On 26/10/2015 1:29 p.m., eve via wrote: >>>> One of my most puzzling ones was a gg grandfather, whose family came >>>> from the Isle of Axholme. He lived in Hull, got married in Bath, and >>>> Came to Natal within a month of getting married. I wondered how he >>>> came to meet his wife, as Hull and Bath seem quite far apart. The Bath >>>> family were from Belfast, and seem to have been from quite settled >>>> farmers in Ballynure before the 19th century, when they scattered to >>>> Quebec, Mauritius, Bath and Durban. >>>> >>> >>> Hull was an major port and trading centre. It's not unusual for >>> inhabitants of trading centres to have far-flung connections. Maybe >>> Bristol would have been the common meeting ground. > > Good point. Hull was also home to a number of @Hamburg merchants' so > you might get the odd Anglo-German marriage. > And Basth was a spa town, where vaguely ill people from all over the place > went to achieve a cure -if they could afford it. There are surpsising numbers > of families with roots in Northumberland and Durham who flee to Bath for the > winter. Just possibly, your man chased a local girl whose family were 'taking > the waters' originally, but changed his mind when the irish lass met his eye. > >>> >> >> I found the link for my gg-grand parents quite fortuitiously, he was a >> barrister's clerk in London (Middle Temple) and she was the daughter of >> a wine & spirits merchant in York. The barrister was a chap called John >> Cowling who worked the northern circuit which included York. I >> discovered it because my gg-grandfather was missing from home in one of >> the censuses and turned up in the same digs as his employer in Liverpool. > > Barristers got around everywhere. I am still chasing the totally unsuitable > marriage of a barrister, James O Griffits, (sic) later a judge, to an East End > girl in the 1850s. Nowhere in London, apparently, could be anywhere in the > country (and maybe recorded as Griffith/s. Am beginning to wonder if it > happened (and what happened to her after having two children. He didn't > marry again (to a rich girl) till he was pushing 60. I do hope Mrs G No 1 was > dead by then. > EVE And then there was servant migration. In 1861 my gt-g-m was 10 and the daughter of an ostler (looked after nags in an inn) in Newmarket. In 1871 she was a servant and a nurse with a family a few miles away in Suffolk. In 1881 she was in Boulogne, France and married to my gt-g-f, who had been widowed about 18 months previously. My suspicion is that she had been hired as a servant for an expected child for my gt-g-f's first wife and stayed to keep the bed warm. Later in that year she gave birth to my g-f. Servants used to travel many miles to or with their employing families; they could not, mostly, get married and then stay in the job so marriage led to repeated job vacancies in the household and needed more migration. As a rough rule of thumb it was mainly clergymen who had servants in their house from the local area. Exceptions excepted of course! -- Tim Powys-Lybbe tim@powys.org for a miscellany of bygones: http://powys.org/