The family tree

The Ardingtons were East Riding country people — yeomen of Gribthorpe, a hamlet of a few farms in the parish of Bubwith, west of the Derwent — who turned from the land to a trade and made shoes. The line reaches back to William Ardington of Gribthorpe, a farmer buried at Bubwith in 1765, of whom the register says only that; his son Richard, baptised at Bubwith in 1754, left the land and moved the few miles south to the market town of Howden, where he set up as a shoemaker. The trade held two generations — Richard, and his son William after him, who worked from Hailgate in the heart of the town from the 1780s to the 1840s: a family of the middling, wage-earning sort, William at least a journeyman rather than a master of his own shop. It was in William's generation that they learned to sign their own names, where their parents had made a mark.

It was Robert Ardington, born at Howden in 1820, who broke the pattern and came undone by it. He trained not as a shoemaker but as a joiner, and in 1841 he married above himself — Sarah Caukill, a landowning Cliffe farmer's daughter, in a match her family thought beneath her. Then he reached for a shopkeeper's independence, trading as a grocer and flour-dealer at Howden, Scarborough and Grimsby by turns, and in 1847 — a year of commercial crisis — the venture failed in the bankruptcy court. The family went west to Manchester; Sarah, the story goes, could not bear the reduced circumstances and left, and after the 1851 census she vanishes from the record altogether. Robert lived on in Manchester in a second household, and died — the only death that fits him — far to the south at Christchurch in Hampshire in 1866, three removes from everything he had known.

The line comes down to the Brocks through Robert's eldest child. Jane Ardington, baptised at Hemingbrough in 1842, went into service as a girl and in 1865 married George Henry Thomas, a Brixham fisherman, at the Hull Register Office — the marriage by which the Ardingtons join the Thomas line, and so reach Jenny, Ida, Janet and the Brocks. The spine of the family is read at the register and the census, generation by generation, from Jane back to the wall: William of Gribthorpe, about 1720, first of the name, with no baptism in the Bubwith book that survives back to his time and no parents the record will give — a genuine wall, honestly stated. And there is a nearer, human wall behind it: Sarah Caukill, the farmer's daughter who married the joiner and then walked out of the record in 1851, her end still unknown.

The Barbers are a fen family — Witcham people, of one small clay island in the black peat of the Isle of Ely — and they held that ground for seven generations. The line reaches back to John Barber, who died in 1589 and survives only in his will, for Witcham's registers begin ten years after him; from his son William it runs down to Thomas the carpenter, and on through the Wenums — an unusual name that marks this branch out among the many Barbers of the village — and the later Roberts, to Rachel, born on the fen in 1848. They are the earliest of our people we can show owning land in their own right: a five-acre close of drained fen called “The Dams Heads,” and other parcels beside the great drain, passed son to son by will. And from Wenham's children in the 1810s they were Wesleyan Methodists, baptised at the chapel in Ely.

Their land was land the age had only just made. In the seventeenth century the draining of the Great Level turned the seasonal marsh around Witcham into farmland — the Hundred Foot Drain cut straight across the fen in 1652 — and the family's fields carry those works in their very names. In Robert Barber's generation, in the 1770s, they crossed the few miles off the island to Ely, Downham and Littleport; and there, across the nineteenth century, the old standing thinned — Jacob a farmer's bailiff at Whelp Moor in 1851, a plain agricultural labourer by 1861 — until, in the 1870s, the family left the fen altogether for Hull.

There the fen family became a city one. Rachel Barber married Isaac Crabb — Littleport folk, like herself — and in Hull she worked as a midwife; through their son Alfred and his daughter Ida the line runs into the Crabbs, and on to Janet and the Brocks. The record stands unbroken from Rachel back to Thomas the carpenter in 1634, read at the census and confirmed generation by generation at the parish-register index; the wills that carry the family's land through the deeper Witcham years reach us through another researcher, Andrew Martin, and wait to be set against the originals at Ely. Above John Barber, in 1589, the parish record does not yet exist — and the page says so plainly.

The Battys are Holderness people — farm servants and labourers of the flat corn country east of Hull, between the Humber bank and the sea. For three generations they moved among a handful of villages you can walk between in an afternoon: Sutton, where Robert Batty was living when the record first finds him in 1801; Aldbrough, where his children were baptised and the family kept returning to marry and to bury; and the Paull–Thorngumbald–Hedon corner where his son Jonathan ploughed. They were working people who could write — Robert signs the Sculcoates register in 1801, Jonathan signs at both his weddings, William and Eliza both sign at theirs in 1853, and Martha signs in 1882 beside a husband who made his mark — and twice the newspapers name Jonathan among the prize ploughmen of Holderness, in 1832 and again in 1838, a decade in the service of the Ingleby farm at Ryhill.

What moved them, in the end, was what moved so many: the roof was never theirs. In September 1864 the cottage William Batty rented in Aldbrough Market Place was sold by auction at the George Inn — Mum found the notice in the Hull & Eastern Counties Herald — and within three years William, Eliza and the children were in Hull, a dock labourer's family in a court off Salthouse Lane, between a laundress, a grocer and the Sailors' Home. The city was hard on them: Eliza died there in 1876, William's second wife Maria in 1883, and William himself — the record corrected on this pass — in the first quarter of 1901 in Sculcoates, not under the 1905 burial his page once carried, which the registers show belongs to another William Batty entirely, a Hull shipwright of the same name and age.

The line passes to the Drewerys through Martha, born at Aldbrough in 1862, in the family's last Holderness years. In service at a Rowley farmhouse at eighteen, she married William Drewery at St John's, Hull, in 1882 — her brother and sister witnessing — and her son, registered Thomas Batty two years before the wedding, grew up as Thomas Batty Drewery and carries this line down to the present family. Mum built the whole frame of these pages, from the parish registers, the censuses and two newspaper finds of her own; this pass has read every reachable record at the image and confirmed her throughout, corrected William's death, and added Jonathan's second ploughing prize. Above Robert Batty — born about 1772, 'of Sutton', parents unknown — the record has not yet been found, and the page says so plainly.

The Brocks are an Isle of Axholme family — for three hundred years they scarcely left it. The line enters the written record almost as early as written records exist: Robert Brocke, born at Belton in 1544, six years after England's parishes were first ordered to keep registers, and set down on the earliest leaves of the Belton book. The name is older on the island still: a Thomas Brok was paying the king's tax at Belton in 1332, two centuries before any register — whether his line ran to Robert's, no record yet found can say. For four generations they were yeomen of that parish — farmers of their own land at the edge of the undrained commons — through the Reformation, the drainers' coming, and a Civil War that nearly erased their records but never their line. In the 1650s Francis crossed the few miles to Haxey, and there the family stayed for two hundred years more: victuallers and farmers, burned out in the great fire of 1744 and recovered, claiming flax bounties, farming the newly enclosed commons their forebears had fought for. A windmill on the Haxey–Burnham road carried the family name.

Milling took them out of the Isle. From the 1780s three generations followed the trade along the Trent and out to the coastal parishes — Beckingham, Hatcliffe, Tetney — until January 1869, when George Brock, master miller of Tetney, died of smallpox at forty-four. The rural Brocks ended with George; the Hull Brocks began with the widow and children he left behind. In the city the climb started over: his son William Henry from warehouse floor to shopkeeper; William Edmund to the trams and Reckitt's; Eddie — whose 1944 war diary is the treasure of this archive — into the Education Offices; and his sons into teaching. Land, trade, town, office, schoolroom: five worlds in five generations.

The record behind this account runs unbroken from 1544 to the present — every generation anchored to a register page, most of them shown on these pages in the clerk's own hand — and where a claim is only probable, the person's page says so plainly.

The Cleggs are a Rochdale family — Lancashire weavers of the parish of St Chad's, from the loomshop generations before the mills. The line stands on its own records back to James Clegg, baptised at St Chad's in 1774, and reaches one step further to his father Isaac; from James it runs down through Edmund, a handloom weaver, to Robert, born in 1825, and to Robert's daughter Elizabeth, who was born in Hull. Weaving is the thread that runs through them — the trade the family carried out of Lancashire — and Clegg itself is a Rochdale name, borne by so many in the town that every step of the line here has to be fixed by a record that names the father, not by the name alone.

What moved them east was a death. Edmund the weaver died at Rochdale in 1841, only about forty, leaving his widow Jane a houseful of children; her second marriage, to a Castleton bleacher named Abraham Mills, carried the whole family the ninety miles east — from Lancashire into Yorkshire — to Hull. By 1851 the Cleggs and the Millses were living under one roof at Front Factory Lane in the Groves — the Sutton district on the east bank of the River Hull that had become a colony of transplanted Lancashire cotton folk, its streets full of warpers, winders and carders from the southern Pennines. Robert Clegg kept the family's trade in the new town: a cotton packer for twenty years, in the Groves and later, widowed, back on the Liverpool docks as a cotton porter, before he came home to Hull to die in 1919 in his ninety-fifth year.

In 1877 the line joined the Brocks. Elizabeth Clegg married William Henry Brock at St James', Sutton — both signing their own names — and it is through her four sons that this Lancashire cotton line runs down into the family. Each generation's link to the next was read at the original register this pass — Elizabeth to Robert at her 1877 marriage, Robert to Edmund at his 1853 marriage, Edmund to James at his 1800 baptism — and the migration itself at the 1851 census. The deeper Rochdale records — the earlier marriages and burials, and Isaac beyond James — rest on Mum's research and the parish index, and wait to be read at the register images. Above Isaac Clegg, in the Rochdale of the 1770s, the line does not yet reach further; and James's own death — the true wall — is not yet found: the page says so plainly.

The Crabbs are the family of Ida Crabb, who married Bill Drewery in 1940 — Janet's mother's people — and their country, for at least two hundred years, was one fen village: Littleport, on the Ouse five miles north of Ely, in the black-earth levels of the Cambridgeshire fens. The line is proven from the marriage of Robert Crabb and Mary Greene there in 1710, and the village registers of that generation are so full of Crabbs — four Roberts at once, with Christophers, Clements and Williams besides — that the top of the tree is a wall of abundance rather than absence: which older Littleport family Robert sprang from is a question for the manor rolls, and we leave it honestly open.

For most of the eighteenth century the family had standing. Carter's county history of 1753 prints the freeholders of Littleport, and four of the clan stand in the list — Christopher, Bennet, William, and a man with the family's most memorable name, Pepper Crabb. Robert's son William (1726–1804) married Esther James at the parish church and baptised nine children there, giving the Pepper name its second outing; his son Thomas (1769–1855) was the freeholders' grandson — and rented half a divided house, sold at auction over his head in 1814 'in the occupation of Thomas Crabb and the widow Moon'. The fall in that one sentence is the story of the fens: enclosure and drainage took the commons, corn prices took the rest, and in May 1816 — Thomas was forty-six, with the house full of children — Littleport rose, marched on Ely, and was broken; five of the village's men were hanged on one morning outside Ely gaol. No Crabb was among the punished. Every Crabb lived in the world that punished them.

The next two generations worked that world's fields. Thomas the younger (1811–1887) spent seventy-five years almost entirely on Burnt Fen — agricultural labourer at every census but the one that briefly called him 'farmer, labourer' — and his widow Susan ended the century alone in two rooms, her occupation recorded in one word: 'pauper'. It was their eldest, Isaac (1835–1910), who broke the pattern, twice. About 1860 he took his first wife and a company of Littleport men to London and dug Bazalgette's sewers at Plaistow — the fen diggers' trade taken to the capital — and came home; then, widowed, remarried to Rachel Barber and served notice to quit his ten acres, he put his family on a train, as his granddaughter told it, and rode it until it stopped. The end of the line was Hull, in 1873, and everything after is a Hull story.

In Hull the family found work, a street, and a faith. Isaac laboured — brickyard, yard-broom, railway — and about 1881 became a founder member of the Salvation Army in the city; when he died in 1910 the Army's own newspaper, the War Cry, reported Brother Isaac Crabb's funeral from the Hull West corps, the Citadel Band playing, and the family's memory that hundreds lined Hessle Road stands corroborated in print. His son Alfred (1883–1960) — the bright lad who left school for a telegraph round, went to sea as a trawler hand, and was still 'seaman' in the register when he married Jane Thomas, the fisherman's daughter — built the rest: a coal round off Hessle Road that became Alf. Crabb & Sons Ltd, horses in the yard at 57 Edinburgh Street, the wartime police-court scrapes of a small merchant under big regulations, the Madeley Street corps photograph with five of his children in it, and a golden wedding kept at Etty Grove in 1955.

Ida (1912–1989) grew up over that coal yard, weighed out with her mother on the kitchen scales, convalesced a year in Somerset with her brother the Salvation Army officer, and married Bill Drewery at the same Newington church as her parents, in the second autumn of the war. Forty-nine years at 162 Boothferry Road, Hessle, followed — Janet born there in 1942, Geoffrey in 1947 — and her family's notice in the Hull Daily Mail asked, in the end, only for 'peace after much suffering bravely borne'. Her pages, and her father's and grandfather's, carry the records this synopsis rests on: the registers of one fen parish across two centuries, the censuses along the Burnt Fen banks, an auction bill, a probate calendar, and the Army's printed farewell. Where the trail runs out — the many Roberts of 1710s Littleport — we have said so; what the next passes owe this family is its women: Esther James, the widow Moon's Susanna, Susanna Pagett the pauper widow, Rachel Barber of the deep Barber line, and Jane Thomas, whose Devon fisher-family is a journey of its own — now told: open her Thomas family in the tree for its story and its sea-road map.

The Drewerys are Mum's own family — the name she was born with — and their country is the other Lincolnshire: not the Isle where the Brocks farmed, but the silt fens of south Holland, the sea-banked parishes strung along the Wash. The line enters the record about 1726 with Jonathan Jarman Drewery, grazier of Fleet — a man of standing who married three times by licence, signed the registers in a strong fluent hand, served his parish as churchwarden, and died worth a notice in the Gentleman's Magazine; yet he arrives in the record already grown, his parents unrecorded — the family's deepest wall, mapped in detail on his page and still unbroken.

The land that made the first Jonathan a man of substance made his descendants labourers: within a decade of his death the same Fleet register slides from “grazier & householder” to “labourer and horse keeper”, and for most of the nineteenth century the Drewerys worked the Holbeach marsh as farm hands and shepherds — Jonathan German baptising fourteen children across four parishes as the work moved him, his widow ending in the Spalding workhouse; his son Robert living out a whole working life within a few miles of sea-banked ground, and dying at seventy-two, a widowed lodger in a farm foreman's crowded house, still labouring.

It was Robert's son William who turned the line, and he did it twice. In the 1870s, as the great agricultural depression emptied the fens, he went north alone over the Humber: a hired farm servant at Holme upon Spalding Moor who rose to foreman at Benningholme — where the Ordnance Survey may carry his name to this day. At his Hull wedding in 1882 his bride, Martha Batty, signed the register; William, five generations after the grazier's fluent hand, made his mark. Then, near fifty, a second reinvention: landlord of the Gate Inn at Hive, where the family knew its brightest and darkest days — one daughter married from the inn, another buried at ten under “Safe in the arms of Jesus”, and a night in 1912 when Martha, by then the licensee, was felled by a customer's blow and William was struck down trying to lift her. He ended as he began, on the land; on the stone at Eastrington that Martha joined him under, twenty-two years later, the family wrote “Reunited”.

The railway carried the next two generations. Tom, William's soldier son, was made by the army — regimental drummer and bugler, for whom playing the Last Post was among the hardest duties he knew; a man who embroidered beautifully, and whose exemplary discharge papers noted in passing “a proficient platelayer”. That one phrase decided his life: a railway cottage at Sandholme, seven children, then Ypres, Loos and Salonica, and twenty-two more years on the line — the man who ran half of Eastrington's societies, and watched the skies for the Observer Corps when war came again. That second war took his son Arthur, a prisoner since the fall of France, dead in captivity in 1944 — a grief Tom, gone in 1941, was spared. Arthur's brother Bill — Mum's father — had left school at twelve for the farms and found his life's work as maintenance engineer at the tin and lead smelting works at Melton; he married in wartime and settled at Hessle, where Janet — who made this whole record, and learnt her lifelong love of football and cricket at his side — was born a Drewery in 1942.

The record behind this account runs from the grazier of 1726 to the present, every generation below him anchored to original registers, marriage licences, certificates and census pages — many of them shown on these pages in the clerk's own hand, several photographed by Janet herself in the record offices. At its head stands the family's great open question — where Jonathan Jarman Drewery came from — hunted through every register and index the archives have put online, and honestly marked open, with the documents that could yet answer it named on his page. Where a claim is only probable, the person's page says so plainly.

The Friths are the family of Joan Kathleen Frith, who married Eddie Brock in 1937 — and their country, before it was Hull, was the other bank of the Humber. The line enters the record with William Frith, a stonemason born about 1771, who married Mary Dobbs at Brocklesby, the Pelhams' estate village, on Christmas Eve 1795 — both of them signing their names in confident hands, at a date when most working couples made a mark — and settled in Great Grimsby as the old borough began rebuilding around its new dock. Whose son William was, no record yet says: that is this family's wall, mapped honestly on his page, with the documents that could still answer it named.

The work runs in stone and then in brick: William and his son David were Grimsby's masons — David enrolled a Freeman of the borough in 1830, noticed in the Hull Packet at his death as "Mr. David Frith, stonemason" — and David's son John Henry laid bricks in Hull for forty years. But the Frith story is not a steady climb; it is rise, fall, and hold. David died at thirty-eight. John Henry, twice widowed, ended his days in the Hull workhouse in 1892 — in the very years his son Samuel was making the family's boldest mark. Samuel kept the fruit shop at 14 Chapel Lane, between the Grapes Inn and a belting works, and carried its trade onto the quays: president of the Hull district of the Dockers' Union within a year of its founding, the man who stood up after the great strike of 1893 was beaten and told the town they were "not knocked out", bound over in 1896 for demanding an extra man on an orange gang — and remembered in the family as the friend of Labour's founders who "was asked to go to London to meet Keir Hardie".

Again and again on these pages, it is the women who carry the family through. When David died in 1847, his widow Jane took eight children across the Humber and kept an inn on Salthouse Lane — every Frith here descends from her crossing. Mary Ann Wood died of consumption at thirty with her husband at the bedside; his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Kirby, came to the altar from a census page that had written her off in one bleak word, and her daughter was raised a Frith. By 1901 the Chapel Lane shop was Alice's, "on her own account". And when the next war made Lydia a widow at thirty-four, she fed three children from a corner shop on Ceylon Street — the trade she had known since girlhood — and was still, in the family's notice fifty-five years later, "dearly beloved wife of the late Samuel David". The children of this line kept losing parents young — John Henry at thirteen, Samuel at nine, Lydia at eight, Joan at three — and each time the family re-formed and went on.

The wars cut deepest here of all the site's families. Samuel and Alice lost three sons: George to the Boer War, Walter — gassed in France — in 1927, and Samuel David, serjeant of the Hull Commercials, at Oppy Wood on the 3rd of May 1917, Hull's blackest day. His body lay on the battlefield for more than three years and was known at last by the wallet he carried; his headstone bears no epitaph, and his widow's verse in the Mail asked the town to understand what a smile could hide. His daughter Joan grew up over the Ceylon Street counter — "shews much intelligence", says her 1922 school report, kept with her original birth certificate — served her working life at Thornton Varley's, and in 1937, at St Giles', Marfleet, married Eddie Brock. The second war set the women moving again — the Hull house lent to a bombed-out couple, Joan and the boys at a Lancashire farm, her brother George's airgraphs coming home from Basra — and with Joan the Frith name joins the Brock line this whole site descends from.

Every generation of this account stands on original records — the Brocklesby, Grimsby, Sculcoates and Lowgate registers read in the clerks' own hands, the family's kept certificates and letters, the newspapers that carried their unions, inquests and griefs, and the war-graves file that brought Samuel in from the field. Where the trail runs out — William's parents, George's Boer War record — the pages say so plainly, and say exactly where the answer might still be found.

The Harrisons are Harriet's people — the line that met the Drewerys at Eastrington church in 1908 — and theirs is the one story in this archive with almost no journey in it. From a wedding at Thorganby in 1754 to Harriet's death at South Cave in 1967, the whole line lives inside ten miles of low country where the Derwent meets the Ouse: Foggathorpe and Breighton, the Eight and Forty, Laxton, Eastrington, Sandholme. Every other family here travelled to its story. The Harrisons stayed, and the story came to them — the enclosure came, the chapel came, the railway came, and at last a platelayer from the railway's own cottages married the labourer's daughter.

At the top stands the wedding: Thomas Harrison of Holme parish and Ann Baylier of Thorganby, married by banns at St Helen's on the 3rd of November 1754 — the record Mum never found, recovered by sweeping the county for the bride's rare surname. Thomas farmed at Foggathorpe and was buried from it in 1786; where he was born is the line's honest wall, and his page says so plainly. His son George settled at Breighton on the Derwent bank — labourer by the registers, husbandman by the church-court file: for in 1787 the family stood at the centre of a village slander war heard before the Archbishop's court at York, and George's wife Hannah swore her careful, plain deposition and signed it with her mark. The file survives complete, and with it something rarer than a verdict — the reported speech of a hamlet street in the summer of 1787.

George's son Robert married Ann Woodall at Howden Minster in 1806 and walked the levels for fifty years — New Village, North Cave and its bleakly named hamlet of Bedlam, Blacktoft, the Eight and Forty on Wallingfen — twelve children christened along the road and five of them buried small. The great common that named the Eight and Forty had been enclosed within his parents' memory; the Harrisons lived in its houses as wage men, and Robert's youngest son was still on Wallingfen at the century's end. Two boys were baptised at the Wesleyan chapel in Newport and quietly re-baptised at the parish church eight years later; and one son carried his mother's surname into the world as a christian name: Woodall.

Woodall's life holds the family's whole pattern in one span. Boarded out at eleven; farm servant at twenty-one in a Laxton farmhouse where the house servant was Harriet Wainman, eighteen — married at Howden Minster within the year, both signing with marks. Fined a shilling once for a straying horse; bereaved of his first child and of his last; grandfather-in-residence to a houseful of the next generation; and in his sixties raised to farm bailiff for a Dewsbury family's Eastrington farm, with an obituary that gave him what few labourers ever get — a printed character: "His honest, straightforward character won the respect of all who knew him. He was particularly successful in feeding and rearing cattle." Service was the women's road in every generation: Harriet Wainman in the Hills' farmhouse; her granddaughters out to place from the two-roomed house on Station Road, where John Harrison — who signed his 1911 schedule in a firm hand, ten children born, eight living — raised the half of the family that wasn't at its grandparents'. His grandson remembered him digging dykes and cleaning rivers around Eastrington all his working life.

The last Harrison in this line is Harriet Ann: school-girl at her grandparents', general servant at a Newhay farmhouse at seventeen, "of the Parish of Selby" when her banns were read, and home to Eastrington church to marry Tom Drewery the platelayer — the trade of the street she grew up beside. Her Sandholme garden is remembered on her page in her granddaughter's own words. What the next passes owe this branch: the top-rung question (Escrick or Holme — one age in a Bubwith burial register may decide it); the Bayleys of Thorganby, whose churchyard has yet to be walked for stones; and three whole lines Mum left ready in her notebook — the Wainmans of Laxton back to about 1693, the Scotts of New Fields back to 1713, and the Woodalls of Selby and Howden. And one coincidence the research only discovered at its end: the village where Thomas and Ann were married in 1754 is the village where, two and a half centuries later, this history is being written. The road home had been travelled before anyone knew it was one.

The Houltons came off the north Lincolnshire land. Joseph Houlton — born about 1784 at North Elkington, high on the Wolds, by his own account to the census — spent his working life as a farm labourer, and by 1841 he and his wife Mary were at Thealby, a hamlet of Burton upon Stather above the Humber. Their son John broke the pattern by a single trade: at twenty-four he was the hamlet's shoemaker with a cottage of his own, a few doors from his parents, and a shoemaker — cordwainer, salesman at a shoe shop, boot and shoe maker, shopman, as the censuses variously styled him — he remained for fifty years, on whichever side of the Humber he lived.

The middle of the century turned the family twice. In 1844 one opening of the Burton upon Stather burial register took both John's young wife Sarah and their infant daughter Christiana, and by 1850 he had buried a second wife, Ann, in Hull; his third marriage, to Mary Ann Temperton at the Primitive Methodists' Mill Street chapel, finally settled him in the Old Town courts — De la Pole Court, Winter Alley, James Place, Lock's Place — where Alice and her brothers and sisters grew up over the shoemaking. His father's end was harder: widowed in 1846, Joseph was found by the 1851 census living alone at the Boucherett Arms corner in North Willingham, twenty-five miles from Thealby, and was buried at Winterton that July, aged 67. At the foot of the register page Mum found a note in the clerk's hand — 'This man committed suicide' — which this site repeats only as she recorded it.

The line joins the spine through Alice, born in the parish of St Mary in 1859 and received into the church at St Mary's, Lowgate, aged ten. In 1877, at the same church, she married Samuel David Frith, and her son Samuel David carries this line to the present family. Mum built the frame of these pages from the censuses, the registers and her certificate for the 1850 chapel wedding; this pass has read every reachable record at the image — confirming her throughout, moving two of John's children under the register-named mothers, and finding the register's own words for old John in 1901: 'Living on Parish'. Above Joseph the record has not yet been found: his baptism is unindexed on every service searched, his wife Mary has neither maiden name nor grave, and the page says so plainly.

The Oates were a Hull family of skilled tradesmen, and their story is told in the descent of a trade. It runs to Christopher Oates, a master cordwainer — a shoemaker with his own shop and his own apprentices, buried by his trade at Holy Trinity in 1796; down through his son Christopher, a sailmaker; to that Christopher's son William, a joiner; and to William's daughter Mary Elizabeth, born in 1847. Each generation kept a skilled man's craft, and yet the ground fell away beneath them: master, then bankrupt, then a wandering journeyman, until Mary Elizabeth's marriage into the rising Richmond keel family steadied the line again.

The fall is documented plainly. Christopher the sailmaker took his family south across the Humber, to Scawby near Brigg, and reached for the grocer's trade there; it ended in 1838 in the Lincolnshire Insolvent Debtors' Court, in a newspaper report of seven children round a hearth and a father who could neither read nor write. Ruined, he went to sea as an able seaman in middle age. His son William followed the building trade the other way — west, over the Pennines to Manchester and Salford, where Mary Elizabeth was born, and on to Boston and Bedfordshire before the family came home to Hull. And the workhouse took one of them: Christopher's widow Maria, a pauper inmate of the Sculcoates Union Workhouse in 1871.

Through Mary Elizabeth the line joins the spine. She married Samuel Richmond, a Hull keelman, in 1871, and through their daughter Minnie the Oateses join the Richmonds and the Brocks. The record stands here, evidenced, from Mary Elizabeth back to Christopher the cordwainer — the baptisms of 1795 and 1821, the marriages at Holy Trinity in 1819 and at Louth in 1788, the cordwainer's burial, the seaman's ticket and the 1838 insolvency read this pass at the register, census, ticket and newspaper images; the rest — William's 1845 marriage among them — confirmed at the index and on Janet Brock's own reading. Above Christopher the master cordwainer the record does not yet reach: his own parents are unknown, and no baptism survives for him at Hull — and the page says so plainly.

The Padgets are Littleport people — agricultural labourers of the Isle of Ely's northernmost parish, where the black fen meets the Ouse — and in every record we hold they stay within a mile or two of the river. The line as the record gives it begins on 9 June 1792, when Thomas Padget, twenty-two, a labourer, married Mary Aspland at Littleport by licence, her father standing bondsman; Mary's own baptism of July 1770 is in the transcript book, daughter of William and Elizabeth Aspland. Nine children followed between 1793 and 1817 — the eldest born over the Norfolk border at Welney — with the infant burials in among the baptisms, and a pair of twins.

Their world is on the register pages beside them. The 1815 opening that holds Susanna's baptism reads Labourer down the whole trade column; eleven months later the parish rose in the Littleport riots, and the vicar who had christened her fled his ransacked vicarage while five men went to the gallows at Ely. In 1841 the family stand next door to Barbers at Sandhill and to Crabbs at Ten Mile Bank; in 1851 John Padget is in the Cambridge Independent Press, the labourer who watched a bather drown below Littleport bridge and rowed out with a Thomas Crabb in the second boat to bring the body home. The endings are the fen labourer's: Thomas and Mary entered together in 1851, both eighty-one, as paupers; their granddaughter Susanna widowed to two rooms at The City, a pauper among a street of widowed paupers, and at the last one of six widows in a row at The Holmes.

The family joins this tree twice, through two sisters. Susanna married Thomas Crabb in 1835 — by banns, with her parents' consent, signing with her mark — and their son Isaac carries the Crabb spine; Hannah married Jacob Barber in 1842 and followed the fen migration to Hull; and in 1869 Hannah's daughter Rachel married Susanna's son Isaac, tying the knot a second time in the next generation. The pages stand on three hands, kept distinct: Mum's twenty-five years (the licence's contents, the census readings, the inquest transcript she found), the records this pass read at the images (Susanna's baptism and marriage, Mary Aspland's baptism, the widow censuses, the newspaper page), and the transcript indexes between. Two walls are stated plainly: Thomas's own beginning — no baptism at Littleport despite a leaf-by-leaf read of his birth-years, a John and Mary Pagett of 1770 the nearest candidates — and the maiden name of John's wife Mary, waiting in an undigitised Littleport marriage register at the record office.

The Richmonds are Minnie's people — Eddie's mother's line — and they are the family that arrived by water. For four generations their address was as often a vessel as a house: a keel at Thorne Quay, a barge at a Rotherham lock, a sloop in Humber Dock. They begin in the records as Richman, watermen of Thorne, when that town was the inland port of the Don — a place that built keels, rigged them, and married its mariners in batches; the register year in which William Richman took his second wife reads like a muster of the river, nine mariners and a shipwright in a single Lady-Day year. The line runs William (born about 1746, and the register names his father, a Henry Richmond, one step beyond the tree) — Henry — Samuel — Minnie: waterman, waterman-master, keel owner, and the shipowner's daughter who married the machinist.

The Thorne generations lived close to the water's dangers and kept its habits. William married twice — Sarah Brown in 1779, dead at twenty-three within eighteen months; Hannah Kettle in 1783 — and both registers keep the same small asymmetry: the waterman made his mark, and his brides signed their names. Hannah died in June 1804, and the burial register says why in a correction the leaf still shows: the clerk wrote "Killed", struck it through, and entered "Accidental Death." Her youngest child, Henry, was seventeen months old. That Henry — the ninth child, carrying the name of a dead brother and of his grandfather — became a keel master himself, and his life held the family's darkest season: married in London in 1832, at St George in the East among the Wapping docks (why there is still the line's best mystery), he buried his wife Ann and their infant daughter twenty-one days apart in the autumn of 1841, both from Thorne Waterside. He married again the following June — Selina Hirst, a collier's daughter from Elsecar, born to the digging end of the coal trade and married into the carrying end — and on census night 1861 the enumerator found no house at all: the whole family, seven of them, asleep aboard Henry's keel, the Ann.

Samuel, aged eleven on the Ann that night, is the line's full arc in one life. Master of the Mayflower at twenty — his mate stood witness at his wedding twenty-four days later, where Samuel signed with a mark and his bride, Mary Elizabeth Oates, a joiner's daughter born in the family's Manchester years, signed her name. The 1881 census caught his world in two halves sixty miles apart: the master aboard the Marion at Ickles Lock, the head of the Rotherham navigation, and the Spyvee Street household with no head present — his wife "keelman's wife", his brother a keelman, his widowed mother in the house as nurse, six weeks before Minnie was born there. Then the climb ashore: registered owner of the steam keel Reliance by 1890, "keel owner" in Kelly's, and by the 1901 census "Ship owner… Employer" at 17 Pennington Street. The Reliance earned her newspaper file — robbed twice, and in 1906 the heroine of the case of the two Reliances, when Samuel's steam keel salvaged a sinking sloop of the same name and an Admiralty court gave him almost nothing for it. In 1911, a widower of sixty, he remarried as "Ship's Captain" — and signed the register in a careful hand: somewhere in forty years the master had learned his letters. Seven months later the Reliance was found derelict off Grimsby, her lights still burning; Samuel and his engineer came ashore at Easington, but the boat and cargo were gone, and the family remembered what the loss cost him. The 1912 directory closes the working life in one word: lighterman. He died in 1930 and left no estate to prove.

The women of this line kept its shore. Selina raised her predecessor's five children and eleven of her own, ran the household as "Head" when the census found Henry away on the water, and worked into widowhood — "nurse", the 1881 schedule says, in a house that six weeks later needed one. Mary Elizabeth kept the Spyvee Street half of a divided household for thirty years and died at Pennington Street a year before the wreck. And Minnie, born into the crowded Joseph's Terrace house and raised at the shipowner's table, married William Edmond Brock at St Mark's in 1905 — the register set her father down in one word, "Sailor" — and carried the line into the Brock story. Fifty years of Hull addresses later, at Wilton House on Holderness Road, the Queen stopped in front of her on the 17th of May 1957 — her birthday — and asked whether she was happy there. "Very, very happy, thank you, ma'am," she said: the only words of a Richmond this archive holds in her own voice.

What the next passes owe this branch: Ann Dobson's identity and the 1832 London register (one batched Ancestry month at the LMA's St George in the East books); the generation the Thorne register hands over — Henry Richmond senior, and Hannah's parents John and Susannah Kettle — waiting on a decision to build them; the Reliance's official number in the shipping registers, and the earlier Hull Packet robbery's date; Samuel's drifting birth year, to be settled by the GRO index; and Minnie's grave reference at the Eastern Cemetery. The keels themselves are gone — the last traded under sail within living memory of the war — but for a hundred and fifty years this family's addresses were vessels, and the registers, censuses and court reports on these pages are the wake they left.

The Scotts are the family of Annie Elizabeth Scott, who married John Harrison in 1880 — and their country, for three generations, was the flat farming ground of Howdenshire around Thorpe Lidgett, Cavil and Newfields, where the Derwent and the Ouse run out into the Humber levels. But they did not begin there. The line reaches back with certainty to Ralph Scott, born not in the levels at all but at Dunnington, a village east of York, in 1713; and above him the register names one man more — his father, David Scott, a miller — and then stops. That is the Scott wall, and it is an honest one: a miller of Dunnington, a name with no record yet behind it.

What the generations between show is a family drifting down a river and quietly down the world. From Dunnington the Scotts came to the Ouse-bank parishes of Blacktoft and Yokefleet — where Ralph's son Solomon, baptised at Blacktoft in 1756, rose to be the parish clerk, the reading-and-writing office of a small riverside parish — and then worked their way up the levels into Cavil and Eastrington, where Solomon's son Ralph married in 1812 and was set down in the register as a 'Husbandman', a small tenant farmer. After him the fall is plain in the records themselves: his son George, and the Scotts who followed him, worked as agricultural labourers and signed their names with a mark. In two generations the family lost both its letters and its land — the parish clerk's grandson George could claim neither a field of his own nor the writing of his own name — and stayed put, in the same few fields, to do it.

As so often on this site, it is the women who hold the line together and carry it onward. Elizabeth Holliday, married to the husbandman Ralph in 1812, outlived him by eighteen years, living on at Thorpe Lidgett into her eighties in her children's houses, the census at the last setting her down in the old country name, 'Bessy Scott, widow'; her maiden name she gave to a son, Holliday Scott, and to the family's memory. Her daughter-in-law Mary Ann Stainley brought her own widowed father, George Stainley of Asselby, under the Scott roof in his old age — the one record that names and places him — and so opened a line of her own. And it was Mary Ann's daughter Annie who carried the line into this history: she married John Harrison at Eastrington in 1880, making her mark where he signed, and through their daughter Harriet Ann — who married Thomas Batty Drewery — the Scott line reaches the Drewerys, and the Brocks. The records that carry the recent generations — Annie's parents' marriage of 1854, her grandparents' of 1812, the censuses of 1861 and 1871 — are read here at the register image; the deep spine at Blacktoft and Dunnington rests on Janet Brock's own reading of the older books; and where the trail runs out, above Ralph at Dunnington, the page names what a deeper read might still find.

The Stubbs are a Lincolnshire Marsh family — people of Alvingham and North Cockerington, the rich low farming country behind the sea-bank near Louth. They begin, so far as we can prove them, with William Stubbs, a carpenter and wheelwright of Alvingham baptised in 1752, who married Frances Addison of Saltfleetby; and they rise in a single generation, for William's son Christopher, born in 1786, left the workshop for the land and became a farmer of two hundred acres. The wives came from the parishes around — Frances from Saltfleetby, out toward the coast; Mary Waters from Ludford Magna, up on the Wolds. Above William the descent is Janet Brock's, tentatively, to a Thomas Stubbs and Mary Rose — but a fourteen-year gap leaves that link unproven, and the evidenced line ends with the carpenter.

Christopher Stubbs was the height of the family. By 1851 he farmed two hundred acres at Alvingham, by 1861 two hundred and four, employing the labourers of the village — a substantial farmer among the principal men of his parish, a name the county sale-notices could point buyers to. In the spring of 1863 he sold up — a day's auction on the premises, fifty-two sheep and thirty-eight beasts and seven named horses cried off by the auctioneer — and retired inland to West Ashby, where he died in 1875. His estate did not pass quietly: it was fought over a decade later in a Chancery suit of Stubbs against Stubbs.

The line leaves the Marsh through a daughter. Christopher's Eliza married George Brock, a miller of the Isle of Axholme, and when he died of smallpox in 1869 she took their children to Hull — where the master miller's sons became warehouse hands and oil-mill labourers, and the family's story passes from the Lincolnshire land into the industrial town. Through Eliza the Stubbs join the Brock spine, and run on to William Henry Brock and his descendants. The recent generations are read at the census and the register index — Eliza's own baptism recovered where Janet Brock's page had left a gap, the 1851 farm and the 1863 dispersal sale read at the image; the deeper Marsh years rest on Janet's own research, and above the carpenter of 1752 the record does not yet reach.

The Thomases are Jenny's people — the Devon fisher-line that married into the Crabb family at a Newington altar in 1905 — and their story begins in Cornwall. In December 1781 the register of St Mary's, Brixham, married two strangers to the parish: 'John Thomas of the parish of Loggon in Cornwall, sojourner of this parish, and Priscilla Maddick, sojourner in this parish' — a mariner of Illogan, baptised there in 1754, and both of them signing with marks. Their children were baptised on the move around the Devon ports, some at the Independent chapels of Devonport and Plymouth Dock — the family's first recorded dissent, long before anyone owned an Army bonnet — and the next two generations tell one story twice: William, mariner, married Jane Soper at Brixham in 1810, fathered one son, and was dead by 1815; that son William, master mariner, married Eleanor Clarke Peters on Valentine's Day 1836, fathered three children, and was dead by 1848, 'possibly at sea'. Both widows remarried; neither husband has a grave.

The second widow's remarriage turned the family's course. Eleanor — a Brixham cooper's daughter — married the mariner from along King Street, John Vivians, in 1848; and when the smacksmen's discovery of the Silver Pits pulled the Brixham fleet to the Humber in the 1850s, her blended household went with it, her teenaged son George Thomas among them. The family split between the two great fishing ports: the Vivians settled at Grimsby, where Eleanor — widowed a second time — kept a grocer's shop on Church Street and died in 1900, aged eighty-six, at her daughter's; George made his life at Hull. He married Jane Ardington, a Hemingbrough joiner's daughter, at the Register Office in 1865, raised eight children in the courts off Great Thornton Street, and rose to skipper — an employed man on other men's smacks to the end, at sea so constantly that three censuses running could not find him. In March 1886 the Hull Daily Mail carried the report he brought ashore: his second hand, George Cant, swept overboard near Spurn from the smack the paper called the Burton — her crew agreements, found in Hull's archives, name her the Burton Constable — George Thomas, skipper; George Cant, second hand; drowned, washed overboard by shipping a sea, in the ship's own record. He held her command for some three years, and the sea was not done with his crew: the returns record a second drowning in 1889 — Edward Skelton, the apprentice cook who had risen to second hand under him, lost when the boat capsized boarding fish to the cutter. The smack world itself — the Silver Pits, the sixty-fourth shares, the apprentices, the fleet that rose and vanished inside George's working life — is told in a context piece on his page.

The line's last Thomas is its brightest thread. Jane — born the 7th of December 1881 at 2 New Buildings, Great Thornton Street, and called Jenny all her life because her father came home from sea to find her christened Jane against his wishes — braided trawl nets as a girl, joined the Salvation Army, and in November 1905 married the Salvationist coal-boy Alfred Crabb at Newington: the marriage that joins this page's two halves. Her parents kept their distance — though her brother Harry signed the register — and yet when old George died in 1916 his address was 61 Edinburgh Street, two doors from Jenny's family at No. 57. Her birth certificate, which Mum obtained in 1983, quietly corrects the year the family always gave her; her funeral in September 1972 left from her daughter Ida's house at 162 Boothferry Road for the Icehouse Citadel — a Salvationist sixty-seven years after the wedding — and the photograph on her page shows her at the end of that life, holding her great-granddaughter Jane: the disputed name, an heirloom. What the next passes owe this branch: the Ardingtons of Hemingbrough, whom Mum traced to the 1720s; the Peters, Soper and Maddick hinterland of Brixham; the Vivian cousinage of Grimsby; the original Burton Constable articles ordered from Hull's archives, which will give the two drownings in the clerk's own hand; and the at-sea schedules of the 1881 and 1891 censuses, which may yet name the other smacks George served.

The Veritys are a Yorkshire Dales family — of Kettlewell and Burnsall, high in Upper Wharfedale, the Craven country at the head of the dale — and tradesmen for as far back as the line reaches. It runs to William Verity, a cartwright, married at Kettlewell in 1790; down through his son Abraham, a shoemaker; to Abraham's son Frederick, an iron moulder; and to Frederick's daughter Clara, born in 1856. The trade shifts a rung with each generation — cartwright, shoemaker, moulder — and so does the ground beneath them: from the Dales, down to the industrial West Riding at Bradford and Leeds, and at the last across the Pennines into the cotton-and-iron towns of the Tame valley.

For three generations they came down and along. Abraham the shoemaker left Kettlewell for Bradford and then Leeds, where the 1841 census finds him at Bridgesfield Row with his first wife, Mary Holliday, and their children. It was his son Frederick who crossed the hills — an iron moulder, he went to Stalybridge, Dukinfield and Oldham, not for the cotton but for the iron the mills were built upon — and there, at Dukinfield, the 1871 census holds the family: Frederick still at the moulder's work at fifty-one, his daughters in the cotton mills, and a nephew and niece taken into the house.

Through Clara the line runs on. She married Thomas Wilson, a Hull-born iron moulder who had come to Oldham for that same trade — so the foundry work stood on both sides of the marriage — and through Clara's daughter Lydia the Veritys join the Wilsons, the Friths and the Brocks. The record stands here from Clara back to William the cartwright, read this pass at the register and census images — the marriages of 1850 and 1859 and the Dukinfield census at the leaf, the rest confirmed at the index and on Janet Brock's own reading. Abraham's 1850 marriage certificate names his father, William Verity, cartwright, and carries the line to the top of the page. Above William the record does not yet certainly reach: a William Verity christened at Skipton in 1759 is the probable origin, no more — and the page says so plainly.

The Wilsons are a Hull family — Sculcoates people, of the crowded parishes on the north edge of the old town — and metalworkers for as far back as the record reaches. The line runs to James Wilson, a whitesmith, baptised at Holy Trinity in 1761, and, above him, to his father John Willson — a name Mum had already read from the same baptism and set on her page, now confirmed against the original register and its Bishop's Transcript, and built into the tree. For five generations they worked iron within a few Sculcoates streets: James at the whitesmith's fine, cold bench; his son Peter a blacksmith at the Foundry on Gibson Street; Peter's son and grandson, James Henry and Thomas, iron moulders casting metal at the same works; and the trade reaching, at the last, into Earle's shipyard on the Humber. Gibson Street held them for three generations — from Peter's forge to the house where James Henry died.

The one time they left Hull, they went for the iron, not the cotton. In the 1870s Thomas carried the moulder's trade west to Oldham — to cast the machinery that spun Lancashire's cotton — and the iron-working family followed him, so that the Wilson children were Oldham-born and one married-in wife came from Scotland. But loss turned them home: Thomas's young wife Clara died in 1890, at thirty-four, at the family's houses in Hull, and he brought the children back to the Sculcoates streets and the trade they had always known.

Through Thomas's daughter Lydia the line runs out of iron and into the Friths — she married Samuel David Frith in 1906 — and on, through her daughter Joan, to the Brocks. The record here stands unbroken from Lydia back to James in 1761, most of it read from Mum's own certificates and the registers of Holy Trinity and Sculcoates; the father Mum recorded above James is now confirmed against the register and its transcript and built into the tree, and where his mother, or John Willson's own beginnings, remain unproven, the pages say so plainly.

The Woods are the family of Mary Ann Wood, who married John Henry Frith in 1854 — and their country, before it was Hull, was Darley Dale, in the Derwent valley of Derbyshire. The line reaches back with certainty to Anthony Wood, baptised at Darley in 1745, whose own father the register names as John Wood but takes no further; from Anthony it runs down through his son George, an agricultural labourer of the dale, to George's son Samuel, born there in 1805 — the one who left. Above John Wood the record thins, and the page says so; the single Darley marriage of the right years, John Wood to a Johanna Prince in 1727/8, offers Anthony's mother only as a probability, not yet tied to his baptism.

Samuel Wood carried the line off the land. He was in Hull before he was thirty, and married there in 1831 — the register catching him at a trade the family never kept in memory, 'Mariner', before the carts took over: truckman through the 1840s, 'brickman' at his daughter's wedding, and, in his widow's plain word at the last, a 'General Carrier'. The family settled at Anne Street, in St Mary's parish, Sculcoates, and stayed. One small thing the records keep marks the change the city worked on them: Samuel and his wife both signed their names in 1831, in a good hand, where their Hull-born daughter Mary Ann would make her mark at her own wedding a generation later.

As so often on this site, it is the women who carry the family through. Mary Ann married John Henry Frith at seventeen and died of consumption before she was thirty, in 1866, her husband at the bedside; her second child, Samuel David Frith, would grow up to lead the Hull dockers. Behind her stands her mother, Elizabeth Graham — a Hull woman baptised 'Betsey' — who was widowed in 1859 and held the household together for another quarter-century: keeping a shop, taking in her daughter's motherless Frith children, and ending her days with her son George, risen to manage the Vauxhall Tavern on Hessle Road. Through Mary Ann and her son Samuel David, the Wood line joins the Friths, and the Brocks. The Hull records that carry the family — Mary Ann's baptism and marriage, and Samuel and Elizabeth's — are read here at the register image; the Darley Dale origins are confirmed on FamilySearch, matching Janet Brock's own reading generation by generation; and where the trail runs out, above John Wood at Darley, the page names what a deeper read might still find.