Hayes family updates

One of our cousins on the Vause side of the family, Sandy Struckmeyer, asked if I could give her some of our information to have in her family tree, so I've been checking what we have and what we don't have on that branch of the family, and seeing what research still needs to be done. From what I can see we have no living relatives with the surname Vause anywhere outside South Africa. All those with the surname Vause today are descendants of Richard and Matilda Vause who came to Natal in 1852, within a month of getting married in Bath, England. Our Vause family seems to have originated in Epworth in the Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire, England. The earliest ancestors we have managed to trace are John Vause who married Ann Gilliot in in Epworth January 1701/1702. Epworth is quite famous as the town where the founders of Methodism, John and Charles Wesley, grew up.

John Vause and Ann Gilliot had five children, and two of them, Susanna and Alexander, died young. The eldest son, John Vause, died in his early 30s, and we don't know if he married or had children, so all the descendants we know of are from the two remaining sons, Thomas and Richard. Thomas Vause (1704-1757) married Ann Crawshaw or Cranshaw and they had four daughters: Ann, who married George Collison or Collinson; Susanna who married John Brunyee or Brunyea; Sarah who may have married John Holdsworth; and Mary, born in 1749, about whom we have no further information. Richard Vause (1718-1751) married Elizabeth Hill in 1745, and they had three children, the youngest, Catherine, being born after her father's death in 1751. Catherine married Thomas Coggan in Epworth. John, the eldest, was our ancestor, and married Elizabeth Brooks.

So all our relations from those early generations of Vauses will have descended from Collisons, Brunyees, Holdsworths, Coggans and other families, and it is only the South African branch of the family that have members with the surname Vause. When we first started our family history research, beck in 1974, I was not aware of this, and fossicked around in libraries looking for phone books for Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire and Humberside, and writing to people with the surname Vause to ask if they were related, and now, nearly 38 years later, I realise that they weren't, unless, of course, they were connected with earlier generations, because we don't know who were the parents of the John Vause who married Ann Gilliot, and there were other Vause families in the Isle of Axholme. And then, of course, there are the Wyatt, Brooks, Hill and Gilliot families, who all married into different generations of the Vause family, and about whom we know very little. We do know, however, that after the death of her first husband, Richard Vause, Elizabeth Hill married Francis Whitehead, and we have been in contact with cousins in that branch of the family, who have given us information about several generations of descendants.

One of the ancestors we knew little about was Val's great-great-great
grandmother Mary Kerwick. She married William James MacLeod, a master
mariner, in Cape Town in 1827, and they had eight children.

On her death notice (she died on 23 June 1863) it said she was born in "Three
Rivers, Canada" and that she was 52 years and 9 months old. So we put her
date of birth as September 1810, and wondered what had brought her from
Canada to the Cape Colony.

Since the advent of the World Wide Web more and more genealogical records
have been put on line, and yesterday we discovered her in the International
Genealogical Index (IGI), which informed us that she was the daughter of
James Kerwick and Elisabeth Clouith; born 13 Sep 1810, baptised 25 Sep 1810.
Eglise catholique. Immaculée Conception (Trois-Rivières, Québec).

That would make her age at death exact, so we're pretty sure she's the right
one.

Now, of course, we're looking for more information about her parents and
where they came from, and also whether she had any brothers or sisters, and
what happened to them.

We recently received a message via our family tree on TribalPages:

http://hayesstw.tribalpages.com/

to the effect that a Sharon Gilmour had visited the site and left a message saying the she was a granddaughter of George Emmett Brennan. We sent her an e-mail message, but unfortunately it bounced as follows:

On 9 Jan 2012 at 6:40, Mail Delivery System wrote:

> This is the mail system at host wblv-ip-mesg-1-3.saix.net.
> > I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
> be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.
> > For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.
> > If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
> delete your own text from the attached returned message.
> > The mail system
> > : host mx3.hotmail.com[65.54.188.94] said: 550
> Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable (in reply to RCPT TO
> command)

So now we have no way of making contact. I'm just hoping that Sharon herself, or someone who knows her, may see this to let her know that we tried to get in touch, but failed. George Emmett Brennan (1905-1961) married Maude Florence Beatrice Crighton (1905-?) in 1928, possibly in Johannesburg. We visited her on 6 April 1986, when she was living in an old age home in Bertrams, Johannesburg, with her sister-in-law "Baby" Crighton.

When we visited the Cape Town archives last may we recorded the deceased estate of a William Hutchinson Cottam, a retired company director who died in Claremont, Cape, in 1946. He married Adelaide Ferreira in Humansdorp, and they had three children: Frederick, Edward and Faith. On checking this with our other family records, I'm now fairly certain that he was the son of Hannah Hutchinson, and was born in Liverpool about April 1879. He is recorded in the 1881 Census has having a brother, Henry E. Cottam, and a sister, Annie S. Cottam. One of his earlier ancestors was Henry Cottam of Heaton with Oxcliffe, Lancashire, who married Alice Edmundson and was the brother of my ancestor John Cottam, who married Mary. So this South African Cottam family is somewhat distantly related to ours.

We haven't had much time for family history the last couple of weeks, and now there seems to be a problem with our ISP so we can't access the web (though e-
mail still seems to be working). We've made contact with some other researchers who have provided quite a lot of useful help on the PARK family. My ggg grandfather William PARK (c1780-
1844) of Bath, Belfast and Quebec seems to have had a number of children, and thanks to Shaun Jones on the Rootschat site, we've managed to find quite a few possible links. We've also made contact with a James PARK in Luxembourg, who has suggested a possible link between William PARK and a PARK family of Ballynure, Antrim, Ireland. We're still looking for confirmation of most of this.

William Park married Mary Martin, daughter of John Martin, a merchant of Belfast, and we are still looking for more information on the Martin side of the family as well. Their daughter Matilda PARK married Richard VAUSE, and came to Natal in 1852, immediately after their marriage. Richard Vause was part owner of the Natal Mercury (with John Robinson) and was five times mayor of Durban.

For Vause/Park family descendants - I've made an attempt to join the dots on the Park family descendants, and you can find this in the linked file. At the moment it's mostly based on conjecture and speculation, so I hope anyone who has more information will join in the hunt and help us.

It's Heritage Day, and what better way to spend a grey and overcast holiday than trying to tie up some loose ends of family history. This time it's the Park family, one on which we've made little progress since we started researching our family history back in 1974. One of the web message boards where I've found helpful people is RootsChat:

http://www.rootschat.com/

and one of the good people there helped me to find some Park and Bruce families in the England censuses with connections to Mauritius. None of them directly linked to what we already have, but they must be connected somehow. There are now parent-child relationships, but lots of nieces and nephews, great nieces and great nephews. And someone on a newsgroup found a Park family tree on the web, which may have connections with ours - just one one name with a death date so far, but an address to write to, though only snail mail, and since it's a public holiday we have to wait till Monday to buy a stamp. But still, there's hope. We haven't connected many dots yet, but the nice thing is that we have a lot more dots to connect.

Over the last year we seem to have been jumping wildly from one branch of the family tree to another. Usually a breakthrough in one branch keeps us working almost exclusively on that for a month or two, and then a breakthrough in another branch gets us busy on that. For the last couple of months it has been the Ellwood family of Cumbria. We had the family in Whitehaven, Cumberland, and have been chugging along finding a cousin here and a cousin there, going through microfilms of parish registers collecting all the people with names we were interested in, trying to reconstruct families and see what fitted. Then we discovered that the Ellwoods originally came from Westmorland, and that opened up a lot that we are still trying to catch up with. Before that, in April and May, it was the Hannans. That was mostly because we went on holiday to the Western Cape, visiting relatives, and most of the relatives we saw were on the Hannan side of the family. And also managed to find a few of the Scottish relatives on Facebook, though we haven't followed that up much yet. At the beginning of the year it was the Mortons of Colchester in Essex. Val's great great grandmother came from there and we knew her father's name from her marriage certificate, and that was about all. Then we found her brothers and sisters, including two sisters who married on the same day as her and came to the Cape Colony, and an uncle Henry Morton who was transported to Australia. And this time last year it was the Bagot and Cottam families of Lancashire,. where we found a whole bunch of ancestors and descendants we hadn't known about before, including some who were interested in the family history, and with whom, we were able to share information.

For the moment we are still being kept busy with the Ellwoods, but I'm wondering what next.

We have recently discovered quite a number of Ellwood descendants who went to Australia, and have made contact with some of these families.
The family group sheets that follow show the emigrant generation, and, in some cases, the immediately preceding one in Cumbria. Margaret Ellwood and Thomas Litster

This is the one that is closest to us, since Margaret Ellwood was the sister of Val's great grandfather Thomas Ellwood. They were children of John Ellwood and Bridget Anderson of Whitehaven, Cumberland. Thomas Litster had been married before, and had two children of his first marriage. Two children of the second marriage were born in Cumberland, and the remainder in Australia, where they emigrated in 1886. Children of John Ellwood and Ann Bellas

These are much less closely related to us, since the connection to a common ancestor lies several generations further back. Some of the children, and some of their children and some of their grandchildren emigrated. As with the Litster family, they seem to have initially gone to Victoria, and we wonder if they were in contact with each other there, and if they knew that they were related. We are in touch with some descendants of both families, and hope to learn more about the other descendants. See more details in the linked file. If you are related to any of these families, please get in touch with us. We would like to learn more about them.

Val's grandmother was Martha Ellwood, who came from Whitehaven,
Cumberland. Her great great grandparents were Thomas Ellwood and Hannah Lowery (family group report below). They appear to have had 13 children, of whom 12 seem to have disappeared
without a trace. Perhaps they all died young -- there were two sets of twins,
and the first pair were baptised on the day they were born, which might
indicate that they were sickly and not expected to live. The LDS has some microfilms of Bishops Transcripts, which I'll be ordering,
but they seem to be indexed on FamilySearch, and though I found birth/baptism
records for most of the children, there doesn't seem to be any record of any
of them having died young. Does anyone have any idea of what happened to them?

*ends

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