EUREKA MOMENT
When Trevor Green hit a brick wall trying to find his great uncle’s wife, he enlisted the help of a nun and WDYTYA? Magazine, he tells Claire Vaughan
When Trevor Green hit a brick wall trying to find his great uncle’s wife, he enlisted the help of a nun and WDYTYA? Magazine
How long have you been doing your family history?
I’ve been researching for 25 years. I’ve got back to 928. I’m very lucky in that I found a connection to heraldry, Sir John de Staunton from Leicestershire, and that took my tree back further.
What had you managed to uncover before hitting your brickwall?
William Vernon was my grandmother’s brother and February this year saw the 100th anniversary of his death from wounds at Rouen. My mother pointed out the local war memorial to me when I was a little boy and told me one of my great uncles was named on it, but I didn’t know which one and I never knew anything about him. It wasn’t until I started doing the family history and discovered the name Vernon that I looked on the war memorial and saw that my great uncle’s name must be William Vernon.
I researched the family using primary resources, such as certificates and censuses, and found out that the Vernons also had a bench in the Catholic Church in Cannock, so there were records of bench rent. From service records, I discovered that William Vernon had joined up with the South Staffordshires at the outbreak of war in 1914. His battalion was sent down to Devon in 1915 for training covering trenches and musketry. He was billeted in a place called Lamerton, which is a little village near Tavistock. William was sent to France on 15 August 1915. I contacted Whittington Barracks, in Lichfield, home of the South Staffordshires, which holds the diaries of the 8th Battalion. Using these diaries, I was able to work out where the battalion went. I knew that William’s grave was in Rouen from the Commonwealth War Graves records – I had a plot number and a grave number so I went to see it. It was very emotional. We knew William had married, but the one thing I couldn’t find out was who his wife had been.
What was stopping you progressing your research?
No one talked about him because he was the black sheep of the family. When he was down in Devon he got a girl pregnant.
How had you tried to solve it previously?
I have a friend, Sister Colette, who is a Bernardine Cistercian nun. She’s absolutely fanatical about family history and she’s been helping me try to find out who William’s wife was. We finally narrowed our search down to four individuals, but when I contacted Tavistock Record Office and asked if I could have a marriage certificate for a William Vernon, they said the father we had for William was wrong and so that put us off the trail for about three or four years. That’s when we wrote to WDYTYA? Magazine to ask for help.
What was your eureka moment?
My eureka moment was finding Emma. The magazine’s experts pointed us in the direction of the Soldiers’ Effects Register on Ancestry to find out William’s wife’s name. It was amazing to see his record with Emma’s name on it and ‘wid’ for widow written next to it. A year after his death she had claimed his back pay and a gratuity of eight pounds, one shilling and sixpence.
How did it solve the problem?
Now we had Emma’s name, we knew which of our four marriages it was. I contacted the GRO in Southport and I gave them the details. This time the certificate came back with William registered as a soldier with his regimental number so we knew it was the right one – he’d married Emma Jarman in December 1915 in Lamerton. It seems that the name of William’s father was wrong on the marriage certificate held in Tavistock.
How did you feel when you discovered the solution?
Finding Emma was wonderful – it was like finding the missing piece of a jigsaw.
Did you discover anything else interesting along the way?
Emma was a servant at Lamerton Hall. William must have received a letter from Emma saying that she was pregnant, because he returned to Devon in December 1915, and married her in St Peter’s parish church in Lamerton. The baby, Leslie, was born in January 1916, but William never saw him. He was wounded in February 1917, shipped down by train to Albert, and then to Rouen where he died. After William’s death, Emma was left a single mother. There was such a stigma that Emma left Leslie to be brought up by her brother and went to live with her sister in Birmingham. I made an appeal through the Tavistock Times for information about Emma and a man called Eric, who remembered Leslie, got in touch. He helped fill in some gaps. Sister Colette and I spent a long time trying to find out what happened to Emma and hit another brick wall. Philip Randall, Emma’s great grandson, got in touch just a few weeks ago – and told us that she had remarried in Monmouth, South Wales, to Frederick Riley in 1924. We found Emma and Frederick on the Midlands electoral register in Aston. From the information Phil gave us we found her grave in Witton cemetery – she’d died in 1949. On my father’s side, all the family are buried in Witton, so it’s come full circle.
What would your advice be to other family historians who hit an obstacle on their tree?
Never give up and get a Cistercian nun to help you!
There was such a stigma that Emma left Leslie to be brought up by her brother