Cousins

I have mentioned a couple of times that James Maitland and Letitia Baker are my 3x and also 4x great grandparents, and the reason for this is that on 1 September 1879 their grandson, George Thomas Maitland, married Emily Ann Dowding, who was the daughter of his cousin, Charlotte Maitland.

Emily was born in Blandford Forum in 1851, and in the census records for 1851 – 1871 she is living with her parents, Matthias and Charlotte Dowding, at 33 Salisbury Street, Blandford [see Family Business] – no occupation is recorded for her which suggests that her family was sufficiently prosperous that she did not need to work outside the home.

It is unclear how my great grandparent’s marriage came about as George, who was 15 years older than his wife, had moved to Portsmouth with his father and siblings by 1861 [see Home Sweet Home] when Emily would have been a young child. Emily’s address is given as 6 Harley Street when they married so perhaps she had moved to Portsmouth to join her relations, as other cousins had done, or perhaps the union was arranged by the family as both were relatively old for a first marriage.

When I wrote about the family in Home Sweet Home, I named four children of George and Emily, who were all born in Portsmouth: William (1880), Ellen (1882), Frederick (1886, my grandfather) and Albert (1889). 

William had a grocer’s shop in Portsmouth, which was a favourite childhood haunt of my father thanks largely to the endless supply of broken biscuits. He married Edith Palmer in 1914 and they had two children, George (1915) and Ruth (1920), neither of whom went on to have children themselves. William died in 1949 aged 69.

I have already written about Ellen, who never married and became my grandfather’s housekeeper after his wife died in 1931 – I will write about him in next week’s blog. 

Albert was an assistant grocer who worked for his elder brother. He served in WWI as a corporal, firstly in the Gloucester Regiment and then in the Labour Corps, which was an army unit staffed by men no longer fit for front-line duty. He also never married and remained living with his parents and then with his siblings, Frederick and Ellen, until his death in 1952, when he was 62 years old.

Until recently, I thought that this branch of my tree was complete, but a chance find in the British Newspaper Archive led me to a grim discovery: George and Emily actually had nine children, five of whom died when babies: 

Harry – died 24 September 1880, aged 26 days 

Frederick – died 12 July 1882, aged 10 months 

Ellen – died 21 July 1883, aged 7 months 

Lilian – died 25 October 1885, aged 12 months 

Harry – died 25 September 1888 aged 12 months 

It is not always easy to interpret the cause of death from certificates dating from this time as some of the terms are no longer in use and medical knowledge was obviously less advanced. For the first Harry and Frederick, the cause given is “eclampsia”, which at the time is likely to have meant a seizure of some kind, and the second Harry also died from “convulsions”. For Ellen, the cause is “teething”, which was apparently a catch-all explanation at the time when there was no obvious cause, whilst for Lilian “emphysema” is recorded, which in such a young child is likely to have related to an abnormality of the lungs. 

Infant mortality rates were obviously much higher at this time but, although around 15% of children did not live to see their first birthday, the loss of five babies in the space of 8 years is very unusual, particularly as the family were living in relatively good conditions and none of them suffered from one of the prevalent childhood diseases. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there was a genetic element involved and that this was perhaps due to the fact that George and Emily were so closely related.

George died at the age of 77 in 1913, and Emily in 1931, aged 80. My father remembered her as a rather severe lady who was always dressed in Victorian-style long, black dresses.