READER STORY
A lot of hard work and determination – and ingenious lateral thinking – helped Judith Bennett uncover some remarkable family secrets, impressing Claire Vaughan
How lateral thinking helped Judith Bennett uncover her family’s secrets
ot everyone who dives into their family history discovers a story that would be worthy of the plot of a gripping historical novel. But Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine reader Judith Bennett followed the clues to try to track down a mysterious French forebear, discovering along the way a passionate affair, a bloody suicide and a man who fought for his principles and paid the price. Uncovering the truth about her McConchy ancestors involved some of the most challenging investigative work the magazine has seen – it’s a truly riveting tale.
“I started researching in about 1990. There was a story in my husband’s family, that one of his forebears was an admiral in the Brazilian Navy. That was really what started it. Then my brother and I started looking at our own family,” Judith tells me. “Our mother, Jessie Tighe née Freeman, told several stories about her side of the family, including that her grandfather had built Eastbourne and that there was a French ancestor who had come to England as a refugee from the French Revolution – one Marie Maconchée.”
The first of these myths was easily investigated. “My grandmother was born Esther Ellis, and I soon discovered that her father, Thomas Benjamin Ellis, did indeed build Eastbourne. The 1871 census shows him as a bricklayer – not the grand developer of our legends.” The Frenchwoman was more of an enigma.
Working her way back through the Ellis line, Judith came to her great great grandfather Benjamin Ellis who had married a Mary McConchy Colwell. This immediately set alarm bells ringing. Was this Marie Maconchée?
The Colwells, it turned out, hailed from East Dean near Eastbourne. Mary McConchy Colwell was baptised there in 1807, the second of William and Louisa Colwell’s six children. So there was no French link there. Undeterred, Judith turned her attention to William and Louisa, finding Louisa on the 1851 and 1861 censuses with her birthplace listed as Chelsea, London, c1782. Several of her children had McConchy as a second name, so Judith wondered if it could have been Louisa’s maiden name. But her baptism remained elusive.
The only possible record relating to the family was the baptism of a Sophia born to a Robert and Mary McConchy at St Luke’s in Chelsea in 1773 – the right timeframe and place for them to have been Louisa’s parents.
Where there’s a will…
Judith spent a lot of time researching Robert and Mary, locating their wills at The National Archives. “In her will, Mary signs herself Mary McConchy, of Chapel Row, Little Chelsea. She died first, in 1800, leaving all her worldly goods – including shares in Sun Fire Insurance – to ‘my beloved friend Robert McConchy’.”
Robert, perhaps something other than her husband, died five years later. His will was much fuller and contained a stunning piece of information. Judith explains: “After bequests of £100 to two goddaughters and to two friends, he left ‘to my adopted daughter Louisa L– my cottage at Claypool in Lincolnshire and the rest of my property in the Sun Fire Office’.” So Louisa was adopted – the plot thickened.
“As is often the way, most of the vital word – Louisa’s birth surname – was illegible.” Judith tried everything to decipher the squiggle, even approaching a palaeographer, who suggested it could be ‘Lockyer’. Could the Sun Fire documents mentioned in Robert’s will hold the key? She headed to the Guildhall Library where they were held. “I traced the shareholdings that Robert had acquired, and their transfer to ‘ his executrix’ – unnamed in these documents, but the fact that it was a woman was promising.”
Judith then consulted the shares registers – where she found exactly what she was looking for. “She had decided to cash in her inheritance,” says Judith. The document included the words: “We Louisa Colwell (late Louisa Locher executrix of the last will and testament of Robert McConchy of the Parish of Kensington in the County of Middlesex deceased).”
So Louisa’s maiden name was Locher! This was a big thrill for Judith. “Seeing the share certificates was amazing because it linked the Lochers, the McConchys and the Colwells.”
Knowing Louisa’s surname unlocked more doors, and Judith found a marriage at St James’s Piccadilly, on 15 April 1805, for a Louiza Lockie and William Colewell. “I was pretty confident this was the right couple.”
Sifting through all of the leads relating to Robert McConchy, she uncovered something else interesting. The land tax records on
Seeing the share certificates was amazing because it linked the Lochers, the McConchys and the Colwells
showed that he occupied property in Little Chelsea. “I noticed that a great many houses in the area belonged to a Lewis Locher.” For the second time in her search, alarm bells rang. The records were scans of the original documents, and studying them Judith realised that the word that looked like ‘Locher’ in some places looked like ‘Lockie’ in others. Suddenly it clicked: “It wasn’t a dotted ‘ i’, but an acute accent above an ‘e’ – ‘Lochée’.” It was French. So who was Lewis Lochée? Did he fit into her family somewhere?
Hunting for links
First Judith tried to find a link between Lewis and Louisa. There was a marriage for a Lewis Lochée, described as being “of Camberwell”, to an Elizabeth Dubourg by licence at St James’s, Westminster, on 26 August 1767. They had two children Elizabeth Teresa and John, but there was no sign of Louisa. Further investigations into the family revealed that John died aged 39 in a truly shocking episode.
“Perhaps he was unbalanced,” says Judith. “He tried to get a job in the Army and then the legal profession, but finished up as a bookseller. He cut his throat in Covent Garden. It sounds as if it was a pretty bloody occasion.” Judith came across an obituary for him, which later turned out to be a crucial part of the jigsaw.
There was a huge amount of information about Lewis online – including an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ( oxforddnb.com). “Lewis was the founder and proprietor of a military academy, a sort of finishing school for prospective soldiers.” Some of the buildings that housed the academy still stand – one of them is now the Hollywood Arms in the King’s Road area of Chelsea. Lewis even received a pension from George III towards the academy’s running costs. “He was a prolific writer on military subjects, particularly field fortification. Some of his essays were published by Thomas Egerton of the Military Library of Charing Cross and Whitehall.”
Lewis had been naturalised, which confirmed he was born overseas. The record was held at the House of Lords Library. “He was naturalised on 8 May 1780. The Act of Parliament revealed that he was born in Brussels, the son of John and Theresa Lochée. No birth date was given.” But the most exciting revelations were to come.
In 1789–1790 there was an uprising in Brabant (now western Belgium) against the Austrian Empire. Lewis went to fight for the cause as part of La Légion Belge. The Brabantine Revolution was a short-lived affair. Judith came across some fascinating newspaper reports, including one in The Gentleman’s Magazine, that mentioned Lewis. It seems he was killed – or perhaps executed – outside Lille on 8 June 1791.
“I think he was quite likely a political exile from Austrian rule. And if he wasn’t, then maybe his parents were.” Perhaps this is where the émigré element of the family myth came from.
“The thing that really niggles me is we don’t really know why or how he died,” says Judith. “There are so many stories about it on the internet – one account even refers to a son, also called Lewis, being held as a hostage. I can find absolutely no evidence of another Lewis, so I discounted this story.”
Despite a gut feeling that Louisa was Lewis’s daughter, Judith couldn’t find any proof. “His will of 1787 names his wife Elizabeth as his heir, and guardian of their son John in his minority.” There is no mention of Louisa.
However, one day a search on findmy past.co.uk bore fruit in the shape of a record for an Anna Maria Louisa Lochée, daughter of Lewis Lochée and Mary Egerton, baptised at St George’s, Hanover Square, in 1784. “When I discovered this, I felt wildly excited. I went to a family history society meeting about half an hour afterwards and enjoyed spilling the beans to everybody there.”
Lewis’s wife was called Elizabeth, so
The thing that really niggles is we don’t really know why or how Lewis died
who was Mary? The fact that her surname was recorded suggested that Louisa was illegitimate. Judith had seen the name Egerton before – Lewis’s publisher and incidentally the first publisher of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. Had he had an affair with the wife of one of the brothers who ran it – John and Thomas Egerton? Both their wives were called Mary.
“John Egerton had only married in 1783, so it seemed unlikely that his wife was carrying on with one of their writers so soon – and when he died in 1795, his will of 1793 describes his wife Mary as ‘excellence itself ’,” says Judith. By contrast, Thomas mentions no wife in his will. “I cannot prove it, but I’m fairly confident that Louisa Lochée’s mother was the wife of Thomas Egerton.”
Hot on the trail
Judith found a burial for a Mary Lochée, aged 69, at Boyton in Wiltshire in 1819. “Somewhat to my surprise, the index to the post-1858 wills showed Letters of Administration for Mary Lochée being granted to one Henry Aylmer Colwell [her grandson] in 1864. I obtained a copy of Mary’s will from The National Archives, and it lists Louisa and her children as the sole beneficiaries – proving without doubt that Louisa Colwell was the daughter of Lewis and Mary Lochée.” But why was Mary buried at Boyton?
The Kensington and Westminster Land Tax Records show a Mary Egerton living in Lower Grosvenor Street from the 1790s until 1806. “Also listed as occupier of a nearby property until his death in 1842 is Aylmer Bourke Lambert, a well-known botanist, whose ancestral home was… Boyton Manor.” Judith believes that she’ll never know the exact nature of the relationship between Mary and Lambert, but they were clearly close.
Louisa’s childhood is a mystery. “She was only about eight when her father, Lewis, died, and I assume that it was at this stage that she was adopted by the McConchy family.” She left us some clues though. Her youngest child, born about the time of Mary’s death, was named Henry Aylmer Colwell, after the owner of Boyton Manor. So she must have remained close to her birth mother. Judith found something else linking the Colwells and Lochées – the obituary for Lewis’s tragic son John was written by one of the executors of Robert’s will.
And so we reach the end of the story: a tangled web binding together members of polite society in 18thcentury London, and at the centre of it a love affair and a child who was born out of wedlock. It’s a tale that Judith, very skilfully, managed to unpick – teasing out the truth and closing the book on the missing French (well, Belgian) link in her family tree.
So what has she taken away from the experience? It’s simple really: “I’ve learned that research is a thing that I rather like!” And she’s extremely good at it.