Thomas Cotterill great great grandfather

My next great great grandparent is Thomas Cotterill the father of Sarah who married James Timmins

There are several variations on the spelling name Cotterill throughout the original documents, and I have stabilised on this one. Like so many in our story Cotterill is a name almost entirely confined to the Black Country in 1881, according to the National  Trust surnames database http://gbnames.publicprofiles.org . It is very uncommon still in the south and north. The name derives from the Saxon word cotter which was a serf who held his cottage by labour service rather than by paying rent. There have been some prominent Cotterills in West Bromwich history including two mayors and the founder of the West Bromwich Building Society, but I can’t see a link between them and our Cotterills. There is also a Cotterill Street in West Bromwich.

For Thomas’ early life we have to back to before registration.  According to IGI Going backwards to before registration, according to IGI. Thomas Cotterill was born on 25^th May 1813 and christened on 24^th November 1813 at St Lawrence Darlaston. Thomas father was also Thomas Cotterill and his mother was Mary. Thomas married Hannah Tompkinson on 13^th March 1836 in Walsall.

I can’t find the family in the 1841 census but this is not unusual. On later censuses Thomas, his wife Hannah and their eldest son Isaiah were all born in Darlaston, while the rest of the children were born in West Bromwich. This suggests that the family moved to West Bromwich between 1838 when Isaiah was born and 1841 when Thomas Jnr was born. In 1851 the family is living in Hargate Lane West Bromwich

At the time of the 1861 census Thomas was listed as a coal miner and the family was already living in Stoney Lane, where they stayed for the rest of Thomas’s life.  Thomas was still alive at the time of the 1901 census and at the age of 88 was still describing himself as a coal miner. Living with him, still at No 8 Stoney Lane, were his married daughter Maria and her husband John Whitehouse. Thomas’ grandson George, now 22 is also still living with them. Thomas Snr died in 1902, at home in Stoney Lane at the age of 91.

An update on Ann Worrall

As I get going again, I've looked at my file on Ann and discovered that I had sent for a marriage certificate. It shows that she married James Timmins on 18^th July 1855, but if I have the right marriage they already had 6 children at that stage. We know that James’s wife Ann’s maiden name was Worrall because it is given clearly on the birth certificates of her children Cornelius and Eliza Jane. And the father’s name is given correctly as James. So I'm pretty sure that I have the right person and we shall never know why they married so late.

I'll leave them there and move on to next great great grandparent, who will be Thomas Cotterill.

Getting going again

I wrote about the really useful booklet from the Nuneaton and North Warwickshire Family History Society. I have just finished transcribing all the family tree information from there onto Ancestry into a new tree called janddhamilton. The previous tree had become corrupted for all sorts of reasons and we wanted to make sure that everything on there is known to us to be factual. So now back to where I left off some time ago, with the elusive Ann Worrall.

A family connection

We discovered the link between us and the person with the 2nd cousin DNA match. It turned out that my father and her grandfather were first cousins. Both worked at the carriage works but I had never heard Dad mention him. Even more interestingly, her mother and I were born in the same year, and both lived in West Bromwich and I had never heard of her either. How weird, but we shall now never know the answer. What a pity we didn't come across this person when dad was still alive.