Help! I like to think of myself as a "no stone left unturned" researcher but I have hit a serious brick wall.
DNA matching has led me to discover that my great grandmother, variously known as Louisa Foster, Louisa Stephens, Louisa or Julia Clayton, and Louisa or Julia Coles is a daughter of John Stephens (1836-?) and his wife Grace Hugo (1838-1883) of Redruth, Cornwall.
Louisa was a prostitute (no judgement from me) in Fremantle, Western Australia, who had her children (including my grandfather) removed and put into State care in the late 1890s. She died in Fremantle in 1904, after a few stints in Fremantle Prison for vagrancy. She described herself in prison records as “American-English”.
DNA matching suggests she is one of three daughters of John and Grace Stephens, namely
Elizabeth Grace Stephens, b. 1861, who is last recorded in the 1871 census;
Catherine "Katie” Stephens, b. 1863, who married distant cousin James Joseph Victor Hugo in 1883 and is last recorded at the death of her new born son Joseph in 1884;
Caroline Stephens, b. 1865 and who is last recorded attending on her mother Grace at her death in 1883?
A brother William Stephens b. 1869 last appears in the 1881 census.
John Stephens, their father, was a gold miner. Like many Cornish miners, he rarely appears in the census as he was probably in the US or Australia on the goldfiedls. His place of death is unknown.
In August 1891, a "Louisa Stephens", wife of George Maddocks, gave birth in Carlingford, Sydney, NSW to John George Maddocks, my paternal grandfather. The birth record says she and Maddocks were married in Southampton in August, 1889, but no such record exists. Further, Louisa had an older daughter, Louisa May Maddocks, born in 1889. DNA testing of her descendants confirms Louisa May's father was not George Maddocks. DNA testing of me and my immediate family shows we are of both Maddocks and Stephens-Hugo descent.
What became of these three Stephens sisters and their brother? Did they visit their aunts in America? Two aunts - Elizabeth Hugo Stephens Toward and Catherine Hugo Terrill Barnicoat lived in Schuylkill County Pennsylvania.
The puzzle for me is to work out which of the Stephens-Hugo daughters is "Louisa", and where all siblings - including the married sister - disappeared to between 1883/4 and 1891. (James Hugo, Catherine's husband, describes himself as a widower in 1891, but I have found no death record for Catherine in Cornwall).
