Week 16: My ancestor was a governess/nursemaid

[Jill on the A272]

Week 16: Governess/nursemaid



This is an opportunity to showcase a governess or nursemaid from your family tree or you may have had people who employed them. You might want to offer a short biography and speak about their work eg
Name
Birth location/date
Family background
Where you've found them on the census
Their workplace/employer
Any tips on researching this occupation?

[Next week: Shoemaker/bootmaker/cordwainer/leatherworker]

[Jill on the A272]

My 2x great grandparents William James and Jane Crisp employed a governess for their younger children Florence, Helena, Maude and Herbert. The Crisps lived in Mile End road, Stepney, William was a leather factor and the governess Isabella Hay Dodds was also from Stepney, she was born in 1846, and was the daughter of master mariner John Dodds and his wife Isabella.

In 1871 Isabella aged 24 and her charges were in Seal, Kent while her employers were in Stepney. The Crisp childrens' grandfather lived in the near by village of Ightham. Also in the household was seventeen year old Clara Hawes, the Hawes family were friends of the Crisps and Clara's grandfather was another of my ancestors.

Isabella Hay Dodds married schoolmaster Henry James Johnson in 1872 and had three sons with him, all born in Ramsgate, after his death she had a brief marriage to William Jeffs in 1892 but had reverted to the name of Johnson and was a widow by 1901.

[Anne in Carlisle]

I wrote this piece a while ago.

Selina Horsfield A coal miner’s granddaughter became nursery nurse to the Churchills

Selina Horsfield was my 1^st cousin 3 times removed. Her Grandparents Charles (a coal miner) and Martha Horsfield of Silkstone, Yorkshire were my 3 x great grandparents. Selina’s father was their oldest son William who was born in Silkstone in 1819 (before his parents’ marriage!)

Selina was born in Greenwich in 1849 and died in London in 1935 aged 86. She was buried with her parents in Ladywell and Brockley Cemetery. The inscription says she was 89, she seems to have had a little problem with her age once she was over 30!

Selina appears on the 1851 and 1861 censuses with her parents in Greenwich. Then she seems to have embarked on a career as a nursery nurse in increasingly wealthy households. At each census she is listed at the top of the servants list as ‘nurse’. There are always small children under the age of 4 in the families.

In 1871 she is at Glebe Lodge, Lee, Kent aged 23. There are 4 servants including Selina. The head of the household is John Ratcliffe.

In 1881 she is at 18 Linden Gardens, Kensington aged 33. There are 5 servants including Selina. The head of the household is H. G. Walpole, ‘Indian Officer’. This is Sir Horatio George Walpole, CBE (1844-1926) an assistant secretary of state in the India Office.

In 1891 she is at Frenchay House, Winterbourn, Glocestershire aged ‘39’!! There are 13 servants including Selina. Head of household is William G Tanner who had recently inherited the estate and a large sum from his father.

In 1901 she is at Blenheim Palace aged ‘45’!! (She was in fact at least 52!) There are 35 servants, including Selina, who appears at the top of the list of female servants. The head of the household is listed as Consuelo Marlborough (aged only 22). Selina’s charges are John and Ivor Spencer Churchill aged 3 and 2.

The Yorkshire coal miner’s granddaughter had done well and I’m sure the whole Horsfield family were proud that Selina had presented ‘her’ little boys to Royalty when the King visited Blenheim!

[jenoco]

Ann Glasscock is my 3x great grandmother. She was baptised 19 January 1801 in Cold Norton, Essex, fifth child of Henry and Mary (Hart) Glasscock. Ann married John Philbrook on 20 September 1823 in Purleigh, Essex; they had 11 children, nine of whom lived to adulthood.

Ann didn’t have an easy life and, from court records, she lived with an abusive husband – he was charged with threatening to cut her throat in October 1834. On at least three occasions she was charged with stealing food. In 1831, she was sentenced to three months imprisonment for larceny; in 1832 to five months hard labour (with last month solitary confinement) for stealing a sheaf of wheat and in 1837 she stole a quantity of beef (she told the court she had seven children at home and her husband had been away a fortnight). In 1850, she was charged with stealing cabbages and the following year with stealing coal (she told the court her husband made her do it).

Ann and John eventually separated and she moved with her two youngest sons to Sydenham to be with her oldest son, James. Sometime after the 1861 census, Ann becomes a ‘monthly nurse’ and appears on the 1871 census living at King’s Road, Chelsea in the home of surveyor Charles Walter and his wife Eliza. They had four children under six – I imagine quite a handful for a 70 year old.

I can’t find her on the 1881 census but she dies that year of ‘decay of old age’ at the home of her son James.

[Jill on the A272]

Two of my great aunts worked with children, Florence Campbell Crisp (known in the family as Aunt Gipsy) aged 21 was a children's maid in Epsom for Jerome Nugent Bankes children at the 1901 census, for some reason the census says he was a widower, though he wasn't, his wife was visiting elsewhere. Gipsy married the following year and lived in Fratton near Portsmouth (her husband was a sailor).

Her sister Beatrice Lacey Crisp was in charge of the children of "Mrs W" in Fishguard, I have postcards from her written to her mother in West Wittering, one dated 11 Sep 1907 saying that people say she keeps the children nice, and another sent 1 Jul 1908 saying they were staying at Dinas Cross and Mrs W had gone to London for a week so she only had the four younger children and a servant. Her employers may have been solicitor Walter Levi Williams and his wife Martha who had the right number of children, and Beatrice went on to marry Walter's brother Llewelyn in 1908.

Beatrice had a secret son, Arthur, born in Fratton at her sister's in 1905, I have a postcard she sent from the Sussex County Hospital Brighton when I calculate she would have been 6 weeks pregnant, it marks her room at the hospital. I went through the operations log and the staff records for the hospital hoping to find her but drew a blank. The child was brought up by foster parents in Portsmouth, when his son David got in contact several years ago he said Arthur was told that his father was a soldier from Fishguard. Beatrice went on to have three children with her husband.