Can you help me to trace my husband’s grandmother?
Jackie Scowen hit a brick wall while tracing a missing widow
QI have hit a brick wall trying to track down my husband’s paternal grandmother, Rosina Beatrice Hammond (a widow, née Barrett). She married Charles Scowen in Woodbridge, Suffolk, in the third quarter of 1911 (Jul- Sept) aged 31. The marriage certificate states that her father, Frederick Barrett, is deceased. I haven’t been able to find Rosina in the Suffolk 1881-1911 censuses, nor can I find her birth, earlier marriage or her father. Jackie Scowen, by email
AThe question of Rosina Beatrice Hammond née Barrett’s origins has been exercising family members for some years. People in rural areas met spouses through contact at the local market, when men and women came looking for work or through relatives and friends and, with this in mind, I repeated many of the searches already undertaken. I scoured the local censuses where Charles grew up and investigated a local Hammond family in Waldringfield where Charles lived in 1911 and in his previous home in Hadleigh.
I concluded that she was most likely not a local woman. The obvious searches in general registration for her birth and marriage also failed to find anything locally or indeed nationally. So at this point, I was not even sure if she had been born and married in England and Wales.
If she had come to the area for work in 1911 after the census was taken there seemed a strong possibility that she was recorded elsewhere in the country, but was proving difficult to find. I have written before in these pages about the power of the search engines at ancestry. co.uk and other websites and decided to strip out everything of which I was uncertain and see what result I could get.
Her name, Rosina, was information given by her on the marriage certificate so I entered this, but not her second name in case it had been assumed by her. I was unsure of her surname, Hammond or Barrett, so I left that out. Again her age is disputed so I decided against using this as a search term. I knew she was a widow so this went in. So I just searched for all Rosinas who were widowed in the 1911 census.
This provided a result that I interpret as being correct despite the wrongly transcribed data. She was returned as Rosina Beatrice Hannard aged 20 years and born in Ash.
You will see from the actual return below that she is Rosina Beatrice Hammond born in Stepney East. How this became Ash is known only to the transcriber. She was a Cook living in lodgings in Glebe Place, Chelsea. She was a widow, but volunteered that she had been married for four years. What we do not know is which four years. Was it four years past including her widowhood or four years up to becoming a widow?
A search for a marriage to Mr Hammond, was a long and fruitless task. There were many Rosinas and Hammonds, but no Barrett or variant entries. There were also possibilities for her baptism in the East End of London, but none under the name of Barrett. So there is still more to be found and a list of Stepney registers should be made and the original images searched. There were many late baptisms in that area so remember a birth is distinct from a christening.
You should also bear in mind the proximity of Glebe Place to Chelsea Barracks and the possibility that she may have married a soldier elsewhere in the United Kingdom or abroad.
The reason for Rosina’s move to rural Suffolk may have been that she found a job in the area. I did note that a William Scowen, born in Hadleigh around 1872, was a tailor’s porter in the 1901 census in Steward’s Grove near Glebe Place having been a servant in the house of a nearby barrister ten years earlier, so maybe she heard of a position through him or was introduced to Charles if he was a cousin, which seems highly likely. Steve Thomas