A Family History Blog

The eldest sons of four generations — from my dad to my grandchild — have Thomas as a middle name.

I suspect my grandmother Bessie (nee Estall) Schutze gave my dad his middle name in honor of her brother Thomas. Since there were no other Thomases on either side of the family, that appears to be a safe bet. Somehow the name stuck, and we continue to use it as a middle name in the family.

It seems like a good idea to know a bit about the man whose name survived despite never having had children of his own.

Thomas was the third illegitimate child of Sarah Hutchings, a ‘fur sewer’ living in Bethnal Green in London’s notoriously poor, overcrowded, and crime-ridden East End. An Estall family historian believes Thomas’s mother Sarah — in light of her frequent visits to the workhouse to deliver children without a father — was a prostitute. If so, she wasn’t alone: up to one in eight women of the East End turned to the trade to make a living or supplement their meager wages.

Thomas was born in the Bethnal Green Workhouse in July of 1889. He had a brother (or more likely a half-brother) Alfred, who was five years older; and a sister (or half-sister) Harriett who was three years older.

A couple of years after Thomas’s birth his mother married a laborer, William Estall, who was working the shipping docks. And a month after that his mother delivered Thomas’s half-sister Bessie, my grandmother.

[As an aside, with Sarah Hutchings’s possible occupation as a prostitute and Bessie being born only a month after Sarah’s marriage to William Estall, one may wonder whether Bessie was really his daughter. However William was living with Sarah at least ten months prior to Bessie’s birth, and Bessie needed an operation for the same condition that killed her father (an aortic aneurysm), so her claim on the Estall name appears solid.]

The Estall family lived in multi-story brick tenements around Bethnal Green. At first they lived behind a lunatic asylum on Cornwell Road. Their next home, where Bessie was born, was across the street from the other side of the asylum on Green Street. (The building, Museum House, still stands at the present-day corner of Roman Road and Burnham Street.) Within a couple of years they were living at a place on Russia Lane a police inspector described as among those where ‘there are no worse places to be found.’

Thomas lost his older brother Alfred in early 1894 to diphtheria (though Bessie, then 3 years old, thought he’d been killed on the street by a horse). Thomas, at four years of age, became the eldest son in the family. The streets were the playgrounds of the families in the East End. Thomas and his friend William Morris got lost on the streets when Thomas was just shy of five years old, and a police constable delivered the two boys to the Mile End Workhouse . The children were later returned to their parents.

Thomas and his younger sister Bessie were enrolled in the Globe Road primary school when he was six. He likely was protective of his four-year-old sister, as older siblings tend to be. Bessie would have looked to her half-brother as both a playmate and role model.

More children followed in the Estall family: Lily came after Bessie, then Rosie, then James, and Robert. Seven children and two parents would have strained the tiny living space available in tenement quarters.

Things went from bad to worse. Their mother Sarah took ill after delivering Robert, and she died of acute meningitis on Christmas Eve of 1899 at the age of 39. The family was now motherless. Thomas’s step-father William, who had a history of physical ailments, reported to the Bethnal Green Workhouse infirmary with his family, and the children — less Bessie who was also kept in the infirmary; Robert, who died in his first year; and James, who was adopted out — were sent to the Leytonstone Workhouse School a few miles away. Thomas was ten years old.

Thomas, as the oldest of the siblings at the Leytonstone School, likely would have felt responsible for watching over his sisters Lily and Rosie and keeping the family together, such as it was.

After a year and a half at the school Thomas’s step-father William was released from the workhouse infirmary and the family was reunited. With no mother to watch the children, however, William was incapable of making a living while raising the family alone.

William’s solution seems questionable. He had ten siblings, at least one of which was living in Bethnal Green. But rather than turning to them — the children’s aunts and uncles — William decided to drop off the children with a former “wife’s” family in Lewisham in southeast London.

The term ‘wife’ is used loosely. William had moved in with a married woman, Sarah French, a decade before marrying Sarah Hutchings. He had two children by her but moved on when her husband returned.

Perhaps William wanted all of his children to be together under one roof. But nobody in Lewisham was buying it, and when William abandoned them there, they were promptly dropped off at the Lewisham Workhouse.

Thomas was motherless, abandoned, and the head of the remaining Estall family. He was twelve years old.

His sisters were admitted to the Workhouse school, and Thomas was sent off for boarding and instruction on the London Asylum Board’s training ship Exmouth moored in the Thames. He spent 2-1/2 years learning seaman’s duties, then was hired as a deck boy on the coal cargo ship S.S. Turkistan at age 14.

After a couple of years at sea he seems to have become a photographer for a short stint before joining the British army in southwest England in 1907 at age 18. His enlistment papers showed him to be 5’8,” 125 pounds, blue-eyed, and brown-haired.

He was assigned to a rifle company and spent his first two years training and on duty in England. In October of 1909 he was assigned to the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Alexandria, Egypt.

While there, he was admitted three times to the Army hospital in Cairo. An accident on duty resulted in contusion of his right foot that exacerbated an old injury and left him hospitalized for three months and caused him pain thereafter. In August of 1910 he spent two weeks in the hospital for dysphoria — a profound state of unease or dissatisfaction, which can accompany depression, anxiety, or agitation.

His physical and mental pain seem to have overwhelmed him, and in September, at age 21, while sitting on his barracks bed, he propped a rifle between his legs and committed suicide. He was buried in the English cemetery in Cairo the next day.

At the inquest into his death his acting corporal said “he was very quiet, very careful about money mattters. He did not drink at all. I had not noticed anything unusual about him lately. [Did his corporal not know about his recent hospitalization for dysphoria?] He used to complain about his foot especially after marching. He said he was expecting to purchase his discharge and go to Canada. He was on good terms with the others but was quiet and did not mix much with others.”

So ended the hard and short life of Thomas Hutchings. Though a Hutchings, he went by the Estall surname of his step-father. He apparently had dreams of emigrating to Canada, probably to be with his sisters Bessie and Lily who’d emigrated there in 1906 under the aegis of an orphanage.

My grandmother once mentioned to me that she had a brother who’d died while serving with the British Army and there was a great deal of pride in her voice when she said it. When she had her first son in April, 1912, she gave him the middle name of Thomas, and I’m quite sure it was to honor the recently deceased lad who had accompanied her to primary school, shared the family’s shabby lodgings, and was the closest thing she had to a father figure after her dad abandoned the family.

I consider it an honor to have his name too.

Leonard Paul Schutze was my father’s uncle and the man my dad was named after.

That got me to wondering who Leonard — I’ll call him LP for short — was.

His is a rather sad story, it turns out.

LP was conceived in Hamburg, Germany, and born in Detroit, Michigan. His mother Friederike (nee Schrotzberger) was four months pregnant when she emigrated to America to join her husband in Detroit; she delivered LP on a winter’s day early in 1881.

LP would be the oldest of four children in the Hermann and Frederika home. He had two younger sisters who died in youth, and a brother (my grandfather Herman) who was ten years his junior. His mom died when LP was eleven; his father married Frederike’s sister Hannah and had another pair of children by her.

LP hewed closely to his father’s example. His dad was a butcher; LP became one too. His dad joined the Masons and was insured by the International Order of Foresters; LP became a Mason as well, and spent his last twenty years in a hospital run by the IOF.

When LP was 21 the family moved to Stratford, Ontario, but he sensed it was time to spread his wings, and three years later moved to California, joining his uncle Fred Schrotzberger in Pomona, 25 miles east of Los Angeles, working as a butcher. The slim, gray-eyed, brown-haired young man married an 18-year-old girl in 1908, when he was 27. The free-spirited Mildred “Pearl” Lloyd lost her mother at age 9 and was farmed out to be raised by various older half-siblings. “It seems Pearl was pretty much left on her own throughout the years and probably more so once she reached age 18; maybe that’s why she married so young, apparently not ready or able to settle down,” according to a Lloyd family historian.

When LP’s father died in Stratford in 1909, his step-mother moved the family back to Detroit, where LP and Pearl joined them from California. In a year or two the entire family, including my grandfather, moved to Los Angeles, which explains why my dad was born there.

LP and Pearl seemed to have a rocky relationship. City directories and censuses show there were years when they lived together, but there were just as many when they didn’t. She rarely lived long in one place. She worked as a dressmaker and filled in her idle hours as a movie extra in the fledgling years of the industry. She enjoyed riding motorcycles. And she had an affair with a married man — a police detective with a wife and two daughters — that ended in 1924 on the corner of Pasadena and 35th avenues in Los Angeles where she shot him dead and then took her own life in the back bedroom of LP’s home a couple of blocks away. She died painfully of strychnine poisoning, leaving a note that read “Daddy and I decided to end everything. Life without each other was unbearable.” The story made it into the Los Angeles Times and on the front page of the Madera Tribune.

According to the Lloyd historian, “Leonard loved her very much and buried her as if nothing happened.” Whether that’s a sign of great love and forgiveness or a character flaw is open to speculation.

After losing his wife, LP moved in with his step-mother Hannah and half siblings Hattie and Hugo who were living in a house on Halldale Avenue in Los Angeles. He stayed there for six years, working as a store butcher, but in 1931, at the age of 50, contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to the IOF sanatorium north of L.A. and remained there the rest of his life, dying in 1951 at the age of 70. He never remarried and never had children.

His remains were buried in the San Gabriel foothills in a cemetery close to the sanatorium.

Though my father was named after him, LP apparently wasn’t a presence in my dad’s life. My dad grew up and lived in Detroit; LP was on the west coast. My grandfather Herman probably looked up to his older brother LP as a role model when growing up, but after Herman started a family of his own he moved back to Detroit from L.A. and I don’t know if they stayed in touch.

Though LP didn’t have descendants, his name lived on through my father, and because of that he hasn’t been forgotten by his great-nieces and nephew. Visiting his grave this year, I was struck by how peaceful and scenic his final resting place is in the steeply rolling hills. It’s a fitting end to a man who seemed imperturbable in the face of a harsh life.

If you can’t believe your father, who can you believe?

Bessie Estelle (my grandmother) and her younger sister Lily were orphans from the poverty-plagued east end of London. Their mother died when Bessie was eight, their father abandoned them when she was ten. The sisters were left adrift in a world where even their identities were illusionary, as it turned out. As a result, probing Bessie’s history was a challenge.

I had a note from my father showing that Bessie’s mother was Sarah Billingshurst, who’d had children by her first husband Mr. Hutchins as well as with her second, William Estelle. The Billingshurst name was confirmed by Lily’s marriage license which showed her mother’s maiden name.

I found Bessie and Lily’s arrival cards to the U.S., dated 1911, in which Bessie and Lily identified the orphanage they came from in Canada. That too was useful information. The cards also identified their “race” as French. I remembered that Bessie, many years later, told me that her family was from France.

So that was a start:

✔ Merry orphanage in Canada

✔ Father an Estelle

✔ Mother a Billingshurst

✔ Family from France.

However, like a driver in winter, I couldn’t find traction with the information and was spinning my wheels trying to research the family on line. Finally, out of desperation I wrote the Barnardo’s organization, who’d inherited the Merry orphanage records, to ask if they had any information on Bessie Estelle. Their answer was yes, they have a record of Bessie Estall. And that was when the wheels finally hit pavement.

Apparently some time after arriving in Canada, Bessie’s surname evolved from Estall to Estelle. That’s not unusual, as many European names were changed when they landed on North American ears. Estall (‘es-til) and Estelle (es-‘tell) are quite similar.

But I was still stuck on the Billingshurst and the French heritage angles until my sister found an Estall family tree on line and suggested I look into it. That proved to be a turning point, thanks to the amazing work of Mark and Kim Baldacchino.

So where did Bessie’s mistaken ideas about her origins come from? The only way I can account for them is that Bessie’s father likely lied to her.

Kim Baldacchino told me she thinks Bessie’s mother was a prostitute. Given that Bessie’s mom had three children out of wedlock before marrying William Estall and that she frequently changed residences around the east end of London — making stops in the poor house to have her children — is pretty convincing evidence for the argument. Bessie’s mother turned out to be Sarah Hutchings, and she had her first three children under her maiden name, which was Hutchings, not Billingshurst.

I can only guess Bessie’s dad suggested the Billingshurst maiden name to the kids to hide the fact that Bessie’s half-siblings were illegitimate. Or maybe he said it jokingly, giving his down-on-her-luck wife a name that had a ring of class to it. Whatever the reason, the naïve children took it as truth and believed throughout their lives that their mother was a Billingshurst.

And the idea that the family was French? Well, there’s a story that may or may not explain the notion.

Before William Estall married Sarah Hutchings he lived with a married woman named Sarah (nee Whitmarsh) French. French had two young children by her husband, to which William Estall added a pair for good measure. William, however, didn’t stay around, leaving his two children for Sarah French to raise when she reunited with her husband.

William Estall and Sarah Hutchings had eight children to raise and were eking out a living in the slums of the East End until Sarah was killed by meningitis at age 39, and William turned to the poor house for help. When he and the children got out a couple of years later, it appears William took his kids to live with their half-siblings in the Sarah French household. I can almost hear him now, “C’mon, kids, I’m takin’ ya to live with yer French family.” How was a ten-year-old Bessie to know that this referred to their name and not their nationality? But that wasn’t the worst part. William apparently abandoned the children there as they ended up at the neighborhood poor house. Bessie lived eight of her formative years in London workhouse schools and infirmaries.

The moral of this story is that fathers harm their children when they lie to them, whether intentionally or out of sarcastic humor. When parents lie they steal their children’s innocence, and in this case, their identities as well.

Brick walls are a genealogical challenge. They’re places you seemingly can’t get past, the end of the line for a branch of the family tree. With diligence sometimes you can break through and step back another generation or two in time. But sometimes you’ve gotta acknowledge that banging your head continuously against a brick wall is only going to result in brain trauma. That’s when closure is a good thing.

After years of sifting through myriad sources, structuring queries in every conceivable permutation, revisiting sites for newly posted information, and contacting other family historians to no avail, it’s time to throw in the towel on the last of the Mystery Ladies of our family.

The Mystery Lady is Jane Hannah, wife of Barney Anthony, my mom’s great-grandmother. Family notes said Jane was born in Ireland in 1819, had two or three brothers, and that her mother, who’s maiden name was Shepard, died on the voyage to North America and was buried at sea.

I wanted to find exactly where Jane was born in Ireland, her father’s name and fate, her mother’s given name, when Jane sailed to the west, where she landed, how she met Barney, and when and where they were married. If that would help me go farther back into the Irish family, so much the better.

But it didn’t happen.

The realization that this really was a brick wall hit me after reading an email from a librarian in Jefferson County, New York. He couldn’t find anything on Jane either, and he went on to explain:

“This is in reply to your email seeking any marriage record for Barney & Jane; and any record of her birthplace in Ireland, parents and emigration.

“Since this [marriage which occurred around 1839] is before the first period of NYS vital statistics, 1847-1849, there would be no official marriage record. They are also not listed in our Jefferson County church members index or in any of the surviving records of the Cape Vincent churches. I also checked our Marriage extracts from early Jefferson County newspapers and nothing there either.”

He continued, “There is no record in our Jefferson Co. Naturalization file [from Jeff. Co. records] of either one [Jane or their first child, Sarah, who was born in Canada] being naturalized here. The only benefit it would have conferred on them would have been eligibility to vote but since that was not possible for women in this country until the 19th Amendment became part of the Constitution in 1920, many emigrant women did not seek to become citizens if it was during a period when marriage to a native-born male did not automatically confer it. The early 19th century did not have that provision.”

Well, heck, not only did this gentleman comb every conceivable record in the county, he flipped a switch in my head that maybe I was trying to chase down information that simply isn’t there. New York State didn’t keep birth, marriage, or death records before 1847; Jane wouldn’t have sought naturalization (which paperwork sometimes provides clues to origin and immigration); Canada didn’t keep ship passenger records before 1865; and Ireland, which lost most of its census records before 1861 in a fire, didn’t institute vital records before 1864.

You can continue to fish all summer on a lake, but if it ain’t got any fish in it, you aren’t going to reel anything in.

All was not lost, however. Given that the family note said Jane Hannah had two or three brothers, I looked through Jefferson County, New York censuses, naturalization records, and land records to see what I could find on any Hannah men in the area. The 1855 census showed two Hannah brothers, William and James, on the same page as Barney and Jane. William was three years older than Jane, James was a year younger than her. Hmm, that looked pretty promising.

Furthermore, the county deed records revealed that Barney’s father and the Hannah brothers had adjoining farms. That, I’m speculating, would explain how Barney and Jane met. I’d be willing to wager that William and James were indeed Jane’s brothers.

William, being a male and eligible to vote upon naturalization, sought naturalization in 1847. In his application he stated that he came from Ireland and arrived in Jefferson County in 1835. That predates Jane’s marriage by about four years, so the timing is good. The librarian explained that “he is listed as emigrating from Belfast, Ireland to the Town of Hounsfield, possibly on a ship coming up the St. Lawrence river to Sackets Harbor which was the likely port for that Town. He was resident in the Town of Lyme when he was naturalized on 23 Sep 1847. The Town of Cape Vincent was part of the Town of Lyme until 1849 so he could have been in that portion of Lyme that was adjacent to the St. Lawrence River, and which became Cape Vincent.”

That information was a three-fer:

(1)  the Hannah’s came from northern Ireland and arrived in 1835;
(2)  they likely arrived in Quebec and came down the St. Lawrence River;
(3)  the split off of Cape Vincent from Lyme township explains how Anna Anthony, my mom’s grandmother, was recorded as born in Lyme in 1847. The Anthony farm was indeed near the St. Lawrence River and the area would have only been called Cape Vincent from 1849 on.

A little more research into William Anthony revealed that he, like his sister Jane, named his first daughter Sarah and first son Robert. Not only does that seem beyond coincidence, I believe it probably honored the memory of their parents and reveals the first names of Jane’s parents, though there is no way to prove it.

And so we reached the brick wall. True, we were able to read some writing on it, but no, there was no breaking through. At least now we have a sense of closure.

There’s nothing more exciting for a genealogist than to discover one’s family line extends back to the Mayflower landing of 1620. Sadly, ours doesn’t.

But I recently found it almost goes back that far–namely, to 1634.

My mother came from an Anthony family and there is a 1904 book by Charles Anthony, The Genealogy of the Anthony Family from 1495 to 1904, that traces Anthony family lines to the original Anthony colonist, and even farther back in England.

The challenge was to definitively link my mom’s line to a person found in the book. That was done through family records, the 1855 New York census, and an 1842 probate filing which linked her great-great grandfather Job to Paul and Elizabeth (nee Chase) Anthony from the book.

The title of this post arose from finding that one of the English ancestors was Francis Anthony, a noted London doctor of physick, who was the son of an eminent goldsmith, and who made a considerable fortune producing and selling a “medicine” drawn from gold called Aurum Potabile, which landed him in prison for a while. His son carried on in his father’s questionable footsteps. Together they are the Quacks of our story.

John Anthony, the colonist who landed at Rhode Island in 1634, had a couple of sons who married into a Quaker family, and this began a number of generations of Anthony’s who practiced their faith in Massachusetts and New York. The marriage of Paul and Elizabeth (see above) is recorded in the Swansea Monthly Meeting of Friends of 1778, in which Paul pledged “until Death it please the Lord by Death to Separate them or words to that Effect.” These generations are the Quakers of our story.

Paul and Elizabeth Anthony resettled in up-state New York, and there we find the first occurrence of what I call the Mad Anthony Syndrome. According to several witnesses at the verification of Paul’s estate in 1842, Paul was an eccentric man given to having divine revelations, a talent for creating mechanical devices that didn’t work (including a cultivator that hopelessly bogged down in the soil and a “perpetual motion” machine), and an unjustified belief in the value of his land, which he thought was worth a million dollars an acre “because of a mineral substance that was found in some particular Earth on that land which by going through with the process of leeching would make beer – and make all his relitives emensely rich.”

In fact the opposite happened. According to his son-in-law, Paul Anthony “has a son in the County Poor House in a state of derangement where he has been since the death of his mother. There was another one who put an end of his own life by hanging himself about two or three years ago last June & left his children three or four thousand dollars of property. There is another one who has had three turns of derangement and I have been told he now has a fourth; his circumstances are poor; he has only a little personal property and has five children.” This son-in-law concluded that “things gave me to understand that he [Paul Anthony] was a man particuly deranged.”

Apparently Paul passed his Mad Anthony genes on to his son Job. On a small stream Job built a saw mill which the History of Jefferson County relates “was, however, one of the kind known as “dry mills,” and was of short continuance. For some unknown cause this neighborhood has received the name of “Bedlam,” and is so most generally designated.” Oh, really? Job, by the way, ended up in the county poor house in his later years.

In turn, Job’s son Barney (my mom’s great-grandfather) made claims on his application for a Civil War pension that despite only spending 3-1/2 months in the Union Army–and never deploying–his “exposure to inclement weather and sleeping on the damp ground for many nights in succession, resulted in disease of the lungs, vertigo, and deafness from which I have not recovered.” So Barney nobly carried on the Crackers tradition of our story. He ended up in an old Soldiers’ Home.

Let’s hope those Mad Anthony genes are now recessive. Just to be sure, though, let me go ask my wife if that seems to be the case.