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I got an update on my family tree from a nice man who’s been looking into it for us. He was the one who discovered I had ancestors called Donkin Dover and Elizabeth Raper and Ann Cuming as well as a whole load of Cockburns.
Today I learned that one of my great-great grandmothers was called Sarah Ann Wolf, which is a pretty cool name (especially compared to all the ones with sexual associations and/or fish) and she was married to David Simmonds.I was even told where they were married, at St Giles without Cripplegate (on December 10th 1865) and where Sarah Ann and David were living at the time (4, Well St for Sarah Ann with her stone engraver dad, George and 18 Golden Lane for David who was a fishmonger - looks like I didn’t inherit the sell fish gene). I was able to look up the addresses on google maps and see where my cockney ancestors lived (most of my recent family are form the North East, so it’s interesting to have a branch right from the heart of London (this is basically the Barbican area).
You can even see photos of the outside of the buildings and whilst 18 Golden Lane looks like a rather grand building, it does look old enough to have been the place where David lived or (if it’s not quite the right addresss) walked past each day.
He’d also found a new set of 5xgreat-grandparents, Henry Butler and Ann Rose, who were married in Alton in Hampshire on 22nd June 1802. As well as new 6xgreat-grandparents, James Avery and Elizabeth Chambers, parents of Paul Avery, who were married in Chester-Le-Street on 9th May, 1721.
Presumably that latter pair were alive (or near as dammit) when my current house was being built in the early 1700s, and probably sucking on straws throughout their lives therefore.
And if that wasn’t enough another set of 6xGreat-Grandparents were found: Nicholas Whitfield (1732-1798) and Jane Watson (?-1774) of Stanhope, Durham. Nicholas owned his own house and so must have been quite well off, but none of that money filtered down to us, sadly. Nicholas’ dad was called Henry, so that’s my seven times great-grandad (assuming there was no sexual monkey business in the intervening years and anyone became impregnated by someone other than their husband - a big assumption to make in my family). I think that I have 512 ancestors in that generation and we have names for 6 of them. Even if I am a part of Henry Whitfield, it’s a very small part (but I still think I deserve a share of Nicholas’ estate).
What I hadn’t really noticed before was that the Herring line (which presuming surnames continue to be passed on as they have in the past- which I sort of hope they won’t- is only being carried by my son of all my parents’ grandchildren) goes back 5 generations to John Herring 1828-1887. His dad is listed at William Hearing (who died in 1867, a century before my birth) and his dad was called Robert Heron. I suppose back then names were said more than written and so how they were recorded was very much based on how they sounded. Unless William was embarrassed to be named after a bird, so changed his name and then John was embarrassed to be named after a sense, so changed it to a fish. But the Herrings have only been going since the 19th Century and I am, in many ways, living a lie. My name is Richard Heron or possibly, if the name changed before that Richard Heroin. That’s what I am calling myself from now on anyway. No one told me that you could just change your surname on a whim.
