Allen
British Census 1891 - Household of George Smithson
Church of St. Peter
East Drayton
Looking through my notes I came across this entry in the British Census of 1891:
Address: 2 North Green
Place: East Retford - Nottinghamshire
Enumeration District: 12a
Civil Parish: East Drayton
Ecclesiastical Parish: East Drayton
Piece: RG12/2642
Folio: 109
Page: 4
Schedule: 20
| Surname | First name(s) | Rel | Status | Sex | Age | Occupation | Where Born | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Smithson | George | Head | M | M | 61 | Agricultural Labourer (Em'ee) | Nottinghamshire - Upton | |
| Smithson | Jane | Wife | M | F | 40 | Nottinghamshire - Retford |
Elizabeth Allen or Elizabeth Smithson
While checking this earlier article:
Ziller Jacklin (née Ziller Allen)
one of the earliest articles on this website, the name Elizabeth SMITHSON caught my eye.
This is my transcription of the 1881 British Census:
Dwelling: 4 North Street
Census Place: East Drayton, Nottingham, England
Public Records Office Reference: RG11
Piece: 3304
Folio: 137
Page Number: 1
| Surname | First name(s) | Rel | Status | Sex | Age | Where Born | Occupation | Remarks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Smithson | George | Head | M | Male | 51 | Headon, Nottingham, England | Ag Lab | ||
| Smithson | Jane | Wife | M | Female | 28 | Retford, Nottingham, England | |||
| Allen | John H | Step Son | Male | 9 | Lambeth, Surrey, England | Scholar | |||
| Allen | Jane | Step Daur | Female | 7 | Retford, Nottingham, England | Scholar | |||
| Smithson | Elizabeth | Daur | Female | 2 | E Drayton, Nottingham, England | ||||
| Zillah | Allen | Sister In Law | U | Female | 22 | Little Gringley, Nottingham, England | Dom Serv Unemployed (Farm) |
These records suggest Jane SMITHSON (née ALLEN) had 2 children, either from a previous marriage or 'out of wedlock'.
I suddenly realised that Elizabeth SMITHSON b.1879, Jane's daughter presumably from her marriage to George SMITHSON, could be the elusive Elizabeth 'Betty' ALLEN.
Read more...
Submitted by Neil Jacklin on Mon, 2008-09-29 18:19.
Coal Miners - 1891
The British Census of 1891 records 3 of the Allen sisters, all originally from Little Gringley, Nottinghamshire, now married and living at Aston-cum-Aughton and nearby Treeton. Their respective husbands are all recorded as coal miners.
I am intrigued as to how the sisters found their way to this area. I conject Daniel and Ziller JACKLIN (née ALLEN) were forced to escape the poverty of living off the land at Little Gringley and seek a slightly more prosperous existence in the employment of the mine owners of the South Yorkshire coalfield. Likewise did the other sisters follow? Did they meet their husbands through the mining community or were they already married?
Daniel had left his home county of Cambridgeshire, presumably to seek work as a navvy on the railways or canals, both of which pass through Retford, Nottinghamshire and very close to Little Gringley.
I really need to need to study the relevant census information together with marriage certificates and maybe I can better ascertain when they made the transition from agricultural labourer to coal miner.
Read more...Elizabeth 'Betty' Allen - Intrigue
Recently I was discussing with my mother the news regarding Harriet ALLEN and Mary ALLEN. We were chatting about Daniel JACKLIN and Ziller JACKLIN (née ALLEN) and if they ever had visits from other members of the family (Daniel and Ziller moved from Bradley Yard, Swallownest, Yorkshire and lived the rest of their lives at Langley Street, Darnall, Sheffield, Yokshire). My mother happened to mention that they brought up a young girl known by the name of Betty, and Betty would occasionally visit. Immediately I recalled the census record shown above which records Elizabeth aged 9 and described as a niece; undoubtedly this is Betty.
Read more...Harriet Allen 1877-1958 and Henry Barlow 1870-1959
Harriet Barlow (née Allen) abt. 1918
Photograph courtesy of the family of Henry and Harriet Barlow
While I was busy replying to the contributor of my previous post I was contacted by a grandson of Harriet ALLEN, another sister of my great grandmother Ziller JACKLIN (née ALLEN). He has provided me with a great deal of information regarding the descendants of Harriet ALLEN together with permission to publish this photograph of Harriet taken about 1918.
I have added the information to my GEDCOM which greatly extends my family tree along yet another branch.
Read more...Mary Allen 1871-1951 and George Bacon 1878-1944
Left to right - Helena (Nellie) Bacon, Mary Bacon (née Allen), Florence (May) Grayson (née Bacon)
Photograph courtesy of the family of George and Mary Bacon
A few weeks ago, through this website, a grand daughter of Mary ALLEN (Mary is sometimes shown as Sally ALLEN) contacted me regarding Mary ALLEN. This was wonderful news and has solved a few of the mysteries surrounding this branch of the family.
Left - John (Jack) Bacon, third from right - Everatt Bacon, right with pipe - George Bacon
Photograph courtesy of the family of George and Mary Bacon
Mary ALLEN was a sister of my great grandmother Ziller JACKLIN (née ALLEN) and is one of the sisters about whom I had little useful information.
The research is very interesting so I have decided, with permission, to publish it here:
Read more..."I have been researching my tree for several years but couldn't find anything on my grandmother as there seemed to be two Mary's registered for that year but neither appeared on the 1881 census. I did find a Mary on the 1891 census living with the Hopkinson family at Mill House Farm, Hodsock, Nottinghamshire. This gave her place of birth as Little Gringley, Nottinghamshire.
William Butroid and Rebecca Butroid (née Bowering) - Church of All Saints, Misterton, Nottinghamshire
Church of All Saints
Misterton
Nottinghamshire
After walking part of the Chesterfield Canal from West Stockwith towards Gringley-on-the-Hill we decided to return by way of the north Nottinghamshire village of Misterton. This gave me the opportunity to take some photographs of All Saints Church at Misterton and check the headstones for family names. This graveyard is immaculately kept and congratulations must go to the person or persons responsible.
By sheer chance the first headstone I checked was that of one William BUTROID and his wife Rebecca BUTROID (née BOWERING). Click here to view the headstone.
Read more...
Submitted by Neil Jacklin on Wed, 2007-08-29 16:16.
Conveyance from Allen to Eyre - Little Gringley, Retford, Nottinghamshire
A recent Google search for "allen little gringley" found these documents in the 'Manuscripts & Special Collections' of the University of Nottingham.
The title of this document caught my eye:
"Conveyance from Allen to Eyre of cottage and garden in Little Gringley, Nottinghamshire; 1827"
Maybe this is one of my ALLENs or maybe one of Juanita's ALLENs selling a cottage and garden to the Eyre family, which if I am correct is the family that once owned 'The Manor of Grove' and nearby Grove Hall.
Read more...Church of St Saviour, Retford, Nottinghamshire
St. Saviour's Church
Retford
In this previous post I wrote about Little Gringley near Retford, Nottinghamshire; wondering where my ancestors may be buried.
This weekend I was in the vicinity of St. Saviour's Church at Retford, Nottinghamshire. I took the opportunity to take some photographs and check the headstones in the graveyard. Few of the headstones remain standing and some of them have been moved to the perimeter and are facing the 'wrong' way with overgrown vegetation preventing examination of the inscriptions. I didn't find any headstones bearing the family names of ALLEN or LITTLEWOOD.
A church service was taking place so I had to forgo taking photographs of the church interior. Another time, maybe.
Read more...John Allen and David Allen
A couple of weeks ago I recieved an email via the feedback form on my jacklin.info website.
"My name’s John and I’ve just discovered we share the same great-great-grandfather (John Allen, b Little Gringley c1830)."
"I see your line develops through Zillah Allen, whereas mine comes from her younger brother David (b 1867), my great grandfather. The tree I saw had no other details of him so I will be happy to fill you in."
This is very exciting news.
As Juanita Lewis indicated at our meeting in 2006, and John has confirmed in a subsequent email there appears to have been, at this time, two John ALLENs living at Little Gringley.
"John (christened 13/4/1827) to parents John and Elizabeth.
John (christened 15/4/1831) to parents Thomas and Elizabeth."
Not suprisingly this has lead to some confusion. Hopefully, now I know which line to research, I can make some progress with my great great grandfather John ALLEN.
This news has enabled me to add additional information to my GEDCOM regarding David ALLEN, one of Ziller's brothers.
Joseph Allen and Hannah Allen
In May 2006 we travelled to Reford, north Nottinghamshire and met up with Juanita Lewis and her son Al. Juanita and Al had travelled from the USA on a weeks holiday in order to discover more of their family history. The day turned out to be full of surprises and the discovery of this headstone was one of them.
Juanita is researching the ALLEN line of her family so we spent some time visiting various locations Juanita and Al wished to see, with Al doing an exceptional job driving on the 'wrong side' of the road and negotiating the narrow lanes of north Nottinghamshire.
Our first visit was to St John the Baptist's church at Clarborough. Unfortunately as is the norm in these times the church was locked so we wandered about the graveyard, took some photographs and searched the headstones for clues.
On leaving St John's, and quite by accident, we came across the church at nearby Hayton. It appeared many of the headstones had been removed so we wandered in and amongst those that remained searching the legible headstones for family names. As usual due to time and erosion many of the inscriptions were now illegible so we were tremedously lucky to we find a headstone for Joseph ALLEN and Hannah ALLEN which was perfectly legible.
The inscription on the headstone reads:
Loving Memory Of
Joseph
Beloved Husband Of
Hannah Allen
Died May 24th 1927
Aged 74 Years
At Rest
Joseph
Beloved Husband Of
Hannah Allen
Died May 24th 1927
Aged 74 Years
At Rest
Also Of Hannah
Wife Of The Above
Died March 19th 1976
Aged 83 Years
Wife Of The Above
Died March 19th 1976
Aged 83 Years
It was only this evening while studying my photographs of the headstone in order to decipher the inscription that I noticed, and even then only after several readings, the difference in ages.
As yet I have not had the time to carry out further research into which line of the ALLEN families Joseph may originate. Indeed Juanita may be a good starting point in trying to answer this question.
John Allen and Elizabeth Bird
Ever since I started researching my family history I have been frustrated by the apparent lack of information available for my great great grandfather John ALLEN.
I know he lived in Little Gringley, Nottinghamshire but there were many branches of the ALLEN family in and around the parish of Clarborough, Nottinghamshire and it has been difficult to associate the various indviduals with the various households.
Well thanks to a very kind lady from the USA with whom I share a common ancestor, many of these quandaries have been resolved. I now have a father, mother and siblings for John ALLEN the father of my great grandmother Ziller ALLEN.
John ALLEN born abt 1789 and Elizabeth BIRD born 17th January 1796 married on the 28th November 1816.
John and Elizabeth raised 9 children (there may have been others that died in childhood) and I will list them in chronological order:
Gervase, born 1817
Mary, born 1818
George, born 1823
William, born 1824
John, born abt 1827
Harriet, born 1828
Vincent, born 1833
Jane, born 1834
Hannah, born 1837
I have a slight discrepancy with the date of birth for John ALLEN (son) but I'm sure a little more research will resolve this.
This lady has a great deal of information regarding the ALLENs who emigrated to the USA in the latter half of the 19th century and I will eventually document and comment on some of these branches.
Update: 2007-01-30 Having met with Juanita Lewis (the lady I mention) and compared research, Juanita believes we have two distict lines of ALLEN families and two John ALLENs. I am inclined to agree and desperately need to obtain further documentation.
Vincent Allen - update
In this post about Vincent ALLEN I surmised he and John ALLEN may be brothers. A recent comment on this post states:
The 1841 census has both John and Vincent in the same household of John and Elizabeth Allen at Little Gringley
I am very grateful for this information and I will follow this line of research a little further.
Creating timelines
Over the last few weeks I have been looking for a way to create a graphical 'timeline' in order to improve on the handcrafted, time consuming, text only method I currently employ.
Having not been able to find a suitable Drupal module I spent quite some time searching for alternatives.
When it comes to historically orientated 'timeline' applications I found the choice very limited indeed. My preference for open source applications further limited my options. When choosing open source applications I try to pick out one that appears to be under active development in the hope that future development will continue. This is not always easy to judge, so when eventually I came across EasyTimeline I realised I had probably found the application I had been looking for.
According to the EasyTimeline project site:
"EasyTimeline is also an integral part of the MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia."
EasyTimeline is developed by Erik Zachte though for uses outside of WikiMedia it also requires Ploticus for the actual plotting and Nconvert to convert the graphical output to the smaller file size png format.
Hopefully development will continue and the command line/script based interface will be improved upon. The script syntax is not difficult to pick up, though constructing the scripts is just a little tedious. This is not intended as citicism and I express my sincere gratitude to all developers of open source software. It would take me several lifetimes to develop my own.
After many late nights developing a script which meets my requirements, I have finally settled on a suitable layout, an example of which can be seen for my great grandmother Ziller ALLEN.
Update: 2007-09-10 I am no longer using this application so I have removed this page and link to the timeline.
At the moment I cannot apply a style sheet to the output nor does the script support unicode or specific fonts, though I understand this is under development. I also found this Timeline Editor at NEWPED2. This form is a front end for creating scripts for use with Easytimeline, though I have yet to try it.
Update: 2007-09-10 Though the above applications work very well the process is extremely time consuming. Since this website is powered by Drupal I am now using a Drupal module by the name of 'Timeline' to produce timelines. Click here to view an updated post about timelines.
Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire
Descendants of my great grand aunt Sarah ALLEN are linked to the north Lincolnshire villages of Owston Ferry and West Butterwick. This area, the most north-westerly part of Lincolnshire, is more commonly known as the Isle of Axholme, due to it's location between the rivers Trent, Nidd and Old Don.
For a more comprehensive overview of this area and some useful family history resources, follow this link to the Isle of Axholme Family History Society.
I have added this link to my Lincolnshire family history resources menu.
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