I agree that the workhouse doesn't necessarily indicate neglect or hostility. Illness or disability, short or long term, is at least equally possible.
I have two grx2 grfathers who died in the workhouse (not the Moonwalk family!) and in at least one case I am sure that must have been the reason as there is no indication of family estrangement. In the other, I just don't know; in the workhouse in his birth parish in Wiltshire in 1851, present for his second wife's death in Scotland! in 1854, back in the workhouse in 1861, died there later that decade. Meanwhile, only known child, born in Bristol, prospered mightily in Kent, where he was as a young man in 1841 when the father was in Scotland. The things these ancestors got up to, one just shakes one's head sometimes. I haven't moved around that much in my own life.
I'll tell you, finding those Smith/Moonwalk people consumed a lot of my life for some time! But I kept running into those strokes of luck, being able to match up all sorts of details between Smiths and Moonwalks -- each Edward with the other, and each Alice with the other, and in fact Edward's mother had even adopted the fake name, when I found them together in 1881! -- and between one pair of Edward and Alice and the other.
The one thing I have not been able to do, myself, is find where the Moonwalk name came from. And of course, you just know, the tale Edward told was of blue blood. Yes, there is a very senior line of peers with the name, and he claimed to be the son of the black sheep younger brother of the one at the time in question. And yea it transpired that said peer did have an unmarried younger brother, in the Coldstream Guards, who did die in the Crimea mere weeks before the birth of Alice London Moonwalk Smith ...
Vivienne just hasn't had one bit of luck herself, nothing to tie John to a previous John, or to any other person anywhere.
I poked at the John Thomas and Thomas John births in the relevant areas at the relevant time a bit, and traced each forward and found them all accounted for, I'm pretty sure. Firefox crashed before I was quite finished, maybe, and then I was flooded with work and had to leave off.
If there were any connection could be made, even just geographically, with a Kempthorne in this tale ... But there too, I have striven and failed, so far.
In Newlyn there is only that family of Kempthornes that has been investigated: Mark, Betsy and children.
(Believe it or not, Newlyn is the stomping grounds of the family of what seems to be my Smith/Moonwalks' paternal grandmother ... several of them there in 1841 ... maybe we're cousins ...)
I wonder what of son Mark in that household? or did the whole lot of them go to New Zealand?
1861, Mark Kempthorne was a general servant in Phillack.
1871 he was a private on the Resistance off Rock Ferry, Cheshire.
(okay, believe it or not, a decade later, the decade-younger Edward Moonwalk and mother were living, oh, 2 miles from Rock Ferry)
The navy doesn't have privates, does it? Ah. Royal Marines.
Mark's real dob was 1838. In 1861 he was aged 19; in 1871, aged 26, and born in Truro.
But there are no spare Mark Kempthornes born c1845 in Truro, so that must be him.
There's no record of him after that. He could well have gone off somewhere as well, or been killed in some action or other.
But if he'd left the military and gone home ... being John rather than Mark might have worked for him ...
Older brother James also seems to disappear after 1861.
Here's an interesting tidbit, though. Mark Kempthorne, the father in that household, had alternate surnames.
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/NPNS-W6TName: Mark Dennis Or Kempthorne
Gender: Male
Christening Date: 16 Feb 1806
Christening Place: Saint Endellion, Cornwall
Father's Name: William Dennis Or Kempthorne
Mother's Name: Charity
Indexing Project (Batch) Number: P00237-1
also here, Dennis alias Kempthorne:
http://www.cornwall-opc-database.org/search-database/more-info/?t=baptisms&id=2635974The mother is shown as Charity Nicholls on some baptisms. William married as William Kempthorne Dennis in 1796:
http://www.cornwall-opc-database.org/search-database/more-info/?t=marriages&id=294719I haven't thought how it might work yet - did one or more of the Dennis/Kempthorne children of William and Charity use the Dennis surname? - but it's something to think about ...
For one set of twins (Mark and Martha 1806) the surname is Dennis alias Kempthorne.
For the other set (Rebecca and Henry 1808) the surname is Dennis and the parents are "William and Charity Kempthorne Dennis".
A William Dennis base child of Ann was baptised in St Breward in 1774. Was his father a Kempthorne? Thomas Kempthorne married Alice Dennis in St Breward in 1765. Alice 1739 and Anne 1747 were sisters ...
It's certainly reaching back, but could John X have been a son of one of the children of William and Charity, and have known that his grandfather was really Thomas Kempthorne?