Tag Archives: Procktor

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.

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Family history, Procktor

William Procktor-poulterer, porkman & cheesemonger

Procktor ancestors

The jobs you see in old census records sound so odd to 21st century ears. Some no longer exist – stay maker, maltster, lime burner – and some have changed so much they’re barely recognizable – tallow chandler (candle maker & dealer), cordwainer (shoe maker), braid picker (selecting & wrapping cord & ribbon), wheelwright (made & repaired wheels).

My 3rd great grandfather, William Procktor, was a poulterer – he sold game and poultry – in the middle of the 19th century in the East End of London – he moved around Stepney & Shoreditch and one of his locations was 58 London Wall, the road along the long gone city walls. His father was a mariner from Bermondsey and his children all moved “up” as best they could and did not follow their father into the business. London was a very different place by the end of William’s life.

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Family history, Forster, Procktor

Procktor, Forster & Owen families blend in pre-WWI Stoke Newington

I usually think of London as “big” – it certainly felt that way when I was a student there in the 1970s. During recent research on my maternal grandparents and their forebears, I plotted homes (using census and electoral rolls) on an old ordnance survey map. Once I realized how short a walk it was from one house to the other, it became apparent that for three families, Stoke Newington was more like a village than part of the capital city of a huge empire.

To keep family stories from becoming too abstract, I’ve included another bow tie chart showing the relatives mentioned in this story – my mother’s parents, her grandparents, and one set of great grandparents. My mother was born in Chingford, Essex – her parents had moved away from Stoke Newington a year or two earlier – but Wynne’s first cousin, Olive Marie Procktor (whose son was a DNA match, leading to unraveling this tangled family connection) was born in Stoke Newington and baptized in the church in which her parents married.

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Family history, Forster, Procktor

Yvonne paints Wynne & Len

Yvonne Forster, my Mum, sketched, painted and drew for most of her life. Some scribbled drawings accompanied her diaries – abstract ideas or objects or decorated letters. This was from a notebook with various rough sketches or watercolors – Mum always preferred communicating with pictures. Some painting was for income – she didn’t do many commissioned portraits, but her graphic design work sometimes included freelance projects (a children’s illustrated guide to crochet stitches is one I still have). I would get watercolor birthday cards until shaking hands and poor eyesight made it too hard (she could still do it but wasn’t happy with the quality). One subject stood out from all others – trees.

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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!

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Family history, Procktor, Theatre

Wild-&-artsy second cousins – William Thomas Procktor’s great grandchildren

Looking into my 2nd great grandfather’s time in Canada in the 1870s, I filled in a few blanks on my family tree on Ancestry. A couple of the names rang a bell as ones my mother had mentioned, but I didn’t know how these people were related to her. I don’t recall ever meeting them, but in researching the family connection, it’s not surprising that my mother knew of them. It’s not clear how well she knew them, but it turned out she and they were second cousins – all three were great grandchildren of William Thomas Procktor who sailed to Canada in search of work in 1870.

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Family history, Forster, Procktor

Emigration charities and “pauperism” in 1870

Yvonne Mary Forster's ancestors
Yvonne Mary Forster’s ancestors

My mother’s stories about her Procktor ancestors, based presumably only on what her mother had told her, told a story of her great grandfather, a cabinetmaker, being a Quaker pioneer who went to Canada, returning to London when her grandfather was 12. It turns out the real story has no connection with Quakers at all (that I can find anyway).

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Family history, Forster

Winifred Adelaide Procktor in Mum’s social history

Winifred Adelaide Procktor 1918
Winifred Adelaide Procktor 1918

I provided an overview of my mother’s social history of her parents for teacher training college in a separate post. This is the detail section for her mother, Winifred Adelaide Procktor. I scanned and converted into text (production note: OCR software is still sadly an almost-success where fixing up errors almost negates the time saved) to improve readability, but the spellings (English versus US) and rather odd sentence structure – more like notes than an essay – I left intact. You’re seeing what my mother turned in – it surprised me to see such ragged work, but possibly she was pushed for time given other coursework.

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Family history, Forster

Mum’s social history of her parents

Yvonne Poulson
Yvonne Poulson

My mother, Yvonne Mary Poulson (née Forster), attended Teacher Training College at Eastbourne College of Education from 1966 to 1968, intending to become a school teacher. She didn’t finish the training – she said managing classroom discipline as a teacher walking with two sticks (or in a wheelchair, which she sometimes used) was impossible for her. As part of the course she completed a social history of her parents. Amazingly – given the number of moves and other upheaval that followed – it didn’t get lost or tossed, and I have inherited it.

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Family history

A base child…

Fore St, Kingsbridge, Devon
Fore St, Kingsbridge, Devon

What a terrible phrase: “A Base Child”. I looked it up to be sure, but it meant what I thought it did – a child born out of wedlock. People use phrases like “born on the wrong side of the blanket” in conversation, but to see the parish curate or vicar write something in the register seemed extraordinarily harsh, especially as the “sin” wasn’t the child’s.

My maternal great-grandmother’s immediate family lived in London, but her parents were both born and brought up in Devon in the Kingsbridge area and have roots going back several generations in Dodbrooke, Charleton and Stoke-Damarel.

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