More Darned Australian Distractions

I don't know what it is about the Australian branch of the Cockram/Cockrem family, but somehow they keep distracting me.  I'm supposed to be concentrating on great-granddaddy George getting from Devon to Canada, but I keep finding myself poring through Australian records about his brothers and their descendants.  One big reason for this must be the fact that it's so easy to find intriguing things about people in Australia, via Trove, a website that brings together a whole lot of Australian newspaper archives, seachable in all kinds of ways, and is 100% free.  (If only there was a similar site for Canadian newspapers... sigh).

from the Cairns Post, 17th February 1934, page 6

This time it was the story about Louisa (Lee) Cockrem's death in 1934 that sent me off on a tangent.  The story mentions her son-in-law, F Gayton of 53 Gatton Street, Cairns.  That name didn't ring a bell, and when I checked Louisa's two daughters, Ada and Daisy, I found that neither of them married anyone called Gayton.  And taking a second look at the news item, I noticed that it said that Louisa had three grown up daughters, not two.  Uh oh, another puzzle to solve! 

I searched Trove for other stories that mention F Gayton, hoping to find out who he married, but all I discovered were lots of references to Mr and Mrs Frank Gayton, often in the same stories as various Cockrems, going off on interstate trips, winning prizes, and attending parties and funerals. No mention at all of Mrs Gayton's first name.  So I searched for Frank Gayton on Ancestry, and found his marriage, to someone called Victoria May King, in 1919.  Was this the right Frank Gayton?  I thought so, so I kept looking for more information, and soon found Frank and Victoria May Gayton in the electoral rolls, living at the address mentioned in the death notice.  But who was she before she married Frank and how did she get to be Louisa's daughter?

Eventually I found a birth record for Victoria May King Yeen, born in Queensland in 1901.  Her mother was recorded as 'Beatrice Mary King Yeen', and her father as 'King Yeen'.  But it soon became clear from other records that 19 year old Beatrice was an unmarried mother, and that she was the daughter of Albert King Yeen, a Rockhampton businessman.  So was Victoria the product of incest? Was Beatrice forced to give the baby up and keep her existence a secret?  I haven't been able to discover what went on, but at some point, Victoria seems to have been adopted, legally or otherwise, by Louisa Lee, and either Herman or Frederick Cockrem.

But where's the evidence that Victoria May King Yeen is the same Victoria May King who married Frank Gayton?  I'm coming to that....

Beatrice, Victoria King Yeen's biological mother, shows up again in 1920, getting married in Sydney.  She and her groom, Harold Chippindall were both 38 years old and neither had been married before.  I haven't bothered to search for details of their lives - but I found Beatrice's death certificate.  She died in Sydney in 1963.  Her husband had predeceased her, and her sister, Jessie King, supplied the information for the death registration. She said that Beatrice had 'no issue'.  Was Jessie, who lived with Beatrice when she died and for some years before that, really unaware of the existence of Beatrice's daughter Victoria?  I doubt it. (Reminder: Don't believe everything you read on 'official' documents.)

Once again, I went back to Louisa Cockrem - this time I had a look at a news item about her funeral, which includes a long list of names of people who sent flowers and messages.  Among those names is 'B Chippindall (Sydney)'.  So there's the evidence that Beatrice and Louisa were connected somehow, and it would be highly unlikely that the connection had nothing at all to do with Victoria May King.  Okay, that's not exactly 'proof' of anything, but in this genealogy game, we often have to make assumptions based on the evidence we find, plus common sense, and continue to look for more evidence that proves we're right, or wrong.

The only other information I've found about Victoria was that she was apparently a keen gardener, often winning prizes in local flower shows; and she was known as 'Queenie'.  With a name like Victoria King, I guess that's not surprising.  I discovered that little tidbit via Trove, in Daisy Cockrem Sullivan's death notice, which names Queenie Gayton as one of Daisy's beloved sisters.

from the Sydney Morning Herald Death Notices, 5th July 1961, page 34

I also learned a thing or two about Frank Gayton along the way, but that's for another time - the point today is this:  When you're reading newspaper accounts of marriages, parties, deaths, funerals etc, don't ignore the details!  Those names that seem unconnected may lead you along a whole new branch of the family.

Dodging the Census with George

I don't call my dear old great-grandfather The Elusive George for nothing - not only did he change his identity and keep the reason secret, he also managed to hide his whereabouts on four different censuses!  Okay, he probably didn't do that on purpose, but who knows.  I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on the first one - it was taken at the end of March 1851, and he wasn't born until two months later, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't his fault.

But seriously, the other three are really annoying me, especially the 1871 one.  He was twenty years old then, and possibly at a crossroads in his life.  Apparently he had left the family home, but where the heck did he go?  I've searched high and low for him, using every ridiculous spelling of both Cockram and Cochrane I can think of, with wildcards and crossed fingers and even a magic spell or two.  No George. (Update - I've found him! See this post.)

And the really interesting thing is that I can't find his 24 year old sister Mary Ann or his 14 year old brother Alfred, or their 22 year old cousin William Hopper, who lived nearby in Fremington, in that census either.  All of these people show up again later in several documents, so I know they were somewhere in 1871 - but where?  And were they all together?  It seems like too much of a coincidence for all of them to disappear at once if they were in four different places.

Here are some census night theories I'm working on:

• William and Mary Ann were in love, but being first cousins, they kept their relationship secret, and ran away together.  George figured it out and went after them, and Alfred came along for fun.  On the way back home, all four of them slept in somebody's barn and nobody knew they were there.
• George, Mary Ann and William were celebrating someone's birthday, and got so drunk they fell asleep in somebody's barn and nobody knew they were there.  Alfred was behind the bike shed, smoking.
• George, Mary Ann and William had all decided to leave north Devon but couldn't afford the train fare to go anywhere, so they walked, and spent the night in somebody's barn and nobody knew they were there.  Alfred had told his parents he was spending the night at a friend's house, but actually it was a girlfriend, whose parents didn't know he was there.

Or, to stop being so silly, perhaps all four of them went to Barnstaple to see their Uncle George, and stayed overnight.  Of course the census taker may not have got around to knocking on Uncle George's door for a month or more after census night, and he could easily have forgotten what night it was that four extra people were in his house.  Obviously, if something along those lines happened, I'm never going to find them.

Or another likely scenario is that wherever they were that night, the census taker was told about it, and wrote their names down, but that page of the census got badly damaged or smudged, and their names were unreadable, and may have been transcribed as anything at all, like Go#-bk Nee9lhrbn.  Believe me, I've seen a few transcriptions about as bad as that.  And sometimes, names don't get transcribed at all, for good reason.  Here's an example:

This is part of a page from the 1911 Canada census, which is the next one where George wasn't where he should have been.  You can probably make out the name Smith near the top - that's George, now known as Thomas, abbreviated to Thos on this census.  The seven names below that are Louisa and six of the children, but if I hadn't known their names I would never have found them, because the transcriber couldn't read them and just guessed, badly.  Fortunately their birthdates (not shown in this excerpt), are vaguely legible, so I used those to figure out who was who.  The names at the bottom of the page weren't transcribed at all, not surprisingly.

Ironically, finding George in this census came as a disappointment - he wasn't supposed to be in Canada in early June when the 1911 census was taken, he was supposed to have gone back to England for awhile.  I thought he had left Canada in late May that year, but if so, there's no way he was back on the first of June.  Once again, it could have been a memory thing - the census taker might have arrived several weeks after the first of June, and whoever answered the questions forgot that George wasn't home on census night.  Or, I've got his travel dates completely wrong and I need to go back to square one.

Ten years later, George disappeared again, and this time, so did Louisa and their youngest daughter Audrey.  I think they must have been travelling in the United States on census night.  But here's the twist - they lived in Regina, Saskatchewan at that time, and I know the addresses of both houses they had there, but I don't know exactly when they moved from one to the other.  So I searched the 1921 census for both of those addresses, expecting one or the other to not show up, as nobody was home.  But they're both there, each with a family in residence who I never heard of!  What the ...?!

It'll be a few years yet before I get to see the 1931 census, and I won't be at all surprised if George is missing from that one too.  He's very good at driving me crazy.

George in Bickington

Giving myself a rest from trying to figure out why George Cockram changed his name to Thomas Smith, I'll get back to wondering why he left England.  Of course the answer to those two questions could be one and the same - but for the time being, I'm going to assume that he wasn't running away from anything, he was just looking for a better life.

So what might George's life have been like in mid 19th century Devon? Let's start with his childhood.

George was born in 1851 and grew up in northern Devon, in a little village of around 300 people called Bickington.  The nearest town was Barnstaple, about two miles away, with a population of about 11,000.  This was in the Victorian age, which saw the industrial revolution radically change the landscape and the living and working conditions of English people.   Industrialisation brought with it new jobs, a consumer boom, a shift from a mainly rural to a mainly urban population and greater prosperity for most of the propertied classes.

But George and his family weren't among the propertied classes - they were rural labourers.  His father, and siblings as each of them came to their early teens, worked as farm labourers or domestic servants, and George may have done the same.  And for the first half of the 19th century the rural and urban poor had much in common: unsanitary and overcrowded housing, low wages, poor diet, insecure employment and the dreaded effects of sickness and old age. Life expectancy at birth was only around 40 when George was born.

I think the Cockrams were not exactly poor, but father William's labouring wages would have had to feed quite a few mouths before any of the children were old enough to go to work.  In the mid 1860s, he would have earned around 10 to 12 shillings a week (25 to 40 pounds a year, at a time when a man was considered a gentleman if he earned more than 150 pounds a year), and being a farm labourer, he wasn't guaranteed work all year round.  He may have supplemented his income with other forms of work in the winter.

The family home, which was a rented cottage, was probably made of cob - unbaked clay with organic material to bind it.  This form of building, often with a thatched roof, was very common up to the late Victorian period, particularly in northern Devon, where the soil was suitable.  These were durable houses if plastered over and damp proofed top and bottom, and many of them still stand.

Cob cottages on the main road through Bickington.  George's family lived
somewhere right around here - possibly in one of these houses.

Any notions that the rustic life had its attractions can be discounted by the changing conditions and great poverty in England. I've found no specific description of Bickington at the time, but I hope it wasn't as bad as another north Devon village, Halberton, which was described as follows in the 1860s:

"The general sanitary condition of the village was very bad. Picturesque as they were externally, many of the peasant's cottages were unfit for the housing of pigs. Pools of stagnant water stood in many parts of the parish....The whole village was badly drained, open sewers ran through it frequently trickling down upon the cottages into the village brook, from which cattle slaked their thirst and the villagers and their children often drank."  

Giffard, Ann, 1981: Towards Quebec: two mid-19th century emigrants' journals

The house would have had only one sink, in a tiny scullery, and there was probably a communal toilet somewhere out back, shared by several cottages. Water would have had to be fetched each day, either from a village pump or well. Right up until the end of the century, it was common for rural houses to be lit by rushlights (rush plants dipped in fat), or candles, which were expensive. Heat would come from the fireplace, which was also used for cooking.

In the early 19th century the working class lived on plain food such as bread, butter, potatoes and bacon. Butcher's meat was a luxury. However the diet of ordinary people greatly improved in the later part of the century. Railways and steamships made it possible to import cheap grain from North America so bread became cheaper. Commercial refrigeration made it possible to import cheap meat from Argentina and Australia. Consumption of sugar also increased. By the end of the century most people (not all) were eating a much better diet.  Most cottagers kept a pig or pigs, and if they were not eating ham, sausage, bacon and lard from the pig, they were eating a diet, the scraps of which would feed the pig well and fatten him up before slaughter.

"Most rural people didn't have coal-fired ranges or access to gas, so cooking was generally done in the fireplace.  A big iron boiler was slung on a hook over the fire, and everything was cooked in the one utensil; the square of bacon... cabbage or other greens in a net, potatoes in another, and the roly-poly swathed in a cloth.  The water in which the food was cooked, and the potato parings and other vegetable trimmings were the pig's share."

Broomfield, Andrea, 2007: Food and Cooking in Victorian England

Schooling was not compulsory for children until 1880, and then, only for 5 to 10 year olds - neither was it free, except for the children of the destitute.  Nevertheless, George and all of his siblings went to school, which is an indication that their father wasn't doing too badly. When George was a child, there was no purpose-built school in Bickington, so the children had their lessons in an old barn.  By 1868 there were about a hundred children attending school there - it was time that a proper school was built.  A bazaar was held to help raise funds for it, and by 1870, a fine stone school had been built. George's youngest siblings would have attended it, but George himself had all of his schooling in a barn.

This undated photo, showing the stone school on the left, is probably from the early 20th century. 
The building next to the school was, and still is a pub.  Just beyond that are the cob cottages in the photo above.

Outside of school, he would have had chores to do, which probably included foraging for mushrooms, nuts, apples, berries and whatever other wild food was in season.  He may have had to fetch water from the well, or milk from the dairy, or bread from the baker, or if his mother baked her own bread, George may have joined her and and his siblings in 'leazing' - combing the harvested fields for missed grain.  After two or three weeks of leazing, the collected grain would be thrashed at home and sent to the miller for grinding into flour.

A rural child's leisure hours were probably very few, but when there was time for play, popular pastimes included hoop-rolling, skittles, and kicking a ball around, or in the absence of a proper football, a pig's bladder would do.  On Sundays, nearly everybody went to the parish church, which was the focal point of village social life.

One effect of the industrial revolution was the drawing of a great many people from rural areas into the towns and cities, where jobs could be got in factories or dockyards.  At some point, George was drawn away from Bickington, to Plymouth in southern Devon.  Exactly when he went there and why, I don't know, but soon I'll follow him there to see what his city life might have been like.

It was Probably No Accident

In my last post, I mentioned that I had contacted the Canadian Immigration Museum - since then, I've had some very helpful information from Steven Schwinghamer, one of their historians, who, I think has become somewhat intrigued by George's story, and as I write this, he's busy trying to find out where George was in 1911... but that's another story altogether, which I hope to get around to writing about soon.

Frankly, I'm quite annoyed with myself for not making much better progress with this blog!  I've been working on it since June, and I've only got through the first 25 years of George's life.  He lived to be 92, so there's a long way to go.  But I'll make no excuses for being slack, and just plough ahead. (Never explain, never complain - that's my motto.)

So to get back to Steven at the Museum - he explained that at the time George arrived in Canada (1875), admission procedures were very lax, especially when it came to British immigrants.  I get the impression that just about anybody could stroll into the country as long as they weren't sick or a 'lunatic', and the ship's captain provided the port authority with an accurate passenger list.  So I still don't know if George would have been required to produce any identification or otherwise vouch for himself at all, as long as he could be ticked off the passenger list.

Steven also expressed his opinion that he thinks it's quite unlikely that George's name change came about simply because he got someone else's ticket for the ship.  As he says,

In a nutshell, while I would expect civil examination at the time to have included a check of documentation to verify a person's identity, the practice at ports was so loose that it is credible to me that a British subject might have entered at that time on weak documentation, as you describe.  It would be exceptional for someone to enter with a name so different from any other identification, though.  His actions in support of the other identity (maintaining it for the immigration process ... and for years in Canada) might indicate some agency on his part with regard to the change. 

I have to say that I tend to agree with him.  It would seem to be more trouble than it's worth to start going by a completely different name and keep it all your life, just because... well, no reason, really.  It was a theory worth considering though, and of course it hasn't been completely dismissed, and it won't be until and unless I discover the unequivocal truth of the matter - and that seems quite unlikely too.

As I said, although Steven couldn't give me a definite asnwer to my question, he did send me some very helpful information about early immigration to Canada, which I'm still reading through, and being inspired to write about in relation to George.

And for those of you who are interested in the subject generally, check out the Museum's website at http://www.pier21.ca/home or better still - go and visit it!  I wish I could do that.

More Thoughts about an 'Accidental' Name Change

In an earlier post here, I threw the idea out there that maybe George's name change came about just because he got somebody else's ticket for the trip to Canada.  But I wondered, if that was the case, why did he keep the wrong name for the rest of his life?

Two heads are always better than one, and my cousin Jack added his to this question.  He has a theory that goes something like this:

When George arrived in Canada, he was asked for identification, and all he had was his ticket, with the name Thomas Smith on it.  He told the immigration official that it wasn't his name, and why he had that ticket, but the official didn't care - his job was to fill out some paperwork and it had to have a name on it, and the name on the ticket, which of course matched the name on the passenger list,  would do just fine.  So George became Thomas Smith, thinking he would straighten things out later.  But as time went on and Thomas got a job and a home, other things took priority, everyone came to know him as Thomas, and he never got around to officially being George Cockram again.

This seems like a reasonable possibility.  But I don't know what immigration 'processing' he would have gone through when he arrived, so I've sent an email to the Canadian Museum of Immigration, in hopes of finding out whether a scenario like that could have happened or not.  I had a quick reply from them saying that I had asked a very good question, but they didn't have the answer at their fingertips, and promised to get back to me with some information soon.

Stay tuned...

George's Bible

George's bible and the papers that were inside it

I've recently come into possession of something precious - my great-grandfather's bible.  My cousin Donna had it in her care until she passed away, and now, thanks to my cousins Dick and Pam, it has come to me.

George Cockram / Thomas Smith was a man of strong faith, and a regular church-goer who often read his bible.  It's an old one, printed in England in 1890 for the British and Foreign Bible Society, and it's showing its age.  It's obvious that it was consulted often, by George and probably others in his family.  One page has been badly torn and repaired with sticky tape; a few other pages are ripped and ragged, and one has fallen out completely; and the binding has come loose from the spine and is just hanging on by a few threads.  At some point, the cover was patched up with something that might be duct tape.

George, or someone else, apparently consulted the ten commandments frequently - a corner of the page has obviously been turned down for many years, and there are pencil marks on several of the commandments - the ones to do with honouring God and one's parents, and keeping the Sabbath, rather than the more juicy ones about not killing, stealing, committing adultery or bearing false witness.  What does that tell us?  It might suggest that the person making the marks took the latter ones for granted, but needed to reinforce the others.

Donna told me that our great-aunt Prue, one of George's daughters, told her many years ago that George was very fond of the psalms.  And sure enough, those pages are obviously well thumbed.  The psalms are numbered with Roman numerals, and George has renumbered over fifty of them in Arabic numerals, apparently to find favourites more easily.  Other than that, and a few more pages with their corners turned down, George hasn't left any clues in the bible.  I had been hoping that he had written margin notes that might tell me something more about him, but I was disappointed there.

However, he and other people did write in the front of the bible.  All of his children's births, marriages and deaths are there, as well as his and Louisa's, and some of their grandchildren's.  I recognize George's handwriting from his signature on a couple of documents I have - it looks like he entered most of the information about marriages and deaths, but someone else wrote the names and birth information, probably Louisa, and later, more than one of the children - it's clear that there were four or five different hands at work.

Two pages showing George, Louisa and their children's births, deaths and marriages

Records of some of the grandchildren, opposite the title page

Tucked inside the bible was a page from a book probably published in 1895.  Sadly, it's not a revealing piece of prose or poetry, it's an advertisement for other books published by George Routledge & Sons, priced from 1 to 2 shillings.  One of the 'new volumes' listed is Kate Greenaway's Almanack for 1895, leading me to assume that this page comes from a book published that year.  There's also a very small brown cut-out from a newspaper, containing the following quote:

When that one great scorer comes

To write against your name;

He writes not that you won or lost,

But how you played the game. 

This comes from a poem written by Grantland Rice in the 1920s, so it could have been George who cut this out and kept it in his later years, but of course I don't know.  Another cutting, with a list of bible lessons, comes from the late 1950s (I was able to figure that out from a partial advertisement on the back).  George died in 1943, and Louisa in 1928, so it obviously wasn't either of them who put it there.

Although the bible hasn't proved to be the hidden source of great revelations about George's life, it's something I treasure.  Because I live in Australia, and my family are all in Canada, I have no other family heirlooms that date back before my parents, so this is a special gift, and I find it incredibly moving just to hold it in my hands and make a connection between myself and the great-grandparents I never met.

Finding New Cousins

It's been an interesting couple of weeks here in the Smith/Cockram tree.  Not that I've managed to write anything I was intending to write - but I did accomplish something else.  I knuckled down and started seriously looking for some of George's living descendants, in hopes that someone among them knows something I don't know about George.

I started by looking for information about all of George's grandchildren, many of whom I knew very little about, such as, did they have any children?  And did those children have children?  And if so, where are they now?  This kind of search, as you may know, is much harder than finding information about dead people.  I hit a lot of brick walls along the way, but suddenly I remembered the existence of a book about the town and people of Indian Head, Saskatchewan, where George and his family lived for awhile.  I'd never seen this book, and didn't know what it was called or when it was published - all I knew is that one of George's daughters, Bessie Jane Fleming, had written something in it.  I wondered if she had written anything that might help me find living relatives. 

Indian Head:
History of Indian Head and District
is online here

So I went searching for the book, and found the whole thing online, what luck!  As it turned out, Bessie's little section didn't reveal anything new (except that when she was a girl, the family of eight lived for a couple of years in a rented two room house!).  But looking through the rest of the book, I found some information about Bessie's children, grandchildren, and the first names of two of her great-grandchildren.  The book was published in 1984, so the whereabouts of any of these people today was the great unknown, but at least I had some names to look for.

The next thing I found, while Googling the name of Bessie's son, was his wife's obituary.  Obituaries are often goldmines of information, and this one didn't disappoint.  It told me where Bessie's grandson and two great-grandsons were living in 2010.  So I started looking in the relevant phone books.  But that didn't work - too many people these days don't have landlines, or just put their first initial in the phone book.  So I tried Googling the names with the locations, and pretty soon I found one of the great-grandsons, with an email address!  So I got in touch, and he passed my message on to his father, my second cousin, who just happens to be interested in family history, and he passed it on to another second cousin, who is also interested.

So now I'm corresponding with Jack and Merle, two second cousins I didn't know I had, and have already been sent several pictures of George and Louisa and others in the family, that I had never seen before.  It's been very exciting to find these cousins and share information - neither of them knew that George had changed his name, but both of them are thinking about it with me now!

It's great to have company on this quest.  If you've been following this blog, you might be wondering, 'What about your cousin Donna?'  Sadly, Donna passed away a couple of months ago, and I miss her.  I wish I had found Jack and Merle when Donna was still alive - she would have been thrilled to meet them.