16 February 2009

Why Smith

Positively tropical weather today; well, it was about 8C and that's warm compared to what we've been having!

Anyway, to Biggleswade first: for the 139th birthday of Martha Jane Pates, one of the ten children of Samuel and Eliza. A laundress in the 1891 census, Martha married William Tobyn in 1893 and they had three (or four) children. I've just found them all in the 1911 census and there's a possible fourth child there. Their daughter Lilian, born in 1896, is in Leighton Buzzard in the census so I guess that she's in service there.

Moving back to my home county and yet another Smith! William, of that name, appeared in 1827 to Nicholas and Susannah. When I first looked at him, I could only find his birth and an entry in the 1841 census so I did some homework . . . to discover, to my amusement, that he married Miss Why. Oh yes, all manner of comments come to mind but I will behave; Jemima Why, also born in Chatteris, married young William in 1848 and I found the pair of them in Slade End, Chatteris, for the next twenty-odd years. Jemima was nearly twenty years older than her husband and she died in early 1881 at the age of 74; I haven't found any more on William yet - I was rather using Jemima as the marker which made him stand out in the indexes amongst all the other William Smiths. I'll put him on the to-do list.

That's it for today. I've got six weddings and five birthdays to report on in the next three days so I need to do some research!


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