Local history – rowleyregislosthamlets.co.uk

Families of the Lost Hamlets – The Alsops 4, Joseph and his eldest son Edward

Joseph Alsop (1816-1868)

Joseph, the third son of Edward Alsop and Betty (nee Hodgetts), was baptised at St Giles on 14 January 1816, so may have been born late in 1815.

Joseph married Sarah Eliza Dingley on 4 December 1836 at Clent. In the 1841 Census they were, from the description of the enumerator’s route, living at the bottom of Rowley village, very near to Lillypot Row, with their 3 year old son Edward and also Nahan (Nathan?) Dingley, aged 14, presumably a relative of Sarah. Joseph was a shop keeper.

In the 1851 Census, Joseph and his family are shown as living in Blackheath. But then, so is everyone else in nine pages! Trying to work out whether these were actually the same place, I looked at the route described by the enumerator. The enumerator’s route, however, is slightly – but only slightly – more informative when trying to work out exactly where they were living and then only if you know where other named individuals were also living, as routes are often defined by reference to the occupants or sometimes the builders or owners of particular houses. I do not have that knowledge! So:-

“All that Part of the Parish of Rowley Regis called Blakeheath [a common spelling variation then and later in the document the writer consistently spells the name as Bleakheath] , commencing at two houses lately built by James Preece [no help at all!], taking both sides of the road up to the Endowed School, then Lillypot Row, Barton [at this period Barton seems to have referred to an area around what is now the Britannia Inn. The historical meaning of barton refers to a barley farm and I am interested to note this as I know from other studies that at least one farmer of this land was also a publican on the site and perhaps grew barley for use in brewing his beer] and up to the Partridge’s on that side only, then along Siviters Lane, taking New Ross and Shepherd’s Fold including the Yew Tree Lane and Hyams Hill House, and Scotwell Cottage, thence to Benjamin Adshead [again, no help, except that I was interested to see that there were Adsheads living in this area as I had previously only come across this surname in connection with the Levett family] taking that side of the village to the National School.”

The Enumerator’s route for the adjoining part of the 1851 Census reads :

“All that Part of the Parish of Rowley Regis called Mincing Lane, taking Bell End, MackMillans’s Green, the North side of the village including 2 houses at Whiteheath Well, Spring Row, the Parsonage, Hawes Lane, Club Buildings, the Mill Farm House and Tippity Green, ending at Joseph Parkes.”

From various descriptions, Mackmillan’s Green appears to have been below Bell End, perhaps opposite to what is now the entrance to Britannia Park.

So it appears that the line of what was or is now called Birmingham Road was the boundary between these two Enumerator’s sections and that Joseph and his family were living somewhere at the bottom of the village, between Lillypot Row and Siviter’s Lane, on the side where Britannia Park is and possibly where the Tesco is now and possibly in the same place as in 1841. But this time, Edward was described as a farmer of 7 acres, so not a big farm.

Joseph and Sarah had six children: Edward (1838-1908) who is looked at in the rest of this piece; Joseph (1841-), Eliza (1844-); William (1845-1846); Elizabeth (1847-) and Rhoda Ann (1849).

Rhoda is quite an unusual name but appears several times in the Alsop family, both in Rowley Regis and as far afield as Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Derbyshire, Cambridgeshire and London in the 1700s and early 1800s. Presumably this Rhoda was named after Joseph’s youngest sister Rhoda (1821-1903)of whom more anon.

In this piece I will deal with their eldest son Edward who had an extensive and busy family. The others will follow soon! I hope…

Joseph and Sarah’s children:

Edward Alsop (1838-1908) married Sarah Whitehouse at St Edmund’s Dudley on 25 December 1858. Sarah’s family lived in Portway. It was not unusual to have weddings on Christmas Day in those days, as this was the one day that workers were on holiday and would not lose pay. Perhaps also it was a day that families often got together to celebrate so that a separate celebratory gathering was not necessary.

In the 1861 Census, when this Edward was living in Rowley Village with Sarah and their eldest son Joseph, aged 3, he was a cordwainer or shoemaker, a trade which he passed on to others in his family and in which he appears to have built up a successful business in the Blackheath area.

Edward and Sarah had six children, all blessed with the usual Alsop names, leading to some confusion at times. I apologise in advance if I confuse you, too! These were : Joseph (1859-1932), Eliza (1863-1939), Mary (or Polly) (1865-1938), Alfred (1871-1900), Alice (1875-1887) and Annie (1879-1954).

Joseph Alsop (1859-1932)

Their eldest son Joseph, like his father and brother, became a boot and shoe maker, he had a shop for many years in Oldbury but moved back to his father’s business in Blackheath after his father’s death. It does appear, looking at the locations of the family in various censuses and wills that they kept a connection to a shop in this immediate area for many years. Other records refer to 4 Long Lane and others to Market Place, Blackheath. And as seen before, the boys in the family appear to have been placed in businesses of their own, even if in the same trade, but carefully situated far enough apart not to compete with each other.

Joseph married Annie (Susannah) Grosvenor at Quinton in 1880, they had three sons. The eldest Edward (1881-1946) was in Barnsley Hall Mental Hospital in the 1921 Census and apparently remained there, dying there in 1946.

I can remember when I was growing up in Rowley in the 1950s there was an absolute horror of people being ‘taken to Barnsley Hall’ and I know from other people I have researched that quite often people who were admitted to mental hospitals, including some who were admitted after shell shock in WW1 military service, never came out. Whether Edward was admitted for these reasons we cannot know but it is possible that he remained there for most of his adult life.

Joseph and Annie’s other sons were Alfred (1886-1973) who married Elsie Oakley in 1909 and was a Master Shoe Maker, staying in the Blackheath area for the rest of his life. Alfred and Elsie appear not to have had any children.

And Horace (1892-1945). In the 1911 Census Horace, then 19, is recorded proudly as ‘Student – Arts Degree’. This is the first time I have come across a member of this family graduating, which Horace clearly did as he became a secondary school teacher and later an Inspector of Schools. He married Hilda Lusty in 1917 and was a schoolmaster in Norwich by 1921, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

Joseph died in 1932 and his Probate Record describes him as ‘of Long Lane, Blackheath, I have been unable to find a record of his burial and Susannah died in 1933.

Eliza Alsop (1863-1939)

Edward and Sarah’s daughter Eliza married James Stafford (1864-1940) who was a Boot and Shoe Maker in 1886 (although he later became a publican and also, at some point a shopkeeper); they lived in Mott Street, Blackheath in 1891, just around the corner from Eliza’s parents, later at the Quinton end of Long Lane in 1901 and later still in Riddins Street, Old Hill (which was apparently somewhere in the Brickfields area) in 1911 and 1921.

And Hitchmough confirms that James Henry Stafford was indeed the licensee of the Riddins Tavern from about 1905 – 1930. What fascinated me about the entry in Hitchmough was the name of the previous licensee – John E French [1899] – [1901]. Hang on, we already know about a John French who was a licensee, the son-in-law of Hannah Alsop, Eliza’s aunt. And although he was dead long before this, he did have a son John E French. Was it possible that Eliza and her husband took over the pub from her cousin?

Well, no, apparently not! The John Edgar French (1881-1973) on the Alsop family tree was born in Belbroughton in 1881 and was a farmer whereas the publican John E French was, according to various censuses, born in 1866 in Cradley Heath. And our original John French (1832-1886) was the son of George French, and was born, as was his father, in Wardington, Oxfordshire. The Cradley John E French was the son of Andrew and Ann French who were both from County Mayo, Ireland. Just a strange coincidence, it seems! But it is tempting to wonder what connections there might have been further back…

James and Eliza had two daughters Elsie (1889) and Lily May (1893) and one son James Leonard (1898). Eliza died in January 1939, her death being registered in the Rowley Regis Registration District so she had not moved far from her Rowley roots, James died in 1940.

Mary (or Polly) (1865-1938)

Mary [usually known as Polly] Edward & Sarah’s next daughter, married Alfred Adams (1865-1943) in 1889, he was a Solicitor’s Clerk. In the 1921 Census, which asks for the name of employers, Alfred says that he was employed by T Cooksey and Co., Solicitors, of Old Hill. They stayed in the Blackheath/Cakemore area for the rest of their lives.

Polly’s husband Alfred Adams is related to me as a distant cousin, through my maternal line, and I will be doing a separate piece about the Alsop premises in Blackheath and how they relate to my Rose/Adams/Parsons family.

Alfred and Polly had four sons, Eli Percy (1890-1891), Alfred Theodore (1894-1960), Bertram Leslie (1897-1992) and Harold Cyril (1902-1974). Of these, Eli died in infancy, Alfred and Cyril appear to have stayed in the Halesowen/Cakemore area and Bertram, who was a Civil Servant lived in various places including Nottingham, Doncaster and London, but died in Bournemouth. Alfred does not appear to have married though both his brothers did. He was noted in the 1939 Register as living with his retired father and his occupation , very unusually for a man in those times, was shown as ‘unpaid domestic duties. Since he died in Powick Mental Hospital in 1960, it is possible that he suffered from some disabling condition.

This Alfred was a second grandson of Edward & Sarah’s who appeared to have long term residence in a mental hospital. It seems very sad that this should have happened and that it appears to have been relatively common to have people confined in these hospitals for such long period but there appear to have been relatively few effective treatments at that time, conditions such as PTSD were not defined (although shell shock was) and it was many years before a campaign was undertaken to move people who were capable of being released into the community.

Polly died in the second quarter of 1938, aged 73 and Alfred Adams in 1943, aged 78.

Alfred Alsop (1871-1900), was born in 1871, in Rowley Road, Blackheath (which was another name for Birmingham Road at that point), and was less than one month old at the date of the 1871 Census (which took place on 2 April 1871). In 1881 the family were stillat Birmingham Road, living next door to the Shoulder of Mutton, a property with which they appear to have retained a connection well into the 1900s. More of that in my next piece. Alfred was then a scholar. In 1891 he was still at home with the family (who had moved from Birmingham Road to 122 Halesowen Street), now aged 20 and a journeyman bootmaker, following the family trade. He married Flora Jones, who was a dressmaker, on 20 March 1895 at St Paul’s Blackheath, Flora being a Quinton girl. Alfred’s sister Polly (Mary) and her husband Alfred were the witnesses at the wedding. Alfred and Flora had two sons Arthur William Alfred (1895-1979) and Harry Leslie (1897-1954). Sadly, Alfred died on 18 July 1900, aged 29 and was buried at St Paul’s on the 20^th. His widow re-married in 1908 to James Adderley and Flora, by this time a widow again, died in Hove, Sussex in 1845. Her son Harry was living in Hove in 1939, working as a Motor Mechanic and died in Hove in 1954. His older brother Arthur died in Eastbourne, Sussex in 1979, a period of fifty years between those deaths so presumably they had all moved to Sussex at some point. So this was another branch of the family who moved a long way from Rowley Regis.

Alice (1875-1887)

Alice was born at Birmingham Road, next to the Shoulder of Mutton and was listed as a scholar, aged 6 in 1881. Alas, this was the only census in which Alice appears as she died in 1887 and was buried at St Paul’s, Blackheath on 1 September 1887, aged 12.

Annie (1879-1954)

Annie was also born at Birmingham Road, and was there in 1881. In 1891 she was with the family in 122 Halesowen Street when she was a scholar. As the youngest child she was still at home in 1901, at Halesowen Street, with her parents and their grandson Arthur, son of Alfred, mentioned above.

Where exactly did the Alsops live?

I was still trying to sort out the exact location of these addresses in my own mind, as more and more family addresses seemed to link back to this immediate area. So I looked in more detail at the censuses for this area. In the 1891 Census, the list goes:

123 High Street: George Darby, Grocer and his family.

Next house:

122 Halesowen Street: Edward Alsop, Boot & Shoe Manufacturer and family.

Then:

123 Halesowen Street: Henry Bennett, General Outfitter and his family.

And then:

124 Halesowen Street: The Shoulder of Mutton, Thomas Miller Gun Wadding Manufacturer and Licensed Victualler – interesting combination!

It appears, from carefully reading the extensive information in Hitchmough about the Royal Oak Inn (which was later demolished to make way for the roundabout in the Market Place) that George Darby was born in The Royal Oak as his father owned it and that the Darby family owned extensive properties in this area and, again, all the family were involved in different businesses and pubs.

Detail showing Market Place/Halesowen Street/High Street. Copyright: Alan Godfrey Maps. Surveyed 1883, revised 1902.

So I think that the households listed above ran across the west side of the market place, where the Midland Bank and Burtons were later so that the Alsops were in the middle of that row of shops. And it seems quite possible that this is the same place sometimes known as 3 Market Place, where Edward Alsop died in 1903. The Royal Oak was sometimes described as in Halesowen Street and sometimes in High Street so it can be quite confusing!

I have found this photograph in Anthony Page’s Second Book of Blackheath Photographs which shows this area (albeit slightly later) and refers to the Shambles which ran from the back of some of the shops in Birmingham Road and the Shoulder of Mutton (which had been built on land originally owned by the butcher who had asked for the pub to be named after one of his products!) into Market Place and High Street. And I think that the Alsop’s shop and home in this photograph was between the advertising hoarding and the Shoulder of Mutton. The Royal Oak faced them, on the far right of this photograph, with a van parked outside. The Darby family hired various means of transport from the pub so this may well have been one of their vehicles.

Back to Annie

Annie married William Leonard Butler in 1907, and they continued to live in Halesowen Street. They had one daughter Vera May Alsop Butler in 1908. Although Vera later moved to Mucklow Hill with her husband Reginald Hiscock, Annie stayed in Blackheath. In 1939 she was living at 3 Halesowen Street (which as so often may have been the same house previously numbered 122 which appeared from the census return to be immediately adjacent to or on the Market Place). William Leonard Butler died in 1949 and Annie in 1954, they are buried together in Quinton Cemetery. Annie’s Probate entry still refers to her as ‘of The Market Place, Halesowen Street, Blackheath so there was an Alsop connection to that address as late as 1954. Does anyone remember Alsop’s Shoe shops? I don’t, I’m afraid but it must have been before my time, nor have I found any advertisements for the shop or business .

Summary

So this was the family of Edward Alsop, (eldest son of farmer Joseph Alsop), and Edward’s wife Sarah Whitehouse. Edward’s family started and expanded the boot and shoe making of the Alsops.

As usual, the Alsops were in trade, always willing, it appears, to diversify into new areas of trading and to ensure that their children also had business opportunities and training or education to take later generations into the professions. A far cry from the millers/farmers only a few decades earlier, but clearly the business acumen and drive of the Alsops was fully present in this branch of the family.

Their six children had given Edward and Sarah the fairly modest (for that time) total of thirteen grandchildren.

In my next piece I will look at the other younger children of Joseph and Sarah.

Families of the Lost Hamlets – The Alsops 3 –Sarah, John, Thomas and Mary

This very short piece looks at the next younger children of Edward and Betsey (nee Hodgetts) Alsop , having dealt with their eldest daughter Hannah in my last piece. This piece covers Sarah, John, Thomas andMary. Joseph will be looked at in the next piece, as he has turned out to have quite a lot of information available about him, and the remaining children Edward, Mary Ann and Rhoda will be in the final piece.

This picture (copyright unknown) shows the view to Turners Hill from Hawes Lane which would have been very familiar to the Alsop family, their farm was just over the wall! They must also have had good views of Turner’s Hill, and this was before the hillside quarries really ate into the hillside, and their own quarry also created a very large hole! I am not sure what the enormous heap on the right is, as I am not aware of any mining in this immediate area which would create spoil. Perhaps it was material from their quarry or perhaps it was Alsop’s Hill which appears on the 1902 OSMap. I think that the houses on the left are in Tippity Green and it is possible that by this time, the mill and farm may have disappeared.

Sarah Alsop (1805-1884)

Sarah was born early in 1805 and baptised on the 2 June 1805 at St Giles. In 1841, 1851 and 1861 censuses she was living at Mill Farm, one of several unmarried children of Edward. In 1871 she had moved to Mincing Lane where she was living with her sister-in-law, Eliza Alsop (widow ofJoseph) . In this census she is described, at the age of 69, as an ‘idiot’ which does not have quite the same meaning as it might today but implies some sort of mental condition or handicap. However, by 1881 she had moved to 93 Rowley Village where she was living with Jesse Patrick, a tailor and his wife. By now Sarah was 77 but there is no mention in this census of any health issues. Whether Sarah was suffering from dementia we cannot tell nor whether any health issues might have prevented her from marrying but it seems unlikely that she would have lived to such a great age if she had suffered from Downs Syndrome or some such disability. It is possible that she had some degree of learning difficulties and certainly she was looked after with the family until at least 1871. She never married.

Sarah died in Rowley Regis and was interred at St Giles on 27 April 1884, aged 79 and ‘of the village’.

John Alsop (1807 -?)

John Alsop, named presumably for his grandfather John Alsop, was baptised at St Giles on 4 October 1807. And that is the only definite information I can find of him. I cannot find a burial or a marriage for him in Rowley Regis or the surrounding area. The period of his younger life was before censuses, of course, so there are no clues there. There is a possible baptism for a John Alsop, son of John and Mary Alsop at Dudley St Thomas in 1839, the father being a baker who could be the right man. But I cannot find that couple in the 1841 Census so that is also inconclusive. There are three other trees on Ancestry which have John on them but none of them have any further mention. It is tempting to assume that he died in infancy but no subsequent sons were called John, as often happens when an infant dies and a later sibling is given the same name, especially when it is a family name. So John is a mystery!

Thomas Alsop (1809-1865)

Thomas was baptised at St Giles on 29 October 1809. He was living, unmarried, with his family at the Windmill Farm in 1841, in 1851 when his occupation was given as ‘Farmer’s son’ and in 1861 when, at 51, he was the farmer at Blowershill Farm (otherwise known as Mill Farm or Windmill Farm), farming 35 acres. His father had died in 1860 so Thomas had taken over the farm but there is no reference at any stage to him being involved with the milling trade, unlike two of his brothers. He was still single in 1861 and his unmarried sisters Rhoda and Sarah were also living there. John Wright, a labourer and carter born in Rous Lench , near Evesham, Worcestershire, was also living there. Another instance of labour being brought in from outside the area, even for relatively unskilled work for which one would have thought there would have been suitable local candidates.

Thomas Alsop, of Blower’s Hill, was buried at St Giles on 10 July 1865, aged 54, having outlived his father by only five years. In the next census, his sister Sarah, as related above, had moved to live with her sister-in-law in Mincing Lane which would tie in with this.

Mary Alsop (1811-1813)

Mary was baptised on 24 November 1811 at St Giles and buried there less than two years later on 17 October 1813. The entry in the Burial Register has her abode as the Windmill and the cause of death as a ‘bowel complaint’, a very common cause of death for infants, not only then but for more than a century to come, before water supplies and sewage disposal conditions were improved in the area which helped gradually to reduce the number of infant deaths.

The next brother, Joseph, turns out to have quite a lot of information available so he will probably have a post of his own, hopefully very soon.

Families of the Lost Hamlets – The Alsops

The Alsops only just count as a family of the Lost Hamlets, as they lived at Windmill Farm from about 1764 and were there in the 1841 Census, right on the edge of the Lost Hamlets area where they originally operated the Windmill. In this first piece I will look at John Alsop and his family and his son Edward. Edward’s children will be the subject of another piece.

Windmill Farm was off Tippity Green and Hawes Lane, the windmill was between the church and Tippity Green, opposite the Bull Public House and where the Windmill is shown on this Ist Edition OS map. The quarry which developed on this land was marked on the 1892 OS Map as Alsop’s Hill Quarry so the family obviously retained control for many years.

Reprint of the 1st Edition Ordnance Survey, Copyright: David & Charles

The Role of the Miller in Society

Where there were farmers growing crops requiring milling and where there were people needing flour, not to mention bakers, Millers were important and necessary in society. Some home grinding was possible with small querns or grinding stones but later two millstones one on top of the other – the bottom one stationary and the upper rotating to grind grain between them to crush the seed, remove the husk and crush the germ inside. The Romans developed this method further by using power to drive the runner stone, at first by horse or donkey but later using water power.

The Domesday Survey records more than five thousand water mills in England, the wind mill was not introduced into England until about 1185.

During the medieval period, there was a customary law known as Mill Soke. The Mill would be built by the Lord of the Manor and his tenants were obliged to bring their corn to be ground there, by the Lord’s Miller and he retained a percentage of the ground flour as his ‘toll’, usually about one fifteenth. Millers were apparently not popular in the communities they served, often accused of taking more than their entitlement (it was noted that the Miller’s pigs were usually the fattest in the village) or adding material, such as alum, to pad out the flour which would, of course, affect the subsequent baking with the flour but would increase the profit for the miller. In 1872 Dr. Hassall, the pioneer investigator into food adulteration and the principal reformer in this vital area of health, demonstrated that half of the bread he examined had considerable quantities of alum. Alum, while not itself poisonous, by inhibiting the digestion could lower the nutritional value of other foods.

The Rowley Windmill was a manorial Mill. It occurs to me that it may have suited the Lord of the Manor to recruit his Miller from outside the community and he would certainly have needed a miller who knew the business and how to operate the machinery.

By 1750 the tradition of ‘soke’ was disappearing and millers bought grain direct from farmers and sold flour direct to his customers. White bread also became more popular so millers had to install extra equipment, more storage was needed and mills became larger. Between 1750 and 1850, the population of England tripled to nearly 17 million so more flour was needed.

Copyright: Paul Harrison. This painting shows Heage Mill, in Derbyshire, probably painted in about 1850, this mill is very similar to the remains of the windmill in Rowley Regis, shown in this photograph published by Wilson Jones.

By 1850, the traditional windmill or watermill had arrived at a developed state, with many operations becoming automated. The growth of canals and later railways made it possible to distribute flour more easily and quickly. But as new large automated mills with steel rollers rather than stones were built, traditional millers could not compete, particularly in urban areas. In rural areas, some diversified by milling animal feed as well as flour but by the early years of the 20^th century, traditional flour milling had all but ceased.

This timeline certainly fits in very well with what we know of the Rowley windmill. In November 1860, an advertisement appeared in the Birmingham Journal, giving details of the Rowley Flour Mill to be let at a low rent, with two dwelling houses and good access to both canal and railway. The Mill was said to consist of “an 18 horse condensing engine, driving three pairs of French stones, with Dressing, Bolting and Smutting machines, Bean Mill, etc all in excellent repair.” So it was using relatively modern technology and money had been spent on equipment. But Edward Alsop had died in August of that year so perhaps no-one in the family had the skills or was prepared to continue traditional milling, especially if they were already well established in other work.

The role of the Millwright in the development of mechanical engineering

I recently read an interesting paper [i]which examined the importance of technical competence in the development of the Industrial Revolution. This suggests that the manufacturing and maintenance of relatively sophisticated devices using high quality materials (such as in mills) required top quality mechanical competence. In the early stages, this competence mattered more than schooling or literacy. The paper focuses on a particular group of craftsmen, millwrights and wheelwrights or simply known as ‘wrights’. These were originally highly skilled carpenters specialising in the planning, construction, improvement and maintenance of mainly water-powered machinery. The paper calls these the engineers of the pre-industrial era. They suggest that the agility and efficiency of the English Apprenticeship system also helped to produce high-skilled mechanics who in turn apprenticed others to pass on their knowledge. The skills developed by these ‘wrights’ later enabled them to be at the forefront of other engineering work, including steam engines – so when mines needed pumps and lifting gear and when factories began to be set up these men were the ones who knew how to install the machinery and the power sources which drove them. Was it a coincidence that many of these factories, especially those in the weaving industries, were known as ‘mills’? And although the Midlands did not have textile mills in the same way as the North-East, they certainly had many other areas of work and factories requiring similar engines and similar skills.

Some of the best-known engineers of the Industrial Revolution originally apprenticed as Millwrights, including James Brindley, the great builder of canals during the early canal era after 1750 and John Rennie the co-inventor of the breast-wheel water mill and who built the first steam driven flour mills. The millwrights were seen as all-round technically competent craftsmen and textile engineering installations categorised their equipment as either ‘millwright’s work’ or ‘clockmaker’s work’.

The report quotes John R Harris, a historian of technology during the Industrial Revolution, as saying “so much knowledge was breathed in by the workman with the sooty atmosphere in which he lived rather then ever consciously learnt”. Which I think sums up very nicely the versatility and dexterity of many of our Black Country workers, well before literacy was common. Specific skills were recognised and valued, some men described themselves as nailers or labourers but many others were more specific, many of my male Rose ancestors were rivet makers, others were furnacemen or puddlers, quarrymen were stone cutters or sett makers. I recently saw a remark that competent people in the Black Country made chains, less able made nails but I do not think it was as simple as that. Each village made a particular type of nail – Dudley folk made horse nails – whereas chains tended to be made in the Cradley area but each nailer would learn the skill from their own family so such small differences remained very local. And other skills, such as ramrod making, jew’s harp making, gun making, bladed tool makers were all present locally and usually appear to have been family based skills and very possibly keenly restricted to family!

The authors of this report urge recognition of the ‘crucial role of mechanically trained and highly competent craftsmen in the Industrial Revolution’, which they suggest correlates closely to the distribution of mills and millwrights centuries ago, even as early as the Domesday survey, as the forerunners of the mechanical engineers who enabled much of the Industrial Revolution.

Millers in Rowley Regis

So, milling as a profession required certain skills which were clearly, in the Alsop (and Mallin) families passed through the generations. Although they may not have actually built the mills or the milling machinery, so were not technically ‘millwrights’, millers required quite a high level of engineering skills to operate and maintain their mills, and were not unskilled workers but likely to be in considerable demand by the owners of manorial mills to operate them safely and efficiently. And such owners may have preferred to bring in millers from outside the immediate area whose loyalties would lie with the mill owner, rather than the local populace. From my research, the children of the Alsop family appear considerably more likely to move away from the area and settle elsewhere, than most of the core families I have examined so far in this study.

The Alsop Family

The Alsops were not a family who had been in the parish for very long (at least in contrast to some of the local families who had been there for several centuries) and they were not as prolific as some of the Hamlet families. There are only 28 Alsop entries in the whole of the printed parish registers for Rowley Regis and only 34 results for the parish in FreeREG.

John Alsop (1744-1809)

John Alsop was born in about 1744, calculated from his age at burial which may not have been very accurate, such details are only as accurate as the knowledge of the person giving the information at the time of the death so with older people unlikely to have first hand knowledge. I searched FreeREG for the period 1730-1750 for a baptism in the area around Rowley Regis. There were three John Alsops baptised in the period. The first was baptised on 30 October 1734, the son of John and Mary Alsop. The second was baptised on 7 April 1740, the son of John and Elizabeth Alsop and the third on 9 September 1748, the son of Thomas and Mary Alsop. All three were baptised in Walsall where there are other later Alsop connections. I was very interested to note, whilst I was researching John Alsop, that another John Alsop aged 70 (which tallies with the last baptism above if the age was accurate)was buried in 1818 in Walsall and that his abode was also at ‘Windmill’. Perhaps the Alsop family were Millers and the Rowley John Alsop had moved to Rowley, with his specialist skills, specifically to operate the windmill there. As to which, if any, of these is the John who moved to Rowley, we cannot be sure.

John first appears in the Rowley Parish Registers in 1764 when his daughter Elizabeth was baptised, the first of five daughters – who were baptised to John and Elizabeth (nee Gough) Alsop. Then followed Hannah in 1766, Rachael in 1768, Lucy (1770-1791) and Mary in 1773. Elizabeth Alsop died in childbirth in 1773, (which I have concluded as Mary was baptised on the same day that Elizabeth was buried). A child of John Alsop was buried in November 1773 but no name is given but this was probably the motherless Mary .

John Alsop’s daughters

There is no further clear mention of any of John Alsop’s daughters in the Rowley Registers, other than the burial of Mary in 1773 and Lucy in 1791. There are no marriages for the other daughters in Rowley Regis but I think I have found their marriages elsewhere.

Elizabeth Alsop (1764-1794)

I think that Elizabeth Alsop married widower John Cooper (1761-1797) at Harborne, on 16 July 1782. Cooper’s first wife Mary nee Smith had died in March 1782 and their daughter Sarah (1782-1793) was baptised on the day of Mary’s burial so John re-married very quickly, partly, one would think, to give Sarah a mother. Elizabeth and John Cooper had five children, all baptised in Rowley Regis: these were Joseph (1783), Esther (1785), Elizabeth (1787-1811), Edward (1790-1794) and George (1792). Elizabeth died in 1794 and was buried at St Giles, so when John died in 1797 their surviving children would have been orphans. There are numerous Coopers in the area after that, especially in the Oldbury area but I have not been able to identify what happened to the children after that, although they may have been taken in by family.

Rachel Alsop (1768-1836)

It seems likely that Rachel Alsop married John Fenton at St Martin’s (in the Bullring) in Birmingham on 7 October 1788 and it appears that this couple went on to live out their lives in Aston, Birmingham where they had at least five children: John (1791), Isaac ((1793), Charles (1800), Sarah (1803) and Henry (1806). This Rachel died in 1836 and I think John Fenton died in 1843. If this is the correct couple, they were living in Potter Street, Aston which is just behind what is now Aston University and in the 1841 Census John is shown as a Steelworker.

Hannah Alsop (1776-1824)

Hannah married Benjamin Edge, a chain maker of Tuckies in the parish of Broseley, Shropshire in a Quaker ceremony in Worcester in April 1801 when she would have been 35, she was said to be of the City of Worcester. They lived in Coalbrookdale, certainly most of their married lives and at the time of their deaths, Hannah died in 1824 and Benjamin in 1845 and they appear to have had at least one child James Edge (1808-1887) who continued to live there for the rest of his life.

So only one of John Alsop’s daughters stayed in Rowley after her marriage, the other daughters settled in Birmingham and Coalport respectively and it appears that their children stayed in those places.

John Alsop’s second marriage

After Elizabeth’s death, John Alsop then married Sarah Bate, a widow, at Clent in 1780. Sarah’s husband John Bate had died in 1775, he and Sarah had had three sons and a daughter between 1770 and 1776. Perhaps John, with his several daughters, was keen to have a son to inherit his mill and farm. Edward Alsop was baptised at St Giles on 30 December 1781, the son of John and Sarah Alsop, he appears to have been their only child.

John Alsop died and was buried at St Giles in 1809, aged 65. Sarah Alsop, of the Windmill, died and was buried in February 1813, aged 76, of Dropsy.

Edward Alsop (1781-1860)

In 1841 John’s only son Edward Alsop, aged 60 with his wife Betty (nee Hodgetts), also 60, were living at the Mill Farm with their children Sarah aged 35, Thomas aged 30, Mary Ann aged 20 and Rhoda aged 15. There was also a Male Servant John Morteby, aged 15 who was not born in the County. Again, perhaps it suited millers to employ family members to keep their knowledge within the family or to bring in servants from outside the local community.

The 1851 Census is helpful, concerning farms and this has Edward Alsop, by then 70,as a farmer of 40 acres, employing 2 labourers. And in 1851 there were two men listed in his household, one a cowman and one a waggoner. I wonder whether Alsop was already quarrying by that time and required a waggoner to transport stone from the quarry?

Edward Alsop had married Betty Hodgetts of Clent on 7 Jun 1801 at Clent, and his abode was also shown as Clent. It may be that there was a family connection for the Alsops in Clent as his father had also married there but there were also a large number of Alsops in Walsall.

Edward and Betty’s first daughter Hannah was baptised on 11 October 1801 at St Giles, Rowley Regis. Then followed Sarah in 1805, John in 1807, Thomas in 1809, and Mary in 1811, (who was buried aged 1 in 1813), Joseph in 1816, Edward in 1818 – in these latter two baptisms the occupations of the fathers were being shown and in these two Edward Snr’s abode was shown as Windmill and his occupation as a Miller. Next came Mary in 1820 and Rhoda in 1821 and now his occupation was shown as farmer, so perhaps the milling was becoming less important.

Betty Alsop nee Hodgetts, died in July 1854 aged 74 and her abode was given as ‘The Mill’. Her cause of death was noted as ‘old age’. Hodgetts is not an unknown name in the area. I have not yet researched Betty Hodgetts myself but other researchers who have her on their trees on Ancestry indicate that she was born in Halesowen and that her father was Timothy Hodgetts and her mother Mary Mallen – Mallen is a name which will recur later.

Edward Alsop died six years later, aged 78 in 1860 and was buried at St Giles on 7 September 1860, no cause of death noted. The Mill was being advertised for rent only a few months later so it was obviously still operational and fully equipped at that point, when milling ceased completely is not known.

The next piece will look at the children of Edward and Betty.

[i] The Wheels of Change: Technology Adoption, Millwrights, and the Persistence in Britain’s Industrialization Joel Mokyr, Assaf Sarid, and Karine van der Beek+ which I was able to download free from academia.edu

Where was Blower’s hill?

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!

Families of the Lost Hamlets, a diversion to the Dingleys, the Ingleys and the Hingleys in the Hill area!

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 1960s 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…!

Families of the Lost Hamlets – Finger-I’ the Hole, the 1841 Census

Having researched the Hill family of Finger-I’ the Hole (later known as Gadd’s Green) at such length in previous posts to my blog, I have been looking at what to explore next. As I concluded at the end of the Hill family study, it is now apparent that, by and large, the families in Finger-I’ the Hole especially and in the adjoining areas were so closely connected that any family I now investigate there will almost certainly link back almost immediately – in one way or another – to the Hill family.

So I have gone back to the 1841 Census to see who else was living in Finger-I’ the Hole in 1841 and whether or how they related to one another. The 1841 Census does not show relationships and adult ages are rounded down to the nearest five years (mostly, occasionally a presumably accurate full age is shown) and the origins of each person are limited to whether or not they were born in the County. So there is a certain amount of guesswork about relationships (which can sometimes be resolved by looking at the next census). I will look at the children shown here in more detail as part of further family studies but am just trying to establish how these mixed households related to each other at this point.

The image above lists the census enumerator’s route which is shown on the first page of each batch of the census. It appears that the enumerator was approaching Finger-I’ the Hole from Tippity Green and he later moved on to Turner’s Hill before returning to The Bull’s Head and Cock Green so presumably the first families listed lived in the first houses he came to as he climbed from Perry’s Lake. There is no mention of Freebodies Farm in this census so it is possible that some of the people listed under Finger-I’ the Hole were living there although none of the occupations are shown as farmers.

The occupations appear to be shown only for the Head of the Household, even though it is highly likely that older sons, the women and some of the younger children would also have been working or making nails. This is better recorded in later censuses.

In censuses, a double stroke after a group of entries indicates that the entries for that household are complete. A single stroke indicates that a sub-group is living in the same house. At the end of the subgroup a double stroke then shows the start of the next household. I am not totally convinced that these were always correctly recorded, perhaps omitted sometimes from the pages I am looking at as at times it appears that there is yet another group living in the same household but the stroke or double stroke are not shown. But I will work on the basis of what is shown. Where I have been able to find the maiden names of the married women I have added these in brackets, these were not shown in the Census.

My apologies that the correct layout for the table has not copied over from Word so some names are spread over two lines – very irritating!

In 1841 then, living in Finger-I’ the Hole, were:

First Group

The Priests, the Taylors and the Hills

Christian name	Surname	Age	Occupation	Whether born In County
William	Priest	45	Nail m[aker]	Y
Sarah (nee Smith)	Priest	45		Y
Elizabeth	Priest	15		Y
Sub-household 1
Joseph	Taylor	40	Nail m	Y
Margaret (nee Bagnall)	Taylor	40		N
Emma	Taylor	12		Y
Josiah	Taylor	10		Y
Thomas	Taylor	8		Y
Mariah	Taylor	6		Y
Sub-household 2
Thomas	Hill	45	Nail m	Y
Catharine (nee Taylor)	Hill	45		Y
Thomas	Hill	15		Y
Eliza	Hill	15		Y
James	Hill	12		Y
Elizabeth	Hill	9		Y
Joseph	Hill	7		Y
John	Hill	5		Y
Catharine	Hill	5m		Y

So were there really three families living in one house here? Three adult men, nailmakers, with their families of one, four and 7 children respectively? It seems there were. Or perhaps this was a once larger house sub-divided, as discussed previously in my blog.

Were they related to each other? Yes, certainly in at least some of the cases.

William Priest had married Sarah Smith at Harborne on 3 October 1813. The parish boundary of Harborne at this time covered all of the Hill part of what later became the town of Blackheath and also included much of Whiteheath. So, although this couple had not been living in the Lost Hamlets at the time of their marriage, they were probably close by.

I have not yet identified how or whether William Priest and David Priest, the husband of Ann Hill and living just a few doors away, were related but I have not yet researched the Priest family in detail so that may yet emerge. They do not appear to have been brothers but I have more work to do on David Priest’s family.

Nor have I yet discovered whether Sarah Smith was a Rowley girl but again, that may become known. Sarah’s age, given as rounded down to 45 in the 1841 Census seems to be given ten years later in the 1851 Census as 43 but it is possible that this is not the same Sarah so more research is needed. There were 17 Sarah Smiths baptised in Rowley Regis St Giles alone, between 1790 and 1810 and another 21 at Dudley St Thomas, so it is not going to be a quick process to identify her with any certainty and for these marriages before Civil Registration started in 1837, family details are not given so I do not know who her parents were!

However, looking at the marriage of the next couple listed – Joseph Taylor to Margaret Bagnall, – I was interested to find that this took place at Kingswinford on 19 May 1823. And on the same day, Thomas Hill married Catherine Taylor, also at Kingswinford – a double wedding of the Taylor siblings, presumably. So finding those two families living together now makes more sense.

So there were connections between at least part of this household and their neighbours but more to be investigated.

Second Group

The Hipkisses, the Whitehalls & the Taylors

Christian Name	Surname	Age	Occupation	Whether born In County
John	Hipkiss	70	Nail m	Y
Ann (previously Nock, Nee?)	Hipkiss	60		Y
Paul	Hipkiss	20		Y
Sub-household
Solomon	Hipkiss	30	Nail m	Y
Sarah (nee Brookes)	Hipkiss	30		Y
Thomas	Hipkiss	9		Y
Hannah	Hipkiss	7		Y
Maria	Hipkiss	5		Y
Ann	Hipkiss	3		Y
(N/k in this census, actually Solomon Jnr)		5m		Y

John	Hipkiss Jnr	30	Nail m	Y
Priscilla (nee Guest)	Hipkiss	25		Y
Selena	Hipkiss	8		N
Henry	Hipkiss	3		N
William	Hipkiss	7m		N
Sub-household 1
Joseph	Whitehall	59	Nail m	Y
Sarah (prev.Taylor, nee Hipkiss)	Whitehall	69		Y
Sub-household 2
Elijah	Whitehall	25	Nail m	Y
Ruth(nee Priest)	Whitehall	25		Y
Sarah	Whitehall	6		Y
Tabitha	Whitehall	4		Y
Emanuel	Whitehall	2		Y

Philiss	Taylor	35		Y
Mary	Taylor	12		Y
Joseph	Taylor	9		Y
Samuel	Taylor	7		Y
William	Taylor	5		Y

Another interconnecting group –

Looking at John’s history, John Hipkiss Senior, from his age in the 1841 Census and at the time of his death in 1850, was born in about 1770. There were three possible John Hipkisses baptised about this time, two at Dudley St Thomas and one at Harborne. Only one was actually born in 1770, John, son of George and Margaret Hipkiss who was baptised on 25 Feb 1770. Another John, son of Edward and Mary was baptised at Dudley on 29 April 1764, which is a little early. The third John was baptised at Dudley on 5 December 1773, the son of John and Sarah. None of these seem to have died in infancy so it is not really possible to know for sure which was this John. However, none of this John’s numerous children was called Edward, George or Margaret so it is possibly the son of John and Sarah that we are looking at.

A Rowley killing

I noted an intriguing burial entry in the St Giles Register on 18 December 1792 when a William Richards was buried with a note that he had been “killed by Jno. Hipkiss”. Sadly I have been quite unable to find out any more about this event, whether or not there was an inquest or a trial, no mentions in the Press and whether this is the same John Hipkiss.

Military Service

Whilst researching, I also came across an entry in the Royal Hospital Chelsea Records for a Sgt. John Hipkiss who was discharged from the 37^th Regiment of Foot in August 1808 suffering from ‘diseased viscera and broken constitution’. I looked up viscera and it apparently refers to the soft internal organs of the body, including the lungs, heart, and the digestive and reproductive systems. Quite a poorly man, then. His age was given as 32 (so born in 1776) and his place of birth as Rowley, Staffs so it is possible that this is the same John. Interestingly there was another Hipkiss from Rowley on the same page of hospital records, a Corporal Joseph Hipkiss who had been discharged in October 1806, following a severe fracture at what looks like Trinidad – although the writing is not good and it may be that this is an obscure medical term I do not recognise. This Joseph was 36 then, so born in 1770. This was during the Napoleonic Wars when Britain was at war with France, which continued until 1815, and 1/6^th of all British men served in the army or navy during this period. They may have been brothers or cousins but Rowley was a large parish. There were probably a lot of Rowley men who served in the army during this time.

John’s marriages and offspring

However, it may have been this John Hipkiss who married an Ann Shaw in Dudley St Thomas in 1794, when he was about 24, the marriage witnessed by Sarah Hipkiss and J Bond. And it may have been this Ann, the wife of a Hipkiss who was buried at St Giles on 26 July 1798. An unnamed child of John Hipkiss was buried at St Giles on 19 August 1798, less than a month later and it is tempting to think that Ann may have died in childbirth and her baby a few weeks later. I cannot be sure but it is possible.

Certainly a John Hipkiss, a widower, married a Sarah Day, a spinster at Dudley St Thomas on 15 January 1799, just a few months later. Joseph Hipkiss, the son of John and Sarah was baptised at St Giles on the 5 January 1800, possibly or possibly not the Joseph Hipkiss buried at St Giles on 20 July 1802. Mary, daughter of John and Sarah Hipkiss was baptised at St Giles on 12 February 1804. On the 14 September 1806, Sarah, wife of John Hipkiss was buried at St Giles and only three weeks later, John, son of John Hipkiss was also buried there. Draw your own conclusions, but sadly I suspect that John had lost another wife and child in childbirth. And it seems possible that John had at least one living child to care for and would need another wife.

In addition to the birth of Solomon to Ann Nock, there is a baptism on 25 December 1807 of a John Hipkiss, son of Jno. and Ann Hipkiss at St Giles. Where does he fit into the picture? – I really don’t know since Ann Nock and John Hipkiss were not married until 25 November 1811. Perhaps John Snr managed to fit in yet another marriage in between which I have not yet found!

So I think it is fair to say that John Hipkiss Senior, as he appears in the 1841 Census, had a fairly complicated marital history. But it appears that he had at least one son – Solomon Nock– born before he married Ann Nock and that this Solomon was still living in his house with his own family and who continued to use the name Solomon Hipkiss for the rest of his life. Next door to them was John Hipkiss Jnr, born to John and Ann in 1807. There had also been twin sons James and Daniel born to John and Ann, and baptised on 8 December 1811, just a month after their marriage. I wonder whether the curate had realised that John and Ann were not actually married and put pressure on them to marry before the twins were born? Little Daniel’s burial on 1 January 1818 has a note that he, aged 3 weeks, had been found dead in bed with his mother. His twin James was buried a few months later on 29 April 1812, aged 20 weeks, of a bowel complaint.

Solomon Hipkiss and his family are in the household of John Hipkiss who appears to be the right age to be his father. However, I can find no trace of a baptism for a Solomon Hipkiss anywhere in the area. He is very consistent in the 1841 Census, later censuses and his age given at the time of his death in 1884 that he was born in about 1810 in Rowley Regis and, since he was living with John Hipkiss it seems likely that he was John’s son.

So I looked at children called Solomon who were baptised in Rowley Regis at about that time and there were three.

Solomon Priest was baptised on 26 October 1806, the son of Mark and Rosanna Priest. But this Solomon died in 1808 so that rules him out.

Solomon Trowman was baptised at Rowley on 28 April 1811, the son of Thomas and Mary Trowman. But this Solomon appears to be alive and living in Cradley Heath in 1841 so not our Solomon.

The third Solomon was Solomon Nock who was baptised at Rowley on 24 December 1810, so exactly the right date. He was the ‘base born son’ of Ann Nock. Aha! And – oh look – I see from FreeREG that John Hipkiss, widower, married Ann Nock, widow at St Giles, Rowley Regis on 25 November 1811, less than a year after Solomon’s birth, their marriage witnessed by none other than Timothy Hill and also Richard Gaunt who was the Parish Clerk and probably frequently acted as a witness to marriages. Timothy’s wife Maria had been a Hipkiss until her marriage. Was John Hipkiss related to her? Very probably! So this was presumably the Ann who was living in the household of John Hipkiss in the 1841 Census and it seems likely that Solomon was John’s son, as he subsequently used that name.

Also in the house in 1841 was Paul Hipkiss, who had been baptised at St Giles on 5 September 1819, the son of John and Ann Hipkiss of Finger-I’ the Hole, John’s occupation given as a labourer. In later censuses Paul is shown as Ann’s son (John’s son too, presumably, but he was deceased by that time).

It seems that the John Hipkiss Junior who appears next in the census is the John who was born in 1807. He died, aged 40 and of Gadd’s Green, in 1847 and was buried at St Giles on 28 December 1847 so from the age and date it seems likely this is the same person. Poor chap was noted as having died, on 23 December 1840, of rheumatism which seems unusual as a cause of death but medical diagnoses were somewhat inexact at that time. His death was registered by John Hipkiss of Gadd’s Green, his father and his death certificate was uncertified so that there is no knowing what a medical practitioner might have put. His death was followed in 1850 by that of his father, who died of old age, aged 80, also of Gadd’s Green and who was buried on 21 July 1850 so both of these Johns were gone before the next census.

John Hipkiss Jnr was living in 1841 with his wife Priscilla nee Guest. They had married at Dudley St Thomas on 26 March 1832. The witnesses at the marriage were Thomas Allen and Thomas Whitehall, a name which will recur in this family. Their children Selina, aged 8, Henry aged 3 and William, aged 7 months were, unusually for this hamlet, noted as not having been born in Staffordshire. It took a while to find out more about Selina since she was born in 1832, before the start of Civil Registration but I eventually found her baptism at Christchurch West Bromwich where she was baptised as Ann Selina on 31 Jul 1836 with an incomplete note of her birth date as 19 ? 1832, with no month shown. I found a birth registration for a Henry Hipkiss on 1 July 1838 when the family were at Rood End, near Oldbury and Henry was also baptised there on 12 Aug 1838. In both baptisms the family were living at Rood End and his father was noted as a collier. The birth of William Hipkis was registered in the Kings Norton Registration District, William was born on 31 October 1840 in Streetly Street, Kings Norton and his father’s occupation was shown as a miner. He was baptised on 22 November 1840 at St Nicolas Kings Norton when his father was still shown as a Coal Miner.

However, by 1841, only a few months after William’s baptism, the whole family had moved back to Gadd’s Green, possibly because of his illness and so that his family could support them.

Sub-household:

The Whittalls

Also, apparently living in the household of John Jnr, was Joseph Whitehall, aged 59, as his name was shown in this census with his family. Elsewhere he is shown as Whittall and there are several other variations of this name in use around the area! There is only one likely marriage for Joseph and his wife Sarah, (aged 69) going by ages of themselves and their children’s ages and that marriage took place at Dudley St Thomas on 11 April 1813, both Joseph Whittall and Sarah Taylor being widowed.

Sarah Taylor’s previous husband was Josiah Taylor and they had been married on 13 September 1795 at St Giles. She had eight children with him, from Sarah Taylor in 1796, Mary in 1796, Catherine in 1799, Joseph in 1799, Elizabeth in 1803, Benjamin in 1803, Phillis in 1805, to Ann in 1806.

Joseph and Sarah remained in Finger-I’ the Hole, or Gadd’s Green as it was subsequently known until their deaths, Joseph died in 1855, aged 75 and Sarah in 1863, aged 93 (according to the Burial Register entry, although I make her age 88), both were buried at St Giles.

More connections:

Hmm, some of those names ring bells. When I look back to the first group, living in the household of William Priest, there are the two Taylor siblings, Catherine and Joseph who had a double wedding in 1823 in Kingswinford. And the ages of those two siblings match, given the five year variance in the 1841, with Sarah’s children. And it appears that this is who they were. Their re-married mother was living next door to them in Finger-I’ the Hole, in the household of John Hipkiss. And, guess what Sarah’s maiden name turns out to be, when I find the marriage of Sarah and Josiah Taylor? Yes, Sarah was a Hipkiss… And Sarah’s sister was Maria who was married to Timothy Hill, also living in Finger-I’ the Hole, whose family was the subject of my last family study.

Joseph and Sarah’s son Elijah Whitehall was also living with them in 1841 and he had been baptised at St Giles on 10 November 1813. By 1841 Elijah had married Ruth Priest at Dudley St Thomas on 1 June 1836, a first marriage for both of them, and their three children Sarah aged 6, Tabitha (sometimes known as Sabia or Sabiah), aged 4 and Emanuel aged 2 had been born. I cannot find baptisms for any of the children at present. The family were great users of biblical names and it is interesting to speculate that they were early Dissenters who had their children baptised by Methodist or Presbyterian ministers. Their use of unusual biblical names implies a good knowledge of the Old Testament. In later years, Elijah and Ruth had added Paarai (later known as Pharoah) in 1841, Mabel in 1844, Mary in 1846, Charity in 1848, Priscilla in 1851, Abraham in 1854 and Ruth in 1857. Elijah and Ruth remained in Gadd’s Green and Tippity Green for the rest of their lives, Elijah died in 1874 and Ruth in 1883, both were buried at St Giles. I will do some more work on the Whittalls in more detail at some point.

Phillis Taylor: Also with Joseph and Sarah was a Phillis Taylor, born in about 1805 – probably Sarah’s daughter from her first marriage, as the age is correct. Along with four Taylor children – Mary aged 12, Joseph aged 9, Samuel aged 7 and William aged 5. In the 1851 Census, Phillis is still living in Gadd’s Green with Sarah and Joseph Whittall and is described as a widow. It is possible, of course, that Phillis Taylor married a Taylor so did not change her surname but I cannot find a marriage for Phillis anywhere in the area. I found a baptism on 16 August 1829 for a Mary Ann Taylor at Dudley St Thomas, daughter of Phillis Taylor of Rowley, also a baptism for a Joseph Taylor, also at Dudley St Thomas, on 12 August 1832 when Joseph was described as the son of Samuel and Phillis Taylor of Rowley Regis, Samuel’s occupation given as a nailer. Phillis continued to live in Gadd’s Green, with various members of the Whittall/Priest/Taylor families but no husband, until her death in 1882.

Curiously I have found a Samuel Taylor, living in Rowley Village in 1861, aged 57 who might be about the right age to be this Samuel . He is a nailer, married to a Mary and has three children – Edward aged 18, Hannah, aged 12 and James aged 9. I was also interested to see that this Samuel was living next door to an Issachar Hipkiss (later known as Hezekiah) who was the son of James Hipkiss and Phebe Moreton – Phebe was the sister of Thomas Moreton who was married to Elizabeth Hill. This may be a coincidence but there do seem to be a lot of links between the Hipkiss/Hill/Taylor families, to say the least.

3^rd Group

Christian name	Surname	Age	Occupation	Whether born in county
William	Woodall	45	Nail M	Y
Elizabeth (nee Whithall)	Woodall	40		Y
Edward	Woodall	15		Y
Pheby	Whitehall	30	Nail M	Y
Mary	Whitehall	10		Y
Samuel	Whitehall	7		Y

Goodness, what a small household, only 6 people, but still two families.

To look at the second part of this household first, Pheby Whitall was the daughter of Joseph Whittall/Whitehall, living next door in this census, by his first wife Mary Worton who had died in 1810 a few months after Pheby’s birth. Mary and Samuel appear to be Pheby’s illegitimate children, had been baptised at Dudley St Thomas, Mary Ann on 12 September 1830, and Samuel on 4 May 1834, both described as children of Phebe Whittall of Rowley and both noted as illegitimate. So these three fit easily into the web of family relationships in Finger-I’ the Hole.

Woodall, however, is not a common name in the Lost Hamlets area, although there were Woodalls in the Rowley Parish Registers as early as 1611 and a William Woodall as early as 1626 when Elizabeth, daughter of William Woodall was baptised. In later times, the Woodalls tended to be in the Old Hill/Cradley Heath area or Dudley/Tipton/Sedgley. In fact I find that William is definitely a favourite Woodall name, it recurs constantly through the generations.

The age of 45 in the 1841 census means that William was aged between 40 and 44 so that indicates a birth year of between 1796 and 1801 and he was born in Staffordshire. When I searched FreeREG for the baptism of a William Woodall in this period in Rowley and the surrounding area, there were only two baptisms, one at Dudley St Thomas on 6 March 1796 of William, son of John and Mary Woodall, and the other at Tipton, for William, son of Thomas and Ann Woodall. The latter William appears still to be in Tipton in the 1851 Census so it may well be that the William in Rowley was the son of John and Mary baptised at Dudley St Thomas, remember that residents of Turner’s Hill and often Finger-I’ the Hole/Gadd’s Green frequently used Dudley rather than Rowley church.

The only marriage I found for a William Woodall marrying an Elizabeth was on 23 April 1821 at Dudley St Thomas when he married Elizabeth Wythall, both of Dudley. Wythall is not a common Rowley name either. This stymied me for a while. ( I can be quite dense at times!) Until it dawned on me… Hmm, was this a corruption of Whittall/Whithall? And sure enough, Elizabeth Whithall, the daughter of James and Phebe (nee Downing)Whitehall was baptised on 1796, so a good fit for this Elizabeth. And Elizabeth’s brother Henry Whittall was married to Mary Hill, eldest daughter of Timothy and Maria Hill. So that would account for this couple living in the Hill stronghold – Hill family connection firmly established!

I found a baptism at the Old Hill Primitive Methodist church, dated 9 April 1851 for an Edward Woodall which stated that he was born on 3 August 1823, that is, baptised as an adult, and that he was the son of William (a nailer) and Elizabeth Woodall, his abode given as Old Hill. And sure enough, William and Elizabeth are living in Garratts Lane, Old Hill in the 1851 Census and Edward, now a nailmaker and aged 26, is living at the ‘Back of Garratts Lane’, with his wife Ann and three children, Elizabeth aged 6, Jane, aged 3 and Edward aged 1month.

So, as I suspected at the end of my Hill family study, the Woodall family is also closely linked to the Hill/Whittall tribe!

The Priest household

Next along the row is the household of David and Ann (nee Hill) Priest which also includes Ann’s brother Joseph Hill and his family: I list them here for completeness but both families were covered in detail in my study of the Hill family.

Christian name	Surname	Age	Occupation	Whether born in county
David	Priest	35	Labourer	Y
Ann (nee Hill)	Priest	35		Y
Timothy	Priest	10		Y
William	Priest	9		Y
Mary	Priest	7		Y
Elizabeth	Priest	5		Y
Sub-household
Joseph	Hill	20	Coal Miner	Y
Betsey (nee Jones)	Hill	20		Y
John	Hill	5		Y
Cathrine	Hill	2		Y

The Moreton Household

The final household in Finger-I’ the Hole is that of the widow Elizabeth or Betsey Moreton, nee Hill. Again, this family was covered in detail in the Hill family study so they are included here just for completeness.

Christian name	Surname	Age	Occupation	Whether born in county
Elizabeth	Moreton (nee Hill)	35	Mail M	Y
Emma	Moreton	15		Y
Mary	Moreton	12		Y
Thomas	Moreton	8		Y
William	Moreton	5		Y
Elizabeth	Moreton	2		Y
Maria	Moreton	10		Y
Sub-household
John	Simpson	20		Y
Fanny	Simpson (nee Hill)	20		Y

The sub-household consists of John and Fanny Simpson. John and Fanny were married on 12 Apr 1841 at Dudley St Thomas. John Simpson was a minor, a bachelor and a Miner, with his abode given as Dudley Wood. Frances or Fanny, his wife, was Frances Hill, of full age, also of Dudley Wood. John’s father was Joseph Simpson, a potter and the bride’s father was Thomas Hill, a miner. Interestingly, the witnesses at the marriage were Thomas Hill and Elizabeth Moreton – and here they are, living with Elizabeth on 6^th June when the Census was taken. Was this Thomas Hill the same Thomas Hill who is listed in the very first household in Finger-I’ the Hole in this census? Well, it seems not as that Thomas and Catherine were not married until 1823 but there was another Thomas and Catherine Hill pairing who baptised other children, mainly in the Handsworth area at about that time. It is intriguing, though, that Elizabeth Moreton was clearly closely involved. I have not yet been able to link the Thomas Hill in the first group to the rest of the Hill family but will continue to work on this.

Summary

So there we have it, as I suspected at the conclusion of my Hill family study, it transpires that everyone living in the hamlet of Finger-I’ the Hole in 1841 was closely related to the Hill family. It seems extraordinary to me that the entire hamlet was inhabited by one family but it appears that this was the case.

I do not know the logistics of this, how ownerships or tenancies of the various parts of the family passed between members of the family, how it was decided who would live here and who would live just down the road in Perry’s Lake or Hawes Lane. But we already know that there were members of the Hill family living there for hundreds of years…

So, who owned the properties in Finger-I’ the Hole?

The Enclosure Act and Award 1807-08

About 300 acres of common pasture in Rowley in 228 separate holdings were ‘enclosed’ under this Act and various freeholders were mentioned in this. Richard Bate, a farmer bought some additional land adjoining his existing holdings at Tippity Green, Isaac Downing did the same at Turner’s Hill. Richard Gaunt acquired land at Portway Hall. Some of these names recur in later records.

The 1841 Poll Book

On Ancestry, there is a Poll Book for 1841 which gives the names and abodes of those qualified to vote in the Parish of Rowley Regis, the nature of the qualification to vote – ie. the land or property held – and where this property was. Interestingly, there are no Hills listed as voters in the Parish, so presumably they did not own land in the area but there are various other familiar local names.

A William Bennitt owned a freehold house and land in Oakham;

Benjamin Bate held freehold houses in Tippity Green; Ferdinando Smith of the Grange at Halesowen also owned freehold land and premises there. (I have a feeling that Ferdinando Smith may have been connected with the Earl of Dudley but I may be wrong!) I am slightly puzzled that the Earl of Dudley does not appear in this list as I suspect he owned a great deal of property in the area but I cannot find his name or title in the list, perhaps nobility were not permitted to vote in elections for the House of Commons, although no doubt they made their preferences known to their tenants.

Joseph Bowater is listed as the owner of a house and land at the Bull’s Head;

Other owners are listed as holding property –

John Bate lived in Garratt’s Lane, but owned one third of a house and land in Cock Green, the Bate family were in the licensed trade and owned the Cock Inn and Benjamin Bate, mentioned above, also had houses at Perry’s Lake.

Joseph Cookes, of a local farming family, had a house and land in the Knoll (Knowle), and Edward Fletcher of Netherton owned a freehold house and land there.

Charles Cox lived in Hall Street, Dudley but owned a house and land in Oakham, William Cox owned freehold land in Portway. Other voters in Portway included Joseph Green Bourne who lived in Dudley, the Rev. William Lewis who lived in Sedgley, John Mallin who also lived in Portway, John Taylor who lived in Birmingham, Joseph Woodhouse and John Williams who each owned a house and land and also lived on Portway.

Owners of land on Turner’s Hill included Joseph Downing who also lived there, Jeremiah Detheridge and Edward Foster who both lived on Portway Road, Benjamin Thompson who lived in West Bromwich, William Woodhouse who owned and lived in a house there and William Jewkes who lived in Dudley but let his house on Turner’s Hill to James Hipkiss (who is not listed as living in Finger-I’ the Hole in 1841but is listed as living just up the hill on Turner’s Hill). As might be expected John Levett had a house and land at Brickhouse and James Adshead Levett owned houses at Perry’s Lake.

Two members of the Hipkiss family appear on this Poll Book list: Joseph Hipkiss is listed as owning freehold houses at Springfield, William Hipkiss also owned a house and land at Springfield Colliery.

The Woodhouse family are also well represented: William Woodhouse owned and occupied a house and land at Oakham, Joseph Woodhouse lived in Kidderminster but owned a freehold house and garden at Portway, let to Joseph Lowe. Benjamin and Thomas Woodhouse, publican at the Wheatsheaf and farmer respectively are both listed as owning houses at Lye Cross.

Samuel Whitehouse is listed as occupying a house and land at Lye Cross Farm and John Whitehouse as owning a freehold house at Causeway Green.

There are dozens of entries in the Poll Book relating to other parts of Rowley village and the wider parish but I have concentrated on the owners of land in the immediate area of the Lost Hamlets.

There are only two specific references to Finger-I’ the Hole in the list, Samuel Partridge who lived at Long Lane, Halesowen owned a freehold house and garden there and William Partridge of Oldbury also owned a freehold house and garden, which was let to John Hipkiss. Partridge is a name I associate with the Long Lane/Quinton area (a dear life-long friend of my mother named Partridge lived off the top end of Long Lane until well into the 1980s and many of her family were from Quinton) which is indeed where Samuel Partridge was living. Perhaps their two houses were adjoining and let to various connections of the Hill family.

Or perhaps some properties in the area were under the direct control of the Earl of Dudley who was the Lord of the Manor, and were rented direct from him, which might account for the apparent continuing occupancy over such a long period of time.

But there were no Hills, no Moretons, no Whittall/Whitehalls, appearing in the Poll Lists for the Lost Hamlets area. Two members of the Hipkiss family appear to have owned houses in the Springfield area and there are members of the Priest family listed but they are all based in the Cradley Heath area where the Priests had a strong association with the Presbyterian chapel there. Some of the houses described as Turner’s Hill might also have been around Finger-I’ the Hole. So it is clear that the Hills and their immediate family were tenants of some sort and not land owners, which ties in with their apparently fairly humble status generally. This would have been the case for most ordinary people in those days, home ownership was not a common experience for humble folk.

What next? Further research on-going!

It seems possible that there were also family connections between the Hill and also the Hipkiss, Priest and Taylor families with Cradley Heath, Old Swinford and Kingswinford so there is more digging to be done there. Interestingly, whilst looking at members of the Hill family, I notice that a Thomas Hill was at one stage the curate at Oldswinford so that may help to explain family connections in that area!

I am also now working on the Priest and Hipkiss families to work out how or whether they interrelated and I will also be doing more work on the Whitehall/Whitall/Witall/Wytall families so more family studies are in the pipeline.

And I confess to being tempted to do a similar exercise as this for Perry’s Lake/Tippity Green in the 1841 Census and, perhaps, in due course, Turner’s Hill to further track the close contacts between these communities. But it is painstaking work, made even slower these days as I am finding that I must check that people are not duplicated on my own family tree, having arrived there through different connections. Knowing now, as a result of this research, how interrelated the local populace were, the ‘Merge with duplicate’ button on my family tree on Ancestry is coming into use more often! And, having merged duplicated individuals, the same exercise then has to be undertaken for their immediate relatives! I have eleven Edward Coles, ten Thomas Hills, ten Joseph Priests, for example, all with sufficiently different year of birth to make it likely that they are separate individuals but needing to be checked- So updates may take a little time.

Yes, I am a glutton for punishment but I hope that my faithful readers will find something here of interest!

Families of the Lost Hamlets – the Hill family 9 – an overview

In all, Timothy Hill (1763-1831) and Maria Hill nee Hipkiss (1782-1855) had seven children between 1800 and 1823, including Benjamin who may or may not have been the son of Timothy’s first wife Ann Priest or of Maria, his second wife. I have been aware of the number of children they had almost since I started my family history research but until now I had not realised how closely they all remained in their community.

Perhaps unusually for that period, it seems that all seven survived into adulthood and childbearing age. Although it is possible that there were other children that I have not found who lived only short periods or were stillborn.

Timothy was about 68 when he died. Two of the Hill sons died relatively young – Benjamin aged 44 in a colliery explosion and Joseph aged 49. Joseph was also a miner but the burial record contains no clues about his death. Samuel lived the longest of all the children, to the ripe old age of 90, very unusual for those days.

And the four girls also all lived long lives, most of them staying within the close neighbourhood of the Lost Hamlets. Maria, their mother, had lived to be 73. Mary Hill was 81, Ann and her sister Elizabeth (Betsey) were both 86 and Jane was 77 when they died. These were unusually long lives for those times, these girls must have inherited some strong genes!

Perhaps living up on the hill above the main settlements meant that they had space to grow some of their food, fresh air, free mostly of much pollution and similarly their water supplies from local springs were probably purer than water in wells lower in the valleys. Whereas many of the men were in quite hazardous occupations, their lungs subjected to constant exposure to coal dust, furnace fumes and quarry dust, with no safety equipment which may have impacted their health, not to mention the hazards of explosions in mines and quarries. But the women and children nail makers would also have worked in the dusty polluted air inside poorly ventilated nailshops.

Grandchildren

So how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren did Timothy and Maria leave?

Child No of children No. of grandchildren

Benjamin 4 27

Mary 9 53

Ann 6 28

Elizabeth 8 64

Jane 10 68

Joseph 5 27

Samuel 4 3

Total: 46 270

So, from their seven children, Timothy and Maria had about 46 grandchildren and the extraordinary total of about 270 great-grandchildren, 213 of these through their daughters so not bearing the Hill surname. Many of these stayed in the immediate area of the Lost Hamlets. So, I think it is fair to say that the Lost Hamlets were well populated with this family and their close connections.

I say about 46 and 270 grandchildren and because there are a couple of instances of people marrying their cousins so Timothy and Maria would be their grandparents twice over and there are also some children whose exact parentage is unclear. There may also have been some children who died in infancy who I have no information about. And a few people simply could not be traced after a certain point and they may have had more children wherever they were.

The Hill children married mostly local people, usually very local. Surnames of spouses in that generation include Whittall, Priest, Moreton, Taylor/Bridgwater, Hackett, Williams, Jones, Bate and Smith.

In the 1841 Census there are twelve households listed under Gadd’s Green or Finger-i-the-Hole, as it was known then, but I can only see one family listed there which is not named either Hill or one of the first four of these names – he was William Woodall. And even then, I suspect I will tie him into the Hill family at some point as he has a Pheby Hipkiss living in his household. So it appears to me that this hamlet was essentially a Hill family enclave. There were certainly Hills in Rowley as early as 1604, as mentioned in the Parish Register and it is likely that they were in the Lost Hamlets area then.

Timothy and Maria’s grandchildren married spouses called Tibbetts, Pearson, Worton, Pritchard, Steadman, Lowe, Whitmore, Blakeway, Jarvis, Parish, Cole, Hemmings, Bowater, Ingram, Leech, Homer, Slater, Priest, Redfern, Siviter, Beet, Parsons, Stokes, Nock, While, Payne, Westwood, Cox, Perry, Raybould, Pockett, Allen, Barnsley, Groves, Ennis, Fellows, Hadley, almost all of these familiar Rowley names.

The next generation linked with Bastable, Gazey, Horton, Harvey – and I have barely looked at that generation, there will be more names.

And yet there are other Rowley names which do not appear – no Parkes, Darbys, Rustons, Levetts, who were all farmers or business people. It appears generally that the Hill family married into families like themselves, nailers, labourers, miners, foundrymen, quarrymen – not many rags to riches stories but plenty of hard working people.

Family life for this part of the Hill tribe essentially centred – literally for centuries – around Gadd’s Green, on the Hill above Perrys Lake and Tippety Green which also provided homes for many of the overspill, which then edged along into Hawes Lane and Siviters Lane.

As I related in a previous post (Tales of Old Portway – https://rowleyregislosthamlets.uk/2023/10/15/tales-of-old-portway/) in a newspaper report about Portway, the reporter noted that “The cottage is said to be over 300 years old and one family – that of Hill, members of which reside in an adjacent cottage – lived there for nearly 200 years.” That 300 year old cottage was built then in about 1600, which ties in neatly with the first mention of John Hill in 1604.

This map shows Gadds Green in 1902 and there are only perhaps twelve cottages shown, none of them of any great size but as I set out in a previous post, (A Hall House at Gadd’s Green?) I think that the group of buildings shown on the right of the green circle on this map was where the Hill’s, in all their nomenclatures, lived and that it is likely that their house started as a hall house and was later sub-divided.

And when these descendants moved away they often stayed in close proximity to other members of the family, little colonies of Hills. And there were other Hill families in the area, these articles relate only to Timothy and Maria’s descendants.

Overcrowding

And the crowded conditions in which many of them lived and on which I have commented several times in these posts, were recognised by officialdom. In his 1875 report on living and sanitary conditions in Rowley Regis, Dr Edward Ballard (who prepared similar reports for many surrounding areas for the government) noted specifically:-

“Overcrowding of cottages, although, of course, not universal, nor perhaps very general, must, from my observation in this matter, be pretty common in many parts. Some of the worst cases I chanced to fall upon during my inspection were at a group of cottages at Gadd’s Green; in Mrs Siviter’s cottage at Hawes Lane, Rowley, and in one of the old cottages opposite the gas-works at Old Hill. In some of the instances of overcrowding which came under my observation, lodgers were taken in; in others the occupants belonged to the same family, but were grown-up sons and daughters of the tenant of the cottage with (in the worst case of all) a number of illegitimate children of two of the girls.”

I remember reading that paragraph for the first time, sitting in The National Archives in October 2023 and mentally noting the specific reference to Gadd’s Green. But it was only re-reading this section of the report last week that the penny dropped and, having done those detailed reports on each of the Hill children, I knew exactly which family Dr Ballard was referring to!

Improvements to Housing

The general overcrowding in the parish and the poor conditions of many cottages was to lead in the 20^th century to a huge programme of house building which led to the local council setting out big new estates around Britannia Road, below Britannia Park and below Rowley village in the Throne estates. Houses in poor condition were regularly inspected, condemned and either improved or demolished and the tenants were offered new houses.

The detailed inspections which were undertaken, to meet the obligations increasingly imposed on local councils by various housing legislation, can be seen free online in the Annual Health Reports which were made by the Medical Officer and Sanitary Inspectors to the Rowley Regis Council. Some of these are available at The National Archives and others can be downloaded from the Wellcome Foundation. If you search online for Wellcome Foundation and then search their site for Rowley Regis Health reports there are three pages listing reports, and you can download any of them to read later. They date from the early 1890s to the 1960s and make very interesting reading, dealing with all aspects of health, births and deaths, housing, sanitation, water supply and refuse disposal, many reports listing all the staff by name. And there were remarkably few staff with a lot of duties, especially in the earlier years! I have not found the reports for every year but enough to be able to observe the changes that came over the area.

What a contrast it must have been to move from a poorly maintained damp possibly subsiding two up two down cottage with no damp courses, earthern floors, poor water supply and little or no sanitation, into a newly built house with generously sized accommodation and front and large back gardens, a three or four bedroom house with a separate kitchen and bathroom, all on spaciously laid out and designed estates, not just long straight rows of cottages as had sprung up in Blackheath in the mid-late 1800s, all within easy walking access of Blackheath town, shops, churches and chapels, schools and all the facilities they needed. And very often with familiar faces living nearby as the worst areas were cleared.

Conclusion – Kith and Kin in the Lost Hamlets

I hope that my readers have found this long and detailed account of one family in the Lost Hamlets interesting and that it may have been helpful to anyone with Hill ancestors. I am seriously considering combining all these articles into an e-book to keep all the information together.

It seems likely to me that, for centuries, these small communities in these hamlets were very insular and did not really regard themselves as part even of Rowley village proper, until the growth of Blackheath, better housing and opportunities in industry enticed later generations away from the hill.

This family study has, for me, illustrated very clearly the intrinsic web of kith and kinship which existed in the area of the Lost Hamlets and the extent to which people in the Hamlets married the boy or girl next door. (Originally, “kith” meant one’s native land or country, then broadened to include friends and neighbours, kin meant immediate and wider family.)

I follow the blog of another One Placer who is working on a OPS of a village where his ancestors lived. Over the past couple of posts he has been describing how he now has one large tree which covers most of the people which he refers to as a ‘forest’, rather than a tree. I think there is something in that analogy but in my case I do not think the Lost Hamlets or even the Hill family amount to a forest. So I looked up other words for a group of trees and I decided that the word to describe the kinship in the Lost Hamlets is a ‘spinney’ which is apparently defined as “A thicket or small wood, often on higher ground”, a thicket by the way is “a dense, tangled mass of shrubs and small trees” which seems very appropriate. So my Lost Hamlets families are all part of the Lost Hamlets Spinney!

A ‘spinney’ on a hill! Copyright Mark Schofield and Glenys Sykes

It is now apparent that as I research for more family studies in this area that I will keep finding they were also kith and kin and will link back to this research and the work I have done on other families, more trees and shrubs within the Spinney! And I observe that such webs of kinship were the norm in many small places and in small places within larger places. Tribes might be another description, although that can have sinister connotations these days. But tribes looked after their own and protected them. This, albeit a long time later, is my tribe.

How astonished these people would be, I suspect, to stand in Tippity Green today and see that almost all of the places in which they, their ancestors and many of their descendants lived their lives have completely disappeared. More astonished still, perhaps, to know how much information about them we are able to put together two hundred years later, how could they have imagined such interest in them and their lives?

But these small hamlets and the people who lived in them will not be forgotten, at least by me!

Families of the Lost Hamlets – the Hill family 8 – Joseph and Samuel

On to the last two children of Timothy and Maria Hill

Joseph Hill 1817-1866

Joseph was Timothy’s second son, born (or at least baptised) 17 years after his older brother Benjamin and after four girls. Timothy named him after his own father but Joseph was, in any case, one of the favourite names in the Hill family. Joseph was baptised on 6 April 1817 at St Giles and was already married by the time of the 1841 census.

Joseph married Elizabeth Jones on 7 November 1836 at Dudley St Thomas. They had five children: John (1836), Caroline (1840), Honor (1847), Sarah Jane (1851), and Amelia (1856). In 1841 and 1851 the family were living at Gadd’s Green, by 1861 they had moved to Perry’s Lake. Joseph was a coal miner.

Joseph died in 1866, aged only 49 and was buried at St Giles on 27 March.

In 1871 the widowed Elizabeth was living in Siviters Lane, along with the two youngest girls Sarah Jane and Amelia, with her daughter Honor and her husband Joseph Westwood and their two sons. And they are all living in the household of James Whittall who was the second husband of Elizabeth and Joseph’s daughter Caroline. Three families in one small house!

Joseph and Elizabeth’s children:

John Hill (1836-1845)

John is shown in the 1841 Census, aged 5 which would mean that he was born in about 1836, the year his parents married in November. So it is possible that he was born before they were married. This was just before the start of Civil Registration so there are no hints there and he was not baptised until 9 March 1845 when the entry in the baptismal register said that he was eight years old. He was still only eight when he died of measles in September of that year and was buried at St Giles.

Caroline Hill (1840-1911)

Caroline was born in about 1840 but no Christian name is recorded in her birth registration so perhaps her name had not been finally agreed? She was baptised as Caroline on 27 September 1840 at Dudley St Thomas. Her name is indistinct and over written in the 1841 Census but appears to be recorded as Catherine. However, for the rest of her life, she appears as Caroline in most records. In 1841 and 1851 she is with her family in Gadd’s Green as Caroline. In 1856, when she was about 16, Caroline had an illegitimate daughter whose birth was registered in the intriguing name of Joyce Taylor Siviter Hill – make of that what you will, there may well be clues to the father’s identity there! But when Joyce was baptised on 11 January 1857, she was just named Joyce Hill, daughter of Caroline Hill of Tippity Green. It appears that the priest was not prepared to go along with Caroline’s name choices as the Registrar did!

On 23 May 1858 when she was about twenty, Caroline married nailer Joseph While (1833-1861) at Dudley St Thomas and their daughter Patience was born in 1859. I think that another daughter Ellen was born and died in the first quarter of 1861 but cannot find a baptism or burial to confirm this. Joseph was a Rowley boy, he had grown up in Tippity Green which is where he and Caroline were living in the 1861 Census, with Joyce and Patience and a few doors from his family. Sadly Joseph While died later that year, aged 29 and he was buried at St Giles on 24 November 1861.

Four years later, Caroline married her first cousin James Whittall at Dudley St Thomas on 15 May 1865. James was the son of Henry Whittall and Mary Hill and was a miner. In the 1871 Census, Caroline once again becomes Catherine – was it a family alternative to Caroline?

James and Caroline had seven children: Joseph (1866-1866), Alice (1867-1867), Mary Jane (1868-1868), Abraham (1869-1870), Eliza (1870 – ), John Fred (1875- and James 1879-1879. It appears that only Eliza and John Fred survived early infancy, so sad but by no means exceptional. And then James himself died in June 1879 and was buried at St Giles on 15 Jun, aged 47. So Caroline was a widow for the second time.

In the 1881 Census, Caroline, Patience, Eliza and John Frederick were living in 5 Siviters Lane, with Caroline’s illegitimate daughter Joyce, by now married to Thomas Southall with their two children Kate, aged 4 and Samuel aged 2, plus Caroline’s grandson Joseph Hill, aged 6. Caroline, Joyce and Patience were all nailmakers and Eliza and the other children were scholars.

On 6^th November 1881, Caroline married her third husband John Payne at Dudley and by 1891 they had moved to 23 Hackett Street, Blackheath. By this time, only John Frederick remained at home. Caroline was 50 by this time and John Payne about five years her junior. They had no children of their own. Caroline and John were still in Hackett Street in 1901, now at number 40. Whether they had actually moved along the street or whether the houses had been renumbered is unknown. By 1911, John and Caroline had moved to 12 Powke Lane.

Caroline died in December 1911, aged 72. She was buried at St Giles on 28 December 1911. I have been unable to find a death or burial for John Payne after the 1911 Census.

Caroline had lived a long life with three husbands and ten children, of whom six had died in infancy. What a hard time that must have been for parents. Blackheath was expanding rapidly with streets of houses which we now know had inadequate sanitary provision and poor water supply. It must have been very hard to keep living conditions suitable for small babies, especially as the causes of cholera and similar diseases were not known or understood by most people. My own great-grandmother, living in Beeches Road, lost six of her eight babies in infancy in this period and mains drainage was still being installed in many areas of Rowley Regis. Matilda Hackett was not the only mother to lose babies like this, but perhaps with very different causes.

Honor Hill (1847-1901)

Honor was born in the third quarter of 1846 and was baptised on the 17 September 1848 at St Giles. In 1851 she was in Gadds Green with her family and in 1861 in Perrys Lake.

On 27 December 1864 she married Joseph Westwood (1848-1910) at Dudley St Thomas. Joseph was a Miner and had been born in Tippity Green in 1848, according to the 1911 Census which he completed. By 1851 he and his parents Caleb and Rosannah (nee Hipkiss) were living in Blackheath with their three sons William, Joseph and David, all born in Rowley.

Joseph and Honor had two sons William, born in 1865 and Joseph, born in 1866. They were all were living in Siviter’s Lane, with Honor’s widowed mother and other family in 1871, but by 1881 they had moved north to ‘Company Terrace’ in Darfield, Yorkshire where Joseph was working as a coal miner. They remained in that area for the rest of their lives and both died there, Honor in 1901, aged 55 and Joseph in 1910, aged 62.

Sarah Jane Hill (1851-1901)

Sarah Jane was born in the last quarter of 1851, just missing the 1851 Census. In 1861 she was living in Perrys Lake with her family and in 1871 she was again with family and her mother in Siviters Lane.

On the 14 September 1873 Sarah Jane married Jonathan Lowe at Dudley St Thomas. Jonathan, a rivet maker, was from a Rowley family and grew up in Rowley Village. They were another family who lost several babies. They had six children – Henry (1873-1874), Frank (1875), Joseph (1876-1876), Sarah Ann (1880-1880), James (1881-1881) and Jonathan (1884). The last of these, Jonathan was born on 25 January 1884, (according to the 1939 Register) just a few days after his father’s death.

Jonathan Lowe died on 7 January 1884 at 15 Siviters Lane of Anaemia and Syncope, certified by his neighbour Dr Beasley. He was buried on 13 January 1884. I can trace Frank after his father’s death and also Jonathan but these were the only surviving children of this marriage.

On 15 Sep 1886, Sarah Jane married again to William Blakeway, a bricklayer, of Powke Lane. William’s wife Phoebe had died in childbirth in March 1885, leaving him with several children. William Blakeway was a great-grandson of Timothy and Maria Hill, descended from Mary Hill, their eldest daughter born in 1801 and Henry Whittall, through Sarah Maria Whittall who had married John Blakeway. Sarah Jane was a granddaughter descended from Joseph, Timothy and Maria’s youngest but one child born in 1817, so a generational gap! So they were first cousins, once removed.

In 1891 William, Sarah Jane and their blended family were living at Powke Lane and also in 1901 by which time only Joseph Blakeway, 18 and working at the quarry and Jonathan Lowe 17 and working as a nut and bolt dresser, remained at home with them. It is possible that William and Sarah Jane had children together, there are three births locally to Blakeway/Hill parents – Mary Jane in 1889 , Elizabeth in 1890 and Sarah in 1892 but in each case there are also deaths for babies of those names under the age of one and none of them appear with the family in later records. But Sarah Jane was about forty by this time and it is also possible that there was another Blakeway/Hill marriage of which I am not aware!

Sarah Jane died in 1901 and was buried on 6 June at St Giles, aged 49, of Powke Lane. William married again to Ellen Jeavons at Quinton on 21 December 1901. They appear to be living in Oldbury in the 1911 Census. William died there in 1918, aged 70, of Rood End Road and was buried at St Giles on 28 May 1918.

Amelia Hill (1856-1877)

Amelia, the last of Joseph’s children was born in the first quarter of 1856 and baptised at St Giles, on 16 March 1856. She was with her family in Perry’s Lake in the 1861 Census and with her mother in Siviters Lane in 1871.

On 25 December 1874, when she was 18, Amelia married Thomas Cox at Dudley St Thomas.

Thomas Cox was born in 1856, the illegitimate son of Sarah Cox. His mother had later married James Daniels in 1858, so Thomas appears in the 1861 Census as Thomas Daniels, also in 1871, living in Siviters Lane, a few doors away from Amelia. Thomas’s mother Sarah had died in January 1871 but James Daniels obviously continued to look after Thomas. He is described as the ‘son-in-law’ of James Daniels which meant step-son, so it appears that Thomas was not his son.

Amelia and Thomas Cox had a son William, born in the second quarter of 1876 and a daughter Sarah Ann who was born in 1877 but died, aged 5 months in January 1878 and was buried at St Giles. Amelia died of typhoid fever on 29 December 1877 at 8 Tump Road (later known as Beeches Road) and was buried at St Giles on 1 January 1878, aged 21, of Blackheath. The death was registered by James Daniels of Siviters Lane, ‘father-in-law’.

James Daniels had re-married after Sarah Cox’s death and in the 1881 Census little William Cox, aged 6, son of Thomas Cox and Amelia nee Hill, was living with James Daniels and his wife Martha nee Hadley and family at 13 Siviters Lane, described as ‘grandson’. Thomas Cox was not living there. James and Martha clearly brought William up as he was still there in the Daniels household in 1891 and in 1901, when he was working as a stonebreaker. Yet again, James Daniels was shown to be a kind man, he had reared his stepson and then he had brought up Amelia’s son little William Cox as his grandson when it seems very probable that he was no blood relation at all. I think that Thomas Cox had also remarried and moved away from Rowley village but have not yet confirmed this.

Samuel Hill (1823-1913)

Samuel, the last of Timothy and Maria’s children, was born in 1823 and baptised at Dudley St Thomas on 17 August 1823, son of Timothy and Maria Hill of Rowley. In 1841 he was living with his widowed mother in Blackberry Town (in the Springfield area but exact location unknown). No occupation was shown for Samuel who was then15 but his mother was a nailer and he may well also have been nailing.

On 26 February 1843, Samuel married Amelia Smith at Christ Church, West Bromwich, both bride and groom gave their address as Bromford Lane and Samuel gave his occupation as an engineer. This may have meant that he operated the stationary pumping engines which were used to drain mines, rather than an engineer as we think of them today.

By 1851 they were living in Springfield (possibly in the same houseas he and his mother had lived in in 1841) with his wife Amelia, and he was listed as an engineer. In 1861 he and Elizabeth were living in Perrys Lake, (three doors away from his brother Joseph) and he was working as a coal miner. With them were their children Harriet Maria (1846-) , Elizabeth Maria (1849-), and Enoch, (1851-1858), then aged 1 month.

Amelia died, of consumption, or what we now know as tuberculosis, according to a note in the Burial Register, in 1852 and was buried at St Giles on 29 August 1852 aged 29 and of Perry’s Lake.

Samuel married again to Elizabeth Bate on 28 December 1856 at Christ Church, West Bromwich. They had a daughter Anne Eliza in 1857.

Samuel’s children:

Harriet Maria Hill

Harriet was baptised on 2 June 1846 at St Giles but her birth was registered in the last quarter of 1845. In 1851 she was with her parents in Springfield but her mother died in 1852 and in 1861she was living in Tippity Green with her father and stepmother and her sister Elizabeth and half-sister Ann.

Both her birth registration and her baptism record her name as just Harriet but at her marriage to Richard Pockett in 1866, she was recorded as Harriet Maria. I have noticed that a large number of the Hill granddaughters and great-granddaughters bore the name Maria, presumably after Maria Hill, nee Hipkiss, the matriarch!

Richard Pockett (1846-1872) and Tewkesbury connections

Unlike most Hill spouses, Richard Pockett was not a local boy. He had been born in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire in 1846 where his father was a Toll House Keeper on the Toll Road to Gloucester. In the 1851 census the family was in a Toll House at Tutnall and Cobley, near Bromsgrove and by 1861 his father had become a labourer in the Railway Carriage Works in Oldbury – the railways led to the end of most toll-roads, so that was rather a case of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’!

Richard was a carpenter. Carpenter, Tewkesbury – bells were ringing in my head, at this point.

I was interested to reflect that my Hopkins ancestors were also in Tewkesbury and later Gloucester at about this time and my 2xg-grandfather Edwin/Edward Hopkins had been born there in 1839, about five years before Richard. Edwin’s father James was a carpenter, too. It seems almost certain to me that my Hopkins family members must have passed through that Tollgate on many occasions to visit James’s family in Gloucester, a tollgate manned by Richard’s father.

How weird it is then, that these two Tewkesbury born boys, with carpentry connections – my Edwin/Edward Hopkins and this Richard Pockett, both of whom moved away from Tewkesbury in early childhood, should have ended up marrying such closely connected girls from the same tiny hamlet on consecutive days? Edwin/Edward married (his second wife, his first wife had been her first cousin Ann!) Elizabeth Cole on 25 December 1866 at Dudley St Thomas and Richard married Harriet Hill on 26 December 1866 at Dudley St Edmund. Elizabeth, born in 1844, grew up in Perry’s Lake, Harriet, born in 1845, in Tippity Green. It is probably pure coincidence for the boys but the girls at least must have known each other all their lives. Harriet’s first cousin Thomas Whittall had married Elizabeth Cole’s sister Phoebe (b.1843) in 1861. Yet another example of how close-knit these families were!

Harriet and Richard lived on the Oldbury/Rounds Green/Portway side of Rowley and they had three children, Annie (1867-1881), John (1870-?) and Elizabeth (1872-?). Richard, who had been working at the Railway carriage Works, died of meningitis in 1872, aged only 26 and was buried in the Oldbury Public Cemetery on 10 April 1872. So Elizabeth, whose birth was registered in the last quarter of 1872, was a posthumous baby. The family were living in Shidas Lane, off Portway Road and later in Brades Road, Oldbury and on 23 May 1875 Harriet re-married to John Allen, (who had also been born in Gloucester – another Gloucestershire connection – is it coincidence or might John and Richard have been friends?) and they continued to live in the Rounds Green area for the rest of their lives. Harriet was a widow in the 1901 Census and so John must have died between 1891 and 1901 but I have not identified his death for certain and cannot find a burial for him.

Harriet’s children:

Annie Pockett died in December 1881, aged 14.

John Pockett, baptised on 15 June 1870 at Oldbury, married Emma Dutton on 24 June 1894 at Christ Church, West Bromwich. They had six children: John (1895), Annie Eliza (1897), Samuel Wilfred (1899), and Elizabeth Maria (Lizzie) (1902). Twins Joseph and Maria were born and died in the second quarter of 1905. John and Emma lived at 2 Shidas Lane in 1901 and 4 Rounds Green in 1911, John working as a Boiler stoker in 1901 and 1911 at the Railway carriage works in Oldbury. His mother Harriet was living with them in both censuses. John was admitted to Barnsley Hall Asylum on 6 November 1912, suffering from General Paralysis of the Insane (late stage untreated syphilis), and died there on 5 April 1915, aged 44, of that and pneumonia. I now know of at least two people on my tree who died of this, in about this period, both of them, strangely, living in Oldbury. It is also possible that this disease affected their children,

Elizabeth Pockett, the posthumous baby, lived with her mother until her marriage to Joseph Harvey, at St Giles, Rowley Regis on 25 December 1895. One of the witnesses was Reuben Ingram, who has appeared so often linked to the Hill family.

Joseph, son of John Harvey and Keziah Hill had been born and grew up in Oldbury (and no, I haven’t established a link between Keziah and the Rowley Hills yet, she was also an Oldbury girl).

A short diversion to the Harvey family of Oldbury/Langley/Rounds Green

All of the Hill family on my family tree are on my dad’s side, the Hopkinses. Looking at Joseph Harvey’s family, I remembered that my 2xg-grandfather on my mum’s side was a Thomas Harvey who had also come from Oldbury. Anyone on my family tree from outside Rowley and Blackheath in this period is somewhat unusual so I wondered whether they were the same family, this Oldbury connection was worth investigating.

There was no immediately obvious connection and my research revealed that many family trees on Ancestry had assigned the wrong father to John Harvey which led to serial errors. Fortunately FreeREG had transcribed the marriage at Handsworth between John Harvey, a boat loader and son of John Harvey, also a boat loader and Keziah Hill, Keziah is a helpfully unusual name! The boatloader information helped to identify the families in the censuses.

Oldbury was surrounded by canals, the Birmingham Canal, opened in 1722, passed round the centre of Oldbury. With the opening of the loop bypass in 1858 it became impossible to enter the town without crossing a canal. So the Harvey men may have loaded boats in numerous places. But the Harvey family lived in Summer Row, Rounds Green and it seems very likely that they may have worked loading stone and coal, from Rowley, at the canal wharf and basin at Titford, Whiteheath.

This photograph, copyright Anthony Page, is somewhat later than my Harveys but the work and working conditions would have been much the same.

So I plodded through the various Harveys, building up the tree with siblings and marriages and looking for common ancestors. And eventually, after two or three days of meticulous cross-referencing, and tantalising recurring names such as Esther, John, Joseph and Thomas generation after generation and the link finally dropped into place! Joseph Harvey is my 3^rd cousin 3xremoved on my dad’s side, Thomas Harvey is my 2xg-grandfather on my mum’s side. Their common ancestors were Job Harvey (1733-1808) of Oldbury, married to Esther Jones (1733-1796). Job and Esther Harvey were great-grandparents to Thomas Harvey (1832-1894) and great-great-grandparents to Joseph (1871-). So Joseph and Thomas were second cousins, once removed. Would they have known each other? Probably not, it seems to me. They were different generations. Thomas had been born in Oldbury but lived in Blackheath most of his life, Joseph stayed in the Shidas Lane/Portway area between Oldbury and Rowley all his life so they were unlikely to have been close.

I cannot tell you how ridiculously satisfying it was to me to to establish that connection, connections between the Rowley families are very common in my research but it was very pleasing to detail the connection between these Oldbury Harveys on different sides of my family tree about whom I had not been able to find much in my original research forty years ago. The advent of computers, online resources such as Ancestry and Find My Past, the availability of Bishop’s Transcripts online and above all, FreeREG have transformed the research situation. The benefits I derive from FreeREG in particular make my many hours of transcribing Parish Registers for them worth every moment. Perhaps it is time I revisited some of my early research!

This week, the Staffordshire Co-ordinator told me that every register in the Rowley Regis Parish (that can be found, some Methodist Registers have not yet been found) has now been transcribed and added to FreeREG, except one twentieth century burial register for St Luke in Cradley Heath and that is currently being transcribed. Staffordshire researchers are especially fortunate to have this resource. It is hoped now to extend transcribing to some of the nearby Worcestershire parishes not yey transcribed, notably St Paul’s in Blackheath and Dudley St Thomas which was used by many Rowley people.

So… Back to

Joseph Harvey and Elizabeth who had six children – Joseph (1895), William (1900), Ada (1902), John (1907), Alfred (1909) and Cissie (1910). So, adding a few more to the descendants of Timothy and Maria Hill!

Harriet appears to have had no more children after Richard Pockett died and she appears to have lived with her son and, after his death, her daughter-in-law in Rounds Green, Harriet died in 1922, although I have not yet found details of her burial.

Elizabeth Maria Hill (1848-1932)

Elizabeth appears not to have married and I have not been able to trace her in some censuses. However, it appears that she went into service so may have been living elsewhere and her name is not distinctive enough for me to trace her in the wider area. In 1871 she was a servant to Richard Bate and his family in Tippity Green (who may well have been connected with Elizabeth Bate, the second wife of Elizabeth’s father. I was next able to find Elizabeth in 1901 when she and her father were living with her half-sister Anne Eliza in Malt Mill Lane, Blackheath, described as a Domestic Housekeeper which tallies with the domestic servant status in 1871. In 1911 she was living with her father in Beaumont Road, Blackheath and she continued to live there after his death, and was still there, according to her probate record, when she died in 1932. I have not been able to find burials for either Elizabeth or her father and it seems possible to me that they were buried in St Paul’s graveyard in Blackheath which would have been their nearest church. The burial records for St Paul’s may be transcribed for FreeREG over the next few months so I will check again at some point.

Enoch Hill (1851-1858)

Sadly Samuel and Amelia’s son Enoch died, aged 7, in March 1858 and he was buried at St Giles on 11 March 1858.

Annie Eliza Hill (1857-1906)

Annie Eliza was Samuel Hill’s daughter by his second wife Elizabeth Bate. The Bates were another long-term established family in the hamlets and were often in business of one sort or another, keeping pubs and in at least one case described in the census as a ‘nail manufacturer’ which implies employing others and being rather more than a simple nailer. However Richard Bate, this manufacturer, still lived in Tippity Green so was not too grand!

Elizabeth herself was born in Withymoor, or Darby Hand, near Netherton and her father was described as a scythe smith, later an engineer and an ‘Inspector of Engines’. There were a number of scythe smiths around, this was obviously a particular set of skills to produce a long bladed item, much in demand for farm work and for export and from what I have seen of some scythe smiths in Clent village, it was a skill often passed from father to son. In 1861 Elizabeth was with her father and mother in Perry’s Lake and in 1871, they had moved to Northfield Road, Netherton.

On 17 June 1879, Annie married David Raybould at St John’s, Kates Hill. In 1881 and 1891, they were living in Terrace Street, Blackheath and in 1901, they were in Malt Mill Lane with Annie’s parents also living with them. They appear not to have had any children.

Annie Eliza died in 1906, aged 48. She was buried at St Paul’s, Blackheath on 13 January 1906.

David Raybould appears to have remarried in 1910 to Eliza Haden, at Quinton Church and the couple were living at 9, Edward Road, off Long Lane in 1911 and in 1921, they were living at 5, Holt Road, Blackheath. He died in 1928. I have been unable to find details of his burial or any Probate Record.

So Annie Eliza Hill is the last of the grandchildren of Timothy Hill and Maria Hipkiss of Gadd’s Green, the last of my more than 200 fourth cousins, in what has turned out to be a much longer and more involved research project than I had originally anticipated. I shall make one last piece on this family summing up what I have learned about them. The end is in sight! I think…

Families of the Lost Hamlets – the Hill family 7 – William Hackett and Matilda Ennis

“Cradley Heath & Stourbridge Observer – 29 October 1864. Copyright BNLibrary.

This is an extended account of the lives of Matilda Ennis, her husband William Hackett and her children. I outlined this briefly in my piece on Jane Hill’s children but this gives a longer explanation of my researches into this matter. A full transcription of the newspaper article appears below, the article appeared verbatim in at least two newspapers I have found, so probaably in others, too.

“SUSPICIOUS DEATH OF A CHILD

An inquest was held on Friday last, at the Shoulder of Mutton, before Mr E Hooper, Coroner, on the body of Emma Hackett, aged 6 months.

Henry Duncalfe, surgeon, West Bromwich, deposed to having received the Coroner’s precept to make a post-mortem examination; that he had found the body in a very emaciated state, but every organ of the body healthy. The stomach contained half a teaspoonful of liquid, but there was no trace of poison. There was no doubt in his mind that deceased had died from want of nutrition, and it was clear that she could not have had any food for nearly two days before death; but if she had been purged, it was possible that if she had food within two days all traces of it would have disappeared.

Jane Hoddy swore that she lodged with Miss Matilda Hackett, the mother of deceased who was living apart from her husband. She had known deceased for six weeks, and she had been very delicate. Mr Phillips, who had been attending her, pronounced her to be in a decline, so she had heard Mrs Hackett to say. Mrs Hackett went from home on Monday morning week and never returned till the following Wednesday night. Witness attended the deceased. She took a quantity of bread and milk. Up to Friday she had not been purged. She was taken much worse on Saturday and no doctor was sent for. Deceased died on Sunday morning.

Matilda Hackett identified the body as being that of her daughter Emma and proved her death. She at first denied that any woman had been in her house on the Sunday before deceased died, but on the Coroner pressing the question, she said there had been some women there.

Sarah Edwards swore that on Wednesday last she heard that Mrs Hackett had gone from home, and her child Emma was dead. She also heard they would let no person see it. She went to the house and found two women there. They said Matilda had gone to Dudley. They said Emma was in bed. She went upstairs and on removing the bedclothes she found the child lying in its own filth, and must have been in that state a long time. She had not been purged. One of the women said she had taken more care of the deceased than the mother would have done if she had been at home, for she had given her her own breast which the mother would not have done.

Thomas Bevington, Police Constable, deposed that on Monday he had received information that Hackett’s child had been poisoned, whereupon he went to Mr Philips [apparently a local doctor] and told him what he had heard. He said reports must not be attended to, but he did not give a certificate. The case caused much talk in the neighbourhood and an inquest was much desired. Consequently he reported the whole of the facts to the Coroner. On Sunday, before the death, there had been several prostitutes in the house.

The Coroner, in addressing the jury, stated that all the evidence had been laid before them that could be obtained , and upon that evidence their duty would be to find a verdict; but at the same time he must caution them against placing too much reliance on the mother’s evidence, considering the unsatisfactory manner in which she had tendered it.

The foreman said the Jury returned a verdict that the deceased had died from exhaustion, produced through want of sufficient nourishment; and they were of opinion that the n-mother’s conduct had been most inhuman, but that the evidence, in their opinion, was not quite sufficient to warrant them in committing her for manslaughter.

Matilda Hackett was called in, and severely admonished by the Coroner, who informed her that in as much as the deceased was the fourth child she had lost under similar circumstances, he considered it his duty to cause a strict watch to be kept upon her movements, at the same time informing her that she had very narrowly escaped a verdict of manslaughter. In his opinion, she had been guilty of very disgraceful conduct.”

This sad tale was a newspaper report which I found while I was researching the Hill family, and working on William, son of John and Jane Hackett (nee Hill). William Hackett had married a Matilda Ennis at Dudley St Thomas in April 1856, so his wife was Matilda Hackett. Could this be her?

The 1861 Census showed that there were three Matilda Hacketts living in the Rowley/Blackheath area at this time – but one was too old to be the mother of the child. Another was the wife of Thomas Hackett, she had been Matilda Willetts and they were living in Hyam’s Hill in 1861 with their five month old son and next door to her parents. The other Matilda was married to my William Hackett and in 1861 they were living in Blackheath with a son George who was 7 (her illegitimate son born in 1854, so some time before the couple married) a daughter Elizabeth, born in 1857 and a son John who was 1 month old. Was this the same Matilda?

I checked the 1871 Census for Matilda Hacketts to see whether these Matilda Hacketts were still in the area. I found the first Matilda mentioned above still with her husband Thomas, now in Halesowen Road with the son who had been five months old in 1861, now 11 plus three more children born in the interim. So it did not seem to be her.

What of the other Matilda Hackett with her husband William? They were not in Blackheath in 1871 and I could not find either Matilda or William Hackett of the right age nearby.

I checked what children the couple had had. I checked for birth registrations and found the birth of George Henry Ennis in the first quarter of 1854, with no MMN so probably illegitimate. This was confirmed when I found his baptism in Dudley on 3 September 1854, which listed his mother, of Queen’s Close, Dudley but no father. This also recorded his date of birth which was 17 January 1854. So he was the eldest child listed with the family on the 1861 census.

Then there was Elizabeth, born in 1857, John who had been born and died in 1858, John who had been born and died in 1861 and Eliza, born in 1862. Then there was an Emma born in 1864. Oh dear. This was sounding familiar.

Back to basics then.

Matilda, I discovered had been born in Dudley in 1835, the child of quite a big and apparently respectable Dudley family. Her father Benjamin had died in 1835, the year she was born but she had five older brothers of whom only two survived infancy and an older sister. Her uncle Joseph Ennis was a stone miner but later the gate keeper at Dudley Castle for many years.

A general search for Matilda found another marriage. Matilda appeared to have remarried in Smethwick in 1868, describing herself as a widow. But I couldn’t find a death registration for William Hackett between 1861 when he was listed in the Census and 1868 when Matilda re-married. I checked FreeREG for burials, too but couldn’t find a burial either for a William Hackett of the right age. But it was not unheard in this era, because of the expense and difficulty – and stigma – of divorce for ordinary people, for separated couples to ‘marry’ again, possibly in an area where they were not known and to pretend that they were widowed. Matilda seemed to have married Thomas Lane, a carter, at Smethwick, as Matilda Hackett and with her correct father’s name. The happy couple had a son Thomas Charles Jabez Lane in the third quarter of 1869.

But I now knew that I was looking for Matilda Lane, not Hackett in the 1871 census. But I could not find a Matilda Lane in the 1871 Census either , so where was she?

I searched the 1871 Census for the children.

I found an Elizabeth Hackett of the right age and born in Rowley Regis, living as a servant in Oldbury Road, Smethwick and the family for whom she worked, although a name I did not know, had two younger children of 7 and 6 who had been born in Rowley Regis so the family had obviously lived there at some recent point. The husband was a Railway Contractor so perhaps he had been involved with the building of the railway there – I see that the station at Blackheath had opened in 1867 so the dates for that are exactly right. So this may well be William’s daughter. And by this time, I later discovered, Matilda was also living in Smethwick…

Then I looked for George, under the surnames of both Ennis and Hackett. Nothing for George Ennis but there was a George Hacket living in Halford Street, Smethwick – the same address given as the abode of Thomas Lane, father and son in their various register entries. George was with his mother Matilda Jones, and his sister Eliza H, aged 7 and an Albert Hacket, aged 4 who had been born in Spon Lane, Smethwick and, although he had been given the surname Hackett there was no Mother’s Maiden Name, so this implied that he was illegitimate. George and Eliza appeared to be the right children. But Matilda, who was 35, was shown as being married to John Jones, aged 26, a puddler and he was noted as the father-in-law (step-father) of the children George, Eliza H(?) and Albert Hacket. Was this Eliza the Eliza Jane born in 1862? The age in this census suggests she was born in 1864 but I cannot find such a birth registration so it may be her. Or did that earlier Eliza die – or was there another baby?

And where did John Jones come from?

I then discovered that Matilda’s new husband Thomas Lane had died, aged 29 in July 1869 and was buried in Smethwick. His abode was given as Halford Street, Smethwick.

And the baby Thomas Charles Jabez Lane also died, in the third quarter of 1870, aged 11 months and his burial entry shows the same address. Oh my, another infant death and another dead husband.

Thomas Lane had only died in July 1869 – and little Thomas only in 1870, surely she had not married again so quickly? Well, yes, she had.

Matilda Lane had married John Jones at St Stephen’s, Birmingham on the 5^th April 1870, just nine months after Thomas Lane died and while the baby was still alive. In 1881 the family were still at Halford Street with another son Reuben, aged 7, son of Matilda and John Jones. Albert Hacket was also still there, aged 15.

But in 1891, although John Jones and Reuben were in Smethwick, John Jones’s wife was named Louisa and her age was twenty five years younger than Matilda. Matilda had died in 1886.

So Matilda‘s life story was that she:-

Had one child in 1854 – George Henry Ennis who survived into adulthood.
Married William Hackett in 1856 and had five children, Elizabeth 1857, John 1858-1858, John 1861-1861, Eliza Jane 1862-?, and Emma 1864-1864. At least four of her children died in very early infancy, of diarrhoea or (implied) neglect and she was separated from William by the time of Emma’s death in 1864. Reprimanded by the Coroner who was going to have a watch kept on her. There is the implication that she was – at the least – sharing a house with prostitutes and that the deaths due to neglect of her children was well known to local people who were disturbed by this.
Had a son Alfred Hackett in 1867, father unknown, born in Smethwick, who survived into adulthood.
Married Thomas Lane in 1868, he died in 1869. Thomas Lane, at least, did not die due to Matilda’s negligence. His death certificate says that he was crushed by a wagon upsetting on him – what terrible luck, after only 15 months of marriage. , their child also Thomas died aged 11 months in 1870, of diarrhoea.
Married John Jones on 5 April 1870, had a child Reuben in 1874, was still with John Jones in 1881.
Matilda died in Derby on 19 August 1886, aged 51, of Diabetes which she had suffered from for 9 years. Buried in Derby.

John Jones

It appears that John Jones had moved to Derby at some point between 1881 and 1885, where he must have worked as an iron puddler. After Matilda’s death, he married Louisa Hinton in Derby in the last quarter of 1886. They had two sons and were still living in Litchurch, Derby in 1891. Sadly both of those babies died within weeks of birth so Matilda was not the only mother whose children did not survive those early months. However, by the time of the 1901 Census the couple were back in Smethwick and in 1911, they were living in Dawley in Shropshire where John was working as a Roadman for the County Council. John had been born in Wellington, Shropshire so he had returned to his roots. Curiously, although they had married in Derbyshire, Louisa and her family came from Dudley and they had lived in Dudley until at least 1871: the link is in their occupations again – Louisa’s father had been a furnaceman, John was a puddler. I have lost track of the couple after 1911, too many John Jones around!

Matilda’s surviving children

Those children who survived infancy become difficult to trace after this.

George Ennis or Hackett does not appear to be in Derbyshire with his mother and step father and I cannot find any definite record of him after 1871.

I think I have found Eliza in service in Handsworth in 1881 so she did not move to Derby with her mother and step-father. This census entry states specifically that she was born in Blackheath, rather than Rowley Regis. She may well have married after that but I have not yet found her thereafter.

Alfred Edward Hackett must have moved to Derbyshire with his mother and John Jones as he married there in 1888, two years after his mother’s death. He had one daughter Edith Ellen in 1890 and appears to have remained in Derbyshire for the rest of his life, dying in 1922.

Reuben Jones was in Derby with his father in 1891 and may well have remained there as there is a record of a Reuben Jones of the right age being buried in Derby in 1944. However, his date of birth in the 1939 Register does not fit with the birth registration for Matilda’s son so this is unclear.

Matilda as a mother

If Emma was William Hackett’s child, he and Matilda were together – at least part of the time – until no later than 1864. But if the hints of prostitution are correct, Emma may not have been his child. Whoever her father was, however, it seems clear that Matilda did not find motherhood easy and was inclined to neglect her children. She did not even register all their deaths herself, after the first, shown below. The death of the second child called John was registered by a neighbour, the death of Emma by the Coroner.

The first infant John died aged 4 months from ‘lientery’ as shown on the partial death certificate above– a form of diarrhoea where food passes undigested through the body which had been of three moths duration. Why would a four month old baby be given food, almost from birth? Would he not be breast fed? Apparently, though, it was common for babies to be fed ‘pap’, a mixture of bread and milk, especially in orphanages where there were no wet nurses available.

The second John died aged 6 months, also of diarrhoea, this death was registered by his half-brother George Hackett, by then 16. This was in 1861 – why was the death not registered by Matilda or by William? Had they already separated by then? Was Matilda in denial or unwilling to register the death? Just as she apparently left the dead body of six month old Emma in her bed and left the town for several days.

The death of little Thomas Lane, aged 11 months in 1870 (who also died of diarrhoea after only six hours of illness) was registered by a neighbour Adeline Smith who had been ‘present at the death’. Curiously this neighbour and her husband had also witnessed the Lane’s marriage. And yet, I cannot find any trace of a woman of this name (or her husband) in the 1871 census, only a few months later, anywhere in the area.

The report in the account of the inquest mentions a comment by one of the women in the house where little Emma’s body was found had said that this woman ‘had given her her own breast which the mother would not have done” could perhaps imply that Matilda may have had an aversion to breastfeeding which could account for a lot if this had been a problem with all her babies and would account for them being fed on unsuitable food at an early age. Not every woman finds motherhood easy or natural.

Given what we also know about sanitation and water supply in Blackheath, it is not perhaps surprising that some babies died of such things but there does appear to be an unfortunate pattern in these deaths. Or perhaps Matilda was just in denial or unlucky.

What happened to William?

Another mystery. William Hackett, coming from a prolific family where children – legitimate or not- were cherished and cared for within the family group, must have found his situation after this death and inquest, appalling and shameful although no reference or reproach was apparently made to him by the Coroner, nor does he appear to have given evidence to the inquest which may be telling in itself, as it may imply that William was out of the picture by this point.

I have looked at every local burial and every death in the country of a William Hackett between 1861 and 1867 when Matilda re-married and ruled them all out on age or other grounds so I cannot find any evidence that he died. There was a William Hackett living in Cradley Heath in later censuses who was about the right age but I also found the same family in Cradley Heath in the 1861 and 1871 census so this was not our man.

And yet it seems strange for him to abandon children? Would someone from his family not have taken him in in his distress? Had all the children he knew to be his died? Did he change his name and move away, or emigrate and start a new life? Did he kill himself somewhere he was not known and was buried unknown? A brick wall I shall no doubt return to and look at again from time to time. But, of all the Hill descendants I have looked at, in all my years of family history research, this is undoubtedly the saddest story I have found.

Families of the Lost Hamlets – the Hill family 6 – Jane

Jane Hill was baptised at Dudley St Thomas on 2 July 1809, daughter of Timothy and Maria Hill. She married John Hackett , also at Dudley St Thomas on 29 December 1828. The witnesses were Henry and Mary Whitehall but we know them as Whittall – Jane’s eldest sister and her husband. The name was fairly flexible at this time and as most people were illiterate they could not know whether the clerk or priest had spelled their name in a different way from the priest in their local church. And I have noted that Henry Whittall was a witness at most of the family weddings.

I have not been able to find out much about John Hackett. He was a collier and he was literate enough to sign the Register at his marriage. He was born in Staffordshire, we know from the 1841 Census, the only one he appears in. From the age given at his death he was born in about 1808 but how accurate that was we cannot know. I cannot find a baptism for him but then, neither can Ancestry, FreeREG, FamilySearch or FindMyPast nor anyone else researching this John Hackett on Ancestry. But it seems likely that he was fairly local and there were certainly Hacketts in Rowley Regis at this time.

Jane and John Hackett had nine children in the fourteen years they were married – Rebecca (1829), John (1831), William (1833), Thomas (1837), Jane (1839), Sarah (1840), Joseph (1843) , Alice and Leah, (both 1844, Alice in the first quarter, Leah in the last quarter.).

In the 1841 Census John and Jane are living in Perry’s Lake, with their first seven children Rebecca, aged 12, John, aged 10, William aged 8, Thomas aged 4, Jane, aged 2 and Sarah, aged 1. Thanks to a Death Certificate uploaded to Ancestry by another researcher, (Thank you, Nigel Croft) I know that John was killed in a fall of coal in a pit at Rowley Regis on 27 April 1844, his death registered by the Coroner so there was clearly an inquest, although I have not been able to find any press reports of it. John was buried at St Giles on the 30^th April 1844, leaving Jane with eight children to care for and another on the way.

By 1851 Jane was back in the Hill enclave at Gadd’s Green, living in the household of her younger brother Joseph Hill, his wife and two daughters. With her are Thomas aged 14, Jane aged 12, Sarah 10, Joseph 8, Alice 7 and Leah 6. So the three eldest children were living elsewhere – Rebecca was married and her brother John was visiting her, William – by then about 18 – was, I think, lodging in Perry’s Lake, with the Griffiths family, he was working as a coal miner.

On one side of Joseph’s household were living David and Ann Priest, with their six children, on the other side a Thomas and Catherine Hill with their five youngest children (not in this direct line of Hills – as far as I know, so far…!) and beyond them Elijah and Ruth Whittall and their eight children. More connections in the Hill dynasty, to be discovered in due course, I am sure.

The 1861 Census finds Jane living in Rowley Village as a lodger in the household of John Taylor, 35, a nailer and only a couple of doors from the Ward Arms so probably in Hawes Lane. With her are Joseph, Alice, Leah and another child Ann who was 7.

Yet again, they are surrounded by familiar names. On one side is Jane’s son Thomas Hackett with his wife Jane and one year old son John, lodging with him is William Stokes with his wife Sarah nee Hackett, Jane’s daughter and their son John, aged 3 months. Next along the road is Elizabeth Hopewell with her family. Elizabeth was a widow but we have come across the family before and Elizabeth’s later born son Edward Hopewell (or Brooks or Oakwell which were names he used at various times) who, a few years later , was to marry Jane’s great-niece Phoebe Priest, the granddaughter of David and Ann Priest. And next along, with his family is Henry Taylor who may well be related to John Taylor– yet to be determined. The Taylors are another family who are not just a genealogical rabbit hole, they are a whole genealogical warren! But the pattern is the same. Even as the family spread out from their base at Gadd’s Green, they go only a short distance and even then, live surrounded by family connections.

By 1871, Jane Hackett had become Jane Taylor – yes, another Hill daughter marrying a Taylor… On the 9 July 1865 Jane, aged 56, married John Taylor – or Bridgwater, it says in the marriage record, aged 40, no details given of the groom’s father. The witnesses at the marriage are Jane’s son Thomas Hackett and his wife Jane. Presumably the John Taylor she had been lodging with in 1861. I have Bridgwaters in my family tree but let’s not go there. At least, not at this moment… but I see that Timothy Hill’s mother was a Bridgwater, too. As usual, the more I look at local families the more the Lost Hamlets web continues to expand. By now they were shown as living in Club Buildings and were there also in 1881.

Although John used the name Bridgwater at this marriage, thereafter they used Taylor in all records, including his death and burial. Other researchers on Ancestry show Bridgwater as his birth name which is quite possible, if his mother subsequently married a Taylor and he then used his step-father’s name, this was not uncommon. But I have been unable to find a baptism in the correct period for this John under either name.

Jane and John Hackett’s children

Rebecca 1829-1910

Rebecca was born in 1829 and was baptised at Dudley St Thomas on 16 August 1829. Her father’s occupation was shown as a Collier and his abode as Oldbury, although this might have included areas around Whiteheath. Certainly by 1841 the family were living in Perry’s Lake.

Rebecca married Samuel Barnsley on 24 May 1847 at St Giles, when she was living in Perry’s Lake and he in Spring Row. He was a stone quarry man, as was his father, also Samuel. Samuel had been baptised at Dudley St Thomas on 8 April 1827, the abode for his parents, Samuel and Charlotte Barnsley was shown as Oakham.

Their first daughter Priscilla was born in 1847, followed by nine more children – Sarah (1849), Samuel (1851), Mary Ann (1853), Rebecca (1853), John (1858), Mary J (1860), Lavinia (1862), Annie (1867) and Thomas (1869).

Samuel died and was buried at St Giles on 14 June 1893, aged 66 and of Church Row. Rebecca lived in Rowley for her whole life. She died in 1910 and was buried at St Giles, on 26 July 1910, aged 81, of 39, Hawes Lane.

John Hackett 1831-1909

John was baptised on 24 April 1831 at Dudley St Thomas and in 1841 he was living with his parents and siblings in Perry’s Lake. By 1851 he is shown as a visitor with his sister Rebecca and Samuel Barnsley in Perry’s Lake, aged 20.

On 20 June 1853, at Dudley St Thomas, John married Priscilla Groves, the marriage witnessed by his cousins Eliza Whittall and Joseph Hill. His occupation was shown as a miner. In 1861 they were living in Peartree Street, Old Hill with their daughters Catherine – sometimes Caroline, Ann and Louisa. Their neighbours? Well, I notice that on that one page of the census, with twenty five people listed, there are families named Priest (two families), Groves, Barnsley, and another family of Hacketts. On the previous page are Priests, Willetts, Halls. I think we can assume they were surrounded by kith and kin! A fourth daughter Martha came along in 1862 and a fifth, with the unusual name of Viannah or Vihannah in 1865. Martha and Vihannah were to marry Saunders brothers at a later time.

In 1871, the family are still in Reddall Hill, plus Alice Hackett, who is John’s sister. Although there is a child William, born in 1869, apparently listed as the child of John and Priscilla in this Census, it is my opinion that William is in fact the son of Alice Hackett, John’s sister who is staying with them as she is shown as the head of the sub-household and his name appears as her son below hers in the list. His birth was registered without a Mother’s Maiden Name which indicates that he was illegitimate. In any case, by this time Priscilla was about 50 so the child is unlikely to be hers. In this entry John is listed as Thomas, a coal miner but the remainder of the family is correct, so this must be an error, unless John had become John Thomas – not noted anywhere else.

By 1881, John and Priscilla had moved to Bowling Green, near Netherton – foreign parts, more than two miles from Rowley! Here John was shown as a nail maker but his two daughters Louisa and Martha are chain makers and Vian as a nail maker. In 1891, John and Priscilla were living in Brook Lane, Reddall Hill where John had apparently taken employment as a labourer in a Timber Yard. They were shown as lodgers but were living with Alfred and Martha Saunders, Martha being their daughter. Alfred is shown as Arthur in this census but is Alfred in all other records so this appears to be an error, he was also a chain maker, in those few miles from Rowley village, chain making was much in evidence in this area, nail making not appearing on this sheet of the census return.

Priscilla died in 1892 and was buried at St Lukes on 4 August 1892, aged 60 according to the Burial Register which is also the age shown on the death registration. But this is another instance of varying ages in different records. I cannot find any record of baptism for her. But in the 1841 Census she was shown as 15, so could have been up to 19, giving an approximate year of about 1826. In 1851, still living at home with her parents in Plants Green, she was 27, again computing to 1824. In 1861 she was 28(!), in 1871 51(1822), in 1881 61(1820), in 1891she was 69 (1822). So, somewhere between 1822 and 1824 is my best guess which would have made her much nearer to 70 than 60 at the time of her death. But she was several years older than her husband so perhaps she was coy about her age and possibly even her children did not know her true age.

John Hackett in the 1901 Census was with his sister Alice Fellows at 61 Enville Street, Stourbridge, a retired Miner and aged 70. He died in 1909 and was buried at St Luke’s Cradley Heath on 25 March 1909, aged 76 and his abode given as 24 Petford Street.

William Hackett (1833-?)

William was baptised on 15 September 1833 at Dudley St Thomas and is living with his family in Perry’s Lake, in the 1841 Census. In 1851, when his mother was a widow and had moved back to live with her brother, he was lodging with the Griffith family in Perrys Lake and working as a coal miner.

On 21 April 1856 William, son of John Hackett, miner, deceased, had married Matilda Ennis, daughter of Benjamin Ennis, at Dudley St Thomas and in 1861 they were living in Blackheath, with George (7), Elizabeth (4), and John, (1 month).

Elizabeth had been baptised at St Giles on 11 October 1857, I cannot find a baptism for John.

George Henry Ennis, son of Matilda Ennis, according to the record of his baptism at Dudley on 3 September 1854, had been born on 17^th January 1853 so William was probably not his father, although it appears that George used the name Hackett thereafter.

It appears from a newspaper article I found that several of Matilda’s children died in early infancy, at least one of them of neglect and it also appears that by 1864 Matilda and William were separated. Matilda goes on to marry twice more before the 1871 Census, and in 1881 she was living with her third husband in Smethwick. That husband remarried in Derby in the last quarter of 1886 and I found that Matilda had died there, of diabetes, aged 51. I may do a separate piece about Matilda as her life was so complicated.

William is also elusive after this point. I cannot find William after 1861, but nor can I find a death for him. The situation with Matilda must have been deeply humiliating and the loss of several children with possible implications of neglect must have been utterly heart-breaking for him, coming as he did from a family where children, whatever their birth circumstances, seem to have been cherished and welcomed.

Perhaps William moved away, perhaps he emigrated, perhaps he simply chose to disappear – it is impossible to know but it is a sad story.

Thomas Hackett (1836-1919)

Thomas was baptised at Rowley Regis on 28 August 1836 and in 1841 he was in Perry’s Lake with his family. In 1851 they were in Gadd’s Green.

On 29 August 1859, Thomas married Sarah Jane Whittall, daughter of Samuel and Mary Whittall (nee Hipkiss) of Portway and in 1861 they and their one year old son John were living in Hawes Lane, (possibly Club Buildings although the census does not specify this), part of that little group of Hacketts, Taylors and Hopewells we have already noted in connection with Thomas’s mother Jane.

By the time of the 1871Census Thomas and Sarah Jane had joined other relatives in Barrow-in-Furness where they were living, along with other Black Country furnacemen, amongst a whole community who these pages of the census show were mainly drawn from Staffordshire and Worcestershire – later censuses show that Thomas was working at the Bessemer Steel Works who obviously recruited workers from the many blast furnaces in the Black Country.

Some statistics

In his book The Little Book of the Black Country [i]Michael Pearson gives some interesting numbers of industry in the Black Country.

In 1800 there were 160 collieries, producing 500,000 tons per annum.

By 1868, there were 540 collieries, producing 10,206,000 tons per annum.

In 1796 there were 14 blast furnaces, by 1806 there were 42.

By 1868, there were 167 and iron production ran at 855,000 tons of finished product from 2,100 puddling furnaces.

20,000 people were employed in the Black Country Iron Trade which had doubled in 68 years. So there was plenty of experience for Barrow-in-Furness to call on.

By 1860, within five miles of Dudley, there were:

44 pits

181 blast furnaces

118 iron works

79 rolling mills

1,500 puddling furnaces.

No wonder the Black Country was black!

But although these numbers obviously declined and the heavy industry now disappeared I can remember looking out from the Grammar School on Hawes Lane in the winter and seeing the glow of numerous furnaces even in the early 1960s. Today the closure of some of the last remaining blast furnaces in the country has just been narrowly averted – what a change. So many skills, so much experience gone – which can probably never be recovered. Let’s hope we don’t suddenly need to have a steel industry again.

Steel Working in Barrow-in-Furness

The Morecombe Bay Partnership say the following about the Iron Works there:

“In 1859 Schneider, Hannay and Company established the iron works in Hindpool, marking the beginning of what would be the largest iron and steel works in the world. Twelve blast furnaces were built in the 1860s producing 5000 to 5550 tones of iron each week. In 1866 18 Bessemer convertors started making steel from the iron smelted at the iron works. By 1903 7000 tons of steel was produced a week. A large amount of the steel was used to make rails for railways all over the world. From 1962 no new steel was made, instead scrap was melted to produce steel. The steel works became part of British Steel in 1964 and the works closed in 1983. All that is left is the slag banks which have now been landscaped and opened from walkers.”[ii]

By 1871 Thomas and Sarah Jane had had four children – John (1860-), Mary Jane (1867- born in Rowley), Alice (1869 – born in Barrow), and Eliza (1870). They went on to have Ellen (1873), Thomas (1875), Sarah (1876), Louise (1878), Rose (1880), and Frederick (1882), ten in all. And boarding with them in the same house in 1871 were Sarah Jane’s brother Reuben Whithall (24), plus Benjamin Tibbetts (22), Samuel Ellis (18) (from a distant part of the country called Wednesbury so not a familiar name!), and one other Rowley man whose name I cannot read, also 18. And one 11 year old servant girl. Imagine the washing and cooking required to look after three children under five and those five men working in hot filthy conditions.

Thomas and Sarah stayed in Barrow-in-Furness for the rest of their lives, Sarah appears to have died between the 1891 census when she was still in Barrow, listed as a grocer at 2 Lincoln Street, with her family and 1901 when Thomas is listed with a different wife.

This article in the Barrow Herald, dated 14 September 1895, seems to indicate that Sarah was still alive and well and still in Barrow in 1895 but in Newbarns, not Lincoln Street. I cannot find a death registration or a burial for a Sarah Hackett of the right age in the years between 1891 and 1901. Had Thomas and Sarah separated?

Thomas appears to have married again, to Alice Standbridge in Coventry in 1897. Alice’s initials appear differently in different records so it has not been possible to find her before the marriage to Thomas.

Thomas died in Barrow in January 1919, a few years after Alice. I cannot trace a burial for Sarah Jane but Thomas and Alice were buried in the same grave so what happened to Sarah is something of a mystery.

Jane Hackett (1839-1907)

Jane was baptised on 14 April 1939 at St Giles, Rowley Regis. She was at home with her family in 1841 and 1851. In 1861, there is a Jane Hackett, aged 23 and born in Rowley, living as a lodger in Cherry Orchard, Old Hill, with William Chapman and his family. Also lodging with the Chapmans is a miner named Thomas Bagley, aged 24 born in Dudley. I have no real evidence that this is the correct Jane but she is the only single Jane Hackett of the correct age in the area. Jane did not die or marry between 1851 and 1861, and I cannot find her living with any of her family so it is probable that this is her.

In 1861 Jane had a daughter Ann, followed by George in 1864, Maria in 1867, William in 1869, Sarah in 1874, and Jane in 1876. During the whole of this time Jane Hackett was apparently a ‘lodger’ in the household of Thomas Bagley, the one who had also been lodging in the same house as Jane in 1861. The births of all of these children were registered as illegitimate. Jane is shown as Hackett and ‘boarder’ in 1871 and Bagley in later censuses and the children were shown as the children of Thomas Bagley but listed as Hackett. Until 1881 when Jane is shown as the wife of Thomas Bagley and all the children are shown as his children and listed as Bagley, the name most of them appeared to have used. So it seems extremely likely that Thomas Bagley was the father of them all.

In 1880 a last child was born but this one, Thomas, was registered as Bagley with a MMN of Hackett and was always known as Bagley. This might be taken to imply that Thomas Bagley and Jane Hackett had married by this time. However, I cannot find a marriage for Jane Hackett and Thomas Bagley at any time anywhere in the GRO records.

In 1901 Jane can be found in Harborne, listed as Jane Bagley, widow, visiting her married daughter Maria.

Jane died and her death was registered as that of Jane Bagley aged 69, of Elbow Street, Old Hill and she was buried as Jane Bagley in St Giles on 15 May 1907. One can, of course, in law, call oneself any name one likes, providing we do not do so to deceive and it appears that for nearly forty years Jane was to all intents and purposes, the wife of Thomas Bagley. There is no obvious reason why they did not marry, although it seems likely that Thomas was himself illegitimate so perhaps he saw no need. Or perhaps he had a previous wife living, although he described himself in censuses as unmarried and I cannot find such a marriage. We shall never know.

Sarah Hackett (1840-1865)

Sarah was baptised at St Giles, Rowley Regis on 8 Jun 1840.

On 19 September 1859 Sarah married William Stokes at Halesowen and in the 1861 Census she and William and their son John, aged 3 months are living with Sarah’s brother Thomas Hackett in Hawes Lane, next to Sarah’s mother Jane. In 1864 they had a daughter Ann but Sarah died on 30 August 1865, of Typhoid Fever, having been ill for three weeks. She was buried at St Giles aged 26, on 3 September 1865.

It is possible that John was the baby John Stokes of the Village, aged 11 weeks who was buried at St Giles on 9 May 1861 .There were three John Stokes born in the first quarter of the Dudley RD but this is the only baby of that name buried in 1861 in the area around Rowley which does seem a bit of a coincidence. I cannot find John with his father after that date. Nor can I find William Stokes with Ann in the next census, nor in fact William himself with any certainty. So the whole family seems to have disappeared, sadly. It is possible that they moved to a distant area but I cannot find them, if they did.

Joseph Hackett (1841-1925)

Joseph was a dream to research, he was where I expected him to be, when I expected him to be, no mysteries, no disappearances, such a pleasure!

Joseph was baptised on 20 November 1842 at St Giles. Born a few months too late for the 1841 Census, he was living with his mother in the 1851 and 1861 censuses. On 16 July 1865 Joseph married Sarah Ann Perry at St Giles, Rowley Regis. Sarah’s family lived in Rowley village, with their eleven children, next to the Ring of Bells pub which was opposite the parish church (as you might guess from the name of the pub!).

Sarah had an illegitimate daughter Sarah Jane in 1864 and she lived thereafter as their daughter and was listed as Hackett in censuses. However, when Sarah Jane married in 1895, she used the name Perry, not Hackett and gave no details of her father so it seems that Joseph was not her father.

Joseph and Sarah lived on Dudley Road, Cock Green for the rest of their lives and Joseph worked as a coal miner all of his life. In 1911, aged 68, he was still working as a miner/loader (underground) although by 1921 – when he was 79 and six months, he was finally described in the census as retired. The ‘old age pension’ had been introduced on 1 January 1909 with a non-contributory pension of 5 shillings (25p) per week to individuals aged 70 or over, a significant step in providing financial security for the elderly.

They had fourteen children, according to the 1911 Census, although I can only find birth registrations for thirteen, including Sarah Jane. Of these two had died so twelve survived. If a child was born dead that birth would not have been registered but no doubt the couple would have counted such a child as one of their own which may account for the different number. So, there came Hannah in 1866, Phebe in 1867, Thomas in 1868, Joseph in 1870, Polly in 1872, Harriet in 1875, John in 1877 who died in 1878, Benjamin in 1879, Selina in 1882, Jim in 1885 and Clara in 1889.

Sarah died in 1924, and was buried at St Giles on 26 August, aged 80. They had been married for 59 years. Joseph followed barely six months later and was buried at St Giles on 18 April 1925, aged 83 and of Dudley Road where they had lived all their married life.

Another fourteen grandchildren for John and Jane Hackett, most of whom appear to have stayed in the Rowley area.

Alice Hackett (1843-1924)

Alice was baptised on 16 July 1843 at St Giles, Rowley Regis. In 1851 and 1861 she was living with her mother, in Gadd’s Green and then Hawes Lane. In 1869, it appears that Alice had a son William, as he is listed after her in Reddall Hill, where she was lodging with her older brother John and his family. I think that this is the William Hacket, aged 2, of the village who was buried at St Giles on 14 Jun 1872 as I cannot find this William after that date and he is certainly not living with his mother at any later points of record.

On 14 October 1872, Alice married Noah Fellows who was a maltster and in 1881 they were living with her mother and Jane’s new husband John Taylor in Hawes Lane, together with their children John Thomas (1873), Ruth (1875), Noah (1877) and Alice (1879). Another son Joseph was born in 1882 and William in 1885.

Noah Fellows, you think – well, that’s a distinctive name, should be easy to track him. Except that there were three Noah Fellows born, one in the September quarter of 1846 in the Dudley RD, one in the following quarter in the Stourbridge RD and one in Shifnal in Shropshire in June 1848. I’m sure they are all closely related and in the same family at some point but fortunately in censuses, the two I am interested in each usually say where they were born – in Cradley or in West Bromwich. Alice married the Noah who was born in Cradley and at a later stage they moved back to Cradley, and then to Wolleston.

Noah died in 1914. Alice died in January 1924, in Stourbridge. Their children seem to have settled slightly further afield than most of the Hill decendants, settling either in the Stourbridge area, where Noah’s family were from, or in Birmingham.

Leah Hackett (1844-1864)

Leah was baptised on 26 January 1845 at St Giles. In 1851 she was living with her mother in Gadd’s Green in her uncle Joseph’s household. In 1861 she was again, aged 16, with her mother in Hawes Lane where her mother was lodging with John Taylor.

In the last quarter of 1862, Leah married Titus Hadley somewhere in the Dudley RD. Unfortunately I cannot find any details of where this marriage took place or exactly when. Both of these parties have unusual names and both appear to be the only ones born in the relevant period so it would look easy to trace them. It ain’t necessarily so…

I was able to find two men named Titus Hadley, in the 1861 Census, one born in 1842, and the other in 1845. One of these, Thomas Titus Hadley, was living with his parents and family in Shepherd’s Fold in Blackheath. The other, born in Causeway Green, off Penncrickett Lane, was living in Club Buildings with his grandmother Martha Westwood, aunt Phoebe Westwood and sister Martha Hadley. This seems the likely candidate to me, given the, by now, frequently evidenced tendency of local people in this area to marry their neighbours. Leah was just along the road in Hawes Lane at this time.

Which of these is the Titus Hadley referred to in this press cutting, I am not sure.

It coincides almost exactly with the Rowley Titus’s later marriage to Emma after Leah’s death, the paternity hearing being reported in September 1865 and Titus married Emma in October 1865 which may or may not be relevant. Or this may have been the other Titus Hadley.

It seems likely that Titus and Leah Hadley were the parents of Samuel Hadley, whose birth was registered in the first quarter of 1864 and who was buried on 21 July 1864 at St Giles, aged 6 months and of Club Buildings.

Leah died and was buried on 4 April 1864, aged 21 (according to the Burial Register entry although her death registration has her age as 19 – let’s say she was about 20… ), three months before baby Samuel.

There were actually three male children born to Hadley/Hackett parents in just three years – John in 1862, Samuel in early 1864 and William in the last quarter of 1864. (Another child, Edward was born to this combination in 1866 when Leah had been dead for two years. So there must have been another Hadley/Hackett marriage in the village. I will probably find it at some point.) So William cannot have been their child but John possibly could. I cannot tell unless I buy the birth certificates, a temptation I am currently resisting. However, I cannot find baptisms for John or Samuel, nor a burial for John so these are unknowns at present. Later Hadleys were certainly active Methodists so it is possible that babies were baptised in the Methodist tradition, for which records are patchy at this period.

After Leah’s death, Titus re-married to Emma Whithall in October 1865 at Halesowen, (who was on the same page in the 1861 census, living with her father William in Club Buildings.) They had four sons, Joseph, Titus, Alfred and Jason and lived in Birmingham Road and Station Road, Blackheath until Titus’s death. He was buried on 6 May 1922 in St Giles, aged 81.

So these were the nine children of John and Jane Hackett, nee Hill.

Ann Hackett 1854-1923

And then there was Ann Hackett, the daughter apparently born to the widowed Jane Hackett on 7 February 1854 in Rowley village, father unknown. Oddly, this Ann seems to have been baptised as the daughter of Jane Hackett of the village, but not until 2 Mar 1868, when she would have been fourteen. In 1861 and in 1871, Ann is living with her mother and step-father.

I do wonder whether Ann was actually the daughter of Jane Hackett’s daughter Jane. Jane Hackett, nee Hill would have been 45 in 1854, her daughter Jane would have been 15 so either would be possible. There is no way of telling from the birth certificate , it merely says Jane Hackett as the mother. However, in the censuses, Jane Hackett Senior describes Ann as her daughter and I have left her as that in the family tree. It was not unusual for parents to raise a grandchild, particularly one born illegitimately to a young girl so it does seem possible to me. The only thing which gives me pause is that Jane named her own first-born daughter of her marriage, in 1861, Ann. Although that was also the name of her husband’s mother so he could have decided that.

In 1873, Ann Hackett married Benjamin Tibbetts in the Ulverston Registration District, presumably the same Benjamin Tibbetts who had been lodging with Ann’s half brother (or uncle!) Thomas in Barrow-in-Furness in the 1871 Census and presumably they married in Barrow.

Elizabeth was the first child born to Benjamin and Ann, she was born in 1874 in Barrow-in-Furness. But by 1876, when their second daughter Annie was born they were back in Rowley Regis, living in Hawes Lane in the 1881 Census. The Tibbetts family lived in Hawes Lane until by 1901 they were at 70 Rowley Village. Later children were William Benjamin (1882), Jane (1883-1890), Mary (1886), John Thomas (1888), Harry (1890), George Frederick (1894) and Lucy (1902).

In the 1911 Census, which asks how many children were born alive in the present marriage and whether they were still alive, Ann says that there were thirteen children, of whom 7 were alive. I can only find birth registrations for nine, however but spelling errors in one or other of the surnames might have prevented me from finding the others.

In 1821, Ann was still living in 7 Hawes Lane and was recorded as a “Midwife Certificated”, so apparently still working at 68 years and 4 months. No doubt she would have been a familiar figure in the local community. By 1821 Annie was lised as a widow and there is a death registration for a Benjamin Tibbetts in the last quarter of 1915 which is for someone of the correct age; however, I cannot find a burial for him. He had worked as a labourer at the quarry for the whole of his working life in Rowley, perhaps he is one of those anonymous faces we see in old photographs of quarry workers.

Annie died on 4 Nov 1923 and was buried at St Giles on the 8^th November, aged 70.

Finally…

John Taylor, or Bridgwater, second husband of Jane,died in 1882 aged 55 and was buried at St Giles on 25^th April.

Jane Taylor, previously Hackett, nee Hill of Club Buildings, survived him by four years and died in 1886, aged 77 and was buried at St Giles on 21 July 1886.

Jane Taylor, nee Hill, had at least 9, probably 10 children and they in turn added at least 69 great-grandchildren to Timothy and Maria Hill’s dynasty.

Only two more of Timothy and Maria’s children to come in the next instalment, with possibly another diversion en route!

[i] The Little Book of the Black Country by Michael Pearson, The History Press. ISBN 978 0 7524 8783 0

[ii] https://www.recordingmorecambebay.org.uk/content/stories/iron-steel-works-barrow-furness