Linking the Growdens

When we started researching our family history more than 40 years ago, one of the things we soon discovered about the Growdon or Growden family was that everyone said they came from Cornwall, and that they were all related. Louise Deragowski of New Orleans, one of the first Growden researchers we made contact with, quoted another relative as saying that “they lived so close, they traded roosters”.

My mother was Ella Growdon, and her father George Growdon came from Cornwall in 1876 at the age of three, when his father, William Matthew Growden, came to work in the Cape Government Railways, building the rail line inland from East London. We soon traced his ancestry though is father Matthew Growden, and his father William Growden, who married Elizabeth Saundercock, and there we were stuck. It took a couple of years to be fairly certain my my relationship with Louise Deragowski (she was my 4th cousin). She was in contact with lots of others, including Sylvia Reebel, who researched the Pennsylvania Growdens, and we all owe a great debt to those two, because much of what we know comes from them, though they never did manage to discover how they were related.

We discovered some other Growden families, who came from the same area of Cornwall, but no links between them. We made a Growdon family web page, and invited members of the various Growden families to help us find the links between them. Then Marguerite Growden, who was originally from Australia, and is now living in Canada, discovered some Growden baptisms in Withiel, Cornwall, that seems to provide the missing links that draw all these families together.

Withiel, Cornwall, where the Growden family lived in the early 18th century.

Laurence Growden married Elizabeth Vanson in Withiel in 1719, and had four children, Laurence, Matthew, Joseph and Elizabeth. Most of the Growden families in the world today are descended from Laurence and Joseph.

Laurence Growden the younger (1721-1787) married Joanna Thomas, and they are the ancestors of the South African, Australian, Canadian, Lancashire, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alaska Growdens,

Joseph Growden (1726-1811) married Grace Jeffery and they are the ancestors of the Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, California, and Yorkshire Growdens.

The exception to this is the New Zealand Growdens, who are descended from Edwin Williams alias Edwin Growden, who was the stepson of Thomas Growden who married Edwin’s mother Charlotte Hawke. Edwin took his stepfather’s name and passed it on to his descendants.

Louisiana Growdens: Arthur Bruce Joseph Growden, Vicki Growden, Lori Growden Murphy, and Thomas Bradley (Brad) Growden at the Southern Yacht Club, 2 June 2013

Some of these links are based on circumstantial evidence, but they seem the most likely explanations of the relationships that we have been able to find.

Grave of George Growden and Ann Maynard, ancestors of the Australian Growdens, in Wallaway, South Australia (click to enlarge).

Marguerite Growden, who found these links, has also written a book on the Australian branch of the Growdens, and so when it comes out a whole lot more people can find it interesting, knowing that she is writing about our cousins. Though some of the other branches of the Growden family have descendants in Australia, most of those bearing the surname Growden are descended from George Growden and Ann Maynard, who emigrated from Cornwall to South Australia in 1864.

Most branches of the family seem to have used the spellings Growden and Growdon interchangeably, and a few earlier records have the spelling Grouden. But most seem to use the Growden spelling. Our South African branch seems to have used the Growdon spelling almost exclusively.

 

 

 

Yooper Greenaways

According to Lois Haglund (my step third cousin-in-law once removed — see her blog here) people who live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the USA are called Yoopers. I’ve just discovered some Greenaway relations who were Yoopers, at least for a while.

My great grandmother was Elizabeth Greenaway who married William Mathew Growdon, and they came to the Cape Colony in the 1870s, where he was a platelayer on the Cape Government Railways. That was just after the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley, and there was a rush to build a railway line from every port to the interior.

Elizabeth Greenaway had an uncle, Thomas Greenaway. who emigrated about the same time to the USA, to Quincy, Houghton County, Michigan. There’s another Quincy in Michigan, so the county name is important, and if you Google for Quincy, Michigan, it will show you the wrong one, in Branch County, right at the other end of the state. In fact it seems that almost every one of the United States has a Quincy, and Michigan has two.

Quincy Mine

What seems to have drawn the Greenaway family to Michigan was the Quincy copper mine.

Thomas Greenaway was born in 1829 in St Breward, Cornwall, where he became a quarry labourer. He married Margaretta Bone in 1851, and, according to the 1900 US Cenus, they had 9 children, of whom only 2 were still alive in 1900. We only have a record of the names of 5 of the children, and one of those died young.

In the 1860s the family moved to Gwennap, Cornwall, where Thomas worked as a tin miner, and in the early 1870s the family emigrated to the USA, and he was a miner at Quincy in the 1880 US Census. In 1880 their daughter Mary (a widow at age 19) was living with them, as was their daughter Maggie (10). Also living in Quincy was their son Richard John Greenaway, who had just married Polly Kinsman, and they were staying with her parents. They were also miners.

It is said that Gwennap produced more emigrants than any other town in Cornwall, and so it is possible that several people emigrated together to Quincy.

The Greenaways did not stay Yoopers for long, however, because by the 1900 census they were in Braceville, Illinois, a coal mining town. Thomas had retired by then, as he is shown on the census with no occupation. His son Richard John was also there, still a miner, with his wife and two adopted daughters.

Unfortunately the 1890 US Census didn’t survive, so we have not been able to see what happened in between. In 1900 their daughter Mary would have been 39; did she marry again? The youngest daughter, Maggie (Elizabeth Margaret) would have been 30 — did she marry and have children? We haven’t been able to find out.

The move to Braceville was perhaps not a wise one, as we can discover from this site.

Braceville thrived until the summer of 1910 when the miners of the Braceville Coal Company went on strike. Fed up with the whole affair, the coal company simply closed and within just a few months the town was all but abandoned leaving behind an opera house, a large frame school and many empty businesses. Of these today, there is no sign other than a few slag heaps along the old highway.

Did the Greenaways stay, or did they move on again? Did they leave any descendants in any of the places where they lived, so that there might be cousins living there today? We don’t know.

 

UK Trip 5 May 2005: Cornwall

Continued from Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.

We had breakfast at 7:00 am, and by 8:00 set off to explore the Bodmin Moor villages where some of my ancestors had lived. We went first to Cardinham, where William Growden and Elizabeth Sandercock had
got married in 1792, and the first of their children were born. Just over the road from the church was the village hall, where they were setting up the polling station for the general election.

Cardinham parish hall, Cornwall, being set up for use as a polling station in the General election, 5 May 2005

Cardinham village on the edge of Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, where the Sandercock family had lived for several generations 5 May 2005

The grass in the churchyard was dewy, but we found a number of tombstones of Sandercock and related families, and took photos of them with the digital camera and also of the interior of the church, where the pews were very ancient indeed, and it was quite a thought that ancestral bums had sat upon those pews.

St Meubred’s Church, Cardinham, where William Growden and Elizabeth Sandercock were married in 1792.

The Sandercock family went quite a way back in Cardinham, but William Growden appeared from nowhere, and we have not been able to find where he was born or who his parents were. You can see more about the church and these families here, and the gravestone of the earliest Sandercocks is here. The church is also known for its Celtic style wheel-headed crosses, which are said to be the oldest in the area.

Celtic-style wheel-headed cross in Cardinham churchyard

If you are reading this because you are interested in family history, and would like to learn more about these families and discuss them with others, you can find a discussion forum for the Growden family here, and one for the Sandercock family here.

Carvings at the end of one of the pews in St Meubred’s Church, Cardinham, where ancestral bums had sat. Each pew seemed to have a different carving.

From Cardinham we drove in to Bodmin, about 6 km away, and bought some more detailed Ordnance Survey maps, and then went to take some photos of the Growden family home at 3 Higher Bore Street, where the Growden family was living in 1861. My great grandfather, William Matthew Growden, was ten years old when they were living there. His father, Matthew Growden, was shown in the census as an agricultural labourer. His mother was Christiana Dyer, originally from Roche in Cornwall.

We also went to Scarlett’s Well, not far away, where my great grandfather, William Matthew Growden, was born in 1851. It was very interesting, as the well was a holy well, reputed to have healing powers.

Scarlett’s Well, Bodmin, Cornwall. 5 May 2005

Next to it was a cottage that could well have been where the family lived, because it was the only dwelling in the vicinity. Though there had been some modern additions, the basic house looked very old, and it also made sense of Matthew Growden’s occupation as a “woodman”, someone who took care of the woods on the land. For more pictures of the area, including the cottage and William Matthew Growdon, see here.

We went on to Penpillick, near Tywardreath, whiere my grandfather, William George Growdon, had been born, and seeing an advertisement for cream teas went to a farmhouse and had some, but like so many other such places, the people were not Cornish, but had moved here from elsewhere a few years ago. They had a nice smooth dog, called Manic Mabel. We took some photos of the parish church in Tywardreath, but did not stay very long, because the family had not lived there very long either. We went to Par to look at the beach, and drove East along the the south Cornwall coast towards Fowey.

South Cornwall coast near Par. 5 May 2005

There was a footpath along the coast, but we did not walk along it, as we did not have enough time. If we ever win the Lotto and can afford to have a return visit it might be fun to do that. We turned inland at Fowey, and drove through Lostwithiel and St Neot. St Neot was where another Growden family had lived, though we have not found any link between it and ours. From there we went past the Dozmary Pool, where King Arthur’s sword was supposed to have been thrown after his death. It did not look much different from the Colliston Lake on the other side of the road.

Dozmary Pool, Cornwall, where King Arthur’s sword is said to have been thrown after his death.

It was lunch time, and we went to Jamaica Inn nearby, but it looked too touristy, and very crowded. It was on the A30, the main road through the area, and it looked as if every passer-by had had the same idea. Instead we went to look at the parish of Temple, where Mary Ann Tilly had come from. She was my great great grandmother, and had married Richard Greenaway of St Breward, and their daughter Elizabeth Greenaway had married William Matthew Growdon.

Temple Church, Cornwall, 5 May 2005.

Temple was a tiny village, but there were lots of cars there, and at first we thought that the entire population had come to vote all at once, but then we saw strangely dressed people, looking like druids or something, though some were dressed as friars or knights in suits of armour. They seemed to be coming up from the church, and it turned out to be a medieval wedding, and we spoke to some of the guests.

Medieval wedding at Temple, Cornwall. 5 May 2005.

We then drove to St Breward, thinking to have lunch at the pub there. We drove across Bodmin Moor from Temple, and the road was on the surface instead of in a sunken lane, so one could see the horizon, and there were ponies that appeared to be wild wandering about on the moor.

Ponies on Bodmin Moor

It was 2:30 by the time we got to St Breward, and they stopped serving food after 2:00 pm, so we went back to Bodmin, to Weaver’s tea room, over the road from the Weaver’s bar where we had eaten the previous evening, and there at last they did have Cornish pasties on the menu. The woman running the place was from North London, however. There don’t seem to be any Cornish people around. She said she worked part time, and lived in Blisland, near where we were staying, and she said there were still some Greenaway families in the village.

Bodmin, Cornwall, 5 May 2005

We walked around the churchyard of St Petroc’s, where all the tombstones had been placed around the
walls, but there were no Growden ones. The church was closed at 3:00 pm. Though it was supposed to be western Ascension Day, there didn’t seem to be any services at any of the churches we had visited. There was a museum with exibits showing the history of Bodmin, and and we went up to The Beacon, a hill with views all around, but the day wasn’t clear enough to see very much. There was also an obelisk, a  memorial to Sir Walter Raleigh, on top of the hill.

St Breward Church and pub. 5 May 2005

We returned to St Breward, and wandered round the churchyard, taking pictures of tombstones, as there were several Greenaway ones, some quite recent, and had supper of sausage egg and chips at the pub, which was quite good. The sausages were real, and not like the bread-filled Walls sausages that were all one could get in England 40 years before.

Val Hayes in St Breward churchyard, 5 May 2005

We went down to Blisland again, and went to the church there, and took more photos in the churchyard, where the old school was being used as a polling station. Then went to the pub which was quite crowded, and had a beer, and were joined by a couple who had been at the medieval wedding at Temple, Martin and Bemi Murphy, and chatted to them for a while. They were originally from Manchester, but now lived at St Ives, where they ran an ice cream van, and they had made most of the costumes for the wedding.

Blisland Parish Church, 5 May 2005

When we got back to Trewint farm we went to bed, and watched TV for a while, when the first election result was announced, which was Sunderland South, which Labour held with a reduced majority.

Continued at Cornwall to Morgannwg, 6 May 2005.

 

Catching up with the Sandercock family

My great great great grandmother was Elizabeth Sandercock (1766-1866) who married William Growden. She was the daughter of Thomas Sandercock and Ann Couch of Cardinham, Cornwall, England. There are various spellings of Sandercock, and Saundercock is also quite a common spelling.

For the last week or so most of my family history activity has been concentrated on the Sandercocks. I thought I’d pretty much done with them a couple of years ago, once the FreeCEN censuses for Cornwall were available almost completely for Cornwall from 1841-1891. But there is always something more, and it kept me busy for quite a few hours, catching up and adding more Sandercock descendants.

There are several different Sandercock families in Cornwall, and the Cardinham Sandercocks seem to be quite distinct from most of the others, which seem to have been mostly from North-Eastern Cornwall. I’ve been more-or-less doing a one-name study of Sandercocks, though concentrating on the Cardinham (sometimes spelt Cardynham) family. That is useful for purposes of elimination, which his becoming increasingly important with the proliferation of wildly inaccurate online family trees, where people happily copy the errors of others into their own family tree, and ad new errors of their own, which are in turn copied by others.

Tombstone Tuesday: Growdon, Queenstown, Eastern Cape

Having just written a blog post about my great grandfather, William Matthew Growdon (or Growden), it seems appropriate to include a closer view of his tombstone in Queenstown Cemetery.

William Matthew Growdon’s grave in Queenstown Cemetery, Eastern Cape

His wife Elizabeth Growdon (born Greenaway) died some 14 years later, and was buried next to him. She was born in St Breward, Cornwall. Her brother William Greenaway also came to South Africa.

Elizabeth Growdon, born Greenaway (1842-1927), Queenstown Cemetery

When we first visited the cemetery in 1975, we found the graves quite easily. We took black & white photos then. In 2011 we visited again, and had some difficulty in finding them. Memory seems to play strange tricks. We took a number of colour photos this time, and also noticed that several of the graves nearby had been vandalised. We took some photos to show the graves in relation to surrounding graves, to make them easier to find next time (if there is a next time).

Queenstown Cemetery, May 2011

 

 

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.

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.

More on connecting Sandercock families

Did you know that Daniel Sandercock is one of the top ten Twitterers in Thailand?

I didn’t, until I read this: Top 10 Twitter Users With Max. Number of Followers From Different Countries though I did a double-take when I discovered that it scored Scotland and the United Kingdom separately. Obviously Scotland’s early release of the guy convicted of the Lockerbie plane bombing seems to have made a bigger impact than anyone suspected.

My concern is slightly different, however — I’m not so much interested in how many people follw Dan Sandercock on Twitter as in how many Sandercocks and people from Sandercock-related families communicate with each other.

I checked through some of my old Sandercock crorrespondence, and found that mail to a lot of people was bouncing. Research web sites that had been set up in the past no longer exist, and it all seems to be sliding into entropy, or oblivion, or something.

So I took the plunge and set up another forum cum website for people from Sandercock and Saundercock and other related families to communicate with each other, and I hope they will. That’s quite a lot of people. All my Growden and Growdon relations, for example, are descended from William Sandercock and Mary Verran of Cardinham in Cornwall. There are lots of Growdens who are not related to Sandercocks, of course, but all my lot are.

So if you have Sandercock (or Saundercock) family links have a look at the new Sandercock family forum, and start communicating. In order to join in fully you will need to explain your Sandercock links — you need to be descended from one, or married to one, or married to a descendant.

Connecting the Sandercock families

I looked at some old files and found a copy of a New Zealand marriage certificate that had been sent by Harvey and Jan Saundercock. It was for William Thomas Sandercock and Elizabeth Harker, who were married in the Wesleyan Church in Pitt Street, Auckland on 12 May 1887. William’s parents were listed as Thomas Sandercock and Elizabeth Smale.

I checked in the records I had recently entered, to see if I could find their family in England, and it seemed that the parents were actually Thomas Sandercock and Ellen (not Elizabeth) Smale of Egloskerry, and managed to get several generations of the family linked. The Egloskerry Sandercocks don’t seem to be related to us, but at least that eliminates their family members from our search. The William Thomas Sandercock in New Zealand had a son Raymond, and if we can find them, his descendants may be interested, so if this is your branch of the Sandercocks, please leave a comment, and I can send you what I have managed to link so far.

Most of the Sandercocks seem to come from north-Eastern Cornwall. There’s quite a big bunch from the St Gennys-Poundstock area, and another from Tintagel. The ones I was looking at today were from Egloskerry. Ours are from Cardinham, with their earliest ancestors being William Sandercock and Mary Verran. There’s a picture of their gravestone in an earlier post in this blog. Several people have been trying to collect them and sort them out into families, including Alan Sandercott in Canada. Maybe in the end we’ll find links between these different groups.

Greenaway and Michell additions

I was looking in search engines for the Greenaway family and came across a new cousin, I think.

My 3 great grandparents were Richard Greenaway and Mary Michell, who lived on Bodmin Moor (mostly in the adjacent villages of Blisland and St Breward). So when I came across a web site that had both names, I looked more closely, and found that Muriel Trendell was indeed researching the same families as me, and had taken my family tree back a couple of generations back on the Michell side, adding Lego and Gelly branches to my family tree, which I had not known about before.

That was quite exciting, and finding new cousins is always interesting. But some family mysteries remain.

Muriel’s web side shows a Caroline Greenaway, born 1814, as a daughter of Richard Greenaway and Mary Michell. There is a Caroline, aged 26, staying with the Greenaway family in St Breward in the 1841 census. That census unfortunately does not show relationships in the household, but it looks as though she was more likely to have been a niece or some other relation. There was also a baby, apparently hers, named Reynold Greenaway. The only likely candidate on Free BMD seems to be a William Reginald Renney Greenaway, born at about the right time.

In the same census and in the same household there are a Thomas, aged 12, and a George, aged 6. Trying to find their families in subsequent censuses and other records is not easy, however. It appears that there were two Thomases born in St Breward about the right time, neither of whom was baptised there.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in these families, and trying to solve some of these mysteries, please get in touch.