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Find My Past Blog - Famous family trees: Adrian Edmondson

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  • Find My Past Blog - Famous family trees: Adrian Edmondson

    Welcome to the latest blog in our ‘famous family trees’ series. In this blog series, experienced family historian, Roy Stockdill, investigates the family histories of the famous, both living and dead. Adrian Edmondson is the subject of Roy’s powers of deduction this month.*
    Ade Edmondson on stage with The Bad Shepherds.

    If ever someone qualified for the title “A man of many parts”, it is surely Adrian Edmondson. Comedian, actor, writer, director, musician, television presenter and chef – how many talents does the ebullient Yorkshireman have?
    From his early days as a performer in zany alternative comedy shows like The Young Ones, Bottom and Comic Strip Presents, Ade – as he now likes to style himself – has blossomed into a personable and bubbly TV presenter with series like The Dales and Ade in Britain, in which he’s seen touring the country towing his mobile kitchen, cooking mouth-watering regional dishes and joining in songs with local folk groups. He also launched a punk-folk band called The Bad Shepherds AND won the 2013 series of Celebrity MasterChef. Is there no end to the man’s extraordinarily diverse abilities?
    I confess to a little bias in wanting to research Ade’s family roots because he’s a Bradford boy, like me. He was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, on 24 January 1957 as Adrian Charles Edmondson, the middle one of three children. I found this research not easy however for two reasons: 1) Edmondson or Edmundson (the family appear in records in both versions) was a common surname in Victorian times in the large Yorkshire towns of Bradford and Leeds, where Adrian’s ancestors came from; 2) His great-grandfather, Thomas Edmondson, was illegitimate and took his stepfather’s name at one stage, so I had problems in finding him in a couple of censuses.
    How I eventually solved the puzzle will, I hope, help novice family historians by showing them how brick walls can be broken down with what I like to call “lateral thinking”. Adrian’s parents, Fred Edmondson and Dorothy Eileen Sturgeon, were married in a Unitarian Chapel in Bradford on 25 August 1951. The marriage certificate showed that Fred was 22 and a school teacher and Dorothy was 21 and a ladies’ hairdresser. The groom’s father was Redvers Edmondson, a yarn merchant, and the bride’s father was George Harold Sturgeon, a wool sorter – both typical occupations in Bradford’s wool trade.
    When he was young, Adrian lived in Cyprus, Bahrain and Uganda and was also a boarder at Pocklington School, near York, because his father was a teacher for British armed forces and his parents were often abroad. Fred (not Frederick) Edmondson was born in 1929 at Dewsbury, a small town at the heart of what was known as Yorkshire’s Heavy Woollen District, a connurbation of small mill towns south of Leeds. Fred was the second of five children born to Redvers Edmondson and Ruth Annie Hird who were married at Dewsbury in 1924. Adrian’s paternal grandfather had an unusual first name – or so I thought until I looked at the 1911 census and found over 1,300 children aged 11 and under bearing the same forename of Redvers. A little research elicited the information that the name appeared in many British families from late 1899 as a tribute to General Sir Redvers Buller VC, GCB, GCMG, a Victoria Cross holder who was commander of the British forces in Natal in the Second Boer War until being sacked for alleged military incompetence. Sir Redvers was made a scapegoat for British failures in South Africa but many people appear to have sympathised with him and named their children after him. Redvers Edmondson, born in Leeds on 30 March 1903, was very probably one of them.
    Redvers Edmondson in the 1911 census

    Redvers Edmondson appears in the 1911 census, aged 8*with his family at 5 Glencoe Street, Lumb Lane, Liversedge, a suburban area of Dewsbury registration district. His parents were Thomas and Maria Edmonson and his siblings were two older sisters, Annie and Amy, 19 and 17 respectively, and a younger brother Fred, 5. Thomas Edmonson, head of the household, was a labourer for the urban district council. The columns headed “Particulars As To Marriage” showed that Thomas and Maria had been married 24 years and had had eight children, four of them still alive and four who had died. Thomas Edmondson, 51, was shown as being born in Leeds about 1860, Maria Edmondson, 43, as being born at Roberttown, Yorkshire, in 1868, with children Annie, Amy and Fred all born at Robertown and Redvers in Leeds. Roberttown is a village in the parish of Liversedge.
    In 1901 Thomas and Maria Edmondson were in Leeds with daughters Annie, Amy and Alma*at 7 Club Yard, York Road, Leeds. Thomas Edmonson was then a coal hewer and his wife and three daughters were all said to have been born at Liversedge. It seems Alma died young soon afterwards, according to General Register Office death records. In the census of 1891 Thomas and Maria Edmondson were living in Lumb Lane, Liversedge*but then had no children. Thomas was a coal miner, born at Leeds, and Maria was born at Liversedge.
    It was at this point that I hit a snag! I got the marriage certificate of Thomas Edmondson and Maria Ellis, who were married at the parish church of Birstall, a town six miles south-west of Leeds, on 12 February 1887. Thomas was 27 and a miner, while Maria was only 19. Both were said to be of Norristhorpe, another nearby village. While the bride’s father was shown as Joseph Ellis, a carpet weaver, the columns for the names and occupation of Thomas’s father were empty apart from one peculiarity. Under “Father’s name and surname” someone had begun to write what looked like the name Samuel, and then crossed it out with a horizontal line. This was to turn out later to be an important clue in identifying Thomas’s parentage, but the lack of a father on the marriage certificate indicated that he was probably illegitimate.
    Despite intensive searching, I couldn’t initially find any sign of Thomas Edmondson in the censuses of 1881 or 1871. Without much hope, I went to the 1861 census looking for anyone of the name born in Leeds about 1860 – and found a likely candidate! This was in a household at 4 Pickard Street, Leeds, headed by a 62-year-old widow, Elizabeth Edmondson, a laundress who was born at Stanningley, a district of Pudsey, a town between Leeds and Bradford. Also in the household was an unmarried daughter, also called Elizabeth, aged 23, a cloth dresser, a son Thomas, 18, a cloth burler – and another Thomas Edmondson, aged one, who was shown as the older Elizabeth’s grandson. All three were shown as having been born in Leeds and it seemed likely that the young Thomas was an illegitimate child of Elizabeth the younger.
    Elizabeth Edmondson in the 1861 Census

    Some instinct I cannot entirely explain – put it down to the experienced family historian’s “hunch” if you like – told me I had found the right family and, if I was right, Elizabeth Edmonson was Ade’s great-great-grandmother. But despite more searching, I couldn’t find them in either 1871 or 1881.
    Then I went into my “lateral thinking” mode! Supposing, I told myself, that the younger Elizabeth Edmondson had married AFTER the 1861 census and acquired a new surname? I checked the GRO marriage indexes and discovered four Elizabeth Edmondsons and two Elizabeth Edmundsons who had married in Leeds *between 1861 and 1871.
    Without going into all the details of how I eliminated the other candidates, I eventually plumped for an Elizabeth Edmundson [sic] who married a Samuel Ambler in the first quarter of 1862 at Leeds Parish Church, St. Peter’s.
    I then went back to the 1871 census and found Samuel and Elizabeth Ambler living at Brittain Terrace, Templenewsam, in the Hunslet area of Leeds. Elizabeth’s age of 32 fitted perfectly with her birth in 1838/9 – and, lo and behold, they had a son called Thomas Ambler, aged 11, who I now felt reasonably certain was, in fact, Thomas Edmondson or Edmundson who had taken his stepfather’s name.
    To confirm my belief, I obtained the marriage certificate of Samuel and Elizabeth – and this turned out to be treasure! The marriage took place at Leeds Parish Church on 26 January 1862, some nine months after the 1861 census in which Elizabeth had been a single woman.
    Samuel Ambler was a bachelor of 32 and a miner, while Elizabeth Edmundson was 24 and a spinster. But the most vital piece of evidence lay in the addresses given for the couple. Samuel’s place of residence was Swinegate, a major thoroughfare in central Leeds, while Elizabeth’s was given as Pickard Street – the address where she was living with her widowed mother and presumed son Thomas in 1861.
    Samuel’s father was John Ambler, also a miner, and Elizabeth’s father was Richard Edmundson, a dyer. It is hardly surprising that Elizabeth’s surname had changed from Edmondson to Edmundson since the couple both made their marks on the certificate, so were presumably illiterate.
    The fact that his stepfather was called Samuel probably explains why someone had apparently started to write that name on Thomas’s marriage certificate to Maria Ellis in 1887, then crossed it out. Probably Thomas had remembered that Samuel Ambler wasn’t his real father and by then he had reverted to his birth name of Edmondson or Edmundson.
    Oddly, I still couldn’t find Thomas in either surname in 1881, but now I knew that his mother was Elizabeth and her father was Richard, I was able to find the family in the censuses of 1851 and 1841 and so pursue the line further back another generation. In 1851 they were at the same address as they were a decade later in 1861, 4 Pickard Street, Leeds. Elizabeth Edmundson [sic] the elder was aged 52, a laundress and even by then a widow. She had a son Richard, 15, a cloth dresser finisher, daughter Elizabeth, 13, a cloth piecener, and another son, Thomas, 9.
    In 1841 the family were living at Well’s Yard, Leeds, with Richard Edmundson, 40, a dyer, wife Elizabeth, also 40, and seven children aged from 20 down to one, including Elizabeth, 3. Richard’s occupation, a dyer, matched the detail given on the younger Elizabeth’s marriage certificate in 1862. Remember that in the 1841 census the ages of adults over 15 were normally reduced to the nearest lower multiple of five, so Richard and his wife may have been slightly older than 40.
    Ade Edmondson’s family in the 1841 Census

    For my final piece of research into the ancestry of Ade Edmondson I found a marriage at Leeds Parish Church on 23 August 1819 of Richard Edmondson [sic] and Elizabeth Harrison. It seems likely that this couple were Ade’s great-great-great-grandparents. The fact that the family name swung from Edmondson to Edmundson and back again is hardly surprising. It’s just one of the many salutary lessons familiar to family historians which make it such a fascinating, if sometimes complex, exercise!

    Roy Stockdill


    Roy Stockdill has been a family historian for almost 40 years. A former national newspaper journalist, he edited the Journal of One-Name Studies (for the Guild of One-Name Studies) for 10 years. He is on the Board of Trustees of the Society of Genealogists and is commissioning editor of the ‘My Ancestors…’ series of books. He writes regularly for Family Tree magazine.
    Photo Credit for Ade Edmondson on stage with The Bad Shepherds – Tony Hisgett


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