Hi Mike,
Thank you very much for providing this information. Most kind of you. Since I wrote the inquiry to which you responded on Roots Chat, I have been contacted by John Colam whose wife shares with me a common ancestor, specifically a great grandmother who was Charlotte Clarke Howe. It now appears that Charlotte Clarke Howe was married twice, both times in St Helier. Firstly in her late teens to an older man, Private Edward Liddell with whom she had a son, Charles Edward Liddell. Sadly, Edward Liddell died within a year or so of marrying (possibly en route back from India as he was invalided out of the army). Charlotte then married a man about three years her junior, my great grandfather, Private Thomas Jackson. Shortly after the marriage the family were posted to Ireland for a few months and from there they travelled on the Royal Navy troopship HMS Serapis, captained by John Clark Soady R.N., to Canada where Thomas Jackson served in the Lincolnshire Regiment possibly for a few years. The family were living in Lenton, a suburb of Nottingham by the time of the 1881 census and Thomas was no longer a soldier. John Colam has obtained a copy of the Ship's Log showing that Charlotte, Private Thomas Jackson's wife, gave birth, on board, to a female child (my grandmother) about 9 hours after the ship set sail at 4.10 pm on 19th August 1867 and that this child was baptized Charlotte Serapis Soady Jackson three days later when the ship was mid-Atlantic.
I am gradually building this information into my own amateur website :
www.mealsgate.tk see Nottingham links and Channel Island Links - if interested.
John Colam's wife, Gillian, is directly descended from Charles Edward Liddell who was Charlotte Serapis Soady Jackson's half brother. Last week I located the grave of Charles Edward Liddell and, as recently as yesterday, I found the burial record of his mother, Charlotte Clarke Jackson, formerly Liddell nee Howe. We are now hoping to locate her grave. She died aged just 38 and was buried on 27th December 1882 in Trinity Churchyard in Lenton Nottingham.
What is really mind-boggling is that John Colam has managed to trace some ancestral lines of Charlotte Clark Howe back in Jersey to 1478..... I think that represents going back 16 generations or thereabouts! This was possible, I suppose, because the family stayed put in Jersey ... in fact most were in the same Parish! Anyway, there's even a Le Bastard in there somewhere which, I understand, was the family name of the Duke of Normandy.... so who knows, could be related to William the Conqueror!! The other spooky thing is that my wife's late mother came from Guernsey so my wife has many relatives on Guernsey. Until John Colam identified Charlotte Clarke Howe as definitely coming from St Helier, I had no idea that I myself had Channel Islanders as ancestors.
