Old photo investigation part 5 -- Nancy Hamilton

My only photo of Nancy Hamilton

My last hunt for clues to the people in my old photos (from the collection of Henry Fitzgerald Reynolds) and their families focuses on Nancy Hamilton, seen above in the photo taken on Brean Down on 19 September 1931, when she was 23. Nancy's grandfather was Henry's uncle (he was one of Henry's mother's brothers) so I think that makes her his first cousin once removed.
     Nancy was born on 30 June 1908 in Ulverstone, a small town on the north coast of Tasmania, Australia which had only really started to develop when the railway had arrived there less than twenty years previously.

Ulverstone

The story of Nancy's family -- her grandfather in particular -- is incredibly interesting but it has already been thoroughly researched by one of Nancy's distant relatives and it wouldn't be right to claim any of her research as my own. Anyone researching the Hamiltons of Fintra online can't fail to find her research, which she is incredibly generous about sharing (I'm not sure if she'd want to be named online). Suffice it to say, in brief, that Nancy's grandfather was Richard Hamilton, born in Ireland in 1826. One interesting little side story that I've discovered myself concerns Richard's aunt Isabella (his mother's sister) who married a gentleman called Thomas Moores, a cheese and ham wholesaler in London with a house at 90 Farringdon Street. According to the 1841 census, Richard went to live with this aunt and uncle at Farringdon St, almost certainly in order to study. He would have been fifteen then so he probably stayed there for a few years until he completed his studies. They had no children of their own.
     On Thursday 24 September 1846 a very curious thing happened at the house. It was still owned by the Moores but was unoccupied for a period (perhaps while they travelled abroad), so they had left it to the care of a couple, Mrs and Mrs Taylor. On this Thursday an aristocratic lady drew up outside the house and made inquiries there about a child that she had heard about. Mrs Taylor went off to fetch her daughter from Chandos St -- she did in fact have a three-year-old son (who was illegitimate). She sold the child to the lady for a down-payment of half a sovereign. Not long afterwards the woman came back and showed them the boy, who was now sleeping, stripped of his ragged clothes and 'now superbly clad in new clothes, and hat and feathers of the most tasteful and expensive kind'. The woman promised to return five days later to give the mother more money, up to a total of £5. This story was told in the Sunday Times but I don't know if there was any follow-up -- if there was I haven't found it.
     So, back to Richard Hamilton, who joined the navy before marrying a girl from very close to his home at Fintra, Alicia Barrett. They went to live in South Africa where Richard wanted to be a farmer. Sadly Alicia died giving birth to her second daughter. Her two girls seem to have been sent back to Ireland to be brought up by their aunt Clara Barrett. Meanwhile Richard married for a second time, a woman who had been born in England but who had also emigrated to South Africa, named Margaret Mason. Richard had a chequered career in South Africa, trying his hand at a number of careers, including diamond-mining, but eventually returned to Ireland to try to raise money against his future inheritance from his mother (who had the Fintra estate in trust) in order to fund a new venture in America. While he was detained at Killybegs (where the Fintra estate was), it seems he may have fathered an illegitimate child with his dead wife's sister Clara -- a boy named Douglas. While his wife and children waited in South Africa for him to send for them, Richard set off to San Antonio, Texas without very much money, intending to work for a couple of years, learning the lie of the land, until he could realise his assets in Ireland. Sadly, he never made it to San Antonio as he died on the train journey from the East Coast, possibly of alcohol poisoning.
     Nancy's father was Richard Robert Ernest Hamilton, the eldest of Richard's eight children with Margaret Mason. He was born in 1865, the same year as 'my' Henry. In 1881, according to the census, he was staying with his great-aunt Isabella Moores, just like his father before him. By now she was living alone (her husband Thomas had died in 1870) at 129 Holland Road, West London, with just the services of a cook and a housemaid. Richard was studying Law while he was there. Once qualified, he emigrated to Tasmania, settling in Ulverstone near Launceston, Tasmania's second town.

He married Margaret Phillips in November 1895 and I believe this was their house, in New Street:

It doesn't look as grand as I expected but it's on quite a big plot of land. Richard was quite a key player in Ulverstone, carrying out business functions solidly for decades. He was an estate agent with an office in Ulverstone's main street, Reibey Street. He was also a government valuer, chairman of Ulverstone Football Club and secretary of the Leven Marine Board for just short of forty years. He didn't seem to do anything glamorous, just solid, money-making ventures and some property development.
     He and Margaret had three daughters, Connie Loo (born 1897), Jessie Fintra (born 1902 -- I love that they named her after the ancestral home) and Nancy (born 1908). In 1904 Richard also fathered another child who was named Robert. Robert's mother was Rhoda King, who I believe was a servant in Richard's household. The illegitimate child was fostered out to a local woman, Mrs Greeney, who fostered a great many children both privately and for the state. She was a good woman. Robert was renamed Eric Reginald Greeney by his new guardian and later he changed his name again to Reg Greer. He was Germaine Greer's father and she wrote an excellent book about her search for the key to the mystery about him, Daddy We Hardly Knew You, published in 1990. She is an amazing genealogist. She's also 'my' Nancy's 'half-niece'!
     Unlike some of her relatives, Nancy does not seem to have had an exceptional life. She evidently took part in lots of school activities and sporting events as she grew up. It's possible to track her through mentions in the local newspapers. For instance, on Thursday December 20th 1923 Nancy played Catherine Parr in a 'spooky sextet' of the wives of Henry VIII at the end-of-term speech day at Church Grammar School, Ulverstone. 'Each child in turn delivered a little speech very effectively'. As part of the same event Nancy played a Huguenot, the Comte de Caerhout, in the closing entertainment, 'The Trap', about the Huguenot Massacre on St Bartholomew's Eve. Her character-acting was 'outstanding', the paper said. Nancy won prizes for arithmetic, sewing and popularity (the latter voted for by the other pupils). She played a lot of tennis.
     Nancy was soon to leave to go to finishing school. When she came back to Ulverstone she threw herself into the local social scene. She was named Belle of the Ball at more than one of the many dances and balls that took place. The papers lovingly described what seem like all the ladies' outfits so that we know that Nancy wore 'black georgette with inlets of lace' on one occasion and 'satin-trimmed net' on another.

from the Burnie Advocate of 1 July 1932

At the end of March 1931 Nancy travelled to England on the SS Mongolia, disembarking in London on 3 April 1931.

This postcard of the SS Mongolia was sent from Gibraltar during the voyage Nancy was on

Almost all we know of her adventures in the old country is that when she first arrived she stayed at St Christophers Buildings, Wigmore St and that she visited her cousin Henry and went for a walk by the sea near Weston-super-Mare. That must have been towards the end of her stay as two weeks later she had embarked on the SS Strathnaver, a brand-new ship making her maiden voyage to Australia. The ship sailed on 2 October 1931. Here's the page from the passenger list showing Nancy's name:

The Burnie Advocate noted her safe return on 18 November 1931:

Of course it was expected that Nancy would marry and she duly did. She married Henry Charles Room, scion of a local family. I don't have a photo of Henry but there's one of some of his family, taken in the 1910s, when Henry must have been a child:

This photo shows Henry's grandfather, James Henry Room, front centre, surrounded by five of his children, including Henry's father, Bill Room, standing behind his father. The others are Henry's uncles and aunts, Harry, Dick, Mary and Edna

I don't know the date of their wedding, but it must have been before 1935 as on Wednesday 6 November 1935 the local paper noted the following:

A few years later there was a mention of a visit home from the mainland with a little girl called Margaret. Trawling through the Australian census records it's possible to glimpse the family, moving from home to new home, some of them back in Tasmania. Henry was a bank clerk. I've only really found one interesting trace of him which is that on Friday 8 January 1954 Henry knocked over a cyclist (17-year-old Arthur Pyers) in his car on the street where their current residence was, Goldie St in Wynyard, a little town along the coast from Ulverstone. The poor boy suffered 'severe abrasions to the head' but there doesn't seem to have been any sort of court case.
     Apart from that, Henry is elusive. I haven't found the date when he died but Nancy seems to have outlived him by a number of years as she appears on her own in the censuses for a long time, right up until 1980 when she was living in a small house in Auburn Road, Hawthorn, a suburb of Melbourne. Again, I haven't found the date of her death.
     Nancy wasn't famous or extraordinary, but I have hugely enjoyed hunting down all the little mentions of her that I've been able to find, in an effort to bring her to life. This post concludes all the stories that I've been able to squeeze out of those photos found in a flea market in Brighton. Well, almost all of them, but those lesser tales may have to wait.

Old photo investigation Part 3 -- The Cators of Texas

This rather sad-looking woman is Marion Bertie Mills. The photo is another of those I found in Brighton, part of the collection of Henry Fitzgerald Reynolds, who you'll hopefully remember from my earlier post. Marion was Henry's cousin, the daughter of his mother Matilda's sister Louisa Hamilton. Louisa Hamilton was born in 1832, the fifth child out of ten born to James and Ann Hamilton of Fintra House, Donegal. She married Sir John Bertie Cator in 1849 when she was only 17 and he was 29. They made their home at the Grange in Swanland near Hull.

The Grange, Swanland

Sir John came from near Doncaster in Yorkshire and was a captain in the British Navy. He had already fought in the Chinese Opium wars and only a year or so after his marriage to Louisa John captained a steam tender, Intrepid, one of four ships that set out in search of the doomed expedition of Sir John Franklin to find the Northwest Passage, one of the most famous disasters in exploration history. At the Scott Polar Research Institute there are two sketches made by John whilst on the journey. You can see them by clicking on the link (can't reproduce them because of copyright restrictions) -- one shows his ship breaking through the ice to join the other ships in Melville Bay on August 3rd 1850 -- you can see the steam engine toiling away.

One of the other ships looking for Franklin trapped in the ice in Melville Bay, 1850

Louisa, only 18, had had two children by the time her husband's expedition returned (one must have been born before he left!). These, the first of the seven children she would eventually have, were Arthur John Locke Cator and James Hamilton Cator. Marion, above, was the fifth child, born in 1857.She was, unusually, given her father's middle name of Bertie -- John and Louisa's youngest child, a son, would be christened Bertie Osbaldeston when he was born in 1863 (we'll be hearing more of Bertie O Cator later on...).

By the time his two oldest sons, Arthur and James, were reaching their majority, Sir John was focussing on their future careers and taking steps to try to ensure they would be successful in life. Ironically, in view of what they went on to do, he felt that a career in the Navy would be too dangerous and he had them trained in engineering and draftsmanship. He wrote to the American consul in London to ask about opportunities for young men in the less settled parts of the United States and in 1871, after hearing glowing reports about Kansas, he sent Arthur and James there to strike it rich as farmers. Kansas had only joined the Union in 1861 and had been caught up in the American Civil War. An indication of how wild it was when the young men arrived there is that in 1871 Wild Bill Hickok was the mayor of Abilene, Kansas.

Wild Bill Hickok

Arthur and James couldn't settle to farming, however, and I've read that they were 'scorned' by the other Kansas frontiersman (perhaps they spoke with an upper-class British accent that made people laugh). However, they managed to transform themselves into men of the Wild West, becoming known as Bob and Jim Cator, respectively. They turned their hand to hunting buffalo, a highly profitable trade at the time (before the buffalo were hunted almost to extinction). With their first earnings they bought a wagon with mules and horses and set to hunting with a vengeance. At one point they employed seven skinners.

At a certain point, when the price of buffalo hides dropped, the brothers turned to killing wolves and coyotes, but soon returned to hunting buffalo. In the late autumn of 1873 Jim and Bob moved into the Texas Panhandle where the animals were still abundant. The winter, when it came, was severe, and the boys had to hunker down and wait it out. They camped in North Palo Duro Creek and made themselves a crude dugout of branches and hides.

Today a waymarker records the place where the Cators made their camp (the dates on the stone conflict with other accounts I've read..). From a longer shot, you can see that the landscape is still pretty empty:

The Cators are famous in Texas as some of the earliest 'Anglo' settlers there. There are lots of accounts of how they first established themselves, many with conflicting dates, perhaps reflecting the lack of documentary evidence. They carried on hunting buffalo for several years, until the dwindling numbers of animals prompted them to try their hand at ranching. They had maintained their dugout in the Creek as a base all this time and now they herded the stock they had bought from a ranch about 100 miles to the south, in Potter County. Their dugout perhaps looked something like this one, a far cry from the Grange, Swanland:

By 1877 Jim and Bob were well-established in Hansford County and they built themselves a far superior home which they named Zulu Stockade (a few miles from their first place. The name was a nod to contemporary British military efforts in Africa and their sense that Texas was just as wild as Africa). By now there was a regular route through their part of Texas, from Dodge City, Kansas, to Fort Bascom in New Mexico. The Cators turned their hand to supplying goods to passing traffic and the stockade became a store.

In 1880 they also got a license to run a post office there, with Bob as postmaster. Another waymarker records where the Zulu Stockade once stood:

As you can see from the Google Street View picture above, nothing remains of the Stockade today. It was abandoned in 1912 -- the coming of the railways took their business away. But the Cators were well and truly established in Hansford County, Texas and their success tempted other members of the family to come out from England to join them. 

You can see the Cator settlement marked on this old map of the Panhandle

Their sister Clara and much younger brother Bertie O came out to join them in 1879. Clara would have been 24 and Bertie only 16. Another young woman came with them called Jennie Ludlow and in 1882 she married Bob. Clara and Jennie were among the first white women to settle in the Panhandle. They tended the store. Jim Cator had been back to Hull in 1879 (perhaps his siblings then travelled back with him to America) and had met a girl called Edith Land. But it wasn't until 1887 that Edith came out to the States (travelling with her brother Arthur). Jim went to meet her in Dodge City, Kansas, where they got married. By this time Bob and Jennie had moved away to Oregon after a particularly hard winter in 1886 had nearly wiped out their herd of cattle. But Clara had married a local schoolteacher, Clayton McCrea (known as 'Clate'), and they took over the running of the stockade. The last sibling apart from Marion, Leslie, came out to Texas not long after the others, bringing his bride Bessie Donelson with him. Here's an amazing picture of Jim and Bertie Cator in their cowboy prime:

As Texas was progressively settled and developed, the Cator family were right in there at the heart of it. The town of Hansford, close to their ranch, was laid out in 1887. Both Jim and Leslie Cator served as county judges and Jim's brother-in-law Arthur Land was the first county treasurer. Bert established a timber and grain company in Hansford and twice served as county sheriff. Jim and Clate were the first farmers to introduce alfalfa as a crop in their county and Jim also set up the first local bank, in 1907. Jim died in 1927 whilst Edith lived on in the house he had built for her until 1950. The town of Hansford was overtaken by another nearby settlement, Spearman, which was on the railway. Hansford became a ghost town but many of the original Cator settlers are buried in the cemetery there.

Hansford cemetery.

Bert O's son Marshall was born in 1902 and lived to be just short of 100. A statue of Marshall was erected in 2000 at a museum in Canyon, Texas:

When Marshall died in January 2002 he too was buried in Hansford cemetery.
     It seems that Marion was the only Cator sibling not to emigrate to Texas. I wonder what her feelings were about the steady disappearance of her family across the Atlantic and whether she was tempted to follow them? However, I think perhaps Marion did go to America after all. In 1883 she married a local gentleman in Hull, Arthur Richmond Mills, but Arthur was, like Marion's father, a man of the seas, and seems to have spent his professional life as the captain of ships sailing to and from New York. It seems he was naturalised as an American citizen and they may have had a home in New York. I have one other photo of Marion from my Brighton finds. She's standing with Arthur and the shot was taken by Henry, her cousin, in Southampton in 1925 -- it would make sense that they were in Southampton, if they had just come in from an Atlantic crossing:

What a paunch on Captain Mills! Somehow I don't feel Marion can have had much say in the direction her life took after she married him (pure speculation, of course). She does look somewhat meek in her photos. It seems amazing that all her brothers and her sister went off to the Wild West from Hull.



The next 'chapter' of the investigation will focus on Henry's Reynolds ancestors...

Old photo investigation Part 2 -- The Hamiltons of Fintra

Above is the second of the two original photos I pulled out, almost at random, from the large box of old photos at the fleamarket in Brighton. At that point I hadn't even realised that it was connected to the first. If you haven't read the first instalment of what has become, for me, a very satisfying saga, catch up here.

This is the back of the photo and tells us that it was taken on June 2 1925 at Bitterne, Cleeve Hill, near Cheltenham. The people in the photo are Henry Fitzgerald Reynolds' elderly mother, Matilda, his sister Mabel and his wife Gladys (I confess I'm not 100% sure which of the other two women is which -- I think it's Mabel in front). I imagine Henry was behind the camera on a visit to his mother in what was perhaps her nursing home (she seems to be in a bath chair) or just a lovely quiet house that she had retired to. From the pebbledashed wall and the window panes that you can see, I think the house must have been this one or one like it, with a view over the valley below:

Or perhaps this is a photo of Henry's mother's house, among the pictures I found on my second trip to Brighton:

I love this funny, skewed photo, taken in September the previous year -- it looks about right in terms of the windows and walls, but I haven't been able to spot this house on my Google Street View visits to Cleeve Hill. There's no information on the back apart from the date.
     By finding the photo of Henry's mother I've been able to clear up uncertainty about the date of her death. Most of the people researching the Hamilton family (on Ancestry.co.uk and so on) have her death tentatively recorded as 1907 in her native Ireland, but in fact she died in 1930, aged 88, and her death was registered at Winchcombe, very close to Cleeve Hill.

Matilda Hamilton was born in 1842 at Fintra House near Killybegs, in Co. Donegal, Ireland. For a long time I thought that it was the white house on the far side of the bay in this old postcard, just above and to the left of the square tower of St Mary of the Visitation Catholic Church (the nearer church is St John's Church of Ireland Protestant Church). However, a kind commenter has put me right (May 2021): the white house is actually the Glebe House. Fintra House  is out of sight behind the hill beyond the Glebe House! Fintra was built in the late seventeenth century (I think) and  faces a bay: for a long time it was used by passing ships as a landmark, so clearly did it stand out.

The Hamiltons of Fintra House were a well-known branch of the Hamilton family who originally came over from Scotland during the 'Plantation of Ulster' to take over lands forcibly confiscated from the Irish families whose power base the English crown wanted to thoroughly undermine. I'm on very thin ice with my grasp of this history, so if you want to know more, try Wikipedia. Other researchers have done amazing work tracing the Hamiltons back to the time of James II of Scotland. In particular, I consulted a vast tome, published in 1933, called The House of Hamilton by Lieutenant-Colonel George Hamilton:

This is a bit of an aside, but the copy of the book that I was able to borrow from University of Birmingham Library had once been the personal copy of Thomas Erskine Swanzy and had his name and address inside in his own handwriting as well as his bookplate, based on his family coat of arms:

I know this is is T E Swanzy's own handwriting as I was able to compare it to his census form from the 1911 Census when he was Vicar of All Saints Church in Lincoln. Himself a descendant of a very old Irish family, Swanzy was a very keen genealogist who corresponded frequently with Henry Fitzgerald Reynolds on various obscure matters of Irish family history which they both then published in Irish history journals. In fact on the page about 'my' Hamiltons, Henry gets an acknowledgement in the footnotes:

Matilda Hamilton was the youngest of the ten children of James and Ann Hamilton. Ann's maiden name was Hutchinson and she came from Earby Hall near Newsham, which in turn is near Richmond, North Yorkshire, where I come from. I know it's only a tenuous link, but when I saw 'Richmond' popping up in my Ancestry.co.uk searches, I felt even more connected to this family.
     Ann, who was born in 1803, outlived her husband James by 32 years. He left the house to his wife, but after she died in 1881 under the terms of James's will the house and all the land the family owned was supposed to be shared out equally between the children. The will took a long time going through probate but in 1885 Matilda's sister Isabella and her husband Richard Gorringe bought everybody else out and moved into Fintra House. They had ambitious plans and tried to develop the house. They built the clock tower and coach house in 1896 but unfortunately ran into financial problems. In the photo below you can just see the clock tower and the other new buildings to the right of the original house:

The property passed into different hands eventually and, sadly, the house was burnt down in 1923 during the Troubles (although according to my kind Killybegs commenter, it was rebuilt before finally being demolished in the 1980s). Today only the Clock Tower remains and is run as a restaurant (below).

Nothing remains of the house itself. As there has been some discussion in the comments about the exact location of the house, here's a map, if helpful (added May 2021).

     On 18 May 1864 Matilda Hamilton married Walter Reynolds of Melton near Hull at Fintra House, which was still occupied by her widowed mother at that date:

'My' Henry was their first-born and they had six children in all. They lived at various addresses in and around Hull. Matilda's husband died in 1893 when she was only 51 and she lived for a further 37 years. In 1901 she was living 'on her own means' in Eastgate House, Cottingham on the outskirts of Hull with her son Walter, a stockbroker (Henry's younger and only brother) and her three surviving daughters (her daughter Kathleen had sadly died in childhood):

Only Henry had flown the nest. He must have gone down to London to get his education in order to become an engineer and analytical chemist. Just before he got married in the summer of 1911 he was renting rooms in this house at 92 Denbigh St, Pimlico:

Then he and Gladys (nee Williams, from Southampton) got married and went to live in Merton Hall Road, Wimbledon. He was 45 when he married, Gladys quite a bit younger at 29.

It would be brilliant if they had lived at no 95 Merton Hall Road, above, with the dragon on the roof, but I have no way of knowing. It must have been a similar house to this one, though.

We'll leave Henry and Gladys for now. In future instalments I'll be looking into Matilda's brother who went to South Africa and America, her nephew who emigrated from South Africa to Australia, and her cousins who settled in the Texas Panhandle, plus my favourite Hamilton, Nancy.