Ernest Addington Pitts: A Genealogist's Dream

It was his name that attracted me. Ernest Addington Pitts. Not quite double barrelled but still with an air of gentility to it. As it turns out, Ernest may have started as a young man living on independent means but he didn't necessarily end up that way.

He was a dream ancestor to research - I found him on every census; there were migratory records; divorce records; he's mentioned briefly in a book; he appears on electoral rolls; in prison records; his WW1 service record survived the destruction of so many others during WW2; and to end the story of his life, he had a brief obituary in his local paper.

Ernest is my third cousin, three times removed. So he's fairly distant. Our shared ancestor is my five times grandfather, Luke Addington, a Bedfordshire ag lab through and through, who was Ernest's two times grandfather.

Ernest's grandfather, Isaac Pitts, is listed on the various census records as a slater, a masoner or a bricklayer. On one census he calls himself a proprietor of houses which I believe means he owned and rented out homes. He had clearly found himself in the property business and although living apart from Ernest's grandmother for most of their marriage, he was able to put his children through boarding school and leave £300 to his wife in his will.

Ernest's father, also called Isaac, lived by independent means or as an annuitant all his life. So in 1873 Ernest was born into a comfortable home in Chawston, Bedfordshire, a small hamlet eight miles north-east of the county town of Bedford.

Chawston, late 19th century

At the age of 7, in 1881, he was living with his parents in his grandmother's home, Box Cottage, in Chawston. The family must have been living comfortably off of his grandfather's pension as his grandmother and parents are listed as annuitants, and Ernest is a scholar. Ten years later, Ernest and his parents are still living off their own means, helped along by the £450 that his grandmother had left in her will, having died eight years previously. Ernest's father Isaac describes himself as a gentleman in the probate records.

Isaac died in June 1891 leaving a substantial sum behind him. But how much of this money made it to his widow and son needs to be ascertained as by the turn of the century they were both living in central Bedford with Ernest making a living as a commercial traveller.

At some point on his travels, Ernest met Edith Heydon and they were married in August 1901 in Marylebone, London. Edith was the daughter of a coal merchant from Devon. Ernest's address at the time of his wedding was the rather impressive sounding 292 Regent Street, London. A grand thoroughfare today, at the time of Ernest's residence it was being substantially rebuilt, taking on the appearance we see now, so it may not have been quite as grand as one imagines.

It is around this time that Ernest starts to stray from his hitherto good reputation. Quite unexpectedly I came across a prison record for him! In the first decade of the twentieth century, Ernest had been making a living as a 'stationer and fancy goods dealer' in Clapham Junction, London. However, in 1907 he was sentenced to 12 months in Wormwood Scrubs for obtaining property by false pretences, unlawfully obtaining credit, common law forgery and uttering. His citation states that he'd been up to no good since at least 1903. It appears my Ernest was a bit of a forger. Thankfully, on release from prison he was able to continue his stationer's business for a few more years.

In the clink

But it's also around this time that Ernest's marriage to Edith starts to look a little unsettled. On the 1911 census, Ernest is living in Sherborne, Dorset and states his occupation to be an organist. Edith meanwhile is living with her mother in Woking, Surrey, along with John, her three month old son by Ernest. Had she left him because of his criminal activities or for other reasons, yet to be discovered?

In 1914 with the outbreak of war, Ernest immediately enlisted. However as he was 41 in 1914, and also said he was a dairy farmer on his enlistment records, he was assigned to the 447th Agricultural Company in the Labour Corps, and consequently did not see military action overseas. He would have worked on the land ensuring food production was kept up at a time when there were major labour shortages. He began his Labour Corps career as a private with the Royal Bucks Hussars Reserve Regiment, but steadily rose up the ranks until, in 1917, he was promoted to Company Quartermaster Sergeant. He did well during the war years though he believed that the rheumatism that he developed in his feet was due to his war service. Was he not used to being on his feet all day? The army were having none of it though. They rejected outright his claim for a war pension stating his symptoms appeared to be 'subjective'.

Between his demobilisation in 1919 and 1925, Ernest appears to have continued his occupation as a dairy farmer. He co-owned a business in Islington, London called "E Jones: Dairymen, Cow-keepers and Provision Merchants". Whether Edith is with him I cannot tell, but I think it is unlikely. Most of her life from 1911 onwards appears to have centred around Woking.

In March 1925 Ernest's life was to change forever when, aged 51, he boarded the S.S. Ballarat, destination Australia. He settled in New South Wales and initially made his living as a driver. His wife and son did not emigrate with him and in 1935 Edith filed for divorce. Interestingly, within two years both had remarried. It's clear that new prospective marriage partners had prompted the need to separate offiicially so that both could marry again. In Ernest's case he married Beatrice Wyatt in 1936 in Sydney, citing 'organist' as his occupation.

SS Ballarat

Ernest as an organist is one side of his life which crops up time and again. He gets a blink-and-you-miss-it mention in a book by Anthony Paice called 'The Professional Beggar' (about the life of a Surrey clergyman) where it states Ernest was the organist at St Nicholas' Church in Pyrford, Surrey. And in a June 1895 issue of the Northampton Mercury, Ernest is mentioned as the organist at the wedding of a Miss Tyringham and Captain Cookson at Turvey in Bedfordshire. He states on the 1911 census that his occupation is organist, and likewise on several Australian electoral rolls.

Organist

Beatrice and Ernest lived together until his death just two years later in 1938. His brief obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald says simply: "February 27 1938 at the Masonic Hospital, Ashfield. Ernest Addington Pitts, dearly loved husband of Beatrice M. Pitts."

I loved researching Ernest. Records for his life seemed to be falling around my ears. Perhaps it's because he has a fairly unique name, and one that not many transcribers stumbled over, that the available records were easily found and accessed. There were so many different types of records available too - migration, census, prison, bmd - that his life became well rounded and interesting. He definitely seemed to have two sides to his nature. He was not averse to trying his luck for his own ends, whether it be through forgery or attempting to weasle a pension out of the army. And yet he was also a church musician, a passionate organist. Was this where Ernest's true vocation lay? He was relatively young when he died, only 64, but his life was packed with incident and variety. I think he was a real go-getter, not afraid to try new things. For some reason I visualise him as a tall man with glasses. But mostly I picture him as seated at a church organ, lost in the music he is making, serene and content, if only for just that moment in time.

Fanny Hardwick 1834-1898: An Ordinary Life

This is the story of one of my ancestors, Fanny Hardwick. I chose to write about her by using the scientifically proven method of closing my eyes and sticking a pin in a list of my forebears! Over the last few weeks I had been struggling to find an interesting subject to blog about. I had been concentrating on all the 'compelling' folk, the people who I knew lots of things about. But then it dawned on me that ignoring those people with, dare I say it, 'humdrum' lives, meant that their stories were at risk of being lost, of never being written about because they appeared to be run-of-the-mill, unexceptional, average. But who am I to say that they led pedestrian lives just because they weren't documented except in a census or church record? Just because they didn't fight in a war, or invent something, or die horribly, or end up in a newspaper article doesn't mean they shouldn't be remembered and recorded for posterity. So here is my first randomly selected ancestor, my Great Great Grand Aunt, Fanny Hardwick.

Tempsford in the early 1830s

Fanny was born in 1834 in the small village of Tempsford in Bedfordshire. She was born midway through the  reign of William IV, and just three years before William's niece Victoria ascended the throne. Tempsford was a small agricultural village nestled on flat, open land with the River Ouse forming a natural boundary to the west. The village was cut in two by the Great North Road, the main coaching route from London to York since Roman times. As a very small child, Fanny would have seen the stage coaches passing through the village carrying passengers and mail to far off cities and towns. This was before the coming of the railway put an end to the centuries-old coaching tradition.

The Widower by Jacques Joseph Tissot

Fanny lived with her parents, Ezekiel and Sarah, in Langford End which formed one half of the village. At the time of Fanny's birth there were roughly 570 residents in the village, and the majority of these would have worked on the land. Fanny's father was no different. For most of his life he was an 'ag lab' or 'grazier', though, for a time, he was also a road labourer. By the time of the 1841 census Fanny had been joined by a younger sister, Mary. A year later, in 1842, the girls' mother, Sarah, died at the young age of 31. Fanny was eight, and her little sister was just four. Ezekiel suddenly had two small daughters to care for as well as a living to make. It must have been a difficult and upsetting time for this young family.

Ten years later however, circumstances had changed and life was very different. In 1851, Fanny was 17, and she was still living in Langford End with her father. But by this time there were two new additions to the family. Within three years of his first wife's death Ezekiel had married again, to Ann Esther Ibbot Miles, a lady with a very long name! Together they had Samuel, my 2 x Great Grandfather. Fanny was working as a lace maker, in keeping with many women in the area who were able to work from home supplementing the family's income.

The Lacemaker by William Weatherhead

How long Fanny was a lace maker I don't know, but at some point after 1851 she found work as a live-in servant in the home of one Joseph Addington who also resided in Langford End. She was to live there until his death twenty years later. On the 1861 census she is listed as 'servant', but by 1871 her occupation had been inflated to 'housekeeper'. Fanny was the only servant who lived-in; Joseph may have had other day servants, but Fanny was the only one who lived there all year round. Joseph, who described himself as a 'gentleman' was much older than Fanny, and one of the village's 'gentry'. He was obviously considered to be one of the more well-born inhabitants of the village.

By the time of the 1871 census, Fanny was 37 years old and still unmarried, a fairly rare state of affairs for the times. So I was pleased to discover that on Christmas Day 1874 she wed a local market gardener, George Cope, and settled down to married life with him. She was 40 when her wedding took place, and it's possible that they tried for children but were unsuccessful. I'm intrigued as to why she waited so long to marry when the majority of her peers would have been marrying and having children when they were barely out of their teens. Fanny had lived with her gentleman employer as his 'housekeeper' since her early twenties. Had they enjoyed more than a master-servant relationship which society would stop them from making official? Or maybe she was too busy to marry; running Joseph's home may have taken all her energy leaving her with no time to even meet possible suitors. Joseph died not long after the census in 1871. His death clearly left her free to find a partner to share her life with. Enter George.

Fanny lived out the rest of her life in Tempsford with her husband. They lived alone in their cottage in Nags Head Lane, next door to the local inn.

In 1898, aged just 64, Fanny died. I was amazed to discover that she had made a will and left behind effects worth £364, 17s, 8d which according to the National Archives currency converter is around £20,000 in today's money: a small fortune! How did she amass such a large amount of money? Perhaps her old employer, Joseph Addington, had left her some money in his will (I'll have to investigate) or maybe Fanny and George were just careful with their money. I'll probably never know. George outlived her by four years; he died in 1902.

So that was Fanny's life. It's very ordinary and not at all unusual, but I'm so pleased that I've documented it. I've really enjoyed writing this blog post, as, even though all the evidence for her life comes care of census records and BMD records, it still reveals so much of the person and the times they lived in.