My great-grandmother Annie Laura White

[Keith Sherwood]

Hi, Everyone,
This is my first posting on RootsChat, and it concerns my elusive great-grandmother whom I have managed to trace, with great difficulty, from her birth at 7, North Place, Somers Town, London on 25-03-1873 until the occasion of the death of her second husband, Vernon Nott at 23, Parliament Hill Mansions, St. Pancras on 26-05-1914.  From that moment, at the age of 41, widowed a second time by the premature death of a husband from TB, she seems to disappear from the face of the earth.  I have searched extensively in the death and marriage records at the FRC without success.  She sometimes referred to herself as Leila or Laura Nott.(The 1939 death of a Leila Nott at the Royal Waterloo Hospital, is NOT her, by the way.)
If anyone has come across her emigrating, turning up abroad, marrying a third time somewhere in the world, or indeed a possible decease, again anywhere in the world, I would be eternally grateful to hear about this!  By the way, I am descended from her one and only child, a daughter born illegitimately to her by an Italian man, prior to her two legal marriages.
Very best wishes,
Keith Sherwood, living in Cambridge, England

[Kazza]

Hi Keith,

And welcome to RootsChat. 

Have you tried phone directories and electoral rolls?

This topic may be of interest: 

http://www.rootschat.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=7176.0

Good Luck

Kazza.

[Keith Sherwood]

Hi, Kazza,
Thanks so much for taking the trouble to respond to my query with some suggestions. 
I have had a good look at the London Directories held at the Guildhall Library, and from there pursued one or two avenues in Electoral Rolls at the Camden Local History Centre at Holborn Library; also paid quite a bit of money to the Lambeth Archives to look up an address for a "Mrs Nott" in the Dulwich area.  These Local Archives do tend to vary in their approach to queries - when I phoned up the Hammersmith and Fulham centre they simply looked up something for me there and then without charging anything.  And searching Cemetery Records also seems to be very hit and miss, though I of course intend to persevere, as we all do..!
Very best wishes,
Keith

[Arby01]

Hi Keith, off topic but I wanted to reach out to you about something you may be interested in..

I have an old 1st edition of Bernard Bosanquet's "Philosophical Theory of the State" the inside of which has an inscription "Cyrillo Waltero Gurner" (and some more latin.) The book appears to have been in the possession of Cyril Walter Gurner at Oriel College Oxford (and subsequently in the possession of Richard Robinson.) Even more interestingly, my mother in law was flipping through the book and found an old photo in it. The photo is very faded but shows for men standing in front of what looks like a cottage. On the back is an inscription which is hard to make out but is something like "Wi??sey Hill Farm ??rcestershire Xmas Vac. 1910-11."

Googling Cyril's name, I came across your RootsChat post about your grandfather.

[juliew]

This probate sounds a possibility.

Nott Annie Laura, otherwise Leila of Lynton Cottage Hotel Lynton Devon.  Widow died 13 Jan 1941
Probate Llandudno 7 March to Cecisely Edith Esbell Laurence widow.  Effects £293 8s 11d.  Resworn
£365 14s 4d.

Death registration:-

Annie L Nott
Birth date about 1874
Mar 1941
Barnstaple
Devon

[Mabel Bagshawe]

There are a few entries for a Leila Nott (once Leila Vernon Nott)  on the electoral register firstly at Wentworth Mansions, South End Road, Belsize park, then Rosslyn Road in Twickenham and later in 47 Heath St, which Ancestry moves around from Camden to Hammersmith! At this last place there are a number of seemingly unrelated people.

The last entry is 1932, so there is a possibility this is the other person whose death you fuond

[Mabel Bagshawe]

I was trying to find a link to Cisely Edith Esbell Laurence - but think they mightjust have ebenn friends. She was the widow of Reginald Laurance, an engineer who made good and ended up owning Felthorpe Hall in Norfolk. i can find a few references in the papers to Mrs Reginald Laurence in Lynton in the late 1930s and 1940s

[Keith Sherwood]

My Goodness, this is so remiss of me!
This was actually the first ever post I made on Rootschat - over 10 years ago now -  and I must have thought that things had ground to a disappointing halt way back in July 2004…
But I have just discovered the posts that were made on December 7th 2013, just over a year ago, that were not, for whatever reason, flagged up to me on my e-mail account.
So, where to begin: Arby01, that's simply incredible news, my grandfather Cyril Walter GURNER did indeed mark his books in that way, and that photo must have been of himself and three friends on holiday before he went off to a Civil Service Career to India the following year in 1911; he didn't return until 1946.  I don't suppose you still have that photo, my mother (his middle daughter) and I would SO like to see it.  Is it possible to send an image of it, or even reunite the photo with our family?

…and Julie, I did get a copy of Annie Laura's will, and went down to Lynton in Devon to stand beside her grave.  I even managed to contact the person she left everything to, and went to visit him - he had been adopted by her as a 4-year-old-boy, and is now very elderly.  He was of course able to tell me stories about her, the gt-grandmother I had never known I had.  She'd been badly injured by an exploding German bomb in Brighton in July 1940 and had gone down to Lynton to try and recuperate with her sister-in-law Esbell, but died soon afterwards and was buried there…

…and Mabel, thanks very much for those addresses for Annie Laura that I never knew about, and I have indeed looked into the successful Laurence family in Norwich; and in Norwich one day I met a lady of 93 who remembers going as an assistant cook to Felthorpe Hall as a 13-year-old in the early 1920's.
Esbell Laurence (nee Wethered)and Annie Laura were sister-in-laws through Annie Laura marrying into the Wethered family in 1897.
But if you could find those references to Esbell in the local Lynton papers that you mention, I would be eternally grateful!  She came back up to Norfolk once the War was over, sometime in the 1940's, and lived until her death in the 1960's in Sheringham.
It has been quite an ancestral journey, all in all, and my mother and I were just talking about Annie Laura the other evening
Many, many thanks to you all…
Keith