Part 5: The Mystery Baby

On November 17, 2021 By kristendenhartogIn 1914-1920: The Noise of War, Genealogical Case Studies2 Comments

“A sudden death,” and mourning ribbons revisited…

*George and Emily with Jack, Bill and George Jr, early 1910s*. *According to the London Advertiser, the 1912 picnic was at Port Stanley, and the 1913 picnic at Springbank Park.*

Back in Part 1 of this tale, I posted a picture of the three eldest Cartwright sons with their parents, George and Emily, at the annual picnic for McCormick’s, the biscuit and candy company where George worked. An observant reader pointed out that the family appeared to be wearing mourning ribbons, and in Part 2, I explored that topic. I was hoping to find clues by establishing when the picture was taken and comparing that to events in the family. Who was the group mourning? I guessed at the date of the picture, thinking the youngest boy, our grandfather Bill, was either three or four years old, which meant that the year was either 1912 or 1913. If the picture had been taken in 1912, some time after baby Edna’s July death, then perhaps the ribbons were for her. If the picture was taken in 1913, why wasn’t baby Stuart, born that January, among his brothers? And who were the ribbons for?

I’ve made a couple of discoveries since then — as usual, somewhat by accident. I had already visited the London Advertiser at Canadiana Online to search for mentions of family members, but the search mechanism is a bit clunky, and if you get a “hit,” you have to read the whole page to find the word you searched for. “Cartwright” often proved disappointing, since there is a Cartwright Street in London that was frequently mentioned. Instead I decided to browse through the Monday, July 22, edition of the paper in the year baby Edna died, thinking it would be interesting to know what was happening in the city that day, and in the Cartwrights’ wider world. To my surprise, I stumbled on an article about the annual McCormick’s picnic, which had been held two days earlier.

Below the article was a list of winners in various races, with a “Mrs. Cartwright” included among three names for the “Married Ladies’ Race.” Was it Emily, flying along in her hat and long skirts, hoping to trounce Mrs. McCabe and Mrs. McInnes, George and her little boys cheering her on? Likely yes, since there weren’t that many Cartwrights in London at the time, let alone Cartwrights with a McCormick’s connection. The old family albums contain a number of pictures from games played at these annual outings over the years, so I think it’s safe, in this case, to surmise that the Cartwrights attended the picnic in 1912, just two days before Edna’s death, and that Emily, a few months pregnant with Stuart, took part in the festivities.

Curious to know if the paper would offer any more clues, I scrolled through the next day’s edition, and soon came upon a little notice:

So the Cartwrights must have attended the picnic on Saturday, and then shortly after that, baby Edna fell ill. The same edition that features her death notice carries a cheerful photograph of the winners of the baby show being held aloft by their parents and the judges, the picnic crowd behind them.

What a great sadness this death must have been for Emily, George and their three little boys. When the 1913 picnic rolled around, with pillow fights, three-legged races, and a tug of war between the biscuit and candy departments, surely the family was reminded of the previous year, of Emily taking part in the Married Ladies’ Race, and then Edna’s death soon after. Is this why they wore the previously discussed mourning ribbons? Or were they mourning ribbons at all?

Searching through the photographs we scanned years ago for The Cowkeeper’s Wish, I came upon a McCormick’s picnic image dated 1922. This one shows George and Emily with two of their younger children, Gordon and Mary, the great aunt who’d been the keeper of Stuart’s baptism certificate until her death earlier this year at age 100. If you look closely, you’ll see that George and Gordon are wearing ribbons; perhaps Mary and Emily are wearing them too, but it’s hard to see in the old photo. Clear enough, though, is the lettering “McCormick’s” on the other two. So more than likely, the darker ribbons in the photo taken a decade earlier were also to do with the picnic.

*George and Emily with children Gordon and Mary at McCormick’s annual picnic, 1922*

*Gordon, age 3, sporting a McCormick’s picnic ribbon, 1922.*

That same year, 1922, the London Advertiser carried a mention of “G. Cartwright” having the largest family in attendance — seven children in all. In the family tree as we knew it, that’s all the Cartwright kids accounted for: George, Jack, our grandfather Bill, Earl, Florence, Gordon, and Mary. Do, the youngest, was not yet born.

It’s very satisfying to solve these little mysteries, but of course the big one still lurks. What happened to baby Stuart, for whom we have a baptismal certificate but no birth or death record? Can we assume that, because baby Edna is not in the earlier picnic photo, it was taken in 1913, a year after her death? But if that is the case, Stuart was born in January of that year. Why is he not in the photo?

As we’ve seen, assuming can be problematic. When this whole tale first began, I assumed my great aunt Mary had tucked the certificate away in her bedside table, knowing it would be found after her death. Perhaps she knew something about baby Stuart that she’d never told anyone, and she didn’t want him to be forgotten. But there’s a danger in reading too much into the fragments that come our way in family research. And much can be learned by sharing information with other family members who might hold missing pieces. My mom’s cousin Susan Butlin, also an author and a lover of historical research (The Practice of Her Profession, McGill-Queen’s University Press), was the one who found Stuart’s baptism card after Mary’s death, and she describes the discovery this way:

“The Baptismal certificates, along with several Confirmation certificates, were found in the right top drawer of Aunt Mary and Dorraine’s long, low bureau of drawers in the bedroom, not the bedside table, I don’t know where that came from. They were neatly placed together in a small book, it might have been a New Testament, from which they stuck out. Also in the drawer were things like new gloves, small boxes with pieces of jewelry, small personal things that were valued. After I looked at them, I saw Stuart’s certificate and, according to my sister, I said ‘Oh my goodness, look at this!'”

Susan agrees that it’s highly likely that Jack, Bill, Stuart and Earl (Susan’s father, and the baby born after Stuart, in January 1914) were baptized at home, together, in September 1914. But why, and what became of Stuart after that, remains unknown. I still hope to find out that he was buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where Emily and Edna lie, but Covid, quite understandably, means that cemetery staff is slower than usual in replying to these sorts of requests. The history section of the website shows pictures of the old burial registers, dating back to the 1870s, so if Stuart was buried there, the details will be hiding somewhere in those pages. Finding Stuart’s grave won’t tell us how he died, but it will be one more piece of the puzzle, and might lead to still more clues as to what happened to him.

The Cartwright family in 1933. What could they tell us now? Had Stuart survived — and if he existed! — he would have been 20 years old in this picture. Bottom, left to right: Mary, Dorraine, Emily, and Gordon. Top, left to right: Earl, George, George senior, Jack, Florence, and Bill.

Part 4: The Mystery Baby

On November 13, 2021November 14, 2021 By kristendenhartogIn 1914-1920: The Noise of War, Genealogical Case Studies2 Comments

Home baptisms for multiple children? The plot thickens…

*Emily Ingram Cartwright in her choir robe, 1920s London, Ontario*. *Was the church always a big part of her life?*

In the last few days, another clue has come in from the relative who found the scrap of paper containing burial details for babies Emily/Sissy and Edna. It turns out two other baptism certificates were in Great Aunt Mary’s possession: one was her own (born 1921), and the other belonged to John Frank Cartwright, known as Jack, the middle son in the trio of photos of George and Emily’s eldest boys. Mother Emily was pregnant with Jack when she came to Canada in the summer of 1907, and he was born that October, after “Sissy” had already died. The document shows Jack was baptized seven years later, on the same day as Stuart: September 26, 1914. Again the word “church” has been crossed out so that the place name for the baptism reads “Parish of Church of the Redeemer.”

Those of you who’ve been following the story closely (see parts one, two and three) might remember that when we originally discovered the card bearing Stuart’s baptism details, we thought it was strange that he’d been baptized more than a year and a half after his birth. George and Emily were regular churchgoers, at least in later years, so we assumed they’d have had their children baptized quickly. Was it a clue that there was something wrong with Stuart, and were they prompted to get it done when he was close to dying or being sent away? Now we know Jack was baptized with Stuart, which makes me wonder what the situation was for the other children, for whom we have no cards.

Here’s a list of the first seven of George and Emily Cartwright’s offspring:

Eldest boy, George, born 1905 in England. We don’t know when/if he was baptized, but presumably not in England, since the baptisms for that area/era (Bexley, Kent) are available online and his is not among them.
Emily Louise, George’s “Sissy,” born 1906, England, died August 18, 1907, buried the next day at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, London, ON. As with George, we have no baptismal info.
John Frank aka Jack, born October 1907, baptized in the parish of Church of the Redeemer, September 1914.
Edna May, born July 1911, died July 22, 1912, and buried two days later at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. We have no baptismal info.
William Charles, our grandfather Bill, born May 1909. We have no baptismal information for Bill.
Stuart Ingram, born January 1913, baptized in the parish of Church of the Redeemer, September 1914.
Earl Richard/Richardson Ingram, born January 1914. We have no baptismal information for Earl.

The new information, and the gap in age between Stuart and Jack, makes me suspect that several baptisms happened at once. If Jack and Stuart were baptized that day, surely Bill was as well, being between them in age. And since no baptismal record for their older brother, George, has turned up among similar records in Erith, perhaps he was also baptized that day, though by now he was nine years old. The daughters, of course, had died already, but the youngest of this group, Earl, may also have been included, since he was nine months old in September 1914. Come to think of it, if there ever had been baptism records for babies Emily and Edna, surely they would have ended up among Mary’s belongings as well, since Mary inherited the family papers etc., and the ill-fated girls never grew up to take their certificates off with them.

Of course, it isn’t unusual to find groups of siblings in baptism registers. In fact, when I went hunting for the English-born children George and Sissy in the register for Bexley, instead I found their mother Emily and her three younger sisters being baptized in June 1907, just before her departure for Canada, and after her husband had left to get settled there. Emily’s sisters were 16, 18 and 19, and she was 21 years old and already, according to family lore, estranged from her parents. So what prompted this group trip to the church? Why weren’t they baptized earlier? Were they something other than Church of England before this time, or were they simply not a religious family? Did the baptism provide Emily with a sense of security for her forthcoming trip across the ocean? If so, why didn’t she have her babies baptized at the same time? Whatever the reasons, the information is intriguing. George Cartwright — Emily’s husband and the father to the brood of 11 (if we count Stuart) — was baptized as a young child, as were his siblings.

*Emily Ingram, bottom row, left, with two of her sisters behind her. 1890s Erith, England*.

One thing the new information tells us is to avoid assumptions. Speculation can be a great exercise, but it’s important to stay open to all the possibilities, because you never know where you might go wrong in closing a door. The other thing that comes to mind is that, if the siblings were baptized along with Stuart that September day at the beginning of WW1, they were gathered together, wherever the baptisms were performed. Bill was five, Jack was almost seven, and George was nine. So they were old enough to remember the occasion and the brother, too. Why did no one speak of him in years to come?

*The picnic photo was taken almost two years after the baptisms of Stuart and Jack (centre) and possibly the other siblings. George, the eldest, is on the left, and Bill, our grandpa, on the right.*

And what does it mean that the word “church” is crossed out on the cards? Were the children baptized at home? And if so, why? From what I can glean online, home baptisms in those days usually happened because a child was ill and not expected to survive, and couldn’t be brought to the church. If this was the case with Stuart, did the minister come to their home to baptize him, and perform the ritual for the other children as well, since he was already there? Or perhaps they had all come down with a some sort of illness, and only Stuart didn’t survive? It occurs to me that even if we do find out where Stuart was buried, we will still not know how he died, or why there is seemingly no birth or death registration.

The mystery continues.

Part 1: The Mystery Baby

On October 29, 2021November 2, 2021 By kristendenhartogIn Genealogical Case Studies24 Comments

Even the most ordinary family has secrets…

*Our great aunt Mary, sweeping out her potato-sack tent in London, Ontario, mid-1920s*

Tracy and I spent years researching The Cowkeeper’s Wish, and while we never expected we’d filled in all the blanks of our family history, we thought we’d done a pretty thorough job, and any mysteries that lurked unsolved were far away in the tree, and not terribly integral to our story. And then our great aunt Mary died, at the impressive age of 100. The birth certificate for her baby brother Stuart sat in the drawer of her bedside table, as if she’d purposely placed it there so it wouldn’t be missed among the remnants of her long life. As far as we can tell, no one now living ever knew about Stuart’s existence.

We interviewed Mary and her sister Dorraine for our book several years ago when we first began our research. Unmarried sisters who’d lived together all their lives, they were a wonderful resource for us, and their recent deaths, one after another, marked the end of that generation of our family. As the last children to live at home with their parents, Do and Mary were keepers of the family archive, a treasure trove of photographs and old documents, and even the family furniture. To our delight, they recounted all sorts of stories about our grandfather (their brother Bill) and the wider family. Of special interest was anything they could tell us about their parents, Emily Ingram and George Cartwright, who’d come to Canada from England in the early 1900s and raised a large family in London, Ontario.

*The Cartwright clan, with Emily overdressed for the beach, and little Do and Mary in the front row*

*Emily Ingram Cartwright with baby Emily, little George and her in-laws, shortly before leaving England for Canada*

It was our understanding that there were 10 children in total. The eldest two, named Emily and George for their parents, had been born in England. Their father sailed for Canada in 1907, got himself somewhat settled, and then sent for his wife and kids. Baby Emily was nearly blown out of her mother’s arms while they were at sea one blustery day, and one can only imagine how tightly she was held for the rest of the voyage. And yet, the little girl died anyway, of bronchial pneumonia, not long after their arrival in Canada.

George found steady work at McCormick’s Biscuit Factory, and Emily proceeded to have more babies: two boys and then another ill-fated girl, who died on her first birthday. These daughters – Emily and Edna – were not a secret. Their many later siblings knew they had existed, and the girls were diligently placed in family trees created by subsequent generations.

Which makes it hard to explain Stuart. Why had no one heard of him? Mary, known for her phenomenal memory, obviously knew something about him, because she tucked his baptismal certificate into the drawer of her bedside table before she died. She’d been asked oodles of questions about family over the years, not just by us but by others interested in history and genealogy. But she never presented this intriguing piece of paper.

The document itself raises more questions. It says that Stuart Ingram Cartwright was baptized in September 1914, but gives a birth date of January 1913. George and Emily were regular church-goers, so it seems odd that they waited so long to have Stuart baptized. And it would seem the ceremony wasn’t performed in a church, since the word “church” is struck through and replaced by the word “parish.” The baby was baptized in the parish of Church of the Redeemer. Even more puzzling is the fact that no official birth or death records have surfaced. What became of Stuart? Was he sent away from the family? Or did he die young? Why did no one ever speak of him?

Even the most ordinary family has secrets, and a few had already been revealed about this particular branch: Emily had been pregnant before she married George, and had become estranged from her family; she’d been arrested for stealing from her uncle not long before leaving England for Canada; and her sister married that same uncle, even though nieces and uncles are not permitted to be husband and wife. Each of these discoveries was fascinating and surprising. Our mother, who knew her grandmother as a strict, somewhat intimidating, and morally rigorous lady, was shocked to imagine her as a thief. And while we couldn’t ask Emily for her own perspective of the story, we had newspaper accounts and wider family information that helped us put this new information into context. With Stuart, though, we’ve hit a brick wall — which only makes us more determined to find him.

This post marks the beginning of our search.

*George and Emily with their three sons at McCormick’s annual picnic in the early 1910s*

Part 1: Myrtle, Blanche and Walter, a genealogical case study

On October 9, 2019December 8, 2019 By kristendenhartogIn Genealogical Case Studies5 Comments

I mentioned in my last post that Tracy and I have been busy lately, each with new projects. Mine, very happily, has me visiting many of the same resources we used to create The Cowkeeper’s Wish — but the new story is set here in Toronto, and is not family-related. Still, I find I am coming up against many of the same conundrums and genealogical brick walls, and I thought I would write about one of them, partly to sort it out in my own mind, and partly because it will probably be of interest to anyone engaged in similar research, whether they are curious about family or general history.

This new book in the works, also non-fiction, explores patients and staff at a military hospital just after WW1. One day I was scouring the Toronto Star Historical Newspaper Archive available through our public library system. I was searching specifically for the term “lost an arm,” for reasons I won’t go into now, and I came upon a tragic 1920 article about a veteran who had indeed lost an arm during the war, and whose young daughter was killed accidentally by a boy playing with a gun.

The Dominion Bank Building, circa 1914, at the corner of Yonge and King. Courtesy Toronto Reference Library, Baldwin Collection.

I was intrigued to find out the back story of this family. The little girl’s name was Elsie Dunn, and her father was Walter, a returned soldier who had just taken a job as an elevator operator in the Dominion Bank Building at Yonge and King. The mother/wife (as so often happens) was mentioned in the article, but not by name. Still, I had dates and details, and the article even included photographs of Walter, Elsie, and Elsie’s “mother.” (Read on to see why I use quotes here!)

I quickly found Walter’s service record at Library and Archives Canada, and was able to corroborate details in the article: the wound matched, the home address matched, and he had one child named Elsie. So now I also knew that Walter had been born in Liverpool in 1888, that he’d enlisted in Montreal in 1916, that he’d been wounded in the Battle of Arras, and that his wife’s name was Blanche. Some time during the war, or slightly after, the family moved from Montreal to Toronto.

When I looked for the death record of Elsie Dunn, however, nothing came up. Since I knew her age, and figured it was fairly unusual to die at eight years old, I removed her first name from the search field, and searched instead for a girl named Dunn who’d died in Toronto in March 1920. The record turned up, with her name recorded as Juanita Odesse Dunn. Almost everything else fit: her age; her father’s name, address, and birthplace; the cause of her death. Her mother, however, was listed as Mirtle B. Bishop, born Nova Scotia. I assumed the “B” stood for Blanche, and carried on gathering information.

I found the now childless Walter and Blanche still living on Gamble Avenue, in an area called Todmorden, just east of the Don River in Toronto in 1921. That particular census included a column for the year a person arrived in Canada, and told me that Walter had come in 1898, and Blanche, also born in England, in 1908. I immediately wondered if Walter had been a home child, having arrived here at age 10, and I quickly found his name, along with a sister Maria’s, in the Home Children Records at Library and Archives Canada. The back story to this is rather fascinating, but I will save it for a subsequent post, and stick with my investigations about Blanche and Myrtle for now.

Patagonian-Welsh home children on board the Numidian in 1902, the same ship Walter and Maria Dunn traveled on when they left England for Canada. Courtesy Library and Archives Canada/C-037613

Now I knew that Blanche, married name Dunn, was born in England in 1888 and had come to Canada in 1908. That went against the details in Elsie’s death record, which said the Myrtle/Mirtle had been born in Nova Scotia. I searched for a marriage record and found one for Walter James Dunn marrying Myrtle Pearl Bishop in Montreal in 1912. Immediately preceding that record was a Catholic baptism for Myrtle. The discovery also revealed Myrtle’s and Walter’s parents’ names — but again I’ll stick with Myrtle for now.

Myrtle’s parents were Allen Bishop and Amy Hindon — clear, not-too-ordinary and not-too-odd names that I knew would be easy to find. And indeed, there they were with baby Myrtle on the 1891 census living in Nova Scotia. A later census showed the parents without Myrtle, but with a sister named Juanita Maxime. Hunting further back, the name Odessa also turned up in Amy’s ancestry. It was obvious I’d found the right family, and that Myrtle had named her baby after her own relatives.

And yet — the 1891 information challenged the idea that Myrtle, if she was Blanche, had come to Canada in 1908, and that she’d been born in England. It corroborated the information in Elsie’s death record: that mother Myrtle had been born in Nova Scotia. So all the records thus far very clearly showed two different names, two different birth dates, and two different birth places. If Elsie could be Juanita, then surely Myrtle could be Blanche, and I knew from the work Tracy and I had done on The Cowkeeper’s Wish that Eleanors could be Margarets, Olives could be Isabels, and so on. But now I had too many details that didn’t add up, and I knew there had to be a different story.

Next I searched for a birth record for Juanita Odesse Dunn, aka Elsie, and found that she had been baptized Juanita Maxime, like Myrtle’s sister, in Montreal in May 1912, a month after her parents had married. Once again the parents’ names were Walter James Dunn and Myrtle Pearl Bishop, with no mention of a Blanche. I began to wonder if Myrtle had died and Walter had remarried, but I could find no death record for Myrtle, and no remarriage for Walter. I wasn’t sure how to proceed to determine who Blanche was, but the little 1908 notation from the census kept niggling.

Finally I did a broad search of passenger lists for all Blanches, without a surname, born in England in 1888, who came to Canada in 1908. There was a handful of possibilities, but I was especially drawn to one record that showed a French surname: Poidevin. This Blanche was the daughter of an egg sorter born in France. The family lived in London, and Blanche’s siblings had working-class occupations like feather curler and perfumer’s assistant — not as glamorous as it sounds, and familiar territory from when Tracy and I researched our own ancestors in the poor areas of London. Like so many young English women of her era, Blanche Poidevin came to Canada with a party of domestic workers, and found employment in Montreal. Her English baptism record also gives her birth date — February 11, 1888 — and it was this detail that eventually linked her with more certainty to Walter Dunn.

Domestic workers arriving in Quebec, 1911, courtesy Library and Archives Canada

In 1935, 15 years after Elsie/Juanita’s awful death, Blanche and Walter Dunn traveled across the US border, heading to London, England, via New York. The cards filled out confirm various details: Walter’s sister Maria is given as a contact; the couple’s address is still Gamble Avenue, Toronto; and finally Blanche’s birthdate, February 11, 1888, matches the baptism record for Blanche Poidevin, daughter of the egg sorter.

Sometimes less is more with this type of research — the best way to find Elsie Dunn was to remove her first name; and the best way to find Blanche was to remove her surname. So now we know that Walter and Myrtle had a baby named Juanita; that something happened to Myrtle, or to her relationship with Walter, between the time Juanita was baptized in 1912 and the time Walter enlisted in 1916; that Walter married or took up with Blanche Poidevin; and that Blanche and Walter were living as husband and wife when Juanita died. Was it Blanche who decided to call Juanita Elsie, once Myrtle was longer around?

The mystery as to what happened to Myrtle is far from solved, but there is plenty to say about Walter, home child turned war veteran, in the next post; and about Elsie and the boy who caused her death.

♦

An unknown soldier and an unconventional woman

On October 11, 2018 By kristendenhartogIn 1914-1920: The Noise of War5 Comments

Mary Jamieson Front & back (1) The woman in this lovely portrait, Mary Jamieson, came to my attention when I corresponded with her granddaughter Alison following my earlier post about finding women hidden behind their husband’s names. Just like Tracy and me, Alison Botterill and her sister Fiona Duxbury have been on a lengthy quest to solve some mysteries in their family’s past. Alison told me the following story:

During the First World War, Mary Jamieson was a young Scottish woman living far from family in London. She was involved in the suffragette cause, and family lore says she spoke at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, a popular place for speeches and demonstrations. She didn’t believe in marriage, unusually enough, and had a son out of wedlock in January 1916. Then in 1917, she was among the first to join the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, attached to the 2nd Artists Rifles, and a photo of her exists with some of her co-workers, taken outside Hare Hall in Romford. Though her record doesn’t survive, Alison and Fiona were told by family that she held the rank of forewoman and spent some time in France, near Lille. They think she may have worked as a cook. The photograph is one of a series taken in the same place, and experts have suggested that the number in the lower right-hand corner dates it to approximately October 1918.

Alison's grandmother — Mary Jamieson sits second from left in the front row.

John Jamieson, Mary’s son, was given to friends to raise

War work at this point in Mary’s life would have been a challenge, given the fact she was on her own with a little boy, John, and then a daughter, Mary Joan, born in June 1918. Both children were born in London workhouse hospitals, near to where Mary was living and working at the time, and are listed in the ledgers with their mother, bearing the surname Jamieson. In Joan’s case, the specification “Illegt” is scribbled in as well. A fragment of a story has been passed down that she was named for a “Lady Joan someone” — maybe a connection of Mary’s from the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

Whether the children shared the same father or not is uncertain, but they didn’t spend long living as siblings. At some point John was given to friends to raise — perhaps soon after Joan was born, for Mary’s workhouse record gives no clues as to his whereabouts at this time. It must have been painful to give up the joy of seeing her little boy grow up, although there appears to have been some contact between mother and son during his early years. Joan stayed with Mary, and became part of her mother’s second family when Mary met her husband-to-be a couple of years later. Mary Jamieson and George Couper Reid had several children together, but they didn’t wed until 1948, shortly before Mary died.

(Mary) Joan Jamieson — Mary’s daughter, Joan Jamieson

With this second family, more clues emerge. Mary and George had a son in 1920, and though they weren’t married, Mary’s name on the birth record appears as Reid formerly Cameron nee Jamieson. So was Cameron the name of the other babies’ father?

Alison and Fiona hung on to that clue when Joan died, and a photograph of a handsome young soldier surfaced among her possessions. The writing on the back gave no name, but stated, in Joan’s hand, “This is my father who died of WW1 wounds in 1918. He was the eldest son of one of England’s old Catholic families.”

So it seems that Joan’s father died the year she was born — which might explain why Mary felt she couldn’t manage alone with both children. When looking at an enhanced version of the soldier’s portrait, military experts have suggested he belonged to the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and pointed out that he’s wearing a Military Medal ribbon. Putting all these pieces together, the sisters settled on a soldier named Archibald Borland Cameron as a good possibility for Mary’s man. He served with the KOSB (and later with the Border Regiment); he was awarded the Military Medal for heroic action in 1916; and he died in April 1918, just a couple of months before Joan was born. Other parts of his story don’t fit, however: Archie, as he was known, was Scottish, not English; and he was the youngest son, not the oldest. But his service record does offer a tempting detail: in January 1916, the very month John was born, Archie Cameron “illegally absented himself without leave.” Is this just a coincidence, or was it the case of a young father anxious to meet his baby son?

Untitled 3.tif

Does some distant relative of Archie’s have a photograph that matches the picture above, of Joan’s father? It’s hard to imagine what evidence might surface now, after a century has passed, to clear up the mystery of Mary Jamieson and her children. But I can relate to Alison and Fiona’s determination to find the answers. And to the fact that, even when you don’t find answers, the search is fascinating.

♥

Lives of the First World War: Mary Jamieson

Lives of the First World War: Archibald Borland Cameron

Lost and found: a WW1 nurse

On July 24, 2018August 19, 2018 By kristendenhartogIn 1914-1920: The Noise of War8 Comments

LMA Stone Case Book Our Ellen 2 — The elusive Ellen Evans, otherwise Roff, otherwise Humphries, discovered in the Stone Asylum casebook at the London Metropolitan Archives (City of London). Ellen’s sad and tangled story is recounted in The Cowkeeper’s Wish. (This image appears with permission, ©LMA.)

I’ve mentioned in earlier posts how challenging it can be to find women in a family tree, because they tend to disappear behind their men. During out research for The Cowkeeper’s Wish, one of the biggest brick walls was finding Ellen, our great grandmother’s sister, who left her husband in the 1890s and eventually turned up living with someone else and using his surname, though they had not married. Sometimes women disappear even more completely behind their partner’s name and become “Mrs John Humphries,” erasing every letter of their own identity.

I recently found an example of an elusive woman while engaged in some volunteer work I do for the Imperial War Museum’s excellent Lives of the First World War website. I’ve taken a special interest in the women’s records there, and I was searching specifically for women who’d worked at the Australian Voluntary Hospital in Wimereux, France. I was surprised to come upon a page for Staff Nurse Robert Hannah nee Walter E. C., and wasn’t quite sure where to begin to untangle such a jumble of surnames that could also be first names. I double-checked the original source Lives had used — the women’s service roll at the National Archives — and the name appeared the same way there.

Since it’s highly unlikely that a nurse in 1915 was named Robert, I thought the names were simply transposed, and should read Hannah Robert nee Walter. I searched for a marriage record during the war that would confirm that suspicion, but nothing fit. And then I remembered the “E. C.” that I’d ignored on the entry the first time around. I checked the National Archives record again, this time viewing the digitized version, and saw a tiny crucial “Mrs” beside the name, and left out of the transcription. Mrs. Robert Hannah? That made more sense. I popped in a new search, still within the Lives database, and found that Ella C. Walter had married Robert C. Hannah in Kensington, London, in 1917.

That the marriage took place in London was another bonus, since Ancestry holds those digitized entries of Church of England Marriages and Banns. Here I was able to find yet a little more about the woman so recently known as Robert.

When they married on January 6, 1917, at St. Phillip’s Church, Ella Clarice Walter was a 39-year-old spinster, living at 4 Richmond Mansions, Earl’s Court. Her father’s name was John Charles Walter, and though he was now deceased, he’d been “civil servant, Melbourne,” according to the certificate — another Australian connection for the woman who’d worked at the Australian Voluntary Hospital. Her new husband was considerably older than she was; a widower named Robert Campbell Hannah, he gave his occupation as “gentleman,” and he resided at the Thackeray Hotel in Great Russell Street.

Searching backwards now, I found Ella living on her own in London in 1911, a single 30-year-old woman of private means, born in Melbourne, Australia, a British subject by parentage. What brought her to London I don’t know — but being unmarried, Australian, and keen to assist with the war effort, she was an early recruit for the hospital founded by Lady Rachel Dudley, wife of the Australian governor-general, first located at St. Nazaire, France, and soon moved to an old hotel in Wimereux. The medal roll shows that Ella joined the hospital staff late in August 1914, with the war not even a month old.

avh, wimereux

In a 1915 piece about “the good work [the AVH] is doing at the front,” writer Katharine Susannah Prichard describes the setting, and brings the photo above to life:

The Winter quarters of the Australian voluntary hospital are in a great, rambling, muddily-white French hotel. When first you see it, you want to draw it as it stands against the sea, under a clear, shining sky. You feel you want to use a rough chalk for its vermilion roof, and for its shutters and doors that are vivid, apple-green. Beyond it stretch the dunes, vague and formless, with their coarse, wind-threshed, bleached grasses, and behind it spreads a scattered toadstool growth of white-walled, red-roofed cottages. Gris Nez forms a rampart on the north, and there is a deserted, red-roofed village along the coast. The Picardy landscape the hospital stands in is so tranquil in a peaceful, pastoral way, that it is almost impossible to believe, that only a few miles away all the damnable business of war is going on.

Ella Walter and colleagues in Wimereux — Clockwise from top: Elizabeth Mundell, Patience Outram Anderson, Ella Clarice Walter, and Mary Rawson.

When the staff first moved into the hotel, they’d barely had time to settle when word came that a convoy of wounded was on its way. Ambulances began arriving even before the beds had been made to receive the wounded. “They kept on arriving,” writes Prichard, “a continuous, slow stream of khaki-covered cars, with a red cross blazed across them. They came over the brow of the hill, and filed past the hospital from 10 in the morning until after four in the afternoon.” Soon stretchers lined the corridors, and 145 men required the staff’s careful attention.

Knowing Ella’s name wasn’t Robert helped me to find this lovely picture of her and some of her colleagues, posing in uniform. She and the other women depicted are each mentioned, albeit briefly, in the unit’s 1915 war diary. In May, the diary tells us, Ella contracted the measles (as did Patience), and in August, she had a brief stay at a rest home in Hardelot. The diary mentions many of the women resting there, and the Australian War Memorial holds a picture that suggests they were happy to go. I don’t see Ella in the Hardelot photograph, and I lose track of her now until her 1917 marriage to Robert Hannah. What sent her back to London, and was she nursing there as well until she married? These answers might surface if I keep searching. But it feels satisfying to have made even some small discoveries about this stranger, to sort the name and put a face to it, and to reunite a nurse with some of her colleagues from a century ago.