Hello! My name's Liz Plummer and I have a textile arts blog over at Dreaming Spirals. I have recently got into family history research and so I decided to start a blog about it, talking about my discoveries and journey along the way. Feel free to leave a comment, especially if you are also researching any of the same surnames.
Most of my ancestors lived in Staffordshire and the West Midlands in the UK; a few wandered over from Cheshire and perhaps Shropshire. The main surnames I'm researching are: Docksey, Meredith, Hopkins, Simpson, Cooke, Swetmore, Lunn, Cooper. I'll put a full list further down the sidebar.
Since I visited Walsall Local History Centre a few months ago to try and sort out all my Taylors and Fosters (and subsequently Birds) in Walsall and Darlaston, I have been following Walsall Council’s Twitter feed. A lot of their tweets aren’t really relevant, although they had an interesting 24 hours which they called #Walsall24 (the hashtag on Twitter denotes a collection of tweets which people have tagged with the same ‘title’ so you can follow all of a conversation at once on one topic). In this, the Council tweeted over a 24 hour period telling us what was happening right there and then in the Council (it was over the winter so I can’t now remember what it was, but do remember I found it an interesting insight into the various activities of the local Council over one particular time period.
Over the next week they, in partnership with various other Walsall bodies like the Local History Centre and the Police, are tweeting under the hashtag #Walsall100 . This is what they describe it as (from their webpage):
A pioneering online experiment is set to be staged to help lift the lid on the life of Walsall town centre.
Businesses are set join forces with Walsall Council, Walsall Police and other partners as part of the week long initiative.
The campaign, known as Walsall Town Centre 100, will help tell the story of a thriving and changing town centre.
The event will be launched on Tuesday 17 May 2011 and run until Monday 23 May 2011.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other internet tools will be used.
Councillor Mike Bird, Walsall Council Leader, said: “Walsall is a historic town centre that is a great place to shop, work, live and do business.
“One of it’s names is the town of 100 trades and this is where Walsall 100 comes from.
It sounds interesting: one of my ancestors, Elizabeth Taylor, was running a pub in Green Lane called the Bull’s Head in the 1861 census and several members of her family were miners, and another branch of the family, the Lunns, were locksmiths and hinge makers there. So hopefully by following this Twitter feed I will find out more about the history of the town.
I do think that this is a great imaginative use of a council’s Twitter feed and wish more councils would use Twitter.
After he read my blog posts about William and Hannah Hopkins, my brother Dave kindly sent me a few photos that I didn’t know existed.
This one is my great grandmother Minnie Hopkins in the doorway of one of the greengrocers’ shops. Dave said it was the Market Street, Fenton shop, but I think it might be the one in Church Street (now Christchurch Street) because my mother told me she remembered the arcades outside it, and if you look carefully you can see them reflected in the shop windows, along with some of the buildings opposite.
The following photo is one of the shops in London Road, Stoke, and I think it must be the one at 7 London Road because it says C Hopkins on the window, which would be William and Hannah’s son Charles who was at 7 London Road in the 1901 census.
It is really nice to see photos of the shops – this is the sort of thing which brings family history to life!
I just discovered the British Library’s Sound Recordings archive and spent a couple of happy hours listening to their sound clips. They have a large collection of old voice recordings – try going to the Accents and Dialects section and putting the county of your ancestors in it, and see what comes up! They have other categories too – the oral history section and a large music collection (old country songs and that sort of thing). Definitely worth a visit to make your ancestors’ lives come alive!
To get back to the family profiles, I will now take William’s wife, Hannah, and her immediate family.
Hannah Barlow was born on 16th September 1839 in Fenton, Staffordshire. She was baptised on 6th October 1839 in Fenton, possibly in the parish church of Christchurch as it was erected in 1839 according to Genuki. She was one of 10 children, the third youngest born to Thomas Barlow (1802-1846) and Matilda Challinor (1806-1884). Thomas and Matilda were married on 31 October 1824 at St John’s, Hanley – according to the censuses Matilda was born in Shelton though we haven’t been able to find a baptism for her or know who her parents were. However, there are a family of Challinors living in Tinkers Clough, Shelton in 1851 and 1861, which is where William Hopkins was living in the census before he married Hannah, so I have made a note of them, especially as one was Josiah and another James, the same as two of Hannah’s brothers. We are not sure who the parents of Thomas are either as there are a few possible candidates and as he most inconsiderately died before the 1851 census we don’t know his place of birth.
In 1839 when Matilda was born, they were living in the Lower Lane area of Fenton. Thomas Barlow was noted as being a ‘turner in pots’ in the 1841 census – they were living in High Street, Fenton (part of which was in the Lower Lane area). He and Matilda were both noted as being 35. Hannah’s eldest brother, Joseph, was born and baptised in Hanley but after that they must have moved to Fenton. She had 4 brothers, all J’s – Joseph, Jabez, James and Josiah/Jesse (he appears as both on the censuses) and sisters Mary (x2), Martha Ellen, Myra and Harriet Elizabeth. Her father, Thomas, died in 1846; he left £100 to his wife, but if she married again or died, the money was to be shared like and like between the children. Matilda outlived him by 38 years, but did not marry again. They must have been fairly prosperous as £100 was a lot of money back then, but by the 1851 census Matilda and Hannah were shown as being laundresses so they obviously had to take washing in to make ends meet. They lived next door to Hannah’s brother Joseph and both households had boarders called Challinor – I have traced them in the censuses to Broseley in Shropshire but so far can’t find any definite family link to Matilda and the censuses didn’t say that they were related, although I have found cases in the past of extended family members being classified as boarders.
In the 1861, 1871 and 1881 censuses Matilda was living with her daughter Harriet and her husband, Thomas Jones, a blacksmith, and their family, at first in Market Street, Fenton then in Queen Street, Fenton (now Burnham Street). Thomas was a Welshman from Carmarthen. Queen Street is just off Market Street, so she wasn’t living far away from Hannah, who had the shop in Market Street by 1871.
Anyway, back to Hannah. As I already said, she was married to William Hopkins on 28 December 1857 in St Mark’s, Shelton. She must have been quite a woman, because she had 12 children in 23 years and ran a successful greengrocery business on top of that, setting up many of her children in shops of their own. I get exhausted just thinking of it! She seems to have outlived all her siblings. Her husband, William, died in 1891 and left her everything, provided she did not remarry. In the 1901 census she was still in 58 Market Street, Fenton aged 62, widow, fruit merchant, employer; 3 of her daughters worked in the shop with her. By 1911 she was still in Market Street, aged 70, fruiterer and her granddaughter Mabel Willding was living with her. She filled in the census form herself. The house and shop had 7 rooms.
By the time she signed her will in February 1918 she was living at 223 Frank Street, London Road, Stoke where she had another shop, with her daughter Mary Matilda Parsons. She died on 14 January 1923 at the above address, aged 83, of senility and asthemia. She left over £2,500.
I have been reading a blog created by Vicki Washuk which consists of the diary of her great grandmother Ruby during the London Blitz of World War II. It makes fascinating reading of her day to day activities and thoughts as the events actually happened. Especially compelling as two of her sons are in the war and we share her fears for them and, of course, don’t know the outcome of their war service….
And to complement that, today I found a collection of videos put on YouTube by the London Screen Archive, including these of the blitz.
Google Street View came out for Britain a year or two ago and I had great fun looking up various ancestors’ streets.
I spent a happy few evenings virtually walking round Stoke on Trent, where I grew up, and finding the streets (and possibly the actual houses) various ancestors lived in, with the help of the census records and a webpage on thepotteries.org site which converts old street names in Stoke to their new equivalents. In the 1950s lots of them were changed because the six towns which made up the city of Stoke on Trent had grown up independently and there were lots of duplicate street names, with resultant confusion. Lots of High Streets, Albert Streets, Church Streets, etc!
Here are a few of the streets in Fenton, not far from where I lived until I was 11. Fenton is the town that the 19th century novelist Arnold Bennett, in his novels about the Potteries, missed out: the residents never forgave him for the omission.
This is Berdmore Street where my great grandmother, Minnie Simpson, was living before she was married:
John Swetnam, my 1st cousin 4x removed, lived somewhere in this street in 1871:
The husband of the half sister of my great great grandmother, Sarah Swetnam, lived in this house (that is, if the numbering hasn’t changed) in Heron Street in 1901 (sadly Sarah died in 1883 but several of my first cousins 3x removed were there.)
William Brown, my second cousins 3x removed, lived in this street in 1891; then it was Peel Street, now Ramsey Street. He was a mineral water carter.
Hope you enjoyed this little tour round one of the Potteries towns!
