Who Was Hannah Genders?

 And so finally, we get to Hannah Genders, my 3x great grandmother. It would be hard for me to know less about Hannah. She has proven so elusive it has been much easier to prove who she wasn't rather than who she was. I only have two records that I know for sure relate to to my Hannah and they are the birth records of her children, Mary Hannah, and John. Mary Hannah Whilock birth (1846) So from this record I know that on the 8th April 1846, Hannah gave birth to her daughter at 22 Court, 8 House, Lionel Street. I know she was still there on the 9th May that year because that is when she registered the birth, and I know that she can't sign her name. The surname Wheelock is transcribed as Whilock, and she makes the claim that she is William's wife.  Mary Hannah Wheelock Death 1848   When Mary sadly died in 1848, she did so at her grandparents' home, Court 22, House 2, Weaman Street. Now although it states that Hannah Wheelock was present at the death, this almost certainly...

William & Eliza's marriage record 1834  Having explored William Wheelock's world and surmised what we can about his character, it is time to consider some of the gaps in his timeline and some of the people who knew him well. William's first wife, Eliza Whitehouse, presents one of the first mysteries. She's there and then she isn't and I have found scant details about who she was. Let's start with the base facts: 1) Eliza married William in Handsworth, St Mary's in 1834. 2) Her marriage record states she was of the parish. 3) She was living on Weaman Street with William and his family at the time of the 1841 census. 4) The 1841 census states she was born out of county. Now moving on to the maybes: 5) She may have been born in 1811. The 1841 census certainly implies she was older than William. While the census takers were supposed to accurately record the ages of children, they were supposed to round down the ages of over 15s to the nearest 5. Many ignored...

 If you read the previous post about William's life you may well assume that William was a dangerous man to know. The records certainly give that impression. However, the only record of this type that I can definitely tie to William is the 1870 news report about him assaulting his wife. In the other instances the link is less certain.  Let's look at each in turn. We'll start with the one we know for sure is the right man. The Birmingham Daily Gazette (1870)  On this occasion William was drunk and his wife was staying with neighbours who lived in the same Court, though it does not say why she was doing so. We are presented with a man who did not hesitate to strike two women. As there is no mention of an altercation with John Brown we can perhaps assume he was not home. William also threw a chair and broke a table, and importantly, it states he had been previously convicted on several occasions. It does not say what he was previously convicted for, but reading between the l...

 I know a fair amount about my 3x great grandfather, William Wheelock, but there are just enough gaps to make him one of the most frustrating individuals in the family tree. While I know nothing about Hannah, there are so many tantalising glimpses of William, attached to so many questions, ifs, and maybes, that his story is basically impossible to tell without resorting to conjecture, making assumptions based on the available sources. His story is fragmented, but I shall tell it as best as I can here. William Wheelock was born on 30th May 1817, almost certainly in Leicester, which is where his family lived before moving to Birmingham, and where all his older siblings had been born. I do not know exactly when the family made the move, but they were certainly in Birmingham by 1821. William was baptised on 5th September 1822, the same day as his brothers John and Thomas, in St Philip's church.  William's baptism record 1822   William trained as a blacksmith, like his father,...

 In the previous post we met my great grandfather, William , and discovered that he had the use of two different surnames: Walock and Genders. Keen to discover why, I looked back a generation for answers. It turns out the mystery didn't begin with WIlliam. His father, John, also had use of both names, and on occasion double-barreled them into Wheelock-Genders.  Now you may have noticed that Walock and Wheelock are different. Wheelock, as a surname, is a minefield of miss-spellings and variants. I have traced many of my Wheelock ancestors and found the name appear as Whillock, Willicks, Welock, Waylock, and this is just a small sample, so you get the idea. It's a tricky name to work with.  Why John used Wheelock and William used Walock is a little odd though. It's possible that the spelling Walock was a byproduct of the Brummie accent and that William just embraced it later in life. It appears on his baptism record in 1886 when he was 12. I don't know who provided the sp...

 So why is finding Hannah proving so tricky?  Well, let's start at the beginning, before I knew Hannah existed. Long ago, I was in the process of looking for my great grandfather, William. William was a Brummie who moved to Derby and made a living as a fruiterer. I knew some basic details about him when I started looking, so finding him should have been relatively straightforward. Whenever he cropped up in the records though, I noticed something a little odd. Here are some extracts. Notice anything unusual about his name? 1874 - his birth record: 1886 -his baptism: This record incorrectly states his mother's maiden name was Jenders. It was actually Goode. 1932 - his marriage: 1943 - his death record:   In census records, William's surname is recorded as Wheelock (1881), Genders (1891), Waylock (1901), and Walock (1911, 1921).  So there is something a little unusual going on here. My great grandfather freely used either Walock or Genders as a surname. I asked relative...