Your place in history

[benny1982]

Although when John Hurt was aghast to find he had no blue blood in him I did laugh as he was so smug and brash about it but seriously he needed to grow up a bit. Genealogy is not set in stone and you may have to accept that what you read or hear is not necessarily true.

When I began in 2004 on genealogy I took a lot at face value then realised soon it was best not to until I can find ultimate proof or strong evidence. Sometimes 100% proof is hard to achieve.

[Colin Rowledge]

Although when John Hurt was aghast to find he had no blue blood in him I did laugh as he was so smug and brash about it but seriously he needed to grow up a bit. Genealogy is not set in stone and you may have to accept that what you read or hear is not necessarily true.

When I began in 2004 on genealogy I took a lot at face value then realised soon it was best not to until I can find ultimate proof or strong evidence. Sometimes 100% proof is hard to achieve.

I'm with you, Benny1982. Just read my thread on Work House births London/Middlesex.. Even with documents - BMD's - it always necessarily so and sometimes the results of investigation don't alway support the documentation.

[benny1982]

Hi Colin

I have replied to your thread. Seems there was 2 Annie Obedience Gaults born 1861/1862, one registered and one not. I have had the same with my George Musgraves born 1856 in the same village. One registered and one not.

Ben

[Nore]

Hi Zen Rabbit. Sorry for being so late responding. The past few weeks have been hard for me. I have a picture of my grandfather Ernest Jones ( I guess) McVicker by adoption. I also have one of my greatgrandmother Ann Farnworth-Chell- McVicker. My grt. grandmother worked in the potteries so did Henry Jones. This divorce etc.went on around 1880-1883. I found the divorce papers quite by accident on the archives. I find myself wondering how she could come to America and leave two sons in England.She left them with her parents in Burslem. This all went on between 1880 and 1883.The boys left were Edward Chell ( whom the father claimed as his) and Henry Jones Chell. Henry and my granddad Ernest both belonged to Henry Jones! Ernest came with gram and Patrick McVicker.I know nothing as to the Jones side, with such a popular name I may never know. On top of it I am computer dumb and always afraid of messing it up. I have come to feel like I "know" these people. Just cant figure out Grt.grandmother. Take care. Noreen/

[Mallyjam]

Well I've swallowed the whole genealogy thing hook, line and sinker LOL The more I delve and the further back I go the more interested I become. Have found my old history lessons coming back to me even though I was never that interested and certainly spent no time thinking of figures of history as real people. I certainly do now though and find I appreciate the lessons learnt - even all those dates LOL They give me a reference.

I have no wish though to live in times past. They were very hard - for men as well as women. Men always seemed to be at war and women always seemed to be pregnant with child. The workhouses were truly terrible. Have just read Charlie Chaplin's account of his experience in them. Lives of the labouring poor could be insufferably harsh and made worse by laws and social mores designed to keep them in in their place.

But I've discovered that the most ordinary of my ancestors have lived the most extraordinary lives - extraordinary at least to an outsider like me looking in, if not to their neighbours and immediate families.

[Zen Rabbit]

You have a facinating story there. Divorce was not an easy thing to come by in those days, I have an ancestor who lived with a married woman as his wife for the best part of ten years and she never divorced. Divorce could be costly so it also implies that they had some money. Neither Jones nor Mc Vicker are Potteries names so I am guessing that Henry Jones was one of the many people who gravitated to the Potteries around that time (it is a period when my Philpotts, Pughs and Stantons arrive) as industry in Stoke was entering its "Golden Age" and also its smokiest. Chell on the other hand is a very old Potteries name and can be found in some of the earliest records for the region. It apparently derives from the Old English name of Ceola and is marked in the arewa by the place name of Chell Heath. I will have a look through my books for you

[Zen Rabbit]

Well it appears after a brief hunt that I was wrong in one respect. The name Chell is quite scant in the records for Burslem (although I did use the quick search facility on my PDF's of the documents and to be honest it isn't always accurate) the only one I could find was Thomas Chell of Burslem who married Ann Boon of Burslem, spinster, on 21 July 1806. Wit. John & Elizabeth Boon. Which I thought weird as I have seen a lot of Chells recently but couldn't place where. Then I did a similar search on the Stoke parish records and it gave me Joseph Chell farmer of Dilhorne & Mary Spencer, wid. who married by lic. in 16 April 1782 wit. John Chell. It was then that I remembered that while researching my Hollins roots I had come across a lot of Chell graves at Dilhorne. A search of the 1839 survey for Caverswall (literally a mile or two from Dilhorne) reveals Joseph Chell as owner of 5 plots in the Caverswall area https://www.
caverswall.org.uk/cgi-bin/1839survey.pl?search=Chell. Admittedly it is a bit patchy but from my Hollins family who came from the same area I found out that a series of bad harvests in the late 1700's forced a lot of families to move to the potteries to seek employment. So maybe an area to explore.