Julia Bridget Hayes – ikonographer

Our daughter Bridget the ikonographer has set up a web page to display her
ikons.

She has been painting ikons for several years now, and is using them to
finance her studies in Greece (she is studying for a doctorate in theology at
Athens University).

Canadian Growden family redux

It’s nearly three years since I wrote to several members of the Growden family in Canada, asking about the history of their branch of the family, but haven’t had any replies. It seems that none of them are interested in the family history.

I have managed to find a bit more from public records, like censuses and so on.

James Growden, who was born in Bodmin, Cornwall, England, emigrated to Canada in 1857 at the age of 20. He was my great grandfather’s first cousin. He married Harriet Baldwin and settled in Lindsay, Ontario, where he worked as a bricklayer.

They had five sons and three daughters, and several of their children married and had children of their own. One of the daughters, Florence, married a William McKay.

I hope any Ontario Growdens who read this will get in touch — we are probably related, and it would be good to share family information.

Tombstone Tuesday: Greenaways in Blisland

William Ead Greenaway

Our Greenaway family came from Blisland and St Breward in Cornwall, England, so when we visited Cornwall on 5 May 2005 we took photos of any Greenaway tombstones we saw, whether or not we knew if they were related.

This one was in Blisland churchyard. We don’t know if William Ead Greenaway was related to us… yet. But if anyone who was related to him sees this, please get in touch!

My great great grandfather was Richard Greenaway, born in Blisland in 1817. He married Mary Ann Tilly (or Tilley) in St Breward in 1842 and they had seven children, two of whom are known to have died young.

Their eldest daughter, Elizabeth Greenaway (1842-1927), married William Matthew Growden, and they came to the Cape Colony in the mid-1870s. Elizabeth’s younger brother William Greenaway (1848-1912) also came to South Africa.

Blisland Church, 5 May 2005

We do know a little more about William Ead Greenaway, though. From the parish registers we know that he married Bessie Long on 11 June 1898, and that his father was George Greenaway, and they were both teenagers when they married.

In an earlier period the parish priest appears to have had the fixed idea that Greenaway should be spelt “Greenway”, and entered their names in the register with that spelling, even though, when they could write, they signed the register as “Greenaway”.

What are you looking for here?

What are people looking for when they visit this blog?

According to the statistics people used the following search engine terms to find their way here:

Search	Views
dead at my age	37
mysterious names	31
emily growden	25
family history blog	15
greene family history	14
deadatmyage.com	13
freecen	13
greene family crest	9
beningfield history	9
greene family australia	9
greene family	8
interesting children	8
hayes family tree	8
mollie gillen	7
thomas growdon death	6
josephine tsegaye	6
hayes history	6
hayes family history	6
beningfield family	6
edward lister green	6
geni.com scam	6
brenda hundermark	6
saundercock	6
www.deadatmyage.com	6
stellawood cemetery durban	6
joseph theodore chelin	5
red cross records	5
red cross war records geneva	5
green family wikipedia	5
greene family tree	5
history of beningfield	5
cade hannan	5
family history blogs	5
ogilvie family tree	5
huguenot bettac	5
family reunion sugar grove pa	5

Some of those are fairly general, and people may have found other sites through the search term that were more interesting or useful to them.

But there are some that I wish had left a message and introduced themselves, when their search term was the name of a specific person in our family tree.

Josephine Tsegaye, for example, is my fifth cousin, so it would be nice if anyone who was looking for her had left a comment to say if they were related or not, and if she was the person they were looking for.

Joseph Theodore Chelin was my wife’s grandmother’s first husband. It would be nice to know if he was the one they were looking for, or if it was someone else of the same name.

Edward Lister Green was my wife’s great great grandfather’s brother, and we are in touch with some of his descendants, and would like to make contact with more. If would have been nice if people left a comment to say if they had found what they were looking for or not — well in his case, perhaps some did, because we have had some comments from that side of the family.

But we have quite a bit more information on some families than is posted on the blog, and if people are related and genuinely want to make contact, we would gladly share it with them.

Calling all Growdens

Here’s a call to all members of the Growden / Growdon family to help us find links between our families.

If you go to the Growden discussion forum you can find a database where we are trying to collect Growden links.

If you have any Growdons or Growdens in your family, please try to enter at least one parent-child link in the database. If you don’t want to enter your own information there because of privacy concerns, please at least add some dead relatives.

Tim Growden, on the Growden Group on Facebook, recently asked: “Is there a chance that we could figure out some sort of family tree, i know my dad would appreciate it”.

Well, here is a way to figure out some sort of family tree — if every Growden/Growdon contributes to the database.

I’m doing a one-name study on Growden/Growdon, and I hope to link the major family branches together before I die.

You will have to join the forum before you can see the database or add to it. If you are already a member of the forum, you can see the database here.

Geni.com — a flawed site

I was doing an internet search for Growden / Growdon families, on which I’m doing a one-name study in the hope of being able to link the different branches together.

I came across a reference to a Nancy Growden, in a family tree on a site called Geni.com.

I wanted to contact the person who posted the tree, but the only way I could do that was by actually becoming a member of Geni.com. It seemed easy enough to join, and looked quite interesting so I thought I might as well join and see what it was like.

But I had let myself in for a frustrating couple of days.

The registration asked me to upload a GEDCOM file, so I did.

It then asked me to identify myself on the GEDCOM file I had just uploaded by choosing my name from a list.

The choices on the list were the wrong person, or an undefined person.

But by the time it had finally assimilated the GEDCOM file it had me as the wrong person — my wife’s 5-great grandfather, born in 1640. Then began a frustrating search through help and faq files to find out how to correct this. But since I couldn’t find myself on the tree I had just uploaded, there wouldn’t be much point in trying to correct it anyway.

Eventually I decided to delete the entire thing, and try again, registering from scratch, uploading the GEDCOM file again, and waiting a few hours for it to be assimilated.

But the same thing happened, only this time it identified me as my second cousin once removed.

I decided to waste no more time on it, and delete the account for the second time.

But then I saw the message saying that I could ask for assistance in correcting the problem.

Well, I tried that, and then came the real kicker. In order to ask for help to find out how to correct the errors their clunky and faulty program had made, I would need to sign up for a “premium” account at $9.95 a month. Now that sounds like a scam. Offer someone something free, but broken. Then when they discover it’s broken and are about to toss it, offer to fix it if they agree to pay an exorbitant monthly fee! There’s chutzpah for you!

If I try something free, and it works well, and I use it a lot, I’ll consider paying for it. That’s the shareware principle. I’ve done that with two genealogy programs I use all the time — Family History System and Legacy. I used the free version of each for a couple of years, and decided I was going to go on using them, so I sent the money. But that was after I had used them and was satisfied that they worked well.

But when, like Geni.com, they ask money for something that I’ve discovered works badly from the get-go, thanks but no thanks!

And if they’ve tried one scam, maybe they’ll try two — I hope that when I closed my account they deleted my GEDCOM file and the information they imported from it into their database, but perhaps they are the kind of unscrupulous people who will keep that information and then try to sell it to someone else.

William Park of Bath, Belfast and Quebec

My great-great grandmother was Matilda Park (1828-1881). She was born in Belfast, Ireland, and married Richard Vause in Bath, Somerset, England, in 1852 and they emigrated to Natal in the following month.

Richard Vause was born in Hull, and grew up there, and so one of the mysteries of our family history is how he met and married a girl who lived in Bath. He did work in shipping for a while, and that may have led him to travel, but Bath was not exactly a major port.

Matilda was the youngest daughter of William Park (c1780-1844) and Mary Martin (c1784-1851).Her death announcement in The Times (Jun 17, 1881) reads:

On the 12th May, at her residence, Bellevue, aged 52, deeply lamented,
MATILDA, the much-loved wife of RICHARD VAUSE, of Robinson, Vause, and Co.,
Durban, Natal, youngest daughter of the late William Park, Esq., of Bath,
Somersetshire (formerly of Belfast and Quebec, Canada), and granddaughter of
the late John Martin, Esq., of Messrs. John Martin and Co., Belfast,
Ireland. Friends at a distance will kindly accept this intimation.

Also in The Times (Mar 5, 1855) appears this death announcement:

On the 1st inst., in his 35th year, Samuel Martin Harrison, Esq., youngest
son of the late John Knox Harrison, Esq., and grandson of the late John
Martin, Esq., of Belfast.

So Samuel Martin Harrison was possibly a first cousin of Matilda Park, and John Knox Harrison may have married a sister of Mary Martin.

Mary Martin is described as the daughter of John Martin of John Martin & Co, Belfast.

Matilda Park and Richard Vause were married in a double wedding ceremony, along with Matilda’s sister Octavia. The Bath Herald of 10 Jan 1852 carried the following marriage announcement

Jan. 6, at St Saviour’s, in this city, by the Rev. Dr. Stamer, Rector, Frederick Robert Hawkins, esq., of Trowbridge, to Octavia, daughter of the late William Park, esq., of Belfast.
At the same time Richard Vause, esq., of Hull, to Matilda also daughter of the late William Park esq., of Belfast.

The name Octavia could imply that she was the eighth child in the family (making Matilda the ninth), and there were certainly other siblings.

A death announcement in the Natal Mercury reports that Annie G. Barrett (born Park) sister of Matilda Vause died 19 Aug 1871 New York, aged 52. Another death announcement in the Natal Mercury noted that Alice Bruce, wife of John Bruce of the Surveyor General’s Department, niece of Matilda Vause (born Park) died 21 MAR 1877 at Rosehill, Port Louis, Mauritius aged 28. Another announcement in the same paper noted that William Bruce of the Storekeeper General’s Department died at Port Louis, Mauritius on 3 June 1885, and that he was a nephew of Matilda Vause.

A marriage register entry shows that Margaret Martin Park married James Drake in Bath in 1848.

I’m interested in finding out more about William Park, and his connections with Belfast and Quebec. There is some more about him on our family Wiki pages. We’d also like to know more about his children, and descendants of his other children, and more about the Martin family of Belfast. There is more information about Matilda Park and her husband Richard Vause here.

Genealogy bloggers group

I’ve started a Genealogy Bloggers group on Blog Catalog, and invite people who blog regularly about genealogy and family history to visit it and consider joining it.

It provides a discussion forum, and also a place where genealogy bloggers can be seen together, which makes it easier to find each other’s blogs.

Blogging on obits

Newspaper obituaries are not nearly as common as they used to be. Only the justly famous and celebrities seem to get obits nowadays.

But the Washington Post wants to know what people think makes a good obituary blog. Blogging on Obits – Post Mortem -:

These are tough times for traditional journalism even as the digital horizons for a new kind of journalism expand. As writers, we always want our work to be read, whether in print, online, via mobile applications, no matter if people find us by links or searches or Technorati Profile.

We’ve recently ramped up the number of times we post on this blog and we’re curious what you think: Are the blog posts of the past month and half interesting or relevant to you? Would you prefer links to our daily news obituaries? Do you want links to obits from other places? Do you want the ’story behind the obit’ or the weird, irreverent things that happen here? What would you like to see in this blog?

If you have any ideas, go tell em.

Mysterious family and place names

When you start doing family history, sooner or later you come across mysterious names that crop up among family members, and you wonder where they came from and what their significance is.

Barlow-Jones

I was reminded of this when someone asked on the South African genealogy mailing list about the name Barlow-Jones.

I’m researching a family JONES who lived in Ladysmith, Natal.

They lived in a very big, beautiful house named Barlow House/Lodge.

Can anyone help me with history of this house/lodge. ‘Barlow’ played an important part in the family as 4 of their 13 children had Barlow as a second name.

Well we have a Barlow-Jones in our family tree, a Kerry Barlow-Jones who married a third cousin once removed named Beattie, who is related on the Crighton side. The person who asked about Barlow also had a Kerry Barlow-Jones, born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) but on a different date. No known connection between them, but one can’t help thinking that we may discover one one day. But if anyone knows about this name and its connection with the house in Ladysmith, please let us know, and we’ll put you in touch with the enquirer.

Wynn

That reminded me of a couple of other mysterious names in our family.

My grandfather was Percy Hayes, and at some point he began calling himself Percy Wynn Hayes, and he gave all his children Wynn as a middle name, and I got it too, though none of my first cousins on my father’s side did. My father’s death certificate shows his surname as Wynn-Hayes. The mystery is where the Wynn came from.

I’ve found no relatives with that name. When I was 7 we stayed at the Valley Inn, Ingogo, for a month, and it was run by some distant cousins of my father the Bradburys. There were two children there, Gillian who was about my age, and her brother Michael who was a few years older. We knew we were cousins of some sort, but did not know how. The name of the father was Wynn Bradbury, so I thought, when I became interested in family history, that if I found more about him I’d solve the mystery of where the Wynn came from. I looked up his death notice but discovered that he was actually Harry Winston Churchill Bradbury, Win for short, and that it was his wife Sheila (born Cottam) who was the relation. So the mystery of the Wynn remained unsolved, as it does to this day.

An interesting sidelight on this is where Harry Winston Churchill Bradbury got his moniker. There was, of course, a famous British Prime Minister named Winston Spencer Churchhill, though he wasn’t famous when Win Bradbury was born, back in October 1899. But October 1899 was the month the Anglo-Boer War started, and Win Bradbury was born in Ladysmith, which was almost immediately besieged by Boer forces, and Winston S. Churchill was there as a war correspondent, so perhaps he was known to Win Bradbury’s parents. And that brings us back to Ladysmith, where Barlow House was situated.

Esdaile

When thinking of names associated with houses, another name comes to mind: Esdaile.

My wife Val’s maiden surname was Greene, and a couple of generations earlier it was Green. You will find her great great grandfather Fred Green in Pioneers of Rhodesia by Edward C. Tabler, though erroneously recorded as Frederick Joseph Green. He was actually Frederick Thomas Green, but one of his daughters, I think, told Lawrence G Green (no relation) that his name was Joseph. Lawrence G. Green wrote books about African travel, several of which mentioned the Green family, and Fred Green in particular, among them Thunder on the Blaauwberg and Lords of the last frontier.

The Green family came from Canada, and spread all over the world, and
carried with them the legend that Fred Green’s father, William John Green, alias William Goodall Green, was a son of Edward, Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria’s father. Not true, of course, but his mother, Eliza Green (Fred Green’s grandmother), had two illegitimate children, one by William Goodall, a London businessdman, and the other by Marc Pictet, a Swiss army officer.

Eliza Green later married another London businessman, Thomas Esdaile, by whom she had no children, but he became the stepfather to her children by her earlier liaisons. And ever since then, throughout the world, Green descendants have named their houses, farms, and sometimes their children, Esdaile. So in our family history research the name Esdaile is an indicator of a possible relationship, even though there is no blood relationship with Thomas Esdaile.

So sometimes one discovers the story behind mysterious names, and sometimes one doesn’t.