Family history – Page 7 – rowleyregislosthamlets.co.uk

The Granite Connections 1 – The Mountsorrel and Shropshire Connections

I have noted from Census entries for the Lost Hamlets over several decades that while most residents were from the village or the hamlets themselves, some people came from other areas. If a place recurs several times when I am transcribing, I look the place up to see whether I can work out the link and I often find that these places had granite quarries, just like Rowley. Researching around this theme, I have found so much information that I am splitting the results into three posts.

To illustrate this migratory pattern, I have concentrated initially on looking at one family, the Hopewell brothers who came to Rowley from Mountsorrel in Leicestershire, fifty miles away, in about 1841. There were numerous other migrant workers but I picked this family because there were three brothers to work on. I do not appear to be related to them, at least so far!

In the 1851 Census Thomas Hopewell (aged 30) and his brother Charles (24) were living in Tippity Green, probably lodging at the Bull’s Head. They both gave their occupation as Stone Cutter and both were born in Mountsorrel, Leicestershire. Thomas had already been living in Tippity Green in the 1841 Census, but the 1851 Census is the first which actually shows the place of birth, usually County and place. The 1841 Census does not show relationships within a household and just says whether someone was born in the County or not. In Rowley’s case, this means that someone could be born as close as Dudley, parts of Whiteheath or Gorsty Hill, Oldbury or Halesowen and still tick No so this is not a good indication of how far people had moved.

Thomas Hopewell had married Mary Trowman on 18 Sep 1843 at St Giles Church. His occupation then was given as a Stocktaker, perhaps at the quarry but there is no way of knowing for sure. Mary gave her abode at the time of the marriage as Club Buildings and she was the daughter of Benjamin Trowman, a Jews Harp Maker. Thomas signed the Register so he was literate, as presumably he would need to be as a Stocktaker but Mary made her mark as most people in Rowley did at the time.

The marriage registers tell us that the father of the brothers was Septimus Hopewell and his occupation was given as a ‘Frame work slitter’ who does not appear ever to have moved from Leicestershire. That would have been a very unfamiliar occupation in Rowley, and I think he was actually a frame work knitter. The framework knitting trade was common in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, making stockings but, like nailmaking, work at home which was very badly paid which is perhaps why Thomas and his brothers sought other employment. I have put a link at the end of this article to an interesting website about the conditions of Framework knitters.

There was at least one other Hopewell brother in the area, George Hopewell who married Mary Ann Masfield/Masefield in Rowley in 1842. George was also living in Tippity Green at the time of the marriage and was also a stone cutter. He died aged 47 in 1862, leaving his widow with his stepson. They do not appear to have had any other children.

Charles Hopewell, the youngest brother I have found in Rowley, married Elizabeth Lowe in St Giles in 1852 but died aged only 32 in 1860 leaving his widow with five young children. Lowe is another Rowley name which will recur in this family tree. The children from Charles’s marriage appear to have stayed in the Rowley/Blackheath area although their mother had at least two more children and then remarried in 1870 to John Brooks, living almost next door to the Gadds in Ross. The Hopewell name in this part of the family appears to have been spelled as Oakwell in various records for some time, a hazard to the illiterate (and to the family history researcher)! If you say Hopewell and drop the ‘h’ you can hear how that might happen. Later some of the children used the name Hopewell and some Oakwell and some swapped between the two…

Both George and Charles Hopewell were buried at St Giles.

In 1861 Thomas and Mary were living in Hawes Lane, Rowley with five children: Annie, born 1844, Sarah, born 1847, George born 1850, Elizabeth born 1853 and Septimus born 1860, all in Rowley Regis. He was now described as a Stone Cutter.

Living next door to them were Joseph Lowe and his sons including Samuel, then aged 20 and Joseph, aged 18, both of whom feature later in the Hopewell family story. Thomas and Mary’s eldest daughter Annie married Samuel Lowe in Dudley in May 1861 and they stayed in Rowley for some years after her parents moved to Shropshire although her later children were also born in Shropshire.

Mountsorrel in Leicestershire, where the brothers came from, is described even today as ‘The village renowned for its granite quarry, the largest in Europe… and the local area is built on granite. Organised quarrying of the granite in Mountsorrel Quarry began in the late eighteenth century, and the quarrying trade had around 500 employees by 1870.’ So there was certainly expertise in granite quarrying there.

Clee Hills, Shropshire:

There were apparently numerous granite quarries around the Clee Hills in Shropshire at this time, most of which are long closed now. Interestingly, there were a few Hopewells living in the area in the 1841 and 1851 censuses but I have not been able to link them to the brothers.

This map shows the locations of Mountsorrel in Leicestershire, Bedworth in Warwickshire, Rowley Regis and Cainham in Shropshire, all places which had a notable interchange of workers and their families.

By 1871 Thomas, Mary and three of their children were living in Cainham (now Caynham), Shropshire, thirty three miles from Rowley.

Most people in earlier censuses in Cainham were involved in agriculture but by 1871 there were many stone cutters, most of them incomers. There is no mention of a quarry at Cainham in current information online about the village but in the 1871 Census there was a Quarry House and ‘The Stone Inn’ in Cainham, which are pretty good clues that there was a quarry operating then. Quarry House was occupied by a Quarry Man, his two lodgers were from Leicestershire – one from Mountsorrel and one from Sileby which is a nearby village, both stone cutters.

Next to the Stone Inn were the ‘New Buildings’, eight or nine houses, presumably built specially to accommodate incoming quarry workers, as six of these were occupied by stone cutters or sett makers, mostly born in the Mountsorrel area of Leicestershire, one from Bedworth in Warwickshire plus a Clerk of Works who almost certainly also worked at the quarry. Amongst these were a sprinkling of wives and children from other granite producing areas, including several who gave their place of birth as Rowley Regis.

A few doors along the street from the New Buildings Thomas and Mary had living with them their sons George aged 20, Septimus aged 11 and Benjamin aged 7. All the children were born in Rowley, plus two boarders. Joseph Bissell, a familiar Rowley family name, aged 20, listed as from Staffordshire (but in all likelihood the Joseph Bissell who was baptised at St Giles on 26 Sep 1849, the son of Joseph and Mary Ann Bissell of Hawes Lane). Another lodger in their household was a Thomas Baum, born in Leicestershire, the Baum name recurs later in the Hopewell family history, too. Thomas Hopewell, his two older sons, George aged 20 and Septimus aged 11, and their two lodgers were all described as ‘stone cutters’.

Next door was Thomas Rudkin, also born in Leicestershire and also a stone cutter, with his wife Jane and his daughter Sarah who were both born in Rowley Regis, three further children born in Cainham and his brother-in-law Thomas Parkes and mother-in-law Mary Parkes, both born in Rowley Regis. Samuel Sharpe, aged 22, a few houses away was also a stone cutter, he was born in Mountsorrel, his wife in Cainham. A real mixture in Cainham of Mountsorrel , Cainham and Rowley Regis origins.

By the time of the 1881 Census, Thomas and Mary, both now 60 , were still living in Shropshire but had moved three miles along the road to Hope Baggott. Their son Benjamin, now 16, was still at home and their son George, with his wife Hannah and children Mary, aged 8, Joseph aged 6 and Anne, aged 2 were living next door. All of the men were stone cutters.

Interestingly, although George had been with Thomas and Mary in Cainham in 1871, his wife Hannah and two older children were all born in Rowley Regis, clearly in the interim George had gone home to Rowley to get married and stayed there for long enough to have two children before they all m oved to Shropshire. His bride Hannah Bissell, daughter of Joseph Bissell, lived in Tippity Green, so still in the Tippity Green area. It took me some time to find the record of their wedding in 1872, as the bridegroom’s name was recorded as Oakwell! Was Hannah the sister of the Joseph Bissell who was lodging with the Hopewells in Cainham a year earlier? Yes, she was. What you might call close family links!

By 1891 Mary Hopewell was living in Clee Hill, Shropshire, a widow, although I have been completely unable to find a record of the death or burial of Thomas Hopewell in this period. Mary had two lodgers aged 20, Albert Varnham (her grandson by daughter Elizabeth) and James Masefield, both stone breakers. The Masfield/Masefield/Macefield name has occurred in this family before, too – Mary’s brother-in-law George Hopewell was married to Mary Ann/Maria Masfield in 1842 so it is possible that there is a family connection here too.

In 1901 Mary was still living independently in Cainham, still with two (different) lodgers, one of whom was born in Rowley Regis, sadly I cannot read his name but he was, as you might expect, a stone cutter.

Mary Hopewell, nee Trowman, died in March 1907, aged 88 and was buried at St Paul’s, Knowbury.

I have created a family tree for the Hopewells on Ancestry; if anyone has connections and would like to see it do let me know and I will give you a link. At present the tree is private.

I have not yet been able to trace all the Hopewell descendants although I know that Septimus Hopewell moved to Pistyll, near Pwllheli, where he was working as a sett maker in 1881 and lodging with Daniel Baum and his family, (in 1871 a Thomas Baum had been lodging with his parents). Septimus appears to have been with his brother Benjamin in the Bradford area by 1901, both working as sett dressers. He returned to Cainham later and was living with his sister Elizabeth and her family there in 1911. He had then returned to Rowley Regis by 1921, still single, when he was living at 1 Tippity Green, as a lodger and working as a quarryman, full circle for this Hopewell! He appears to have died in the Dudley Registration District in 1930.

There are some connections with the Bradford area where some of the family worked as sett dressers at one point but I have not done a great deal of research on that. Again, the granite dressing skills, this time used in road making, are the connecting factor.

Several of the Varnham family, children of Elizabeth Hopewell, later moved to the Alnwick area of Northumberland, where most of them were sett makers! Follow the granite…

A moving pattern

So there is a pattern in the mid-1800s of stone cutters moving from Leicestershire, in particular the Mountsorrel area, to Rowley Regis, marrying local girls and having children there and then moving on to other quarrying areas. The family patterns felt rather like ribbons intermingling on a maypole at times when I was trying to sort them out. Suddenly a familiar name would pop up again!

It was obviously very common, even for families with several children , to accommodate and living in what were probably quite small cottages, for young single men to be taken in as lodgers, though it appears that in the case of the Hopewells they were often related or in close friendship groups.

Stone cutters were clearly not simply labourers, there are other entries in the censuses for labourers, both general and agricultural but stone cutters and sett makers, wherever their origins, are listed by their skill.

This photograph (brought to my attention by Ronald Terence Woodhouse) shows workers in the Hailstone Quarry and shows the size of some of the rocks they were working with. Imagine the effort needed to manually reduce that very hard rock down to small evenly shaped setts. Hard and dangerous work. It is also used on the front over of Anthony Page’s book on Rowley in Old Photographs and he notes that it was from the Ken Rock Collection: the photograph itself refers to BlackCountryMuse.com. Whichever owns the copyright, due acknowledgment is made!

Whether these movements of workers happened because the quarries sent recruiters to particular areas which had the skills they needed is not clear or whether word was spread by the men themselves that work was available or a combination of both. Some of these skilled workers settled in their new areas and many moved on again to another granite quarrying location where their skills would have been at a premium. If you have ancestors in Rowley who you know came from Leicestershire, or who subsequently moved to Shropshire, this may well account for it!

I will do another post about the Nuneaton/Bedworth connections to Rowley.

And there was another migration wave, a little later on in the century , which I will write about in another piece – The Threlkeld Connection, to follow soon!

Other resources:

https://intriguing-history.com/the-framework-knitters-1821/

I’m a fan of the FAN method of research!

I am a ‘FAN’ fan!

Genealogy or family history research is a very broad interest. It encompasses those who just want to track a direct line, father’s line only and who are not interested in siblings or female lines; those who insist on three separate pieces of written proof before anyone is added to their tree (which can be difficult once you go back a couple of centuries when a single parish register entry may be the only piece of evidence you can find); those who are desperate to find that they are related to someone famous. “I am a sixth cousin, 32 times removed from this famous actor/president/Mayflower passenger!” seems to crop up fairly regularly on some family history online groups. Or related to Royalty… I resist the temptation to say ‘So what? ‘. Although there is a theory that all white Europeans are related to royalty through William the Conqueror, Charlemagne or Edward III, prolific breeders all, on both sides of the blanket. Edward III has been referred to as ‘the Clapham Junction of English Genealogy’ as ‘all lines go through him’. That probably had more meaning when we had a better railway network…

And then there are those, like me, who research all direct ancestors, their siblings and in-laws and then their sideways connections. So I sometimes find myself diligently searching online for someone’s marriage or death, glance up at their page on my Ancestry tree to check what their relationship is to me to find that I am spending this time on someone who is a “paternal grandfather of wife of 1st cousin 5x removed”. Ah, maybe not spend too much more time on this then. Now, what was I doing before I went down this rabbit hole? But hey, it’s interesting… and it’s surprising how often familiar names and addresses crop up and you do get a picture of how families interrelated.

There is a research technique in family history called the FAN method – Friends, Associates, Neighbours. By looking at the people around your ancestors, at home, at work, at church or chapel, you build a fuller picture of their lives, are more likely to have an impression of what they were like, you may find neighbours who subsequently marry into your family. Always look a page or two either side of your ancestor on censuses and maybe more in a parish register, you may find other relatives there. And noting the names of the witnesses of a marriage may act as a confirmation that you have the right one, if a parent or sibling signed.

My husband started researching his family history while he was waiting for me to finish some research in Gloucester Local Studies Library many years ago. He decided to look for his grandmother in the census, as he knew where she had lived in the West End of Gloucester. This was in the days before the internet so you sat in a library or archive or record office, winding through a microfilm page by page, not much indexing. I was using a neighbouring film reader to look at press reports and heard a little “Ha! Got you!” when he found her. ‘That’s you hooked’, I thought. I was right…

He carefully noted down the details and we left to continue our day. It was only some weeks later as he explored more marriage and birth details that he realised that his granny’s maternal grandparents had been living next door – another trip to the library! So the FAN method can be very useful.

In looking at the families who lived in the Lost Hamlets, I suppose I am doing the ultimate FAN exercise. Preparing detailed family trees however, even for what I think of as the ‘core families’ who lived there over a number of decades, would mean creating at least 14 family trees, possibly more than 20, which is daunting, even for me.

There are things that will help. There is a wonderful online site called Black Country Connections which was started on the basis that it was very likely that many Rowley and Blackheath folk were related to each other and this is undoubtedly correct. So I can go to that tree and see whether any of the core families are listed (yes, mostly they are!) and have a head start on how they connect, possibly when and where they married and who their children were, all useful stuff.

And I have realised that in the 1841 Census, the Cole family had six households in these hamlets and most of these were already on my personal tree, three brothers and their father, so I have a head start there and have decided for now to start with them and work outwards, as it were, since they often intermarried with members of the other ‘core families’. In the last couple of weeks I’ve spent some time revisiting my original research done many years ago and expanding it in earlier generations, doing more work on siblings to my direct ancestors where I had not previously traced their descendants, too. Very enjoyable, if something of a rat’s nest! And uncovered some fascinating stories about them, so I will be posting some of their stories in due course. Apologies to those who have been waiting for another post, I have been busy gathering new information.

This photograph shows my original paper Family Tree, started in about 1980. It’s fair to say that it has expanded a bit since then. My current tree, stored digitally, has over 5000 people on it. Nonetheless, my original research in Smethwick Library and other archives all those years ago has proved very accurate, fortunately, as more and more records became available digitally to check against!

Interesting stories about your Lost Hamlets ancestors would be warmly welcomed!

Poisoned by his wife…

This is not strictly within the Lost Hamlets but concerns a member of the Cole family who was born there – and it’s a fascinating story so I am sharing it with you anyway!

Even after 40 years of research, I still find new facts on my family. Recently I was working on siblings of my 4XG-Grandfather Edward Cole and tracking their descendants, a task infinitely easier than it was when I first worked on Edward himself 40 years ago. With the advent of digitised records and family history programs and online resources, plus, of course, the many subscription services research has utterly transformed.

Searching through the Cole entries in the St Giles Registers, I came across the Burial Record on 14 March 1832 for my 1st cousin 5xremoved David Cole. The entry says that he was 43 when he died in Mar 1832 and that he was a farmer living in Slack Hillock , off Gorsty Hill. I was picking out Cole burials, spotted the note on his made by the Vicar and was off down a fascinating rabbit hole, irresistible!

A note in the Register , added by the Vicar, says “Poisoned by drinking a composition which his wife retailed as a specific for the gout”. How about that for a damning story in a few words? I had to know more. I did some sleuthing and found a newspaper report in the Wolverhampton Chronicle dated 14 March 1832.

David Cole had woken at about five o’clock in the morning, with a pain in his bowels and had gone to get a nip of rum to settle his stomach. The ‘specific’ made by his wife, was called ‘seeds of Colchicum’ and was stored in the same cupboard as the rum in a similar bottle. The bottle containing the mixture was labelled “Wine of the Seeds of Colchicum” but it was not sufficiently light for him to read it. When he returned to bed he told his wife he had taken some of the gout mixture and she was concerned and wanted to get a physician to purge him but he strongly objected to this, saying that he did not think the mixture would hurt him. He went off to work as usual but returned four hours later at 11.00am, feeling ill and very sick and took to his bed. He died two days later. The surgeon who had attended him later on the afternoon he was taken ill could do nothing and told the inquest that he had taken ‘enough of the mixture to kill half a dozen people’. The jury returned a verdict that he “died from accidentally taking seeds of colchicum, mixed into liquid, under the apprehension that it was rum.”

He left his wife Charlotte with thirteen children, the youngest David baptised in June 1832, after his father’s death so it seems very likely that Charlotte was heavily pregnant when her husband died. However, the oldest were old enough to be already working, one as a butcher and others on the farm and she stayed there, listing herself as a farmer for many years after that. I wonder whether she carried on selling her remedies?

But doesn’t this little story actually tell us quite a lot about them? Yes, she was a farmer’s wife but also a herbalist of some knowledge and known as such to local people. I wonder who taught her? Perhaps a family skill? When I looked into it, seeds of Colchicum is still listed by present day herbalists as a treatment for gout but with warnings that it is toxic in large quantities and may cause death. And, to my geat surprise, when I recounted this tale to a genealogist friend who has recently had extensive heart surgery, she responded immediately that “Colchicum is still recommended by the NHS! When I saw my consultant a couple of weeks ago, he recommended colchicine for gout”. So an extract of Colchicum is still used by the NHS today. Charlotte Cole actually knew her stuff, it seems.

And there were few remedies for painful gout in those days, if I remember correctly. Presumably she was known to local people for her remedies, hence the Vicar’s somewhat judgmental comment that she sold the remedy. But they didn’t have pharmacies as we know them then, no picking up a remedy at the chemist or pharmacy as we might and probably most people couldn’t afford to consult doctors.

How devastating for Charlotte to have witnessed this tragedy, her husband killed by her own remedy and to have suffered the reproaches of someone like the Vicar and possibly others for something that was not her fault.

Families in the Lost Hamlets 1841-1881

There are 13 families who were living in the hamlets of Perry’s Lake, Gadd’s Green and Turner’s Hill area for all five censuses which I have so far transcribed. All are familiar Rowley names:

Cole, Cutler, Darby, Foster, Hill, Hipkiss, Levett, Parkes, Redfern, Simpson, Taylor, Whitehall/Whittall and Woodhouse.

A further 9 families had moved in between 1841 and 1851 and were in all four of the 1851-1881 Censuses:

Barnsley, Detheridge, Edwards, Hadley, Harcourt, Ingram, Jones, Knight, Ocroft, Payne and Timmings/Timmins.

Four families were in the 1841-1871 Censuses but had moved on by 1881 – Badley, Downing, Round and Siviter.

When time permits, I will check where these families had moved to.

Certainly there will have been marriages between these families and they were most likely closely interrelated over those years.

This information will be updated as more censuses are transcribed.

The ‘Lost Hamlets’ of Rowley Regis

Rowley Regis was once a small ancient village on the top of a very high hill in South Staffordshire, now apparently absorbed seamlessly into the enveloping sprawl of the West Midlands conurbation. It has had several other municipal designations due to local Government re-organisations in the last century but historically, it was in South Staffordshire – that’s what it said on my school exercise books, so I know! The other, less defined, description is that Rowley Regis was in the Black Country, that nebulous area of industry, metal working, mining, quarrying and sheer hard work and where probably most of the population lived in what we would think of now as poverty.

Although Rowley Regis is an interesting name – yes, at one time, part of it was held by the King, possibly as a hunting area – by the 19^th century the village was of no particular note, the main industries in and around the village were quarrying the very hard ‘Rowley Rag’ stone from various quarries on the hill, mining and, above all, in Rowley itself, wrought iron hand nail making which was mostly carried out in small ‘shops’ at the back of houses, and involved whole families, men, women and children from about the age of six. The metal working skills of the local people and the plentiful supplies of the raw materials required meant that, as the Industrial Revolution progressed, hand nail and chain making fell into history and the metal working and myriad engineering skills gave rise to a vast landscape of heavy and polluting industry, canals, mines and brickworks.

I am a Rowley girl. I was born there, grew up and was educated there and lived there until I was eighteen. My parents and grandparents and many of their forebears were born there too and lived out their lives there. My mother told me stories about the area when I was growing up and I started my family history research in about 1980 and have been working on it ever since.

Retired after many years working in local government and now living in the West Country, during the first Covid lockdown I volunteered to transcribe parish registers at home from photographs for FreeREG, for Rowley Regis and Blackheath, the adjacent town which developed just down the road in the mid 19th Century, after the glebe lands belonging to the church were sold. This has included many non-conformist registers, which have never been available online previously.

Very quickly I noticed that many of the family names in those registers were familiar although some of them I had not come across for many years, since I moved away. But I had been at chapel and school with those names! It was also apparent from the Registers and from the various censuses that as well as the village proper, there were a number of hamlets on the edge of the village, some large and some small, and that families tended to stay within these hamlets or nearby. They appear to have been close-knit little communities. Some of my ancestors seemed to stay very firmly in and around the hamlets of Perry’s Lake, Gadds Green, Tipperty Green and Turners Hill, for example, which were very small settlements barely a mile from the village church and within half a mile of each other. Gradually as houses were built, new roads opened, transport improved and development spread, addresses were formalised and house numbers began to appear in the parish registers and censuses and some of the old names for the hamlets became less significant.

There is a very active and informative Facebook page about memories of Rowley Regis and Blackheath, the town. Recently one person asked on the Facebook page where Gadds Green was, because Poppy memorials were being placed near the homes of soldiers who had died in the First World War and one of those had come from Gadds Green. She couldn’t find any trace of it. I had not realised until then that quarrying had completely obliterated Gadds Green, and much of Perry’s Lake and the houses on Turners Hill – they only existed now on old maps. Other local names do not even appear on maps – there has been some animated discussion on the page about where a place called ‘Finger-i-the-hole’ was and most local people will never have heard of Blackberry Town, which appears in the 1841 census.

Several of the local historians using the page were able to tell the Facebook enquirer where Gadds Green had been. But it seemed a pity to me that these lost hamlets, home to so many of my ancestors, have not only physically disappeared but are now fading from local memory. Through my various researches and transcribing church registers and censuses, I have gathered quite a lot of information about these places, who lived there, who ran the shops and pubs, where people worked and worshipped and who married who.

So I have decided to create a One Place Study about these ‘lost hamlets’. My study will initially concentrate on the hamlets of Perry’s Lake, Gadd’s Green and Turner’s Hill, clustered to the North-West of the village centre, during the period 1840-1921, principally looking initially at censuses, parish registers , maps and what these can tell us about the people who lived there. The people and their lives are my main interest. I suspect that it will expand both geographically and in time period as particular information and resources come to hand. I will be posting to this site with new posts about aspects of life in the hamlets and will add maps and photographs in due course.

And by starting a One Place Study, now registered with the Society for One Place Studies, hopefully information about the people who lived in those ‘lost hamlets’ and in due course, others of the ‘lost hamlets’ can be preserved in a study where other people can also contribute their knowledge to it and where later researchers can find the answer to ‘Where was Gadd’s Green?’.