Down the rabbit hole…

Sometimes research can send you down rabbit holes – the evidence is suggesting you take a certain route, and it can take quite a while before you discover it might not be the correct origin story. In my case this happened in the very early days of my research investigating the origins of my family.

My Great Grandmother, Emily Renshaw nee Thorley, who died when I was 14, was born in Manchester in 1899. The census indicates that her Grandmother, Rachel Thorley nee Hollis (1847-1891) was born in Ashbourne in Derbyshire. She was born to John Hollis (1787-1850) and Sarah Turner (1807-1879). These facts I am 99% satisfied are correct. There is an official birth entry for Rachel Hollis, born in the last quarter of 1847 in Ashbourne Derbyshire, with the surname Turner given as her Mum’s maiden name.

Before Rachel was born, the census in 1841 shows her parents and older sisters living in Dig Street, Ashbourne, which was the site of the workhouse at that time. They may or may not actually have been inmates in the workhouse, it is difficult to tell from the barely legible census. Certainly by 1851, widowed Sarah (John died in 1850), and her 5 daughters and one granddaughter are found living in the Workhouse yard.

According to information on a website for a restaurant now located on Dig Street in Ashbourne:-

“The yard on the other side of the building was Work House Yard which had some of the worst of the overcrowded slum properties in the Town.  It contained lodgings for labourers and in the 1851 census one house had 15 people listed, 13 of them Irish labourers.  Conditions in the Yard were poor and as late as 1893, 8 people died in this yard as a result of a typhoid outbreak.”

In the 1851 census, Sarah is listed as a “Pauper”. Her eldest daughter is named Mary Turner, presumably an illegitimate child she had before marrying John Hollis.  It is Mary who has had her own illegitimate child by then, Harriet Turner aged under 1. 10 years later the 1861 census shows they are all still living there, and Sarah also has 2 more grandchildren living with her, children of her unmarried daughters. Life was very tough!

It is when I tried to discover the origins of Sarah née Turner, that I disappeared down a rabbit hole for a time.

According to at least 3 family trees on one of the websites I use, Sarah was the daughter of Edward Turner and Sarah Herring, who married in the Derbyshire village of South Wingfield in 1805. At the time, being fairly new to family history research, the fact that 3 Family Trees said this, seemed very persuasive. I now know to be very skeptical because I have seen time after time that branches on trees I know to be wrong, appear in a number of trees. Clearly one person has done some research, come to a conclusion which is in fact incorrect, and other people have simply taken the information on trust. I now never accept information I find on other people’s trees without rigorously testing whether the fact is proved by other evidence. In this particular case, I was alerted to the possibility that the connection might be wrong, by a newspaper article I stumbled across online from the 1980s. A journalist was interviewing an Australian descendant of Edward Turner from South Wingfield in Derbyshire, and she believed that Edward’s daughter Sarah, had died without children.

How an Australian came to be in South Wingfield in the 1980’s researching her family tree, and a journalist was sufficiently interested in the story to write it up in an article, is because this Edward Turner, who may or may not be my ancestor (but, on balance, was probably not) led an action-packed life. And I simply can’t resist telling you what I found out about him!!

Originally, knowing only his approximate date of birth – 1785 – and its location – South Wingfield, I started looking through newspaper articles to see if anything came up. I was astonished to find an article from 1817 in which Edward Turner from South Wingfield of the correct age, was a criminal defendant. It was a major trial of its day and he had been part of what came to be known as the Pentrich Revolution or Rising. The background to this was the extreme poverty felt by the agricultural community at the time as a result of the Napoleonic Wars in 1816, the early effects of the Industrial Revolution, cold weather and a poor harvest in 1816. In South Wingfield four men were at that time due to be executed for setting fire to Colonel Wingfield Hatton’s haystacks in South Wingfield. The four men, George Booth aged 21, John Brown aged 38, Thomas Jackson aged 20 and John King aged 24, all protested their innocence to the very end.

On 9 June 1817 a gathering of some two or three hundred men, led by Jeremiah Brandreth (‘The Nottingham Captain’, an unemployed stockinger and someone Giles Brandreth claims to be descended from!), set out from South Wingfield to march to Nottingham. They were lightly armed with pikes, scythes and a few guns, which had been hidden in a quarry in Wingfield Park. One among them, William J. Oliver, was a government spy, and the uprising was quashed at Pentrich soon after it began. Three men were hanged and beheaded at Derby Gaol for their participation in the uprising: Jeremiah Brandreth, Isaac Ludlam and William Turner.

They were the last people in England ever to be sentenced to be Hung Drawn and Quartered. Though they were spared the quartering by the Prince Regent, being hung and then beheaded seems literally to be overkill to me! 12 men were sentenced to be transported to Australia for life, one of whom was Edward Turner.

Edward Turner sailed on the convict ship The Isabella in 1818. Here is his entry alongside other convicts from the Pentrich Revolution, listed in the manifest of the convict ship Isabella bound for Australia.

When he was eventually released from his sentence in 1834, he married Ann Cawson in Sydney (technically bigamously, as I found his poor first wife still living in South Wingfield on the 1841 census) and had around 8 more children. He is buried in Paramatta New South Wales. A pub he built and ran called The Stone Mason’s Arms, is still standing in Sydney today. It is described as one of the oldest pubs in Sydney, though it is now run as a “beer café” and has a different name.

For further information about our “hero” Edward Turner, follow this link https://timegents.com/2013/05/16/the-stonemasons-armsvictoria-inn-ultimo-1834-1867/

For further information about the Pentrich Revolution or Uprising follow this link https://pentrichrevolution.org.uk/pentrich-revolution-the-revolution.html

Both are fascinating reads… and have left me feeling robbed of being able to tell the after dinner story of my ancestor, one of the main instigators of a peasants’ uprising, and a convict transported to Australia for life!