a Plymouth geography question (1861 census)

[JaneyCanuck]

On this side of the Atlantic, there really isn't much understanding left of the long-term effects of WWII on Britain, even just physically. I say "even", meaning apart from the social and economic and personal hardships of the post-war years, but of course the damage to the physical infrastructure was a large part of that, particularly the destruction of housing. The London Museum has a website about the Blitz, and the bald facts and figures of that (the number of people left homeless, for instance) are ... striking isn't quite the word.

Because of family connections, more Canadians were aware of what things were like, at the time of WWII, than people in the US were, I'd say. There was an awful tendency, say in the 1960s, for people in the US to scoff at social conditions in the UK -- the war had brought enormous post-war prosperity in the US, which didn't have to rebuild whole swaths of its infrastructure, social and economic as well as physical. But while my parents were the first generation of both families to be born in Canada, around 1930, they had no contact themselves with relations back in the home country.

I have one line of family that comes from the bits of Devon and Cornwall near Plymouth, but that was in the generations before 1850. No family knowledge at all made it over the ocean when the one ancestor born there around 1850 (who had left permanently by 1870) came to Canada in about 1910 -- and he never spoke a word to his family here about his background. I have only recently found two descendants of two of his siblings, who also left the area before 1870. So while my roots there appear to go back from one set of greatx2 grandparents to long before record-keeping, it has been close to two centuries between when they were born and today.

And of course anything that has happened since then, in particular WWII, came long after my people left. So I'm ignorant of both conditions in the mid-1800s, and what has gone on since!

So all these bits of info are really interesting, and thanks for that too, hendren.


And my apologies to BradyCMH for some crossed wires earlier.

Yes, I did want to look at a modern map -- I wanted to know where to look, so I could use Google's satellite view to zoom in on the location in question, to see whether there was anything there now that was there around 1860. I realize that was unrealistic -- if the Victorian building fervour hadn't transformed the area, WWI could have. It's hard to know, looking from over here, where one is likely to find pre-Victorian building still extant (I mean, there is a lot of it!), and where it is long gone.

[Harlem]

Hi Janey

Just catching up on some posts.

Basically, the whole of the centre of Plymouth was destroyed by the bombing. If you look at a map you can see the two rivers, Tamar and Plym, meeting in Plymouth Sound. My parents survived the bombing and told me stories of it when I was a child. The 'centre' of the city was just north of where the rivers met. In spite of th e blackout , if the rivers could be seen in the moonlight, bombs dropped between them would hit something. There were some buildings that survived, but no t many. The story is told in a book called 'It came to our door', which may be available via Am...on.

 If   you look at the ruin of Charles Church on Google earth you can see a building that has been preserved in its bombed state as a memorial. My parents' wedding photo was taken in the ruin of St Andrews Church (now rebuilt) and I often think people in the future will not understand why that photo was taken there, in a grassed ruin, but the war was a big thing in their young lives and that photo tells such a story.

I think if you want to know about an area  mid-nineteenth century, your best bet is to look at the occupations of the folks in the streets you are interested in and see what class they were - class was a big thing! (Still is!) - labouring, skilled, professional? Did they have live-in servants? How crowded were the households? The census will tell you all these things.

It's good to find out the contexts of our ancestors' lives - I love doing that bit!

Harlemswife

[JaneyCanuck]

Great picture and story to go with it. I don't imagine anybody in your family will be forgetting
what that story is for a long time!

Yes indeed, I always check surrounding occupations etc. In 1871 in London, the family is
sharing an address with a theatrical impressario, which makes sense since the youngest daughter
was an actress! with a pub next door and the workhouse just around the corner.

As I mentioned earlier, the address in Plymouth on Russell St appears to be multi-family.
Determining the household's class is actually what I'm after: the husband/father was
well off enough at some point to have a draft mining lease in his name, and to have gone bankrupt ...
The actress daughter married a very wealthy young man and set up on 50 acres in Cheshire where
he was a "gentleman farmer", with 8 servants (4 of them grooms, this being a clue to her husband's
subsequent bankruptcy, I do think), while the child who was my ancestor was hauling crates in
a biscuit factory in Berkshire. But the household they grew up in, with the apparently prosperous
father, never had servants, for instance.

So indeed, exactly what their socioeconomic situation was in the earlier years is just what I'm after.
They're kind of surrounded by tradespeople -- blacksmiths and stonemasons, and a pub and a grocer
-- and a butcher and baker, but I haven't spotted a candlestick maker. A confectioner, a hairdresser;
all very "urban". Most of the dwellings seem to be multi-family. I guess "middle class" is about the
most likely characterization.

Thanks for the local WWI history. My ancestor who was a child in that household had his own family
in East London 40 years later (and then immigrated to Canada), so we here have tended to feel affinity
for the history of that area, of course including the Blitz. I only discovered 5 or 6 years ago that he was
really from Cornwall originally, so it's been a question of catching up.

[Harlem]

Hi Janey

One of my lines immigrated from Cornwall to Plymouth - I guess it was part of the general migration from the country to the cities that happened in the nineteenth century. I would normally associate that with our great northern industrial cities, but I guess Plymouth was the south-western equivalent. It sounds as though some of  your ancestors were able to take advantage of the migration upheaval and take an opportunity that enabled them to get into trade, even though that subsequently failed. Mine did likewise and in two generations had progressed socio-economically from being paupers and ag labs to being boatyard owners. No money came down to me though!!

There are also probably experts on the history of show biz on RC. I wonder if being on the stage enabled people to transcend the British class system rather like it does now, where top singers and sports people mix in the same circles as royalty.

It was WW2 - I realise that there was probably a typo, but I thought I'd mention it just in case . .

I had an ancestor who migrated to Canada in the 1930s, but his descendants don't keep in touch - they have their own lives and not everyone is as interested as we are . . . I also have an affinity with the place, having had three wonderful holidays there - and my daughter currently lives in Montreal. It's a beautiful country.

Harlemswife

[JaneyCanuck]

It was a typo.

I think it was the "trade" connection that brought the actress and the rich boy together -- his family
was into copper etc. in a big way. Or he could have been a stage door johnny, since he obviously led
a bit of the high life. She was just a bit player, I think. She was very young. It's just another of the
either/or-s I'm not likely to resolve, in terms of the class of this family! Either they met because
they were both from prosperous mining & mineral families, or they met because she was a showgirl
and he was a gambling man ... but the latter strikes me as the more coincidental / less likely
of the two.

I think mine were already a peripatetic Cornwall-Devon bunch, having lived on the Devon fringe of
Cornwall for centuries in a couple of lines, at least (around St Stephens by Saltash): the marriage
c1815 of a woman living in Cornwall to a man whose residence was given as the Exeter area, but
who I think was probably from Cornwall; their son the future wheeler-dealer born near Plymouth
and marrying a woman with long roots in Cornwall and having kids in Devonport and then in Cornwall,
then the family living in Plymouth before permanently departing the area in multiple directions.
Canada was just the logical next step, in my gr-grfather's case.

That's just one great-grandparent of mine, of course! The others came from the various places you
can see in my sig line, going back only two more generations, in most cases. And they all converged
in Ontario when my parents effected the merger.

And yes, we became the lost tribes. Whenever I've contacted someone in England over the last
decade, when I've seen their tree at a site, showing that we descend from common greatx2 grandparents,
for instance, the response has mainly been: no, sorry, I really don't think so. Then I've had to defend
my pedigree and persuade them that our great-grandparents were siblings. And of course that was
after figuring out who the heck my any of greatx2 grandparents were, because I only knew the names
of seven of the eight great-grandparents, to start with!

My brother lives in Montreal. Maybe your daughter knows him ... 

PS -- I've been having a bit of a read up on Charles Church as well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Church,_Plymouth#Destruction_and_recent_history_1941-2002
so thanks for that too.

[DSWilsonCT]

Never been there, but

http://maps.nls.uk/view/102352952

https://genealogyensemble.com/2016/11/10/bomb-sites-school-and-rebuilding-a-city/
http://i.thisis.co.uk/274078/article/images/224709/294742.jpg

[JaneyCanuck]

Thank you, DSWCT! I zoomed in at the first link and fortuitously found Russell St almost right away.

A tangential update:

About 18 months ago, I found the grave of the ancestral actress (who was a child in 1861 in Plymouth at the address I had wondered about) -- in Montreal. After over a decade of searching, after learning of her existence, unknown to my family until then, I discovered her burial record in the Quebec govt archives and her grave indexed at findagrave. I then found references to her husband playing there in a regimental band, and listed as a journalist in the city directory. She had died after about 4 years in Canada; he lost no time in remarrying, and he and his children and new wife returned briefly to England. He published a humorous account of trying to find lodgings in Wales on their arrival, before settling briefly in Somerset ... and then upping sticks, minus the children, and setting sail for the island of St Helena, where he edited the newspaper and the trail grows cold.

So the next project is to visit my brother in Montreal and follow the map of Mount Royal Cemetery to her grave site, over 125 years after she was buried and left behind, and wonder whether her brother, my gr-grandfather, who immigrated to Canada 25 years after her death, even knew she was buried here.

[DSWilsonCT]

This site gives old and new maps, side by side, but not as far back as 1861. The best old map for detail is OS 25 inch 1892-1905.  The Bing, etc. hybrid map shows satellite images with street names added.
 George Hicks once farmed Scraesdon.
 http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/sidebyside.cfm#zoom=17&lat=50.3707&lon=-4.2595&layers=168&right=BingHyb

[louloubelle]

Hi cambridge street and surrounding streets are gone now .my grandmother lived in the street .my aunt and uncle ran the fish and chip shop .I think it's where penrose street is the pub used to be called the Cardiff arms on the corner dint know if it stood behind cambridge street .I do remember the street vaguely I must have been quite young but I do remember the houses as the windows were arched .my grandmother lost a baby in the house when plymouth was blitzed she was knocked out of her cot . King street .and Cecil street are there