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July - September 2017
Welcome to the latest Family History Newsletter! In this issue we report back on the recent and very successful Family History Fun Day at Worthing, there's another article about unusual professions included in the census, advice on how to find out where your relative is buried, and much more!
This is what we have for you :
- Family History Fun Day - a report on the Worthing event
- Abecedarians - teachers of the alphabet
- Bombs fall on East Grinstead
- Looking for a burial plot?
- The Butcher the Baker the Candlestick maker
- What's on in West Sussex Libraries
The first Family History Fun Day was held at Worthing Library on
Saturday 13 May 2017.
A variety of external organisations were on hand to provide help
and information including Sussex Family History Group, West
Sussex Record Office, Guild of One Name Studies, Canadian Roots and of
course our own Library Information Team. Three talks on various aspects
of Family History also took place and were well attended.
Lots of children came to the specially themed family story time
and took part in related activities.
Over 150 people attended the event and many commented on how it
had inspired them to start their family history research and what an excellent
day it was.
We will be holding another Family History Fun Day in Horsham Library on Saturday 21 October. For this and other forthcoming events information can also be found on the What's on in
Libraries page.
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This obscure old occupational term appears only in the 1851
census where a 26yr old man named Magnus Jamieson, from Lerwick in the Shetland
Isles, has entered his occupation as ‘Abecedarian’. The Oxford
English Dictionary and other Oxford reference material found on the einformation pages reveal that although this is an early historical
term relating to anything written or pertaining to an alphabetical arrangement
it was also…’Someone who teaches or is
learning the alphabet.’
Until the Elementary Education Act of 1880, which made it
compulsory for all 5 – 10 year olds to attend school, many children received
little or no tuition for reading and writing. The fortunate ones who did went
to various types of schools or received education from those individuals who
taught them only the basics. It was not
a well-paid profession and if we follow Magnus through later census they show
that he married and quickly moved on to other occupations, moving to the
mainland of Scotland.
The 1851 census also lists an 11yr old girl, Eliza Findlay,
who gives her occupation as ‘teacher of the alphabet’. The census does not
elaborate any further as to why an 11yr old child, living in Balornack Farm near
Glasgow, was working at such a young age teaching others their alphabet. Eliza,
listed as a visitor, was the youngest occupant of the ten people at the
farmhouse on the night of the census. The head of the house was a 23yr old
farmer along with his mother, sister and an assortment of servants and farm
workers.
Another interesting fact is that the 1911 census
includes a ‘bakery engineer’ living in Buckinghamshire whose name was ‘Alphabet
Ayres’. His father was named Theophilius Ayres, a ‘Bricklayer’ who chose to
give his eighth child this name – reason unknown.
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Information Librarians deal with many questions
on a daily basis, often discovering interesting stories as they carry out their searches. The
following tale emerged when a customer asked for help researching an
address in East Grinstead, and in particular to discover who the occupants were at
the beginning of the war years. A search
was made using, among other sources, the 1939 Register, available on findmypast. The address in East
Grinstead was registered as the home of a special constable named Bernard
Prodger. Bernard lived in the house with his wife Gladys and their 9 year old
daughter, Evelyn. Another child is also
listed - a 12 year old named Mary K Fuller who may have been an evacuee as she
had a different surname.
To find the continuing history of the home, and to see how long the family had lived there, the search moved to other
documentation, including death records and obituaries found on Ancestry. The records revealed that Bernard’s daughter Evelyn had died in 1943, aged 13. According to
the Roll of Honour website she was killed when a bomb fell on the Whitehall Cinema
in East Grinstead on July 9th 1943. Further research revealed that
the cinema was showing ‘Hopalong Cassidy’ on the night in question when a
German bomb smashed through the roof and exploded killing over 100 people. The same website gives further personal details outlining how
Bernard ‘was on duty all night
following the bombing despite his daughter’s death.’ In the face of such tragic news he continued
to serve his community as did many during the war years.
The above photograph, from the West Sussex Past
Pictures website, shows the inside of the cinema
some years before it was bombed.
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