On the hunt for William’s death certificate, I realised I hadn’t attached an 1861 census record to him yet.
The Wreford Pedigree recorded his death date as November 1866 and the last census I had him on was the 1851. The only appropriate death record I could find was registered in East London but didn’t know whether it was the right guy. So I searched for William WREFORD and found one in the house of his sister, Sarah BROOKS:
1861 Census – William WREFORD staying with his sister, Sarah BROOKS
I checked that William did indeed have a sister called Sarah (baptised 18 Apr 1797 in Morchard Bishop, Devon to the same parents, John & Mary) and then checked for a marriage between a Sarah WREFORD and a man named BROOKS.
Sarah WREFORD baptism
Marriage of Charles BROOKS & Sarah WREFORD (Chulmleigh, Devon)
It all checked out and I am confident that the William living with his sister in 1861 IS my William WREFORD (b. 1793). I ordered the death certificate and hoped there was some clue as to how he ended up in London. Unfortunately there was not. Since then, I learned that both his eldest son William (1817) and his daughter, Elizabeth lived in London at the time and am still tracing his other children. More information can be found in my ‘Wrestling with Death‘ post.
William WREFORD was my famous (in those times) wrestling ancestor hailing from Devon (previously mentioned here and here). So, the fact that the only likely death entry for him was registered in London was a bit worrying for me. Could I be confident this was really him?
Luckily, I had found a newspaper article mentioning he had died ‘in the metropolis’ to help put my mind at ease:
DEATH OF A RENOWNED DEVONSHIRE WRESTLER. – On Sunday last the veteran William Wreford died after a very short illness at the house of one of his children, in the metropolis. (Exeter and Plymouth Gazette (Friday, 07 December, 1866)
The Wreford Pedigree also notes that he died 26 November 1866 aged 74 which matches the death record, so I’m confident this is my William WREFORD.
The death record states William, a yeoman, died of ‘Natural decay’ on 26 November 1866 at 5 New Street, Bishopsgate [London]. However, the informant is listed as Thomas Cusiok/Cuscok (also living at 5 New Street), NOT one of his children.
Two of his children were living in London around this time. William’s son, also named William, had been living in London from at least 1840 – he had married at St Dunstan in the East, and was in the censuses until 1861 as living in the court behind St Clement’s church, Eastcheap. (He was in the police force but by 1871, he was a ‘coffee house keeper’ a little further north in Paul Street.)
Also, his daughter, Elizabeth had married a mariner (Alexander SMALL) in London, 1853 and was a widowed lodging house keeper by the 1871 census (where she lived further north in Tower Hamlets – I’m yet to find her on the 1861 census). Could Thomas Cusiok have been one of her lodgers?
Whilst reading my copy of ‘Your Family Tree’ magazine, I came across a great resource for people with London ancestors. The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection includes an 1843 London map which you can transpose over google’s current satellite map. This would have saved me a lot of time a couple of years ago.
I don’t have many links to London in my tree. The only significant person in my tree to reside in London was George Wright PALMER and part of his family.
George was born in Portsea and his job in the Royal Navy caused him to move around a bit. For some reason, George was in London at the time of the 1871 census. He was living at 33 Marshall St with his first wife, Mary Ann and youngest son, Edward.
Palmer family in 1871 census
When I went on the hunt for this address a couple of years ago, I had to switch between windows and use educated guesses to pinpoint the locations. With Rumsey’s site, I was able to search and quickly locate Marshall St in Westminster.
Marshall Street, Westminster
Here is a photograph I took of what I believe to be 33 Marshall St (I found it the hard way but using this map overlay it was so quick and simple):
33-36 Marshall Street c2000s (no.33 in foreground)
Here is a picture I found of 33 – 36 Marshall St, taken in the 1960s (annoyingly from the opposite direction to my picture):
33-36 Marshall Street c1960s
It’s hard to say how long George and his reduced family lived at this address. Mary Ann died the next year and he married his second wife, Emily Jane FELLA in 1873. Tragically, she died just two years later.
I’m not often able to find detailed information on the houses in which my ancestors lived, which makes the details I found at British History Online even more special:
Most of these buildings […] were erected in the 1820’s by or under the supervision of Thomas Finden after the closure of Carnaby Market […]. This redevelopment was uniformly planned, small in area and scale, but forming to-day an unusually pleasant oasis for pedestrians, and offering facilities for shopping away from the through streets. There is accommodation for shop-keepers over the shops, as well as for chamber trades such as tailoring. The least altered parts are the block bounded on the west by Newburgh Street and on the south by Ganton Street, and the two pedestrian courts west of Newburgh Street—Lowndes Court and Marlborough Court. The prevailing form was thefour-storey terrace house fronted in stock brick, two windows wide with plain window-openings, and a continuous plain parapet with stone coping. The windows, most of which have their original narrow glazing-bars, have stone sills. The ground floors were built as shops from the beginning, for this was the period of the planned shopping street… The ground floors of Nos. 33–36 Marshall Street have thin pilaster-strips and a continuous entablature; space appears to have been provided for shop-windows but, except at No. 35, these spaces have only one domestic-size window each. The ground floors of Nos. 20–22 Peter Street are similar.
(From: ‘Marshall Street Area’, Survey of London: volumes 31 and 32: St James Westminster, Part 2 (1963), pp. 196-208. via British-History.ac.uk (Date accessed: 10 Jan 2010).
