Poor Mary
by Lynne Waters
Edmund Manchip,
a sailor on HM Royal Yacht in 1871 had been born in the Axbridge
Workhouse. Somerset, there was no birth certificate.........
Read how the research behind what sometimes appear
to be just names in a record, can bring to life the real life story
of our forbears.
Back
in 1979 I went on a night-school course to find out how to trace my
family history. I was able to whiz back to 1871 in no time, my
grandfather and great-grandfather had been born in Portsmouth in
1899 and 1871 respectively, but although the 1871 census revealed
that great-great grandfather, Edmund Manchip, a sailor on HM Royal
Yacht then stationed in Portsmouth had been born in Axbridge,
Somerset, there was no birth certificate.
Never mind, I decided, the baptism
will be in the Axbridge parish register. I arranged a holiday in
Somerset and visited the Records Office, but was disappointed to
discover that there was nothing about him in the parish records at
all.
There was another avenue open though,
I could look at his naval records. I went to the PRO, and spent a
whole day fruitfully looking at his career through the Admiralty
records. His Attestation Record, dated March 1861, physically
described this Boy of the 2nd Class who was entering HMS
Training Ship Implacable, confirmed his place of birth as Axbridge,
and gave me his exact birth date in 1845. I traced his rise through
the ranks and found all the ships he served on until he left the
Navy in 1873.
Edmund had married in 1869 at
Portsmouth Registry Office, but I still had no clue as to his
parentage because the column for Father’s Name was left blank. Being
new to genealogy I was stumped for a while, until I began to wonder
if he may have been illegitimate or perhaps born in an institution.
I wrote to Somerset Records Office and
back came the successful answer. Yes, he was born at Axbridge
Workhouse. His mother was Mary Anne Manchip, a single woman of
Compton Bishop. Fascinated to know more, I returned to the Records
Office and with my husband helping, spent a whole day reading
through reel after reel of microfiche trying to find Mary Anne and
Edmund in the 1851 census.
We found a Mary Anne Manchip at East
Brent, working as a servant at the vicarage, but she didn’t have her
child with her. She gave her age as 25 and had been born at
Bridgwater.
So where was the 5 year old Edmund? I
couldn’t locate him. Was he with relatives, at school, adopted? He
was not still at the workhouse. The mystery was to remain for more
than twenty years.
Meanwhile I located a marriage for
Mary Anne at East Brent in 1854 to Jeffery Coombes
which told me
that her father was Isaac Manchip, a brickmaker. I found a baptism
in 1819 for a Mary Anne Manchip, daughter of Isaac and Jane, at St
Mary’s Bridgwater, the only Mary Anne born to a father called Isaac.
Her parents had been married the year previously. Her mother was
Jane Stone, a widow when she married Isaac. Over the next several
years I extracted every Manchip entry from the Bridgwater parish
records and built up a huge data base, drew up trees within trees
and cross checked it all back against the censuses. I eagerly
collected every reference to the family name that I could find.
There were very few Manchips in other parishes. There were other
Mary Manchips born around the same time at Bridgwater but working
meticulously I was able to eliminate them all so that ultimately I
was sure that Isaac and Jane’s daughter was the same Mary Anne who
had given birth to Edmund at Axbridge Workhouse.
The Manchips were an interesting
family to study; in one branch of well-to-do furniture makers, a son
had followed his father as Mayor of Bridgwater. They were employers
and employed in multitudinous trades, a tailor, butcher, bakers,
cabinet makers, schoolmasters, inn keepers, painters and decorators,
and a great many, including women, were employed as brick and tile
makers.
Alas, the Accounts books of the
Bridgwater Overseer of the Poor bear witness to the many Manchips
who regularly sought relief from the parish.
Gradually I pieced together more parts
of the story. Isaac, the brickmaker, had died in December 1823. The
burial entry says that he was aged 28 but I have so far never been
able to find his baptism to substantiate this. Poor Jane, widowed
for the second time but now with the four-year-old Mary Anne, had to
fall on the parish for relief. The Overseers Accounts record regular
payments made variously to Jane Manchip, the widow Manchip, or Jane
Manchip and child, of at first two shillings and sixpence weekly in
the year 1824, and then one shilling and sixpence weekly until 1827.
After 1824 there appears mysteriously the bracketed word (Weston)
after her name. I tried to come to terms with the sad and desperate
lives of misery they must have lead at this time. As I couldn’t find
them on the 1841 census in the area either, the mystery deepened.
Meanwhile I carried on researching the
later life of Edmund. I was successful in finding out a great deal
about his family but sorry to find that he too had died aged only
thirty-seven years.
Although my curiosity about Mary Anne
and the whereabouts of her little son continued, I thought my
research into the mystery was at an end and so my files sat in a
cupboard untouched for several years.
The arrival of the internet renewed my
interest and from time to time I dabbled, adding new pieces of
information gleaned from the census web-sites. Imagine my joy on the
day that I found the 5 year old Edmund!
How intriguing! He was listed as
"lodger" in the household of agricultural labourer John Trego, 50,
and his wife Martha, 48, at 5 West Row, Weston super Mare. Also in
the family were a son 15, a daughter 12, and another lodger, 6
year-old John Glover, who turned out in fact to be Martha’s
grandson. Now I realised that the (Weston) entries in the Overseer’s
book had referred to Weston-super-Mare, and that the widowed Jane
and little Mary Anne may have gone there as far back as 1824.
Perhaps Jane came from there before marrying Isaac?
I explored the possibility that the
Tregos were in some way related and investigated that family. As yet
I have not found any links, although this is complicated by the fact
that Jane was a widow so I don’t know her maiden name. The only
explanation I could come up with was that Edmund was "farmed out"
from the workhouse to this family for payment.
By now twenty-five years had elapsed
since I began this research.
In the summer of 2006 I was one day
surfing websites to find information about workhouses when I came
across a link to Weston-super-Mare’s Family History page which in
turn led me to Ms Pat Hase who has specialist knowledge. I e-mailed
her with my story and she alerted me to several pieces of useful
information. The first was the burial of Jane Manchip, aged 52 at
Weston super Mare in 1833. There were also three references to Mary
Anne Manchip, two of which I had already seen in the Somerset
Records Office. The third was a document in the PRO!
For a fee and a wait of two weeks I
was able to download the PRO documents. They comprised a
correspondence between Mr George Wickham, Overseer of the Poor for
the parish of Compton Bishop, and The Poor Law Commissioners at
Somerset House, London.
In his letter of 26 August 1845 Mr
Wickham queries whether or not his parish is legally liable to pay
the costs incurred by the pauper Mary Anne Manchip, as she was not
of that parish. He goes on to describe the circumstances which led
her to apply for "restitution" at Axbridge Union Workhouse, as
described by Mary Anne herself when she had to appear before the
Board of Guardians. She reported that she "had been born at Weston
super Mare within this union, engaged as a servant and lived there
about twelve months; removed with her master to Bristol and remained
with him about eight months more, leaving him at that time and
having gained no settlement since, but finding herself with child at
Newport in Wales, she wished to get home to her parish. On her way
home she engaged a place in a carrier’s wagon which brought her from
Bristol to Axbridge where she slept one night and paid for her
lodgings, the following day she applied to the Relieving Officer of
the Weston super Mare District of the Axbridge Union House."
He requested her to go before the
Board of Guardians for their advice, and their decision was that the
Union House being situated in the Parish of Compton Bishop, the
pauper must be placed to that parish.
The reply of 13 October 1845 from the
Poor Law Commissioners ruled that this decision was correct. After
corresponding with the Guardians they ruled that Mary Anne was
destitute at the point of asking for help from the Union House, and
as that House was in the parish of Compton Bishop then the said
parish was legally liable.
What a wretched situation, like
something out of a Thomas Hardy novel. How that poor girl must have
suffered, all alone. But how marvellous to have those letters, which
actually tell what happened in her own reported words. She doesn’t
tell me the father of her child, that I will never know. Neither
will I know how much contact she had with Edmund and how much he
knew of the story, but I have since found a possible 1841 census
entry for her in Newport.
The Union House was probably
instrumental in finding her a placement as servant at the vicarage
at East Brent and in that village she met her husband Jeffery
Coombes and had further children. Perhaps there is a researcher of
that family who knows more ?
The message to fellow genealogists is
never to give up – one day you too may find the answers - even if it
takes 27 years!
Now I must find my next step, that
missing baptism for Isaac Manchip circa 1795!
©Lynne Waters 2006
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Lynne for more about her family history. Please contact me John,
webmaster. And I will put you in touch.
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