I have a short attention span. So my focus
has changed somewhat since the last post.* I’m still tracking
Smith ancestors but I've moved back in time about 140 years.
Our forebears came, as I already knew, from Wales. The trail back to Wales begins with
great grandfather George Smith, the royal reporter. In census and other
records, George’s birthplace appears as Stroud in Gloucestershire, his birth
date as 1863.
Online
searches at Ancestry.com and FamilySearch, an excellent free online source for genealogical information, turned up a birth record for George, dated 19 January
1863. I sent away (by snail mail) to the General Registrar Office for a certified
copy of this “entry of birth.”
George's father was Thomas Smith, listed in the entry as a “Retired Inland
Revenue Officer.” This is an important detail because it distinguishes him from
the gazillion other Thomas Smiths in Britain. His mother was Mary, neé Jones.
The family lived at Walls Quarry, Minchinhampton, a village in the
Stroud district.
So far,
so good. Next I went looking for more about Thomas, my great great grandfather.
He appears in the censuses of 1851, 1861 and 1871, with a wealth
of interesting, sometimes surprising, information.
At the time of the 1871
census, the first I found, the family was still living in Stroud, but now at
26 Church St., Avening (Tetbury today): Thomas, wife Mary and a pile of kids,
including George, aged 8.
Under “rank, profession or occupation,” Thomas is listed as “superannuated
revenue agent.” So no question, this is our guy.
26 Church St., Avening, Stroud (Tetbury) |
The real
shocker is Thomas’s age. He was 72 when the census takers came calling that year – with a family of
six kids ranging in age from 12 years to 7 months! Mary is 41.
Old census
records also show birthplaces of respondents, and Thomas gave his as
Carmarthen, Abergwilly (Abergwili, Carmarthenshire, a village about 30 miles north west of Swansea in Wales.) With that
information, I was able to find his birth listed in an online index to the
Abergwili parish records, which was in turn linked to an image of the handwritten page at a
third online site, FindMyPast.co.uk.
Thomas
was born 21 August 1798. The entry reads, “Thomas the son of Jno. [a short form
of John] Smith Excise Officer by Bridget his wife.” So his Dad was a revenuer
as well.
I only
recently unearthed the 1851 and 1861 census records for Thomas. In 1861, Thomas
and Mary were living in Minchinhampton (where George would be born two years later) at 129 Walls Quarry (an address that no longer exists). Thomas is listed as “retired inland revenue officer,” aged 62. Mary is 32.
Elizabeth, the eldest child, is 2, and baby Thomas is 11 months. No surprises, all
the dates and ages jibe with what we already had from the 1871 record.
Then
comes the census of 1851. We’re still in Minchinhampton, Stroud. At this point, Thomas Smith, 53,
from Abergwili, was living at 58 Walls Quarry. And he was listed even then as “retired inland revenue
officer.” (Apparently civil servants retired early in those days too.) The
surprise is that his wife is listed as Elizabeth, also 53.
Image of page in 1851 census book |
So Mary
was Thomas’s second wife. Did he have a first family with Elizabeth? Given that
they were 53 in 1851, their kids could easily have all grown and moved away.
Or maybe they never had any. Note that Thomas’s first-born with Mary is named
after his first wife.
Next
task: find more about John Smith – I already have a record for a John Smith born in Abergwili in 1761 – then push back and back…to the dawn of time! Stay
tuned.
* I do have a short attention span, and my focus has changed, but I have also
made a fresh enquiry with the Archives of Ontario for information about Tom
Herbert Smith’s criminal conviction. And I made corrections in the previous
post.
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