A Presbyterian minister in Cornwall

[bobcollier]

I wonder if somebody could advise me on this before I start exploring further.

My wife's father, John Jeffrey, who was born in Belfast in 1918, had a grandfather, Jeremiah Jeffrey, who was from Hauxton in Cambridgeshire (dob 1851).

My wife's family is Catholic. A joke her father used to make when he was alive was that he had a relative in Cornwall who was a Presbyterian minister. No specific location was ever mentioned, or any dates, and I don't even know for sure that the man's surname was also Jeffrey.

I discovered a couple of days ago what appears to be a link between the Jeffrey family in Hauxton and a William George Jeffery (different spelling of surname), born in St. Just, Cornwall, in 1857, who married a Beatrice Mitchell in Redruth in 1895. Beatrice Mitchell's family was from a place called Rosewarne, south of Camborne. Wiliam George Jeffery was a Boot Maker, clearly not the Reverend I'm looking for, but he and my father-in-law's paternal grandfather Jeremiah Jeffrey do seem to be relatives of some kind. This at least establishes a tenuous "Cornwall connection".

I don't suppose there is such a thing as "A Complete Alphabetical List of Every Presbyterian Minister in Cornwall Ever", but, rather than exploring Cornwall resources generally, is there a particular resource I could start with in trying to discover who the mysterious minister was?

With thanks.

[JaneyCanuck]

One little tidbit that might help is that William George Jefferey was baptised in the St Just in Penwith Wesleyan Methodist baptism circuit:

http://www.cornwall-opc-database.org/search-database/more-info/?t=baptisms_nc&id=127736

I'm not familiar with Non-Conformist records so I'm not sure where Presbyterians might come into it, but at least there is evidence of widespread non-conformism for this surname -- if you search the Non-Conformist baptisms database there

http://www.cornwall-opc-database.org/search-database/baptisms-non-conformist/

using only the term JEFF for surname, you will get a couple of hundred results.

William George's parents James and Martha had four other children baptised, but they were all girls, so it looks like he didn't have a sibling who was a member of the Presbyterian clergy, unless there were other children not showing up.

You can tell us what the connection between William George and Jeremiah seems to be -- who knows what someone might find to help? and no point in you having info that we don't have.

[bobcollier]

Thank you so much. I'll follow up on your suggestions. I know my father-in-law's ancestors in Hauxton, Cambridgeshire, were non-conformists but I don't know of which kind. That's something else I could look at.

The story. What basically happened was that I was going back over my research into my father-in-law's paternal grandfather, Jeremiah Jeffrey, and at the moment I'm trying to gather as much information as I can from the internet before I commit to using a commercial genealogy website, so, I'm finding a lot of interesting references but I'm not getting access to details of what I'm finding. I did a name search at Ancestry.com and it turned up "Jeremiah Jeffrey born 1851 Cambridgeshire" as a "matching person" in a "Mitchell family tree" created in 2008. When I repeated the name search using the names of Jeremiah's seven siblings, five of them also showed up as a "matching person" in the same family tree. With the reference to Jeremiah's brother Joshua, there was a thumbnail photograph of him and his second wife, Bella Austin, with four younger people who may have been some of their children. Bella Austin was Joshua and Jeremiah's cousin, the daughter of their father Benjamin's sister Sarah.

Because I couldn't go any further along that line of enquiry on Ancestry.com, I did a name search for just the surname "Jeffrey" with spouse "Mitchell" and found a William G. Jeffery married spouse "Mitchell" in Cornwall (I didn't actually know until then that I was looking at something that might be related to my wife's vague family connection with Cornwall). Then I did a name search for "Mitchell" with spouse "Jeffrey" and came up with a reference to a marriage between a Beatrice M. Mitchell and spouse "Jeffrey", in Cornwall. A further name search at UK Census Online turned up more details - the spouse was William George Jeffery, born St. Just, Cornwall, estimated year of birth 1857, he was a Cordwainer then a Shoe or Boot Maker, the marriage was in Redruth in 1895, Beatrice M. Mitchell's birth was registered in Camborne. I found her baptism record at the OPC website which gave me her date of birth and that her family's residence was Rosewarne.

Now, of course, I haven't confirmed any of this, but I've found nothing else to contradict my feeling that this is how Jeremiah Jeffrey and his siblings came to be in a "Mitchell family tree". That William George Jeffery was a relative of Jeremiah Jeffrey, my father-in-law's paternal grandfather.

Perhaps it's something to do with Jeremiah's brother Joshua. Why would a photograph of him and his wife be in another family's possession? This is what I know about Joshua: He was born, in Hauxton, Cambridgeshire, on 13 September 1835. He married Ann Frost (born c1833, Isleham, Cambridgeshire) in 1859 and they had three children - Emily (b1861), Louisa (b1863), Archibald (1865-1915). Ann Frost died in 1875 and in 1876 Joshua married Bella Austin (born 1848, Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire). They had 12 children - Edith (1877-1953), Cecilia (1878-1969), Annie (1880-1942), Minnie (1881-1941), Joseph (b1883, died in infancy), Hetty (b1885, died in infancy), Hilda (1886-1975), Elsie (1888-1947), Blanche (1889-1956), Arthur (1890-1971), Amy (1891-1973), May (1892-1894).

Joshua Jeffrey died in Hauxton on 20 November 1915, age 80, so it seems that he lived in Cambridgeshire all his life. Bella Austin died in Staines, Middlesex (now Surrey) in 1933. The age they looked in the photograph I saw suggested to me it was probably taken in the Edwardian era.

Sorry, that's a lot of information in one go.

(I'm thinking now perhaps this post should be moved from the Cornwall section into somewhere more general?)

[JaneyCanuck]

I just have two seconds, but try this: http://www.mundia.com

It is a mirror site for family trees from Anc'y, where Anc'y has posted up all the trees at its main site. You can register free free of charge, search trees and send/receive messages via the private messaging system.

(Users will get your messages in their Anc'y boxes, and probably have no idea Mundia even exists let alone that their tree is there, so it's easiest just to refer to their Anc'y tree.)

For other free resources, don't forget the Cornwall OPC site I posted above and of course FreeBMD:
http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/cgi/search.pl

And everyone's main caveat: believe nothing of what you see in online trees unless and until you have verified it with your own eyes.

My grx4 grandparents born in Cornwall in the early-mid 1700s really did not have a son in Tennessee in 1775, despite the 48 Anc'y trees that say they did ... !

[bobcollier]

Awesome! Thank you, Janey. Have signed up with Mundia and had a quick look for relatives of Jeremiah Jeffrey, but almost midnight here in Australia, will explore in depth in the morning. Thanks again.

[bobcollier]

The Mitchell family that the Jeffrey family in Hauxton was linked to turned out to be in Oxfordshire, so no Cornwall connection there. But it did bring me back to a previous mystery.

Jeremiah Jeffrey's youngest brother was called Josiah (he would have been my father-in-law's granduncle). Josiah married an Emily Douglass in 1874. She was also from Cambridgeshire. I found the Douglass family tree online and, according to that, Josiah and Emily had six children. The first four were born in Cambridgeshire, the fifth in Caterham, Surrey, and the sixth in Launceston, Cornwall, in 1890. This was a daughter named Blanch or Blanche.

I thought at first that perhaps this was a possible clue to the mysterious Presbyterian minister in Cornwall. I found a reference through the UK Census Online website to a Blanch Jeffery born 1890 in North Hill, Cornwall, which is in the Launceston area. However, through the Cornwall Census Online Project, I found this Blanch Jeffery was the daughter of a Robert and Martha Jeffery.

I couldn't find Josiah Jeffery in the 1891 Census. In the 1901 Census, he was in Preston, Sussex, presumably with his family. I found a reference (I don't recall where now and couldn't re-find it) to a Blanch Jeffery born in 1890 in Norwood, Surrey. That seemed to me more likely since Josiah and Emily's fifth child was born in Surrey, so I disregarded the information on the Douglass family website regarding their daughter Blanch's place of birth, thinking it was a mistake.

On the Mundia website last night, I found three separate references to Josiah and Emily's daughter Blanch being born in Cornwall. I thought this might be a case of incorrect information being passed around without being checked, but went back to the 1891 Census information at the Cornwall Census Online Project anyway just in case. It seems solid - North Hill, Bladder House, Robert Jeffery, wife Martha, youngest child Blanch, age 1.

Then I found two references in the 1901 Census to a Blanch Jeffery born in 1890 in Cornwall on FamilySearch.org that had this information:

1.
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/XSHW-92H

2.
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/XSJW-SJ1

So now I'm completely baffled. Does anybody have any ideas?

[JaneyCanuck]

Here's the quick answer for the #1 and #2 Blanch Jeffery-s at the end of your post.

1. in North Hill (which is in Launceston reg dist)
born North Hill, parents Robert and Martha

2. in Preston
born "Cornwall, Devon", parents Josiah and Emily
Josiah a gardener, both parents born Cambridgeshire


Don't forget that the authoritative source for births is the GRO index, searchable at FreeBMD.
(And of course birth certificates are the only authoritative source for parents' names, etc.)

There are only one birth in Cornwall/Devon 1889-1890 for the name Blanch* Jeff* (wild cards will catch any spelling variations):

Births Mar 1890
Jeffery Blanche
Launceston reg dist
vol 5c page 29

Even expanding the search to 1887-1892, there is no other birth in Cornwall/Devon.


Here is your household in 1891 in Sutton, Surrey, Epsom reg dist:

Josiah Jeffery 37 - gardener
Emily  36
Henry  13
Josiah  10
Hezekiah  7
Blanche  1 - born Norwood Surrey

They are in the Cottage at The Arches, home of William Palmer, a merchant with several servants.

In 1891 they are living next door to the vicar, and in 1901 they have a Congregational evangelist for a neighbour.

Did someone in 1901 mishear "Norwood" as "Cornwall"?

It still isn't clear from this what birth is Blanche, but I might guess

Births Dec 1889
Jeffrey Blanch
Croydon reg dist
vol 2a page 219

Croydon doesn't actually cover Norwood, but perhaps she was born away from home or at a transitional address if the family moved a couple of times.

(The one registered in Chesterton reg dist in Mar Q 1889 is yet another one, shown in the censuses as born in Hauxton.)


The 1911 census confirms the birth information for both Blanche-s, with the Cornwall one shown as a year older:

Cornwall Blanche Jeffery with Robert and Martha:
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/JQ3X-4H2
Norwood Blanche Jeffrey with Josiah:
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/X7B5-GGV


The people whose trees you have been looking at, if they have Blanche daughter of Josiah and Emily as being born in Cornwall, are just plain negligent.

This is often the case with people who are simply collecting names for their trees, of people they are not directly related to. They want to incorporate the names of the offspring of the siblings of the person who married their great-aunt's older brother's wife, so they just bung in whatever they find in the census without checking it, for instance.

(I learned this lesson early on when the very first person I found with names of people in my family in their tree at another site had my father's father's father's parents as Mr X and Ms Y. I was grateful for the boost, being totally new to the whole genealogy thing, and happily adopted that couple. Fortunately, I went looking for more info about the people right away, since they were my direct ancestors. Well, my grx2 grfather was indeed a Mr X, but I very quickly found that he was not married to Ms Y - they were a completely different couple who happened to marry around the same time in the same county. The person whose tree this info was in had no reason to care about accuracy -- my Mr X's daughter had married the brother of some distant relation of hers, so the nonsense in her tree did not affect her own family history at all. Took me a year to get her to remove it from her online trees.)

So, all in all, I think we have ruled out the Cornwall connection in the case of Blanche Jeffery and her father Josiah -- but only the birth certificate or a baptismal record would say for sure!

[bobcollier]

Thank you so much for clarifying that situation. I'm very grateful - I felt like I was going around in circles trying to figure out which Blanch (or Blanche) was which!

It seems I was confused from the outset by the different spelling of the surname at the Douglass family website. I've now found Josiah and Emily's daughter Blanch at the FreeBMD website, surname spelt Jeffrey not Jeffery. The same as the rest of his family, which makes sense when I think about it.

The Blanch Jeffrey whose birth was registered in Chesterton, Cambridgeshire, is the daughter of Josiah's older brother Joshua and his second wife Bella Austin.

It appears then that it is a case at Mundia of incorrect information being passed around without being checked. In fact, there's another family tree I've seen now that has Joshua's daughter Blanch shown as Josiah's daughter. Presumably the reference I found at FamilySearch.org (number 2 in my last post) is an incorrect transcription of information too. I appreciate your advice about these things.

Thanks again for your help. I can get on with my life now. 

[JaneyCanuck]

Just one little clarification -- the 1901 census for the Norwood Blanch really does say

Devon, Cornwall

on the original image, unmistakably clearly. (County was entered before location on that page, all down the list.) Familysearch calls Devon "Devonshire" in all its records.

That's why I wondered whether somebody said "Norwood" and it got heard as "Cornwall", and then the enumerator threw in "Devon", being geographically challenged all round. It's a very strange error. And the previous and subsequent censuses definitely do not say Cornwall for her.

Glad to have got you out of your feedback loop.