26 Sep 2024

I found a possible baptism of the first son of James Jennings Smith at the Saville Street Scotch Presbyterian Church in South Shields:

James Smith, lawful son of James Smith, mariner, and Elizabeth Smith, his wife, in the parish of Jarrow, was born on the 3rd October and baptized on the 19th October, 1836.¹

However, it lacks a reference to Jennings and to him being an engineer, so this could simply be another James and Elizabeth Smith, of which there are dozens.

I did some work on FamilySearch to see if I could link James Jennings Smith to my part of the tree there and in the process I tidied up some of the records around Thomas Turner Peak and Elizabeth Hinksman. I noticed some names of children that I didn’t recognize. I looked them up in the GRO and ordered digital images and they were indeed children that all died young and so we didn’t find them in the census. The children were:

• Dinah, born 17 Oct 1881, West Hartlepool and died there on 14 Nov 1882 of bronchitis
• Thomas Turner, born 16 Jun 1883 in Woolston, Hampshire and died on 13 Nov 1883 in Wallsend of heart disease
• Rebecca, born 3 Jun 1893 in Cowpen and died there on 26 Oct 2893 of diarrhoea
• Thomasina, born 30 Oct 1898 in Blyth and died there on 7 Nob 1899 of capillary bronchitis

This takes the total number of children of Thomas and Elizabeth to 13.

Rebecca’s death certificate records the name Margery Peak but it is indexed in the GRO as Rebecca Peak. Since she had an older sister Margery born in 1891 and the next child in 1894 was named Rebecca I am sure this is an error in the death entry. It’s really unusual and I’ve never encountered it before. One can only wonder how many other errors like this exist and defeat our searches for ancestors.

At first I dismissed the birth of Thomas Turner in 1883 since it took place in Hampshire but after receiving the birth certificate copy I’m now sure that he was a child of Thomas and Elizabeth. The whole family must have been in Hampshire for a period. It’s fascinating to think that they were possibly living within a few tens of miles of Maria Hinksman (then Lucas), Elizabeth Hinksman’s great aunt. It seems unlikely that they knew of one another, but there is a remote possibility they Elizabeth knew of her father’s cousins in the area.

Thomas and Elizabeth married in Wallsend and lived for a short period in Newcastle. At this time Thomas was working as a mason. By the 1881 census Thomas was living with his parents and siblings in Hartlepool. Although married, Elizabeth was not present in that census and I’ve not found her whereabouts. However by December, after the birth of Dinah, she was living in Hartlepool.

Between Nov 1882 and Jun 1883 the family relocated to Woolston in Hampshire, near Southampton, but by Dec of that year they were back in Wallsend. Up until this time Thomas had been a stonemason but when they returned to Wallsend he took up a job as a labourer in a shipyard, although the next year he was once again working as a stonemason. In 1889 family were still living in Wallsend and Thomas was recorded as a lion ship rivetter.

By 1891 they had relocated to Cowpen Quay near Blyth and Thomas took a job as a rivetter boilermaker. Thomas and Elizabeth stayed in or near Blyth until their deaths in the 1930s.