Over the years, Lifers have shared interesting bits of their family history with the rest of us, and I thought a family history thread where these stories could in future be gathered together might be useful. I’ll kick it off…
I have a shameful secret to share. Although I was born in Charlton, my London ancestors came from further west. Places like Peckham, Rotherhithe, and yes, I hesitate to admit, Bermondsey! One of my uncles was a Spanner
Researching family history has taken me to some interesting records – not just the ship-builders of Rotherhithe, the leather workers of Bermondsey, and barometer makers of Borough, but also – sadly – to Victorian debtors’ prisons, workhouses, industrial schools and lunatic asylums. Sometimes you find more than you bargained for…
My latest researches in SE London, in collaboration with a cousin (a Brighton Seagull), have unearthed a Dickensian amalgam of the Trotters and Steptoe & Son, with a touch of EastEnders – father and son
James and Thomas Judd. (And although this story pre-dates the foundation of Charlton Athletic, I bet they knew the times of every train rumbling over the viaduct in and out of London Bridge, for reasons which should become apparent.)
In brief, James Judd was born in Ireland c.1820-30 and arrived about the time of the Potato Famine in a notoriously crime-ridden corner of Newington, where he met his future wife Mary Daly. He became a tanner, and then set up business in one of the hundreds of Rotherhithe railway arches as a fish manure maker, the revolting stench from which was a great nuisance for about two decades in the neighbourhood (just up-line from the current site of the Toolbox!). After his wife died, James lived in a nearby arch, where he was nearly killed in 1896 by Thomas William Elliott, the man his daughter Catherine was living with, who beat James round the head with a coal shovel. (Details in
https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18970111-name-290&div=t18970111-154#highlight)I did come across one Charlton reference while researching injunctions against Judd’s fish manure business – an 1894 complaint from Lee District that Rotherhithe was dumping parish refuse in the Charlton Chalk Pits. Might this be the site which 25 years later became The Valley
@CharltonAthMuseum ? In which case, the unusable residue from James’ manure making may still lie deep beneath our pitch, having been fly-tipped there!
Son Thomas Judd trained as a leather finisher, but later drove the horse & van (not a 3-wheeler…) collecting rotting fish offal and selling the manure. Multiple newspaper articles between 1874 and 1896 reporting police court proceedings show fish manure was not the only thing the family sold – Thomas had a side-line in stolen goods, and was not above doing a bit of warehouse burglary himself. Thomas’ brothers James jnr., William and Joseph Judd were also light-fingered in their youth, although not charged as often as he was.
In 1889 Thomas was convicted of breaking and entering a leather dresser’s warehouse, stealing a set of harness and 380 sheepskins worth £40, and sentenced to 5 years penal servitude. In 1894 he and his father were charged with working a pair of unfit, lame horses. James was fined and promised to have the aged horses destroyed. In 1896 Thomas was bound over to keep the peace for allegedly hitting his sister in the face after she gave evidence against him. A fortnight later he was sentenced to a year’s hard labour for theft of two horse-vans worth £55.
No wonder the Greenwich J.P. Mr Kennedy described them as “a terrible family”!
Illegality, illegitimacy, illiteracy, insolvency, incest, insanity – you can choose your friends but not your relatives, and must be prepared to discover skeletons if family history is your hobby. I can now add the criminal justice and penal systems to my opening list of Victorian institutions.
My cousin and I wonder if any living descendants of James Judd snr., his sons James jnr., William, Thomas and Joseph, or their sisters Ann, Mary, Hannah, Catherine and Margaret, would be interested in reading more about our findings and sharing their knowledge of the family. Surnames we have linked to this Judd family by marriage include Alder, Arnold, Baulch, Boot, Catford, Leahy, Marks, Maybee, Sackett, Thurbon, Turner, Warren, Williamson. The most “recent” direct descendant we have definitely identified is Thomas’ youngest son Stanley Judd who lived in Peckham / Lewisham, and died childless nearly 40 years ago in 1979.
I would be pleased to hear ideas from Lifers how to trace forwards to living descendants, as we are struggling to make progress after the 1911 census, by which time some of the family had moved to Essex. WW2 produced further scattering, and most of the SE London roads in which they lived have been redeveloped. Neither my cousin nor I are descended from the Judds, so DNA is not the answer.
Comments
About thirty years ago, my aunt got a bit of the genealogy bug and decided to investigate the family history. Just a week into her investigations, she stumbled across a book written in the late 19th century called “The Ormistons of Teviotdale” This is pretty close to our relatively rare surname, so she started to study the book which details family history, the geographic locations of branches of the family etc, then lo and behold, there was a family tree in the book and the final name on one of the branches was my great-grandfather!
At the end of the day, she continued the family tree and we now have proof that we are descended from such historical characters as Kings of Scotland; Duncan, Malcolm I and Malcolm II.
But most pleasingly, directly descended from the one and only Alfred the Great.
One of them was passed down the generations and shared in the 1800s by James Gibb, my great x 5 grandfather. The story is of how his own great grandfather survived during “the killing times” in the 1600s. Unlikely to be 100% truthful but more than I’ve found for most family lines going back to that period.
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=569615.0;attach=254292
Perhaps I should change my username to Ag.Lab.N01R4M, because right back to the 16th century, that is what most of my ancestors have been!
I hope the book about your ancestry is more accurate than one written in America in the 19th century about my family name. The writer seemed determined to link my surname to a noble family, where no such link exists.
@McBobbin, I’m so glad your family can laugh at the discovery about your naughty ancestor. The Christmas mail today has brought me confirmation that a tale I first heard 15+ years ago, that my great-grandmother ran off with her husband’s brother, was untrue – it was actually his brother-in-law! From shortly after he was widowed, they lived together as man & wife for 19 years, eventually marrying when she was 69 and he was 70, after her husband, my great-grandfather died. I’m just so sad that Mum did not live long enough to hear this news, because I know it would have tickled her.
How lucky you are @Scoham that such a vivid piece of your family’s oral history has survived, and thank you for sharing it. I’m sure it has kindled your interest in the historical circumstances surrounding it.
My current problem is that I am used to tracing family lines backwards or sideways, but the same techniques are not working so well trying to trace forwards over the past 100 years.
I know every ancestor had 2 parents, each of whom had 2 parents, etc. Working forwards, there is no certainty how many offspring a couple had, and whether or not they went on to have children! Also, Sod’s Law, it is the less usual surnames which seem to peter out, leaving me wading through far too many references to names like Turner and Williamson for me to easily filter out the ones who are irrelevant! If anyone has a possible solution to this problem, I would be delighted to hear it.
With DNA you of course need to be prepared that you might find out something unexpected.
I have a great x 2 grandmother that was born in England to Irish parents. They moved to Mitcham from County Cork around a similar time to yours, during or just after the potato famine. I have DNA matches clearly from that line, and with some of the more recent ones I know how they’re related. Others are a bit more distantly related and the lack of Irish records (that I’ve found so far) mean I can’t work out where they fit in. It’s worthwhile continuing to check your DNA matches, you never know when someone may take a test and that link could help you find the answer you need.
My cousin is male, but his connection to the Judds is via the sister of his great-grandmother. It was the sister we were originally researching (she was also my grandfather's first cousin) & she married into this family of Judds. So again there is no Y-chromosome link. There might be a possibility via mitochondrial DNA, (I would need to sit down with a sheet of paper & plot things out for my cousin and myself and the sister who married a Judd, to be sure!) but as you say, it is the Y-DNA which is most used for family history matching.
So quite aside from, as you put it "something unexpected" (@clb74 was a little more direct!), I think we are probably going to have to rely on less high-tech methods.
Good luck with the Irish records (or rather, the lack of them). And thank you for the suggestions.
Grandad was born nearly 125 years ago in Stepney, London. He had 10 siblings and lived in a two up, two down cottage, and seemingly survived via a mother who through necessity ruled the house with an iron rod … but, with kindness. This may be of interest to students of social history as this is as it was in those times.
It does go on a bit, but if you stick with it there is evidence of the happiness and contentment that existed within the old East End. Incidentally, my contribution is in bullying my brother to committing his tape to youtube.
Y and mitochondrial tests were available first but all the major websites now offer autosomal tests. In the case of Ancestry that’s the only one they offer.
2) 1939 list will give information re deceased relatives if they passed away a reasonable time ago.
3) Electoral Rolls. If you have a subscription to Findmypast you can find out information. I think they may also be linked to 192.com which does a similar thing.
1) FreeBMD has already been very helpful getting us to where we are, and my cousin has signed up to a service being trialled by GRO which means you can get downloads of "historic" birth & death info much cheaper than buying the actual certificates. Has all the info, but is not in itself a legal document.
Unfortunately, the Judds moved to urban rather than rural Essex, and there were already a surprisingly large number of Judd families already there, which muddies the waters. They also seem to have given up their criminal ways - or else the local papers were less inclined to print Police Court reports!
2) The 1939 list will be added to our "to do" list. I believe it is available via Ancestry and we plan to try out their 14-day free trial, once there is time after Christmas to make good use of it.
3) I have used the London Electoral Rolls (mostly c. 1880s-1913) free on FamilySearch to resolve some issues. I will investigate whether Findmypast have anything wider geographically, and more recent. We would still have 80 years to bridge between 1939 and the present, and the inclusion of all adult women after 1928 will make them even more useful.
Cheers
Ray
Essex have their own website for parish registers which includes some records from the 1900s. They’re not transcribed so you’d have to look through pages manually or use alongside transcribed records elsewhere.
http://seax.essexcc.gov.uk/ParishRegisters.aspx
I'm sure I see an article some while ago saying at least 10% of me who think they are the father of thier child are in fact not.
I'm sure they said the average could be as much as 20%.
That might then help find his birth certificate and potentially identify him in other records such as the 1939 register.
It might take a week or more given the season and resulting family commitments.
Although this interview was specific to the East End in its references to roads, pubs, music halls, etc., so much of the life style must have been common in every large city of the country.
I know that in SE London my ancestors also often crammed seemingly impossible numbers into small houses – and often just one floor of a house which they shared with another family. The housing shortage in London is certainly not a new phenomenon.
The difference is in our expectations, and rightly so, but the downside is the lack of affordable accommodation for many lower paid people. I’m certain far fewer now rent out a spare room to singles or young couples when children leave home – we want to keep that spare room available for them to come back and visit, now the odds are that they will be living far away, not just around the corner, or simply we value our privacy above the potential rental income.
I've also been able to build a friendship with a cousin we knew nothing about. My uncle, long since departed, was a sailor with an eye for the ladies. A girl in every port it seemed.
My cousin grew up in New Zealand and then America knowing only that he was a British sailor and his name. She started a Facebook campaign based on the name and a third party contacted me on an ancestry website. We were able to flesh out the man (A bit of a wrong un) and provide photos etc.
Make sure you record those tall tales gran & grandad tell when they’ve had a few – there may be truth behind the most unlikely of family stories! I look forward to reading the results of your researches in the coming year.
Find out what electoral district / Registration district Hopedale Road lies in.
Electoral registers for Hopedale Road should give you a shortlist of possible Nellie / Eleanor / etc. with surnames. According to LenGlover (see above) they are available on FindMyPast.
Then look in FreeBMD death indexes for those surnames for deaths of that name in 1975/6. Will give age at death/ date of birth. Actual certificate will say who registered the death, who may be a relative.
Look for marriage in marriage index - will be a lot easier if she has an uncommon surname! Index will give husband's surname, and should cross reference to her index entry from which you get her maiden name (or previous married name if she was a widow).
Then search for her in birth index. From September quarter of 1911 onwards the index entry also states the mother's maiden surname.
If your biological father is not named on your original birth certificate, which is unlikely, then I think the only record is probably in your biological mother's memory. There could be many reasons why she is reluctant to share that information, hard though it may be for you.
My post yesterday was in the context of your question re progressing from 1911 to the present day.
Findmypast electoral rolls are fine from 2002 to the present day but only selected before that.
Ancestry might be better but I've not used that facility sufficiently to be 100% on that.
@rananegra , I've PM'd you
Many of us are curious about those in our family who came before - there's 'plenty of skeletons in the wardrobe' rattling around in our histories.
Or at least an unexpected turn of events.
But actually most of our earlier forebears just lived an ordinary life of their times.
Have a dig around old photos/old newspaper accounts of their area and then you can picture the environment in which they lived, and worked.
With a little imagination, 'you can get to know' what it was like to see and feel their lives almost through their eyes.
In this way, history comes alive.