Harley Family Places

I knew our Grandmother Harley as a resident of London.  At some time I heard vaguely that the Harleys were from Birmingham.  But I was surprised to learn that Granny’s own family, the Gilvrays, came from Newcastle upon Tyne, with a Scottish link too. 

Altogether 37 of the counties of England and Wales, and two of Scotland, were occupied at some point by one or more of our ancestors.  There were those who migrated to Canada, to Australia and to the USA. But the center of Harley family history is undoubtedly the village/town/city/Birmingham suburb of Smethwick. And the rural Shropshire village of Hopton Castle was the birthplace before the move to Smethwick.

John Harley (1807-1884) was of the generation of Harley brothers who left the village of Hopton Castle in the 1830s, for opportunities in the new industrial areas further east.   They settled in what was then the hamlet of Smethwick in the parish of North Harborne, but which grew into the city of Smethwick.  John, as a builder and contractor, contributed to that growth. At one time he lived on South Street (South Road), which Tom and I visited, in the company of an on-line acquaintance and now friend, Judith Berry and her husband Alan, in 2010. It was only later that I found the following:  “South Road was built up from the 1840s by John Harley, a Smethwick builder, who was later joined by his son James.”

Granny Harley’s Newcastle line met the Harley’s Smethwick line in the Birmingham suburb of Handsworth, where her mother’s family was living at the turn of the twentieth century.  Handsworth also was the home of the Lilly family, whose daughter Louisa married Frank Harley.  Other families in our Birmingham past include the Wards (and the Macnees’ paternal grandmother, Emma Carr, whom I had always assumed to have been from Scotland but who spent much of her life in Handsworth and Edgbaston).

Another online contact was with a descendant of Granny’s sister, Ella Kent Ryan, living in Canada, and I have enjoyed tracing those branches of the family who left the shores of the United Kingdom to cross the Atlantic. There were others who sailed south, to the antipodes, including our runaway grandfather, Cecil Harley, his sister, our great-aunt Connie, and for a while my parents, Douglas and Joan (Harley) Macnee. Then there was the branch that lived in Kenya for a while – Tony and Rene Harley with their son Michael – but they eventually returned to England.

And most surprising of all was Granny’s grandmother, Mary Ann Joy. Born in Dorset, moved with her gamekeeper husband to the Midlands, then leaving him and living with her 3 children to London, I was stunned to discover that in her fifties she had emigrated to California in 1890 with her eldest son and his two daughters.

Photo taken with: OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA