

Economic conditions in the Leicester area were pretty dire at the time, as an excerpt below from the May 1819 Leicester Chronicle points out. I can see why a young man in the late 1830s might head for London to see if he could do better for himself.

Continue reading John Hewitt Hatfield-watchmaker to surgeon dentist →
Family history, Williams

William Williams, brewer

Elberfeld
Elberfeld, William Williams’ birthplace

Other than wondering how one survived childhood with first and last names almost the same, I hadn’t thought much about my 2nd great grandfather, William Williams. I had him in the family tree and knew he was born in 1840 in Elberfeld, Germany, but lived in England as an adult, dying in Forest Hill, London in 1907. I don’t think we have a beer brewer anywhere else in the family tree, but William picked about the best time to get into the beer brewing business as it was booming in England in the mid- to late-1800s. He moved frequently from one beer-brewing town to the next in England and Germany and managed to make a decent living along the way. Not bad given the very rough start he had.

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Family history, Forster, Jenkins, Meredith, Overview, Poulson, Procktor, Williams

Who were those people in the family tree?

I’ve spent many hours combing through records and newspaper articles about ancestors and long-dead relatives, and although there’s much I don’t know, I realized I have lots of thumbnail sketches of where they lived, what sort of work they did and occasionally other snippets of information which I haven’t shared. The more substantial stories – such as interfering in an election in Pontefract – have blog posts, but the smaller details are only in my head. Recently I sent my brothers two bow-tie charts, and one replied that it looked odd as he’d never heard of many of the names. Time to put a little flesh on those bones!

Continue reading Who were those people in the family tree? →
Family history, Williams

Beacon: Amos or Alfred, Charles or Cedric, teacher or tram inspector…

My connection with the Beacon family is limited – my great aunt Maisie was briefly married to Cedric Alfred Beacon (1914-1922).  Cedric and his father – Alfred Beacon, or Amos Beacon, or Dr. A. Beacon, or the “Rev. A. A. Beacon, Ph. D., M.A., etc.” are a puzzling and colorful pair, and I wanted to try and put together their story – or at least an outline of it. I believe that some part of their series of unusual transformations is upheaval that was going on in England at the time – a transformation in how children were educated in Alfred’s case and World War I and its aftermath in Cedric’s.

Cedric’s father Amos leaves you scratching your head. If census records are accurate (and this is all self-reported data, so it’s not always correct), a man who was a schoolmaster and for a while ran his own schools, in later life became a farmer, a green grocer and a timekeeper for a tram car company! How did that transition happen? Continue reading Beacon: Amos or Alfred, Charles or Cedric, teacher or tram inspector… →

Family history, Poulson, Williams

How to avoid jet lag – world travel by boat

Typical Mail & Shipping News column
Typical Mail & Shipping News column – from 1934

Passenger liners were regularly criss-crossing the globe in the early 20th century – the British Empire on which the sun never set was still very much a thing. When you traveled from India to London or Australia to London, you didn’t go directly, either “calling” at a port to transfer mail and goods, or staying a couple of days before continuing the journey.

I started looking at newspaper accounts of voyages when I wanted to know a departure date – passenger lists had the arrival date and the port at which a passenger boarded, but not dates. What I saw was daily coverage of the movements of mail ships, liners and other traffic in newspapers around the UK – not just in the port cities.

Passing the Lizard
Passing the Lizard

These lists stopped around the start of WWIII and were irrelevant thereafter, but provided fascinating insight into both getting or sending a letter or package then, plus the role of local newspapers for practical aspects of daily life, not just politics, sports and “celebrities”.

This world had its own lovely terminology – such as a headline “Ships Passing the Lizard” – and the tables with last times for mailing (to catch an outgoing ship) were massive matrices of places and routes.

Continue reading How to avoid jet lag – world travel by boat →

Family history, Forster, Williams

Picnics are as loose or uptight as you wish

Clara Anne Williams family picnic
Clara Anne Williams family picnic

Some people know how to relax and have fun – and picnics are a wonderful way to do that. Some people bring their tensions and rigidity with them wherever they go, and not even picnics can help! This picnic is Clara Ann Williams  (older woman) with her daughters Maisie (L of Clara), Sis (far L) and Billie (R in a scarf). Her granddaughter Muriel Maisie Beacon is sitting in her Mum’s lap, and if you look carefully, you’ll see there’s a kitten nuzzling with one of the other two women (friends, unidentified). I didn’t notice the kitten initially, but when cleaning up some of the image scratches and flaws, there’s a sleepy kitten nestling! Who takes a tiny kitten on a picnic? Continue reading Picnics are as loose or uptight as you wish →

Family history, Poulson, Williams

Dressing up for a Pierrot dance

Goggie, Nanny & Gamps in Pierrot costumes
Goggie, Nanny & Gamps in Pierrot costumes

My father had commented on this picture of his parents and Auntie Goggie in fancy dress that this was all his mother’s doing – his father just went along because Billie could be very persuasive! I never saw my grandfather in fancy dress and couldn’t imagine the man I knew could ever have permitted his face to be painted with a beauty spot or to be photographed in a costume like that. Yet there was the photo.

It wasn’t hard to imagine other people liking costumes – my mother, father and stepmother were actors – but Gamps…

Continue reading Dressing up for a Pierrot dance →