Mary Skerritt nee Brown 1804 – 1879: a quiet life in Lincolnshire

I have been reading about X-DNA inheritance. Greg inherited 12½% of his X-DNA from his 3rd great-grandmother Mary Skerritt nee Brown (1804 – 1879), so I thought I would see what I could learn about her. I found her christening record and added her parents. Doing this brought my family tree up to 10,000 people.

Greg’s X-DNA inheritance is research in progress, a story for another day. However, I thought I would commemorate the 10,000 people milestone by writing about Mary.

Mary Brown, born in 1804, was baptised on 26 August 1804 at Sapperton, Lincolnshire, England. Her parents were John Brown and Jane [probably Jane Shipwright].

Map highlighting places in Lincolnshire associated with Mary Skerritt nee Brown’s life. From Sapperton to Grantham is only 8 miles.

On 26 June 1792 John Brown, bachelor of Sapperton, married Jane Shipwright at St Wulfram’s Grantham. She was ‘of this parish’. John could not sign his name but Jane Shipwright could. The witnesses were William Marshall and John Scarborough.

St Wulfram’s Church Grantham is 8 miles north-west of Sapperton.

“North East View of Grantham Church, Lincolnshire” by J M W Turner watercolour c 1797. The church has been described as having the finest steeple in England.

I have found no other children of John Brown and Jane baptised at Sapperton. I think it is likely that Mary Brown had siblings, but Brown is a common surname and without knowing which parish the baptisms took place it is hard to link family members. It is possible that Elizabeth Brown baptised in 1805 in Osbournby, Lincolnshire and William Brown also baptised 1806 in Osbournby are siblings. Osbournby is 6 miles north-east of Sapperton. I haven’t have enough information to decide. There are also children baptised at Grantham to John Brown and Jane but these include another Mary baptised in 1812. It is quite likely that more than one family surnamed Brown is included in these baptisms.

Similarly I have not yet been able to identify John and Mary Brown’s deaths or find out more about them; the names are too common.

On 26 November 1829 Mary Brown married Robert Skerrett at Welby, Lincolnshire. Welby is 5 miles north-west of Sapperton. Neither Mary nor Robert could sign their name. Both were of the parish. The witnesses were John Fisher, Catherine Sensicall, and John Cheetham.

Robert and Mary Skerritt had at least the following children:

• Robert Skerrit 1830-
• Jane Skerritt 1833- 1835
• Ann Skerrit 1836- 1906
• Eliza Skerrit 1838-1899
• John Skerrit 1841-
• Lucy Skerritt 1843–1888
• George Skerrit 1846–

The following baptisms in St Wulfram’s, the parish of Grantham, Lincolnshire, are recorded for the children of Robert Skerritt and Mary

• Robert baptised 26 September 1830, Robert is a labourer, their abode is Grantham
• Jane 23 June 1833, Robert is a labourer, the abode is Little Gonerby
• Ann 27 December 1835, Robert is a labourer, their abode is Little Gonerby
• Eliza 2 April 1838, Robert is a labourer, their abode is Little Gonerby
• John 8 January 1841, Robert is a labourer, their abode is Little Gonerby
• Lucy 3 January 1844, Robert is a labourer, their abode is Little Gonerby
• George 3 September 1846, Robert is a labourer, their abode is Little Gonerby

The following burial appear to be of Mary’s infant child

• Jane Skerrett aged 1 of Little Gonerby was buried in Grantham on 10 March 1835

On the 1841 census Mary Skerrett aged 30 was living at Manthorpe cum Little Gonerby with Robert Skerrett aged 35, a labourer. In the same household were John (? probably Jane) aged 12, Robert aged 10, Nora (? probably Ann) aged 6, Eliza aged 3, John aged 6 months. All members of the household were born in Lincolnshire.

On the 1851 census Mary Skerritt age 46 born Sapperton was recorded as living at New Street in Manthorpe cum Little Gonerby with her husband Robert aged 50, a labourer, born Barrowby. In the same household were Robert unmarried aged 20, a labourer born Little Gonerby; Ann unmarried aged 15, a servant, born Little Gonerby; Louisa (Eliza?) aged 13, a servant, born Little Gonerby; John aged 10; Lucretia (Lucy) aged 7; George aged 4. The three youngest children had no occupation and were all born in Little Gonerby. Six of Mary’s seven children had survived infancy and all were living at home in 1851.

On the 1861 census Mary aged 51 or perhaps aged 57 was living with her husband Robert aged 60 and their unmarried son George aged 16. Both Robert and George were Agricultural Labourers. Also in the same household was their daughter Ann, her husband George Futcher and two grandchildren aged 3 and 1.

On the 1871 census Mary Skerritt, aged 66, was lodging with her oldest son Robert. Robert had been recently widowed and had 4 children aged between 13 and 3. Mary was described as a charwoman.

I have not been able to locate Robert Skerritt senior on the 1871 census.

Mary’s husband Robert died on 17 September 1877 at Little Gonerby. He was aged 77. His death was announced in the Grantham Journal of 22 September 1877.

Mary died exactly two years later on 17 September 1879. Her death was announced in the Grantham Journal of 20 September 1879.

death notice of Mary Skerritt published in the Grantham Journal 20 September 1879 page 4. Image retrieved from the British Newspaper Archive via FindMyPast

Mary’s parents were the 9,999th and 10,000th relatives added to my family tree. My tree also has 1,979 photos (including images of records), 267 stories, and 14,749 attached records. Much research remains to be done.

Sources

• ancestry.com
  • England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975 [database on-line] Name: Mary Brown Gender: Female Baptism Date: 26 Aug 1804 Baptism Place: Sapperton,Lincoln,England Father: John Brown Mother: Jane FHL Film Number: 504748, 508033
  • England, Select Marriages, 1538–1973 [database on-line] Name: John Brown Gender: Male Marriage Date: 26 Jun 1792 Marriage Place: Grantham, Lincoln, England Spouse: Jane Shipwright FHL Film Number: 432509, 432510, 432511, 432512, 436035
  • England, Select Marriages, 1538–1973 [database on-line] Name: Mary Brown Gender: Female Marriage Date: 26 Nov 1829 Marriage Place: Welby,Lincoln,England Spouse: Robert Skellet [mistranscribed should be Skerrett] FHL Film Number: 508084
  • English census records
    • 1841 Class: HO107; Piece: 625; Book: 4; Civil Parish: Grantham; County: Lincolnshire; Enumeration District: 7; Folio: 47; Page: 34; Line: 10; GSU roll: 438760
    • 1851 Class: HO107; Piece: 2103; Folio: 285; Page: 4; GSU roll: 87732
    • 1861 Class: RG 9; Piece: 2351; Folio: 59; Page: 32; GSU roll: 542958
    • 1871 Class: RG10; Piece: 3360; Folio: 8; Page: 10; GSU roll: 839361
  • FreeBMD. England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1837-1915 [database on-line]. Name: Mary Skerritt Estimated birth year: abt 1803 Registration Year: 1879 Registration Quarter: Jul-Aug-Sep Age at Death: 76 Registration district: Grantham Inferred County: Lincolnshire Volume: 7a Page: 268
• FindMyPast.co.uk
  • • baptism records including images from Lincolnshire Baptisms
    • burial record including image from Lincolnshire Burials
    • British Newspaper Archive images of the Grantham Journal

Related post

• Concerting Mary’s daughter Eliza: X, her mark, revisited

X, her mark, revisited

Second thoughts

On re-reading the ‘Grantham Journal’ piece of 9 December 1893, I find I agree with the interpretation of Linda Curry (in the comments, below). Although she favoured the Catholic candidate, Eliza was persuaded that she should not vote against her own denominational interests, ‘her own’ meaning Anglican. She was a member of the Church of England.

I have no forebears whose names begin with X, but ‘X, his mark’ on a document seems close enough.

Making an X is not a reliable way of identifying yourself, of course, and from time to time illiterate people were tricked into giving false endorsements of their intentions. One of these was my husband’s great great grandmother Eliza Dawson née Skerritt (1838-1899) who lived in Corby, near Grantham, Lincolnshire.

Though she apparently could not read and write, Eliza Dawson was a property owner and therefore entitled to vote for the local Board of Guardians. The Boards were committees that administered the Poor Law in the United Kingdom from 1835 to 1930, elected by owners and bona fide occupiers of land liable to pay the poor rate. The property qualification was abolished in 1894, but in 1893, Eliza, widowed since 1872, was an owner or occupier of land liable to pay the poor rate and so eligible to vote for the local Board.

In the 1893 election Eliza was canvassed by a Mr Walsingham on behalf of Mr William Harrison, the local butcher, who was a member of Church of England. Eliza, however, wished to vote for the alternative candidate, a Roman Catholic, the Reverend Canon Baron. Walsingham seems to have told Eliza that her children could not complete her ballot paper on her behalf but that he could. However, perhaps contrary to her wishes, he completed the ballot in favour of William Harrison. She later asserted that ‘…she did not give him any direct permission to record her vote for Mr Harrison’.

Eliza protested, and in reviewing the election, the Local Government Board  was satisfied that her ballot paper had not been completed in accordance with her intentions and that Eliza’s vote should be disallowed. This tied the vote and a fresh election was ordered.

Witnesses in the case included her sons William and Albert Dawson, and William’s wife Annie.

Local Government Board Enquiry at Corby reported in the Grantham Journal 30 September 1893 page 6 retrieved from the British Newspaper Archive through FindMyPast

Grantham Journal 9 December 1893 page 6 retrieved from the British Newspaper Archive through FindMyPast

Two years before this, at the time of the 1891 census, Eliza Dawson was living at Stonepit Terrace in Corby with her sons George age 20 and Albert age 18, both farm labourers, and her grandson Arthur, age 12, still at school. The house previously enumerated on the Census was in Brown Road, with the occupants listed as Eliza’s son William age 31, who was a chimney sweep, William’s wife Annie, and a stepson, Frederick Munks aged 2.

Eliza presumably owned at least one of these houses, possibly both, giving her the legal status of property owner. (I haven’t been able to locate these addresses on a present-day map.)

I still have much to learn about the Dawson and Skerritt families. Until reading this article I had no idea that Eliza was a Roman Catholic [but see above, at ‘Second Thoughts’] or that she owned enough real property to qualify as a Board of Guardians voter.

A fresh election was held in January 1894. Canon Baron won the popular vote but the successful candidate was the Reverend Charles Farebrother, Anglican priest of Corby Vicarage. Depending on the value of his property, an elector had up three votes. It appears that the wealthier voters chose to vote for the Anglican clergyman.

Grantham Journal 13 January 1894 page 3

Postscript

I am descended from a long line of Huguenots – French Calvinists – on one side and German Lutherans on the other, supplemented by Anglicans (mostly) and various other Protestants. My husband Greg’s family were nominally Anglican, or if not, Non-conformist or, occasionally, followers of unusual creeds, not all of them trinitarian.

So it has been easy to assume that our families were Protestant Christians of one kind or another, and it was a surprise to discover a direct forebear who appears to have been a Roman Catholic.

The evidence is slight, however. To say that Eliza Dawson née Skerritt was described by an 1893 Corby newspaper as belonging to the Roman Catholic church reminds me of the cautious scholar who, seeing a mob of black cows, one of them white, reported that he had observed at least one cow white on at least one side.

There are very few facts, and they are difficult to interpret. Eliza Skerritt married Isaac Dawson in an Anglican Church, possibly before she changed her religious allegiance – if that’s what happened. I have not found her will or probate record, and I do not know whether she was buried a Roman Catholic. I know nothing about her husband’s denominational affiliation, nor her chilren’s.

Greg, raised in a sect which believes the Bishop of Rome to was accurately described by John in Revelation 17, will not be hurrying off to Mass on Sunday. I am waiting for more evidence before I can say with confidence that not all our recent forebears were Protestants.

Related post

• X, her mark

DNA analysis: taking the tree back two generations

DNA: SNP model from Wikimedia Commons

Progress on our family tree using DNA evidence has been slow. Cousin matches are either with people where we have no idea how they fit into our tree, or with cousins whose place in the tree we already know. The second kind of matches are useful, however, because they help to predict where on our  tree those otherwise unlinked matches might belong.

When we received our first DNA results in July 2016 one of the first matches I contacted was A B. She was predicted to be Greg’s 4th cousin with AncestryDNA stating Greg and AB shared 21.6 centimorgans across 2 DNA segments. She had a private tree, so I was unable to view what links there might be between our tree and hers. Her member profile gave no hint as to where in the world she was.
Later in the month AB replied and shared her private tree with me. Neither of us could see where the link was. We both uploaded our DNA kits to GedMatch.com, which confirmed the link, giving slightly more information than AncestryDNA had provided:

Comparing Kit A828918 (*G C Y) and Axxx (*AB)
Minimum threshold size to be included in total = 500 SNPsMismatch-bunching Limit = 250 SNPsMinimum segment cM to be included in total = 7.0 cM

Chr	Start Location	End Location	Centimorgans (cM)	SNPs
8	22,956,646	32,079,918	12.6	1,731
12	64,128,525	77,383,427	13.3	2,210

Largest segment = 13.3 cMTotal of segments > 7 cM = 25.9 cM2 matching segmentsEstimated number of generations to MRCA = 4.6
441334 SNPs used for this comparison.

At the time no other kits uploaded to GedMatch matched AB and Greg. AncestryDNA also showed no shared matches.

AncestryDNA offers a view of surnames and places of birth that two trees have in common. We noticed early on that there were a large number of places in Lincolnshire from AB’s tree and some close to those on our family tree.

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The orange markers are birthplaces on AB’s tree. The blue from our tree, and the green are birthplaces appearing on both trees.

Because of the Lincolnshire birthplaces we looked at both Dawson and Plowright lines as possible connections but came to no conclusions.

In September AB looked again at her tree, focusing on her great grandfather John William Gibbons. AB had noticed that she and her father shared DNA with an AncestryDNA match, To2, and that Greg also shared DNA with To2, although not the same segments (hence not showing as a shared match).  AB found that her shared ancestors with her father and To2 were John Gibbons and Frances. Frances was possibly the daughter of Robert Atkin and Frances Smith.

Greg had no forebears with the surname Gibbons in his tree but looking at his DNA matches there were some matches who had Gibbons in their tree, in particular several had Rebecca Gibbons (1843-1897).

Rebecca was born in Moulton, Lincolnshire, the daughter of Thomas Gibbons. In 1866 she first married William  Noble Waite (1845-1879). They had five children and emigrated to the United States in the 1870s. William Waite died in Utah. Rebecca’s second marriage was to Lemuel Sturtevant Leavitt (1827 – 1916) in 1882 in Utah, USA. I had noticed that several of Greg’s DNA matches had Leavitt as one of the surnames.

Lemuel Leavitt was a Mormon pioneer who travelled overland to Utah at the age of 21 in 1849.

I used Wikitree to document some of my research on the branch and connect the branch to the wider single tree. Lemuel Leavitt was on the tree but I needed to create a profile for his wife Rebecca. Several ancestry trees included Rebecca but she was not well researched and facts were sometimes factually wrong, for example on one tree she was shown as being married to Lemuel Leavitt in 1850.

I found a possible Gibbons link to our tree, an 1826 marriage record in Horbling in Lincolnshire for Thomas Dawson. The spouse was Ann Gibbons, who lived there.

Greg’s 4th great grandfather was Thomas Dawson (1775 Gunby, Lincolnshire – 1861 Bennington, Lincolnshire). He was married to an Ann.  I wondered if this was Ann Gibbons of Horbling.

AB identified Rebecca Gibbons Waite Leavitt in her tree, confirming a link to the trees for the descendants of Lemuel Leavitt and Rebecca Leavitt formerly Waite nee Gibbons with whom we shared DNA. These descendants had apparently not yet researched Rebecca’s parents or origins.

In early November the  General Register  Office of the United Kingdom launched a new index of birth registrations. This revised index included mother’s maiden names. From this, AB discovered the record of Betsy Dawson’s birth in 1838. Bestsey was the youngest child of Thomas Dawson and Ann. The birth index showed the mother’s maiden name Gibbons. Bestsey appeared n the 1841 census with her parents Thomas and Ann and sibling Isaac (1831-1872). Isaac was Greg’s great great grandfather. There were two other siblings, Eliza and William. This gave us confidence that we had correctly identified the 1826 marriage of Thomas Dawson to Ann Gibbons as being the marriage of Isaac Dawson’s parents.

Thomas Dawson married Ann Gibbons at Horbling which is 5 miles from Aslackby, where AB’s Gibbons forebears lived.

We started to speculate. AB gave a surname to the wife of John Gibbons. She wrote:

I have added a surname to Frances (Atkin/s), wife of John Gibbons at the top of my tree. This is what is in many other people’s tree, and its true that the marriage dates seem to fit. HOWEVER – the reason why I am not sure is that the records for the parish of Aslackby for this time period have not yet been fully digitised, but are at the archives. I need to look at them anyway for my mum’s tree.

So having added the surname ATKINS it has thrown up some hints from other trees and in a couple there is a daughter ANN born 1801 Spalding, sister of my George and of Thomas – the ancestor of the LDS’s. I do feel that this would be about the right generational distance between our families.

I am not convinced about the accuracy of the online trees but it is worthy of further investigation.

The next day on the lincstothepast website AB found a baptism for Ann on 16 December 1801, daughter of John and Frances Gibbonds, at St Mary and St Nicholas Church, in Spalding, 15 miles from Horbling .

This was the only ( I think) church in Spalding at this time, as st Pauls was built by my Quinton ancestors ( as labourers)  in mid / late 19thC. St Mary and St Nicholas was the church where John Gibbons and Frances Atkin were married.

The date seems to fit the age Ann Dawson when she died. In identifying a forebear I would not normally rely on such a slim connection but the DNA seems to be another piece of evidence, in particular the additional DNA matches to several descendants of Rebecca Gibbons.

In conclusion, DNA is really just additional evidence, to be reviewed with documents and indexes. Given the DNA evidence I am reasonably confident we have identified the maiden name of Greg’s great grandmother Ann Dawson (1801-1842) and we now know who her parents were: John Gibbons (1780-1840) and Frances Atkins (1772-1856). This means that Greg and AB are 5th cousins, within the range predicted by AncestryDNA and GedMatch.

Places associated with research into Ann Dawson nee Gibbons (1801-1842) Map created using MapAList

https://mapalist.com/map/619269

simplified tree, click to enlarge