Jane Ardington

Jane Ardington was the joiner's daughter who married the Brixham fisherman — George Henry Thomas, at the Hull Register Office in 1865 — and so became the mother of Jenny, the Thomas girl who married into the Crabbs. She was born into the wreck of a marriage. Baptised at Hemingbrough on the 25th of August 1842, the eldest child of Robert Ardington, a Howden joiner, and Sarah, a farmer's daughter who had married beneath her family's liking, she was eight when the 1851 census found the whole household — parents, herself, her small brother George, and three lodgers — crowded into 13 Carlisle Street in Hulme, Manchester, the width of the Pennines from the Yorkshire farm they had left. Her father had gone bankrupt in 1847 and taken the family west; her mother, the story went, could not bear the reduced circumstances and ran away. The paper trail loses Sarah after that census, and the children were scattered.

Jane's own road led back to Yorkshire and into service. By 1861, at eighteen, she was a general servant in the household of Sarah Ryder, a seventy-seven-year-old widow at 4 Mason Street, East Sculcoates, Hull — a joiner's daughter in a maid's place, the family her great-grandparents the Straffords had once lived near. On the 21st of February 1865 she married George Thomas at the Register Office: he a fisherman of Waverley Street, she a housemaid of Temple Court, Cogan Street; both of them signing their names. Eight children followed in the fisherfolk courts west of the Hull docks — the family at New Buildings, off Walker and Great Thornton Streets, then at Arion Terrace off Gillett Street.

Hers was a fisherman's marriage, told by the census through absence. In 1871 the enumerator caught George at home and set the household down complete — the first son named Robert Ardington Thomas for her own father, in the enumerator's hand. But in 1881 and again in 1891 the master was at sea on census night, and the household is Jane's: in 1881 she is entered at its head, "Seamans Wife"; in 1891, a wife with no husband present — her children about her, the man away on the grounds. Only in 1901, past sixty, is George found at home again, a fisherman still, with Jane and the two youngest — among them Jenny, nineteen, a canvas net braider, at 8 Arion Terrace.

She died on the 5th of May 1904, at sixty-one, of pulmonary tuberculosis — the year before Jenny joined the Salvation Army and married a Salvationist against her parents' wishes. Jane did not live to see the breach, nor the quiet mending of it that left George, at his own death in 1916, lodging two doors from the daughter's family he was said to have cut off. Behind Jane stood the Ardingtons of Gribthorpe and Howden, shoemakers for two generations before her father broke the trade — a line Mum traced to the 1720s, and the subject of this page's family.