Jane Mackenzie Fooks

Jane was baptised at Melcombe Regis on 6 February 1811, of ‘Wm & Jane Fooks’ (note: the transcript of the baptism entry incorrectly says William’s name is missing). 

She may not have travelled to Newcastle with her parents in 1832 (when she was twenty-one). By 1841 she was in Newington, south London, living on ‘independent means’ with a Catherine Fooks, presumably her younger sister (their ages in that year’s census rounded down to twenty-five and twenty respectively). They could be found at an address in Liverpool Street, just off Walworth Road. 

Six years later, on Monday 15 February 1847, Jane married Rowland Milner [note: mistranscribed as Richard Miller on freeBMD] (1787–1855) at the nearby church of St George’s, Camberwell. This was two years after the likely death of her father, who is given on the marriage record as  ‘William Fooks, Gentleman’. Marriage records did not always indicate when a father was deceased.

At their wedding, Jane was aged thirty-six: Rowland, a retired naval lieutenant, widower and Gentleman, was sixty. Perhaps amongst the wedding guests on that brisk February day – the winter of 1846/47 was noted for snowfall, severe frosts and heavy rain across southern England – was her cousin James Mackenzie Roberts. Exactly a month earlier, James had married Phoebe Mason and had brought his new bride (who had just fallen pregnant) to live with him at nearby West Square, Lambeth. Also attending may have been his brother, the physician William Pollard Roberts, in London in 1847. Fifty years later, W.P. Roberts would administer Jane’s estate. And perhaps also at the wedding was another relative, Charles Berjew Fooks, who ran a survey office at Camberwell.

Jane’s new husband came with baggage. According to reports in The Times and other publications from 1830 onwards, Milner brought several petitions before Parliament, declaring that in 1821 he had been unfairly accused of both receiving his pay whilst at the same time giving a Soloman Alexander power of attorney to do likewise. He had been summarily dismissed from the Royal Navy and so deprived of his rank and half-pay pension. He was, he maintained, innocent and the affidavit a forgery. There seemed to be no simple conclusion to this and the case dragged on for over two decades, until  his death in 1855 (and in fact beyond it, if reports in The Times are to go by).

When they married, both Jane and Rowland gave their address as Albany Road (no area given, but there was one in Camberwell). Four years on, when the census was taken in 1851, however, Jane and Rowland were at Pelton Road, Greenwich. When Rowland died in November 1855, aged sixty-eight, he was buried at St John of Jerusalem in the parish of south Hackney, although his address at death was Albany Terrace.

Although she was some twenty years younger than her husband, and they had been married barely eight years, Jane never remarried after Rowland’s death. In 1861 she was living in Watling Street, in the City of London, a housekeeper to John Yorke, merchant. Ten years on she was lodging in Stoke Newington Church Street and earning her keep as a needlewoman. Thereafter she could be found at Huggens College, Upper Northfleet, charitable almshouses out along by the Thames estuary in Kent. She died an annuitant on 11 February 1898, at 28 Darnley Street, Gravesend, at the grand age of eighty-seven. 

Jane left £266 5s 5d but died intestate. In her probate administration it states she was ‘a widow without child, parent, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, nephew or niece’. As such her affairs were administered by William Pollard Roberts, brother to my great-great grandfather James Mackenzie Roberts (who had died in 1890). W.P. is described as a ‘lawful Cousin-german and one of the next of kin’. So he and Jane – and thus my great-great grandfather too – were all first cousins. I think this confirms that Jane’s father was brother to my 3xgreat grandmother Mary Roberts (née Fooks). W.P. may not have known Jane well – or at all – but he was the eldest of her surviving cousins living in England. Jane also had other cousins – the children of Elizabeth Emma Lipson and James Mackenzie Fooks – in Australia and New Zealand.

Catherine Fooks

Catherine was baptised at Melcombe on 4 July 1817, of William and Jane Fooks, father ‘a tailor’ of Melcombe Regis. 

In 1851 (age thirty-three) she was still unmarried and living in Blackfriars Road, Lambeth, on ‘income derived from interest’. She died shortly afterwards on 28 July 1855, aged thirty-eight: four months before Rowland Milner, her brother in law. Her address at death was Well Street, south Hackney, the parish where Rowland was buried, so most likely it was the same burial ground: presumably St Thomas’s, aka Well Street Burial Ground.

Catherine may have been the last to be born, as her mother would have been forty-five in 1817, although there are three other possible children, born earlier. Elizabeth Fooks and Mary Ann Fooks were baptised at Melcombe Regis on 19 July 1809, and again on 27 December 1809, both of ‘Wm and Ann Jane Fooks’ (Ann is crossed through and Jane inserted). Were they daughters of William Williams Fooks?

There was also a son, Frederic Thomas Fooks, baptised at Melcombe on 11 October 1812, the son of William and Jane Fooks. He lived barely five years and was buried on 30 March 1817.