Fearless Females 2013: Day 26: Education

What education did your female ancestors receive?

Well, this originally asked what education was received by your mother, your grandmothers, or your great grandmothers.  I decided to be a rebel, and have chosen a great great grandmother!

Emma Elizabeth Dunstone AVERY was christened 4 June 1837 in Rame, Cornwall.  1889 saw her being committed to the County Lunatic Asylum in Bodmin, Cornwall, where her admittance notes describe her as being "well educated for her station in life"...

Once again, in honour of National Women’s History Month, Lisa Alzo of The Accidental Genealogist blog presents Fearless Females: 31 Blogging Prompts to Celebrate Women’s History Month.  I know this is really US-centric - but that's not going to stop me honouring my own Fearless Females...

On This Day: 21 December

A baptism and a wedding today - in that order because they are different families.  Thomas DUNSTONE was baptised/christened on 21 December in 1752 in Rame, Cornwall - he is my 5 x great grandfather, and eventually his descendants married into the HAYWOOD line.

William EFFORD and Elizabeth ELLIOTT were married on 21 December 1802 in Kingsbridge, Devon, my 3 x great-aunt and -uncle.  I only know William's name and baptismal date, but I have discovered that Elizabeth was a schoolmistress.  I first found out about her from her father's Will (John ELLIOTT, 1748-1823), where she was left £100; according to measuringworth.com's calculator this is worth £76,500 in today's money - a huge sum.  Her father also bequeathed her £20 for her own use: £15,300 (without the "interference" of her husband - this is the wording of the Will). The ELLIOTT family eventually married into the BALL family on my mother's side of the tree.

My question is: where did all this money go?

Surname Saturday: Dunstone

So far I have traced the DUNSTONE name in Cornwall back to the early 1700s.  Next stop...?

The DUNSTONEs lived in and around the St Germans area of Cornwall, then moved to Rame (not too far away!) and I have evidence of them in the Cawsand and Kingsand areas as well.   Emma Elizabeth DUNSTONE (my gg grandmother) was the one who stayed in the Bodmin County Lunatic Asylum and was described as having a room which was 'all in disorder'.

But an even more colourful DUNSTONE was her mother, Thomasine.  In some of the censuses she is enumerated as 'Tamson' - can't you just hear her Cornish accent coming through?  Thomasine was born in 1814 in Cawsand, the sixth child of John and Ann DUNSTONE (who are proving to be another brick wall), with six sisters and one brother.  Thomasine married when she was twenty, to George AVERY, a ship's carpenter then a shipwright (yet another brick wall, as he seems to have appeared out of nowhere!), and the censuses record her living in Cawsand, then Kingsand.  She had ten children, four of whom died when they were tiny, so Thomasine was not a stranger to tragedy quite early on into her marriage.  In the 1871 census, George and Thomasine are listed as living at the 'Halfway House'  Beer House - are they the publicans? Her husband, George, died when their youngest was only 14, but Thomasine did not sink into despair and end up being farmed out around the children or, worse, end up in the workhouse.   Only a couple of years after George's death, she is listed on the 1881 census as being the landlady of the 'Halfway House' Beer House in Fore Street, Kingsand, and she remains there until her death in 1897.  I would like to know more about this brave lady.  The 'Halfway House' still stands and runs as a bar and restaurant, in what they call 'Cornwall's Forgotten Corner', so maybe I will email them and see what happens.  Watch this space...

Follow Friday: OPC Rame Peninsula

I posted about the OPC project a few weeks ago (11 June 2010, to be exact).  To recap: An Online Parish Clerk is not to be confused with the official Parish Council-appointed clerks).  An Online Parish Clerk is a volunteer who gathers all the genealogical data they can about their chosen parish, such as Church register transcripts, land tax assessments, census information and more. 

So here's a website that covers a whole section of the county of Cornwall which features heavily in my family tree: The OPCs for the Rame Peninsula. 

As you can see from the map (it's from their website, I'm not that clever at drawing!), the site covers St Germans, Sheviock, Antony, Torpoint, St John, Rame, and Maker.  Of these, the parishes that are most useful to my family tree are Antony, Torpoint, Rame, and Maker (with probably a bit of St Germans from time to time).  These parishes were the ones lived in by my ancestors on my father's side of the family.  These are the parishes which saw my shipwrights and sailors.  I will be starting up a new theme for Mondays: Maritime Monday, to remind me to write about my ancestors who had something to do with the sea, since so many of my ancestors fall into that category.  I haven't found any pirates yet, though! *grin* but there were a LOT of coastguards!

Surname Saturday: Avery

Samuel Avery was a carpenter back in the early 1800s.  His son married into a family connected to the sea, and soon the AVERYs were known for building and designing boats and ships.  Later, the AVERY name is found in its highest concentrations in Canada and New Zealand (interesting to note that it is found mostly in the New Plymouth district of NZ - all my AVERYs came from Plymouth and the surrounding area.

Kingsand, Cornwall

'My' AVERYs lived in the villages of Cawsand, Kingsand, and Rame, in Cornwall, England.  When my great grandmother Emma Maud AVERY married into the Haywood family, although they stayed in the same place, one of her sons (my grandfather) became a shipwright.

The surname itself is Gaelic.  Cornwall (where my AVERYs came from) is well-known for its connections with Ireland, and some of my ancestors on my mother's side were either Irish themselves, or served in Ireland as coastguards.