Letitia Sophia

My first blog post! Thank you for visiting the site. I really hope you find it interesting! Where to start…

Letitia Sophia was born on October 1st 1894 in Barrow in Furness. The fact that she was born In Barrow at all, was as a result of the surge in industry in that area in the second half of the 19th century. But for the iron ore mining in the area and the new railways being built, resulting in the new steelworks and the shipbuilding in the docks to export the steel overseas, her parents, William Charles Ford, from Annan in Dumfriesshire, and Clara Ann Tyson from Ludford Parva in Lincolnshire, would never have met.

Interesting fact: by 1871 Barrow had the largest steelworks in the world!

And but for that huge increase in people migrating to Barrow, I wouldn’t be here. Because Letitia Sophia was my Great Grandmother. She has a wonderful name for genealogy purposes. She was not named Ann, or Elizabeth or Mary, or a handful of other names that our ancestors were very keen on. (No disrespect to those perfectly lovely names, but coupled with a surname like Smith or Jones, they make a geanealogists heart sink, so common are they). Without her two, relatively unusual forenames for the time, she would have been a very difficult lady to track down when she seemed to disappear off the face of the earth in around 1931.

Until 3 years ago I knew nothing of her, not even her name. My father was born in Preston during WW2, and not long after, his parents divorced. Above is his parents’ wedding photograph. They met in Carlisle where they were both stationed. My Nan, Sylvia, was in the Auxilliary Territorial Service (ATS) – effectively the Women’s branch of the army. Unfortunately, my Dad had no contact with his father, after the age of 4. Not unusual for that time when many people lost contact. Added to this, I am sure my indomitable grandmother, who died 6 years ago aged 96, made absolutely sure there was no contact.

My Nan told him very little about his father, Edward Williams. All she was able to tell him was that he was born in the Barrow area, and when he was young, his mother died and he and his sister ended up in a children’s home.

Edward’s mother was Letitia Sophia, and the story Edward had told his wife, my Nan, turned out to be untrue. Because when I was searching for Letitia Sophia’s death in that area, around that time, I simply could not find it. And her name was an easy name to search.

I first had had to locate the family in the area. Luckily, my Dad recalled my Nan taking him up to Cumbria after the war to meet his Aunt Clara and her large brood of children. Thus armed with the names Clara and Edward Williams, sister and brother, and Edward’s DOB, I was able to track them down on the 1921 census living in Dalton in Furness.

On the census, my Grandfather Edward is aged 1, and his father, also Edward Williams, and a native of Liverpool, is working at the Vickers shipyard in Barrow. I later discovered another daughter, Doris, was born in 1922.

When I went back to 1911, I could not find Edward Sr living in the area, so presumed he hadn’t yet moved up from Liverpool. Edward and Letitia did not marry until 1912, not long before Clara was born. However, Letitia Sophia aged 17 in 1911, already had a 6 week old baby, James Harold (on the 1921 census he is given the surname Williams but he is not Edward’s son) and was living in Dalton with her mother, also Clara, and her new born baby and her own 2 youngest siblings. Clara Sr was described as married, but no husband was living there. And the entry said she had 9 living children. Some would have left home, but where were the others?

When I finally found Letitia’s father and siblings, I was astonished. They were listed as “inmates” in the Ulverston Workhouse on the 1911 census. So poverty stricken was the family then, that half of them had to live in the workhouse. I was particularly surprised because I struggled to believe that people were still living in workhouses in the 20th century.

The 1939 Register is the most recent major record set for England and Wales. It is very similar to a census, however it was prompted by the outbreak of WW2 in September 1939. Its purpose was to record details of the population to enable issuing of ration books and ID cards and the direction of labour and conscription into the armed forces. 

Back to Letitia Sophia’s “early death”. When I couldn’t find her dead, I searched for her husband’s death, and in 1931, an Edward Williams of more or less that age, does die in the area. After days and days when I would keep returning to the search for Letitia Sophia, and expanded it to the 1939 Register, I finally thought to search the whole of England only against the forenames, and the year of birth I had for her. In the 1939 register, there were a few Letitia S born 1894, but only one Letitia Sophia. Here is the entry.

This Letitia Sophia appears to be married to a James Balmforth and is living in Lisbon St. Leeds. She is the cook in “Dining Rooms”. Note, her surname is crossed off, and replaced with White. This means that at some point in the following few years she married someone called White. I wasn’t sure it was her, so my next step was to search for Letitia Sophia Balmforth marrying someone called White. No luck. Then I did some thinking outside the box, and speculated that she may have never married Balmforth, and was living “over the brush”, as the good people of 1939 might have said. And if that was correct, then she would have had to marry White in her original married name of Williams.

Sure enough, 3 months later, in January 1940 Letitia Sophia Williams married Albert White. But hang on a moment, wasn’t there an Albert White 12 years younger than her lodging with them in the Lisbon St Dining Rooms in October 1939?! And then on relooking at the 1939 register entry again, I realised I had missed one crucial detail. Underneath her name, looking for all the world as if she was the daughter of James and Letitia Balmforth, was Doris Balmforth, aged 17. Born exactly the same year as Doris Williams, the sister of my Grandfather Edward Williams, and daughter of Edward and Letitia Williams! As you will see her surname is also crossed out and shows she went on to marry someone by the name Cousins. And yes, of course, I found a Doris Williams in Leeds marrying a Cousins a few years later.

So what happened to Letitia Williams back in 1931 when her husband died in the Ulverston area? The family were clearly extremely poor. We know that 20 years earlier part of her family were in the Workhouse. Maybe she simply couldn’t cope and put her youngest children in a children’s home (the older 2 were adults by then). Maybe she ran off and left them, but at some stage went back for them, or at least Doris. Maybe she wanted some bright lights and excitement in the city. But clearly her son could not admit to his wife, my Nan, that his mum had left him in a children’s home….

Anyway, what became of Letitia Sophia? I found that she eventually died, aged 81, in 1976 (I was 10 years old then so could have met her!!) in Leeds. Very sadly, it was the same year that her older daughter, Clara, aged 54, also died back in Cumbria. I wonder whether she kept in touch with Clara. I feel like she can’t have kept in touch with my Grandfather, or in the 4 years they were married, my Nan would surely have heard about her and known she wasn’t in fact dead.

Spare a thought here for poor Edward Williams, my Dad’s father, who lost his Dad aged 11, was abandoned by his mum, and then lost his wife and 4 year old son to divorce. Despite him living in the the very town, Preston, where I grew up, my Dad never met him again after the age of 4, and I never met him, though I was 25 when he died in 1991.

But one day, when my Dad was in his 40s, and was in a pub in Preston town centre, the barman brought him over a pint and said the old man leaving the pub had bought it for him. And my Dad looked over and caught a glimpse. And just knew it was the father he had not seen since he was 4 years old…..