Following on from my last post about Sarah Parker Holdsworth, the youngest child of my 4th great grandparents John and Mary Holdsworth, and her marriage to Oxford bookbinder Thomas Morley, I’m grateful to Wendy Christie for supplying further information about the family, and for correcting an error in my original post.
Part of a 19th century map of Oxford, showing Adelaide Street, Observatory Street and Walton Street (via maps.nls.uk)
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I’d been unable to locate Thomas and Sarah Morley in the census records for 1841 and 1851. Wendy has managed to track them down (the records were difficult to find, due to transcription errors at Ancestry) and in 1841 we find the couple living at Jericho Terrace, off Walton Street, Oxford. With Thomas and Sarah in 1841 are their children Anne, 6, Elizabeth, 2, and William, 1. Ten years later, Wendy has found the family at Walton Terrace, which seems to have formed part of Adelaide Street. The oldest Morley daughter, Anne, is now 16 and already working as a ‘pupil teacher’: she would remain a schoolteacher until her retirement in her mid forties. There are five new additions to the family: Henry, 8, Thomas junior, 6, Frederick, 4, Mary, 2, and Martin, one month. I hadn’t come across Frederick before, but I’ve now found a christening record for him, in the parish of St Giles, on 10th January 1847, when the family were living in Observatory Street, another road off Walton Street, just to the south of Adelaide Street. Sadly, Frederick would die, aged five, less than a year after the census was taken, and was buried at St Paul’s church, Oxford, on 25th March 1852.
St Paul’s church, Walton Street, Oxford in 1900 (via http://viewfinder.historicengland.org.uk/) The building now houses the Freud café.
Wendy has pointed out that my earlier post ascribed the wrong spouse to Thomas and Sarah Morley’s daughter Elizabeth. I should have been more cautious about assuming that information on other family trees at Ancestry was reliable! In fact, Elizabeth married lawyer’s clerk William Jones on 14th April 1863, at St Paul’s church. William was said to be living in Stoke Newington and was the son of a waiter. Sadly, the couple enjoyed very few years together. Wendy has found a newspaper report of Elizabeth’s death, at the age of 33, in February 1871, at the couple’s home in Notting Hill, London. Elizabeth is described as the ‘beloved wife’ of William Jones and as the second daughter of Thomas Morley, bookbinder of Long Wall Street, Oxford. It’s possible that Elizabeth died in childbirth, though I’ve yet to find any definite record of children born to the couple.
Postscript
I notice that on the very next page of the St Paul’s, Oxford, parish register, recording the burial of young Frederick Morley in March 1852, is a note of the burial, two months later, of a certain Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was only one day old when he died. The address is given as St Paul’s Terrace. The poet of the same name had died in 1834. This child was almost certainly a relative, but what exactly was the relationship? I assume that the infant was the son of one of the poet’s children: but which one? I’d be interested to hear from anyone who can throw light on this.