Alsop Family – rowleyregislosthamlets.co.uk

Edward Alsop, of Alsop’s Hill and Alsop’s Quarry, died, aged 78 and was buried at St Giles on 7 September 1860, his abode given in the Burial Register as Blower’s Hill. Does anyone know where this was? I didn’t! And no-one in the local Facebook page knew either when I appealed there. But clearly the name was quite unremarkable to local officials who recorded information in parish Registers, compiled Poll Books and drafted Wills. They must have known where Edward was referring to. But I was puzzled, I had seen nothing to indicate that Edward had moved anywhere else, he appeared to have lived all of his life in the Windmill Farm. But I could not find Blower’s hill on any maps or in any online archives.

So I have been exploring down a little local history and genealogical rabbit hole, trying to find out where Blower’s Hill was.

Blower’s hill

The spelling and punctuation vary slightly but usually the Alsop family appear to have spelled Blower’s with an apostrophe – making Blower’s a possessive adjective. And often they did not capitalise Hill, as if it were just a description of part of the landscape, rather than a defined area.

I considered various issues:

What had this area been called before the Alsops arrived?

First of all, although the land there was known later as Alsop’s Quarry or Alsop’s Hill, it must have been called something before the Alsops came along in the mid-1700s. And it would probably have taken a few years/decades/generations of the family living there before it became associated with their name. Even then, although many records and maps show the land they farmed as Alsop’s Hill or Alsop’s quarry, the family appear always to have called it Blower’s hill.

So perhaps the earlier local descriptive name was ‘Blower’s Hill’, either for the windmill, which was apparently a manorial mill, so long established there.

Or perhaps the land was known by the name of a previous owner, since mostly the Alsops used a possessive apostrophe in the name and it was very common in this area for places to be named after their owners, such as Gadd’s Green, Darby’s Hill, Perry’s Lake, etc, etc.

So – were there any Blower families locally?

I searched all four volumes of the Rowley Parish Registers (1539-1849)for the name Blower and found just one! In 1573. a Thomas Davies married Agnes Blowere. So at some point there was at least one person called Blower or Blowere known of in the parish even if it was 200 years earlier! But when I extended the search on FreeREG to surrounding parishes (including 100 additional places within 7.5 miles) I found that , between 1750 and 1850 there were 314 entries of baptisms, marriages and burials in surrounding parishes. There were Blowers in Harborne, Halesowen, Wombourne, many, many in Penn, others in Oldswinford, Brierley Hill, Dudley, Sedgley, and especially latterly, in Bilston and Wolverhampton. Most of those are on an arc to the west of Dudley, between Harborne and Wolverhampton.

I was especially interested to note the marriage of a Susannah Blower to Joseph Hill at Clent in 1769, Rowley was a chapelry of Clent and quite a lot of Rowley people married there. And, of course, there were lots of the Hill family in the Lost Hamlets. And I also noted the marriage of Letticia Perry to John Blower in Sedgley in 1825 – hmmm, Perry’s Lake/Blower’s Hill, are immediately adjacent to each other in Rowley – interesting, perhaps their families had property interests in common!

So although there were very few Blowers in Rowley Regis in later centuries, there were plenty in adjacent areas.

The Electoral Records

Second: Another important clue lay in the Poll Books. Edward was shown in the 1837 and later Poll Books consistently with a house and land at this address, which was described as Blower’s hill Farm. I found Poll Book entries as early as 1837 – just after electoral reform had been enacted which would have given Edward the right to vote – and all of these identify his only property in Rowley Regis Parish as Blower’s hill farm, which was a house and land occupied, implying it was being farmed.

These voting rights were an important part of political and social reform in 19^th century Britain. There are interesting articles with further information here ( https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/what-caused-the-1832-great-reform-act/ ) and here(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832 ), and on numerous other pages. But it was not universal suffrage, the vote given to all men (and certainly no women!). The right to vote was extended to small landowners, tenant farmers, shopkeepers and all householders who paid a yearly rental of £10 or more. So the holding of property had presumably been checked before being recorded in the Poll Books.

What did the family call it?

Thirdly, at least Edward’s generation of the family were calling it ‘Blower’s hill’, rather than Alsop’s Hill or Windmill Hill, over many years.

Answering my own question!

So I have gone through again all of the records I have found for Edward Alsop, looking carefully at the descriptions in those records.

And, finally, fourthly, looking carefully at the wording of the Probate record for Edward’s Will, shown here, it actually says that he is ‘late of the Mill Farm Blowers-hill in the parish of Rowley Regis.’ And his son Thomas and daughter Rhoda, as executors, are said to be ‘of Blowers-hill aforesaid’.

Which shows, it seems, that Blowers-hill was the name by which the area of land farmed by the Alsops was previously known, and that it and the Mill farm were one and the same place.

Another old Rowley place-name detected and, I believe, placed geographically, at least on my mental map!

Over the last few weeks, I have been doing some of the basic preparation work for more possible family studies, for the Hipkiss and Whittall families. This is going to be a slow painstaking task, as they were quite prolific and, especially for the Whittalls, the spelling variations make this quite challenging. But I have done a lot of searching through censuses and parish records and made pages and pages of notes. And I am nowhere near ready to write either of them up but I needed a break from the Hipkisses and Whitalls!

So I decided to take a temporary diversion and look at something quite different, to give my brain a rest! I decided to look at the farms in the Hamlets in the 1841 census, starting with Windmill Farm at the junction of Hawes Lane and Tippity Green, the Alsops , millers and farmers, newish (by Rowley standards) to the parish, smallish family, no connections to my tree. Very refreshing.

Ibberty or Tippity Mill, Wilson Jones calls it the Manorial Mill and this is presumably the Mill which the Alsops operated. This photograph appears in his book A history of the Black Country and he appears to have taken the photograph himself. There is no indication of when this was taken but the book was published in about 1950. However, the Mill does not appear on the 1902 OS map so perhaps it was a photograph he acquired from someone else.

Copyright and date unknown but I think this map is part of a copy of the map drawn up before 1800 for the Rowley Regis Enclosures. You can see that John Alsop was renting quite a bit of land here which subsequently became Alsop’s quarry. And in the middle at the bottom is a small oblong which has the name J Alsop , the word Mill and a little diagram of a windmill above the word Mill, although almost obscured by the plot number. So this shows where the Alsops were living, milling and farming. The Mill appeared to have an access road, too which has subsequently disappeared, unless, of course, it later became the site of the Club Buildings? The Alsops had arrived in the parish by 1734, possibly as Millers as there are various Alsops in nearby areas who were also millers.

But, as so often happens, when I got started on the Alsops, they turned out to be quite interesting and worthy of a post of their own to my blog (to follow soon!). And as I started to gather information on the children of Edward Alsop, who was the farmer there in 1841, I found that his second son Joseph had married a Sarah Eliza Dingley and was living in 1841 at the bottom of Rowley Village where he was a shopkeeper.

Straightforward enough so far, and I was interested to see the Dingley name, as I was at school with a Geraldine Dingley, back in the 1970s and I hadn’t come across it in other researches. Because Sarah Eliza had given her full name in the Census, I was able to find her marriage easily on FreeREG, she had married Joseph Alsop at Clent in 1832. And, as I could calculate her birth year from later censuses, I found her baptism on 25^th December 1812 at Halesowen. She was the daughter of Ira Dingley (1789-1864) and Elizabeth nee Cooper (1788 -?), the eldest but one, I found, of about ten of their children baptised at Halesowen church. That sounded good, Ira is a relatively unusual name so should be easy to trace. As indeed he was. We will ignore for now that there were at least three more Ira Dingleys to follow in short order, son and grandsons which did complicate sorting them out later. But never mind…

This family all baptised their children at Halesowen, this was before Blackheath St Paul’s was built but they lived in the Hill area of Blackheath, Long Lane, Cocksheds, Gorsty Hill, Malt Mill Lane.

There are clues in these names, I think – Gorsty Hill was probably rough heathland with lots of prickly gorse bushes, the Long Lane really was a long lane leading from Rowley all the way to the King’s Highway at Quinton, there must have been some poultry business at Cocksheds and a brewer’s Malt Mill somewhere in the area – most pubs brewed their own beer but they needed Malt and therefore maltsters.

I was able to find this later Ira’s children William (1810-1842), Sarah Eliza (1812-?), Elisabeth or Betsy (1815-?), Ira (1819-1855), Henry (1822-1885), Paarai (1823-1905), Neri or Nari (1829-?), Edmund (1829-?) and Edward (1830-?). Imagine what it would have been like in that household? Two people called Ira, one called Paarai and one called Nari? Did you shout for me? Recipe for confusion…

I was particularly interested in Nari or Neri, that really is an unusual name. But I do have two other Neris on my family tree – my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfathers were both Neri or Nari Ingley or Hingley – my aunt knew her grandfather and pronounced his name ‘nar-eye’ but he usually spelled it Neri.

How about that for a coincidence? Neri Hingley/Ingley and Neri Dingley, both living within a mile of each other? They must have known each other, surely?!

Neri Ingley /Hingley

So my 2xg-grandfather Neri Ingley (1824-1901) – the spelling varied between Ingley and Hingley for quite a long time about this period – was baptised in 1824 at St Giles, the son of John Ingley and Mary nee Hackett of Old Hill. This Neri married three times – to Mary Slim (1827-1861), with whom he had eight children, then to widow Ann Aldridge nee Whitehouse ((1823-1869) with whom he had my great-grandfather Neri (1862-1934) and finally to Maria Taylor (1832-1906) with whom he had two more sons. Busy lad.

Just to complicate my family tree, Neri Ingley was my 2xgreat-grandfather through Ann Whitehouse and their son Neri, but his third wife Maria Taylor was also my 2xgreat-grandmother through her first marriage to James Hewitt and their son Joseph. Although the 1861 Census just gives the abode of James and Maria Hewitt simply as Blackheath, they were living next door to William Taylor, who was Maria’s older brother and his wife Phoebe (and his step- daughter Sarah Whittall) and next to them was William Dingley, followed by the Hadley family so it seems very likely from this juxtaposition of families that they were living in this same area around the top of Gorsty Hill as in 1881. And the enumerator, in the description of his route, states that he was starting from the market place in Blackheath and covering both sides of the road towards Halesowen, to the top of Gorsty Hill which confirms this.

Lots more to untangle there – and another Hipkiss!

Neri Dingley

Neri Dingley was born a few years after Neri Ingley, he was baptised at Halesowen in February 1829, the son of Ira Dingley and Elizabeth nee Cooper. I have been unable to find any trace of him after his baptism, he is not listed with the rest of his family in the 1841 Census, he has disappeared. After a lot of checking and head scratching, I have come to the conclusion that Edward Dingley, apparently born about 1830 and Nari may be the same person. Edward appears in the 1841 Census, aged 10, as a son of Ira and Elizabeth but there is no baptism for him, I have checked all the way through the Halesowen Registers. Ira and Elizabeth Dingley had all of their other children baptised, why would they not have Edward baptised? And when Edward marries Matilda Johnson in 1856 he gives his father’s name as Ira Dingley. And he names his second son Nari. I can’t prove it but I suspect Ira became known as Edward.

Ancestry Hints

Perhaps this dearth of information about Nari/Neri Dingley accounts for some confusion. When I started to research this Neri on Ancestry, I was pleased to see that there were 14 hints for him, as although I always check sources for these hints, they can be useful shortcuts. This number of hints is often a sign of someone who has already been fully researched by others and it is possible to check their sources to satisfy yourself that you are researching the same person.

But when I looked at the hints, they all related to Neri Hingley, not Neri Dingley. I know because most of them referred back to my original research on Neri Hingley which had been faithfully copied by someone else! But it did throw me for a little while. They were definitely not the same person. Surely the two men had no actual family connections? I had not found any in my forty years of family history research.

The Dingley family in Long Lane/Cocksheds Lane

While I was doing the basic research on the family of Sarah Eliza Dingley, which was where I first came across the Dingleys, I found myself looking at her older brother, William Dingley, (1810-1842) and filling in his family. There were a number of Dingleys living in Cocksheds Lane, Gorsty Hill, Malt Mill Lane and Long Lane, over a number of decades, another family who tended to settle near each other. One census record in 1881 caught my eye.

Ira Dingley (1836-1894)

Amongst the children of William Dingley and his wife Rebecca nee Hadley, was another Ira Dingley , Sarah Eliza’s nephew who, in the 1881 Census, was living with his wife Phebe and their daughter Eliza in Malt Mill Lane. They had had seven children between 1854 and 1873, with most of the familiar Dingley names, including yet another Ira (1869). Checking for the marriage of Ira and Phebe, I discovered that they had married in 1858 in Halesowen church and that she was a Hipkiss, the daughter of Thomas Hipkiss, nailer. I just can’t get away from Hipkisses, it seems, they lie in wait for me and leap out when I’m not expecting them.

Copyright: Mark Bryan who posted this picture of Malt Mill lane on Facebook in 2015. He thinks it was taken about 1900 and it appears to feature a Chapel Witness Procession, possibly for Whit Sunday. (I wonder whether the little building on the far right was the Malt Mill?)

And the Whittall family

The Whittalls lie in wait, too, it seems. Because by the time of the 1881 Census, Ira and Phebe were living in Malt Mill Lane, next door to a Joseph Whittall, his wife Ann and their son James, Joseph born in Gorsty Hill, Ann in Old Hill and James in Blackheath. No direct connections obvious there, I thought, though worth some more checking.

Also living with Joseph and Ann was a Hannah Taylor who was shown as Joseph’s sister-in-law and her son Joseph Taylor who was 3 years old. Joseph’s place of birth was Cocksheds, so he hadn’t moved far. His mother Hannah gave her place of birth as Chalford, Gloucestershire. That stopped me in my tracks. I already had a Hannah on my tree who was born in Chalford, Gloucestershire – that seemed a strange coincidence – was this the same Hannah? It was indeed. The name had stuck with me because I live only a few miles from Chalford now and know it well.

The Aldridge family

Hannah Aldridge had married Benjamin Taylor in 1872 and she was my great-great-aunt, the daughter of Ann Aldridge (1823-1869) who had been born in Rowley Regis but married a canal boatman David Aldridge from Chalford , Gloucestershire in Dudley in 1846 and had borne him two children, George Aldridge (1848-1908) and Hannah (1850-?) in Chalford before he died in Dudley in 1855, whereupon she had obviously moved back to the Black Country with her two children. In 1841 Ann had been living with her mother Hannah (nee Hodgetts) and step-father James Bird, her mother’s second husband, and she was living with James and Hannah again in Blackheath in 1861 (having been in Chalford with her husband in 1851). Ann’s maiden name was Whitehouse, the daughter of Joseph Whitehouse (1799-1828).

So, if Hannah was the sister-in-law of Joseph Whittall, how exactly was she related to him? Well, Joseph Whittall was the step-father of Benjamin Taylor, Hannah’s husband. Joseph’s wife Ann Whittall in this census had previously been married to Samuel Taylor who had died in 1852. What was this Ann’s maiden name, I wondered? I checked my family tree again. She was Ann Ingley – daughter of John Ingley and Mary nee Hackett. So … Ira Dingley was living next door to Ann nee Ingley who was the sister of Neri Hingley.

But that was not the only link in this complicated family. Ann Whitehouse, mother of Hannah, had married again, after the death of her boatman husband. In April 1862 Ann Alldridge had married – taraaah! – none other than my great-great-grandfather Neri Hingley. So Hannah Taylor, nee Aldridge was Neri’s step-daughter. Hannah was living with her step-aunt in 1881. I’m not sure how that made Hannah Taylor Joseph Whittall’s sister-in-law as I reckon she was his step-niece in law but she was certainly family of some sort! And Ann Whitehouse/Aldridge/Hingley’s son Neri Hingley (1862-1934) had married Phoebe Hodgetts (1865-1922) and had five daughters including my grandmother Beatrice Hingley.

There are two pages of the 1881 Census for Malt Mill Lane which read like a list from my family tree, this seems to have been another area where, once carefully examined, everyone was related to everyone else. Margaret Thompson, your great-grandparents George Eades and Elizabeth nee Harris were on the previous page, so no doubt these families would have been well known to them.

So, I finally arrived at the conclusion that (a) my attempt to move away, for a while, from researching Hipkisses and Whittalls had not really succeeded (and may never quite succeed) and (b) Neri Dingley and Neri Hingley may not have been related by blood but their families were certainly living very close if not next door to each other in the Gorsty Hill/Cocksheds area over a period of several decades and must have been closely socially intertwined. Neri Dingley may even have been named after Neri Ingley/Hingley, as he was born a few years after him.

I think I’ve worked it all out, made all the links, for now. But I have barely started on the other Dingleys so there may be more links to come!

My brain hurts again…!

Tag: Alsop Family

Where was Blower’s hill?