Tag Archives: Helmsley

England, Genealogy

Hard Life, Beautiful View

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The path my 2 times great grandmother Anne Nesfield took to work and marry in 1860 era. People in Sleights tended to stay put until the opening of the railroad in 1840.

My father, Peter, born Kuala Lumpur, Malaya in 1922 of hardscrabble North of England stock, always signed his name Peter N.F. Nixon Esq., something I found a wee bit pretentious. He was just a chartered accountant, after all. The F stood for Forster, the N for Nesfield.

I knew Forster was his mother’s surname. I didn’t know until very recently upon doing his genealogy that Nesfield was his father’s paternal grandmother’s name.

Ann Nesfield, my 2x GG was born in 1838A in Sleights near the lovely coastal town of Whitby at the North East corner of the North Yorkshire Moors to Stephen Nesfield of that place and Mary Jeferson of nearby Sneaton.

Stephen was a labourer. He and Mary were both illiterate as they signed their 1830 marriage certificate with an X.

The August 30, 1861B marriage record for Thomas Richardson and Ann Nesfield has them wed in Husthwaite, 40 miles to the south west but still on the Moors. Thomas was from nearby Rievaulx, a small town of 229 people (10 farms and 26 cottages, one school house and no pub) famous then as now for its monastery ruins.

According to the 1861 UK Census, Ann had been working in Husthwaite as a cook at an estate/farm, Highthorne, belonging to one Nathaniel Thomas Lumley Hodgson, Esquire (sic) gentleman horse-breeder who had been a crony of Charles Darwin’s at Cambridge! 3Thomas according to the same Census is living in Rievaulx with an older sister.

Ann and Thomas Richardson go on to have ten children over twenty years with my father’s grandmother Mary-Ellen, 2nd born in 1862, destined to marry one Robert Nixon, a quarryman from the adjacent market town of Helmsley.1

Now, I imagine Ann Nesfield’s existence in rural England post-Industrial Revolution wasn’t that easy despite her initial skilled position as a cook for a small family at a North York Moors estate. And who can know about her 1861 marriage to Thomas Richardson. Tailors and drapers, especially in small towns, were still solidly working class.

It is also possible Ann married right then out of necessity. It was announced in the 24th of August 1861 Yorkshire Gazette (just one week before Ann’s marriage) that Lumley-Hodgson Esq. was selling off some fine animals and leaving his farm for the winter ‘due to the health of his daughters.’

Abbot’s Well cottage on Google Earth with ruins behind. The oldest standing non-monastery building in Rievaulx, designated by the National Trust as Medieval, a period that ended in 1450.
The view from the garden. Roger Smith. Geograph Project Creative Commons

In the beginning, Thomas and Ann Richardson lived at the Richardson family abode, Abbot’s Well, a cozy-looking medieval cottage in Rievaulx, a town that started out as the inner court of one of the richest Cistercian Monasteries in England founded in 1132. The Monastery was destroyed by Henry VIII in 1532 at the very beginning of the infamous dissolution. New homes were then built with stone from the monastery, homes that were used to house various workers from the nearby Duncombe Park Estate of Lord Feversham.

The view from the little garden of Ann’s heritage house, by all accounts, was simply stupendous.

I discovered a 1830’s travelogue online that already describes the town of Rievaulx as ‘quaint’ and ‘picturesque’ and ‘historic,’ claiming the view from the ridge of the vale and ruins “offers a combination of beauties that must be seen to be enjoyed and once seen can never be forgotten.”2

A century later, in the 1930’s, a nephew of the 1st Lord Feversham of Duncombe Park in Helmsley was living at Abbot’s Well House (built 1906 and 30 meters away from the cottage) and Lady Beckett, the widow of the 2nd Lord Feversham, was offering tours of the cottage in benefit of local nurses “with the small garden providing an excellent prospect overlooking the monastery ruins.” Her tours continued well into the 1950’s.

And in May, 1984, the London Times remarked upon a recent sale of the modern Abbot’s Well House. “That a view is worth something is proved by the recent million pound plus sale of the modern Abbot’s Well with a two acre garden that has a view of the 12th century abbey and the Rye Valley beyond.”

I have to wonder, in the 1860’s, did Ann’s heart sing out every time she went out to hang the laundry with my great-grandmother, Mary-Ellen, at her feet? Or did she lament the leaky roof, drafty windows or the lack of bedrooms for her growing family? Was living beside these majestic monastery ruins a comfort to her or merely a haunting reminder of how things can fall apart?

As it happens, the Richardsons did move out of Abbot’s Well sometimes after 1881 and before 1891, but they did stay in town. The 1891 UK Census has the family living at New Cottage in Rievaulx, with Thomas still a tailor and draper but also, now, a grocer. The 1901 CensusC has Ann a widow with four grown children still at home, one son working as a general labourer but three girls in their twenties performing “home duties.” Ann is now the tailor/grocer in the family. In 1911, one year before her death at 74, Ann is still at New Cottage, working as a grocer and living with her youngest daughter who is 30 and married.

Recent Photo: Rievaulx Abbey and Rye Valley beyond from Rievaulx Terrace. Colin Grice. Geograph Project. Creative Commons.
Duncombe Hunting Party. 1728. John Wooten. Yale Collection of British Art. Creative Commons . My ancestors would be the labourers in the background or the scruffy attendants:)

My father’s working-class ancestors lived in picturesque towns all along the route from Whitby to Helmsley; pretty places with colourful names like Goathland, Kirbymoorside and Ugglebarnby. Whitby, where Ann Nesfield lived her early years, is also a North of England beauty spot from what I see on YouTube with surrounding coastal villages as lovely as anything in Italy’s Cinque Terre.

So, although little of consequence about Ann Nesfield’s life can be gleaned from the genealogical record, one thing about the woman cannot be denied. She spent her entire existence surrounded by the breath-taking beauty of the North Yorkshire Moors. That, I think, has to have taken the edge off her own hard-scrabble existence.

Notes:

Thank you to the Ryedale Family History Group for all their kind and expert help and especially to Valerie Slater for helping me sort out the many Ann Nesfields in the Whitby area born circa 1838.

(Apparently, there’s a lot of mix up over these Anns in online family trees. I have to redo part of my tree, now! And it doesn’t help birth dates on the UK Census are only guesstimates 🙂

A walk around Rievaulx Terrace National Trust: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=youtube+a+walk+around+rievaulx+terrace&mid=7CB260977EE2F240F3D27CB260977EE2F240F3D2&FORM=VIRE

  1. Robert Nixon Sr, my great grandfather, 1863-1937, who married Nesfield’s daughter, Mary Ellen Richardson, was a delver in the quarry in 1911 according to the UK Census, but he had other occupations. I know because I found his short obit from 1937 from the Yorkshire Post on the British Newspaper Archive database:

“Mr. Nixon was for man years foreman timber leader with messrs William Frank and Sons and with Mr Bentham King. Later worked for the Duncombe Park Estate, and during the war was put in charge of the felling of timber at Waterloo. He was a Sunday school superintendent and a local preacher in the Methodist circuit for over half a century.”

The 1921 census says Robert is working as head quarryman at Duncombe for the Trustees of the Earl of Feversham who was under age. The former Earl had died in 1915 in the war.*I wonder if the Nixons had an IN with the Earl? A Nixon and a Richardson were pallbearers at the Dowager Feversham’s 1889 funeral.

2. Ross, Stephanie. The Picturesque, an eighteenth century debate. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 1967

Esquire: Modern British. Polite term as appendix to a surname of someone without any other title implying genteel birth. Earlier, for English gentry rank below a Knight.

3. Both Darwin and Lumley Hodgson were ‘admitted pensioners under Mr. Shaw 1827. at Christ’s College a Divinity School.” Apparently, nature studies and divinity studies were considered compatible back then, as in ‘all God’s creatures.” Both graduated in 1832, although Darwin completed his exams in 1831. The Darwin Archives of Cambridge contains a January 1831 letter where a friend is asking Darwin if Lumley Hodgson has passed. “I don’t see his name anywhere, I am almost afraid to ask.”

Nesfield Rugby genes. My father’s nephew 1973, Rugby for Cambridge and England. My father, co-captain, 1939 Rugby for St Bees School Cumberland. My grandfather, 1912 Rugby for Duncombe Park where he was a footman. Through DNA I discovered other Ann Nesfield descendants played rugby for Scotland.

CITATIONS

A: Ann Nesfield Baptism 1838 Family Search
2. Ann’s marriage to Thomas Richardson 1861 Family Search
C: 1901 Census. Ann at Home running the family business with her girls.
Genealogy, Great Britain

The unwed moms of the North Yorkshire Moors

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Ye Olde Homestead: Farndale, Yorkshire moors. Farndale-holidays.co.uk
To see other notable landmarks, including Castle Howard visit https://farndalecottages.co.uk/out-and-about/heritage/

While cobbling together my fathers’s family tree 1, I discovered that his paternal Nixon line2dies out in 1834, when Robert Nixon is born in Marton, North Yorkshire, taking his surname from his mother, Hannah Nixon of nearby Kirkdale. Their reputation is redeemed five years later in 1840 when Hannah marries Christopher Neesam of Osmotherly shortly after she gives birth to a second child, a girl.

There’s no record of Robert’s birth or who Robert’s real father is – and, thanks to further research, I think I know the reason why.

Judging from my father’s family tree,unwed motherhood was not unusual among these Yorkshire farmers.

Church records from rural Yorkshire in medieval times and beyond back up my observation. They reveal that unwed mothers were, indeed, commonplace even way-back-when and the number of unwed mothers in that place only increased over the next few centuries, most notably in the northern ridings.3

As it happens, Yorkshireman Robert Nixon, Hannah Nixon’s illegitimate child, gets married in 1857 to a kindred spirit, Martha Featherstone. Martha, too, had been born out of wedlock in 1835.

Martha’s mom, Mary Featherstone of Pickering, like her mother-in-law Hannah Nixon Neesam before her, gets married a few years later, in 1840, to one Joseph Shaw. 6

Oddly, the DNA cousin matches/tree matches suggest my father is related to both Joseph Shaw and Mary Featherstone,* so this could be a case of a very delayed marriage, for whatever reason.

Maybe that is Hannah Nixon’s case, too. However, I’ve yet to find any Neesam DNA connection to my father’s tree.

In the small town of Rudby (7 miles from Marton, just north of the moors) as much as ten percent of women had children out of wedlock in the early 1800’s. These unwed mothers were stigmatized not only for religious reasons but because they were costly to the town. Sadly, the ‘bastardy wages’ paid to these mothers didn’t do much to end their woe or improve their children’s prospects. An illegitimate child was twice as likely to die in infancy as a child with legal parentage.

Local authorities in Rudby believed that most unwed mothers were the result of ‘courting couples’ where the young man involved was simply marriage-averse, sometimes preferring jail time to tying the knot. It didn’t help the situation, they said, that many unmarried tenant farmers were content with their ‘live-in’ servants (sic).

Modern scholars examining these same records acknowledge that adultery and incest (and, let’s face it, rape) inflated the number of unwed mothers in England but, they think, not to any great degree.4

Grim history, indeed, but my research findings do get brighter.

According to another source5, unwed mothers in the country did have it better than their counterparts in more urbanized areas. A more stable population likely made for a better support system for these women.

In fact, unwed mothers in 18th and 19th century rural Yorkshire weren’t even expected to name a father. A gal in the family way just told her own mom who gathered up her hat and shawl and headed out to find an eligible young man to take the bio-father’s place. (Practical people, those Yorkshire farmers.)

Unwed mothers were also protected by the old Norse superstitions still adhered to by many. One of these superstitions maintained that pregnant women had magical powers, so they were not to be crossed.

The workhouse in Helmsley, hometown of the Nixon clan from the 1800’s onward. Unmarried mothers might end up here to pay off their ‘bastardy’ support, where they were allowed to nurse their child but twice a day. 3

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The street in Helmsley where the Nixons lived in 1911. My grandfather, Robert Nixon, was born here in 1890. In 1911, he was a footman at Duncombe Park. Supposedly he got a girl pregnant right about then so he was sent out to Malaya in 1912 to be a planter. Family myth says this woman was either a fellow servant or the Earl’s daughter. Considering the high cost of going to Malaya in the day and that posts in Malaya were given out to sons of richer men, I suspect the woman was from an important family. This would have made a great sub-plot on Downton Abbey, a fictional story that unfolds in the same area.

1. I admit that I mostly used other people’s research to compile my tree. My father, a child of the Raj, told me little about his British roots. The only information I had to go on was that his mother’s father was a Methodist minister and that some of his ancestors were hanged for sheep stealing. See Border Reiving Ruffians. Also see Dissenters and Poets.

But after I compiled his tree with ancestors from places like Helmsley, Farndale and Appleton-le-Moors, I discovered, through DNA, that the ‘cousin trail’ matches on Ancestry supports the tree, 100 percent, at least for the first few generations. My father has matches both in centimorgans (dna) and tree with people on all branches of the tree.

Let me give you one example: When I discovered, using a stranger’s tree, that my father had a great grandmother, Anne Nesfield from Sleights, this explained his rather silly middle name to me. My father signed his name P N F Nixon, as in Peter Nesfield Forster Nixon.

The Nesfield clan of Ugglebarnby etc. Yorkshire is a well established. My father is a close genetic match with someone else with this Anne Nesfield in his tree. These genes make great rugby players as both sides have world-class players.

2. In genetics, the male Y chromosome haplogroup (or set of common alleles passed from father to son) is a much valued tool used by historians and ethno-anthropologists to track historical population movements back to the bronze age and even farther. All haplogroups are assigned letter and number signatures. My Yorkshire father Peter Nixon’s Y dna haplogroup is I1 Z63. I1 is the most common haplogroup in Northern Europe.

Apparently, my father’s Z63 subgroup dominated Northern Germany before the arrival of Charlemagne (who infamously lopped off the heads of thousands of male Saxons) and has has deep origins in Jutland (Denmark). Yorkshire is the most Anglo Saxon region in all England.

3. Hastings, R. P. Poverty and the Poor Law in the North Riding of Yorkshire: 1780-1837. Unwed mothers often had to repay their bastardy wages by employment in the Workhouse. In Victorian Times in Helmsley, as recommended by the authorities, mothers in workhouses were permitted to nurse their children only twice daily. The infants’ diet was supplemented with ONE meal of cow’s milk sweetened with sugar.

4. ibid ( That seems odd to me as I know that Emmeline Pankhurst turned to woman suffrage advocacy when she saw so many young teen patients in her husband’s Manchester clinic who were pregnant by incest.)

5. Gillis, J.R. For Better For Worse: British Marriages from 1600 to Present.

6. There is no birth record for either Robert Nixon or Martha Featherstone. Census records are what the genealogies go by.

 

My father’s ancient heritage on mytrueancestry.com.

I found this on Youtube, an interview with Tamara Hoggarth, born 1860 in Marton. (The poster says “She’s speaking English, I promise.” According to his blurb, she also had an illegitimate child before marrying

Here it is

England, Genealogy, WWII

My Grandfather, North Yorkshire and Discobulus

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VenusandAdonis

Venus and Adonis by Titian. This Renaissance painting is now at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles but it once graced the Hall of Duncombe Park in Helmsley, North Yorkshire. I know this because of a precious little volume from 1829 I found on archive.org, A Description of Duncombe Park, Rivalx Abbey and Helmsley Castle.

As it happens, my father’s  paternal ancestors are from Helmsley, today a picturesque market and tourist town on the River Pye in the Ryedale District.

helmsley

Duncombe Park  was once an imposing structure in the Doric style built in 1718 overlooking Helmsley Castle not far from Thirsk where the vet who inspired All Creatures Great and Small worked. It was the seat of the Earls of Feversham.

My grandfather, Robert Nixon (1890-1967), was born to Robert Nixon Sr. and Mary-Ellen Richardson.

helmsleynixonhouse

This stretch of very unimposing row houses is where the Nixons lived in 1911, according to the UK Census.

abbott'swellcottge

Mary-Ellen was from nearby Rievaulx, a village famous for its cathedral ruins. She was born in this quaint cottage, Abbot’s Well. Her dad was a tailor.

RobertCENSUS

According to this census, Robert Nixon Sr. was a delver in a quarry in Rievaulx in 1911.

The same census page says my grandfather, Robert Jr.  21,  was a footman, likely at Duncombe Park. Robert was a strapping 6 foot 4 inches tall. The gentry liked their footmen to be fine physical specimens, but this was not always a good thing if Nixon family lore can be counted upon.

According to an English ‘auntie’ of my  father’s, the daughter of ‘the local earl’ went ga-ga for young Robert back in the day, so the love-struck girl’s powerful father sent him away, far away to Malaya.

I have no picture of Robert, but I recall seeing one decades ago and he looked like my dad, Peter.  So here’s a picture of Peter in 1958 holding our new puppy, Spotty, a coonhound. My father was also 6 foot four inches tall.

father

This might be true: posts in Malaya were for the children of well-off families, not delver’s sons. However, a Nixon cousin told me his mother told him Robert got another servant pregnant. Nothing earth-shattering in that, though, is there?

I see that the sitting Earl of Feversham had only very young children. he would die in the war and Robert Nixon Sr. would work for the trustees of the under-age Earl. This is a Vanity Fair pic of the first Earl of Feversham from Wikipedia.

Lord Feversham 1829-1915

According to travel records, my grandfather, Robert,  took a boat to Malaya (willingly or unwillingly) in 1912 to work at a rubber estate in Klang, Selangor.

He returned to England after WWI to marry my grandmother, Dorothy Forster, from County Durham, whose father was an itinerant Primitive Methodist preacher posted in Helmsley between 1912 and 1914.

MRsDOROTHYNIXON

Dorothy followed him to Malaya in December, 1921 and my dad was born ten months later on October 24.  Robert later became Manager of the rubber estate.   Both my grandfather and grandmother were interned at Changi Prison during WWII.

According to the 1829 book, Duncombe Park was  home to a treasure trove of classical paintings, among them the Titian shown at top, but also a Da Vinci, a Reubens, a Rembrandt  as well as Discobulus, described as ‘the finest statue in England.’

My grandfather never did get to see these great works of art in person because most were burned in a fire in 1879.  Back then, some of these paintings were worth five thousand pounds.

The Discobulus and the DaVinci work were lost in the fire but Titian’s Venus and Adonis was saved to eventually find its way to California and the Getty Museum.

Duncombe was rebuilt in the Baroque Italianate style and used as a backdrop to the 2012 British mini-series Parade’s End, with Benedict Cumberbatch.  I love that mini-series, so it is all very appropriate.

Duncombe

Dunscombepark1