Entwined Roots

It is at this point, between 1861 and 1871, that we enter the realm of speculation and family stories…

The family story is that William went to America to build a better life for himself and his family (the pottery industry being in a slump at this time), but came back because he missed the children.  In the meantime, in order to make ends meet, Hannah started a greengrocers business from their front room.

I haven’t been able to find any concrete evidence for William’s trip to America, although there are several William Hopkins in passenger records of around the right age.  None are listed as potters though.   If it happened, it must be sometime between 1861 and 1871 because by the 1871 census, they are living at 35 High Street, Fenton, and Hannah is listed as a greengrocer.  The column for occupation is blank by William’s name, although in subsequent censuses it is he who is listed as greengrocer.  However, there is a line running from William’s name to ‘greengrocer’ as if the enumerator realised he had made a mistake and was correcting it.

If he did go, it must have been a fairly short visit because William and Hannah had children regularly every 2 years during that period – Elizabeth in 1863, Hannah in 1865, William in 1867, Mary Matilda in 1869 and my great grandfather, Ephraim Edward in 1871.  I suppose I could narrow down the dates at least to pin down the change of occupation by sending for all the birth certificates but at nearly £10 each it is a bit of a pricey operation!  I did wonder whether, if the America story is true, William’s brother Ephraim went there earlier and he went to look for him or visit him.  Maybe one day we will find out the truth.  He is not listed as a fruiterer/greengrocer in the 1868 Post Office Directory for Staffordshire, although his cousin Charles is listed as a shopkeeper in Well Street, Hanley.

Anyway, the end result was a change of career and a very successful one at that.  William and Hannah had 12 children in total, of whom 2 died in childhood, plus several greengrocers shops in Stoke.  Most of their children ended up running shops of their own or marrying traders of other descriptions.

In the 1881 census they are still at 35 High Street, Fenton; William is 48, a greengrocer.  In Kelly’s Directory he is listed in 1876 and 1884 as trading at 35 High Street and also 221/223 High Street west, Fenton.  In 1889 he is described as a potato dealer on his daughter Hannah’s marriage certificate.  In 1891 they are at 60 Market Street and William is aged 58, fruiterer/greengrocer. 

Their son Charles John was running a greengrocers shop at 7 London Road, Stoke in 1901.   Their daughter Martha Ellen married Samuel Willding in 1889 and in 1891 they were running a greengrocers in Howard Place, Shelton.  By 1911 Samuel is listed as a fruiterer, book dealer and general dealer!   In 1884 their daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Moseley, a butcher in Fenton, then Hanley then Smallthorne. Their daughter Hannah married John Broad, a farmer from Cheshire.  Their son William became a greengrocer in Liverpool Road, Stoke.  Their daughter Mary Matilda helped in the family business and then married Edward Parsons, and in 1911 they were running the Old Eagle Inn in Whitchurch, Shropshire.    My great grandfather Ephraim married Minnie Simpson and they ran a greengrocers in High Street, Fenton.  Their daughter Asenath married John Thomas Davies in 1901 and they ran a shop in Stoke.  Their daughter Matilda Rose married Samuel Higgins, a coal dealer.  And their youngest son George Henry was a fruit dealer in Shelton in 1901, married to Selina Hargreaves, but in 1906 got a ship to New Zealand without her, married someone else and settled in Australia… 

William died on 13 December 1891, aged 59.  He left £227 5sh and 2d plus several properties to his wife Hannah provided she did not remarry.  Hannah lived to be 83 and died in 1923, leaving £2,560. 

The Museum of London has got a free app for Iphones, etc. You can read about it here.

It has a map of London where you can click on different locations to see photos of how they looked in the past and read about them, and if you have an Iphone you can hold the camera up to an actual street in London and it gives you historical information about it. I’ve only got an Ipod Touch so I haven’t tested this part of it but the map bit is great.

You can download it from Itunes by searching for Streetmuseum, or directly via the App Store on your device.

Wonder if other regional archive offices would consider making something similar?

I have been giving some thought to how I want to structure this blog, and I’ve decided for the moment to feature various ancestors – tell their stories – in individual posts.  I have a family tree on Ancestry so if you are reading this and think we have a common ancestor, do leave a comment and let me know.

William Hopkins was one of my maternal great great grandfathers.  He was born on 5 September 1832 in Shelton, Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire and baptised on 06 Jan 1833 in Bethesda Chapel, Albion Street, Shelton (now part of Hanley).  Bethesda Chapel, according to www.thepotteries.org “became the central place of worship of the Methodist New Connexion. The chapel was rebuilt in 1820 to seat 3,000 people and became known as "The Cathedral of the Potteries," a name it has kept to this day.   William’s brothers, however, seem to have been baptised in the local parish churches (Hanley and Stoke) so obviously his parents, Charles and Mary (nee Astbury), were not regular worshippers there.

William must have had a sad childhood.  His father, Charles, died suddenly in 1840 aged only about 30.  So suddenly that the Coroner described it as a Visitation of God.  He was a potter’s ovenman, which meant that he loaded the pottery kilns with the pottery for firing (in large containers called saggars) and emptied them again afterwards.  He had three brothers that we know about, including one who died before he was born; his brother George appears in the 1841 census but died in 1845 aged 10.  His remaining brother, Ephraim, was with him in the 1851 census but we haven’t been able to find any trace of him since.  

In the 1841 census, William is aged 9 living in Back Street, Shelton with his mother and brothers George and Ephraim, his father’s brothers Isaac Hopkins recorded as aged 20, an ironstone miner and Thomas Hopkins aged 20, a pottery slipmaker, plus two lodgers, Henry Halfpenny and Samuel Holland both recorded as aged 20.  In 1843 his mother married the lodger Henry Halfpenny and they had a daughter, Mary Ann, but Mary herself died in 1847.  

In 1851 we find William, aged 19, now a potter’s ovenman himself, and his brother Ephraim, aged 13, who is a potter’s mouldrunner.  According to the potteries website, this consisted of running in all weathers from one building to another and placing the newly made ware in rows near a stove for hardening.   They are lodging with their mother’s sister Jane Tinsley, her husband William and their 4 children, Thomas, William, Joseph and Harriet, in Tinker’s Clough, an area of Shelton near Etruria, where the Wedgwood factory was located at that time.

On 28 December 1857, William married Hannah Barlow in St Mark’s, Shelton.  Their witnesses were Josiah Barlow, Hannah’s sister, and Jane Matthews, William’s paternal aunt.  Hannah also came from a family of potters, though she grew up in Fenton, one of the other six towns of the Potteries.  She herself was listed as a potter’s stilt maker in the 1861 census (stilt makers die pressed tall supports for ware after dipping).  In 1858, on the birth of their son Charles, they were still living in Hanley but by the time their daughter Martha Ellen was born in 1860, they had moved to Fenton.  In the 1861 census they were living at 5 High Street, Fenton (north side).  William was listed as aged 27 and a potter’s biscuit oven placer (biscuit is pottery on its first firing, before glazing). 

If you want to know more about the process of firing and the potteries in general, this page is very informative.

However, William and Hannah did not remain in the pottery industry.  In the next decade, their lives changed drastically….

To be continued.

I must make it a New Year’s resolution to get this blog underway properly. In the meantime, I recommend that you check out Spitalfields Life blog, especially if you have ancestors from London. It is a brilliant read every day, featuring very poignant portraits of local characters of the Spitalfields area of London.

The writer introduces his blog in the following terms:

Over the coming days, weeks, months and years, I am going to write every single day and tell you about my life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London. How can I ever describe the exuberant richness and multiplicity of culture in this place to you? This is both my task and my delight.

and fulfils it admirably. It is of particular interest to genealogists as some days he talks about crimes committed in the past, bringing the history of the area to life very vividly with anecdotes and old photographs. It is a blog definitely worth following every day. I haven’t got many London ancestors but I lived there for about 6 years in the 1980s and I love it.

I follow a few family history twitterers, and today one of them alerted me to a great post by Shauna Hicks, a genealogist blogging in Australia – Using Twitter for Genealogy. So now I follow several more! I’m glad of the link, because Shauna’s other blog posts are well worth reading so I’ve subscribed to her blog in Google Reader.

Up to now, I have mostly followed quilters and artists on Twitter so I’ve organised my followers into what Twitter calls Lists and now use a web based site called Seismic to read them. I was using a Firefox addon called Echofon (which used to be Twitterfox) but that doesn’t seem to allow you to read tweets from individual lists (unless I’ve missed something here).