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  1. #11
    ianjbennett
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    thank you for your help in 3 hours we have found out more than the last 4 years searching

  2. #12
    lholder
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    Unhappy Jane Bennett

    My brother and I are still trying to find Jane Bennett born in Wombourne, Staffordshire in 1897. We knew from family stories that she had been physically abused by our great grandfathers housekeeper and that they had been imprisoned for the crime. Thanks to your members we have found the newspaper cuttings giving information about what happened but we are now seeking to find what happened to Jane. Her little brother we believe was sent to relatives in Cleobury Mortimer but we cannot find Jane!!! I have looked for information about Seisdon Infirmary which was mentioned in the newspaper report but this was unsuccessful. Has anyone got any ideas please

  3. #13
    Coromandel
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    Hello lholder and welcome to the forum

    It is good to see a family team working on the same problem: I just wish I could get my siblings interested in the family history! They like to hear about all the skeletons in the cupboard but I can't persuade them to do any of the hard work.

    Here are a few ideas for possible avenues to explore in the hope of a new lead on Jane:

    Check other local newspapers (at Wolverhampton Library?) for any further details, especially for more clues as to exactly where the trial took place. Perhaps then you will be able to locate court records.

    Find out if there are any surviving school records for the school Jane was at: a register might say when she left and where she went next, while a log book might mention the teacher having to give evidence.

    Keep looking for her on the 1911 census. Try looking for any Jane [leave surname field blank] of about the right age born in the right area on the 1911 census, in case her surname has been garbled or she has taken the surname of an adoptive family. Check for people listed in institutions just by their initials. Findmypast has a 14 year old female 'J.B.' in an institution in the Lancaster district, for example: you'd need to check the original image to see if any birthplace was given.

    Get Jane's birth certificate so you have an exact date of birth; this may help to identify her in death indexes if she survived into the period when dates of birth are given in the GRO death index.

    Check shipping lists on Ancestry etc. in case she was sent out as a 'home child'.

    (I'm sure there are other things too . . . I will keep thinking.)

  4. #14
    lholder
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    Thank you so much for all your ideas. We are still struggling to find Jane but we believe we may have found the housekeepers baby mentioned in the newspaper article. We are planning to visit the Staffordshire archives soon so hopefully we will find out more then.
    Will keep you posted and thanks again for your help

  5. #15
    lholder
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    Thank you so much for the newspaper info. My brother and I have since looked on the British Newspaper Archive website but have been unable to find this information and are amazed at how you came across it! Please can you give us some tips as to how you found it. Following the links we have been able to print the articles but we are dumbfounded as to how you found them
    I guess you are a real demolition expert
    Thanks

  6. #16
    Coromandel
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    Quote Originally Posted by lholder View Post
    Thank you so much for the newspaper info. My brother and I have since looked on the British Newspaper Archive website but have been unable to find this information and are amazed at how you came across it! Please can you give us some tips as to how you found it. Following the links we have been able to print the articles but we are dumbfounded as to how you found them
    Hello again. I can't remember how I got there but think in the end I just put bennett wombourn in the 'All of these words' search box on the Advanced Search page at

    https://www.
    britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/search/advanced

    This gives lots of results but you can then go to the 'Filter by Date' menu on the left of the page chose first '1900-1949' and then '1900-1909'. This produces nine matches. Putting together the information visible in the first two matches I could see that John Bennett of Wombourn and his housekeeper had been imprisoned for cruelty. (You could have chosen the date range from the menu on the Advanced Search page, but I find that sort of drop-down menu a bit slow and fiddly for choosing dates, so do it the lazy way instead by filtering later.)

    I think I had tried a search with Jane Bennett in the 'Phrase' box and Wombourn in the 'All of these words' box. That didn't work, I think because the child's name isn't given in full in those reports: it just says 'Bennett's daughter Jane' or something like that. If you do the same search but with John Bennett instead of Jane it does work. A short-hand way of doing this search in the simple search form on the home page is to put "John Bennett" +Wombourn (the quotation marks show that you want to search for an exact phrase, while the + shows that you want to search for articles with both John Bennett and Wombourn.

    As you will have noticed from the search results, much of the text gets garbled by the optical character recognition software. Now that you know a bit more about the date and place of the trial, and the housekeeper's name, you could try searching a narrower range of dates and including search terms such as Gould, Wolverhampton, cruelty, etc. in case the key words Bennett and Wombourn have got garbled.

    (I didn't try selecting newspapers from a particular region at all, as newspapers far afield often copied stories from other papers. Indeed, as terrysfamily discovered, the story of little Jane Bennett was even picked up by a New Zealand newspaper. There are excellent and, what's more, free, websites with NZ and Australian newspapers so always worth checking there too.)

    I hope this gives you some insight into my strange thought processes and helps you in further searching.

  7. #17
    ianjbennett
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    Default

    Hello again, we haven't been here for a while. Last week we had a family outing to the Stafford records office, we found the prison records for both our Great granddad and the housekeeper and discovered that Jane went to the Seisdon Infirmary after the court case, however all records for Trysull and Seisdon (two small hamlets in Staffordshire) in the 1911 census are missing. We still have not been able to trace any information about Jane Bennett after 1904.Regards, Ian

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