| Cornish Family History Research |
|
|
|
|
Every family as a hero, Bob Richards of Cornwall Family Finders helps us uncover the paragon in your family tree. I have just got back from an excellent weekend event called: One and All. A Festival of Cornishness held at Godolphin House, an elegant manor house near Helston, parts of which date back over 500 years. Although privately owned, it is open most days of the week and, in addition to the normal tours of house and garden, special events are a regular feature of which this One and All event was one. Demonstrations of everything from Cornish wrestling to pasty making, with a fair sprinkling of singing and musical entertainment, were enjoyed by a good crowd on both days. My family history stand attracted a lot of interest, and there were two main themes in the enquiries I received and the people I spoke to throughout the weekend. The first were folk who had done some family history research of their own, with great success in some cases, but who had come to a halt and needed some assistance, which I was happily able to give. The second were those who said: “It is something I have always meant to do,” or: “It is something I want to do when I retire.” It is quite true that a lot of the time we tend to put off to tomorrow what we should do today and researching the family history is no exception, but what are you waiting for? Time? That waits for no man, as we all know. My answer to this batch of folk was simply: “There is never a better time than the present!” In the last edition I talked about beginning with a plan, with the facts you already know, and about taking it one step at a time. I also offered a few suggestions of places to start looking, like census records, parish registers and so on. This time I want to expand a little on that theme and also add a few suggestions on broadening the research, putting some flesh back on the bones of the folk you dig up in the old parish registers. I know a lot of people who have literally hundreds of names and dates in their family tree, but who do not have a clue what they did for a living, how they spent their time or if they had achieved something of particular note during their lifetime. This is the sort of thing I look at as putting flesh on the bones. So, what is available and where can it be found? One of the best ways of expanding knowledge of previous generations is through family wills. These, where they have survived, are a great asset; not necessarily for finding out if there is a small fortune just waiting for you to claim, no, but for seeing how your family lived and what they owned. Wills we normally associate with land and money being handed down from one generation to the next but often they contain much simpler detail, like who should have the ‘best bed and bed linen’, who would have ‘the crockery, pots and pans’. I have seen wills which share a farm between the sons but stipulate that items such as ‘one quart of milk a day’ or ‘a dozen eggs a week’ are to be enjoyed by those who inherit nothing of the land and money. They can tell you often a little about how well the family ‘got on’ together. Normally, father left the majority of the estate to the eldest son, but if the second or third son got the lion’s share, then had perhaps the first son committed some misdemeanour and was lucky to get anything at all? All sorts of things can be read into a will and further investigation can come up with some surprising and worthwhile results. Simpler even than wills are the details you can read into a simple census entry. Not only are name, age and occupation given on census entries, but also places of birth for husband, wife and all the children, except in the 1841 census which simply has ‘y’ for ‘in Cornwall’ and ‘n’ for ‘out of Cornwall’. After that, if the family are all shown as born in the same parish it tells you that they did not move very far; but if there are half a dozen children born in three of four locations around Cornwall, or even beyond, then it can give you a picture of their life and times. They did not move from Camborne to St Cleer just because they wanted a bigger and better house; no, it would be reasonable to speculate that the move was necessitated, for example, by the closing of a mine. There were indeed a lot of folk who moved from the mining areas of west Cornwall to east Cornwall; from Camborne to St Cleer as we have said. The reason? A lot of mines in the Caradon and east Cornwall area went on working longer than a lot in the west of Cornwall. I had a family the other day where the husband was born in Gwennap, the wife in Newcastle, a couple of children there as well, with later children born back in Gwennap. Answer? He went away, married a Cornish girl whose family had already gone north to find work, they stayed there for a few years and then came back ‘home’ to Cornwall. A little bit of social history from one small census entry. Yet what of the individuals themselves, what did they do of note? I often get enquiries from folk who say: “My granny always told me we were related to so and so,” or “Our great grandfather was a hero in a sea rescue”, or other similar tales and family legends. I have a couple in my own family. The first is my late long departed Great Uncle Edgar who we know went to South Africa as a young man to work in the diamond mines when his tin mine here closed. The family rumour was that he came back with a diamond in his pocket. Now, I have hunted high and low for this diamond but never found it. The second, I can prove with parish registers and newspaper cuttings, another great source of information for broadening the family and your knowledge of them. My four times great grandfather, William Richards, married Elizabeth Pascoe in St Just-in-Roseland Church in 1825. The family had lived and worked in the St Mawes and St Just-in-Roseland area for several generations before him, many of them as carpenters and boat builders. He went out on August 10, 1842, with another man named Bickford, to pilot a boat out of the harbour. On the return journey a squall developed, their small boat was overwhelmed and the two were drowned; their bodies washed up later on a small beach just below St. Anthony Head. He is buried in St Just-in-Roseland Churchyard, quite close to the church door, but after the tragedy his family moved across the water to Falmouth; there was no work for his widow in St Just. One of their sons, Michael Richards, became a Falmouth Harbour Pilot and other family members down the generations have also chosen the sea as their career; and Falmouth has been the family home for each subsequent generation, a change of location initially necessitated by tragedy. There are a lot of unsung Cornish heroes out there and a lot of folk who have this little rumour or story in the family about being related to someone famous, or even notorious. I did a research project for a gentleman from London a few months ago who said that his mother had always told him that they were descended from the Carters of Prussia Cove, the notorious smuggling family which included John Carter, the King of Prussia. It turned out that this man’s grandmother was one Violet Carter and although born in Camborne, which is about as far inland as you can get from Prussia Cove, she was the daughter of Thomas Henry Carter who, according to her birth certificate, was a gold miner. Thomas Henry’s father was the link back to Perranuthnoe and the Prussia Cove area, and the Carter smuggling dynasty. The link was confirmed by birth places noted on census data. Links were also found here to the gold mines of California and some of the family turned up in the famous Grass Valley mining area there in the 1880 US census. Another recent project has made the link between a Cornish World reader in Plymouth and the Cornish Preacher, Billy Bray. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, among whose inventions was Limelight, used extensively in theatres and even the Houses of Parliament, was originally from Bude but went in later life to London. He married a second time when his first wife died and descendants of the one child of this second, but failed, marriage still live there, and I was able to make the link for them back to the Man of Bude. The Wynn family of Wynn’s Hotel, Falmouth, the famous early 19th century Coaching Inn, were originally from out of Cornwall but made their name here, not only in the hotel business but also for being the first to provide a commercial gas supply in Falmouth. One of their sons, John Land Wynn, went with Commander Parry on two of his Arctic expeditions to try and find the legendary Northwest Passage around the top of Canada as a trade route to India. He came back after spending a whole winter trapped in the Arctic ice and was promoted Naval Commander for his services. He spent the remainder of his career mainly in shore jobs in the Packet Service in Falmouth, Northern Ireland and Scotland, where he was Superintendent of the Portpatrick to Donaghadee Packet service, a forerunner to the modern Stranraer to Larne ferry service. Sammy Wroath, RAF test pilot before the Second World War, and Edith Cavell, First World War heroine, both have tentative Cornish connections, investigations into which are ongoing. So where are your family heroes? They are there, waiting to be found, if you can find the clues and expand your family tree beyond a list of names and dates. When you do find them, let us know here at Cornish World and I am sure we can make mention of them in future issues. Happy hunting. Bob Richards, Cornwall Family Finders, bobr.stkilda@btopenworld.com |