Web of Life

Another big thing for me recently has been some breakthroughs in tracing my family tree...

My maternal Grandfathers side of the family as always been intriguing.  There is mystery there for sure.  My Grandfather was a music critic, but a well loved one.  He was close to making a breakthrough and writing for one of the national newspapers but he died of Hodgkins leaving a fiance, an ex-wife and two children.

He fought in the Second World War in India and he rode a horse and may possibly have been a PoW.  His family was very poor, his Dad dead and he often found himself in a Childrens Home with his brother.  There are hints of abuse while in care.  There are hints of lots of things to be honest but precious few facts.  What is clear though is how respected and loved he was.  Years and years later my uncle visited a pub in the town my Grandfather had worked in, and was recognised as a son of my grandfathers...

So it is unclear, the story of my Great Grandfather Owen Edgar, because most of it is just too recent.  He was a Furnishing Assistant and fought in the First World War and may have died of TB but I have no idea when...  He first appears on a census in 1901 at the age of 8 living with his father William Owen and Annie.  When I was able to find his 1911 census record though, things changed.  The 1911 census lists the length of the marriage and the number of children born to the woman and how many are still alive and dead.  Annie never had any children and had not been married to William Owen long enough to be Owen Edgar's Mother.  A pencil written note on the census record confirmed that this was correct and Annie was not Owen Edgar's Mother.

Now this branch of the family has a common surname and lived in London.  Finding them was impossible because I had no way to separate them from others.  I decided to order Owen Edgar's birth certificate and this gave me an address for them in 1893 and his Mother's maiden name, she was called Kate.

My next step was to find their wedding details and this again was very, very hard.  in 1893, they lived within the bounds of Greater London but in 1892, they were based only a few streets away, but it counted as Middlesex.  It took me hours of searching to find them, but I did and I finally ordered the wedding certificate and received it last weekend.

I already knew that William Owen was a Draper but I discovered his father was called John and worked as a Millwright and that Kate's father was called Edmond L something and was a Schoolmaster.  And I still could not find any of them.

The wedding certificate gave an address for William Owen in 1892, so I decided to hunt through the censuses for that address and see if William or any relative has been living there only a year before.  This took some time as the district had nearly 100 sub-sections and I had to wade through, accompanied by a map of London, to find the right area.  When I did there was no sign of William Owen or Kate, but there was a Walter Thomas.  This was really important, because he appears as a witness on the wedding certificate!

At another dead end, I decided to start a family tree for Walter Thomas and see if it connected at all to either of them.  Walter had several brothers but I paid more attention to his sister Caroline because girls change their names.  Caroline married an Edward Argent and this was really important because William Owen's second wife, Annie, was an Argent too.

On looking at the census's it becomes clear that Caroline was Edward's third wife and that he had had three children with his first wife.  The 1881 census shows the family which includes a daughter Ann and a niece, Kate Davis.  So William Owen married Kate, using one of Kate's Uncle's address, Walter Thomas.  Kate had been brought up by her Aunt Caroline in the house of her cousin by marriage, Ann.  When Kate died, William Owen was married again, but this time to Kate's cousin Ann(ie).  This makes sense...  Annie would have been the perfect person to keep house and care for Owen Edgar.

So Kate was probably an orphan.  I eventually found her both on the 1891 census and the 1871 census, both listing her as being born in Kent, obviously whoever answered the 1881 census in her adopted family was a little fuzzy on exactly where she had been born.

Kate's parents were Edmond Louis and Eliza.  Eliza shared the same surname as Walter Thomas and Caroline (before she was maried) and is obviously the family connection but I have been unable to prove the connection.  Children appear on one census, disappear off the next one and reappear again.  This is a family that was fairly fluid in it's child care because the Father appears to have been bringing them up alone.  I have yet to find any trace of Eliza before her marriage.

Edmond Louis is also an interesting enigma.  He was in his 40s when he had Kate and appears to have led a very full life but discrepancies make it hard to say that I am dealing with one person who did all these things.  Before his marriage he certainly moved around and appears as a visitor and as a lodger on different censuses.  Most censuses list him as English but one suggests he may have been born in Ireland.  It may have been necessary for him to disguise this within the circles he moved in to.

He began as a General Legal Clerk but then became a Photographist working for Nicholas Henneman.  Nicholas Henneman taught Rejlander the photographic process and Rejlander went on to become very important in this field.  At Henneman and Co, Edmund sent out photographic supplies to Fox Talbot, another pioneering Photographer, and the letters accompanying these have surivived and are part of the Fox Talbot online archive.  In the archive he is listed as President of the London Horticultural Society which later became the Royal Horticultural Society.  On the final census before his death, he is listed as a Professor of English and Drawing, which fits with Schoolmaster and also shows a considerable development from Legal Clerk.  If all this is true, then he was quite a man, with wide ranging interests and a great deal of success.  He may not have been the brightest star, with his own wikipedia entry, but he was very likely their contemporary...

Except he died and left a very young Kate who had no access in all likelihood to his social circles following his death.  Living with her much poorer maternal family from such a young age, what friends and connections she would have had, if her father had lived, were considerably reduced, however, she did have a career herself.  I found her in 1891 working at Whiteley's, the worlds first department store.  The staff lived in and worked 17 hour days, six days a week and a huge number of rules they had to live by.  She is listed as a Draper Assistant.

So Kate was a Drapers Assistant in a department store with no fixed address as soon as she married and William Owen was a Draper who required the address of Kate's family in order to get married, before settling in London.  Chances are, they met via Whiteleys.  William Owen either worked there too or he visited the store in a professional capacity.

What I find really interesting about this family is this cycle of self made intellectual men, parents who do not survive to look after their children, children in the care of others.  There is a real link to the creative, to the arts too but they were not the stars, they were the clerks and critics and teachers.  Kate, Owen Edgar and my Grandfather all lost a parent or two in childhood and of these, only Owen Edgar did not fall into care, probably because of Annie Argent.

I don't see this cycle in my branch of the family but I do see it in my Uncle's.  he too is a brilliant intellectual but not a shining star.  He is successful but you are unlikely to hear of him but you would admire his work...  He is a Photographer and a Scientist.  And his wife died leaving my cousins as children.  It seems to me that there is a tangled web of life lessons and karma being unpicked.

I still have a lot of work to do and connections to make, but I think I have the bones of the story.