Kendall and Barnicote families of Cornwall

My great grandfather William Matthew Growden or Growdon (1851-1913) came to the Cape Colony with his family in 1876. They came from Cornwall to work onthe railway from the Eastern Cape to the interior, and several more children were born in the Eastern Cape. He retired to a farm near Bethulie, then sold it and moved to Queenstown, where he was killed when the cart he was driving overturned. Many of his descendants are still in South Africa, while some are now living in Canada, Australia, and even back in the UK.

William Matthew Growdon had two younger brothers and an older sister. One brother, Simeon, died young. The other, Mark Dyer Growdon, married Elizabeth Dymond on 1 Jan 1882 and died the following November. They do not seem to have had any children.

The elder sister, Elizabeth Ann Growden (1849-1871), married Nicholas Kendall, a sailmaker of Mevagissey in Cornwall, and had one daughter, Elizabeth Kendall, before she too died. Nicholas Kendall married another Elizabeth and they then had three more kids (that confused me for a while — I thought all the Kendall kids shown in the 1881 census were related, until I discovered the elder Elizabeth had died).

So Elizabeth Kendall, born about 1870, would have been my closest Growden relative left in Cornwall. She would have been about 6 when her uncle William Matthew Growden and all her cousins departed for the Cape.

And today I discovered that she married William Henry Barnicoat in St Austell, Cornwall, in 1895.

I haven’t yet discovered if they had any children, but I hope they did. See Update below! That opens the possibility of more cousins on  the Growden side of the family that would be closer relatives than all the others left in the UK after William Matthew Growdon left there. All the other Growdens that remained were descended from William Mathew’s uncles. We’ve been in touch with some of them over the years.

I hope that if any descendants of William Henry Barnicoat and Elizabeth Kendall see this, they will get in touch.

There remains one other interesting possibility.

In 1824 a Joseph Growden married a Ginney Barnicote. He was a member of a Growden family of Warleggan and St Neot, and some of the descendants of that branch moved to Sheffield in Yorkshire. Perhaps there’s a link somewhere that will show the connections of both families.

Update 23 Nov 2010

I’ve discovered that William Henry Barnicoat and Elizabeth Kendall had at least two children:

• James Growden Barnicoat (born 1897)
• William Ronald (or Roland) Barnicoat (born 1901)

They were my mother’s second cousins, the only second cousins she had on the Growdon side, and I wonder if she even knew of their existence. She never mentioned them, to my recollection.

Susannah Cottam Kellett

Today I followed the story of someone in my family tree, which struck me as rather sad.

She wasn’t a direct ancestor, she was my second coursin three times removed, and the story is just a bare outline, gained from the birth, mattiage and death indexes and census records for Lancashire.

She was the eldest daughter of John Cottam of Heaton in Lancashire, and Nancy Kellet of the nearby parish of Heysham. According to the 1871 census, Susanna Cottam was 3 years old, and her younger brother Adam was 1. Her father John was a farmer of 102 acres at Forton in the parish of Garstang.

In the 1881 census the family was still at Forton, Susanna was 13 and listed as a scholar, and her brother Adam was 10, and there were several younger brothers and sisters: Margaret, Ann, Robert and Elizabeth Alice.

In the 1891 census she was no longer with the family, but I could find no trace of her in the census staying anywhere else. She would have been 23 years old, so perhaps she had left home and got married, and was living under another name. The rest of the family had moved to Nether Wyresdale, and there were no farm servants — perhaps the older sons provided the labour on the farm, or perhaps they lived out, and came in to work; at any rate he is listed as an employer. John Cottam’s widowed mother-in-law Margaret Kellet was also staying with them, living on her own means.

In 1901 the family had moved to Preston, and they appeared to have come down in the world. John Cottam was a farm labourer (cattle), working for someone else, as were the older sons. The mother-in-law had gone, probably died. There was another daughter, Nancy, aged 7.

And the oldest daughter was back, aged 33, and a cotton weaver. She was listed as Susanna Kellett, rather than Cottam. And there were two grandchildren: Edith Kellett, aged 9, and Florence Kellett, aged 5, clearly Susanna’s daughters born out of wedlock.

Why was she now listed as Kellett rather than Cottam? Was she an illegitimate daughter John Cottam’s wife had had before they were married, and now that she had illegitimate daughters of her own, was her father distancing himself from her by listing her under her mother’s maiden name?

Part of the answer is revealed in Susannah’s baptism record in St Peter’s Church, Heysham:

Baptism: 20 Oct 1867 St Peter, Heysham, Lancashire, England
Susannah Kellet – [Child] of John Cottam & Nancy Kellet
Abode: Heaton & Heysham Lordsome House
Occupation: Farmers Son & Farmers daughter
Notes: Single Woman
Baptised by: Charles Twemlow Royds Rector
Register: Baptisms 1849 – 1900, Page 41, Entry 322

Jphn Cottam and Nancy Kellet seem to have married soon after Susanna’s birth, and almost immediately after they were married went to live at Forton in the parish of Garstang, where most of the other children were born. She was listed as Susannah Cottam on the next two censuses, perhaps because no one there knew them.

So I wondered what eventually happened to Susanna. Did she marry, either the father of her daughters or someone else, and live happily ever after? Apparently not.

According to the death register she died in about August 1907, at the age of 38. She was listed as Susannah Cottam Kellett. Her elder daughter would have been 15, ans the younger about 10 or 11. I wonder what happened to them. Did their grand parents continue to care for them, or uncles and aunts? And from the bare outline, Susanna seems to have had rather a hard life. There have been lots of single parents beofre and since, including others in my own family. But her story left me feeling a bit sad for her.

Bagot researchers unite

As a result of an earlier post on the Bagot, Cottam and Mashiter families, I’ve now made contact with two other Bagot family researchers, Johnny Marsh in the UK and Bill Geddes in Canada. It seems that we are all descended from John Bagot and Dorothy Mashiter of Lancaster. It’s always good to discover cousins that one didn’t know about before, and especially when they are also interested in the family. We’ve been exchanging information, and each of us had pieces of the puzzle that the others didn’t, and so we all know more than we did before.

More Cottams in Lancashire

When we first started researching our family history 35 years ago, we made rapid progress. Every couple of months we discovered an earlier generation on one or other branch of the family. But then we got stuck. And so it was with the Cottam family. But now we have discovered two new generations going backin as many months. First was my great great great grandfather Richard Cottam — I discovered his parents, John and Mary Cottam, of Oxcliffe Hall in the village of Heaton with Oxcliffe near Lancaster, as described here.

Yesterday Rick Cowey, of the Cottam Connections mailing list, sent me a copy of the 1851 census page for Oxcliffe Hall, showing that John Cottam was born in Kellet in Lancashire. I’d already copied records from the Cottams there (in the parish of Bolton-le-Sands), thanks to the hard work of the Lancashire Online Parish Clerks (OPCs), and so once the link was clear, bang, instant family. John Cottam was clearly the son of Thomas and Isabella Cottam

Baptism: 27 Jul 1777 Holy Trinity, Bolton le Sands, Lancashire, England
John Cottam – Son of Thomas Cottam & Isabel
Abode: N Kellet
Register: Baptisms 1737 – 1812, Page 42, Entry 16
Source: LDS Film 1849647

and it looks as though the Henry Cottam, also found in Heaton with Oxcliffe, who married Alice Edmundson, was probably John’s brother:

Baptism: 7 May 1775 Holy Trinity, Bolton le Sands, Lancashire, England
Henry Cottom – Son of Thos Cottom & [Isabel]
Abode: Nether Kellet
Register: Baptisms 1737 – 1812, Page 39, Entry 19
Source: LDS Film 1849647

Unfortunately Henry decided to annoy future generations of the family by inconsiderately dying in 1848, before the 1851 census, so it isn’t possible to confirm this, but it seems likely.

Then yesterday I went to the Mormon family history library in Johannesburg and looked at the films for Overton, and especially for the period 1800-1812, looking for the baptism of an Isabella Cottam. I had one who had died young — born in 1809, daughter of Henry and Alice Cottam, and she died in 1818 at the age of 9. But there was another one who married a John Bagot, who was a brother of the Margaret Bagot who married Richard Cottam, my ggg grandfather.

There were two films, one the actual register of St Helen’s, Overton, and the other a copy that was sent to St Mary’s, Lancaster, of which St Helen’s was a chapelry, so I compared both. The copy had an Elizabeth Cottam at about the right period , daughter of John and Margaret Cottam, coming immediately after an Isabella Mashiter. I checked the original and found that it was what I was looking for — Isabella Cottam, daughter of John and Mary, only it was very faint, so I had missed it the first time.

So a Cottam brother and sister had married a Bagot brother and sister.

So two Cottam family mysteries were solved on the same day.

Of course it also produces more mysteries. Just as Cottam families suddenly appeared in Heaton-with-Oxcliffe towards the end of the 18th century — and we now know they came from Kellet — so they suddenly appeard in the parish of Bolton-le-Sands in the middle of the 18th century, and apparently came from somewhere else. That’s the thing about family history. You never finish.

Desperately seeking Susan

No, not that Susan!

The one I’m looking for is my great grand aunt, Susan Greenaway, who was born at Lanteglos-by-Camelford in 1844, and yesterday I confirmed the relationship when I found the baptism record for Susanna Greenaway, baptised on 26 January 1845, the daughter of Richard and Mary Ann Greenaway.

I needed the confirmation because I couldn’t find a census where she showed up with the family.

I first found her in the 1851 census, aged 6, where she was listed as the niece of William and Mary Tilley. The 1841 census shows a William and Mary Tilley, children of John. Then Mary Ann Tilly, daughter of John, married Richard Greenaway at St Breward in 1842. So the baptism is pretty convincing evidence that 6-year-old Susan is the daughter of Richard and Mary Ann Greenaway (nee Tilly), and that William Tilley is Mary Ann’s brother.

In the 1861 Susan Greenaway shows up again, but still not with her family. This time she’s a servant with another family.

But there are TWO of them, both shown as born at St Breward!

And FreeBMD shows:

Surname	First name(s)		District	Vol	Page
Births Dec 1843   (>99%)
Greenaway	Susan		Camelford	9	56
Births Mar 1845   (>99%)
GREENAWAY	Susanna		Camelford	9	57

Well, St Breward is in the Camelford Registration District, as is Lanteglos. And by then the rest of the Greenaway family was living at St Breward anyway, so her boss could easily assume that she was born there and tell the census enumerator so.

But that raises another question — if there were two Susans in 1861, where was the other one in 1851?

And in 1871 there were none.

The simplest explanation for that is that the must either have married or died between 1861 and 1871.

But there were no Susan Greenaways who married or died in that time. Nor were there any under the alternative spelling of Greenway.

But there was a Susan Greenway, aged 26, a cook in the household of a Fanny Little at Maker in Cornwall. And this Susan was shown as having been born at Nantaglas, which could be the census enumerator’s interpretation of Lanteglos.

And that is the last sighting of Susan Greenaway.

But there is a follow-up.

In the 1881 census Mary Ann Greenaway, born Tilly, is shown as a widow, aged 63, living at East Stonehouse in Devon. With her are her youngest daughter Rebecca, unmarried, aged 21, and a granddaughter, Ellen L. Chapman, aged 6, born in Bodmin, Cornwall.

Could Susan Greenaway have married a Chapman and lived in Bodmin?

But there’s no sign of such a marriage.

And there’s no sign of an Ellen Chapman, aged 16, in the 1891 census either.

So I’m wondering what happened to them.

Reviving an old history blog

I’ve decided to revive our old family history blog on Blogger.

A couple of years ago I moved everything from there to this blog because there were problems with the Blogger software, which caused a lot of people to move from Blogger to WordPress. I left the old blog there with a link to this one.

Now Blogger has improved, and appears to be stable, so I’ll start using it again.

But there’s not much point in having two identical family history blogs, so I’ll use them for different purposes. WordPress and Blogger have strong points and weak points and one is better for some purposes and the other is better at other things.

So this blog, the WordPress one, I’ll mainly use for the more personal stuff, stories and news of our family and our own family history research. So you will be most likely to find this blog interesting if you are related to us, no matter how distantly. WordPress is better for this kind of thing because it makes it easier to post family photos and give them captions. I’ll also use it as a kind of research log, with news of things we find, and what other members of the family find.

The other blog, the Blogger one, I’ll use for more general stuff — notes and news on genealogical research generally, research resources, local history articles, background pieces, and general historical stuff. It will also include articles on historical method, technique and theory, comments on software for genealogists and family historians and for research generally, and so on. That’s because one of the strengths of Blogger is making links, grabbing stuff from news articles and putting it in a blog post. It also does a much better job of displaying widgets, like the “Recent Readers” from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. WordPress often makes a pig’s ear out of it, and sometimes displays the wrong pictures and so on.

The distinction won’t be absolute — I might still post some of our own family history on the other blog, and more general items here, depending on which blogging platform makes it easiest for a particular post.

The blogrolls on each blog will reflect this division as well. Here the links will be mostly to blogs by other family members, with a few more general links. On the other one, we will link to genealogy blogs that deal with the areas we are interested in — southern Africa, the UK, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and also ones that give more general information about genealogical and historical research.

US President Barack Obama related to all US presidents but one

7th-Grader: Obama, Most US Presidents Related – Central Coast News Story – KSBW The Central Coast:

SALINAS, Calif. — A seventh-grader and her 80-year-old grandfather are allegedly the first people to discover that President Barack Obama is related to all other U.S. presidents except one.

BridgeAnne d’Avignon, who attends Monte Vista Christian School in Watsonville, traced that Obama, and all other U.S. presidents except Martin Van Buren, are related to John ‘Lackland’ Plantagenet, a king of England and signer of the Magna Carta.

Hat-tip to Father Milovan.
BridgeAnne claims that President Obama is her 11th cousin. I wonder what relation he is to the other US presidents.

Brooks of the Isle of Axholme

Not long ago I wrote about the Axholme Ancestry web site, which seems to have some very useful information for people whose ancestors came from that part of the world. The Isle of Axholme is in north-west Lincolnshire, bordering Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.

One of my ancestors from there, John Vause (1747-1823), married an Elizabeth Brooks in Epworth on 4 January 1780. They had four children: Richard, John, Samuel and Sarah. Elizabeth died when Sarah was a couple of months old, and Sarah herself died a few months later.

Since I first visited the site a month ago someone else has added some more information, including the probable parents of Elizabeth Brooks, Samuel and Sarah Brooks. They had a daughter Elizabeth baptised on 6 September 1745, which makes her about the right age, and since the third son and first daughter were named Samuel and Sarah respectively, it seems that Samuel and Sarah (senior) were probably her parents. So that takes another family line another generation back.

Identity theft and family history

One of the families I am interested in is Growden, and so I was interested in this article Identity thieves prey on everyone, advocate stresses | Local News | Cumberland Times-News:

Last week, a LaVale woman arrived home from her vacation in Virginia Beach, Va., to find charges on her credit card from ITunes. She did some further research and discovered other charges from a bank overseas. Somewhere, on her otherwise restful vacation, a thief had stolen her credit card number and made fraudulent charges. The local woman became the latest victim of identity theft. It happened that quickly.

“And that woman was me,” said Desiree Growden, the coordinator of the local Communities Against Senior Exploitation program. A national effort, CASE was launched in 2002 in Denver and introduced to Allegany County through the local state’s attorney’s office in 2009. Growden said the intent of the CASE program is to educate people on the dangers of identity theft.

Actually, “identity theft” is something of a misnomer. The danger here is not so much identity theft, as impersonation, or as it is sometimes called in criminal law, personation. To personate someone is to assume their identity with intent to deceive. To impersonate someone is a more everyday thing, and not necessarily done with criminal intent. So, for example one gets Elvis impersonators. But what is sometimes called “identity theft” is actually, in most cases, personation.

I’ve often read scare stories about “identity theft”, and have found that it is usually a question of simple personation. Someone who has pretended to be you has bought goods in your name, so that the account goes to you. Or they have withdrawn money from your bank account, pretending to be you.

Identity theft is a lot more serious. If someone steals something from you, you no longer have the use of it. If someone steals your car, you can’t drive anywhere, but have to walk. If someone steals your identity, you are no longer you, or at least no one believes you are you. This is the kind of thing that sometimes happens in science fiction or horror stories – a man goes on a journey and returns home to find that someone has stolen his identity, and is living in his house, with his wife, and his children call the stranger “daddy”, and no longer recognise their real father. That is identity theft, and of course it is personation as well. But someone who personates you in order to withdraw money from your bank account has stolen your money, not your identity. You are still you.

But there are scams that involve identity theft, and they were quite common a few years ago. One was when someone personates you to take out a life insurance policy on your life. Then they get a forged death certificate, and claim on the policy. And they might try to do several other things with it. And suddenly, to a lot of people, you are no longer you, because “you” are dead. In that kind of case, your identity really has been stolen, because even if you know who you are, nobody believes you.

But whether it is simple personation, or actual identity theft, it is still nasty, and something one needs to take precautions against.

How does it affect family history?

One example is that went I moved to where I am living now, I opened a bank account at a local bank, and on the application form I had to give my mother’s maiden name. They didn’t say why they wanted it, but I later discovered that if someone came into the bank claiming to be me, the bank would allow them to operate my account if they could tell the bank my mother’s maiden name. Now that was really stupid on the part of the bank. They thought it provided security and would make it harder for scammers to personate their clients. But family historians know the maiden names of most of the mothers in their family, and are anxious to find out the rest. So using the mother’s maiden name as a security question was really stupid. I think the banks have learnt a few lessons since then, and are not quite so naive about it. But if at the time they had told me that that was why they wanted me to put my mother’s maiden name on the application form, I could have told them how stupid it was.

If one is putting a family tree in a public place, like a web site, then most programs that create them allow one to avoid showing full information about living persons, and it is wise to do that, precisely because of the danger of personation.

We have a Growden family internet forum, with a mailing list, and a place to exchange files and photographs and to share information throuigh databases. But it is a “members only” forum. You have to say what your interest in the family is before you can join.

I have sometimes had requests from complete strangers, asking me to send them all the information on the Xxxx family. My response to such requests is to ask how they are linked to that family, and whether they are related, and what their relationship is. If they can show that they actually are related, then I will gladly share family history information with them, but it must be a two-way thing. I won’t give my research unless they are prepared to give me theirs. The ones who simply ask for “all the information” on the Xxxx family” might be naive newbies, who pick a branch of a family that isn’t really theirs, and latch on to it, or else they are scammers looking for information to try to personate someone in the family for criminal purposes. So my rule is, don’t share your family information with people who aren’t prepared to share theirs with you. If you take reasonable precautions like that, you are unlikely to fall victim to personation because of your family history.

The greater danger is phishing, with phony e-mails pretending to be from your bank or something, and asking for your account and password details. I got one like that yesterday.

Dear Customer,
Absa bank technical department will be carrying out a systematic
upgrade on our Network server from 7am today to 5am tomorrow morning to
avoid hackers from accessing your online account.
To take your account through this update process,
Please click on the link below

https://ib.absa.co.za/ib/tvn_upgrade

*Note. Absa Bank will not be responsible for loss of funds to online Phishers
as a result of failure to comply with this new directive.
You will also need to verify your TVN upon request.
Thank You

But hovering the cursor over the URL they asked you to click on showed this:

http://thoughtbroker.com.au/upgrades.absa/absa-banking-update/logonform.do/ibank-login.php

Now why would a South African bank (where I don’t have an account anyway) have an address at a web site called “thoughtbroker.com.au”? That’s a dead giveaway, and it’s as phishy as hell.

And some of the phishers are even more naive, and send their bogus messages from webmail addresses like gmail or yahoo. No reputable bank would send a message from an address like that, though some of the victims of the phishers are apparently even more naive, and fall for that sort of thing.

To get back to family history: be careful, but don’t be paranoid. Within the last month I’ve made contact with four distant cousins, in either my family or my wife’s, because they discovered links either on this blog or on one of our other family web sites. And because we’ve agreed to share information, once we have established the links, we’ve learnt a lot more about hitherto unknown branches of our family, and so have they about theirs. If we’d been over-suspicious, we might have missed a lot.

But a few years ago I had a couple of strange and rather frustrating encounters with over-suspicious family history researchers. One (no names, no pack drill) complained that I had posted information about “their” family (which was mine as well) on the web, and said I ought to have informed them of this, when I hadn’t even known they existed. But they themselves had posted family history queries on all sorts of web sites and magazines, without informing me, and it was in fact through one of the queries that they had posted in a magazine that I had managed to make contact with them at all, and discovered descendants of a branch of the family that connected with mine in the 1830s. They mentioned concerns about identity theft, but posting family details from the 1830s is hardly likely to help identity thieves, and they had posted more than I had. It was rather sad, because by sharing information we could probably both advance our research.

Another example was even more strange and frustrating was correspondence with someone I knew only as “visionir”, and was researching the Stooke family. I mentioned which branch I was interested in, and got this reply:

I have that branch quite straight and have been in contact with the
descendants of the children Mary and Sarah.
The William I am claiming was 7, in Love Street, Clifton in 1851.
His father was Thomas age 38 born Westbury, Salop.

The Mary in question was my great grandmother, Mary Barber Stooke who married William Allen Hayes, and the Sarah was her sister. I didn’t have that branch quite straight, and wasn’t in contact with their descendants, and would dearly love to learn more, but “visionir” wasn’t telling. In that case I don’t think it was oversuspiciousness or malice, but just being rather scatty and disorganised, and assuming that everyone already knew everything that they knew. Eventually I did manage, about 10 messages later, to get out of him/her that Sarah Stooke had married someone called Charlie Parker who kept a pub in Bristol. And I wasn’t able to help “visionir” much because the information he/she gave was too disconnected to make any sense of.

In neither of these cases did the people concerned use computers to keep track of their genealogy, though they did use the Internet to contact others. This led to some weird assumptions. For example the first lot took offence that my genealogy program put my contact address at the bottom of a family group sheet I sent them to show what I had on that branch of the family. They accused me of “claiming” their research. I think that is carrying the hermeneutic of suspicion too far.

New Growden marriage discovery

I’ve found a possible marriage in FreeBMD for Elizabeth Ann Growden (RIN 3976), my great-grandfather’s older sister.

Marriages Mar 1869   (>99%)
GROWDEN     Elizabeth Ann          Bodmin     5c    122
Kendall           Nicholas Dunn     Bodmin     5c    122
PARSONS     Elizabeth                Bodmin     5c    122
Sturtridge          Thomas                Bodmin     5c    122

It seems to be confirmed by FreeCen 1871:

Piece: RG10/2268 Place: Mevagissey -Cornwall Enumeration District: 1
Civil Parish: Mevagissey Ecclesiastical Parish: -
Folio: 13 Page: 18 Schedule: 105

Where her age fits with Elizabeth Ann Growden (b. 1849)

They are in the 1871 Census as Kendall, but in the 1881 Census the spelling is Kendle, which appears to be an enumerator’s or transcriber’s mistake. I could find no trace of them in the 1891 census — perhaps they had moved away, or it hasn’t been fully transcribed yet.

My great-grandfather, William Matthew Growden (he later used the spelling Growdon, as did all his South African descendants) came to the Cape Colony in about 1876 to build the railway line from East London  to the interior.

At the time of the 1861 Census he was living at 3 Higher Bore Street, Bodmin, aged 10, with his father Matthew, aged 61, his mother Christiana, aged 51, his step-brother Thomas Pope, aged 23, his sister Elizabeth Ann (12), and brothers Mark (7) and Simeon (5).

Higher Bore Street, Bodmin, Cornwall (Photo taken 5 May 2005).

His brother Simeon died a couple of years later at the age of 8, and Mark died at the age of 28, within a few months of his marriage to Elizabeth Dymond. So I didn’t expect to find any relatives from that generation, so it was quite exciting to find a possible marriage for great-grand aunt Elizabeth Ann, and they appear to have had four children by the 1881 census, so there are possibly more third cousins just waiting to be discovered!

Not far from Higher Bore Street is Scarlett’s Well, where the family lived at the 1851 census, and I can imagine the children playing in these leafy lanes after school, or helping their father gather wood (which, as a woodman, was how he earned his living).

Near Scarlett's Well, Bodmin