Finding Elizabeth, My favorite Great
Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Great
Elizabeth is my favorite great, with a great story to tell if she were only around to share it. She is my 3G grandmother on my mother’s side. I have a lot of data about her but would dearly love to know more than the facts.
The first pieces of data I collected suggested a very unusual life for an English woman in the nineteenth century. She lived in Norfolk, and in Dorset, and in Kent and Sussex. Her children were born in Dorset (two) then Norfolk (three, one of whom died), then Sussex, back to Norfolk for the youngest. Then some years in Dorset again before spending some time in what became a very run-down part of London, the London Docklands, before retiring in her widowhood to the Sussex coast where she lived with two of her daughters.
Elizabeth herself was born in Poole, Dorset (1851 census) or was it Deal, Kent (1861, 1871 and where she died in 1873)? She was married to James Joy who hailed from Norfolk and where she was not born (1841 census), but he was seldom at home when the census taker called. He was at home in 1841, when they lived in Great Yarmouth, but in no other census record is he with the family.
As I first began to uncover Elizabeth’s peripatetic life, the absence of a man in the home, and her move to the east end of London, I thought the worst of her, but I was wrong. There was a good explanation for her peregrinations. A better recording of the 1841 census revealed that James was a mariner, and the 1951 census recorder went further. While the man of the house was not at home, he recorded Elizabeth as a “mariner’s wife, husband at sea.” And for all his absences at census time, James is recorded in two of their children’s marriage certificates, and in Elizabeth’s death certificate, where in each case he is referred to as a customs official.
The Customs House, Poole, Dorset, where James Joy must have worked in the 1850s.
So there was an explanation for Elizabeth’s movements after all. This would explain especially the move to the London Docklands. Suddenly my perhaps disreputable ancestor was a woman of some position and status after all. James died before 1871, for in that year Elizabeth was described as a widow. She lived with two of her daughters who were schoolteachers. In fact, three of her children became teachers, as did all three children of the one daughter who did not. So, it seems that the lady that I thought might be disreputable must have been very respectable after all. But where did she start her life and meet the mariner from Norfolk?
I have finally found a marriage certificate which might be the correct one. The date – 1928 – and the location – Poole, Dorset - fit well with the birth of their first child Elizabeth (also) who was born there in 1831. But an earlier version of that record indicated that Elizabeth Groves was a widow when she married James Joy, a possibility that had to be checked out. But I have now seen a copy of the signed original of the Groves-Joy marriage which shows she was a spinster after all. So I can be fairly sure that Groves was her name, and that she was from somewhere in Dorset.
For her birth family there are too many candidates. Seven Elizabeth Groves were born in Dorset between 1803 and 1808, and there is no way (as yet) to distinguish which one is my Elizabeth. Sometimes geography helps – so which of these places is closest to Poole? They are all about 35-40 miles distant, so no help there.
A cluster of Elizabeth Groves, all born between 1803 and 1808, within 35-40 miles from Poole. What I especially like is that this map shows my own birthplace: Crewkerne, just over the county line in Somerset!
For the rest, my favorite great remains a mystery, and a brick wall. But I cherish the thought of this woman moving her family from hither to yon yet providing them, the daughters at least, with a fine education. Thank you Elizabeth, one of the strong women in my past, I do believe.
Footnote: The rest of Elizabeth’s story is at http://ancestry.sheilaspear.com/ps01/ps01_471.html but unfortunately I cannot change the data there until I do another revision of the Reunion tree.