By Christine Swan
Family history never ceases to amaze me. When researching this week’s post, it occurred to me that I had never located a birth or baptism record for my great grandmother, Rebecca Bull. This had not stood out to me as notable until this week. I suppose I didn’t really look hard enough. I knew that she was born in Bristol in 1870 and that was about it. This week’s tale will focus on Rebecca’s mother, Eliza Rosina Mayes. Having two forenames gives you the option of using either, which she did, being recorded as Eliza, Rosina or Rose for short. She was baptised in Bristol at the church of St Phillip and St Jacob, “Pip and Jay”, as it was colloquially known, in April 1850. Her father, Thomas Mayes, was a porter and labourer and her mother was Rebecca Cooper.
Baptism record for Eliza Rosina Mayes at St Phillip and St Jacob in April 1850
In most of my research, families have moved around but, interestingly, the Mayes stayed put for many years. They lived in New Street, close to the centre of Bristol, a road which still exists today and is the site of a former Quaker workhouse and mission hall, dating from 1698. New Street itself dates from 1705 so was well-established by the time that the Mayes family were in residence in the nineteenth century. My father told me that there were Quakers in our family, and that they came from Bristol, although I have not uncovered any definitive proof as all were baptised or married in conformist parish churches. There are few remnants of New Street’s history remaining, other than the aforementioned workhouse building and the Volunteer Tavern, which dates from the end of the eighteenth century and was one of the public houses that served the growing population of that time.
The church of St Phillip and St Jacob, Bristol. By William Avery – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1883394
It is in this historic area of Bristol that the Mayes family lived and worked. In 1861, the large family occupied 50 New Street and were joined by Elizabeth Jenkins, a fifty-five year old widow from Plymouth. Interestingly, she is listed as joint head of the household with Thomas Mayes. Was she a relative? Elizabeth was a Marine Store Dealer which, to my mind, sounded like a very interesting occupation. They generally traded in second hand boat supplies but this occupation was, more often, a glorified term for a rag and bone dealer. The Mayes lived in a poor area and this was indeed, a trade of the poor.
The Mayes family in 1861 with Elizabeth Jenkins , Marine Store Dealer
Eliza Rosina was eleven years old in 1861, a middle child of eight, with six still living at home. In 1869, she became pregnant with her first child, aged nineteen. I cannot possibly know who the father was and it was only by searching by her unmarried name of Mayes, did I easily find the birth and baptism records of my great grandmother, Rebecca. This revelation indicated that of my four paternal great grandparents, three were illegitimate. Another mouth to feed would have added to the pressures on an already large family. At the time, Eliza Rosina’s youngest sister was only six years old. Upon looking at historic images of New Street, I am called to mind of the old woman who lived in a shoe, who had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. The house must have existed in a permanent atmosphere of chaos! Unlike other ancestors, whose stories I have uncovered, Eliza Rosina, and her baby, stayed within the family home until she married William Henry Bull on Christmas Day in 1870. My great grandfather, George Betts, was unofficially adopted and David Dighton Taylor, was cast out to the workhouse when his wife, David’s mother Mary, died of Tuberculosis. To be an illegitimate child in Victorian England was rarely a happy or settled life, but in this case, mother and child remained within the bosom of the family, which cheers me greatly.
Rebecca Mayes (later Bull) baptism record 1869
What of William Henry Bull, was he Rebecca’s father? Or was he a kind and gentle man who married Eliza Rosina and her daughter as his own? If he was the baby’s father, why didn’t he immediately marry the mother of his child, prior to the birth as was the expectation of the day? It is this that leads me to suggest that he was indeed not the father. As a family historian, this presents me with a dilemma that I have faced before – biological inheritance is only one part of our ancestry. It is the people in the child’s life who form their character and have the most influence. How much does it bother me that I will never know who Rebecca’s father was? Not that much if I am truthful, but when I view my DNA matches and don’t recognise some of the surnames in the connected person’s tree, it presents a part of the puzzle that I have to accept has been lost, like a bit of sky or section of grass.
Eliza Rosina marries William Henry Bull on Christmas Day, 1870
After their marriage in 1870, the 1871 census found the Bull family living in nearby Skinner Street. Their next child, William Henry junior, was born in July, indicating that Eliza Rosina was probably carrying him when she had married only seven months before.
The Bull family relocated to Shoreditch in 1878
The Bull family had links with London but Eliza Rosina didn’t, yet in 1878, she and her husband and children, left Bristol for good and settled in Shoreditch and then Hackney. The couple went on to have ten children in total, nine of who survived. They were married for forty-nine years before Eliza Rosina died in 1919. Unfortunately, this was before my father was born so memories about her were sketchy. There were a total of nine people living at 15 Ada Street in Hackney in 1891, an address where the family lived for almost thirty years. In the last two years before Eliza Rosina died, she also appears on the electoral register, qualifying due to her husband’s occupation of chairmaker. I was delighted to see this and I do hope that she used her vote. At the time of writing, I have recently cast mine in an act that it is all too easy to become cynical or complacent about. In 1918, Eliza Rosina would have been one of only 8.5 million women eligible to vote but she doubtless was aware of the campaign so vigorously fought by the suffragette movement only a few years before.
1911 census record for the Bull family in Ada Street, Hackney. The last with William Henry and Eliza Rosina together.
She died in May 1919 and was buried in Manor Park Cemetery, a place that I have clattered past on a train more times than I could count. Most of my paternal relatives are buried in the nearby, much larger, City of London Cemetery. I will visit soon to pay my respects to Eliza Rosina. On my family tree, I changed my great grandmother Rebecca’s family name to Mayes. I did this out of recognition of the strong women who did their best for their children when they had very little and would not have met with approval. Eliza Rosina kept her daughter with the support of her family, so, I do it out of recognition of family also. This is not to diminish the name of Bull in any way. They too proved to be an amazingly resilient and resourceful family as I shall reveal in future posts.
Awful Rigours and Wretched Pay 