Mysterious Black Sheep SMITH
Hello,
I'm just new back to stalking my dead relatives after a very long break(yay for isolation!) and discovered a letter from my grandfather to my mother in amongst a heap of papers. The letter outlines a few family bits and bobs and ended with the below...
...BUT I have made no mention of my black sheep uncle, he was a rapist they used to call him Whip it Quick. G (my dad, who is no longer with us) has heard of him. All the best...
Now, there are a couple of things to consider - one is that my grandfather just liked to drop the odd hand grenade and see what happened next (this is plausible. He was a bit of a smarty britches. Also, the Whip it Quick business screams "joke" to me).
The next is which side of the family am I looking? My grandfather had one uncle on his maternal side, and he seemed to be a fine upstanding citizen (Publican of the Red Lion in Crick, several kids etc etc) so I have ruled him out.
On his father's side, though, he had four uncles...three of whom have families and seem to be all quite respectable. Uncle #4 though...
I cannot find any mention of him anywhere that match up with the information I have that is probably correct, and since the 1881 census, he's vanished without a trace.
His name is Charles Edward SMITH, born in 1873 in Kilsby in Northamptonshire. His parents are Sidney (or Sydney)SMITH (b. Watford 1840 ish) and Emma KEMP (b. Watford 1842 ish)
So, he's either died between 1881 and 1891, run off and joined the circus (or the navy or something) or he legitimately is the aforementioned Black Sheep.
And now that all the correspondents involved in the wee missive from my grandfather are all no longer with us, I am hoping that wiser heads than mine can help me decide if the grandfather was pulling our collective legs, or if his Uncle Charles was a legit black sheep!
Thank you for your patience wading through all of that!
Jodi