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This story started when three things coincided. I was looking at tidying up our family tree and I realised that there was a lot of uncertainty about the earliest person on the female line, Anne Fellows, (Eleanor’s great-great-grandmother) - she was only on one of my trees and I didn’t know where I had got her information from. (Naughty me for not noting sources well enough)
I was then contacted, via Genes Reunited, by someone interested in this woman’s husband, a Mr Gilbert Bolden, and we started further investigations of Gilbert and Anne.
Then I was looking through the family history notes of Gilbert and Anne’s granddaughter, Annie Mary Webster, and found a few details of the sort that are always lovely to have as they add flesh to the bare bones of a family tree. It’s these ‘facts’ that are the main subject of this story. The facts were about Gilbert Bolden and his wife Anne and she noted the following -
My Grandfather, Gilbert Bolden, had a Durham University Degree
His wife Anne, nee Fellows, married first .. Williams. Gilbert and Anne had Annie (1859 - 1932), Frances (1861-?), and Gilbert (no family). She had a son, William with her first husband.
Gilbert, a solicitor, met Anne when he was sorting out the estate of Anne's first husband.
He [Gilbert] was guardian to two girls - he put their money in a Bank - there was a run on the Bank, losing all their money - Gilbert insisted on repaying it from his own money even though he had to sell his home (where he had kept a staff of ten) to live in a small suburban house (with 1 or no servants kept)
These pieces of information intrigued me -
- For a solicitor to marry someone after sorting out the estate of her first husband seemed odd - not the relationship a solicitor usually has with a client - assuming that either the first husband had only recently died, which seemed indelicate, or perhaps it was a sizable estate, so you’d question his motives.
- However, she did have a young son so being a single mother / widow might have been difficult in Victorian times which might be the explanation.
- In passing, the son's repetitious name sounded wonderfully Welsh - William Williams
- And the story about the girls interested me on a personal level because my cousin, a solicitor, had similarly given away a sizable portion of his wealth to clients in a similar sort of situation.
More info
Going back through the three starting points.
1. As I checked the information I had about Anne Fellows I couldn’t find anything to support it. I had a note that she was born in Hertfordshire, according to the census, and that her father was a non-conformist minister but I couldn’t now find any records to support these notes that I had made and I was starting to doubt all of it.
2. The emails with the researcher led off in two directions. The first started with him commenting - ‘Did I know there is information about Gilbert Bolden in Wikipedia?’ Wow - No I didn’t. As a brief but relevant aside, Gilbert had been a leading light in ALFS, which stands for the wonderfully named ‘Alleged Lunatics Friend’s Society’ - a name that is so politically incorrect that I sometimes dropped it into conversation with friends. ALFS was one of the first organisations to campaign for those who were then described as ‘Lunatics’. It had been started by two people who had been treated as lunatics but had major problems with how they were treated. The first had been locked up for a short period at the instigation of his father after they had disagreed about money and he felt that it should not be so easy to have people locked up. The second was an aristocrat who did have psychological problems, and recognised this, but he felt that the treatment that he had received in the asylums was not the sort of treatment that was suitable for his status in society and also that the patients views on treatments should be consulted more. Gilbert joined the group after it had been established for a while, but at a time when it was not being very effective as it had confused aims because different members had different issues. He was key in organising the group to agree on achievable objectives.
Eleanor was very pleased with this discovery. She had worked with mental health charities and so to find such a positive ancestor was good. There was a slight shadow over this discovery, however - my fellow researcher had contacted the current “head” of the Bolden family who described Gilbert as the “Black Sheep” of the family which we didn’t understand unless it was that mental health was one of many subjects that Victorians regarded as unacceptable to talk about in polite society.
The second direction was the problem of finding information about Anne, her birth or either of her marriages. Failing to find this information led to an interest in finding out more about Anne’s first husband who is the main subject of this piece.
3. Eleanor’s Grandmother seems to have been quite accurate and detailed in her family history research, though done in the early to mid-1900’s when this was a very slow task, but she had only pursued certain branches of the family. The only odd item in her notes is a regular mantra “there were 5 Coneys that came over with William the Conqueror”. This never seems to relate to the other notes around it, her family tree doesn’t get remotely near to William the Conqueror and there is never any explanation of how the Coney family was related to her but this fact was clearly extremely important to her. It also turns up, again as information randomly unrelated to the information around it, in a letter from a distant cousin that she had kept.
I found a 1926 Society of Genealogists article on the popular desire to trace links to the Conqueror which commented that it was so much easier to adopt an ancestor who came over with William the Conqueror than to adopt a real person. Trying to prove contacts with the Conqueror was obviously popular at that time and the story about the Coneys seems to have been a family tale. I have not found a link to the Coneys and, as far as I can tell, there weren’t any Coneys that came over with William the Conqueror.
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